Decca, p.81
Decca, page 81
“What did you say your next book is about?”;
“Unrequited love!” moaned Decca, looking at him with languishing, beautiful but shortsighted eyes behind her specs.
Bim gave a rough guffaw of defeat; and the party had begun. On Decca’s terms, of course.
142. The American title was changed subsequently to Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking after Decca’s friend Nora Ephron said the original title made Decca sound, misleadingly, like “a reincarnation of Lincoln Steffens.” When the book was published in Britain, the title reverted to The Making of a Muckraker because, Decca wrote, editors at her English publishing house, Michael Joseph, “thought connotation of poison-pen is vile old maid writing anon. letters re vicar’s sex life.”
143. A reporter for the San Francisco Examiner who had written an article on Decca.
144. The Romilly-Formans’ young housemate was eight years old when this letter was written.
145. Bernstein.
146. Journalist David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). —
147. Founded in 1962 as a magazine for “moderately hip Catholic lay people,” Ramparts became more political, radical, and brash when San Francisco journalist and character-about-town Warren Hinckle took over as editor two years later. The upstart magazine featured nationally prominent writers and regularly scooped major established publications. Its circulation rose as high as 400,000. Decca served for a time as a contributing editor and even tried to help the magazine survive by selling ads part-time. After years of fearless anti-establishment journalism, the magazine went through a period of internal upheaval and decline, finally closing in 1975.
148. In a letter a month later planning their upcoming visit, Decca was still mercilessly teasing Toynbee about his religious conversion: “Will God be coming, & if so does he mind sharing? I only ask because from what I’ve read about him in the Old Testament and other Public Relations handouts he doesn’t sound much like the sharing type. In fact if he isn’t given the best room he might get a bit jealous (see, e.g., Exodus XX 4).”
149. The duchess was writing a book about her resplendent home. It was published in London in 1982 as The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (Macmillan) and in New York the same year as The House: Living at Chatsworth (Holt, Rinehart & Winston).
150. Benjamin Treuhaft suffered periodically from bipolar disorder, or, as it was commonly called then, manic depression.
151. This nickname for editor Robert Gottlieb—and its variations—originated while they were working on Decca’s prison book. A number of years later, Decca explained, “Gottlieb is called BITES, BITER or JAWS because in my prison book I described an experiment on convicts in which fleas ‘in specially prepared biting cages’ were applied to the fellow’s arm. In a moment of exasperation, B. Gottlieb shouted out: ‘I sometimes feel that I live in a specially prepared biting cage!’” Although Gottlieb was often called Biter when it suited Decca’s mood, the editor maintains now that that was “a calumny, since I was usually too busy laughing with her to bite. My view, of course, was that she was the biter.” And indeed, the first use of the term in Decca’s letters was to Gottlieb as “Bitee.”
152. Tom Mitford, the only sibling who had frequented Esmond and Decca’s Rotherhithe Street home in London, had studied in Germany, had met Hitler through his sister Unity, had been photographed at German Nazi and British Fascist rallies, and, though by all accounts not an anti-Semite, had told friends before the war that he was sympathetic to the Nazis’ role in Germany. But he obviously gave Decca and her husband a very different impression. Late in the war, Tom Mitford reportedly volunteered to go to Burma rather than participate in the invasion of Germany. Diana and Oswald Mosley maintained that he had been a paid member of the British Union of Fascists, a fact that Diana insisted on revealing in her interview for Julian Jebb’s documentary after learning of Decca’s condition for participating in the project.
153. Although difficult to obtain in the United States, there was, in fact, an inexpensive American paperback edition of the book, published by Popular Library of New York in April 1976. The volume also included Nancy Mitford’s novel Highland Fling. In a 1974 letter, Decca also made reference to a forthcoming American edition, adding that Nancy Mitford didn’t want the novels reissued in England at that time.
154. Louise Patterson, widow of William Patterson.
155. Decca described economist John Kenneth Galbraith and his wife, Catherine (Kitty) Gal-braith, as “Seminary Hill pals.” The economist, then a top official at the Office of Price Administration, where Decca also worked, drove into Washington in a carpool with her and others. He was a Harvard professor for fifty years and has written more than thirty-five influential books, including The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1958). He also served as an advisor to several presidents and held other top-level positions in public service, including U.S. ambassador to India.
156. Constancia Romilly was marrying Terry Weber. For details, see following letters.
157. Benjamin Weber lived with the Romilly-Webers. Decca sometimes called him her “step-oy.”&
158. This letter was written on the day of President Jimmy Carter’s aborted attempt to rescue fifty-two American hostages held in Iran. In a televised address that morning, Carter said of the operation, in which eight servicemen were killed, “It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation; it was my decision to cancel it when problems developed in the placement of our rescue team for a future rescue operation.” The hostages were moved to a secret new location.
159. In the letter to which Decca was replying, Angelou had said that Louise Patterson “reminded me more of a dutiful member of a large successful Baptist church than a lifelong CPer.” She noted in passing what she said Decca already knew, that she thought of Communists as religious zealots.
160. Angelou had written that black members of the Communist Party and other blacks shared a common oppressor. Decca appears to be modifying that, saying that blacks generally and Communists, white and black, shared a common oppressor.
161. The Wilbur Garys were the black homeowners whom Decca helped protect from racist mobs in 1952.
162. Walter Green.
163. Angelou, speculating with Decca about various nuances of black-white relations, had written that “some blacks were afraid to be connected to some black CPer[s] (note the lack of support for Robeson and Du Bois).” She said they were afraid to “compound their already vulnerable, tenuous security.” In addition, she wrote, “Communists were white, as white as the oppressors and therefore couldn’t be trusted.” Blacks in the party, she said, “were under the aegis of powerful whites … as much as ‘house niggers’ were under the protection of the slave owners, and therefore did not need or even really want support from the common garden-variety black field hand.”
164. Edited by Richard Crossman, the influential book was published in 1949 by Harper and subsequently reprinted several times by others.
165. Among the six essays in the volume were four by former Party members and two by former Party sympathizers.
166. The poet, who was a friend of Decca in the 1960s.
167. Presumably Angelou’s husband, Paul du Feu.
168. Young Communist League.
169. Evidence.
170. Wife of the then Arkansas governor and later president Bill Clinton—and still later a United States senator in her own right—Hillary Rodham had been a summer clerk at Robert Treuhaft’s firm while at law school (see letter of July 4, 1992, to Virginia Durr). Decca had wired her to advocate on behalf of James Dean Walker, who was facing extradition from California to Arkansas, where he had escaped from prison. The extradition—as well as Walker’s guilt or innocence of the murder charges of which he was convicted—was to engage Decca’s political passion and professional attention for years. For more background on the case, see July 16, 1980, letter to Miriam Miller.
171. The Treuhafts did spend a few days with Alexander in East Hampton, a stay that Decca later described to Virginia Durr as “non-stop soap opera conducted by the Rich & Famous, mostly slanging their agents/publishers/each other; good spectator sport for a few days.”
172. Volunteers in Service to America, now part of the federal government’s AmeriCorps program, provides full-time assistance to local community agencies.
173. Church of England.
174. In their prisons.
175. Rodham replied with a long, handwritten, and personal letter acknowledging the deficiencies of the Arkansas prison system but citing improvements in recent years and crediting her husband, whom she put in the “reformer” camp, for negotiating a consent decree in a key Arkansas lawsuit challenging prison conditions, despite opposition from “many people in and out of state government who hoped to avoid responsibility” for state prison conditions. She also said she had researched the Walker case and did not believe it had any merit.
176. Mrs. Weber, groom Terry Weber’s mother.
177. Toynbee’s 1954 memoir of Esmond Romilly and Jasper Ridley in the 1930s had just been reissued by Sidgwick & Jackson.
178. As Decca discussed in her book Faces of Philip, Toynbee had written her in June to say: “Believe it or not, I’ve just been asked to write your Times obituary. In some ways I see that this is tremendously one up on you—unless, of course, you’ve also been asked to write mine. On the other hand, it does give me a good deal of freedom, doesn’t it: I mean either you’ll never read it, or you’ll read it From Beyond where all is forgiven in every conceivable direction.” He later asked her for “a potted autobiography with dates of all books etc.” Decca replied with a list of her books, including “Fair Game: Genuine Sportsmen’s Clubs or Cover for Vigilante Operation? Publisher: Weidenfeld.” She said in a letter that she wondered “if he will twig before it’s TOO LATE that I made that up, never wrote any such book? … [D]on’t you think the title is rather good, exactly the sort of plunking book I might have written, if I had. Can’t wait for the Obit to appear with this glaring error in it—except again, the annoying thing is not being here to enjoy it.”
179. Although Decca dismissed her exchange with Toynbee about the obituary as a “tease,” well over a decade later she was still thinking of her late friend’s obituary sitting unseen in the Times’s files(see letter of November 25, 1993, to Sally Belfrage, and associated footnote 109).
180. Daughter of Cedric Belfrage, and a friend and near contemporary of Constancia Romilly, Sally Belfrage became Decca’s good friend, confidante, and loyal correspondent. They met in 1955 in London when Sally Belfrage was a teenager, not long after Cedric Belfrage was deported from the United States as a subversive alien after refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Sally Belfrage later became a world traveler, independent journalist, human rights activist, and author, publishing the first of her five books, A Room in Moscow, when she was in her early twenties.
181. Belfrage had evidently sent Decca all or part of the manuscript of what was to become her book Flowers of Emptiness: Reflections on an Ashram, published the following year by Dial Press of New York.
182. The Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, at whose Poona ashram Belfrage had stayed.
183. The Duchess of Windsor (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980).
184. Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border.
185. Edmund G. Brown Jr., known as Jerry, whose father, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., had previously served as governor.
186. McClatchy was president of the McClatchy newspaper chain as well as publisher of the Sacramento Bee.
187. Lord Snowdon (Antony Armstrong-Jones), the photographer who was married to Princess Margaret.
188. Some details of that meeting are omitted here because they duplicate a more detailed account that Decca sent to a number of the participants in a letter written many years later. See February 1, 1993, letter to “various friends.”
189. The offending letter was apparently the one Decca sent her cousin on July 24, teasing her about her poem “Where meanwhile is God?”;
190. Decca wrote in Daughters and Rebels about her and her cousin’s “brief bouts of flirtation” with unnamed French students during their year abroad—as well as some of her misadventures on Paris’s seamier side, which were deliberately excluded from her sunny letters home to her mother—but none of the details in her memoir seem to match the particular liaisons she discussed in this letter.
191. Horne’s memoir of her mental breakdown.
192. As Decca was preparing an article on the case for New West magazine, she wrote to a friend, “I don’t think anyone but me is remotely interested in this arcane issue, so it’ll probably be another loser.”
193. Despite Decca’s best efforts, Walker was subsequently extradited back to Arkansas, leaving her “spitting with rage.”
194. Despite her long preoccupation with the Walker case, Decca never did write the book she contemplated here. …
195. “Dear sir, accept my most sincere greetings.”
196. An op-ed essay by reporter Doug Smith entitled “James Dean Walker: The California Connection.” Smith wrote that “most Arkansans probably don’t fully appreciate that on the West Coast, James Dean Walker has acquired the status of Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scotts-boro Boys.” He said that “Miss Mitford is artful and—in one sense—thorough. She interviews and quotes everyone who, intentionally or unintentionally, reinforces the position she is espousing. Those who make a strong case for the other side get shorter shrift, and are always placed on the defensive, leading the careless reader to conclude that there is no other side, or none that is morally defensible. But that is in the nature of muckraking. Miss Mitford herself probably makes no claim of ‘objectivity,’ her journalism is personal and passionate.
197. Smith had described Oscar Fendler as “a colorful and contentious lawyer who is a former member of the state Pardons and Paroles Board and who served as a special justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court when Walker’s first conviction was reversed by the Court.”
198. Smith had written that the “big nit of the ‘Free Walker’ reportage … is its failure to note the one thing about Walker the prisoner that truly distinguished him. He was the greatest jailhouse evangelist this state, and probably any other state, has ever seen …” He asked, “… do his champions feel they must conceal this aspect of his character, lest they alienate Californians more offended by Bible-thumping than by drug-dealing or cop-shooting?”;
199. Philip Toynbee’s characterization of her research, which Decca delighted in citing repeatedly over the years, began with his reaction to the manuscript of The American Way of Death. Decca told a friend at the time that Toynbee didn’t like her history of embalming “because of what he calls its ‘spurious scholarship.’” She added, “I can’t get it through his head that Bob did all the scholarly bits (and therefore they’re not spurious), he thinks I just made it all up.” &
200. Decca sent a copy of this letter also to Marge Frantz with the marginal comment: “Please return this one day. Or give it to Doug Foster for dissection by his journalism class!!” (Foster was a journalist and, later, journalism educator who met Decca when he was a student at San Jose State University during her distinguished professorship and remained a good friend.)
201. Orwell had died of cancer, penniless, in November 1980.
202. Benjamin Treuhaft had married violinist Sue Ann Draheim in Berkeley.
203. Moodswing: Dr. Fieve on Depression, by Dr. Ronald R. Fieve, now available in its revised version but apparently known to Decca in its 1975 edition, Moodswing: The Third Revolution in Psychiatry.
204. Ernest Gaines, the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Dial Press, 1971) and other novels.
205. The city of San Francisco had declared May 17, 1981, “Tillie Olsen Day” to honor the former manual worker, activist, and author of the book of short stories Tell Me a Riddle (Lippincott, 1961), which was revered in some feminist circles. Decca had known Olsen through Communist Party activities since the mid-1940s and considered her “an old frenemy … One of Ours [who] had made it” with publication of Tell Me a Riddle, which she called “a marvellous book.” Decca once wrote that Olsen was known in Party circles as “the 2nd worst housekeeper anywhere (ist worst being me). So that story ‘I Stand Here Ironing,’ in Tell Me a Riddle, is certainly fiction, I never noted any signs of same in her children’s dresses and this was before drip-dry, you must realize.”
206. Tillie Olsen’s husband.
207. For this reason, Decca’s nickname for William (Billy) Abrahams was “the Glider,” and she referred to Holt, Rinehart & Winston, where Abrahams was then a senior editor, as “the Gliders.”
208. Yonnondio: From the Thirties, a novel that Olsen had begun at the age of nineteen and finally published decades later, in 1974 (Delacorte Press), still unfinished. Olsen’s book Silences, published in 1978 (also by Delacorte Press), discussed the circumstances that inhibit literary production, including her own.
209. William Abrahams’s partner, Peter Stansky, professor of history at Stanford University
210. Several days of riots in the severely depressed, largely black area of south London were occasioned by continuing friction with police, including a “stop-and-search” campaign targeting young local residents.
VIII
AN ENGLISH HEART
Launching Grace Had an English Heart in September 1988 at the Longstone Lighthouse on an island in the North Sea, near the scene of Grace Darling’s fabled rescue.
Posing for publicity shots during her book tour in England in September 1988, as Robert Treuhaft stood by.
In a note to her husband in March 1986, Decca discussed an upcoming public-television documentary on her life and career. “I must say,” she wrote, “I was cheered no end by seeing that film. Of course it was the ego trip of all time hence v. DANGEROUS.” She mentioned a friend of theirs who was at the peak of her career and had “developed an adulatory following that she’s fully earned … but seldom gets off the subject of me-me-me.” And then she asked her husband, “Bob, am I, toddling towards the end of MY career, like that? Do say I’m not, or if I am (as at this moment, flushed with pride over the [documentary]), give a swift kick. I do long for you to see the film—the theme song is GRACE DARLING! In other words, I’ve turned into Grace Darling with her English heart, just as Sally [Belfrage] said.”
