Decca, p.104
Decca, page 104
All the best, Decca
Within days, Decca was suddenly taken ill. Her daughter, Constancia Romilly, flew out from New York on July 3 after receiving a report from Robert Treuhaft that a needle biopsy had found cancer in her lungs, with other tests showing it had metastasized to the adrenals and liver. That same day a bone scan was performed, and cancer was also found in the brain. She underwent immediate radiation to protect her brain function for as long as possible.
¦ ¦
To the Duchess of Devonshire
Oakland
July 6, 1996
Hen—you are a marvel & thanks SO, SO much.
Here’s what’s happening this end: we’re definitely off to Cape Cod from 7 to 14 August (will send address etc later). Extraorder character Lisa, a musician by nature (saxophonist) has taken a shine to us & has been amazing throughout, beginning with Bob’s illness which now seems like ancient history & she takes me to the hosp for everything. Anyway she’s coming to Cape Cod with wheelchair so all shld be v. serene. Oys will be there plus Snos, Helena & families; maybe Benj will loom at some pt.
Boring medical news just to keep you in the picture. Turns out cancer is also in bones (bad hip) as well as brain, so it’s radiation in all those places daily until 24 July. Doesn’t hurt at all plus I get marvellous pain pills and blue cheerup pills—Dink’s in charge. So I’m feeling v. well at the moment.
My local researcher Karen Leonard is MOVING IN TO STAY here after Dink leaves next Tuesday 9 July. Idea is that she’ll sort out the whole rest of the book & be on phone with Bob Gottlieb & me as needed. Gottlieb plans to spend full time on book after 18 July. Karen will stay here whilst we are at C. Cod. Bob (T) will work on funerals in England until we leave, hence vastly looking forward to Helen179 FAX next week, so useful. Do thank her no end.
FUTURE PLANS: Am much hoping to get to England, possibly late autumn or even Xmas so don’t come here. But DO come to me funeral, about 9 months or a year off accdg to the Dr. I thought I’d make SCI give a free one with all the best? I’ll let you know as plans progress.
That’s about it for now. Point of brain radiation is to spruce it up a bit so one can get on with the book etc. Time will tell. All hair will fall out I’m told, so various ones are making wigs.
Yr loving and GRATEFUL old Hen
To Robert Treuhaft
Oakland
July 10, 1996
3 a.m.—couldn’t sleep, having slept all day yesterday.
Bob—it’s so ODD to be dying, so I must just jot a few thoughts—starting with fact that I’ve SO enjoyed life with you in all ways. Isn’t it rather amazing how we ever met in 1st place—and thinking back to absolutely everything beginning with the A. Hopkins/Abe etc & you being Bob Trueapple. But did you note a common link such as all that about the Census Bldg seat-switch, the soul-mate (Anne’s) bedbug switch, the you/Abe poems like Drink a Drink to Dauntless Decca etc? Mainly, of course, you’ve been incredibly GOOD to me all through life and have TAUGHT me more than I can say, not to mention being incredibly kind & forgiving of faults such as Impatience.
I must say I’m glad it’s me first as I v. much doubt I’d bother to go on much if it was you. Also there really is a small bonus—I wonder if you agree? In knowing ahead of time so one can think things out a bit (not just finish book—you know what I mean).
Back to us meeting in Washington. What on earth would have become of ME if we hadn’t. There I was surrounded by the Embassy crowd, the importunate Kay Graham rich cousins and even Mike Straight (Va always thought he was about to chuck silly little Binnie for me, but she would think that sort of thing) and YOU loomed. And the Wasserman test180 in Russian river—“Here’s to socialized medicine,” remember? And wonderful Nicky (actually I do think of him most days, now aged 52) when Mrs. King told the children her skirt had blown up at Wild Cat’s Peak & Nick saying “Did the wild cats peek?”; You & Dink, whole relationship over the aeons—goodness what a lucky thing you liked each other almost from word Go. Not quite; I think she rather looked away from you at the very beginning, to my worry. But that soon stopped, & I can skeke imagine a better friendship than you/her. As for Benj—hasn’t he turned out amazingly well lately?
So now, about you. You’ve got the children & Oys all of whom adore you, but you’ll need someone—I mean you’ve got all those household skills, cooking etc., pity to waste don’t you agree? Be thinking of someone agreeable. You won’t have to as they’ll come flocking I bet. I do have some ideas but fear to mention for fear of annoying or being intrusive, none of my business you’ll say.
On separate page, am putting down about money.
Yr loving Wief
By the way—do go to that film this evening [and] dinner…. I long to hear all about it…. Should be v. innaresting
To the Duchess of Devonshire
Oakland
July II, 1996
Dearest Hen,
I note you are in London but this will doubtless catch up. Thanks awfully for the Jon Sno Cape Coddery. That’s where we’ll be with them 7 to 14 Aug. The packer sent such a funny FAX (selon181 yr notification, thanks for that) saying he’d never heard a duchess say “Bugger” so much. Well I wonder if he knows all that many duchesses come to think of it?
So what happened—as you have it, pretty much. Coughing blood Xray—first no cancer cells—other procedures—cancer of lung & other places incl. thigh. I asked how long the cancer had been there—can’t say for sure, about a year they thought.
Not only no malaise whatsoever, no headache which one wld be absolutely expecting don’t you agree with c. of the brain, hardly any pain except in thigh & that’s under control with marvellous medicine for same. Daily radiation at hosp. But here’s the point Hen: SO much better than just being hit by a car or in plane wreck. At least one can plan a few things—also feeling absolutely OK, life is v.v. pleasurable with people coming to chat plus work on bk. It all really is quite extraorder, do admit….
Needless to say I’m taking full advantage, everyone’s bringing meels on wheels, delicious things for me & all marvellous helpers who are absolutely smoothing every path here, so it’s sort of a nonstop party, all my favourite people flocking by. So why worry? Also doing all sorts of things such as helping Benj with his Cuba pianos, everyone now in mood to give him dough for same because of their affection for his old Mum. Did I tell that when I went to register at hosp name of Jessica Treuhaft the social worker said “Are you by any chance related to the piano tuner?”; Oh I was pleased. Dink’s coming to live here with us after C. Cod, isn’t she a trouper.
July 12, about 5 a.m. in Calif Yrs182 of 9:54 from Chatsworth just rec’d, so I’ve answered most of it. Are you getting envious of my extremely comfortable situation? One day I’ll describe the helpers, but will get this off now. Did I tell you about deadline (mot juste) first they said (Drs) about 6 to 9 months but for some reason have upped it to more like 3 months which is rather a drag as was hoping to get to London. Meeting with them in a few days—it’s so almost unbelievable, and I suppose they might be all wrong—in which case helpers etc might get livid, boy who cried wolf. By the way Dink thinks v.v. highly of the whole cancer team—she’s in constant touch with them FAX/t.phone.
Yr loving Henderson
To the Duchess of Devonshire
Oakland
July 13, 1996
Hen …
Of course I’d adore to see you, but when, how? Aunt Weenie, “Geoff, George is dead and now Sydney’s gone, don’t you think we shld meet?”; Uncle Geoff—long pause: “But we have met.”
It’s the when-where, so let’s be thinking. My hope was to come to London in autumn but the Drs are so vague about deadlines, first they said 6–9 months then 3 then maybe a year, & you said about the 6 yr lade by which time people will get awfully bored with it all. Any chance you might skip to Cape Cod for a hot moment? It’s 3 hrs drive from Boston Airport, our dates 7 to 14 Aug. Whole Dink mob plus Jon Sno etc; Maya Angelou is taking a house there so ‘twill be a nonstop party. The packer can tell you how to get there if inclined— oh, DO, Hen.
If you do, that wld just be extra bonus as I do so hope to come for proper visit to England for a proper Honnish chat. Be thinking on’t.
This end, am working on funerals in England which Bob is helping with; my smashing researcher Karen Leonard plugging away with editor (Bob Gottlieb) on general rewrite/update, so I’m sure it will get finished.
Am also taking FULL ADVANTAGE of condition to press all sorts of things (lawsuits etc of no interest to you) on ground that you can’t refuse a dying person’s request. Benj is madly working on his piana/Havana project—see attached, so I’m helping with that too. Having lots of cheering drugs (still no drinks) they may even be giving me street drugs like Speed. Dink is in full control. The Drs this end all say she’s more of a colleague, another Dr rather than just a nurse. Bob’s being marvellous makes proper boiled eggs for breakker etc., I got a lovely letter from e. the good so thank her, with good joke by Toby’s uncle. I do wish that you/Packer or someone cld get the Benj effort into the English papers—Polly Toynbee might help? She was pleased with me FAX to horrible Mail. She’s off to Italy in August, said she might come here in Sept.
Yr loving Hen
Decca died ten days later, on July 23, 1996.
* Dutton, 1992.
† The American Way of Death Revisited, published posthumously by Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
1. Ted Kalman was a longtime political friend of the Treuhafts in Oakland. His daughter, Janice, twenty-seven, a skilled lay midwife from Chico, California, was chair of the California Association of Midwives Certification Board and was being investigated by the Chico district attorney’s office for practicing medicine without a license. Her treatment at the hands of the state medical board fascinated Decca and ultimately led to the writing of The American Way of Birth, for which Ted Kalman served as Decca’s chief researcher. The book was dedicated to Kalman and his daughter and wife, Peewee, “for their inestimable help through a long and difficult labor.”
2. Taking Charge of Your Medical Fate, by Dr. Lawrence Horowitz (Random House, 1988).
3. Kalman had said in his letter that he was trying to write it on an unfamiliar Macintosh word processor without assistance from his mentors, his daughter and son-in-law.
4. After Kay Boyle adamantly opposed Decca’s cooperation with her would-be biographer, Decca asked Mellen for documentation of Boyle’s previous support of the biography, including copies of letters Boyle had written endorsing the biography, providing names of interviewees and otherwise assisting in the project. Although confessing to feeling “a bit on trial” at an otherwise enjoyable luncheon meeting with Decca, Mellen sent her the letters, including one in which Boyle acknowledged her previous “commitment” to the biography. Mellen says Boyle’s refusal to cooperate occurred well into the project and followed an unsuccessful demand by Boyle that she have control over whom Mellen interviewed.
5. Mellen says the authorization letter referred to here was a result of still another reversal by Boyle. She says Boyle changed her mind again because she didn’t want it said in the book that she’d refused to give friends permission to talk about her with Mellen.
6. Decca said Boyle was “livid” when she learned that Decca had read her private letters “to another person” (Mellen). Thereafter, Boyle refused a dinner invitation from Decca: “Deep-freeze. The answer was NO.” As Decca summed it up, “… friendship with Kay must be strictly on her terms which are a) NO criticism of anything she does, b) NO jokes as she’s got, alas, absolutely zilch sense of humour.”
7. About a week before this letter was written, Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa, a religious edict, calling on Muslims to execute novelist Salman Rushdie because of his book The Satanic Verses (Viking Penguin, 1988). Rushdie went into hiding, and many writers around the world came to his defense.
8. Renée Golden.
9. It was some time later that the euphoria was punctured by the realization that Decca’s contract with Dutton for Grace Had an English Heart gave that publishing house the right of first refusal to her next book. A deal was subsequently negotiated with Dutton, which paid a $525,000 advance for the hardcover rights.
10. Abrahams at the time was a senior editor at Dutton and Decca’s editor for her birth book.
11. Decca did use Galbraith’s comment in her book, adding, “If the scene could be reenacted today, we might visualize Galbraith being dragged by a giant hook, like those used in French theaters to remove unpopular performers, off the world stage and into his wife’s delivery chamber. There his attention would be concentrated for a lot more than three minutes, as he breathes and strains … in unison with Kitty until the great moment when he is called upon to himself cut the umbilical cord.” When her book was published, Decca sent a copy to the Galbraiths. Not having heard from them in response, she wrote them expressing concern that Kenneth Galbraith might have been offended by her use of the quotation, although “that wee bit was rather fun to write as typical of Papas throughout the world.”
12. Fursland, writing from Columbus, Ohio—where she had been reading Decca’s papers in the Ohio State University archives for her doctoral thesis in psychology on Decca—had told her subject in a letter “what a tremendous privilege it is to be researching your life.”
13. Author of the memoir Sleeping Arrangements (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989).
14. Dorothy Bryant, a novelist and former teacher, is a Berkeleyan who was a member of the Treuhafts’ social circle.
15. Boyle had asked Bryant to contribute to a book of essays paying tribute to Boyle. Bryant says she demurred at first because she didn’t have enough to add but Boyle told her to “make something up.” The resulting essay contained actual incidents intended to show Boyle’s integrity and political contributions, but details were disguised to protect others mentioned. The essay infuriated Boyle. When Bryant wrote an abject apology, Boyle circulated it widely and explored a lawsuit, which Robert Treuhaft evidently advised against.
16. Decca and Boyle evidently had a short-lived rapprochement, but their friendship turned out to be irretrievable. As Decca put it in a letter to her son when Boyle died almost three years later, “I didn’t give an inch, Kay didn’t give an inch, so there you have it. An irreconcilable end to a very long & much cherished (by me) friendship.”
17. Boyle had begun living at The Redwoods retirement center in Mill Valley, Calif.
18. Eleanor Medili Patterson, newspaper editor and publisher and member of one of the country’s great publishing families. She had been a friend of Katharine Graham’s parents.
19. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, oldest child of President Theodore Roosevelt and a good friend of Graham’s father.
20. Although Decca apparently had forgotten the incident, more than a decade earlier she had discussed the same subject with Graham. Soon thereafter, she apologized that “I damn near blubbed at lunch when explaining why I hadn’t included Nicholas in my memoirs—most odd of me, as he died in 1955 at age 10 & I should have supposed I had totally recovered; not to mention that we were brought up never to cry in front of other people. So please forgive this strange & totally unaccustomed lapse on my part.”
21. In another of her encouraging letters to Katharine Graham, Decca noted that “the wretched public will be expecting lots of tell-all. I think the idea is to write at length & avidly about the things that interest you; that’s what interests any reader.”
22. Prime had written to Decca saying he was working with fellow Shrevesport, Louisiana, writer Monty Brown on a biography of Leadbelly, Huddie Ledbetter. He was interested in Decca’s correspondence with the singer, her reflections on his life and work and futher recollections of the several weeks that Ledbetter had spent with the Treuhafts in the 1940s, which he said were recounted in her 1977 article in Life magazine.
23. The photo shows the singer performing in a living room for Constancia Romilly and her friends.
24. The left-wing folklorist who preserved folk music and stories around the world and went into exile during the heyday of McCarthyism.
25. Decca noted in her memoir the “spectacular” visual effect of the “very large and very black” Leadbelly in his long white nightshirt.
26. Decca once described her son-in-law’s nickname this way: “Terry Southern was in movie Loved One by Tony Richardson—so he was known, H.wood style, as Terbaby. When we took Dink & Terry to stay with Tony … needless to say Terry Weber was immediately known as Terbaby, which has stuck” (at least with Decca).
27. Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), the second volume of a projected four-volume biography. Decca had first read excerpts months earlier in The New Yorker, of which Gottlieb was the editor.
28. Arthur (Tex) and Wicky Goldschmidt were friends of the Durrs. Tex Goldschmidt worked in the water conservation division of the Interior Department, and his wife was in the Works Progress Administration. It was through the Goldschmidts that the Durrs met their fellow Texans Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson.
29. Marina Warner.
30. Social Democratic Party.
31. The duchess had sent Decca an article of reflections she had written for the Telegraph Weekend Magazine. Among the issues she discussed in the article was a pamphlet sent in response to her request for a simple technical guide to the native breeds of sheep. She said the pamphlet—a “gripping read”—included the many regional names for gid, with which she tantalized her readers. Gid is a disease of herbivores, especially sheep, caused by tapeworm larvae in the brain and characterized by vertigo.
32. Miranda was Decca’s beloved pet sheep in her childhood.
33. See August 24letter to the duchess.
