Irrepressible

by Leslie Brody

  Esmond loved to gamble. Perhaps he believed that fortune favors the brave. He always had so much riding on quick, correct decisions. It was perhaps a talent that had kept him alive in Spain. A little fast money would have alleviated the pressure. They hadn’t been in New York long, but all the rushing around—meeting contacts and keeping up appearances—had to have been wearing. Donahue hadn’t persuaded Decca to bet a dime, but in those days, for Esmond, she’d have gambled everything.

  Decca and Esmond snatched success from the jaws of that anecdote. They knew how to frame a good yarn, and they had friends in the press. A New York gossip column called “Only Human” reported: “If we had such an introduction to England on our first trip over, we’d brew a horrible curse upon the country. But not these two. We’ve never seen two such healthy-minded gloriously happy people.” Or so they may have seemed to avid newshounds, but the Romillys were fed up with New York. Their next feature would announce, “Young English Adventurers Make a Door to Door Tour of Washington,” in which Decca records Esmond’s “disturbingly successful” career as a salesman for Silkform stockings. With the instant authority of his British accent and deportment imported from Wellington school parades, Esmond would bring the full force of his charm to bear upon an unsuspecting housewife in some prosperous Washington neighborhood. Only a week or so into Esmond’s new career, both felt they had to make a supreme effort not to be seduced by the prospect of bigger and bigger commissions. Esmond wasn’t actually making much money, but the promise of an elevated income from a job to which he was naturally suited was a temptation they had to escape before it was too late. At the end of two weeks, feeling inundated by Silkform mailings—which steadily trumpeted new products, praised Esmond’s talents, and promised more and bigger rewards—they set out for the open road.

  During their brief spell in Washington, the couple had reconnected with Eugene and Agnes Meyer and their daughter Kay. In Washington that autumn, the talk at dinner parties was of movies, novels, fashion, and who was having affairs, but world politics was the main discourse. What would it take to move the United States away from neutrality toward a more confirmed antifascist position, and under what circumstances would the United States enter the war? Decca was worried about her brother, Tom, now an officer in the army, and sister Unity’s still ambiguous whereabouts.

  THE HEADLINE OF the Washington Post final installment reads: “Young Esmond Romilly Tries His Hand at Being a Waiter—Is Fired After Two Days.” An apparent failure at waiting on people, Esmond tried for a position with a little more panache. He had purchased a used tuxedo in a thrift store and considered working as a maître d’. New Orleans seemed to offer a range of possibilities in the field, so he and Decca procured a used car and headed south. Then, somewhere in Georgia, they missed the turn meant to take them west and just kept driving to Miami.

  Decca didn’t enjoy the journey as much as she had imagined she might. She found the Southerners she met (friends of friends and others from the list of contacts) “snobbish,” and far too indifferent to the poverty of their neighbors. Driving through South Carolina, she and Esmond passed the dilapidated roadside shacks of poor tenant farmers. These she compared to “old, broken-down chicken houses. We couldn’t believe people actually lived in them till we saw inside.”

  Southern Florida offered an immediate contrast, but Decca didn’t take to it, either. Miami struck her as garish and greedy. Working as a salesclerk at the costume jewelry counter of a drug store, her impatience increased.

  I had plenty of opportunities to observe the Miamians. They struck me as a humorless, suspicious, narrow minded lot. It was our first experience of a Southern American town. The Negroes lived like a band of ghosts in miserable shacks on the outskirts, their very existence ignored for the most part by the whites. The verbal fire of my co-workers in the drugstore was reserved for use against the Jewish tourists, on whose money the town grew fat, and whose patronage paid their salaries. Many of those with whom we came in contact exhibited a sort of smarmy bonhomie, reminiscent of sugary German gemutlichkeit, a front behind which lurked the foulest racism.

  They spent days on the beach sunbathing and swimming, but Decca continued to give Miami poor reviews. Despite its purported glamour, it seemed shabby and sleazy. She and Esmond were stuck in an apartment alive with huge tropical cockroaches. Decca eventually came to see Miami as one of those end-of-the-road coastal destinations that attracted outsiders, dissidents, the lost, and the reinvented. Miami was full of characters, and she met them on the beach, in the bar, and at the track. As Decca would note in a letter to Unity (still unaware of her sister’s suicide attempt), this Miami was much “like the South of France or Venice, all the people here have got something extraorder about them,” even the vapid rich. A couple they met in Palm Beach “have a French butler & although he talks perfect English they insist on talking to him in very bad French for the atmosphere.”

  They would stay in Miami for six months. In the evening, already exhausted from work at the drugstore, Decca would join Esmond as an employee at the Roma Italian Restaurant, where in quick time he worked his way up from general help to part owner. Eventually, Esmond would run the bar while Decca worked as a part-time bookkeeper and bouncer. She described with great pleasure the bouncer part of her job, in which she’d occasionally be asked to entice intoxicated women out of the restrooms. Esmond also considered Miami “mean, murky and meretricious.” For him this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was drawn to its Graham Greene sort of tropical intrigue. It was also a great theater in which he could exercise all his considerable talent and charm, a place in which to lose himself. Behind the bar, he would perform characters: a Chicago gangster, a stiff-lipped butler, the sophisticated playboy, and the young immigrant barman, welcoming confidences and dispensing advice. For a while, the nights in the restaurant were an idyll. The Italian meals were delicious, plentiful, and free. Esmond’s energy, Decca’s beauty, and her sense of fun endeared them to their partners in business, the close-knit, amiable Italian American Chizzoli family. In Miami, the couple established a home and network of acquaintances. Unexpectedly, the Roma became their permanent address.

  It may have been the war news in the background or the rumors arriving concerning sister Unity, but as Christmas in Miami approached, Decca had the premonition “that something unpleasant would spring out at us from behind the garish façade of that horribly tinselly town with its maddening eternal sunshine pouring incessantly down.” In late December 1939, Decca learned from newspaper headlines that her sister Unity had shot herself in the head, but the bullet had not immediately killed her. Decca’s family soon confirmed that Unity had survived her suicide attempt. No one in England knew yet how seriously she had been wounded or that, on Hitler’s orders, she had been transferred to a hospital in Switzerland. Every part of Unity’s story excited a prurient interest that sold papers. Reporters demanded to know just how close Unity had been to Hitler. Who was funding her repatriation? And how, when Britain and Germany were at war, did an unreconstructed Nazi get to return to England when the lives of so many anti-Nazis remained in jeopardy?

  Decca may well have been surprised by the newshounds who had discovered her in Miami, and by their number, but she was hardly inconspicuous. The press descended, hovering outside her house and inundating the restaurant. Reporters insinuated themselves with personal questions and demanded statements. One reporter offered Decca five hundred dollars for an interview; another bid one thousand. A third offered to arrange a transatlantic telephone call “to be recorded & used in a broadcast all over the U.S.” At night, sightseers would wander into the Roma and casually ask to meet “Unity’s sister.” This might have been good for restaurant business, but it made Decca miserable. Not knowing the extent of Unity’s injuries, she was at first “terrified” and “grieved” for her sister. She was also worried that her family might see fictitious quotes and think them authentic, when in this instance, Decca had loyally stood with the Mitfords
and refused to speak to the press.

  In January, hearing the news that Unity had returned to England amid a media circus, she wrote again to her mother:Do please write & tell me all news of Boud, it is of course absolutely impossible to get anything reliable from the newspaper reports, & the last few days have been so terribly worrying, all the papers here have been saying the most dreadful things . . . Every paper says something different about Boud & how she became so ill, and it is so awful not knowing anything. However I am terrifically glad she is at home now as whatever is the matter with her she must be better off at Wycombe where she can have proper food & Blor & everyone.

  Muv withheld Unity’s true diagnosis from Decca for several more months. Their mother encouraged Decca to think that Unity had simply lost her memory and suggested that the patient might be well in six months; later, Muv amended the prediction to a year. By March, when Decca exchanged her first letters with Unity, she faced the reality that at age twenty-five, her sister was permanently brain-damaged. Unity would remain childlike and dim for the remaining eight years of her life.

  One of the reporters who plagued Decca asked whether it was true, as speculated in some papers, that Unity had shot herself after “a terrible quarrel with Hitler.” That rumor if confirmed might have meant that her sister had broken with the Nazi leader and perhaps in the end even become antifascist. (As long as the facts remained unclear, Decca could try to rationalize her sister’s behavior. If Unity had recanted, perhaps even Esmond might soften toward her.) Decca must have longed for, if not gentle commiseration, at least some straightforward help in manipulating the press. Esmond was the expert when it came to hustling reporters and finding out what they knew without giving the store away. But he fervently abjured all discussion of his Nazi sister-in-law. “I knew I couldn’t expect Esmond, who had never met her, to feel anything but disgust for her, so by tacit understanding we avoided discussing [Unity].” And her own sense of responsibility and antifascist fervor made it impossible for her to express any public sympathy for her sister.

  The couple’s partnership, built, according to Decca, on “estrangement from our families, the circumstances of our marriage, our constant wanderings about, the death of the baby, all had conspired to weld us into a self-sufficient unit, a conspiracy of two against the world.” Decca was rarely inclined to act alone, but she could when necessary. She had proven this when she had an abortion without informing Esmond. During the Christmas crisis, she coped with the press and her own anxieties and grieved for Unity on her own, with only the occasional letter from Muv to offer small comfort. By the spring of 1940, Miami, though it had many attributes of a last outpost, wasn’t nearly far enough away to escape their destinies as Romilly and Mitford.

  CHAPTER 6

  ON MAY 10,1940, Hitler’s army invaded the Netherlands, and the day after, Uncle Winston succeeded Chamberlain as British prime minister. A letter from Nellie Romilly arrived containing a great deal more family news, none of it good: Esmond’s father, Bertram Romilly, had died of cancer, far more ill than they had known. And then on April 9, while Esmond’s brother, Giles, was reporting from Norway for the English paper the Daily Express, he had been captured by German troops. Nellie was alone, and although she implied that she was gallantly coping, there was desperation to be read between the lines: What were Esmond’s plans, she wondered? She didn’t directly ask him when he would be returning to England or whether he intended to enlist, but she seemed to think that he was only in America because Decca wouldn’t leave.

  Esmond made his decision to train as a fighter pilot. Having fought on the ground in Spain, this time he preferred to be up in the sky. Since the United States had not yet joined the war, he had to enlist in Canada, the nearest Commonwealth nation. The couple sold their interest in the Roma Restaurant, packed up their car, and drove north back to Washington, D.C.

  What a ride it must have been: grief and sorrow over Bertrand, anxiety over Giles. Nellie didn’t come in for much sympathy; Esmond typically mistrusted her motives. He took her neutral prose as cool manipulation, her tender salutations as sentimental manipulation. But whatever Decca and Esmond thought of her, she was now suffering and alone. The landscape reflected their misery. It stormed for days with almost hurricane-force winds. Driving through flooded towns, they noted the still-intact standards of perverse social norms: whites-only water fountains and hand-scrawled signs announcing NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED. As they taxed their little car to breakdown, they strategized about money. There would be a gap before Esmond’s first check from the air force; Decca would need to find a job. She could go through the want ads—but better to comb their contacts. She knew her way around big houses; she was an attractive and energetic guest who lent beauty and a little radical frisson to an occasion. That was the customary exchange for a nice meal or a string pulled for a ticket or visa or job. Decca had repudiated many of the privileges that came with being the daughter of a British lord, but she could still invoke an air of hauteur when it was useful.

  “What a contrast to New York!” Esmond wrote from Washington to his friend Peter Nevile in London. “Instead of the rather wearing kind of sophistication of endless radioish repartee, etc. You get a lot of people sitting around talking about a ‘social program.’” A young labor lawyer newly arrived in Washington by the name of Robert Treuhaft noted the capital’s “very powerful anti-fascist, anti-Hitler spirit.” To Decca it seemed the best place to find a job and companions while Esmond was away. She was impressed by the way so many young supporters of President Roosevelt “lived and worked with a crusading enthusiasm.” Many of the staff workers in Washington identified themselves as New Dealers (after Roosevelt’s policies to revive the economy in the wake of the Great Depression). Decca shared their idealism, collected their literature, and soon employed the local bureaucratic lexicon of aid schemes and benefit packages and farm subsidies.

  She and Esmond made the rounds of cause parties and benefits. She was the aristo-renegade who had publically denounced her family’s connection to fascism. He was the veteran who had fought in Spain. At the end of May, Decca’s brother-in-law, Diana’s husband Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was arrested and imprisoned for activities threatening the defense of the realm. In July, Diana was also arrested for being a security risk. Nancy Mitford, among others, had secretly informed on Diana. “Not very sisterly,” Nancy admitted, but it was the thing to do.

  In Washington, among the socialites and smart-setters who tended to lean left, Decca and Esmond found a few new friends. Kay Meyer (later Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post) and Decca found they had a great deal in common. Both had been born in 1917 and brought up in homes patrolled by nannies and maids. As unenthusiastic debutantes, both had veered off the beaten path for girls of wealth and well-positioned families. While Decca had escaped to Spain, Kay went to college, where she became a dedicated New Dealer. Both had fathers who had powerful personalities and extravagant résumés that included dabbling in gold mines (Eugene Meyer’s investments had struck it rich, while Farve Mitford’s financial experiments had gone bust). Both women had eccentric mothers whose comparative quirks must have supplied long nights of conversation lubricated by that season’s fashionable cocktails: Gin Rickeys, Pink Ladies, and Tom Collinses.

  Decca had grown up in a house of girls. It had been liberating to escape being next-to-youngest and all the intense scrutiny, sniping, power struggles, and alliances of their sorority. Decca must have felt great relief finding a friend like Kay, a responsive and discerning companion so unlike her sisters. Over the previous few months, Decca had spent a lot of time alone with Esmond, and she adored him, but there was no denying he was a handful. The days were long gone when he had dominated every conversation, but she still often had to fight for an inch, he was so full of opinions. He was quick to take offense when criticized and, at the same time, a harsh critic of others. He wasn’t a snob, but he held high standards about the quality of literature a
person should read and how to interpret almost everything. In Kay, Decca found an adviser she trusted and a girlfriend in whose company she could relax.

  Watching the war arrive and the news in Europe from her crazy Floridian perch had wrung her out. Esmond’s resistance to any discussion of her family had made her doubt herself. She knew it wasn’t wrong to wonder, to inquire, even to have some sympathy for Unity. To Kay, Decca confessed her fears, scorned fascist Diana and all her works, and described the amazing and contradictory Nancy. (Kay also had an older, accomplished sister who meant the world to her.) All those surface similarities would have meant little if Decca and Kay hadn’t clicked as optimistic outsiders, sympathetic to one another’s ambition to eschew convention and have brilliant careers as journalists. Kay had recently returned from a stint as a junior reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle; Decca admired her experience and education and dreamed of taking journalism classes once she found a job. They shared political convictions—starting with a mutual admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Kay had (like Decca) visited Paris in 1936, where each attended a demonstration organized by the antifascist alliance the Popular Front, an experience that Kay said produced “the most impressive feeling of communal strength I had ever had.”

  That the Romillys were glamorous, attractive, and temporarily without visible means of support meant they would have to spend their last dime on a hotel or fall back on society contacts (Lord Lothian, the British ambassador, was one). It was a great relief when Michael and Binnie Straight, a wealthy young couple and benefactors of the Spanish antifascist committee, invited them to share their Washington home. Michael was a sleek, Cambridge-educated cosmopolite who worked for the family firm, New Republic magazine, which he would eventually direct as publisher. Esmond was more liable to view a trust-fund baby as a prospective meal ticket than a buddy, but Straight’s politics provided a partial dispensation. Esmond had the ability to talk people into gambles and risks and outrageous schemes that sounded just plausible, like starting a cattle ranch in Arizona (investment prospectus upon request) or betting the house on Peccadillo in the fourth race at the track. Straight considered Esmond “brilliant, colorful, often hysterically funny, sometimes unspeakably cruel.”