Irrepressible (38 page)

The FBI agents who seemed to have become rather complacent regarding the Treuhafts’ activities over the previous few years scurried to make up for lost time. They produced a secret report, which summarized several critical events in Decca’s life, eloquently concluding that she had “lapsed into a steadfast condition of noncooperation.”

Decca’s book would become a best seller, and she would make news for months. After six weeks, it would be supplanted in the number one spot on the
New York Times
nonfiction best-seller list by John F. Kennedy’s book
Profiles in Courage
.

There were protests and letters of opposition to Decca’s appearances, and a bomb threat in Boston. Attacks on her past politics and objections to the way she treated her subject were counterbalanced by the encouraging crowds who came to hear her speak and read, and the approval she encountered for questioning the status quo. She vastly enjoyed her popular success, not least of all because such a thing would have seemed impossible ten years before. “I think that only those who have been, as I was, a target of the Truman-McCarthy-era assault on radicals can appreciate the feeling of decompression on having one’s work accepted at its face value.”

Her touring strategy was to “make thousands of jokes in succession.” In this, she was helped by the high-profile preservation of Lenin’s corpse in Red Square, which held the record for “long-term viewing,” and by Khrushchev’s famous cold-war threat to capitalist adversaries, “We shall bury you,” which, she said, made Forest Lawn mad since he was “muscling in on their territory.” Talk show hosts tried to red-bait her, but she would
turn the situation to her advantage. When she was in Denver, a gloomy funeral industry representative declared, “I could put you away for $150.” Decca snapped, “Sorry, you’re too late. Other undertakers have offered to do it for nothing, as long as it’s soon.” The success or failure of Decca’s book was finally a matter of choice, of taste, of the pocketbook. There was little traction for the attacks against her—and though they continued, its sales increased. “Unfortunately for the undertakers,” Decca wrote, “it would seem there is little popular support for the theory that a ‘fine funeral’ is America’s first line of defense and the highest expression of patriotism.”

Decca had previously experienced fame as notoriety. The response from most readers, apart from right-wingers and the funeral industry, was admiration. She was instantly the expert, the authority on all things funeral. Almost every day, there were articles in the press, more requests for appearances, and political cartoons on the subject. Decca’s droll charm made her an immediate favorite on the interview and lecture circuit. And all this attention translated to money: “Benj is angling for a $2 weekly increase in his allowance,” Decca wrote her mother-in-law, Aranka:

In the past, she’d been used to staying in hotels that were “total fleabags,” but her new publishers booked her into a fancy suite at the Boston Ritz, complete with an enormous basket of flowers. “It was thrilling . . . I danced around the room,” she said.

Evelyn Waugh wrote that Jessica Mitford’s book was funny, but its author did not have a “plainly stated attitude to death.” Decca asked her sister to pass along a message next time she saw Waugh: “Tell him of course I’m
against
it.” Decca’s sisters gave generally positive reviews.

Decca’s book was about the exploitation of the vulnerable, the absurdity of fast-changing styles in postmortem fashions, and the mechanism that reinforces the perpetuation of profit. Here was the capitalist system as represented in the phony-baloney funeral racket. The go-getters of the 1950s had taken off their hats and gotten down to business. Waugh, who had become more religious over the course of his life and had eventually converted to Catholicism, read her book through the lens of a tut-tutter. Mitford chroniclers Jonathan Guinness and Catherine Guinness (Decca’s nephew and great-niece) saw
The Loved One
as Waugh’s dual attack on America’s “materialist denial of death and rejection of its religious implications.” Decca’s book, by contrast, demonstrated that religious implications are more often used to make a killing in the marketplace. Decca was distinctly unconcerned with the “spiritual aspects of death,” which she associated with Christian and Jewish theology. However, one of the great joys she experienced in the whirlwind year was of the clergy defending her position, and she went all out to “exploit that new-found respectability.” Several subsequent articles containing “occasional references to the spiritual aspects of death,” were, she admitted, “a bit specious coming from me, as the undertakers may have divined, but there was nothing they could do about it.”

In its review, the
People’s Daily World
reliably ascribed the crisis in funerals to the corrupting system of free enterprise: “It is bad enough keeping up with the Joneses in life, but it is even more tragic to try to keep up with the Joneses in death.” On the political right, the conservative
National Review
sincerely congratulated Decca for exposing “the whole ghoulish paraphernalia of the death trade.” But once the editors, including William F. Buckley, discovered her political history, the publication rescinded it endorsement and, to the delight of Decca and the whole book committee, attacked her as a “crypt-o Communist.”

Eventually, the trade magazines began to refer to a gadfly named “Jessica.” Sometimes, they’d regard her as a dilettante who got everything wrong, who was hardly worth so much attention. Other times, she was a pernicious and damaging influence. The single-name treatment was at once
a snide dismissal and acknowledgment of her fame. Decca considered it a mark of distinction, like “Zsa Zsa” or “Liberace.”

In the year after her book was published, Decca was swamped with letters. Some were fan letters, but others were messages of complaint and of forlorn hopes. Among other more amusing consequences of her success was the way the Mitford name became “synonymous with cheap funerals.” For a while, the “Mitford style” came to mean the “plainest and least expensive funeral,” and a “Mitford,” the cheapest coffin available. Years later, reviewing a revised edition of
The American Way of Death
, A. Alvarez would compare the book to another “masterpiece of black humor” appearing that year, Stanley Kubrick’s film
Dr. Strangelove
. Each “made fun of the sacred cows of the time with an equal glee.” Alvarez wrote that in 1963, “death was on everybody’s mind.” In November, after the assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy had to choose his brother’s coffin. RFK had read
The American Way of Death
some months before his brother’s death, and he was to some extent influenced by it. He chose the slightly less expensive one.

IN JULY, DECCA traveled to Inch Kenneth. Without her mother and without a book to write, she found its cold, drizzly remoteness, which had kept her inside at her manuscript on previous visits, demoralizing. She and Bob were still laird and lady of the isle, but the prospect of retiring there one day, now that she had a career at home, seemed unlikely. Wandering through the island house, Decca had discovered another hamper filled with old letters all neatly organized by Muv. These included details of their mother’s campaign to get Diana out of prison; letters from Tom to his parents from school, and from his days as an officer, when he was a young cosmopolite who traveled with a tuxedo in his luggage; and “a lot of sad things like Tom’s first hair when it was cut, in a teeny envelope.” She gave the lot to Debo, who had inherited their mother’s family scrapbooks.

In the summer of 1964, Benjy was enrolled at a French college near Lyons, and on her way to visit her son, Decca stopped in Paris to see Nancy. This was their first time together since
The American Way of Death
had been published, and Nancy congratulated the best-selling author, teasing her about her new-made fortune and proudly pronouncing her
une chacal des cimitieres
(a graveyard ghoul). Decca liked to joke that “Nancy was dressed by Chanel and I by J.C. Penney,” but on this occasion, both sisters swept into an exclusive fashion house for a splurge. It was as celebratory a holiday as Decca would ever spend in her sister’s company. On one afternoon, Nancy pulled together some left-wingers for a day’s entertainment, and on another, in an unexpected show of intimacy, she took Decca to have lunch with Gaston Palewski, her French lover.

For her part, Decca “loved Nancy’s company.” In later years, she’d say, “I suppose I never knew her very well. In childhood the age difference between us was too great to permit of much companionship.” In later years, theirs was more of an “arms-length relationship.” But pleasing—or at least impressing—her oldest sibling may have been one of the driving forces of Decca’s life. It wasn’t Nancy’s way to show vulnerability or obvious sentiment to Decca, but during this encounter in Paris, Decca came at last to see Nancy at close range. The older sister was scrupulous and courteous, droll, sometimes icy, sometimes generous. If her words were occasionally wounding or her conduct sometimes waspish, Decca took pleasure in their shared history, in her sister’s expert authorial advice, and in their rare confidences. Outside the family, their relationship looked very different. In Decca’s friend Marge Frantz’s opinion, “Nancy treated Decca like shit.”

Once Decca had left Versailles, Nancy wrote of Decca to Debo: “Oh dear, I regard her as Muv’s greatest failure, she is such a clever person & completely uneducated so that one keeps running into a wall when talking to her.”

MAGAZINE EDITORS KEPT after the author of
The American Way of Death
to write features. Her magazine workload included articles for
McCall’s
,
Vogue
,
Esquire
, and
Holiday
. She didn’t much care for the deadline life, but she liked the attention. She read several local and national papers every day. Long after she had left the Communist Party, she was still receiving the
People’s Daily World
. Decca had earned her lifetime subscription back when she and Bob were first married and she’d won the prize at the benefit party they had thrown on Clayton Street. Bob joked that “they’d have to produce a death certificate to get rid of it.”

Early in the year, an editor at
Show
asked her to write an article about the upcoming film
The Loved One
. Decca had once been in the running to write the film script (as had both Luis Buñuel and Elaine May), but director Tony Richardson had settled on Terry Southern, an author with reliably irreverent credentials. Indeed, the advertising campaign for Richardson’s film announced it had “Something to Offend Everybody,” which warmed the cockles of Decca’s heart.

Decca was a personality in the Bay Area, a national figure whose field was the American funeral, a role often disputed by rival experts inside and outside the industry. Invited to speak on a panel at Albion College in Michigan, Decca first had to endure the lecture of a Dr. Oman, who among his other credentials listed “psycho-dramatist.” He defended the undertaker’s worthy profession and, with Decca in his sights, issued a warning to all dilettantes. Anyone who dared “meddle with these deep-seated desires of the American people in the care of their dead had better go slowly as force of public opinion is so powerful it will sweep him into oblivion.” When Decca took her turn at the podium, she was able to assure Dr. Oman that, actually, meddling had swept her “out of oblivion.”

What she liked best was getting up to her elbows in muck. A perfect opportunity came with a commission from
McCall’s
to investigate an Arizona spa (or “fat farm,” as they were popularly called) where affluent women went to get massaged, indulged, and flattered into losing a few pounds for great amounts of money. The Maine Chance spa seemed made
to order. Her subject was extravagance and the expense of beautifying. The organizing idea was in the contrast: political muckraker entering the anteroom of Oz, where pretty maids all in a row would treat her to those secret ministrations typically reserved for the upper class. It was an absurd assignment. “How do I go about getting accepted?” Decca had asked her editor, who replied, “Oh come
on
, you know better than that.” No one could argue with her aristocratic credentials.