by Leslie Brody
For her supporters, Decca’s performance represented the kind of happy news that reinforced Berkeley’s view of itself as a liberated zone, and Decca their principled and comic champion. When asked about the progress of the trial, she would sing (to the then-well-known tune made famous in the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), “Some day my prints will come.”
San Jose Superior Court Judge William Ingram ruled “that the university’s fingerprint requirement was unsupported by any ‘validly adopted statute, rule or regulation’ and was therefore legally unenforceable.” Asked what she’d do with her fingerprints now that they were returned in their envelope, Decca told a television reporter she thought she might “cremate them, put them in an urn, donate them to the University and take a tax deduction for their value.” The final ruling in the case occurred in January 1974. When questioned, the trustees’ attorney had to admit that Decca still had not been reimbursed for her semester’s work.
“Pay the lady her money!” ruled the judge.
After this instructional drama, Decca would be invited to teach at Yale, where she found the elite students too often reticent to spring for the jugular. She apparently had more luck inspiring Degnan. “Jessica succeeds in bringing out the worst in the officials and their lawyers,” he wrote. She trapped “them into saying and doing things that show them up as increasingly petty and stupid, as far worse than they are.” Degnan was a frenemy, and in her tradition, he went for the throat.
NANCY MITFORD DIED in 1973, at the age of sixty-six. Decca hadn’t attended Nancy’s funeral, but ten years later, Decca would combine a visit to her sister’s grave and to Swinbrook in a magazine article about the changes that had occurred there since her youth. Nancy’s ashes were buried next to Unity’s. About her eldest sister’s grave, she wrote:Nancy’s favorite symbol, part of the Redesdale coat of arms, was a mole couchant. My sisters decided that this would be an appropriate decoration for her gravestone. Wishing to employ local labor, they hired the services of a nearby stonemason . . . the result is a wonderful flight of fancy. If we linger we can hear the comments of tourists: “what’s that supposed to be? A flying hippopotamus? How Nancy would shriek with laughter, could she only hear them!”
IN 1975, ARANKA died quietly overnight in her New York apartment. Decca’s exposure to Aranka’s world of Jewish New York had been as important an education about America as anything she’d experienced in her own émigré life. In tracking Decca’s escape from her past, few episodes are more revealing than the times she spent in Aranka’s house, enjoying a New York City Sunday brunch. Once, Bob returned from the deli with unsatisfactory cold cuts. “This he sold you for three dollars a pound?” Aranka exclaimed. “You should take it back and throw it at his head!” Aranka, as a savvy New Yorker, knew that no deli counter guy would dare to short her. Her son, though, had left all this behind. Fighting for the rights of blacks and Communists, Bob, Aranka implied, still didn’t know when to speak up for a fair portion of pastrami. Aranka’s cultivation of her wildly unconventional daughter-in-law had resulted in the unexpected benefit of a glamorous extended family. Both Aranka and Decca were immigrants to the United States. Both were ambitious working women. Early on, their views on money had divided them, but as that subject became less fraught, their relationship grew comfortable and fond. After their forty-year correspondence, Decca had to wonder, who now would be so indulgent of their little family matters; who would remember Nicky as she had?
Remembering Nicky and telling the truth about the past would be Decca’s hard-fought project over the next several years. In October 1975, Decca had the opportunity to do just that, as Herb Caen announced in his newspaper column:Radical chic marches on! Oakland’s Jessica (Decca) Mitford is off for five weeks at idyllic Villa Bellagio on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como, there to work on a book as the guest of—the Rockefellers. “I simply wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that I’d like a grant so I could put together something on the fun of being a radical in the 1940s and 1950s and I was accepted,” she says in her little girl manner.
Some writers’ retreats like Yaddo are designed for creative artists, but the luxurious Bellagio attracted international scholars, whose high intellectual aims seemed to Decca hand-in-hand with their exaggerated self-regard. One fellow resident was Gerda Lerner, an academic from California, who had been a member of the Communist Party during the same period that Decca was a member. By rights, they’d have had a lot to talk about, but Decca dismissed her as a “grim feminist who talks sociologese.” Perhaps she was still irritated by Lerner’s part in the group that had scorned her friend Pele for writing the saucy “Vicky Says” column in the People’s Daily World. In any case, Decca was bored and restless, and she childishly indulged in some mean teasing: inviting the professor’s friendship then freezing her out until Lerner was “thoroughly muddled.”
Decca called her new book A Fine Old Conflict, a title Robert Gottlieb told her he loved since she saw her life as a conflict and herself “in adversary position against all comers (including him).” (The book’s title was a mondegreen, a word or phrase that in mishearing, a person mistakes for another. “’Tis the final conflict” was the original lyric in “The Internationale,” but as a child, Decca misheard those words as “a fine old conflict.”)
Decca designed her book to alternate between her political adventures and the continuing story of her family life with Bob and their children in California (with occasional Mitford interludes). Early on, she had learned that persuasion was a lot easier when you were amusing, and her style was to treat hardship with humor. It was what her readers had come to expect and what she felt confident providing. It was fun to consolidate the legend of her poor housewifery—all part of the shtick. As was her distracted parenting: “I’m afraid I was a rather rotten mother to Dink & Benj as I was totally preoccupied with CP politics when they were growing up; so while I was fond of them, I didn’t pay too much attention to them when they were little.” Dinky, who was in a position to know, doesn’t think she suffered from dramatic parental neglect. Part of the enduring family myth was that Dinky raised her brothers and organized the household. This was true to some extent, but Dinky remembers her mother making dinner every night and an intimate, reliable family life. So maybe Decca just liked the idea of being negligent, a sort of fantasy for a superachiever.
At Bellagio, perhaps Decca’s biggest battle was resisting the blandishments of sentimentality, and she invented a tough protagonist, more like the author in 1975 than the resourceful young mother she’d been. Even in beautiful environments like Inch Kenneth or Lake Como, there was no avoiding the misery that came with remembering certain events. She told herself it was cowardly to duck “some of the unutterably beastly experiences” and wrote to Bob:As you have probably fathomed, I’m in some distress about the whole thing of Nicholas—I really can’t bear to face the agony of his death in this book. So I thought I almost might just say that? Even in the foreword (which I know you say I’m always talking about but never do, but I will, I will)—something like “our adored son Nicky was born in 1944, killed in an accident at age 10, I am still too sad to write about him so have left him out.”
Bob advised several approaches, but Decca found it impossible to call her son back, just to say good-bye again. She couldn’t find a way to write about Nicky or about their family suffering in the aftermath of his death. And in the end, she doesn’t mention Nicholas in A Fine Old Conflict.
For a writer, the past is malleable; it’s material. The present is far less forgiving, and though she was writing about her children when they were young, concern for their adult lives interfered. Benjy loomed as Topic A. His behavior had become increasingly unpredictable, and she’d grown increasingly frustrated at his unwillingness to let her help.
Her youngest son had always been fast and funny. Going to high school in Oakland in the 1960s and having famous radical parents required imaginative flights of adolescent rebellion. He had entered St. John’s C
ollege, but dropped out to bum around in the counterculture. Still in his early twenties, Benjy was inspired to become a piano tuner, an arcane occupation that combined hard work, close study, skill, sensitivity, and concentration. Without its tuners, the music of the world went awry. Bent on learning from musicians and craftsman and masters in the field, he traveled across the country to apprentice at piano factories. In New York, he tuned for Steinway’s Concert Department. Eventually, he would repair and tune pianos for virtuosos like Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould. The work was fulfilling and he was good at it, but he had severe mood swings. In the early 1970s, he started experiencing longer-lasting bouts of mania characterized by brilliant ideas, relentless energy, and unexpected behavior that exhausted and mystified his friends. Back in the Bay Area, he was diagnosed with a manic-depressive condition.
Years earlier Pele’s son Peter had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and, since then, had spent much of his life in institutions. Decca had consoled her friend after a doctor assessed Peter’s condition as “schizo-genic-frenic,” or in lay terms, mentally ill by virtue of bad parenting. The theory only caused more pain, outraging Pele and reinforcing Decca’s view of psychiatry, which was a “really extreme prejudice in those years,” Dinky said. “My mother didn’t think much of a person’s chances if they had to go to a psychiatrist.”
Bob and Decca looked into behavioral programs that might help their son. Decca heard that lithium promised some relief, but Benjy refused their assistance. “At the time,” he said, “I was militantly pro-mania. Lucky for myself, unlucky for my friends.”
WHEN A FINE Old Conflict was published in 1977, Decca speculated that Debo “skipped 9/10 of the book (all of the Calif. etc bits) because she thought them boring.” That response was the reverse image of the opinion of her old comrade Aubrey Grossman, who was bored by the sections about the British Mitfords. Al Bernstein told his son Carl he thought Decca had trivialized “the whole experience of having been in the Party, reducing it to almost farcical anecdote.” Other ex-menaces, including Marge Frantz, admired the book as “something that had to be done,” but A Fine Old Conflict did not find the affectionate following that her first memoir had.
In 1977’s San Francisco the cultural gap may have been between disco and punk, but the larger world was still divided between the era’s superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Benign and indulgent as most critics were, there remained the sense that as an American Communist, ex or not, one owed the world an explanation. Some reviewers called Decca myopic or naive. Time magazine coined the expression “transcendental blitheness.” Why, critics asked, did Decca stay in the party as long as she did? Few asked why one couldn’t denounce Stalin and all his works and still be an American Communist. Decca and her “sharp turn faction” friends tried in their fashion to achieve such political balance, but the air was already out of that balloon.
Writing A Fine Old Conflict had coincided with an English surge in Mitfordmania, or the Mitford industry, as the sisters came to call it. Diana’s husband, Oswald Mosley, was writing his memoirs, and author David Pryce-Jones was researching a biography of Unity. Decca read the Unity book in manuscript form. It was “incredibly upsetting,” she said to Sonia Orwell, “but then what else could it be?” After Pryce-Jones published his biography of Unity Mitford in 1977, Decca tried again to address what might have propelled Unity and her in different directions. Reluctantly acceding that “sibling rivalry—horrid phrase . . . probably did play a part,” she suggested that “the Zeitgeist of the thirties . . . the cause of anti-Fascism . . . and the socialist reconstruction of society” probably influenced her more. Pryce-Jones interpreted the divergent paths that Decca and Unity took as “one experience but two outcomes, opposed in externals though in fact complimentary.” Decca found this all very interesting, but took exception with his assertion that as ‘thousands simultaneously stampeded along the highway to Moscow and Madrid, she [Unity] had taken the turning to Germany, their mirror-image.” In A Fine Old Conflict, she argued against his assertions:Would that there had been a stampede along the highway to Madrid, a gathering of the anti-appeasement, anti-fascist forces in sufficient numbers to compel the governments of England, France and America to take an early stand against the fascists—It would have changed the course of history.
Later, in reply to all those who said fascism and Communism were two sides of the same coin, Decca would customarily quote Philip Toynbee’s review of Pryce-Jones’s book Unity Mitford: A Quest, “Stalinism may well have been almost as horrible as National Socialism; the motives which led young men and women in England to become fascists and Communists respectively were very different indeed.” By her actions, Unity declared she’d rather die than live in an imperfect world. Imperfection inspired Decca, who deliberately and intensely chose life.
CHAPTER 29
THE VARIOUS VERSIONS of how history would record the Mitfords in the Pryce-Jones book and others was dividing Decca from her siblings. She objected to what she saw as her sisters’ attempts to control or contain Pryce-Jones’s book. She disapproved of Debo’s choice of biographer for Nancy. Decca considered Selena Hasting too tepid and tried to enlist the stronger literary stylist Sybille Bedford for the job (Bedford demurred). Mainly, Decca wanted her sisters to pay attention. “I bloody well don’t see why she [Debo] is self-appointed arbiter of all that goes on re the family,” Decca wrote their cousin. “Esp as I am 3 years older than she is.” After a terse letter from her sister Pam, which implied that Decca had taken one of the family scrapbooks (found at Inch Kenneth and archived at Chatsworth) to supply Pryce-Jones with rare photos, Decca’s relationship with all her sisters hit its nadir. During the so-called scrapbook flap, her grievances as a sister conjoined with injuries harbored as a writer. She was enraged—hadn’t she earned the right to be considered the literary consultant in family matters? Pryce-Jones was a good writer precisely because he wouldn’t be controlled. Still, she loved Debo devotedly. Decca had never bothered to hide her casual attitude toward theft (those chocolates at the Palace!), and she wasn’t ashamed of a little justifiable jiggery-pokery. She might have been capable of taking the scrapbook or charming a proxy into doing it—but if she had, she probably would have admitted it and laughed about it. A year after its disappearance, the scrapbook turned up near where it had been lost. She would eventually call the episode ridiculous. (How they had behaved like “Victorian old ladies in their late old age, bickering about a lost album.”) But one day, in the middle of the drama, Bob had come home from work to find Decca in tears, at the prospect of being alone in her old age, in cruel exile from Debo. It was only the second time her husband had ever seen Decca cry.
Work as always was the writer’s panacea. When one book ended, another began. Decca first considered writing a defense of James Dean Walker, who had escaped to California from Arkansas, where he’d been convicted of killing a policeman. His supporters claimed that Walker had rehabilitated himself and that extradition back to the brutal Arkansas penal system would be a certain death sentence. The book project dissolved at some point into articles and op-ed pieces and a barrage of letters on Walker’s behalf. In one such exchange, Decca (by then an expert on prison reform) presumed on her earlier connection with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then wife of the Arkansas governor.
In the summer of 1970, Hillary Rodham had interned for Bob Treuhaft’s law firm. She’d been a diligent young lawyer from Yale whom the Treuhafts had known only from a distance. When her fame increased, the office gossip was mainly along the lines of, Who knew? Decca wrote to ask Rodham Clinton’s support to end Arkansas’s demand for Walker’s extradition. The future first lady, senator, and secretary of state gave assurances that there were changes under way in the Arkansas prison system, to which Decca replied, “Obviously I applaud many of the changes you enumerate. If I am skeptical of such concepts as ‘American Correctional Association standards’ (page 2, para 1 of your letter) you must forgive me; I had my fill of those alleged
standards when researching Kind & Usual Punishment.” The rate at which such changes would inch their way through the political system, though admirably designed for some future date, might still feel “rather a long time to those confined in the prisons.”
ONCE THE SCRAPBOOK flap was resolved, Decca took a trip to Chichester, England, with Debo to see the latest manifestation of Mitfordmania—The Mitford Girls (a musical based on the sisters’ youth) in its out-of-town run. On stage, Decca and Esmond sang and danced through their elopement: ESMOND: When we hit Bilbao
They’ll wonder where we are from.
DECCA: In my attaché case
My running away case
I’m going to leave a space
For an incendiary bomb!
The Mitford Girls didn’t make it to Broadway, but it demonstrated a version of history that had staying power. Despite all she had written, the most entertaining part of Decca’s story continued for English audiences to be the poor little rich girl running away. Decca might be a heavyweight in the United States, but would she always be a featherweight back in her old hometown? She’d made her case in A Fine Old Conflict, but the daily life of a U.S. Communist was an esoteric curiosity in England. It would take an awful lot of doing to change opinion that had become legend and presumed history. An opportunity to state her version of the story came along soon, when a young man from the north of England hitchhiked across America to California to meet her.
