The Price of Illusion by Joan Juliet Buck

Author:Joan Juliet Buck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Hélène Rochas gave a dinner for Pamela Harriman and me, because, she said, “You are both American ambassadresses to France.”

Well, she was.

Pamela Harriman, who’d married Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, during the war, who’d been the mistress of Stavros Niarchos, Gianni Agnelli, Prince Aly Khan, Bill Paley, Ed Murrow, and then Elie de Rothschild; Pamela Harriman, the stepmother villain of Brooke Hayward’s memoir Haywire after she married Leland Hayward. Pamela Harriman, who then married the tremendously rich former diplomat Averell Harriman. Pamela Harriman, née Pamela Digby in England at the dawn of time, now, thanks to years as the most powerful democratic hostess in Washington, DC, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to France.

“I know Averell Harriman’s grandson,” I said.

“Don’t mention him, ma chérie, I think there’s a lawsuit.”

Hélène assembled a little group, two playwrights and one couple, for drinks at the American embassy residence on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. I remembered how astute and cutting the playwrights were about theater, music, books; they would tell me what Parisian culture had become in the last six years.

Van Gogh’s White Roses hung in the grand salon, the object of the lawsuit. Pamela Harriman wore a silk cocktail dress, had a ball of lacquered blond hair rising around a wide face, little blue eyes, weak pink lipstick; at seventy-four, she looked like a cheerfully reliable En-glish girl, more a British Caledonian Airways air hostess than the most redoubtable courtesan of all time.

As we sat down to dinner at Lucas Carton, one of the playwrights murmured in my ear, “She once said there are no secrets to seducing a man, only enthusiasm.”

The ambassadress of the United States welcomed me to Paris with a toast. I thanked her for the good work she was doing for our country. She said she couldn’t discuss politics, so we lavished compliments on the lobsters à la nage.

“What have you seen?” I asked one of the playwrights.

“At theater? Nothing. But I adore Alerte à Malibu. It is wonderful, so American, so fresh, so amusing.”

The entire table adored Alerte à Malibu.

Pamela Harriman inquired what Alerte à Malibu might be.

“Television!” said Hélène Rochas. “It’s about lifeguards, and the star is a remarkably vulgar young woman. Vulgar, but very amusing.”

“Blond, huge breasts, big lips,” offered one of the playwrights, “very enthusiastic.”

“You mean Pamela”—I shouted, and blanked on her last name as all eyes turned to me—“Pamela, Pamela, Pamela Anderson?”

The French nodded eagerly. Oui, oui, Pamela Anderson! The cultured socialites of Paris were fans of Baywatch, and now we had something to talk about.

I was not going to put Pamela Anderson in Paris Vogue. It had to be the most French of all French things, the summit of French achievement, the embodiment of France. The ads in the August magazines showed black leather corset miniskirts by Dior, fake Chanel by Céline, fur miniskirts by Chanel, a bag made entirely of crystal beads by Swarovski, a fake leopard coat to the floor by Dolce & Gabbana, sunglasses with gold stems by Versace, a fake panther jacket worn

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