Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  In the year after her book was published, Decca was swamped with letters. Some were fan letters, but others were messages of complaint and of forlorn hopes. Among other more amusing consequences of her success was the way the Mitford name became “synonymous with cheap funerals.” For a while, the “Mitford style” came to mean the “plainest and least expensive funeral,” and a “Mitford,” the cheapest coffin available. Years later, reviewing a revised edition of The American Way of Death, A. Alvarez would compare the book to another “masterpiece of black humor” appearing that year, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove. Each “made fun of the sacred cows of the time with an equal glee.” Alvarez wrote that in 1963, “death was on everybody’s mind.” In November, after the assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy had to choose his brother’s coffin. RFK had read The American Way of Death some months before his brother’s death, and he was to some extent influenced by it. He chose the slightly less expensive one.

  IN JULY, DECCA traveled to Inch Kenneth. Without her mother and without a book to write, she found its cold, drizzly remoteness, which had kept her inside at her manuscript on previous visits, demoralizing. She and Bob were still laird and lady of the isle, but the prospect of retiring there one day, now that she had a career at home, seemed unlikely. Wandering through the island house, Decca had discovered another hamper filled with old letters all neatly organized by Muv. These included details of their mother’s campaign to get Diana out of prison; letters from Tom to his parents from school, and from his days as an officer, when he was a young cosmopolite who traveled with a tuxedo in his luggage; and “a lot of sad things like Tom’s first hair when it was cut, in a teeny envelope.” She gave the lot to Debo, who had inherited their mother’s family scrapbooks.

  In the summer of 1964, Benjy was enrolled at a French college near Lyons, and on her way to visit her son, Decca stopped in Paris to see Nancy. This was their first time together since The American Way of Death had been published, and Nancy congratulated the best-selling author, teasing her about her new-made fortune and proudly pronouncing her une chacal des cimitieres (a graveyard ghoul). Decca liked to joke that “Nancy was dressed by Chanel and I by J.C. Penney,” but on this occasion, both sisters swept into an exclusive fashion house for a splurge. It was as celebratory a holiday as Decca would ever spend in her sister’s company. On one afternoon, Nancy pulled together some left-wingers for a day’s entertainment, and on another, in an unexpected show of intimacy, she took Decca to have lunch with Gaston Palewski, her French lover.

  For her part, Decca “loved Nancy’s company.” In later years, she’d say, “I suppose I never knew her very well. In childhood the age difference between us was too great to permit of much companionship.” In later years, theirs was more of an “arms-length relationship.” But pleasing—or at least impressing—her oldest sibling may have been one of the driving forces of Decca’s life. It wasn’t Nancy’s way to show vulnerability or obvious sentiment to Decca, but during this encounter in Paris, Decca came at last to see Nancy at close range. The older sister was scrupulous and courteous, droll, sometimes icy, sometimes generous. If her words were occasionally wounding or her conduct sometimes waspish, Decca took pleasure in their shared history, in her sister’s expert authorial advice, and in their rare confidences. Outside the family, their relationship looked very different. In Decca’s friend Marge Frantz’s opinion, “Nancy treated Decca like shit.”

  Once Decca had left Versailles, Nancy wrote of Decca to Debo: “Oh dear, I regard her as Muv’s greatest failure, she is such a clever person & completely uneducated so that one keeps running into a wall when talking to her.”

  MAGAZINE EDITORS KEPT after the author of The American Way of Death to write features. Her magazine workload included articles for McCall’s, Vogue, Esquire, and Holiday. She didn’t much care for the deadline life, but she liked the attention. She read several local and national papers every day. Long after she had left the Communist Party, she was still receiving the People’s Daily World. Decca had earned her lifetime subscription back when she and Bob were first married and she’d won the prize at the benefit party they had thrown on Clayton Street. Bob joked that “they’d have to produce a death certificate to get rid of it.”

  Early in the year, an editor at Show asked her to write an article about the upcoming film The Loved One. Decca had once been in the running to write the film script (as had both Luis Buñuel and Elaine May), but director Tony Richardson had settled on Terry Southern, an author with reliably irreverent credentials. Indeed, the advertising campaign for Richardson’s film announced it had “Something to Offend Everybody,” which warmed the cockles of Decca’s heart.

  Decca was a personality in the Bay Area, a national figure whose field was the American funeral, a role often disputed by rival experts inside and outside the industry. Invited to speak on a panel at Albion College in Michigan, Decca first had to endure the lecture of a Dr. Oman, who among his other credentials listed “psycho-dramatist.” He defended the undertaker’s worthy profession and, with Decca in his sights, issued a warning to all dilettantes. Anyone who dared “meddle with these deep-seated desires of the American people in the care of their dead had better go slowly as force of public opinion is so powerful it will sweep him into oblivion.” When Decca took her turn at the podium, she was able to assure Dr. Oman that, actually, meddling had swept her “out of oblivion.”

  What she liked best was getting up to her elbows in muck. A perfect opportunity came with a commission from McCall’s to investigate an Arizona spa (or “fat farm,” as they were popularly called) where affluent women went to get massaged, indulged, and flattered into losing a few pounds for great amounts of money. The Maine Chance spa seemed made to order. Her subject was extravagance and the expense of beautifying. The organizing idea was in the contrast: political muckraker entering the anteroom of Oz, where pretty maids all in a row would treat her to those secret ministrations typically reserved for the upper class. It was an absurd assignment. “How do I go about getting accepted?” Decca had asked her editor, who replied, “Oh come on, you know better than that.” No one could argue with her aristocratic credentials.

  In the days long before youthful body worship made gym membership universal, and surgical work on aging faces ubiquitous, the Maine Chance spa seemed both a refuge and a quaint warehouse for trophy wives and old warhorses alike, battling the inexorable tide. Decca was forty-eight and had complained little of that sense of superfluity some women her age come to feel. She’d been an acknowledged beauty in her youth and was always striking. She wasn’t vain, but she was carrying a few extra pounds she wouldn’t have minded losing.

  In the article, she described a guest’s week at the Maine Chance, lampooning its bizarre mix of servility and sadistic domination, the dietitians and nurses and physical fitness instructors who wrapped, pummeled, and fawned upon their wealthy clientele. Her article takes the form of a diary, in which she sounds slightly uncomfortable throughout, reaching for a brisk tone but bored. Perhaps Decca was too discreet or too concerned with keeping her cover, to look behind the mud mask of the class enemies at their most vulnerable, half naked, and half starving. Perhaps McCall’s diverted her from including the intimate confessions of her spa-mates. In the end, it wasn’t the kind of meddling she liked to do. The piece might have seemed explosive for a ladies’ magazine, but it read rather like a soggy éclair. Still, she lost five pounds.

  DECCA’S INTERSECTION WITH the counterculture of the 1960s was inevitable. She had a lot at stake in preserving a self-identity as a radical and subversive. The last thing she wanted was to freeze into a respectable house writer somewhere. Defiance and flamboyance were the hallmarks of the youth counterculture. Hadn’t she and Esmond been “linked together by mutual amorality which at moments approached the sublime”? At least that’s what one reviewer had said after reading Hons and Rebels. Decca was interested in the influence of drugs but not necessarily in experiencing them. The
major theme of the new generation of political activists was anti-authoritarianism, which, for Decca, struck the right chord.

  “Vietnam,” she wrote, “nags unbearably . . . That awful, hopeless feeling of being dragged along into destruction, and nothing one can do to stop it.” The FBI files pinpoint the first time Decca spoke out publicly about the war, at a rally to raise money for the Free Speech Movement defendants:Jessica Mitford Treuhaft was the first speaker at the August 20, 1965, rally at 400 North Point, San Francisco. She was introduced as a socialist and an individual with socialist ideas, and her speech subject expressed sympathy for FSM Defendants. She mentioned U.S. government policy on immigration and passports and asserted that Democracy did not exist in the United States. Subject indicated her opposition to U.S. policy in Vietnam.

  Decca was asked to join various committees to end the war, but considered organizations for “old folk,” like Women for Peace, “a touch too sappy.” At one meeting of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade, a women’s peace organization, the only interesting moment was when she made “Hazel Grossman cry by saying that Women for Peace had become a fearful drag.” One committee she refused to join was against “wicked toys” for children. “I can’t bear to join,” she wrote Debo, “because I know I should have rather longed for a model H-bomb if they had been about when we were little.”

  She remained more interested in the radical, media-savvy tactics of the young. In 1966, the antiwar organizer and radical Jerry Rubin was subpoenaed to give testimony at one of the last HUAC hearings. Like many witnesses before him, he had found the term “un-American activities” mystifying and, to illustrate his unique dedication to the American enlightenment, showed up dressed in the uniform of a Revolutionary War soldier, straight from Valley Forge. The committee replied with a grumpy sputter. They’d seen many things in their time on the bench, but this was a new kind of insolence.

  Warren Hinckle III was a San Francisco flâneur in his twenties, editor of the new radical magazine Ramparts. Decca and he were both leftist journalists and outsized characters, and they liked each other. “Hink 3,” as Decca called him, had come up through a hard-boiled apprenticeship on the San Francisco Chronicle. He wore a patch over one eye and had a “swashbuckling” way with words. Decca was by then one of the Bay Area’s best-known investigative reporters. Younger writers gravitated to her orbit, and her imprimatur had clout. When she was in the neighborhood, Decca liked to hang around in the magazine’s office, where the “level of chaos,” Hinckle said, defied “summation outside of the analogy of an underdeveloped country.”

  At a Ramparts cocktail party, Decca and Bob found themselves face-to-face with one of the FBI agents who had scrutinized their family and tapped their phone a decade earlier. William Turner recognized Bob’s voice across the room. They had never actually met, Turner told Bob, but he had been one of a seven-agent squad who had listened in on the Treuhafts’ bugged telephone. Turner confessed that they had mainly heard kids gossiping and playing records. The encounter was bizarre and comic, but it was also a relief to hear that what they had imagined had been happening was real. By then, Turner himself had become a whistle-blower, and they all had a drink together.

  RAMPARTS MAGAZINE WAS unpredictable and subversive, just the kind of thing Decca liked. Her connection to the magazine came in particularly handy once Bob and she decided to sell Inch Kenneth. Hinckle offered her a free, prominently placed advertisement announcing the sale of her Scottish island in exchange for her accepting a listing on the Ramparts masthead as contributing editor. Advertising was expensive, and Decca liked a bargain. The two-page Ramparts spread was a romp. “The idea of actually owning an island proved irresistible to many among the misguided in the Ramparts’ audience,” Hinckle wrote. After Inch Kenneth was successfully “unloaded” to Andrew and Yvonne Barlow, he and Decca brainstormed other fundraising schemes. In one, Decca and her friend Sonia Orwell would visit “the ranking capitalists of the land, affording them the treat of having high tea with two women of the classy, intellectual left, wherein the captains of industry would be charmed into buying space in a publication that was enemy to their cause.”

  It was a goofy scenario in which Decca would masquerade as the type of indefatigable upper-class Englishwoman she’d known growing up. Her clowning impression of a Swinbrook type (just this side of camp) was reserved exclusively for American audiences. She had begun playing the daffy British auntie, dressed up in her best Aranka hat, in the late 1940s while fronting for black home buyers. (Later, she donned her widow’s weeds as a costume to scout out a swindling mortuary.) It was a role she loved to act, which opened doors, disarmed opponents, gave her incomparable leeway as a journalist, and led Philip Toynbee to caution anyone who thought to underestimate her that Decca’s “dithering manner concealed an iron will.” Hinckle’s scheme to employ Decca and Orwell as emissaries into the bastions of power never progressed. Her fund-raising skills were suddenly required nearer to home.

  In June 1966, Bob Treuhaft had decided to run against their longtime adversary, Frank Coakley, for district attorney of Alameda County. The politics of the area had shifted to the left, and Bob thought Coakley vulnerable on issues of police brutality, racial bigotry, and corruption. In any case, the very thought of a chagrined Coakley was catnip to Decca, who would serve as Bob’s campaign manager. They’d have a laugh she promised Aranka. Of course, Coakley still had the Oakland Tribune, which would pull out all the stops to smear Bob, but the Treuhaft challenge would make Coakley work harder than he had at a campaign in years. When Decca told Nancy of Bob’s political aspiration, her sister inquired, “Darling, is the District Attorney the man who puts the rope round your neck while puffing a huge cigar?”

  Coakley was reelected, but Bob’s campaign carried most of Berkeley and the black population of Oakland. “It was all worth it,” Decca wrote, “and stirred many a lovely stink in these parts.”

  CHAPTER 26

  ACCORDING TO HER friend Marge Frantz, “Decca loved parties and she got high very quickly. She liked to drink and carried around her own flask of gin.” There were frequent mentions of Decca in Herb Caen’s society column in the San Francisco Chronicle: She ate dinners with a crowd at good restaurants, club-hopped, and often ended her evenings at Enrico’s in North Beach with a Vov or an Irish coffee. She loved to sing cabaret music, especially novelty songs. One of her party pieces was “Grace Darling,” an English folksong about a brave lighthouse keeper’s daughter who saved shipwrecked sailors. Her voice, pummeled over the years by thousands upon thousands of cigarettes and mellowed by booze, was a surprisingly warm alto, more versatile than her audience expected. The song, about which she’d later write a book, told a sensational heroic story; there were thrills and chills, ghastly violence in the threatening storm, and morbid sentimentality in its verses. The chorus of “Grace Darling” demanded a hearty sea-chantey shout, which she’d invite her audience to join:Help, help, she could hear the cry of the shipwrecked crew

  But Grace had an English heart and the raging storm she braved

  She pulled away o’er the rolling sea

  And the crew she saved.

  The parties, which Decca and Bob frequently threw, were each famous, one-of-a-kind convergences. Her house on Regent Street was like Rick’s Café in Casablanca: Young and old, hippie and square, exiles, gamblers, lovers, singers, dancers, fighters, and hard drinkers all found one another. As in her early days with Esmond, her door was still open to artists, revolutionaries, socialites, radical journalists, factory workers, poets, insurance agents, longtime Commies and their children, old friends, and old farts from England. Even the occasional Tory made the scene at Decca’s. “People who amused her, odd fellows, who didn’t agree with anybody,” goddaughter Kathy Kahn said. “You could construct a whole friendship at those parties, and never see these people in other contexts.” Union legend Harry Bridges was a frequent visitor, as well as old friends like Eph and Barb Kahn, Eva and Adam Lapin, and Marge and Laurent Frant
z. Decca’s parties were always a good place to catch up. Laurent had become involved with the Sexual Freedom League and would later move in with Miriam Patchen (the former wife of poet Kenneth Patchen). Marge was studying for a master’s degree in history and had fallen in love with Eleanor Engstrom, a librarian at Berkeley. Eva Lapin had completed a degree in social work, and Adam Lapin, no longer a reporter for the People’s Daily World, was writing travel books, one about Alaska, and another a guide to San Francisco, for which Decca had written the introduction. Like Marge and another old friend, Pele, Barb Kahn had been an original member of Decca’s writing committee. Barb worked part-time, and it seemed to Decca that her old friend’s world was more or less circumscribed by “a lot of boring community work like PTA and Planned Parenthood.” She teased Barb about her large house and shiny household appliances. She also counted on Barb’s advice, though, and it was to Barb that Decca wrote many of her funniest letters.

  Some of the other guests were still in the Communist Party, including Bettina Aptheker, Pele, their old friend and Bob’s law partner Dobby (with her third husband, journalist Mason Roberson), and longtime editor of the People’s Daily World Al Richmond. Herb Caen was a friend and frequent guest at Regent Street. So was the estimable writer Kay Boyle. Boyle lived in San Francisco and taught college there, but her reputation as a literary lioness reached back to the 1930s. Another friend, Herb Gold, had arrived in San Francisco in 1960, joining Oakley Hall, Lee Litwak, and Don Asher, to make up the small core of San Francisco’s postwar novelists. That Gold’s work, and those of his cronies, was published by major New York houses set them apart from the younger countercultural literary heroes, poets, and playwrights, who were exploding like Catherine wheels all over town and who were represented mainly by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore. To Herb Gold, the Treuhafts’ “house on Regent Street was more fun than going anywhere else.” Decca provided plenty of food and plenty of booze. Guests sneaked in their own drugs. Decca didn’t take drugs herself, but she was curious and noted the way LSD was spreading everywhere. Marijuana, she would write to Nancy, “makes one love everyone, they say. [Allen] Ginsberg said it made him feel very sympathetic to Lyndon Johnson. I wish they would invent a Loather’s Drug.”