by Leslie Brody
Esmond didn’t help her find a more sanitary or reliable practitioner, because, as it turns out, he didn’t know a thing about it until the procedure was all over and done. Decca made this decision on her own. She may have thought that it was too soon, that they needed to be lighter on their feet, that the world was too vicious a place on principle, or that Esmond would have made these arguments had she asked. Years later, when her oldest living daughter was grown, Decca remembered thinking that Esmond wouldn’t have wanted a baby.
When Decca finally told Esmond about her abortion, “he was absolutely furious.” She argued that he had taken plenty of dangerous risks in his life. Whom had he consulted before enlisting to fight in Spain? That had been his decision, and this had been hers. It had been horrible, she conceded, but she did what she thought she had to do, and it was long since over; they would have to move on.
CHAPTER 5
ESMOND AND DECCA cast their thoughts westward. Earlier, they had considered emigrating to Mexico, but now their shared dream was to reach distant, isolationist, jazzy New York. With the one-hundred-pound inheritance Decca received on her twenty-first birthday, they bought a second-class stateroom on the Canadian SS Aurania and planned to stay at the Shelton Hotel in New York City for $3.50 a night. Esmond said that he would return and fight when England “was drawn into a war,” but when that war would begin, and even how the allies and enemies would line up, was still unclear. As they embarked in Southampton, England, in February 1939, Unity was busy in Germany, a member of Hitler’s social circle. In conversation with the British consul in Munich, Decca’s sister “mentioned that Herr Hitler believed that he had been sent by God and that when one heard him say that one believed it too.” Of family and friends only Philip Toynbee, Tom Mitford, and Nanny Blor waved bon voyage.
Decca and Esmond held much in common with many others traveling from Europe that February: their age, energy, haphazard education, and eagerness to escape the old country. But in other ways, they were two rare immigrants. Esmond was something of a literary prodigy; as every tabloid headline regarding him trumpeted, he was also Winston Churchill’s nephew, the son of the powerful Conservative leader’s sister-in-law. Decca, the red debutante, was herself twice famous—for opposing her family’s public attachment to fascism and now for being the Mitford girl who got away. The couple’s arrival in New York generated a few gossip column items and several welcoming invitations to dine and visit, but nothing that might immediately be translated to real income, which was what they desperately needed.
They came to the United States armed with extraordinary letters of introduction collected in the months before their departure. Decca said that on their very first night in town, they sat in the Shelton Hotel bar and agonized over the best wording for the letters they composed to introduce themselves. “We sat in a dim, plushly upholstered corner ordering dry martinis, absorbing the amazing un-Englishness of it all.” They must have felt giddy to have made their escape from London, where they and their friends had come to feel so discouraged. From the other side, America had shone like the big rock-candy mountain, sunshine and peppermints.
They considered their precious list of contacts a lifeline of favors to call in. These were family acquaintances and friends of friends, as well as artists, writers, and even Hollywood moguls, anyone who might know someone who might give them a break. For instance, a letter from their friend Roger Roughton provided the names and thumbnail descriptions of New York residents e. e. Cummings “an amusing and sometimes very good writer, he’s an authority on burlesque; politically he’s pretty cynical” and James Thurber, who was “exactly as you would imagine him and very kind,” as well as Carl Sandburg in Chicago.
At some point, Esmond hit upon Hollywood as a place where he might have strong earning potential, either as the foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle or as a screenwriter. Roughton suggested they look up Walter Arensberg, “an elderly millionaire, very good natured with a magnificent collection of contemporary paintings and a belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.” He also encouraged them to meet homegrown artists like left-wing actor Lionel Stander, experimental filmmaker Ken McGowan, and Edward Weston, who “is very nice indeed, with a character much like Henry Moore’s.” In Carmel, “Bloomsbury on the Pacific,” the person to see was Ella Winter, “an English communist who was married to Lincoln Steffens. She knows a lot of people in Hollywood and will give you many introductions.”
Decca and Esmond knew they needed a reliable form of income that would work in all locales and weather. What had they to sell? They had their inexhaustible energy, the benefit of their intense though brief life experiences. How to use their resources, wit, and prolixity and the accident of their birth to turn the (assumed) American weakness for British aristocracy to their advantage? Someone suggested a lecture tour; others had tried it and made out like bandits.
A letter they received from acquaintance Walter Starkie of Dublin lit a fire under that plan. His advice:In America what they want is originality and unconventional ideas. They must always hear something for the first time, if they have ever heard what you tell them before, they look on you with contempt. The easiest prey for the visiting lecturers are without question the Women’s Clubs. You should do well with your companions if you give them talks on “England’s gilded youth,” and “how the British Army gets recruits.” You must remember that in some of the God-forsaken towns of the Middle West you and your party will become the sensation of the week. This is flattering at the time, but do not expect them to remember you after you have left because memories like emotions are short lived in U.S.A. There is a great deal of snobbery among American women and you would do well to cultivate it, so I should keep handy your subject “how to meet the King.”
Decca and Esmond thought this through and strategized accordingly. They recruited three co-lecturers. Sheila Legg (the same Sheila who recommended Decca’s abortionist) would discuss various types of men in her lecture “Men from the Ritz to the Fish and Chips Stand.” Philip Toynbee would offer the titillatingly titled “Sex Life at Oxford University” and, as a Father’s Day special, “Arnold Toynbee: Historian but First and Foremost ‘Dad.’” Decca would draw on her early observations in “The Inner life of an English Debutante.” And as manager of the lecture series, Esmond would offer “The Truth About Winston Churchill.”
They eventually had to junk the lecture tour idea when all their traveling companions dropped out. The start-up expenses deterred Legg, who couldn’t raise her fare to America. Then Toynbee fell in love and promptly lost his hunger to escape England. The world was unpredictable and lumbering toward war, but under Esmond’s demanding management, his “fellow lecturers” might have felt themselves already in service. In his memoir, Toynbee later admitted that what he feared was the couple’s “undeliberate but crushing domination.”
Once Decca and Esmond actually started to meet the Americans they had only fantasized about, they were pleasantly surprised. Decca noted early on that New Yorkers elaborated whenever they had the chance and seemed incapable of giving a simple reply. Americans in general rarely seemed suspicious, didn’t hold the couple’s youth against them, and actually liked engaging strangers—going as far as to invite them into their homes (an act Decca thought would particularly shock her parents). Such universal friendliness and curiosity melted them. Often, even brief encounters would include the conversational gambit “Do you like America?” which for the couple epitomized the contrast between the two nations. “It would never occur to us to ask a foreigner if he liked England,” said Decca. “Because if he did, so what? And if he didn’t there would be nothing you could do about it.” Still, like other immigrants, she discovered America to be a land of opportunity and consolation. It helped to be adaptable, and she had that gift.
Describing those early days in the United States, Decca saw herself as a carefree cosmopolite, careening from one funny episode to another. Photographs of the time show off her beautiful compl
exion and eyes. She was always nicely dressed, well coiffed, and merry again like the mischievous child she had once been. Grief didn’t play an overt role in her New York character. She was the first to find a job (as a salesclerk in a fancy dress shop), and the balance of power in the couple’s relationship shifted accordingly.
The one subject that always remained taboo between Decca and Esmond was Unity. Decca couldn’t discuss her anxiety regarding Unity’s activities in the months leading up to the war. She despaired when she heard that her sister had ignored all advice to leave Berlin and gone apartment hunting. (Unity would soon move into a flat vacated by a Jewish family.) For Decca, her “Boud” was a problem like no other. Decca reflected that “perversely, and although I hated everything she stood for, she was easily my favorite sister.” Unity said she hated Esmond as much as he hated her, but made overtures in her own delusional way: “My attitude toward Esmond is as follows—and I rather expect his to me to be the same. I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me, but in the meantime I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends.”
On September 3, in Munich, once Unity had recognized that war between Britain and Germany was certain, she shot herself in the head and survived. She had written suicide notes (one note had proclaimed her special love for Decca), along with instructions to be buried with a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler. Decca wouldn’t hear this news until two months after the fact. On September 6, Decca wrote to her mother: “I see that in the papers Bobo is in Germany, do tell me if you have any news of her & please send her address as soon as you can so I can write to her. Is she going to stay there?”
ESMOND HAD HOPED to find work in advertising, but despite his celebrity, nothing clicked. They relied on their contacts for little luxuries. Decca was stunned by the New York City heat and delighted to accept invitations to the country estates of millionaires like Mrs. Murray Crane. In her letters, Decca marveled that Mrs. Crane has “fine wirenetting around their windows to keep out moths & slow flies.”
The very rich and very Republican Washington Post publisher, Eugene Meyer, and his wife, Agnes, lived in “a sort of Winston Churchill-ish atmosphere of other bigshots.” Meyer himself, according to Esmond, was “a terrific Washington Big-shot w. an aura of cigars, badly sequenced liquors and huge stomached business friends.” He and Meyer found themselves simpatico. They circled one another, each calculating how money might be made from the other’s notoriety. Meyer’s soon-to-be-married daughter Katharine would herself become a good friend of Decca’s. Eventually “Kay,” a committed Democrat, would introduce the couple to the young and idealistic New Deal community of Washington, D.C.
In March, after a month’s stay at the Shelton Hotel, the Romillys moved to their own small apartment on Christopher Street. Greenwich Village seemed a theater of wonders where Decca found shops full of goods and a store window that Dalí decorated. Soon they adopted a stray cat that would wake them up in the morning by walking on their heads. They started to feel so much at home that they took out citizenship papers. England had begun wartime rationing of food and clothing. Decca sent little luxuries like gloves and canned tuna fish in care packages to her mother.
In early summer, Esmond found a job as an executive with an advertising firm called Topping and Lloyd. This enterprise was a calculated tax dodge, designed to efficiently launder his employer’s money, then vanish. (Esmond had wondered why no work was ever required of him, but put it down to the American way of doing business.) For the short term of his employment, the couple managed to save Esmond’s weekly hundred-dollar salary while they lived on Decca’s more modest paycheck. By then, she had moved on to a job at the 1939 World’s Fair selling tartans in “Ye Merrie England Village.”
In terms of minutes and hours, Esmond and Decca hadn’t had much of a courtship. They had eloped after knowing one another for a few days. While they had always laughed and joked and their sexual attraction was intense, they were also always either fighting a war or waiting for one. In the United States, they were amazed by the degrees of frivolity available for connoisseur and amateur. The pursuit of self-fulfillment and personal happiness was for some Americans a way of life—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, no less. They were busy that year finding their feet, and along the way, the two of them also became great friends.
EUGENE MEYER BECAME fond enough of Decca and Esmond to become something of a patron. In the summer of 1939, Meyer commissioned the Romillys to write a series of articles for the Sunday Washington Post about their first year in the United States. The job provided some advance money to travel. Meyer ran the series about nine months later under the headline “Blueblood Adventurers Discover America,” with a sidebar introducing “Two Youthful Escapists Who Fled to America with a Song in Their Hearts.”
The earliest articles were illustrated by cartoons of the couple in action: exclaiming over tea; daydreaming over U.S. guidebooks; persuading the U.S. consul (framed by portraits of Washington and Jefferson) of their commitment, exemplary conduct, and financial stability; and then waving au revoir from aboard the SS Aurania. Subsequent features included cartoons of Esmond smoking in bed as he fantasized about winged horses winning at the track, and Decca flogging plaids at the World’s Fair. The nation was still in the grip of the Depression, and the tiresome and often disappointing rituals of job hunting, employment, and unemployment seemed sparkly and amusing when the working man and woman involved were famous young British aristocrats who seemed to have walked right out of a film comedy.
The first week’s feature, in addition to its many illustrations and oversized photographs, offered a boxed biographical summary of the couple’s life-so-far and this additional hearty introduction: “A gay and exciting salute to reality by two front-page young lovers who bought the world for a song and are making their dreams come true in America where slammed doors and empty pockets have only been fun to two top-drawer immigrants.”
Esmond had already written many articles, but these were Decca’s first publications. She’d honed her brisk, amusing style in letters. In the feature titled “English Adventurers Stalk Job in Wilds of New York,” she reported on her job at the World’s Fair. In her description of “Miss B,” the American manager of Ye Merrie England Village who would “discourse eloquently on the necessity of knowing only the right people,” Decca began what would become a lifelong habit of skewering snobs in print. Her job was to sing “the merits of Highland Hand-woven Tweeds.” Miss B was shallow and deluded. Sales at the booth were slow, the manager claimed, only because “the best people” hadn’t yet found them.
At first Decca had been delighted by her job at the fair. Built to demonstrate “The World of Tomorrow,” the fair offered many international delights, including the outdoor cafés of the Swiss pavilion and a television in the RCA pavilion, which transmitted “operas, cartoons, cooking demonstrations, travelogues, fashion shows, and skaters at Rockefeller Center.” Outside the Heinz pavilion, hungry urchins stood in line to get the tiny gherkins offered as samples. Then they lined up again, making a day of it. The booth in which Decca worked was a faux “old Scotch cottage with a spinning wheel and handloom,” with a “weaver imported direct from Scotland,” who was also their barker. “Only 10 cents to come in! It’s better than the Billy Rose’s Aquacade!” he would shout hopefully, though the Aquacade featured Esther Williams, Johnny Weissmuller, and the opposite of tartan woolens: a wet, refreshing spray. Working the fair in August was too hot, and Decca loathed her boss. Soon, she and Esmond were beckoned by the open road.
THE HEADLINE OF the couple’s next installment was “English Adventurers Learn the Hard Way,” and following the conventions of a second act, introduces its hero and heroine to a deepening series of obstacles. Unemployed again, Esmond attended bartender school, where he met real salt-of-the-earth types, homegrown and immigrant, and worked hard to gain both his coworkers’ and his readers’ approval. In
a complementary piece, Decca delighted in describing the two of them as gadabouts, flirting with the underworld in the person of an expat racetrack tout.
Decca and Esmond invited Donahue, as they knew him, to their apartment for dinner, and he reciprocated by letting them in on some sure bets. Donahue had a “soft Lancashire brogue” and a line about loving and losing a “lass who worked in a mill in Wigan,” as well as a tale of complete financial ruin followed by a miraculous turnaround at the track, once he hit upon a plan to beat the system. Simply put, Donahue bribed jockeys to throw races, and for a very small investment, he offered the young couple an opportunity to share in great rewards. In confidence, he added that his foolproof plan required only that he never be greedy. To Esmond, the humility of the scheme—its nonviolent but low-grade risk—as well as Donahue’s implied friendship with Broadway habitués such as writer Damon Runyon and legendary boxer Jack Dempsey, proved irresistible. Decca was amused but more reluctant to gamble away their small savings. Esmond persuaded her with a strategy of his own to con the con: “You see, he’s planning to take us for a LONG ride. He’s much too important a crook to be interested in some piddling amount. Then when we’ve won say around $500, we’ll simply stop there. The SHORT ride versus the LONG ride, that’s what our policy should be.”
They invested everything they had. Donahue raised their hopes with a big win on their first horse, but when he never showed up to pay them off, they lost their savings after all. The consequence of that deal inspired some unusually revealing writing. Decca rarely portrayed Esmond as anything less than stoic, but on this occasion, he was angry and vulnerable. He stood in the shower looking “as if he’d been there for hours. Water was dribbling down his face, contorting his expression. ‘Don’t come near me,’ he said. ‘Don’t touch me.’”
