Irrepressible (11 page)

Eugene Meyer felt responsible for helping Decca find work where her celebrity wouldn’t be exploited. His assistant pulled some strings to find her a place in a small, exclusive dress shop called Weinberger’s, where Decca would draw her salary mainly from sales commissions. Decca was thrilled to have the job search ended and was in a hurry to earn some money before her pregnancy started to show. She began “Weinbergering” in mid-August and all too quickly exhausted the clothes budget of her closest friends (though she was sure Binnie Straight, who had so much money, might splurge even more on clothing). She trolled society parties at the British Embassy, schmoozed the Meyers’ friends, and sought potential clients among the more affluent matrons in Virginia’s circle. The commission hustle soon took its toll—for every “American glamour girl” who evinced interest in a dress, she had to endure a dozen bores or the presence of a “rich reactionary.” These soirees could leave her feeling “dragged through a filthy mire, they were all
so
awful.”

Decca would car-pool to her job in Washington from Virginia’s home in Alexandria. The always-crowded car included other commuting neighbors like John Kenneth Galbraith, upon whose “bony” knees Decca would often have to sit. By September, she was already having to squeeze into an ever-more-restrictive girdle to give the impression of a still-slender figure. On the drive home, she would wiggle out of its elastic casing in the car. Sometimes, she would just tear it off in the most convenient spot. “Decca, you have simply got to stop taking your girdle off in my office,” Cliff Durr told her.

Back at the Durrs’ home in Alexandria, Decca might find Durr relatives and friends from Alabama, Cliff’s colleagues and younger protégées in the New Deal administration, poll-tax campaign workers, neighbors, children, and friends of friends. Neighborhood guests might include Dee Dee Walker, an Englishwoman who made a mean mint julep. She reminded Decca of the
“staunch” ladies she’d known in England. (Later reports suggested Walker was a spy for British intelligence. One of her assignments was to keep her eye on the Mitford girl in Washington.) Decca was having a wonderful time meeting new people like Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax at the Durrs’ parties, but missed Esmond terribly. In the act of drawing as complete a picture as possible for him, she sharpened her own reporting skills.

Marge Gelders was eighteen years old when she met Decca. She thought Decca was “the most beautiful person” she had ever seen. The way people “buzzed around her like bees” impressed her, and Marge concluded, “Decca also had a wicked sting.”

Marge had grown up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the daughter of two Jewish professors. Her father, Joe Gelders, quit teaching physics and hitchhiked with Marge to New York City, where he became a labor organizer, and his daughter a member of the Young Communist League. After school, she would hawk the
Daily Worker
on street corners. Her vivacious style, urchin look (complete with worker’s cap cocked to one side of her short, tousled hair), and strong Alabama accent made her a top-selling newsie. Marge was on her way to Radcliffe.

Joe Gelders became one of the founders of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

At Virginia’s party, Decca argued with his isolationist position on the war, but still found him an interesting, principled man. Years earlier, Joe had been kidnapped and brutally beaten by thugs hired by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. to intimidate and silence his labor organizing. Virginia considered Joe a living saint and always credited him with inspiring her involvement in human rights work.

In September, Decca’s twenty-third birthday party spread at the Durrs’ featured “fresh curried shrimp & rice, succotash & garden green lettuce salad & hot rolls, followed by the Grand Entrance of a cake.” In England, the Royal Air Force had rebuffed the German attack in the Battle of Britain by shooting down more than 185 German planes. Decca felt great relief that now the suffering in England might be lessened, and she also felt less
guilt and worry along with some pride. She continued to scrimp and save, occasionally indulging in a little jiggery-pokery. At a Bundles for Britain sewing party, which collected useful articles like canned foods and donated clothing to send to the U.K., hostess Dee Dee Walker caught Decca trying to make off with a package of baby clothes, and demanded she return them, despite Decca’s argument that “it might save postage to England & yet still go to a Briton.”

Decca insisted she only ever stole from those who could easily afford the loss, and mainly from the very rich Meyers. She had told Binnie—in confidence—about the silk stockings that she’d taken from the Meyer family residence. Binnie told Kay Meyer, and this made Decca cross, but it was no secret that Decca didn’t respect private property. When the Straights and the Romillys had shared a house, Michael Straight and Esmond would sometimes have ferocious arguments. And one time, after Esmond had accused Michael of being a “bourgeois philistine,” he and Decca had stormed out carrying away a load of Michael’s “shirts, socks and ties.” Kay certainly wasn’t surprised to hear that Decca had borrowed a few little things. The American woman had often heard her father recount the speech he’d given once after dinner with the Romillys and others as guests. He had just reached the part about “there is one thing you can say for the British . . . they never steal other people’s property,” when all eyes swiveled to Esmond, who was filling his pockets with Meyer’s best Cuban cigars. Binnie thought it was all amusing. Kay didn’t care about stockings or cigars. Decca knew that these very wealthy women could never understand her impulse to relieve them of the things they’d never miss: from each according to her ability, to each according to her need, as the Marxist maxim goes.

By December, no girdle could disguise Decca’s pregnancy. She left Weinberger’s after the management gently pointed out that her secret had been known for some time. At Christmas, Esmond was finally granted leave. According to Virginia Durr, he “wanted an intense Christmas.” He had an enormous appetite for whimsical holiday sweets, and he whipped up funny seasonal cocktails like grog. He wanted the biggest tree they could find and
the biggest goose and took on the job of chief Christmas decorator, stringing popcorn and strewing tinsel. One night, he took Decca and the Durr family out to a French restaurant where there were garlicky snails and frogs’ legs on the menu. Every day, he insisted Decca walk two miles with him for the health of the baby. Many years later, Virginia would still marvel that she had never seen “two people more completely in love.”

I
N THE WINTER of 1940-1941, Giles Romilly was being held in Germany as a prisoner of war. He was ill and hungry and would later write about that “long dead time when German victory arrogantly straddled Europe. The war crawled, signs of change were scant.” A continent away, his brother returned from Christmas leave to train as an aviation navigator in Ontario. Esmond hated Canada. It was distinctly not the United States (which fascinated and frustrated him by its stubborn refusal to formally enter the war), but at least it wasn’t England, where he anticipated military service under a slew of “ghastly” Mitford relations.

In Washington, Virginia Durr was getting nowhere with her poll-tax campaign. Even her friends complained that her persistent calls were becoming annoying. Her husband, Cliff, complained about his backache. Decca and Virginia’s mother were bickering. Virginia, tired of the way her young guest monopolized the bath, was beginning to feel like a “Bloomsbury lodging house keeper.” Decca offered to leave, but they really did like one other. And beyond their walls, there was just so much misery. The red-baiters were suddenly everywhere, hating everyone. Mostly, Virginia wanted Decca to make arrangements for her child’s birth. The house was very crowded, and it ran best when Virginia, its nerve center, knew what everyone was planning to do.

Before Virginia mentioned the word, Decca had never heard of the medical specialty obstetrics. She’d had her first child at home, in Bermondsey, close to a Labour Party maternity clinic, which provided her with the free and excellent services of a doctor and nurse. She wanted to give birth this time in Virginia’s home and hoped to convince her hostess that all one
needed was “a quantity of stout brown paper [to cover the bedclothes], boiling water, and a competent doctor.”

“Absolutely not,” said Virginia. It wasn’t just that the demands of her home’s occupants would try the patience of even the most accommodating, or that the drama of a young, British aristocrat’s giving birth in the second bedroom might push Virginia beyond her limits. Imagine the publicity, the press, the photographers. Decca’s life was news. Virginia had her husband’s peace of mind to consider, and she had to protect her own children. Then there was the deep current, rarely addressed, that this young woman had lost her first daughter when the infant was six months old. Who knew what the childbirth experience might dredge up? What if something went wrong? Decca offered an alternate plan. Why not set up a crèche in the barn? Virginia insisted that in Washington in 1941, women gave birth in a hospital.

“I hated that idea,” Decca said, but she did as Virginia advised and engaged the services of a “highly touted” obstetrician. Decca never liked spending her own money, and once she stopped working, she worried even more over her and Esmond’s dwindling resources. Medical care, like electricity and toothpaste, were the kinds of things one should always receive free of charge—and would be provided gratis, in her kind of socialism. She felt trapped by the capitalist, big-shot, patronizing doctor, and eventually she hit on a dramatic way to escape his unwelcome care, which she described years later in
The American Way of Birth
:

Though others within earshot might have heard the big-shot doctor say something along the lines of
Thank goodness I’ve seen the last of her
, Decca exited in triumph. In sacking her specialist, Decca also lost the hospital bed he’d reserved for her. Required now to find an alternative, she went bargain hunting, a skill that came naturally. She applied to Columbia Hospital in Washington, and though it wasn’t exactly in the same vein as a Labour Party free clinic, the price at fifty dollars for ten days in a four-bed ward with an ordinary doctor was closer to what she wanted. She was intrigued by the public ward setup and particularly by the nurses, whom she thought

On the day of their daughter’s birth, February 9, 1941, Esmond was at Malton, Ontario, in an air-observer course. Of their child’s actual birth, Decca provides this in
The American Way of Birth
:

Over the next few days, a parade of visitors trooped through the ward to pay their respects. She received congratulatory cards and letters, including one from Lady Clifford Tate, a friend of Nellie Romilly’s, who offered Decca the use of her house in Nassau for two months. Kay and her new husband, Phil Graham, and Eugene and Agnes Meyer visited, bearing gifts
of eau de cologne, baby clothes, flowers, and hampers of delicious food, which Decca shared with her ward mates.
Washington Post
photographers were on hand to record the first days of mother and baby, and from then on, Decca’s presence on the ward became public knowledge. “Are you any relation of Hitler’s friend?” one of the women in the ward asked. Another new mother, unaware of the Mitford connection, wondered, “Was her baby born with teeth?” Eugene Meyer sat by her bed for a while and said that if she needed anything, she had only to let him know. After he’d gone, Elaine, the unmarried mother in the bed next to Decca’s, said, “I was just thinking; wouldn’t it be wonderful if President Roosevelt came to see you, do you think he will?”

In the 1940s, new mothers routinely stayed in the hospital for two weeks. Decca felt fine, her daughter was healthy, and after the initial influx of visitors, she had a lot of time on her hands to observe what she interpreted as the class system at work in the behavior of doctors, nurses, and patients in the public ward, and she didn’t like what she saw. Decca enjoyed her food on most occasions, but as a new mother, she wanted to be sure that she was getting enough good nutrition to nurse her child. She was convinced that the private-room patients were being fed much better than the women in the multi-bed maternity wards. The longer Decca stayed, the more authoritarian the nurses seemed to become. She thought they didn’t pay sufficient attention to the needs of their patients, particularly when it came to pain relief. She bridled at the nurses’ disrespect and endeavored to both organize and entertain her ward-mates.