True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth Page A

Saint-Honoré turns into rue Saint-Honoré, here’s Gucci and Hermès and Dior – all busy updating their images to strengthen the value of their brands.
    Now I come across one of the most fashionable new shops in Paris, Colette, at number 213 rue Saint-Honoré. This is a modern style emporium that specializes, as they say in Colette-speak, in ‘styledesignartfood’. This shop is about beautiful things, and the aspirations of the people who buy them. It’s all light, fresh and bright here. I stroll downstairs, mistakenly finding myself in a stainless steel underground café. Too shy to leave, I sit and order a café crème which I don’t drink. I don’t like this place much; there are dozens rather like it in Sydney. And anyway, I always prefer old fashionable places to new ones.
    But the visit is worth it: a modern Brigitte Bardot enchants all the waiters as she lingers over a cigarette, her thick honey hair tumbling, long legs encased in tightjeans, complete with a tiny pink knitted sweater and pink kitten-heeled mules. I am captivated too, by her skin and eyes, by her sheen and gloss. She exerts absolute dominance over the room. Funnily enough, it doesn’t seem to diminish my femininity; somehow it enhances it. She is the overt manifestation of a force all women share.
    And then I cut back, take a right off rue Saint-Honoré and slip into the flattering shadows of teashop Ladurée at 16 rue Royale. This is more like it. I sigh with pleasure as I take a cup of tea and a macaroon alongside a couple of immaculate old French ladies and their toothless dogs in a pretty, painted room. For a while I sit peacefully, staring into space, thinking of the beautiful scarf I just saw, and wondering if I can ever justify paying so much for a small square of silk. Suddenly I realize that, in my happy daze, preoccupied with the beauty of the street and the shop windows, I’ve walked straight past two of the buildings I most wanted to see.
    Number 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is the American Ambassador’s residence. Lots of worthy diplomats have no doubt lived there, but only one of them interests me: Ambassador Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman, who reigned from May 1993 to her death in 1997. Pamela Harriman lived by a simple equation: she would give pleasure to men; they would reward her in return. An English nobleman’s daughter, she married Randolph Churchill, Winston’s only son, and spent World War Two learning about politics and power at Winston’s knee. During that time she had an affair with American President Roosevelt’s personal envoy, Averell Harriman. After the war, her marriage over, she drifted to Paris where she became, of all things, a twentieth-century courtesan. Her lovers included Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos,Elie de Rothschild and Gianni Agnelli. Eventually she found another husband, the American theater producer Leland Hayward, and when he died she reunited with her old flame, Averell Harriman. He died leaving her immensely wealthy.
    Pamela was a chameleon: she reconfigured herself to be whatever her lovers wanted her to be. Gianni Agnelli wanted her to be sexy and elegant: she dressed head to toe in couture. Her mirroring was so assiduous that old friends giggled when Pamela answered her phone with a phoney Italian accent.
Prrrrronto
? she’d say. Elie de Rothschild liked a woman who was quiet in bed and lovely to wake up to, a woman of elegance and refinement: Pamela rigorously educated herself in antiques and nineteenth-century art. When Pamela married showbiz impresario Leland Howard, amazed visitors watched as she played the homespun partner, bringing out her husband’s slippers and gently sliding them on his feet. She travelled with Leland for the out-of-town tryouts, packing an electric frying pan so she could rustle up his favorite chicken hash after the show. With Averell Harriman, she straightened up into the model