Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  Decca didn’t take much note of the postrevolutionary moment in France. She arrived from Berkeley, where such images had come to seem normal. Instead, the domestic routine in her sister’s household, keyed to the season and hour, was all-absorbing. She looked for ways to help Nancy. It was necessary to pay attention, to adapt, which she did with gratifying results. She walked, she said, a “slight tight-rope—between going up to her room too much, with the attendant danger of either tiring her or boring her . . . and not going up enough, danger of seeming to neglect.”

  For Decca, Nancy’s life in Versailles conjured “another planet, another century.” At first, Decca had waded in, thinking she might help increase efficiency around the place by suggesting that their food be delivered in bulk, rather than purchased daily, and that Nancy’s doctors visit her at home. These innovations were so un-French they hadn’t a chance in hell. But contemplating them, submerging herself in this entirely other world, afforded Decca a real break from politics, her own children’s dramas, and her literary life, particularly The Trial of Dr. Spock. She “rather lost interest in the book, in all the worry over Nancy.” The book was in the hands of its editors, publishers, marketers, and reviewers, and there was nothing she could do at that point.

  Nancy’s live-in housekeeper, Marie, ruled their home. At seventy-five years old, Marie sometimes required assistance and might assign Decca various tasks like walking to the farther market stall for the better butter, the fresher potatoes, the superior cut of meat. After shopping, Decca might be put to work weeding the poppies and peonies. There were parsley beds, lettuce beds, roses, and lavender. Sometimes, when Nancy felt well enough, she would join Decca outdoors. In the evening, Nancy, Marie, and Decca might gather around the television to watch soap operas or the French presidential debates.

  Afternoons, the other sisters would “swoop in,” and there would be “nothing but rapid-fire jokes,” Decca wrote to Aranka. To Virginia, she said, “Even when N. was in the worst pain she still managed to shriek, it is her way of life.” Decca’s friends were curious to know how she got along with sister Diana, whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to for thirty-four years. The Mosleys’ Temple de la Gloire was about twelve miles away, and Diana a frequent guest. In advance, Decca had written to Debo, “who was the go-between, the manager of it all, and said that . . . of course I’d never dream of being unpleasant in the presence of [Nancy], so it was made clear [Decca and Diana would] discuss the situation with Nancy, and what pills she was having—the usual sick-bed talk. And not a word of politics.”

  “Diana and I are getting on . . . rather well, actually,” Decca wrote Marge. “That is, whilst cutting the grass round the irises I forbore to say I was giving the irises lebensraum [or living space, Hitler’s justification for territorial expansion] although it came into my mind. In other words, all efforts are bent to Nancy’s welfare, & that’s all we talk about if we’re alone together.” After so long, Decca thought Diana looked like “a really marvelous statue that’s been left out in the rain for a long time. She was so beautiful still, yet ravaged, but only ravaged from old age.” Diana seemed to think the only great change time had wrought upon Decca was in her voice.

  Nancy’s prognosis was grave. Decca alone of the sisters thought she should be told, but she was overruled by the others, who believed Nancy would lose interest in the book she was then writing, since work had always been the thing that gave her energy. To Decca, it seemed “a sort of awful betrayal not to tell the truth.” Once she was home, she wrote to Debo to restate her belief: “I do feel most terrifically strongly, and must stress this point Hen very much, that it is now verging on wicked not to tell Nancy, in view of Dr. Evans’ report. Because don’t you see, it’s awful enough to get such news when one is feeling fairly OK & strong; but if it is delivered very late in the thing, when one was completely weak anyway and in much pain, so much harder to bear, I should think. Now might be the time.”

  IN AUGUST 1967, The Trial of Dr. Spock was published. The early reviews were respectable (not a rating she relished), but as she feared, its fizz factor barely registered. Decca’s identity in the movement was tied to her role as a radical journalist. In the literary world at large, the confiding, personalized tone of new journalism was the ascendant trend. Radical journalists and new journalists shared a legacy of social criticism, but radical journalists had a politically left agenda and were more often associated with the counterculture press. (Further left, writers for the underground newspapers were starting to call themselves revolutionaries.) The tone of the radical journalists was less confiding and more defiant. Their work was objective because they said so, and it offered an alternative to what they viewed as the false objectivity of a controlled and biased mainstream press.

  Subjects for investigation were everywhere, flying past fast and furiously, but the better-paid writing jobs on Decca’s work calendar were light features and celebrity interviews. All had a highly anticipated quirk factor that often depended on the tension of some trendy subject in contrast with her background. These paid assignments were often so frustrating that in October, Decca asked Marge, “Shall I give up writing & take Laurent’s massage class, instead?”

  Once the trial of the Chicago Eight began, it was clear that this was the trial Decca should have covered. Its defendants, charged with conspiracy to induce a riot at the Democratic National Convention, included Tom Hayden (who had slept on Virginia Durr’s living room floor as a civil rights worker in the early 1960s) and other leaders of the antiwar movement—David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, John Froines, and Bobby Seale, then chairman of the Black Panther Party. The trial had villains and heroes (among the valiant ones, defense lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, who each received sentences for contempt), fools and knaves. It attracted intense press scrutiny for its contrasts: an ancient, anachronistic judge, a humorless prosecutor, Rubin and Hoffman (the two Yippie comedians), and a sequence of celebrity witnesses, including Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, and Allen Ginsberg (who “Omed” on the witness stand). All the chatter and tomfoolery of the early part of the trial could not prepare anyone for the moment when Seale, denied the opportunity to conduct his own defense, was ordered by the judge to be expelled from the courtroom. Marshals carried him back into the room, bound to a chair with a gag in his mouth, still demanding his right to defend himself. In the following moments of silence and profound shame, Seale’s codefendants, along with their lawyers, jumped up to protest.

  In her book on the trial of Dr. Spock, Decca had wished to show how the government historically used conspiracy law to silence its opposition. Dr. Spock and his fellow defendants had hoped to use their trial to demonstrate their loyalty to fundamental American ideals by attacking the legality and morality of the war on a public stage (material in support of which they’d never been allowed to enter into the evidence). The trial of the Chicago Eight was, as the Smith Act trials had been, about big ideas held by dissenters who threatened the status quo. Hoffman said theirs was a “state-of-mind trial”—they were “charged with carrying certain ideas across state lines.” The Chicago trial did what Dr. Spock’s could not, theatrically contrasting a celebration of life and youth with a militaristic culture of death. The eight defendants weren’t interested in maintaining decorum; their support increased with their defiance. It was farce, melodrama, and Grande Guignol in the instance of Bobby Seale, whom the government could not silence without the clumsy accoutrements of tyranny.

  The end of 1969 brought convictions for the Chicago Eight (all would be eventually overturned). That December, also in Chicago, a squad of police carrying machine guns broke into the apartment of twenty-one-year-old Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and shot him in his bed. The police called it a gun battle, but forensic evidence pointed to a murder and one of many actions initiated by the FBI as part of the counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.

  In September 1970, a memo from the director of the FBI to the assistant
attorney general, Internal Security Division, requested a review to determine whether (in the face of burgeoning rebel movements: antiwar, black liberation, women’s liberation, gay liberation) it was still good value to continue assigning agents to observe the ex-menace Decca. The review affirmed unequivocally that her case “should be continued.” An attached page announced: “Subject one of speakers at National Guardian sponsored public meeting, attended celebration of release of MORTON SOBELL, gave support to Black Panther Party during 1968-1969. Is currently working on a book about prisons.”

  IN 1970, SAN Francisco was still absorbing scads of young people. Haight-Ashbury was in decline, but to its young émigrés, that meant cheap rent and easy-to-find drugs. Politicos and apoliticos made their accommodations; they shared garish, painted Victorians, rice and beans, and their mattresses on the floor. Even the most oblivious “freek-child” would throw on her glad rags and parade in the day’s demonstration against the war in Vietnam. The surliest Socialist Workers Party member knew a Sunday in Golden Gate Park meant he’d probably lose a battle to a tambourine and end up with his shirt off in the sunshine. Most hippies and radicals agreed the music was still in ascendance; so were hallucinogens and the underground press. In the Bay Area, there were several underground papers, of which the Oracle was the most celebrated for its psychedelic design. The Berkeley Barb was starting to actually make money, thanks to the brilliant stroke of its editor, Max Scherr, to charge money for its sexy personals. The Berkeley Tribe was an earnest, seat-of-the-pants organization with a devoted radical staff and following. There was an acknowledged small-press revolution going on in the early 1970s. The little magazines and niche books introduced hundreds of new poets and titles like How to Make Your Own Moccasins and The Anarchist Cookbook, both of which landed a devoted readership outside the mainstream.

  Decca, who was accustomed to the well-capitalized publishing houses of New York and London, was established on the commercial end of the bohemian spectrum. She didn’t have a daily column like other influential journalists, although she was offered one as a sports writer for the Chronicle. (Despite her knowing next to nothing about sports, the idea was that in order to keep Decca around, they would publish her wisecracks on just about anything. But when her first question to the section editor midway through the summer was, “When does the baseball season start?” everyone involved reconsidered.) Her latest projects and antic personality kept her in the news—she could enjoy the let-it-all-hang-out attitudes of the younger and emerging literati, but her work ethic was that of the disciplined veteran professional, no matter how much she drank.

  Bob’s law firm was as busy as it would ever be, defending Black Panthers, professors, students, community organizers, hippies, and dissidents of all stripes. So, when a seventy-two-year-old woman approached him with the complaint that she’d been conned out of some money spent on a correspondence course for writers, she stood out in vivid contrast. A widow on a fixed income, she had originally welcomed the nice young salesman, who had told her about the Famous Writers School, where she could study on her own time at home and receive personal guidance from best-selling authors. She had signed on, but then had second thoughts about the expense involved. When the Famous Writers School refused to return her money, she consulted Bob Treuhaft, famous in Oakland for tackling fraud.

  When Bob summarized the case for Decca, she felt she’d heard this cri de coeur before in her conversations with the victims of funeral swindles. There were different promises involved, but the consequences of a con could leave a person feeling small and silly. The facts as they began to unfold showed that only 10 percent of Famous Writers School students completed their course. Those who had paid in advance but wished to withdraw were threatened with legal action if they demanded a refund. Still, the controversy surrounding it would never have gone so far and so fast if Decca’s first efforts to place an article about the Famous Writers School had not been met with some reluctance on the part of the editors of the Atlantic magazine. The publication had been accepting ads from the Famous Writers School for years. Yes, the editors agreed, perhaps the writing course was unethical, and they shouldn’t endorse it in the future. However, they wrote to Decca, “wouldn’t it be equally unethical to publish a piece blasting them!!!” (The exclamation points are hers.)

  “I am furious,” Decca told everyone who asked. She had seen these kinds of shenanigans from people in power before. The funeral men had tried to quash her book, tried to suppress her articles, to silence her by red-baiting and other smears. She did not take kindly to threats of blacklisting or, in this case, blackballing in the writing world. The whisper of suppression was, to Decca, like the inspiring breath of an avenging goddess. Exposing such cruel deceptions appealed to the muckraker and gadfly in her prime.

  Decca had her pick of publications, but the Atlantic editors soon patched things up to her satisfaction, and the magazine featured “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers” in their July 1970 issue. The project, Decca said, gave her “more pleasure from start to finish, than any other,” and in its composition, she was able to apply all her reporting techniques. Her interviewing style was to be well prepared and self-assured; she enjoyed the chase. She asked graduated questions, from kind to cruel. It was her “special stroke of genius” to extract quotes that were less carefully cultivated or well thought-out and, as a result, were more revealing, funny, and sometimes embarrassing. Decca liked to call them “spontaneous and true.”

  On a big article like the one on the Famous Writers School, she rarely worked alone. Her friends helped out by posing as aspiring writers passing along the feeble reports they would receive from their correspondence school tutors. The Famous Writers School ads proclaimed that a rewarding career awaited the well-trained scribe, and it all started with the completion of an aptitude test, which one could find on the inside cover of a matchbook. “Of course, the whole thing is a terrific fraud,” she wrote to Aranka.

  Bennett Cerf, one of the Famous Writers School guiding faculty, was among the most important figures in English-language publishing. He was also president of Random House, which owned Decca’s publisher, Knopf. As editor of Nancy’s most famous book, he had come up with her book’s title, Love in a Cold Climate. That the highly placed Cerf endorsed and profited from what Decca called a swindle only made him more desirable quarry, and her interview with him is the article’s pièce de résistance. Decca asked Cerf how he could countenance both promising and charging so much to vulnerable idealists. Settling into a confiding chat, he agreed that sometimes, a beginning writer’s expectation was inflated, but in addition to producing publishable writers, their enterprise was to draw attention to their public-spirited guiding faculty, whose confidence in education and opportunity was well documented. As leader of the Famous Writers School faculty, Cerf also enjoyed the media attention. “I’m an awful ham,” he said. “I love to see my name in the papers.” As to the mail-order school’s material success and future, this depended on “a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible.” Realizing at once that the vulnerable idealists in his audience could be offended by the word gullible, Cerf asked Decca not to quote him. “Would you prefer to paraphrase?” she asked. He offered a long-winded alternative, to which Decca replied, “Sorry I don’t call that a paraphrase. I shall have to use both of them.”

  The finished article read as if it were written by the bloodthirsty Addison DeWitt crossed with the staunch Honoria Glossop. (Or is she, as Alexander Cockburn suggests, a kind of “Aunt Dahlia”? Readers of P. G. Wodehouse may take their pick.) Decca called the finished article “one of the clear-cut successes however temporary of my muckraking career.” Its publication in the Atlantic magazine busted the organization. The school’s guiding faculty would briefly suffer the public mortification of cartoons and comedians. Its stock would plummet and plunge the enterprise into financial ruin.

  On September 21, 1971, Decca wrote to Nancy: “Wasn’t it sad about Bennett Cerf croaking. I felt v.
put out about that, as it takes almost as long in my experience to make satisfactory enemies as satisfactory friends, and there he’s not. By the way: those Famous Writers have gone bankrupt. I wish one cld. sink the prisons as easily.”

  HUE NEWTON AND his friend Bobby Seale had started the Black Panther Party as a local organization in Oakland. Seale was in prison in Chicago, and Newton, convicted of killing a policeman, was serving his sentence in California. The campaign to “Free Huey” during his trial and appeals process had turned the charismatic leader into a national icon. In Newton’s absence, the acting chairman of the Black Panther Party was David Hilliard, whose leadership skills were underwhelming compared with the airy Newton, the inspirational Bobby Seale, and the brilliant Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile in Algeria. Hilliard, like Newton, had grown up in Oakland and knew of Bob Treuhaft’s defense of Jerry Newson. He also knew Decca to be an outspoken supporter of the Panther program. (In a letter to Virginia Durr—who had expressed concern that SNCC had rejected nonviolence to support the Black Panthers—Decca wrote: “I know in my heart of hearts that if I was their age and their colour I’d be with them 100%.”) When French writer and political activist Jean Genet came to California to speak for Huey’s defense campaign, Hilliard knew who to call. Would Decca hold a benefit honoring Genet at her house for the Panther Defense Fund?