Decca, p.65
Decca, page 65
15. In a letter a few months earlier, Decca wrote, “I’m supposed to do a ‘profile’ of [Julie Andrews] for Redbook Mag. I dread this for several reasons. Redbook said they want an in-depth sort of thing, not just a string of anecdotes, said they would send me some samples of articles about filmfolk to show the sort of thing. So they did, and … they are purest fan-mag style, too awful for words.”
16. Presumably the New York real estate tycoon.
17. Civil rights leader James Forman—Freedom Rider, militant voting-rights campaigner, and masterful organizer—who was executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Constancia Romilly worked for him in SNCC’s Atlanta office, and they were partners for about a decade, beginning in the winter of 1963–64. They moved to New York in 1965. Forman was the father of Constancia Romilly’s two children, James and Chaka.
18. The military draft was then in effect for young men without student deferments.
19. David Pleydell-Bouverie was a friend of the Treuhafts, who were often among a glittering parade of luminaries invited to stay at his showplace ranch near Glen Ellen, California, which featured a huge outdoor chandelier, Old Masters in the kitchen, and other grand eccentricities. He was a retired architect who had once been married to heiress Alice Astor. Decca met Pleydell-Bouverie, whom she described as another English “renegade aristo,” through “Mary St. Clair Erskine/ Dunn/Campbell etc,” when she was married to local journalist Charles McCabe. In other letters Decca called Pleydell-Bouverie “a rare soul” and an “English nabob, awfully good value, on board of all local art museums etc., mostly had tycoons to his place—Bob & me possibly for comic relief.” He was apparently “nourishing” because Decca’s old friend Dave Scherman, fascinated with his name, used to joke, “I’ll have a nice, hot Pleydell-Bouverie.”
20. The poet.
21. The longtime franchise columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle, who was universally called “Mr. San Francisco.” Known mostly for his insider gossip, his razor wit, and his dripping-with nostalgia portraits of San Francisco life, he was a friend of Decca for several decades.
22. Mark Suckle.
23. Constancia Romilly, who had worked for John Marqusee, a SNCC benefactor, since moving from Atlanta, had recently taken a position as an office manager at Marqusee’s new venture, the Collector’s Guild, which sold limited-edition lithographs. She worked there for about a year and a half. She subsequently returned to college, receiving an associate degree in nursing and, years later, a master’s in adult health. In 1975 she began a career in nursing.
24. The Republican senator and Oakland Tribune publisher.
25. The Treuhaft campaign was closely allied with the congressional candidacy of journalist Robert Scheer, who was running on a New Left Vietnam peace platform against incumbent Democrat Jeffrey Cohelan.
26. A largely black district.
27. Sonia Orwell, a much younger woman who married the terminally ill George Orwell three months before he died, was a habituée of arts circles, an editor, and the much-maligned custodian of her husband’s legacy. Known as a drinker and a difficult woman, she was a loyal friend and sometime hostess of Decca’s at her London home until her death in 1980.
28. Following the death of her mother, Decca received a “gloomy” report from her attorney on Inch Kenneth’s financial prospects—either as a working farm with an absentee owner or as a rental property—and had decided reluctantly to accept his strong advice to sell it, since, as she put it, “neither child seems inclined to be a farmer.”
29. Nancy Mitford had previously written a Voltaire biography, Voltaire in Love (Hamish Hamilton, 1957).
30. Decca had also written a review of the first volume of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Little, Brown, 1967). Hers appeared in Ramparts magazine.
31. Philip’s father, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who was the nephew of the economic historian also named Arnold Toynbee.
32. Allen Ginsberg, the famed Beat poet.
33. Probably Sonia Orwell.
34. It had been revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funneling large sums of money to various civilian organizations such as student and labor groups and the Co-op League. The Berkeley Co-op was intensely politicized and contentious at the time, and Decca wrote her mother-in-law that Robert Treuhaft, a board member, was “in the thick of [the] infighting, esp. demanding to know just how witting they all are about CIA (the international co-op movement).”
35. Nancy Mitford’s novel.
36. The subject of Ann Farrer Home’s book was her nervous breakdown.
37. The duchess’s daughter.
38. Barbara and Ephraim Kahn’s younger daughter.
39. One of Decca’s favorite stories was about the time her flustered husband couldn’t understand the English telephone operator from whom he was seeking a friend’s number. Treuhaft finally put Decca on the phone. She was told, “Well, I told him in pline English, Steeple Bumstead 267.”
40. Although it is not fully reflected in this letter, Decca was very close to Giles Romilly and spent a lot of time with him when she and Esmond were living in London before coming to the United States. She told Giles Romilly’s son that she adored Giles, whom she considered very sensitive and very brave (“running away to the front” during the Spanish Civil War when the International Brigades tried to keep him behind the lines on non-combat duty, apparently because he was Winston Churchill’s nephew).
41. Wellington was the private school—“public school” in English parlance—from which Esmond had run away as a politically radical fifteen-year-old, in open revolt against the Officers Training Corps and other traditional and stodgy aspects of “public school” life.
42. Colditz, the Nazi prison where he had been incarcerated during World War II.
43. Co-authored with Michael Alexander and published in 1954 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), the joint memoir was reissued later under the title Hostages of Colditz.
44. In her letter, Nancy Mitford had described a chance meeting with Graham, whom she described as “one of those wowrm Americans I can’t care for,” adding that she only really liked the “tough brute” type. Nancy told Decca that Graham “loves you, but she’s so wowrm I guess she kinda loves the whole human race.” The word wowrm was Nancy’s exaggeratedly American pronunciation of warm.
45. Constancia Romilly’s newborn.
46. Benjamin Treuhaft had become a piano and harpsichord tuner.
47. Nancy had asked Decca whether she had “hurried [Giles Romilly] into a Mitford (10/—).” After publication of The American Way of Death, “a Mitford” became the lingo in some quarters of the funeral industry for a cheap funeral or cremation. Nancy was teasingly suggesting that Decca would arrange a quick 10-shilling cremation for Romilly. For another such reference, see letter of July 10, 1973, to the Duchess of Devonshire.
48. Presumably members of Giles Romilly’s family in England.
49. Included in the “associated materials” in Decca’s papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin are, in the words of the archivists, “Neva Perkins’ cremated remains.” When asked once what they were doing in the collection, Robert Treuhaft said that Decca was always annoyed by the unclaimed urns of ashes that were stored in the house and must have thrown one in a box when she sold her papers to the university—possibly to “pad” the boxes because she was compensated according to the bulk of the material sold.
50. Vivian Hallinan, longtime friend and ally of the Treuhafts, was a legendary San Francisco civil rights and peace activist and an astute businesswoman. She was married to fiery radical attorney Vincent Hallinan, who ran for president in 1952 on Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party ticket.
51. On January 15, 1968, the day Congress convened, about 5,000 women of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, a coalition of women’s antiwar groups joined together for this purpose, demonstrated against the Vietnam War outside the Capitol. The demonstration was led by Rankin, then 87, the Montana suffragist and pacifist who was the first woman elected to Congress and the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. involvement in both world wars.
52. Future president Ronald Reagan, who was elected California governor in 1966.
53. Dr. Helen Meiklejohn and her husband, philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, were experimental educators who founded the San Francisco School of Social Studies in the 1930s, dedicated to adult education through often confrontational dialogues of diverse labor leaders and leftists of all social classes, in the hope of furthering democratic values. She also helped found the Pacific Coast Labor School.
54. Evy (or Evie) Frieden was an old comrade and friend of Decca’s and one of the women she recruited for the “White Women’s Delegation” that went to Mississippi in 1951 to try to save the life of condemned “rapist” Willie McGee. In A Fine Old Conflict, Decca called her “a rollicking, jolly warehouse worker” who often volunteered to help out at the CRC office. Decca extolled her “buoyant joie de vivre,” her “moral toughness,” and the absence of the “mawkishness” she found in other Party members. Frieden and her husband, Mike, had given up their educational ambitions to take factory jobs at the request of the Communist Party, and their decision in 1958 to leave the Party helped convince the Treuhafts to do likewise.
55. Visionary and unconventional San Francisco ad man and intellectual-provocateur-at-large Howard Gossage, who is often credited with “discovering” Marshall McLuhan. In the spirit of the honorees, the invitations to the one-of-a-kind party specified “Black tie or red shirt.” Decca first met Gossage after he wrote a fan letter when The American Way of Death was published. Gossage was what Decca called “a sort of senior advisor, or guru” for Ramparts magazine and, to spur advertising, cooked up the idea of selling Inch Kenneth with a back-cover ad on the condition Decca agreed to be listed on the masthead as “Contributing Editor from Oakland.” Gossage’s last words to his brother-in-law before his untimely death in 1969 were said to have been, “I think I’m going soon. When I do, call Decca; she knows how to ferret out the cheapest funeral in this whole town.” Decca told a friend proudly that she “got a funeral for $150!!!! As Howard was extremely rich, that really was a coup & well worth the effort.”
56. The docked ferryboat had been permanently converted into offices to serve as the headquarters of the design firm of Walter Landor.
57. Toynbee.
58. Newson, whose cause the Treuhafts had championed from arrest through his imprisonment, had been paroled in 1962 at the age of thirty-two. He was eighteen when he entered prison.
59. Pediatrician, author, and social activist Dr. Benjamin Spock and four other prominent opponents of the Vietnam War and the military draft—collectively known as the Boston Five—had been indicted on January 5 for “conspiracy to aid, abet, and counsel violations of the Selective Service law.” The other defendants were the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin. “Overt acts” to further the conspiracy included holding a press conference, distributing “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” and accepting draft cards and delivering them to the Justice Department.
60. General Lewis B. Hershey was director of the Selective Service System (the military draft) for twenty-nine years.
61. A reference to the Oakland Seven conspiracy indictments. (For more details, see letter of March 28, 1969, to Aranka Treuhaft.) Decca was troubled by the use of vague, all-purpose conspiracy laws to stifle dissent by charging peace demonstrators with felonies based on their “conspiring” to commit misdemeanors such as trespass and public nuisance. She had commissioned a pamphlet to explain in layman’s terms this political use of conspiracy law in the Oakland Seven case. She once described the conspiracy law as “so complicated, it’s like the Theory of Relativity; when somebody is explaining it to you, you can dimly understand it, but 10 mins. later it flees the brain.”
62. Decca was referring to the president’s surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, which he coupled with several initiatives to seek peace in Vietnam.
63. Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese and American governments’ name for the guerrilla forces allied with North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
64. Department of Justice.
65. Washington had been the scene of three days of devastating riots in African American neighborhoods after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4.
66. The self-described “radical journalist” who started out at conventional publications such as the Washington Post and Time but moved later to magazines on the left, including the New Republic, the New Statesman, Ramparts, and, years later, The Nation. He wrote about most of the major social upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century.
67. I. F. Stone, radical editor-publisher for nearly twenty years of the influential and fiercely independent investigative newsletter I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which specialized in exposing government lies that other publications didn’t know how to uncover or feared to touch. During World War II, when Stone was working for magazines in Washington, Virginia Durr once helped Decca get a job with him as what Decca called “sort of Girl Friday (now perhaps called Person Friday?).” The job didn’t last. “Alas,” she later wrote, “I couldn’t understand a word he said and HE couldn’t hear a word I said, being v. deaf. So v. sadly we called it quits after 2 weeks.”
68. For Decca’s later recollection of her “very curious conversation” with the longtime director of the military draft, see letter of March 24, 1972, to John O’Sullivan.
69. Boudin, Benjamin Spock’s attorney.
70. Scene of continuing demonstrations after the Unitarian Universalist church gave sanctuary to two Vietnam War resisters. The previous year, the church had held a Draft Card Turn-In and Burn-In service to protest the war.
71. Kathleen Kahn, Decca’s goddaughter.
72. Al Kliot, Aranka Treuhaft’s estranged husband, had died several days earlier.
73. Democratic Senator Stephen M. Young.
74. Federal Judge Francis J. W. Ford, who was presiding at the trial.
75. Decca wrote in The Trial of Dr. Spock (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969) that John Van de Kamp had been placed in charge of a special unit in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department “to speed up investigations and prosecutions of violations of the Selective Service Act and ‘related statutes’… with special attention to violations of the ‘counsel, aid, or abet provisions and the ‘obstruction of recruiting’ provisions.”
76. Civil rights attorney Victor Rabinowitz, Boudin’s longtime law partner, was a good friend of the Treuhafts and of their daughter, Constancia Romilly.
77. Spock and three of his co-defendants were found guilty; Marcus Raskin was acquitted.
78. Constancia Romilly was staying with friends in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
79. The first national organization formed to resist the Vietnam War and the draft. The organization was sometimes called simply Resist.
80. In another letter, Decca wondered whether her publisher would have contracted for her book if they had known “what a fizzle that trial was going to be, both from the viewpoint of drama and general interest and (above all) from the viewpoint of advancing and clarifying the issues—war crimes, legality of war etc.”
81. Boston Globe editor Tom Winship, whom Decca had met at a dinner party in Boston, introduced her to Federal Judge Charles Wyzanski, from whom she hoped to learn “all the gossip” about Judge Ford. Wyzanski regaled her with background information.
82. Decca had previously been told by Noam Chomsky, peace activist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, that a Harvard math student had found that “there was a .000000000001 chance that, had there been a truly random selection of jurors, there’d have been 5 women and 100 men” in the pool from which the jury was selected. As she put it in The Trial of Dr. Spock, “the hand that rocks the cradle and turns the pages of [Spock’s book] Baby and Child Care was notably absent.”
83. The writer and ardent leftist, best known for her short stories and novels, had been a literary hero of Decca’s since publication of Boyle’s early works as part of the literary avant-garde in Paris in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Decca first encountered her idol in person when Boyle moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to teach at San Francisco State College. They met at parties and political meetings but became better acquainted when Boyle became a client of Robert Treuhaft’s law firm after being arrested with scores of others in a Vietnam War protest. Decca and Boyle often participated together in protest demonstrations, petition campaigns, and political fund-raising activities, sometimes getting in the middle of contentious factions—“but that’s life with Kay Boyle,” Decca observed; “it’s a bit like living in one of her stories.” Decca quoted her husband as saying Boyle was “marvelous, incredibly brave and incredibly difficult,” to which Decca added: “All my favorite characteristics, rolled into one.”
84. Co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Newton grew up in Oakland and served as the revolutionary group’s minister of defense. He was wounded in a 1967 shootout with police and arrested for the murder of an Oakland police officer. Defended by many nationally prominent New Leftists, united under the slogan “Free Huey,” Newton was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in 1968, but the conviction was subsequently overturned and the charges dropped. In 1974 he was charged with assault and accused of murdering a teenage prostitute. He fled to Cuba. Returning in 1977, he was tried twice, each trial ending with a hung jury. He earned a doctorate in social consciousness in 1980 from the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 1989 he was convicted of embezzling funds from a Panther social program. He was killed by a drug dealer on a West Oakland street in August 1989.
85. The Iowa Supreme Court had ruled that the boy could continue to stay with his maternal grandparents, where his California father, Hal Painter, had sent him temporarily after his wife was killed in a car accident in 1962. The court held that the father, a writer-photographer, was “either an agnostic or an atheist and has no concern for formal religious training” and the boy’s life with him would be “unstable, unconventional, arty, bohemian.” Hal Painter had written a book about the case entitled Mark, I Love You (Simon & Schuster, 1967).
