by Leslie Brody
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 l
ong 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.
When Philip Toynbee died in 1981, Decca had reason to apply those theories of biography she had once recommended to Kevin Ingram. She compiled the eulogies and obituaries written about her old friend for a privately published volume. When no biographer happened along, she expanded these into a memoir. By focusing on the parts of her life that intersected with Toynbee’s, she would have another go at the way people viewed their youth together. How, in fact, did one write a biography? “Start with the” was advice she commonly gave to amateurs. Then “chuck in all sorts of fragments, memories, images, remembered lines as into an enormous soup.” One standard of originality was sister Nancy’s book Madame de Pompadour, about which critic Raymond Mortimer said her “narrative style is so peculiar, so breathless, so remote from what has ever been used for biography. I feel as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone.” But, Philip? All that scrutinizing, all that gin, all those all-night debates about the least little thing, all passionately important. She complained about it to her publisher:Toynbee memoir proceeds at snail’s pace, what a bore. Sometimes I wish that a) he’d never been born, b) never died, c) never left all those diaries for me to extrapolate from, d) never had all those wives & children for me to not step on the toes of.
Decca’s version of Toynbee, the philosophical and charismatic journalist, is of a mischievously brilliant, sometimes clumsy, childhood friend (who hardly ages and never seems separate from Esmond) and whose adult choices she regards indulgently, at a distance.
In his last years, Toynbee cultivated an interest in spiritual matters and joined a rural commune. Decca didn’t understand these pursuits, and her effort to explain what attracted him never lifts off. Toynbee had a much better understanding of Decca. Certainly, his talent for portraiture was superior, especially concerning her:[Decca] has a strong element of genuine and unabashed frivolity in her nature. Whenever confronted by any emotion which threatens to become deep—or turgid, she would feel—she dances away from it in a sort of panicky jitter of comical derision. Since she is the only genuine female clown that I know—not just a wit but a total comic performer—her company is always exhilarating; occasionally exasperating . . . On certain occasions when I have begun to speak with great intensity about some issue which is dear to me but alien to Decca she has suddenly pushed my elbow sharply upwards so that my arm has been raised high above my head as if haranguing a multitude.
Philip was one of the few people to ever see Decca clearly, and in writing about him, she produced her favorite book. Faces of Philip doesn’t change the common view of Decca and Esmond as rogue and scamp. She’d have to see whether Ingram could make that case.
As Esmond’s biographer turned up new Romilly-related facts, another literary event gave Decca a shot at replaying history. In 1983, her old friend Michael Straight published a book called After Long Silence, in which he admits that as a young man in the late 1930s, he was the only America student recruited into the Cambridge spy ring. This meant that he was working for the KGB (or Soviet Secret Service) when Esmond and Decca shared his and Binnie’s apartment in prewar Washington. Straight admits he was unsuccessful at the spying game and was abandoned by the Communist International (Comintern) organization early in his career. He kept his secret quiet for forty years, through employment in several high-level political appointments, including deputy chair of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Nixon administration. In March 1981, he was publically outed by the English newspaper the Daily Mail, after which he wrote his own account.
Reading Straight’s book forty years later, Decca was surprised by her old friend’s weird status as a deeply covered spy, of which she had been unaware. The account to some extent also explained why, when they had once been such good friends, Straight had cut her out of his life after Esmond’s death. Straight’s life had been much more complicated than she’d imagined. And though he had in his autobiography written of who he had been in his youth and what he had believed in, in Decca’s opinion, he hadn’t really succeeded. She recognized that if there were to be a more satisfying explanation forthcoming, it wouldn’t come from him. Decca thought he might have conducted himself differently, come to different conclusions. In any case, she wanted him to know she had still been “riveted,” by his revelations, adding, “I, of course, should have loved to be a spy; but nobody asked me.”
DEEP IN ThE Reagan era, Decca was on the road lecturing about prisons, funerals, and the Old Left and protesting the U.S. government’s intervention on the side of the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinistas. In 1984, when she was sixty-seven years old, Decca joined a women’s delegation to visit El Salvador and Nicaragua. It was a demanding tour, hot and crowded with day trips to observe revolutionary collectives, cultural centers, and political events. During the trip, Decca suffered a minor stroke, which “caused temporary loss of feeling in her right hand, and a permanent weakness in her left leg.” From then on, she’d rely on Catherine “Katie” Edwards, her new full-time assistant, to organize and help manage the details of her career as writer and celebrity speaker. Although Decca was slowed down by her stroke, this only meant starting a new book that might be neither “indictment nor an exposé,” an affectionate treatment of her favorite ballad and party turn. Grace Had an English Heart, a benign foray into historical research, posed an opportunity for Decca to remark on what she’d learned of image and celebrity. A reader familiar with the Mitford sisters would have compared the emblematic role Grace Darling played in her day as a sort of Victorian “It girl” with the emblematic roles the Mitford sisters played in their nation’s psyche.
While Decca was recovering from her stroke, Kevin Ingram made a return visit. His mother had knitted Decca a multicolored blanket, which he presented with his finished manuscript. The blanket was as endearing as the book, now called Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly. Decca found it to be “SURPRISINGLY good,” and urged just two further additions. Why not add a lively personal note about how Ingram had first discovered Esmond and then hitchhiked cross-country to visit her? To give it a bit more status, he might also include a foreword written by Peter Stansky, an eminent scholar of the Spanish Civil War. She had already arranged that part, and once Ingram agreed, it would be a cinch to add. Katie saw that Decca adored Ingram and that Decca was disappointed when he wavered. He told her he was happy with what he had written, “happy that he’d finished it.” Perhaps she’d already weighed in so much on all aspects of the book, that her influence over the “style of work may have become too strong.” Decca thought Ingram was foolish not to take her advice. She had hoped to influence the way history would regard Esmond, but had also hoped to sway Ingram—a surrogate son—in a way she found all but impossible to do with her own son.
BY THE EARLY 1980s, Benjy had moved out of state and was keeping his distance. When Decca received a “SANE and AMUSING” letter after a long silence, she believed her son had turned a corner. “You know how desperately worrying he was (manic depression-wise),” she wrote to Robert Gottlieb. “Well he’s been absolutely OK for more than 2 years, despite adamant refusal to go th
e lithium route. He is so smashing when he is his dear self, so you can imagine how v. delighted we are. But it is a bit puzzling—how that dread disease came & went; he was approx. 28 when it all started, is now 33.”
One night during Ingram’s stay, Decca and Benjy had a titanic quarrel at Regent Street. She demanded to know how he could be so sympathetic and sensitive on one hand and then “dreadful, and absurd,” when his “disgusting manic episodes” came upon him. She said she had believed his episodes were behind him. It was this feeling of being sideswiped that drove her fury. Weren’t there remedies? Wouldn’t he listen to anyone? He said she didn’t understand what treatment meant or what it was like in those “snakepits,” where “they shoot you full of thorazine and lithium.” Is that the life she wanted for him?
Once Benjy slammed out of the house, Decca wrote him a letter. She was still furious. They had a guest staying, she told him, Esmond’s young biographer. She couldn’t possibly introduce them, since “you wouldn’t be remotely interested in anybody but YOU.” By then, she was exhausted, and her tone became more conciliatory: “Dear Benjy, you are hardly ever out of my thoughts . . . it goes without saying that if you should ever tire of the manic condition & wish to get back to ordinary life, which wld. doubtless require some sort of therapy, we would absolutely stand behind you & do all possible to help.”
As Ingram was preparing to go to sleep, he found a letter face up on the bedroom table, written by Decca and addressed to Bob. Not for his eyes, but he sneaked a look. She said she was trying to give up vodka and that she’d found out about Bob’s affair. Ingram put the letter back down on the nightstand and hoped no one would come looking for it in the night.
Decca had discovered Bob’s affair through the gossip of mutual friends. For someone who had rarely doubted herself in the past, the circumstances were devastating. Dinky said, “Bob’s affair was very very painful to Decc in a very deep bedrock way.” Decca, wishing to wound Bob, had subjected him to hotly emotional sessions that she called her “X-exams” (or cross-examinations). She ridiculed his girlfriend as “the Loved One” and relished descriptions of Joanne as a snob “only interested in meeting people she conceived of as important.” Bob was still very fond of Joanne, and there were several false endings to their relationship, which Decca associated with lies and the “SQUALOR of it all.” During the time of her affair with Bob, Joanne had managed to keep their secret from her husband, Victor Rabinowitz. Decca planned lacerating letters to her rival and exposés to Rabinowitz, but did not send them. She was disheartened but agreed with Bob to make an effort to repair their marriage, “given persistence & good will (no snappishness on my part; a modicum of lying on his).”