Irrepressible (45 page)

T
HE VARIOUS VERSIONS of how history would record the Mitfords in the Pryce-Jones book and others was dividing Decca from her siblings. She objected to what she saw as her sisters’ attempts to control or contain Pryce-Jones’s book. She disapproved of Debo’s choice of biographer for Nancy. Decca considered Selena Hasting too tepid and tried to enlist the stronger literary stylist Sybille Bedford for the job (Bedford demurred). Mainly, Decca wanted her sisters to pay attention. “I bloody well don’t see why she [Debo] is self-appointed arbiter of all that goes on re the family,” Decca wrote their cousin. “Esp as I am 3 years older than she is.” After a terse letter from her sister Pam, which implied that Decca had taken one of the family scrapbooks (found at Inch Kenneth and archived at Chatsworth) to supply Pryce-Jones with rare photos, Decca’s relationship with all her sisters hit its nadir. During the so-called scrapbook flap, her grievances as a sister conjoined with injuries harbored as a writer. She was enraged—hadn’t she earned the right to be considered the literary consultant in family matters? Pryce-Jones was a good writer precisely because he wouldn’t be controlled. Still, she loved Debo devotedly. Decca had never bothered to hide her casual attitude toward theft (those chocolates at the Palace!), and she wasn’t ashamed of a little justifiable jiggery-pokery. She might have been capable of taking the scrapbook or charming a proxy into doing it—but if she had, she probably would have admitted it and laughed about it. A year after its disappearance, the scrapbook turned up near where it had been lost. She would eventually call the episode ridiculous. (How they had behaved like “Victorian old ladies in their late old age, bickering about a lost album.”) But one day, in the middle of the drama, Bob had come home from work to find Decca in tears, at the prospect of being alone in her
old age, in cruel exile from Debo. It was only the second time her husband had ever seen Decca cry.

Work as always was the writer’s panacea. When one book ended, another began. Decca first considered writing a defense of James Dean Walker, who had escaped to California from Arkansas, where he’d been convicted of killing a policeman. His supporters claimed that Walker had rehabilitated himself and that extradition back to the brutal Arkansas penal system would be a certain death sentence. The book project dissolved at some point into articles and op-ed pieces and a barrage of letters on Walker’s behalf. In one such exchange, Decca (by then an expert on prison reform) presumed on her earlier connection with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then wife of the Arkansas governor.

In the summer of 1970, Hillary Rodham had interned for Bob Treuhaft’s law firm. She’d been a diligent young lawyer from Yale whom the Treuhafts had known only from a distance. When her fame increased, the office gossip was mainly along the lines of,
Who knew?
Decca wrote to ask Rodham Clinton’s support to end Arkansas’s demand for Walker’s extradition. The future first lady, senator, and secretary of state gave assurances that there were changes under way in the Arkansas prison system, to which Decca replied, “Obviously I applaud many of the changes you enumerate. If I am skeptical of such concepts as ‘American Correctional Association standards’ (page 2, para 1 of your letter) you must forgive me; I had my fill of those alleged standards when researching
Kind & Usual Punishment
.” The rate at which such changes would inch their way through the political system, though admirably designed for some future date, might still feel “rather a long time to those confined in the prisons.”

 

ONCE THE SCRAPBOOK flap was resolved, Decca took a trip to Chichester, England, with Debo to see the latest manifestation of Mitfordmania—
The Mitford Girls
(a musical based on the sisters’ youth) in its out-of-town run. On stage, Decca and Esmond sang and danced through their elopement:

The Mitford Girls
didn’t make it to Broadway, but it demonstrated a version of history that had staying power. Despite all she had written, the most entertaining part of Decca’s story continued for English audiences to be the poor little rich girl running away. Decca might be a heavyweight in the United States, but would she always be a featherweight back in her old hometown? She’d made her case in
A Fine Old Conflict
, but the daily life of a U.S. Communist was an esoteric curiosity in England. It would take an awful lot of doing to change opinion that had become legend and presumed history. An opportunity to state her version of the story came along soon, when a young man from the north of England hitchhiked across America to California to meet her.

In 1978, Kevin Ingram was twenty-two years old. He had discovered Esmond Romilly’s memoir,
Boadilla
, while researching his university thesis on the Spanish Civil War. After graduation, he tracked down Romilly’s widow to declare his interest in writing a biography about the war hero and author of
Boadilla
. Decca was charmed by Ingram’s youth and enthusiasm and impressed by the research he had already completed, and she came to believe he had the political sophistication and sympathy to portray Esmond. To encourage his project, she invited Ingram to visit Regent Street. Once the young writer arrived, he moved in for about five weeks. Decca’s friends called him “the boy in the attic.”

Most days, they’d settle in for a conversation about Esmond and Decca’s youth. She showed him her photos and souvenirs and the war-era letters she and Esmond had exchanged. He showed her his writing. Decca found him appealing and adventurous in the spirit of Esmond. Ingram found her
attractive and kind. She said she had only two rules for the book’s author: that “it would be in no sense another spinoff of the Mitford industry” and that it would not be “the kind of biography that makes out the subject to be saintly and wonderful.”

During their daily conversations, Decca, now sixty-one, was smoking heavily, “three packs a day,” Ingram noted, and she was always “slightly out of breath.” Several times during his stay, she suggested that he nip out for a bottle of vodka, which she liked to sip after her morning coffee. Decca told Dinky that she had begun drinking at twelve years old. In Ingram’s estimation, she went through “a liter bottle of vodka in one and a half days.” Then, “in the evening she’d have a Jack Daniels or two.”

Decca imagined that Ingram’s book would offer a bracing contrast to the musical comedy version. She provided him with contacts and introductions to old friends, and he impressively delved into their early lives. At the British Library, he read through Esmond’s mother’s novel
Misdeal
, written under the name Anna Gerstein. Decca had heard about it but never read it. (He sent her some pages, which she called “ghastly.”) From England, Ingram also wrote to ask Decca what she thought he might make of some uncorroborated stories.

She replied, “I’ve never written a biography (only autobiogs, alas!) . . . But if I was doing one, I think I would chuck in all such reminiscences for what they are worth—whilst being extremely careful NOT to indulge in pop-psychologizing, so boring & often patently untrue, as to why . . . & let reader draw own conclusion.”

In 1979, Decca consolidated her reputation as an investigative journalist in a book whose first title,
The Making of a Muckraker
, she discarded as “hopeless” on the advice of her young friend Nora Ephron. Released as
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking
, it provided behind-the-story commentary. In her introduction, she combined the remarks of fellow writers Nicholas Tomalin and Murray Sayre to advise young journalists on several key tips for success: “rat-like cunning, a plausible manner, and a little literary ability,” to which she added “plodding determination and an
appetite for tracking and destroying the enemy.” Writing to Philip Toynbee, she admitted the project had been fun to do, but its research was “spurious,” and the impulse behind it crassly commercial. Decca transmits her delight in writing the book—particularly regarding her tougher interviews and hard-won access to subjects central to her best stories. Most instructive are those serendipitous, transforming moments that she seized and that made her a muckraker.

 

IN 1980, DINKY and the “’oys” (as Bob and Decca called their grandsons, nicely conflating London slang and Yiddish) moved to Atlanta from New York. James was twelve, and Chaka nine. Dinky had been working as an emergency-room nurse at Bellevue Hospital. In Atlanta, she worked in the emergency room at Grady Memorial Hospital and met Terry Weber, who worked for the telephone company in various jobs, including lineman, cable splicer, and operator. Terry, the divorced father of a six-year-old named Ben, was originally from New York. In the 1960s, he had been active in the antiwar movement and, like Dinky, had been drawn south to work in the civil rights movement. They married in June.

“If my parents believed in God, Terry would have been a Godsend,” Dinky said. Decca and Bob both adored him. Hearing that Terry had been raised in a Jewish family, Bob joked, “I’m glad she’s found a nice Jewish boy but what’s he doing climbing up telephone poles when he should be going to medical school?” Dinky and Terry wanted to have children together, and after Dinky suffered a miscarriage, she had a consoling conversation with her mother about the miscarriage Decca had suffered in Washington, D.C., when Dinky was about six months old. Decca also discussed the abortion she had had, without Esmond’s knowledge in 1939, before they left England. “I didn’t tell Esmond,” Decca said. “To tell would have made it more traumatic.”

The wedding of Terry and Dinky, Decca wrote to Debo, went off without a hitch. The bride looked beautiful. Bob had bought champagne in bulk and wandered among the guests, uncharacteristically slugging it down straight from the bottle. Decca was tremendously glad to see her daughter
and grandsons emerge from what had seemed to her a rather “thin” time, after Dinky’s separation from Forman.

A hot Atlanta afternoon might not have been the first location to come to mind when Decca and Esmond had once considered their infant daughter’s wedding day, but a happier, more utopian world than in that place and time—with its potluck meal, folksinging, dancing, unlimited champagne and cake and where the distinctions of race and religion were just normal and went unnoted—would have been difficult to imagine. Decca felt overheated in her long-sleeved and high-collared mother-of-the-bride dress, but she joked and sang with family and friends. On that lovely day, if she had stumbled on an FBI agent hiding in the bushes, she might even have brought the poor misguided wretch a lemonade.

IN OCTOBER 1981, Decca casually mentioned to an acquaintance that she and Bob were planning a cocktail party for Joanne Grant, a writer and filmmaker who was in San Francisco to receive an award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Grant was the former assistant to W. E. B. DuBois and was married to Victor Rabinowitz, a movement lawyer (partner to Leonard Boudin, whom Decca had come to know during the HUAC trials and later as legal counsel for Dr. Spock). Twenty years younger than the Treuhafts, Grant, who was biracial, had met Dinky and James Forman through her own work at SNCC, but she only knew Decca distantly. The Grant-Rabinowitzes lived in New York, but the East Coast and West Coast worlds of leftist lawyers intersected at various National Lawyers Guild conventions. At one of these conventions early in the decade, Bob Treuhaft and Grant met and began an affair. Their romance would have been in its earliest stages when Decca held her cocktail party. She had no idea at the time, and she wouldn’t learn about it for several more years.

Decca had always known that Bob liked the company of women. The same friends who marveled at the companionate nature of the Treuhafts’
marriage noted how Decca would grow excited and fretful “if Bob was out of her sight too long.” She wanted to be with him, but she also wanted to know what he was up to. If she suspected him of having affairs, she told no one. Once, when Pele confided her suspicions of her husband Steve’s infidelity, Decca replied, “Oh he’s perfectly splendid, you’re imagining it. He’s a dear old thing.” Pele concluded, “It was as if she didn’t want to get too involved in identifying with my problem because it ruffled things up.”

In 1981, Decca was sixty-four years old. Bob was sixty-nine. Bob did less courtroom work and traveled more as an advocate for international human rights. He still prepared dinners for multitudes, and together the Treuhafts were still considered A-list guests at parties, benefits, and political or literary events. They spent nights at home playing marathon games of Scrabble or Boggle, into which they might rope any casual visitor. After almost forty years of marriage and twenty years of fame, there was no question of their drifting into a tranquil retirement. They both cultivated drama, though Bob’s ways were quieter and more mysterious. For Decca, family and political battles remained a constant source of excitement. The couple had long since accommodated one another’s routines. She read and wrote all day, with breaks for lunch and drinks, and she liked to stay in her house-coat or pajamas until it was time to get dressed to go out at night. She had just published two books, and in her subsequent publications and letters, she sparred with friends and fans about writing, in discussions that kept her edges sharp. To the visitor, she appeared fulfilled, a woman in her prime. If she felt misery, loneliness, or doubt, she didn’t whine. What she did do was drink, excessively. She was a hardy, heavy drinker of vodka, mainly, quite aware of her habit but uninterested in stopping. She’d say to a visitor, “My daughter tells me I’m an alcoholic. Well, I don’t really think there’s anything bad about that . . . Thinking of all my friends who died, and none of them died a glorious death . . . so what’s wrong with this?” Chain-smoking was far more vexing and the habit she struggled to control.