D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A someone who knew her. There are all kinds of anecdotes that patch together a complicated, driven, powerfully controlling woman who slept her way to the top as well as happily played mistress or mistress-inthe-making to several rich and powerful men. Brooke came to hate Pamela, and for good reason (although that is another story). I can’t recall how she came up in our conversation but I was telling Brooke about the first and only time I met the woman back in 1991. I had heard about her affairs with the rich and famous men of the world when I was introduced to her at Kitty Hart’s apartment on a wintry Saturday late morning.
Pamela had come up from Washington, D.C., to go to the ballet and had stayed over night with her friend. Ours was a very brief meeting, inconsequential even. It was remembered distinctly because I personally experienced her legendary charm in that brief but profound moment. It left me… Charmed. But that’s another story also. My memory tripped Brooke’s memory of the first time she met Pamela. It was summer day in 1960. Leland Hayward had left his wife Slim and, although not divorced, was living with Pamela in a house in Bedford that he’d rented from Irene Selznick, an old family friend (and the
younger daughter of Louis B. Mayer as well as the ex-wife of David Selznick). Brooke was, at the time, dating a man named Jones Harris, the son of actress Ruth Gordon and Broadway producer Jed Harris. They went up to Bedford that day to visit Brooke’s father—and his new amour, Pamela. Brooke knew very little about her except, of course, that she had been married to Winston Churchill’s only son Randolph. When they arrived at the Selznick house, an MGM-perfect, rambling clapboard with shutters replica of a New England cottage (but more sprawling) that was surrounded by forests and bordered by
the Mianus River which flows through the town, Brooke was told by a member of the staff that her father and Pamela were out by the pool on the other side of the house. When they got out to the pool, a big pool, there was Leland in his bathing suit sunning himself on a lounge. And across the pool, on the diving board, there was Pamela standing with a touch of Venus, entirely nude, almost modesty abandoned, “the skin whiter than your shirt” (the shirt being the one I was wearing at lunch). “White, white… And she had red hair, reddish auburn, and the brightest red between her legs... And big red nipples on
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