Decca, p.40
Decca, page 40
99. Candida Donadio was Decca’s American literary agent at the time.
100. Thompson was the Houghton Mifflin vice president who happened to be in London when Hons and Rebels was being peddled there and bought it immediately. (See April 26, 1959, letter to Robert Treuhaft.)
101. A friend of Decca’s from her earliest days in the United States. He was a writer and photographer for Life magazine who had been assigned to do a story on the newly arrived Decca and Esmond Romilly.
102. Decca had been commissioned by Life for a “quickie” article on a four-day drive the previous year across the United States. (She vowed to shorten the road trip the next time by starting three hours earlier … to beat the time change.) For details, see next letter.
103. In a previous letter to her husband about her Life travel article, Decca wrote, “I could do a much funnier article about writing an article for LIFE.”
104. Houghton Mifflin’s “long-suffering … publicity lady,” as Decca described her.
105. At Life magazine.
106. No good.
107. Dave Scherman, Decca’s friend at Life, whose family had joined Decca in New York and helped edit the manuscript of her article.
108. Decca’s paragraph about using their ploy while traveling to evade person-to-person telephone charges was included in the published version, both in Life International and in the domestic edition when the article was republished in August. But there were repercussions, which Decca described years later in her anthology Poison Penmanship. She wrote that she never expected Life, in her first article for a major commercial magazine, to run the paragraph about tricking the telephone company because “surely these giant corporations stick together against the slingshots of us little Davids.” She wrote that after publication of the article, her friend Dave Scherman described the predictable reaction at Life when the phone company, “fit to be tied … called all the brass at Life on the carpet and ordered them to show cause why the phone company should pour millions of dollars into advertising in Life only to be knifed in the back like this.” According to Decca, Scherman reported that the phone company was told “we fired Murphy” (the “fictitious editor who is always fired whenever some high-up in politics or business complains of being maligned in an article”). In addition, Scherman told her, Life smoothed the company’s ruffled feathers by arranging to produce “a special eight-page color spread on the company’s contribution to the space program.”
109. Evidently a “kill fee” for her article on the student movement, which had been rejected by the magazine.
110. Katharine Graham’s mother.
111. People organized to go out in groups to assure integration compliance at lunch counters and restaurants—that is, to make certain they really were serving blacks.
112. In her published article on the Southern trip, Decca wrote that being invited to country clubs “was, for me, a little like being shown around a steel factory behind the Iron Curtain; never having seen the inside of one at home, I had no basis for comparison. Nevertheless, a certain amount of Southern life revolves around these country clubs, and I thought it would be a good thing to have a look.”
113. Decca’s friend Anne Braden and her husband, Carl, both journalists, were active in civil rights and labor advocacy in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1940s and ‘50s. In the ‘60s and early ‘70s, they directed the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF). The couple achieved national prominence in 1954 when they purchased a ranch-style house in an all-white Louisville neighborhood on behalf of black friends, Charlotte and Andrew Wade. Neighbors objected, a cross was burned, shots were fired into the home, and finally it was bombed. The Bradens were called as witnesses before a grand jury, where they were quizzed on their political affiliations and beliefs, including what books they owned. Prosecutors suggested that the bombing may have been a Communist plot to stir up racial animosities and overthrow state and national governments. The Bradens were indicted for sedition, and Carl Braden was tried, convicted, and sent to prison on the charge. Two years later, all charges were dropped after the Supreme Court invalidated local sedition laws. Anne Braden’s memoir describing the episode, The Wall Between (Monthly Review Press, 1958) was a National Book Award finalist and one of Decca’s favorite books.
114. Decca is being facetious here.
115. Oakland Technical High School.
116. In retelling the story of the threatening Klan call some years later, Decca said that “this sort of thing happens constantly” at the Durrs’ Montgomery flat. She said in other letters that Clifford Durr’s client—a married, twenty-two-year-old janitor and father with a perfect job record, a good reputation, and an alibi—had been arrested at his home, viciously beaten, and charged with disturbing the peace, but Durr ultimately prevailed in court after learning that the white accuser had previously been put on probation for making obscene phone calls. Even after the initial verdict, the accuser was said to have called police to complain about a Negro prowler outside her house, but police found nobody.
117. Several days before this letter was written, busloads of Freedom Riders were assaulted by mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. Under federal pressure, state authorities agreed to protect a new attempt by Freedom Riders to reach Montgomery, but the civil rights workers were beaten nevertheless on arrival at Montgomery’s Greyhound bus station three days after Decca wrote this letter. By chance, she and Virginia Durr were at the bus station on the day of the violence, and Decca got caught up in the turmoil of the following days.
118. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
119. Decca was referring to the terrifying night she spent at a civil rights rally in a church besieged by a white mob. See introduction to this chapter for details.
120. A co-founder of Highlander Folk School. See letter of August 16–19, 1941, to Esmond Romilly, and associated footnote 77.
121. Decca’s good friend, frequent host in New York, and occasional traveling companion.
122. Within days, Life reconsidered and decided not to publish Decca’s first-person account of her “nightmare” night inside the besieged church. She was paid a $500 “kill fee” for the article, entitled “The Longest Meeting,” which was subsequently rejected by Look magazine and others. A truncated version ran in her Esquire article “Whut They’re Thanking Down There” (changed from Decca’s “You-All and Non-You-All: A Southern Potpourri,” under which title it was later reprinted in Poison Penmanship). According to a later, and not necessarily definitive, recollection by Virginia Durr, “The Longest Meeting” was never published because another of the trapped attendees published his account first. At least one of the magazines said it was dated by the time it reached them.
123. Through Ruth Waller, “a society type lady, young and charmin’,” Decca tried to get an invitation to a party of the English Speaking Union, or as she called it “the Only Fairly English Speaking Union … purely a snob group, society people.” The invitation was not forthcoming because Decca was said, wrongly, to be staying at the Durrs with a young English student who had been scheduled to be guest of honor at the party. The student, Anne Pike, was “disinvited” after being quoted in a newspaper “man-in-the-street” interview as saying, “Negroes should be allowed to go any place they wish. I am for integration of the races 100 percent.” Pike was also the cause of disapproving gossip in the Union because of what was considered her scandalous relationship with a boyfriend. Decca was told that the party that neither attended featured mostly chatter about Pike and Decca and that Ruth Waller herself “is being accused of being an old friend of mine in NY, probably a member of the same Communist cell.” The Anne Pike affair became “the main topic [of conversation] in certain circles thru arson, assault, attempted murder and all,” Decca told her husband.
124. Names omitted by editor.
125. The Durrs’ rustic retreat in Wetumpka, Alabama, twenty miles from Montgomery, was named Pea Level because peas once grew there. Decca repeatedly misspelled the name, intentionally.
126. Decca later wrote that she convinced her own insurance company, with what she considered “rather specious reasoning,” to reimburse the blue-book value of the car. Her husband, she said, “told me I didn’t have a chance on the claim.”
127. A local newspaper writer.
128. Lulah Durr, Clifford and Virginia’s youngest daughter, was born well after Decca lived with the family.
129. Constancia Romilly was traveling in Mexico.
130. The older daughter of Barbara and Ephraim Kahn.
V
DEATH AND THE AFTERLIFE
The scourge of the funeral industry posed at a Berkeley, California, mortuary chapel in the 1960s.
Decca and Robert Treuhaft with their children, Benjamin and Constancia, on the porch of the family’s Regent Street home in Oakland in the early 1960s.
In the American funeral industry, Jessica Mitford finally found an institution truly worthy of the merciless Mitford Tease. The funeral directors’ self-serving piety and mercenary psychobabble—as well as their use of deceptive sales tactics, frivolous ostentation, technological gizmos, and artful cosmetology to disguise the biological finality of death—all left the industry open to the kind of ridicule that only Decca could dispense. The industry was equally vulnerable on social grounds, taking commercial advantage of families in mourning and maximizing profits through monopolistic legal stratagems.
Despite her acute sense of injustice, what seems to have enthralled Decca most, initially, were the funeral trade journals her husband kept around the house, publications like Mortuary Management, Casket & Sunnyside, and—Decca’s favorite title—Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries. Robert Treuhaft said she showed little interest in his cause until he began bringing the journals home. She loved the manufacturers’ ads touting an array of backless garments, embalming gadgets, and other expensive products designed to prettify corpses (or the portions that showed when they were laid out in coffins) and to create meretricious “memory pictures” for the distraught and financially drained next of kin. She mounted a number of those ads on the walls of the family’s downstairs bathroom. It wasn’t just the ads. She told one correspondent with glee that she had just received the latest issue of Mortuary Management: “There’s [an] editorial headed ‘CHILDREN’S FUNERALS: A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY TO BUILD GOOD WILL.’ Do admit they are a lark.” And then there were the trade catalogues. One firm, Decca was delighted to discover, “has added to its line of burial negligees a line of burial brunch coats. Honestly … The Last Brunch.”
It was rollicking good fun, but it was much more than that. This was a subject whose time had come. In that era, the anguish of death and many of the arrangements that followed were handled privately and secretly. Death and funerals were treated as proprietary information by black-suited salesmen who pushed their costly services in muted voices and passed themselves off as experts in “grief therapy.” Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross didn’t publish her influential book On Death and Dying until six years after publication of The American Way of Death; it was another five years before the first American hospice was founded. Decca almost single-handedly moved the subject of death, embalming, and burial out of hushed, windowless, flower-filled rooms and into the public domain. Perhaps only her brand of brash humor could have yanked aside the shrouds of this deeply ingrained American taboo.
One of Decca’s dearest friends, Pele de Lappe, finds an unacknowledged motivation for the Treuhafts’ passionate interest in funerals. Their son Nicholas’s sudden death in a traffic accident in 1955, three years before Decca published her “St. Peter” article, was rarely discussed in the household, nor could Decca bring herself to write about it in her memoir, but she adored the boy and mourned him, in her own subterranean way, for the rest of her life. De Lappe recalls Nicholas’s funeral at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland; it was the sort of funeral Decca later lampooned, replete with “all the trappings of that kind of thing,” white roses on a white coffin “and the whole gloomy horror of … the conventional commercial funeral system.” One can only speculate whether Nicholas’s death was also the reason why it took so long for Decca—an author in search of a subject for her second book, inundated with supportive letters—to come to the obvious decision to write a book about funeral abuses.
Within weeks after publication of Roul Tunley’s “Can You Afford to Die?”; in the Saturday Evening Post, Decca gained more nationwide exposure with an appearance on a television show called P.M. West on the high cost of dying, but she still thought of it as her husband’s project. She told her daughter, “That subject has suddenly become a sort of number-one issue, all over the place, mostly due to old Bob’s unremitting work.”
As the number of letters mounted into the thousands, the Post’s editor remarked with evident understatement that the article “seemed to have touched a sensitive nerve.” Decca suggested to Tunley, the author, that he follow up with a book on the subject, and she offered research material and other assistance. Tunley replied, “Why don’t you write it?”;
So she tested the idea on her literary agents. Her American agent, Candida Donadio, responded, “It’s a superb idea, so kookie that it is definitely possible.” From there the project took shape rapidly, and the chronology is well-established in her letters.
As originally conceived, the Treuhafts were to write the book together, and Robert Treuhaft did a substantial amount of the research and preliminary writing. Library research was exclusively Robert Treuhaft’s domain; Decca detested that kind of plodding paperwork. She explained another division of responsibility to her mother-in-law, reporting that her husband “is the cemetery man around here (I am the funeral parlor man).” But agents and publishers balked at a joint byline, and her husband deferred to them. In the book itself, Decca’s acknowledgments begin, “Large portions of this book could well be labeled, ‘By Robert Treuhaft, as told to Jessica Mitford.’”
In some senses, the entire funeral industry also served as reluctant coauthors, responding to the Treuhafts’ requests for information or commenting publicly on their early writings with self-inflating comments that Decca recycled in her book. She recalled that “Howard C. Raether, Executive Secretary of the National Funeral Directors Association … unwittingly supplied some of the best lines to The American Way of Death, including the epigraph: ‘Funerals are becoming more and more a part of the American way of life.’” Decca told one correspondent she had offered Raether a two-thousand-word chapter in her book, “anything he wanted … which threw them all into a terrible state trying to decide; they decided not, which I regret but I do think wise from their point of view.”
Decca’s letters chronicle the greatest obstacle she encountered in trying to write the book in her own inimitable way: the resistance from her squeamish publishers to what they saw as the inappropriateness of her chapter on embalming. The subject matter was deemed too revolting and the tone too playful. Decca persevered, although many years later she told her sister Deborah that, rather than remove the chapter, the Treuhafts had been prepared simply “to mimeograph the book for those who wanted it, & pack it up.” Fortunately, a change of publishers saved the project. Decca’s longtime business assistant Catherine (Katie) Edwards reports that more requests have been received to reprint that controversial embalming chapter than any of her other works; she says the requests continue to come in, more than forty years after the initial publication. Decca herself was quick to observe that the reprint rights, often in college textbooks, had brought her far more money than the original advance for the book.
Decca never envisioned more than a small and specialized audience for the book—“too dismal a subject.” She showed an uncompleted manuscript to her sister Nancy while in Europe and reported that “she shrieked for a bit, but then stopped reading saying it is too revolting. Rather a bad omen for me, I thought; suppose the Great American Public agrees with her? Not too good for sales, if they do.” But some people did foresee a bigger impact and told Decca so. One magazine editor who read an early version of the manuscript told her, “This book is going to break them (the morticians). It’s going to smash an entire industry.” Decca laughed it off, telling a correspondent that the reaction “made me feel very good, never having had the pleasure of smashing an industry before.”
The American Way of Death was an instantaneous and overwhelming hit. The response is well documented in her letters, but a few more details might flesh out the picture. Just ten days after publication in August 1963, Simon & Schuster sales manager Mac S. Albert wrote to his salesmen that “[w]e wanted to let you know, in case you haven’t felt it as yet, that we are sitting on a bombshell of a book … which is going to explode any minute now We’re being bombarded with wires and phone calls … screaming for additional copies.” Stores were reordering in ever larger quantities, sometimes placing several reorders a day, and the publisher was simultaneously reprinting and ordering paper for tens of thousands of additional copies. Within weeks of publication, The American Way of Death was on the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained through the fall and winter, until the following March.
As Decca knew they would—and as the book publicists hoped they would—funeral directors and others responded to the book’s success by falling back on Red smears, but this time the attacks didn’t stick (as they might have just a few years earlier). When the book was released, Tocsin, a gossipy, far-right-wing newsletter in Berkeley that billed itself as “The West’s Leading Anti-Communist Weekly,” featured an “expose” of Decca’s Communist associations under the headline “Writer Jessica Mitford Equals Communist Decca Treuhaft.” The article called The American Way of Death “a clever attempt to bury capitalist America’s funeral customs.” The head of the National Selected Morticians also picked up the theme, suggesting that Decca was trying to replace the American funeral service “with that practiced in Communistic countries such as the Soviet Union.” The National Funeral Directors Association’s official press release advised those who “wish further data as to” the authors to check the transcripts of hearings of state and federal un-American activities committees, and they helpfully provided the dates.
