by Leslie Brody
Muv was ailing, and this would be Decca’s last summer with her mother. The drawing room in which she wrote overlooking the sea was a serene refuge after the preceding few months. There was just one small glitch in the supplies department—she was by then used to equating bouts of writing with hard drinking and complained that though there was sherry and wine around dinnertime, there was “no real booze.” Before leaving California, her physician and friend Eph Kahn had presumably told her that cutting back might be a good thing. “I don’t think so,” she wrote to Barb, Eph’s wife. “I know I’d get more done on the book if I could have a good stiff drink in the p.m.”
The greater interruption was her discovery of a cache of letters addressed to Esmond and Decca Romilly at Rotherhithe Street—covering the period when they had run away. Three of these, all posted from Germany, told three versions of one episode before the war. Her mother had written: “Had tea with Hitler. He is very agreeable and has surprisingly good manners.” Debo’s teenaged perspective of their tea party included “Delicious cakes. Bobo [Unity] gets quite different when she’s with him, all trembly and can’t take her eyes off him.” Unity’s letter said: “Tea with the Führer. Muv kept talking about home-made bread and asked if they couldn’t pass a law in Germany making it illegal to take out the wheat germ.”
As chief landowner, Decca did try to participate in island life, though the bloom was off that rose. When her mother invited some guests to dinner—guests whose major characteristic was “freedom from fear of being boring”—she learned “exactly how to import ponies from Iceland to Scotland and train them to carry dead stags.” Educational, she admitted in its way. “In fact, should I ever be faced with this exact problem at some future time I really do think I’ll know just how to do it.”
FOR DINKY, OAKLAND had compensations. There was a new militancy on the nearby Berkeley campus. The SLATE group, begun around the time of the anti-HUAC hearings and other New Left groups, proliferated. Among these was a branch of the National Student Association so that Dinky could pick up where she left off. At a SNCC support group, she met SNCC leader Charles McDew. They started a romance, and by the end of summer (once she found a reliable neighbor to look after Benjy), she joined him on his travels. She would eventually wind up back in New York City and moved into a fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, not too far from the apartment Esmond and Decca had occupied. In 1962, Greenwich Village was a place where a person could share a cheap apartment, where outsiders gathered, and where artists, “ex’s” and red-diaper babies felt at home. It existed as it had for generations, in sharp contrast to uptown, not least for its role as incubator of underground arts and its hospitality to love affairs between men, between women, and between people of vastly different incomes, different marital statuses, and different races. In that last category, Dinky was just one of many people whose interracial relationship would have been dangerous in another state. She loved her new neighborhood. It didn’t matter that she had only one dress to wear to work—she’d wash and dry it every day. She worked as a receptionist in the day and for SNCC at night as an office worker.
On February 1, 1963, SNCC held a fund-raiser at Town Hall in New York and the glitterati of the civil rights movement were all invited. Among them were Harry Belafonte Jr., Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando, and Bob Moses, leader of the voting rights initiative. Former Freedom Riders John Lewis and James Forman (the new executive director of SNCC) came from Atlanta to attend. “Who is Constancia Romilly?” Forman asked around the office. He had read and admired the paper Dinky had researched on Lowndes County, Alabama. When they met, Forman told Dinky that her education and skills as a writer and an editor could be put to greater use in Atlanta, the civil rights movement’s organizational center. James Forman was a professorial-looking man, large and rumpled. He had the good teacher’s motivation to instruct and document and lugged around a clunky reel-to-reel tape recorder to preserve the exact words of people whose stories he believed others needed to hear. He was writing a book, he told Dinky, and needed help transcribing all those tape reels.
Decca and her daughter didn’t harbor grudges. She was proud of Dinky’s resourcefulness and intrigued by her hip and sophisticated downtown life, but typically (as generations mandate) a beat behind. In June, when Medgar Evers was murdered, Decca wrote to commiserate with Virginia. They discussed the great number of students now going south to work for the civil rights movement in voter registration and in Freedom schools, and Decca wrote that her daughter was among those “chucking her job and going to work for SNCC” (or, she added, “SNCCing her job and going to work for Chuck?”). This was old news to Virginia, who told her that Dinky was already in Atlanta and that Dinky’s new boyfriend was Forman, who had separated from his wife. Seen from most angles, their romance wouldn’t be easy. Bob told Dinky he “feared the Klan would come around. He had nightmares about that.”
CHAPTER 25
IN THE SPRING of 1963, Decca went to New York to consult with Simon and Schuster’s marketing team about The America Way of Death’s battle plan. The publishing house knew it had a hot property. The team, including editor Robert Gottlieb, shared Decca’s amused and irreverent attitude toward undertakers in America. If things went as they hoped, a new breeze would blow the proprietary aroma of embalming fluid out to sea. Charmed by Decca’s voice and intelligence and the reasoning of her argument, readers would view the passion and insistence of the funeral industry’s status quo not just as old-fashioned but as con artistry. At their New York meeting, they had a whole spectrum of tactics regarding “how to get the book attacked as subversive and me attacked as a red (surprising how little trouble they are going to have in this regard, I was thinking to myself), how to stir up the John Birch Society to go for us. Goodness you’d have roared.” She wrote to Bob of interviews, photographs, television appearances, and broadcast debates on their itinerary. “All these special letters and special approaches did so remind me of CRC.”
In May, as her publicity team met, Decca heard that at age eighty-three, her mother had died on Inch Kenneth, with four of her daughters around her. Muv had followed her daughter’s adventures and occupations, collected articles and photographs, and logged these in great scrapbooks. She’d been proud of her children. They had all shown resourcefulness, courage, originality. Muv had even applauded Hons and Rebels, though it had caused her discomfort. Decca had tried to balance the impact of the most offensive English reviews, which had ridiculed Muv for her upper-class hauteur and political obtuseness, with more sympathetic comments culled from the U.S. press, and she had sent these over the last year of Muv’s life, like so many mitigating valentines.
Decca was grateful for Nancy and Debo’s descriptions of her mother’s funeral: the Scottish pipers and special hymns. She still felt lonely and far away, but parsed the details with a connoisseur’s mind. The beautiful flowers that she heard covered her mother’s grave reminded Decca of the beds from which they’d been gathered on Inch Kenneth. These she compared with the assembly-line floral tributes so often imposed on American mourners, as part of their funeral package. Her mother’s death and funeral may have been much on Decca’s mind, but it was her habit to bury grief in work. Her bête noir had recently become the floral industry’s connivance to add expensive wreaths (sometimes including withered flowers) to increase the mortician’s bill. There was something fascinating and bizarre in the custom by which a larger wreath showed greater respect and greater sympathy. The book’s publicists planned to exploit this custom; they ordered a giant wreath as center-piece of their booth at an upcoming booksellers convention. Another green and red wreath would show up on the jacket of the book’s first edition.
THE SUBJECT OF a joint byline had yet to be resolved. From the start, Decca and Bob assumed they would share author credit for The American Way of Death. Decca was always lavish in her praise of her husband’s work. Bob was a “marvelous editor.” He wrote bits and pieces, and his research was central to their mutual project
. “You see,” Bob said, “Decca doesn’t like research. She won’t even go to the library. I did that and also the fieldwork because she didn’t like going into mortuaries either.” Decca conducted the interviews and narrated the book in her own voice. Bob assured her that he didn’t feel jealous or deprived. In the end, the question of credit was settled by the agents and publishers, who advised Decca that co-written books never sell as well.
As expected, in the months leading to The American Way of Death’s publication, the funeral industry began publishing updates, warnings, and defensive strategies. Decca played curious and accommodating. After one shopping excursion to Forest Lawn’s gift shop, she inquired about the old English-style designs on some of their merchandise. Her inquiries befuddled the funeral industry, from front-desk clerks to souvenir manufacturers to the undertaker’s apprentice. What sort of person challenges the veracity of a quotation on an ornament? Why did it matter that the inscription on the gift ashtrays featured an invented coat of arms and phony French words? Everyone had a living to make. Some people found comfort in the twenty-five-cent ashtrays (also attractive as wall mounts) to be found in Forest Lawn’s gift shop, or the items wouldn’t sell as well as they did. At first, the industry’s representatives replied with good old common sense. Then warnings appeared in the trade press, but the more they fomented, the more prepublication orders for Decca’s book soared.
IN EARLY AUGUST 1963, the Treuhafts held a party on Regent Street to celebrate the book’s publication. Bob made chicken paprika for “thousands.” Despite their advance warning, the morticians and company hardly knew what hit them. Their first line of defense was to try to smear Decca by association. Wilbur M. Krieger, managing director of National Selected Morticians, said Decca unpatriotically wished to “substitute communist, Russian-style funerals for our fine American ones.” A right-wing journal called Tocsin said she was attempting “to bury capitalist America’s funeral customs.” The mortuary trade journals accused her of ruining business, and some Bay Area morticians simply called her “the devil.”
Decca had decided that once the charges about her past began to surface, she would neither confirm nor deny her previous affiliation with Communism. Although she had long since left the party, a simple denial would not be possible, since it would leave the impression that the premise of such a question was legitimate.
On October 15, Congressman James Utt, whose Southern California district included Forest Lawn Cemetery, denounced Jessica Mitford and her book on the floor of the House of Representatives. In addition, he objected to the CBS documentary The Great American Funeral, which was closely based on Mitford’s research. “While hiding behind the commercial aspects of the mortician and the cemeteries and mausoleums where our dear departed friends and relatives are commemorated, she is really striking another blow at the Christian religion,” he read into the Congressional Record. The Washington Post reported that Decca called the accusations a “Red herring,” or a diversion from the true crime at hand. After this free publicity, her publishers released a list of the cities that she planned to visit on her national book tour.
The FBI agents who seemed to have become rather complacent regarding the Treuhafts’ activities over the previous few years scurried to make up for lost time. They produced a secret report, which summarized several critical events in Decca’s life, eloquently concluding that she had “lapsed into a steadfast condition of noncooperation.”
Decca’s book would become a best seller, and she would make news for months. After six weeks, it would be supplanted in the number one spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list by John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage.
There were protests and letters of opposition to Decca’s appearances, and a bomb threat in Boston. Attacks on her past politics and objections to the way she treated her subject were counterbalanced by the encouraging crowds who came to hear her speak and read, and the approval she encountered for questioning the status quo. She vastly enjoyed her popular success, not least of all because such a thing would have seemed impossible ten years before. “I think that only those who have been, as I was, a target of the Truman-McCarthy-era assault on radicals can appreciate the feeling of decompression on having one’s work accepted at its face value.”
Her touring strategy was to “make thousands of jokes in succession.” In this, she was helped by the high-profile preservation of Lenin’s corpse in Red Square, which held the record for “long-term viewing,” and by Khrushchev’s famous cold-war threat to capitalist adversaries, “We shall bury you,” which, she said, made Forest Lawn mad since he was “muscling in on their territory.” Talk show hosts tried to red-bait her, but she would turn the situation to her advantage. When she was in Denver, a gloomy funeral industry representative declared, “I could put you away for $150.” Decca snapped, “Sorry, you’re too late. Other undertakers have offered to do it for nothing, as long as it’s soon.” The success or failure of Decca’s book was finally a matter of choice, of taste, of the pocketbook. There was little traction for the attacks against her—and though they continued, its sales increased. “Unfortunately for the undertakers,” Decca wrote, “it would seem there is little popular support for the theory that a ‘fine funeral’ is America’s first line of defense and the highest expression of patriotism.”
Decca had previously experienced fame as notoriety. The response from most readers, apart from right-wingers and the funeral industry, was admiration. She was instantly the expert, the authority on all things funeral. Almost every day, there were articles in the press, more requests for appearances, and political cartoons on the subject. Decca’s droll charm made her an immediate favorite on the interview and lecture circuit. And all this attention translated to money: “Benj is angling for a $2 weekly increase in his allowance,” Decca wrote her mother-in-law, Aranka:I’ve already done a couple of daring things, such as to buy a salad bowl (to replace the beat-up old wooden mixing bowl we’ve been using) . . . Oh yes and Bob Gottlieb said: “Do you want some money? You’ve only to say the word, you know, you don’t have to wait for the royalty report with the way things are going.” So I said what a smashing idea, do send loads.
In the past, she’d been used to staying in hotels that were “total fleabags,” but her new publishers booked her into a fancy suite at the Boston Ritz, complete with an enormous basket of flowers. “It was thrilling . . . I danced around the room,” she said.
Evelyn Waugh wrote that Jessica Mitford’s book was funny, but its author did not have a “plainly stated attitude to death.” Decca asked her sister to pass along a message next time she saw Waugh: “Tell him of course I’m against it.” Decca’s sisters gave generally positive reviews.
Decca’s book was about the exploitation of the vulnerable, the absurdity of fast-changing styles in postmortem fashions, and the mechanism that reinforces the perpetuation of profit. Here was the capitalist system as represented in the phony-baloney funeral racket. The go-getters of the 1950s had taken off their hats and gotten down to business. Waugh, who had become more religious over the course of his life and had eventually converted to Catholicism, read her book through the lens of a tut-tutter. Mitford chroniclers Jonathan Guinness and Catherine Guinness (Decca’s nephew and great-niece) saw The Loved One as Waugh’s dual attack on America’s “materialist denial of death and rejection of its religious implications.” Decca’s book, by contrast, demonstrated that religious implications are more often used to make a killing in the marketplace. Decca was distinctly unconcerned with the “spiritual aspects of death,” which she associated with Christian and Jewish theology. However, one of the great joys she experienced in the whirlwind year was of the clergy defending her position, and she went all out to “exploit that new-found respectability.” Several subsequent articles containing “occasional references to the spiritual aspects of death,” were, she admitted, “a bit specious coming from me, as the undertakers may have divined, but there was nothing they could do about it.”
In its review, the People’s Daily World reliably ascribed the crisis in funerals to the corrupting system of free enterprise: “It is bad enough keeping up with the Joneses in life, but it is even more tragic to try to keep up with the Joneses in death.” On the political right, the conservative National Review sincerely congratulated Decca for exposing “the whole ghoulish paraphernalia of the death trade.” But once the editors, including William F. Buckley, discovered her political history, the publication rescinded it endorsement and, to the delight of Decca and the whole book committee, attacked her as a “crypt-o Communist.”
Eventually, the trade magazines began to refer to a gadfly named “Jessica.” Sometimes, they’d regard her as a dilettante who got everything wrong, who was hardly worth so much attention. Other times, she was a pernicious and damaging influence. The single-name treatment was at once a snide dismissal and acknowledgment of her fame. Decca considered it a mark of distinction, like “Zsa Zsa” or “Liberace.”
