Decca, p.105
Decca, page 105
34. On April 7, 1990, police raided the opening of an exhibit of 175 Robert Mapplethorpe photographs—some of them with sadomasochistic, child nudity, and homosexual themes—at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, temporarily closing the museum. The arts center and its director, Dennis Barrie, were charged with pandering obscenity; they were acquitted later in the year. The National Endowment for the Arts, among the Mapplethorpe exhibit’s funders, became the focus of a long and vitriolic dispute about the role of the government in arts funding.
35. Alice Walker.
36. Several weeks later Decca wrote to a mutual friend about Pleydell-Bouverie: “Actually the dear old soul has a long history of chucking over—banishing supposed fond friends. … I see from his latest that I am not totally banished.”
37. The “scholarly report” was an account in the Mandrake column of the Sunday Telegraph that began, “Some scholars of these matters have been assuring me all week that the Duke of Devonshire’s ball last Saturday night and Sunday morning was the grandest the country has seen since before the Second World War. Others held out for it having been the grandest of the whole century. But all agreed that the only one definitely to beat it was the last to be given by the same family”—in 1897.
38. Hall, a model and—as of a few months later—wife of rock icon Mick Jagger, had been one of those in attendance at the ball.
39. Decca was working at the time on an article about her recent Scandinavian cruise.
40. James Forman had traveled to Namibia and Zimbabwe for five weeks with five other first-year Yale law students and two faculty advisors. The purpose of the trip, sponsored by the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale, was to study the transition from military rule to democracy in those countries.
41. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who pioneered the study of death, dying, and grieving and came to have a consuming belief in an afterlife.
42. The annual New York Public Library Literary Lions fund-raising dinner has honored notable literary figures, including Decca.
43. Editor of the literary and art journal Grand Street.
44. Margaret Thatcher formally resigned as British prime minister on November 28, 1990, and was succeeded by John Major.
45. British television journalist and a good friend of Decca’s. She called him “The Packer,” for reasons explained in this letter.
46. Left-wing British author, broadcaster, playwright, political activist, and polemicist.
47. Eleanor Engstrand, Marge Frantz’s partner of many years.
48. William Buchan was an early friend and apparently a onetime suitor of Decca’s. The son of John Buchan, the first Baron Tweedsmuir, he wrote a number of historical novels and other works. His book The Rags of Time: A Fragment of Autobiography (Ashford) was published in 1990.
49. Ben Weber, Constancia Romilly’s stepson.
50. San Francisco novelist.
51. Angelou had written an Op-Ed essay that was published by the New York Times on August 25, 1991, entitled “I Dare to Hope,” in which she had endorsed the controversial appointment of conservative African American judge Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the essay, Angelou said, “… we know as well that if efforts to scuttle his appointment are successful, another conservative possibly more harmful, and one who has neither our history nor culture in common with us, will be seated firmly on the bench till death or decision rules otherwise.” She argued, “The black youngsters of today must ask black leaders: If you can’t make an effort to reach, reconstruct and save a black man who has graduated from Yale, how can you reach down here in this drug-filled, hate-filled cesspool where I live and save me?”; Angelou summed up: “Because Clarence Thomas has been poor, has been nearly suffocated by the acrid odor of racial discrimination, is intelligent, well trained, black and young enough to be won over again, I support him.”
52. McPherson was the author of Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (Peter Lang Publishing, 1990).
53. This letter followed a period during which Decca and Angelou had, in Decca’s words, “a terrible falling-out.” Angelou had been enraged by a letter Decca wrote her, but Decca was never certain which one it was. In the course of their estrangement, Angelou had left a vulgar doggerel note in Decca’s mailbox. At one point, Decca wrote Angelou to say that she “craves” to hear from her, and she cited a song she had heard at Tony Richardson’s French home, a 1954 hit for a British group called the Beverley Sisters: “It went something like: ‘God save the mister/Who comes between me and my sister, and God save the sister who comes between me and my man.’ Ref. in this case is obviously Justice Thomas. So let’s drop him as a topic; we’ve both had our say, and we each knows where the other stands. No point in pursuing the subject—unless YOU want to, obviously!”
54. This is the letter as Decca submitted it. See April 23 letter to Sally Belfrage for the Book Review editor’s comments.
55. Heinrich Hoffmann’s popular nineteenth century children’s book Der Struwwelpeter (usually translated as Shock-Headed Peter or Slovenly Peter). Hoffmann believed in scaring children into obeying their parents, a form of teaching that came to be called “black pedagogy.” Decca said the book “was a great favorite of all of us—my sisters and myself” when they were very young. When she subsequently gave a copy to Julian Quick, the three-year-old son of her friends Barbara and John Quick, Decca wrote in the cover letter, “… a word of warning. It’s exactly the sort of book that modern parents LOATHE,” and indeed the recipient’s mother withheld the book from her son until he was nearly ten.
56. “The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb.”
57. The “he” is “the great tall tailor,” also called “the great, long, red-legged scissorman,” who “always comes to little boys that suck their thumbs” and “cuts their thumbs clean off.”
58. Maria Edgeworth.
59. In the April 9 general election in Britain, despite polls that had pointed to a narrow Labour Party victory, the Conservatives, led by Prime Minister John Major, won their fourth consecutive national victory.
60. The U.S. presidential election campaign.
61. The former California governor was running a quixotic, low-budget grassroots campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He surprised political insiders with his electoral strength in the primaries but lost the nomination decisively to Bill Clinton.
62. The New York Times published Decca’s letter on May 3 with only minor changes. Decca’s “one out of every eight” was changed to “8 percent,” and “intercourse” was changed to “some kind of sex.”
63. Decca was flying to New York the next day.
64. A possible reference to the book Belfrage later published, Un-American Activities: A Memoir of the Fifties (HarperCollins, 1994).
65. The novelist, screenwriter, playwright, politician, and sharp-tongued, sardonic social critic and polemicist.
66. Famed author and food writer M. F. K. Fisher died a week before this letter was written. Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, long in declining health, had lived in a home that Pleydell-Bouverie built for her on his ranch, where she moved in 1971.
67. Vanity Fair writer assigned to do a long article on Decca.
68. This letter was written about a month after Bill Clinton sewed up his primary battle for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention at which he was formally nominated.
69. A radical attorney best known for representing Black Panther Huey Newton. He was a friend of the Treuhafts and legal partner of their old friends Benjamin Dreyfus and Allan Brodsky.
70. President George H. W. Bush, who was then running for re-election.
71. Novelist and essayist James Baldwin, whom Decca had met through friends.
72. Polly Toynbee’s journalist husband.
73. In 1955, while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was abducted from his bed and killed. His offense, apparently, was whistling at a white woman in a local grocery store.
74. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Simon & Schuster, 1975). Decca commented frequently over the years about her dislike of Brownmiller’s “atrociously boring and erroneous book about rape.” She told one friend, “[W]hat is feminist writing, if you know? I mean, how does it differ from just plain writing? If Brownmiller is an example, it means an incredibly plonking, heavy style with a revolting underlay of sisterly sentimentality. Ugh.”
75. Once, in the late 1970s, Decca served as emcee at an ACLU event and, of course, approved of most of its policies in support of civil liberties. But she wrote to a friend at the time, “I more & more realize that I loathe everything ACLU stood for from 1940 to about 1970; but one can’t very well get up & blast them at their own meeting.”
76. Days earlier, despite her firm resolve (see December 21, 1988, letter to Ted Kalman), Decca had acquired her first-and at this point still alien-fax machine, for reasons explained in this and other letters. No one was more surprised by this development than she, but her astonishment soon turned to delight and she canvassed friends for their fax numbers, writing to one friend after another: “I’ve got FAX! Are you amazed?”; Weeks later, she said she had become “addicted” to the machine and “besotted” with it, though still “terrified” because of uncertainty as to whether her faxes had arrived at their destination.
77. President-elect Bill Clinton had just tapped Angelou to write a poem for his inauguration, the first time a poet would address an inauguration since Robert Frost had done so at John F. Kennedy’s.
78. The Clarence Thomas row was never far from Decca’s mind. In one letter to a friend, talking of an upcoming visit with Angelou, she wrote: “Reminder to me: keep off politics.”
79. The author and longtime Observer writer and editor.
80. In her book, Decca described the thirty-five-pound Empathy Belly as “a huge womb-like structure with large breasts, priced at $595, [that] is designed to be worn by the male partner so that he can appreciate the discomfort of the later stages of pregnancy.” (She also wrote that it would be the perfect Father’s Day gift for the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith.) The Uterine University was Decca’s term for a range of devices for “the in utero education of the fetus” through lessons or music communicated through speakers on maternal body belts. One such device was called the Pregaphone.
81. Decca appears to be referring to Angelou’s upcoming poem for the Clinton inauguration.
82. Judith Martin writes a widely syndicated etiquette column under the name Miss Manners. Decca once wrote to Maya Angelou about her correspondence with Miss Manners, saying, “I guess that intellectuals like you don’t bother reading Miss Manners, the Comics or the Horrorscopes? Anyway, I rather live for those trivial things.”
83. The offer was made in response to a letter Decca had written early in 1992 on behalf of a friend.
84. Decca’s letter was published in Martin’s column several months later, but without the sender’s name. Miss Manners’s published response read in part: “As long as ingenious people keep inventing instant ways of attracting other people’s attention, humbler ones, such as your own Miss Manners, will have to keep inventing instant ways of holding them off.”
85. Hilliard had been chief of staff of the Black Panther Party.
86. In his book, Hilliard wrote that Hayden, although warned beforehand not to “upstage” the Panthers at their own event, “double-crosses us, talks about the moratorium and Vietnam.”
87. A reference to the Chicago convention riot conspiracy trial, at which Hayden and Seale were, at first, co-defendants. Seale was shackled in court for disruptively demanding to be represented by the attorney of his choice. After Seale’s case was severed, the defendants became known as the Chicago Seven.
88. An attorney friend of the Treuhafts.
89. The poet.
90. Katharine Graham’s oldest son and successor as publisher of the Washington Post.
91. Power, Privilege and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993).
92. The Treuhafts evidently misheard the name. Her name before she married was Camelia “Cam” Chun.
93. Mrs. King was Camelia and Nicky’s teacher, and Chun confirms that both of them were very fond of her. Chun recalled that Mrs. King adored Nicky and cried openly for days in class after his death, as she tried to carry on with her teaching duties.
94. Julia, daughter of Decca and Esmond Romilly.
95. On Charlotte Mosley’s forthcoming collection of Nancy Mitford’s letters, Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford (published in 1993 by Houghton Mifflin in the United States and Stoughton in Britain).
96. Alexander Mosley, Charlotte’s husband and Diana’s son. When Decca saw him as an adult in 1974, at the Duchess of Devonshire’s Irish castle, she wrote, “[W]e hit it off no end-seems his best friends in Chile, where he lived for ages, were all Allende supporters etc, most surprising.” Decca had also become friendly with Diana Mosley’s son Desmond, from her first marriage, and his wife, Penny. Despite her strong feelings about her sister Diana and Diana’s offspring generally, Decca always said there was one good Mosley son (Alexander) and one good Guinness son (Desmond). She also noted after one visit with Desmond and Penny Guinness and their children, “They all loathe Diana, a great bond.”
97. Decca had learned previously of this ploy by her then brother-in-law, Peter Rodd. See letter of July 22, 1964, to Robert Treuhaft.
98. At the time of Decca’s elopement with Esmond Romilly.
99. Decca had begun anticipating her golden wedding anniversary celebration years earlier, telling her children, “if Memorial Services shld come first, simply switch the venue.”
100. The former Eva Lapin and her husband.
101. The wife of former San Francisco Communist and waterfront labor leader Dave Jenkins, who had died recently. Until the 1960s, the Jenkinses had been good friends of the Treuhafts, dating back at least to Dave Jenkins’s days as head of the California Labor School, where Decca worked. Jenkins’s wife, Edith, had been called to testify before the state Un-American Activities Committee at the same time Decca was subpoenaed. Dave Jenkins was later active in Democratic Party politics and became estranged from Decca for decades after he—as she put it many years later—“threw red wine on my best yellow dress for baiting him about his support of Hubert Humphrey—in 1968!” Decca said she “finally decided to bury buried hatchets with him” in a letter she sent him in June 1992.
102. A letter from Decca on the incident was finally published more than two years later in Mary Killen’s “Dear Mary …” advice column in the English publication The Spectator. Killen called Decca’s joking solution “ideal” and added, “Widows and widowers should seek out jovial minders to accompany them on such early outings following bereavement.”
103. The daughter of Emma and Toby Tennant; granddaughter of the Duchess of Devonshire.
104. Decca’s word for an English telephone operator, coined by her son because, she said, “that’s how it sounds when [the English] say Operator.”
105. Decca’s good friend Jill Tweedie had died at age fifty-seven of motor neuron disease. A Guardian columnist-writing on feminist issues-and novelist who was a friend as well as colleague of Polly Toynbee, she had become a good friend of Decca’s as well. She was a neighbor when Decca stayed in Kentish Town, and Decca on occasion rented her house.
106. Belfrage had sent Decca a clipping from the Guardian suggesting similarities between Angelou’s inaugural poem and one by Norton F. Tennille Jr. See letter of December 10 to David Pleydell-Bouverie.
107. Decca was in Ann Arbor for three weeks to teach at the University of Michigan—“rather an awful experience,” she wrote, “except I liked the students.”
108. The Independent.
109. To another correspondent, Decca fretted, “What did that rotter Philip Toynbee actually say???”; She tried to enlist her friend to write The Times when the obituary ran and to say, “Contrary to PT’s biased & untrue obit …”
110. In another letter, Decca wrote that, if read carefully, Tennille’s comments were “actually v. conciliatory-he just wants an answer from M. & her publisher. So STUPID not to have replied at once. My guess is that some lawyer … advised not to answer. Or possibly… just threw his letter away.”
111. Decca said she was told by Bob Loomis that “there’d been a vicious attack on Maya in—the New Republic, he thought? saying she gets huge amts of money from Wake Forest for doing nothing plus many other adverse comments about her & her work.”
112. This book of essays, published in 1993, has been called a “spiritual classic” by its publisher and others.
113. Charlotte Mosley, following publication of her book of Nancy Mitford’s letters the previous year, was contemplating a book of letters among the Mitford sisters. In reply to this letter, she said she didn’t think such a book was possible without Decca’s letters.
114. Decca once described philosopher Bertrand Russell as “of the Stanleys whence we got all the bad blood.”
115. See letter of August II, 1959, to Robert Treuhaft.
116. Mosley was also considering a book of correspondence between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. That book, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, was published in 1996 by Hodder & Stoughton and Houghton Mifflin Company.
117. Decca is referring here to an article by Masters “In the (hateful) Daily Mail,” as she wrote in another letter. She said Masters called himself “a friend of D.”
118. Decca was referring to her Christmas 1941 visit with Churchill a few weeks after Esmond Romilly’s loss at sea. (See introduction to “America, in Love and War,” the second section of this book.) The Secret Service went to the Durrs’ house on Christmas Day to invite Decca to accompany them to join the president and the prime minister at an Arlington, Virginia, church.
119. Constancia was actually ten months old at the time, and, as noted previously, the talk with Churchill was far more emotional than Decca acknowledges here.
