Welcome to Dun & Dun. I'm Alicia, your hostess on this podcast journey, All Things Dominic Dunn where nothing is linear and everything is connected.

Thank you for joining me today as we continue our investigation into Capote's Cotery.

This time with another kind of swan altogether, Pamela. Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward

Harriman. If you count all the names up in her marriages, and that doesn't even include her lovers,

Pamela really did have that thing. Pamela's story is unique and unlikely to ever be repeated.

It is safe to say that no one could have predicted the impact that Pamela would have on

20th century politics, society or industry when she was growing up in the Dorset countryside. Her life is a testament to resilience,

determination, and reinvention, and that is at a minimum. Pamela was the everything, everywhere,

all at once once swan.

Investigators settle in. Pamela's story is quite a journey and connected into all the things.

Her life is really something. Throughout her life, Pamela would be a snubbed debutante, a trusted confidant and loyal companion to her father-in-law, Winston Churchill,

a paramour to some of the world's richest men, a high society cast off, a despised stepmother, a formidable political consultant, an accomplished diplomat, and a charismatic enigma.

Her lord of men was a mystery to many people, but whatever your opinions are about Pamela Harriman,

it cannot be denied that she was a fighter, a charmer, a seductress, who simply refused to give up.

Throughout her life, Pamela continued to go after exactly what she wanted and was

always willing to do whatever it took to get it.

Although she spent most of her life as a modern-day courtesan, she ended her life as a respected diplomat.

In the glamorous and center-stage way she lived, she died in the same fashion.

Pamela Harriman suffered a stroke while swimming in the pool at the Ritz Hotel in Paris,

where decades earlier she witnessed

the liberation of Paris alongside Ernest Hemingway. Pamela's only son, Winston Churchill,

was mostly abandoned by his mother and left with a family or nannies while Pamela went to

...