Kathleen Lanier Harriman was born on December 7 1917, the younger of two daughters of Averell Harriman by his first wife, Kitty Lanier Lawrance. The family fortune had been made by her paternal grandfather, EH Harriman, head of the Union Pacific Railroad, who, on his death in 1909, had bequeathed an estimated $100 million.
As children Kathleen and her older sister Mary saw little of their father, his polo and far-flung business interests keeping him constantly on the move.
Then, in 1928, Averell Harriman fell in love with Marie Norton Whitney, the wife of fellow business tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. By the end of the year his marriage to Kitty was over, and he and Marie subsequently married.
As teenagers, Kathleen and Mary Harriman were sent to the Foxcroft School in Virginia and Bennington College in Vermont, from which Kathleen graduated in 1940 with a degree in Social Science. Mary subsequently married a doctor and settled down. But Kathleen had a taste for adventure.
In 1941 she joined the International News Service as a reporter and followed her father to London, where he had been appointed Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease envoy. Marie was ill during this period and could not make the trip. But, as he later wrote, Harriman “felt that Kathleen’s presence would be looked upon as a mark of American confidence” in Britain during the war’s early years.
Harriman’s biographers, however, suggested that he may have had other reasons for desiring his daughter’s presence. He and Pamela Churchill, the bosomy young wife of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, had begun an affair. “Kathy was two years older than Pamela,” wrote Christopher Ogden in his unauthorised biography of Pamela. “It would be natural if the two young women became friends. Kathleen Harriman could be a beard for her father and an alibi for Pamela.”
The plot, if there was one, seems to have worked. The two girls got on well, Kathleen writing to her sister that Pamela was “a wonderful girl, my age, but one of the wisest young girls I’ve ever met”.
When she realised that her 51-year-old father was conducting an affair with her 22-year-old friend, Kathleen decided to say nothing, and the two girls even shared a flat for a time. The liaison also seems to have been condoned by Winston Churchill, who saw his daughter-in-law as a useful conduit of information between the Allies.
The affair ended in 1943 when Harriman moved to Moscow as US ambassador. Kathleen followed him, got a job in the Office of War Information and acted as official hostess at her father’s diplomatic functions. In 1945 she travelled with him to the Yalta conference.
On departing for America they were given two fine cavalry horses by Stalin as a goodbye present. “With the possible exception of Eleanor Roosevelt and Deanna Durbin,” the New York Herald Tribune reported, “Kathleen Harriman is the best-known American woman in the Soviet Union.”
After the war Averell Harriman returned to his wife, and in 1947 Kathleen married Stanley Mortimer, heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Pamela Churchill, meanwhile, divorced her husband and, after scandalising London with a series of affairs (with, among others, Prince Aly Khan, Gianni Agnelli, Stavros Niarchos and Elie de Rothschild), embarked on a second marriage to Leland Hayward, producer of The Sound of Music. He proudly described his new (fifth) wife as “the greatest courtesan of the century”.
In 1970, however, Marie Harriman died, followed in 1971 by Hayward. A few months later, in August 1971, Pamela found herself — whether by chance or design — sitting next to her old flame Averell at a Washington dinner party. The opportunity was not wasted: they married in September. He was 79 and she, at 51, became stepmother to 53-year-old Kathleen. Over the next 25 years Pamela Harriman would become a leading figure in Democrat circles and in 1992 – six years after Averell’s death –American ambassador to France.
In 1994, however, Pamela Harriman and her stepdaughter became embroiled in a bitter row over the management of trusts from which Kathleen drew income. Between 1989 and 1994 $21 million of the trust’s money had been poured into a hotel and conference centre in New Jersey that had failed.
In 1994 Kathleen flew with her lawyer to Paris, where the ambassador greeted them graciously, but coldly, and assured them she knew nothing about the matter.
Subsequently Kathleen and the other heirs initiated a lawsuit demanding more than $30 million in damages “from the faithless fiduciaries who... squandered the family’s inheritance”.
A settlement was reached at the end of 1995, and though the details were not disclosed, the cost was clearly considerable. Pamela Harriman sold a Picasso, a Renoir and a Matisse for $11 million, as well as one of her two houses in Georgetown.
Apart from the lawsuit, Kathleen Mortimer led her life out of the public gaze. A keen skier and horsewoman, she served on the boards of the Visiting Nurse Service and the Foundation for Child Development.
Her husband predeceased her in 1999, and she is survived by their three sons.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwu8Giq66Zop6ytHuXbGtqbWVofIyt06Gjnp2eYpqwvtOipJ6qXp3Brrg%3D