Kathleen Harriman Mortimer

Kathleen Lanier Harriman was born on Dec. 7, 1917, the younger of two daughters of Mr. Harriman and his first wife, Kitty Lanier Lawrance. Her paternal grandfather, E. H. Harriman, head of the Union Pacific Railroad, had left a fortune estimated at $70 million to $100 million. Her parents divorced in 1929. Miss Harriman earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Bennington College in 1940. The next year, she joined her father in London, where he oversaw the Lend-Lease Act, which provided United States aid to the European war effort. In London, she was a reporter, first for the International News Service and later for Newsweek. Her roommate there was Pamela Digby Churchill, the daughter-in-law of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As befits a tightly knit society in which people were separated by far fewer than six degrees, Pamela Churchill would, years later, become Averell Harriman’s third wife. In 1947, Miss Harriman married Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune. Afterward, she largely dropped from public view, though her private life was not without turbulence. In 1969, Mr. Mortimer, who suffered from manic-depression, shot himself in what apparently was a suicide attempt. He survived, and the couple remained married until his death, at 86, in 1999. Besides her son David, Mrs. Mortimer is survived by two other sons, Jay and Averell Mortimer; two stepchildren, Stanley G. Mortimer III and Amanda M. Burden; 10 grandchildren; and 7 great-grandchildren.