Irrepressible (7 page)

Decca and Esmond knew they needed a reliable form of income that would work in all locales and weather. What had they to sell? They had their inexhaustible energy, the benefit of their intense though brief life
experiences. How to use their resources, wit, and prolixity and the accident of their birth to turn the (assumed) American weakness for British aristocracy to their advantage? Someone suggested a lecture tour; others had tried it and made out like bandits.

A letter they received from acquaintance Walter Starkie of Dublin lit a fire under that plan. His advice:

Decca and Esmond thought this through and strategized accordingly. They recruited three co-lecturers. Sheila Legg (the same Sheila who recommended Decca’s abortionist) would discuss various types of men in her lecture “Men from the Ritz to the Fish and Chips Stand.” Philip Toynbee would offer the titillatingly titled “Sex Life at Oxford University” and, as a Father’s Day special, “Arnold Toynbee: Historian but First and Foremost ‘Dad.’” Decca would draw on her early observations in “The Inner life of an English Debutante.” And as manager of the lecture series, Esmond would offer “The Truth About Winston Churchill.”

They eventually had to junk the lecture tour idea when all their traveling companions dropped out. The start-up expenses deterred Legg, who
couldn’t raise her fare to America. Then Toynbee fell in love and promptly lost his hunger to escape England. The world was unpredictable and lumbering toward war, but under Esmond’s demanding management, his “fellow lecturers” might have felt themselves already in service. In his memoir, Toynbee later admitted that what he feared was the couple’s “undeliberate but crushing domination.”

Once Decca and Esmond actually started to meet the Americans they had only fantasized about, they were pleasantly surprised. Decca noted early on that New Yorkers elaborated whenever they had the chance and seemed incapable of giving a simple reply. Americans in general rarely seemed suspicious, didn’t hold the couple’s youth against them, and actually liked engaging strangers—going as far as to invite them into their homes (an act Decca thought would particularly shock her parents). Such universal friendliness and curiosity melted them. Often, even brief encounters would include the conversational gambit “Do you like America?” which for the couple epitomized the contrast between the two nations. “It would never occur to us to ask a foreigner if he liked England,” said Decca. “Because if he did, so what? And if he didn’t there would be nothing you could do about it.” Still, like other immigrants, she discovered America to be a land of opportunity and consolation. It helped to be adaptable, and she had that gift.

Describing those early days in the United States, Decca saw herself as a carefree cosmopolite, careening from one funny episode to another. Photographs of the time show off her beautiful complexion and eyes. She was always nicely dressed, well coiffed, and merry again like the mischievous child she had once been. Grief didn’t play an overt role in her New York character. She was the first to find a job (as a salesclerk in a fancy dress shop), and the balance of power in the couple’s relationship shifted accordingly.

The one subject that always remained taboo between Decca and Esmond was Unity. Decca couldn’t discuss her anxiety regarding Unity’s activities in the months leading up to the war. She despaired when she heard that her sister had ignored all advice to leave Berlin and gone apartment hunting.
(Unity would soon move into a flat vacated by a Jewish family.) For Decca, her “Boud” was a problem like no other. Decca reflected that “perversely, and although I hated everything she stood for, she was easily my favorite sister.” Unity said she hated Esmond as much as he hated her, but made overtures in her own delusional way: “My attitude toward Esmond is as follows—and I rather expect his to me to be the same. I naturally wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him if it was necessary for my cause, and I should expect him to do the same to me, but in the meantime I don’t see why we shouldn’t be quite good friends.”

On September 3, in Munich, once Unity had recognized that war between Britain and Germany was certain, she shot herself in the head and survived. She had written suicide notes (one note had proclaimed her special love for Decca), along with instructions to be buried with a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler. Decca wouldn’t hear this news until two months after the fact. On September 6, Decca wrote to her mother: “I see that in the papers Bobo is in Germany, do tell me if you have any news of her & please send her address as soon as you can so I can write to her. Is she going to stay there?”

 

ESMOND HAD HOPED to find work in advertising, but despite his celebrity, nothing clicked. They relied on their contacts for little luxuries. Decca was stunned by the New York City heat and delighted to accept invitations to the country estates of millionaires like Mrs. Murray Crane. In her letters, Decca marveled that Mrs. Crane has “fine wirenetting around their windows to keep out moths & slow flies.”

The very rich and very Republican
Washington Post
publisher, Eugene Meyer, and his wife, Agnes, lived in “a sort of Winston Churchill-ish atmosphere of other bigshots.” Meyer himself, according to Esmond, was “a terrific Washington Big-shot w. an aura of cigars, badly sequenced liquors and huge stomached business friends.” He and Meyer found themselves simpatico. They circled one another, each calculating how money might be made from the other’s notoriety. Meyer’s soon-to-be-married daughter Katharine
would herself become a good friend of Decca’s. Eventually “Kay,” a committed Democrat, would introduce the couple to the young and idealistic New Deal community of Washington, D.C.

In March, after a month’s stay at the Shelton Hotel, the Romillys moved to their own small apartment on Christopher Street. Greenwich Village seemed a theater of wonders where Decca found shops full of goods and a store window that Dalí decorated. Soon they adopted a stray cat that would wake them up in the morning by walking on their heads. They started to feel so much at home that they took out citizenship papers. England had begun wartime rationing of food and clothing. Decca sent little luxuries like gloves and canned tuna fish in care packages to her mother.

In early summer, Esmond found a job as an executive with an advertising firm called Topping and Lloyd. This enterprise was a calculated tax dodge, designed to efficiently launder his employer’s money, then vanish. (Esmond had wondered why no work was ever required of him, but put it down to the American way of doing business.) For the short term of his employment, the couple managed to save Esmond’s weekly hundred-dollar salary while they lived on Decca’s more modest paycheck. By then, she had moved on to a job at the 1939 World’s Fair selling tartans in “Ye Merrie England Village.”

In terms of minutes and hours, Esmond and Decca hadn’t had much of a courtship. They had eloped after knowing one another for a few days. While they had always laughed and joked and their sexual attraction was intense, they were also always either fighting a war or waiting for one. In the United States, they were amazed by the degrees of frivolity available for connoisseur and amateur. The pursuit of self-fulfillment and personal happiness was for some Americans a way of life—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, no less. They were busy that year finding their feet, and along the way, the two of them also became great friends.

 

EUGENE MEYER BECAME fond enough of Decca and Esmond to become something of a patron. In the summer of 1939, Meyer commissioned the
Romillys to write a series of articles for the Sunday
Washington Post
about their first year in the United States. The job provided some advance money to travel. Meyer ran the series about nine months later under the headline “Blueblood Adventurers Discover America,” with a sidebar introducing “Two Youthful Escapists Who Fled to America with a Song in Their Hearts.”

The earliest articles were illustrated by cartoons of the couple in action: exclaiming over tea; daydreaming over U.S. guidebooks; persuading the U.S. consul (framed by portraits of Washington and Jefferson) of their commitment, exemplary conduct, and financial stability; and then waving
au revoir
from aboard the SS
Aurania
. Subsequent features included cartoons of Esmond smoking in bed as he fantasized about winged horses winning at the track, and Decca flogging plaids at the World’s Fair. The nation was still in the grip of the Depression, and the tiresome and often disappointing rituals of job hunting, employment, and unemployment seemed sparkly and amusing when the working man and woman involved were famous young British aristocrats who seemed to have walked right out of a film comedy.

The first week’s feature, in addition to its many illustrations and oversized photographs, offered a boxed biographical summary of the couple’s life-so-far and this additional hearty introduction: “A gay and exciting salute to reality by two front-page young lovers who bought the world for a song and are making their dreams come true in America where slammed doors and empty pockets have only been fun to two top-drawer immigrants.”

Esmond had already written many articles, but these were Decca’s first publications. She’d honed her brisk, amusing style in letters. In the feature titled “English Adventurers Stalk Job in Wilds of New York,” she reported on her job at the World’s Fair. In her description of “Miss B,” the American manager of Ye Merrie England Village who would “discourse eloquently on the necessity of knowing only the right people,” Decca began what would become a lifelong habit of skewering snobs in print. Her job was to sing “the merits of Highland Hand-woven Tweeds.” Miss B was shallow and
deluded. Sales at the booth were slow, the manager claimed, only because “the best people” hadn’t yet found them.

At first Decca had been delighted by her job at the fair. Built to demonstrate “The World of Tomorrow,” the fair offered many international delights, including the outdoor cafés of the Swiss pavilion and a television in the RCA pavilion, which transmitted “operas, cartoons, cooking demonstrations, travelogues, fashion shows, and skaters at Rockefeller Center.” Outside the Heinz pavilion, hungry urchins stood in line to get the tiny gherkins offered as samples. Then they lined up again, making a day of it. The booth in which Decca worked was a faux “old Scotch cottage with a spinning wheel and handloom,” with a “weaver imported direct from Scotland,” who was also their barker. “Only 10 cents to come in! It’s better than the Billy Rose’s Aquacade!” he would shout hopefully, though the Aquacade featured Esther Williams, Johnny Weissmuller, and the opposite of tartan woolens: a wet, refreshing spray. Working the fair in August was too hot, and Decca loathed her boss. Soon, she and Esmond were beckoned by the open road.

THE HEADLINE OF the couple’s next installment was “English Adventurers Learn the Hard Way,” and following the conventions of a second act, introduces its hero and heroine to a deepening series of obstacles. Unemployed again, Esmond attended bartender school, where he met real salt-of-the-earth types, homegrown and immigrant, and worked hard to gain both his coworkers’ and his readers’ approval. In a complementary piece, Decca delighted in describing the two of them as gadabouts, flirting with the underworld in the person of an expat racetrack tout.

Decca and Esmond invited Donahue, as they knew him, to their apartment for dinner, and he reciprocated by letting them in on some sure bets. Donahue had a “soft Lancashire brogue” and a line about loving and losing a “lass who worked in a mill in Wigan,” as well as a tale of complete financial
ruin followed by a miraculous turnaround at the track, once he hit upon a plan to beat the system. Simply put, Donahue bribed jockeys to throw races, and for a very small investment, he offered the young couple an opportunity to share in great rewards. In confidence, he added that his foolproof plan required only that he never be greedy. To Esmond, the humility of the scheme—its nonviolent but low-grade risk—as well as Donahue’s implied friendship with Broadway habitués such as writer Damon Runyon and legendary boxer Jack Dempsey, proved irresistible. Decca was amused but more reluctant to gamble away their small savings. Esmond persuaded her with a strategy of his own to con the con: “You see, he’s planning to take us for a LONG ride. He’s much too important a crook to be interested in some piddling amount. Then when we’ve won say around $500, we’ll simply stop there. The SHORT ride versus the LONG ride, that’s what our policy should be.”