''I'm censured for having had friends,'' Mrs. Harriman said in 1996, assailing the many books and articles written about her, ''and, of course, more friends than I've ever really had. Men friends. The amount of people that I read about that I've slept with that I've never slept with -- I mean it's extraordinary!''

She insisted that she was not looking for a rich husband, saying of her biographers and detractors: ''The one thing that they've all missed is the fact that having once been married I said to myself, 'I don't have to get married again.' I was bruised. What annoys me, especially in this world where women are equal with men, why do they all take the same tack, that people didn't marry me? Nobody's ever thought that I didn't want to marry.''

But then she did marry, in 1960. During a visit to New York she was introduced to Leland Hayward, the Broadway producer of such hit musicals as ''South Pacific'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' A friend asked her to go to the theater with Hayward, whose wife, Slim, later known in New York society as Lady Keith, was in Europe. It was not long before Hayward proposed.

She showered him with what Sally Bedell Smith characterized as ''geisha-like devotion.'' She cooked chicken hash on a hot plate when they were out on the road and organized splendid houses in New York and Westchester, but theirs was a complicated marriage. Hayward had three children from his marriage to the actress Margaret Sullavan, who committed suicide in 1960, 11 years after their divorce. The children loved their mother and their first stepmother, but not their father's new wife.

When Hayward died of a stroke in 1971, there was a feud over his will. His daughter Brooke Hayward even suggested in her book, ''Haywire,'' that her last stepmother absconded with a string of pearls her mother had left to her. Pamela Harriman insisted that she knew nothing about the pearls.

As the Wife of Harriman, She Buoys the Democrats

Five months after Hayward's death, at a dinner party given by Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, there was a serendipitous reunion with W. Averell Harriman, who had been widowed the year before. A month later Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward, 51, married the 79-year-old former Governor of New York, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Harry Truman's choice to be President of the United States.

Although Harriman was the heir to the Union Pacific Railroad fortune, he was famously parsimonious. With his new wife, however, he was generous, and began to live up to his means. She fixed up his houses. She became an American citizen and adopted his interests in the Soviet Union and, more exuberantly, in the Democratic Party.