Decca, p.51
Decca, page 51
43. The National Funeral Directors Association.
44. Ephraim Kahn’s mother, Ray Kahn, was suffering from chronic asthma and died the following January.
45. An apparent reference to Chester A. Arthur, who did exist and was president from 1881 to 1885.
46. Paris had been in spiraling turmoil during Algeria’s war of independence.
47. Decca and Nevile had apparently been out of touch since she and Esmond Romilly left Britain for the United States. He had been their closest friend and ally during their 1937 elopement. See letter of late February 1937 to Lady Redesdale. Decca wrote of Nevile in her 1960 memoir, discussing his role in the elopement.
48. Constancia Romilly had been traveling with Charles McDew, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to meetings of organizations like the National Student Association, on behalf of the civil rights movement. While in New York, she spent all her free time volunteering for the SNCC office in New York. She broke up with McDew the following summer.
49. A portrait of the Mitford girls’ beloved nanny Blor. It was reprinted in Nancy Mitford’s The Water Beetle, published in 1962 by Hamish Hamilton in the U.K. and by Harper & Row in New York.
50. Decca once wrote that in describing their mother in the essay, Nancy was “more or less making Muv out a bit of an idiot.”
51. The duchess, whose late brother-in-law had been married to Kennedy sister Kathleen, had remained a close friend of John F. Kennedy.
52. San Francisco longshoremen’s union leader Harry Bridges was a friend of the Treuhafts and sometime client of Robert Treuhaft. There had been repeated unsuccessful legislative and judicial attempts to deport him on the grounds that he was a covert Communist.
53. The cover drawing for The American Way of Death was a funeral wreath in the shape of a dollar sign.
54. Robert Gottlieb was the young editor at Simon & Schuster who was instrumental in acquiring The American Way of Death. He remained Decca’s editor and became a lifelong friend and trusted professional consultant. (He is also the editor for this book.)
55. Nina Bourne, Robert Gottlieb’s colleague, who was the head of advertising at Simon & Schuster and later at Knopf.
56. The “Builder’s Creed” (or “Builders Dream”) was the visionary document written by Hubert Eaton, the man who transformed a scruffy cemetery in Glendale into the extravagant Forest Lawn Memorial Park (or F.L. as Decca calls it here). F.L. Ashtrays, nutshells etc for door prizes for the salesmen.
57. The ultra-right-wing organization formed to combat Communism in America. Its targets included such “dedicated, conscious agents of the Communist conspiracy” as President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
58. The chapter in which Decca discussed funeral directors’ resentment of religious leaders who help defend their parishioners against commercial exploitation in funeral arrangements.
59. Stage and television producer David Susskind hosted The David Susskind Show, a long-running and highly regarded TV interview-and-debate program on NBC.
60. Typewriter ribbon.
61. The illness of their mother, concluding with her death that morning.
62. Decca had taken on the task because she insisted the book have an index. “Simon & Schuster tried to sabotage it,” she claimed, “as the editor there hates indexes, said they remind him of his chemistry book as a child.” As she related the history, the publisher “knuckled under all right, but still kept saying it takes 3 weeks to make an index. I said I bet I could make one in 2 days, working round the clock (but privately thinking it would only take about 2 hours). So they gave me another set of galleys. After 2 hours, I realized it would take me about 2 months.” She was granted a few more weeks.
63. The main boat on Inch Kenneth.
64. Madeau Stewart, Decca’s cousin.
65. Constancia Romilly was leaving New York and going to work for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Atlanta—or, as Decca put, “SNCCing her job and going to work for Chuck.” Constancia’s friend Charles (Chuck) McDew had stepped down as chair of SNCC and been replaced by John Lewis.
66. The president of Utter McKinley Mortuaries in Los Angeles.
67. “Have the Undertakers Reformed?,” an article in the Atlantic Monthly. It had prompted a flood of reader responses. As Decca commented after reading some of the mostly complimentary responses, “Extraordinary how this gloomy subject interests people.”
68. Seymour Linden, who took the book jacket photo for the first edition of The American Way of Death.
69. CBS Reports was a highly regarded television documentary program that had obtained exclusive rights to an interview with Decca. It was written, directed, and produced by David Lowe.
70. Rosemary Drury-Lowe was a friend of Nancy Mitford.
71. Decca’s daughter had visited with her aunts at the wedding of the Devonshires’ daughter, Emma.
72. The wife of Martin Bernal, son of Decca’s friend Professor J. D. Bernal, the English scientist (physicist, crystallographer, and molecular biologist) and Marxist writer. Martin Bernal was at the University of California at Berkeley at the time, and the couple became good friends of the Treuhafts.
73. Auriol Stevens, who later became a prominent English authority on education and editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement (1992–2002).
74. Dan Green, who was at the time a young Simon & Schuster public relations employee sometimes assigned to accompany Decca on her book tours.
75. This letter was written a week after the Congressional Record reported Congressman James B. Utt’s attack on Decca’s Communist associations, her “anti-Americanism,” and her “anti-Christ attack.”
76. The path of Allen Dulles, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and younger brother of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, may have crossed Decca’s because he was also a recently published author (The Craft of Intelligence, Harper & Row, 1963).
77. In the Savoy Hilton Hotel.
78. The New York Herald Tribune reported that NBC had canceled Decca’s previously scheduled interviews on the Today show and on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show. The Herald Tribune quoted its sources as saying that producers of the two shows were told to cancel Decca’s appearances for unspecified “moral” reasons. The paper said NBC maintained that Decca was “never booked” on the two programs.
79. The actress of stage, screen, and radio dramas became a popular radio and television panelist and host. Her daily radio interview program, The Arlene Francis Show, ran for twenty-three years on WOR in New York.
80. The Peachtree Manor Hotel. According to Constancia Romilly, “it was the only hotel in downtown Atlanta that was actually integrated after Mayor [Ivan] Allen [Jr.] declared that Atlanta was the ‘city too busy to hate.’ The entire downtown, hotels, restaurants, etc., resegregated after the early sit-ins and desegregation agreements were made and broken, except the Peachtree Manor. So, visiting black people and progressive whites stayed there.”
81. The Congress of Racial Equality.
82. Both were stores in Berkeley.
83. A November 6 Washington Post story said that a news release from the funeral industry “charges that her book is an effort to ‘substitute the funeral service, as we know it in this country, with that practiced in communist countries such as the Soviet Union.’” The Post quoted Decca as responding, “The best embalmers in the world are Communist. Lenin is the best example of long term viewing in history. I can turn around and say all the embalmers are Communist.”
84. A. C. Greene was the book editor of the Dallas Times Herald.
85. In another, unpublished letter, Decca described it as a “rave” review.
86. In her other account, Decca said she had been told that the managing editor was “a pretty conservative chap.” The Times Herald’s managing editor at the time this letter was written was Hal S. Lewis Jr.
87. A pun on “occasional pieces of skin,” from the ghoulish Tom Lehrer song “The Irish Ballad”—a Treuhaft favorite.
88. The duchess’s good friend President Kennedy had been assassinated two days earlier in Dallas.
89. Friedan was a founding mother of the modern women’s movement, largely on the strength of her pioneering book The Feminine Mystique (W. W. Norton, 1963), which became a best-seller in 1964. In 1966 she co-founded the National Organization for Women.
90. The “it” was an article for a special issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal to be edited by Friedan.
91. Morgan, author of a guide to simple, low-cost burials, provided Decca with guidance and practical help in the preparation of The American Way of Death.
92. Morgan had sent Decca a detailed, five-page letter reporting on his late-night televised debate, as a stand-in for Decca, with Lawrence Doyle, sales manager of Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
93. Morgan had reported that halfway through the program, Doyle “trotted out the Red herring” with a “harangue” about Decca taking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to deny she was a Communist.
94. Irv (Kup) Kupcinet, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist also known as “Mr. Chicago,” was the award-winning host of a series of variety and informal late-night talk shows over the years, one of which was a precursor of The Tonight Show. He was friends with and interviewed many of the most prominent people in the country in every field, from sports to politics to entertainment.
95. A Methodist minister and psychologist, Jackson wrote and lectured extensively on grief, bereavement, and the healing power of funerals. He was allied with the morticians, and the funeral industry countered Decca’s book by heavily promoting Dr. Jackson’s views and his book For the Living.
96. The New York Times reporter and editor, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for his coverage of Russia.
97. Francis S. VanDerbur of Olinger Mortuaries, Inc.
98. Decca’s name for Forest Lawn’s Lawrence Doyle.
99. The agent, of course, was James MacGibbon.
100. In his letter, Morgan had suggested that Decca “counter-attack” with a statement that she is neither a Communist nor an anti-Communist and that the question is irrelevant to American funeral customs. He sent two paragraphs of suggested wording for such a statement.
101. Morgan had reported confidentially that the former liberal Democratic member of Congress—and neighbor of the Durrs when Decca was living with them in the early 1940s—had “expressed concern over your unwillingness to refute the red smear.” After his 1946 re-election defeat by Richard Nixon, Voorhis spent years as a national leader in the cooperative movement, in which Robert Treuhaft was involved locally. He was, in Treuhaft’s words, “a rather virulent anti-Communist” who “was afraid of any red taint.”
102. A sociologist active in the Unitarian Universalist church along with her husband, Unitarian minister and educator Dr. Josiah Bartlett.
103. Decca apparently was referring to the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
104. Elsewhere, Decca described the article this way: “It’s a final tease on the funeral furor. (Their sales are down like mad; but Practical Burial Footwear announced that their sales have increased greatly since 10 million viewers saw burial footwear on television! Aren’t they marvels.)”
105. Although the full name is not noted on this letter, the “Charlie” to whom the letter is addressed appears to be San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charles McCabe. Around this time, McCabe married an old English friend of Decca’s, Mary St. Clair Erskine, and moved to her Wiltshire farm, where Benjamin Treuhaft was to spend some of the summer as a farmhand. Decca once wrote that the tempestuous, hard-drinking McCabe was “known in British circles as Macabre.” He took to his new role as country squire with relish. He left sports writing and became a general-interest Chronicle columnist, posing for a new newspaper logo photo wearing a bowler. The marriage proved to be relatively brief, and McCabe later returned to San Francisco. Over the years, Decca referred to Mary St. Clair Erskine using various of her married names, including McCabe and, later, Dunn. She was the sister of Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé.
106. Decca’s usual shorthand for The American Way of Death.
107. Chronicle City Editor Abe Mellinkoff.
108. The Marquess of Hartington, the duke and duchess’s son.
109. The hotel where Decca was staying.
110. Through the duchess.
111. For his brother, President John Kennedy.
112. Helen (Babby) Dreyfus was accompanying Decca on the trip. She was the wife of civil rights attorney Benjamin (Barney) Dreyfus. The two, whom the Treuhafts met in about 1943, were among their dearest friends. Benjamin Dreyfus was the founder of the National Lawyers Guild.
113. Benjamin Treuhaft was working at Mary St. Clair Erskine McCabe’s Wiltshire farm.
114. In Nancy Mitford’s savagely satirical 1935 novel, a homegrown English fascist named Eugenia Malmains—a transparent caricature of Unity Mitford—goose-steps around town, haranguing villagers and her fellow “Union Jackshirts” under the leadership of Captain Jack, modeled after Diana Mitford’s then-lover and future husband, Oswald Mosley.
115. Many letters from this part of the cache are published for the first time in this book.
116. For more on this example of Peter Rodd’s “scullduggery,” see letter of May 14, 1993, to the Duchess of Devonshire.
117. Decca had received a letter from Boston University Libraries saying that they wanted to have her manuscripts as, she later wrote, “a nucleus” for their collections. She then discovered that her sister Nancy and Philip Toynbee had been sent identical letters “saying they wanted them to be the nucleus.”
118. For more on the amazing potato cure, see Decca’s letter to her doctor, Arlan Cohn, on March 6, 1986.
119. Decca had contracted to write an article for Venture magazine on the Hebrides, to be entitled “It’s a Pairrfect Day for the Games.”
120. The conservative senator from Arizona had won his party’s nomination for president at a contentious Republican convention held a week earlier in San Francisco. He was soundly defeated in November by President Lyndon Johnson.
121. Probably a reference to the disappearance of three young civil rights workers a month earlier. They were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies were found a week and a half after this letter was written.
122. His stint on the McCabe farm.
123. Philip Toynbee’s teenage daughter by his first wife, Anne.
124. The reason for sending the letters to Chatsworth—the duchess’s assurance that they could be kept there in “maximum archival conditions”—later became a source of amusement for the Treuhafts, who often referred to it by such shorthand terms as “max. arch. cond.” It also became a source of resentment during Decca’s periods of conflict with her sister. See, for example, the letter of October 26, 1976, to the Duchess of Devonshire.
125. The scrapbooks to which Decca refers here were later to become a source of bitter bickering among the sisters.
126. “Terrible mistake. Must be corrected.”
127. “Very strict school.”
128. Salesladies.
129. Decca had been commissioned by Show magazine to do an article on the filming of The Loved One and was to travel to Los Angeles to observe the shooting and meet with screenwriter Christopher Isherwood and some of the actors.
130. Elsewhere, Decca summed it up as “the most expensive day’s shopping of not only my life, but my wildest dreams; equiv. of 2 years’ ordinary shopping, I’d say.”
131. Guineas. The name for an old English gold coin with a value eventually fixed at twenty-one shillings. After the coin was replaced by the sovereign (value twenty shillings), the term continued in commercial use indicating twenty-one shillings.
132. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, then at the height of their popularity, costarred in the film.
133. The Free Speech Movement (FSM) began as a broad-based student protest against restrictive free-speech policies at the University of California at Berkeley and became a landmark in the development of the New Left and the national antiwar movement. Robert Treuhaft, invited by FSM leader Mario Savio to serve as the students’ volunteer counsel, sat in on negotiations with faculty and unyielding administrators. On December 2 and 3, after the breakdown of negotiations and with disciplinary charges pending against some of the student leaders, about eight hundred students were arrested during an all-night FSM sit-in at the campus administration building, Sproul Hall. Among the students sitting in were many young friends of the Treuhafts. Robert Treuhaft himself was the first of those arrested—to the indignation of much of the legal profession—at the behest of District Attorney Coakley’s deputy, Edwin Meese, later attorney general of the United States. His trespassing charge was finally dropped a few years later in exchange for his dropping his own suit against Meese for false arrest.
134. As Robert Treuhaft later recalled the episode, Deputy D.A. Meese said, “Sheriff, there’s somebody here who is not a member of the press,” at which point, Treuhaft said, “I turned around and said, “‘Well, that makes three of us.’”
135. The folk singer and peace activist.
136. Albion College in Albion, Michigan.
137. Esquire had asked Decca to do an article on (as she put it at the time) “Ronald Reagan, an aging film actor being touted for Governor by the Birchers in Southern Calif.” See letter of June 19, 1978, to Katharine Graham.
138. Benjamin Treuhaft was studying at College Cevenol preparatory to attending St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.
139. The duchess’s daughter and son-in-law, Emma and Toby Tennant, then living in Argentina.
140. The duchess’s younger daughter, Sophia, who would have been about eight years old at the time.
141. Decca appears to be replying simultaneously to several letters from Durr, written over a period of a few months, about “rich Harvard boys” (staff members of the Harvard Crimson who went to Alabama to start a newspaper for blacks without “a Negro on the Staff as far as I can discover”) and other well-intentioned Northerners who went to the South, often for short periods, to write about and help the blacks because it was a “fashionable cause.” Durr at once praised the dedicated young idealists and bemoaned their lack of economic “sophistication,” their dismissal of the civil rights achievements that preceded them, and their lack of a permanent commitment. In one of the letters, she wrote, “I think the worst thing about them is that they always leave, they never stay…. They seem to think all of History started with the Movement in 1960 and their involvement in it. …” Decca had previously written to Durr, “Isn’t it an extraordinary advance from a few short years ago—when nobody would lift a finger except us reds?”; (Quotes from Durr’s letters during this period are from Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years, edited by Patricia Sullivan [Routledge, 2003].)
