The Mitford Girls

by Mary S. Lovell

  22

  RELATIVELY CALM WATERS (1980-2000)

  After Nancy’s death Decca remained implacable towards Diana, her antagonism too ingrained for her to make any concessions. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the tenor of all the sisters’ lives was occasionally interrupted by tensions caused either by Decca provoking her sisters to annoyance by something she said or wrote, or by her reacting to something they had said or written to which she objected. One of these was Diana’s portrait of Mosley, contained in her book, Loved Ones, which she wrote while convalescing at Chatsworth from her brain-tumour operation. However, Decca contented herself with private criticism in her letters and did not break into print about it, out of consideration for Debo.

  Decca’s career as a journalist was now at its zenith, and she was a regular and respected contributor to organs such as the Spectator, the Observer and the New Statesman in England, and Esquire, Life and Vanity Fair in the USA. In addition she wrote scores of newspaper articles. Her income from her writing was substantial and despite her apparent indifference to it, one of her intellectual friends told me, ‘Decca was financially very astute.’1 Like Nancy, she had triumphed over what both sisters regarded as a lack of education, and had made her way in a tough profession with better than average success. An objective reader might be justified in thinking that the sisters placed more value on formal school education than it warranted, for the true test of Sydney’s system was surely what her daughters were able to achieve. When the BBC made a documentary about Decca called The Honourable Rebel 2 and she was a guest on the BBC Radio programme, Desert Island Discs 3 some of her remarks about their parents, and her stories about the family, were again the cause of a temporary coolness between her and her sisters, even though by this time they had more or less come to expect her to be controversial.

  Many readers of this book will be familiar with the BBC production Love in a Cold Climate, screened in the spring of 2001. But when, in 1980, Julian Jebb made a television documentary about Nancy, called Nancy Mitford - a Portrait by Her Sisters, he inadvertently stirred up what he described as a hornets’ nest. His programme was intended to coincide with an earlier dramatization based on Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, and given access to Nancy’s (then) unpublished letters he had been fascinated by the two sides of Nancy: her wit, liveliness and genuine warmth which co-existed with snobbery and the malice so often evident in her teases. Jebb interviewed and filmed Debo and Diana together. ‘Lady Mosley and the Duchess loved each other, that was clear at once,’ he noted. ‘It was not immediately apparent how profound, intense and comical is the Duchess’s protective instinct for those she loves, who include every member of the family, living or recently dead.’

  As for Diana, ‘It is hard to convey her charm, even more to defend her politics,’ he wrote. ‘The latter are neither flaunted nor evaded but when they come up in conversation they are defended or explained with a temperance of language equalled by a gentleness of tone.’4 He was especially interested that this most beautiful woman was camera-shy. It seems that just as a plain woman may have a love affair with the camera and appear a ravishing beauty on screen, the reverse can happen too. It is certainly true that there are few photographs that show Diana’s real beauty in the way that paintings of her do. ‘As soon as we began to film,’ he said, ‘her face lost all its customary animation and her replies to my questions came as if from a mask with darting eyes.’ He concluded that she felt trapped by the camera.

  He filmed Pam at her home in Gloucestershire in front of the blue stove that really was the colour of her eyes,5 and on location at Swinbrook, standing by the River Windrush, reading Nancy’s description of ‘Uncle Matthew and the chubb-fuddler’. Then he flew to California to conduct his interview with Decca. It had been set up in advance and he took to her warmth and sense of fun immediately. Things only began to go wrong when she produced a form for him to sign. This made her co-operation conditional on his including in the programme extracts of a letter about Tom, written by Nancy in 1968, at the time of the publication of Mosley’s autobiography. ‘Have you noted all the fuss about Sir Os? . . . I’m very cross with him for saying Tud was a fascist which is untrue though of course Tud was a fearful old twister & probably was a fascist when with Diana. When with me he used to mock to any extent how he hated Sir Os no doubt about that.’6

  Jebb was taken aback: ‘The letter was bound to offend Diana and might annoy the other sisters,’ he wrote in an article for the Sunday Times in the spring of 1980. ‘First I thought it was wrong of Decca not to have told me this condition before I had travelled all the way to California . . . second I thought it ironic that the great upholder of liberal principles should impose what amounted to censorship, for it is just as restricting to be forced to include something as it is to be forced to delete it.’7 In the end, though, Decca prevailed and he had no option but to include the letter. Working with Decca, he was struck by her articulate professionalism, but also by her ‘intense sadness’ at her long separation from Nancy. Diana was not upset, but she insisted on stating during her interview that Tom had been a paid-up member of the BUF, a fact now historically confirmed and curious in view of his pro-Jewish sympathies.

  The letter certainly caused more bother between the sisters in private than its inclusion in the programme merited, and following this incident Decca made a trip to England without contacting Debo or Pam. The public, however, was now so inured to the political rivalries of the sisters that the item about Tom failed to have any shock impact. Decca had felt she must make the point about her brother for he had been the only member of the family whom Esmond could bear. When the dust settled she wrote to Debo explaining that she simply didn’t believe Tom had been a Fascist. ‘Neither, apparently, did Nancy, so I wanted to be sure to get that in.’ But it is clear from Tom’s own correspondence with his oldest friend, James Lees-Milne (which, of course, Decca would never have seen), that he was sympathetic to Fascism if not Nazism. The real surprise of the programme was seventy-three-year-old Pam, for in it the ‘quiet sister’ emerged as a star performer. Giggling, pretty, funny and sometimes serious, she positively stole the show from her more famous sisters.

  At this point the Mitford industry, as the sisters referred to books and articles about their family, was at its peak, and books, plays and articles proliferated. There was a light-hearted musical called The Mitford Girls based on their lives. When Diana, Debo and Pam attended a performance the manager of the theatre gave them badges to wear, which read, ‘I really AM a Mitford girl.’8 One of the most important of the books was arguably Nicholas Mosley’s Rules of the Game, published in 1982, about his father. Nicholas was Mosley’s son by Cimmie, and the book was candid about Mosley’s prolific sex life and his mother’s distress at his father’s infidelity. Among other revelations he included private letters between his parents, written when Mosley and Diana were lovers in the period leading up to Cimmie’s death. Diana and her Mosley children were outraged, as were Nicholas’s own brother and sister. Diana was motivated by a fierce protectiveness of the love of her life for whom she was still grieving. Nicholas’ siblings and his half-brothers perhaps felt they had already suffered enough publicity because of their father. They all felt it was ‘too soon’ to make this sensitive material public.

  Nicholas justified the book by explaining that his father had asked him to write it shortly before he died, and that Diana had given him the letters without reading them. This surely says a great deal about Diana, for how many second wives would hand over this type of correspondence without at least a glance at it out of curiosity? Max, Mosley’s youngest son and Nicholas’ half-brother, suggested that his father was not compos mentis when he gave permission for the book, but Nicholas pointed out that Diana had been present at the time. Diana attempted to have publication stopped, but once again the action merely resulted in publicity, which helped the book. It was hard for Diana to have this aspect of the personal life of the man she still worship
ped spread out for public consumption, and from a source that gave it such authenticity. Predictably, Decca rather enjoyed the embarrassment caused and made quips about it in her voluminous correspondence.

  A year later Jonathan and Catherine Guinness wrote The House of Mitford, in which the Mosley case was strongly argued. This time it was Decca who refused to co-operate by withholding permission for any quotes from Hons and Rebels, or indeed any of her books or letters. ‘Leave me out,’ she wrote to her nephew grimly, ‘you’ll have plenty of copy from the rest of the family.’9 Her dislike of Jonathan had been bolstered recently at a meeting with his daughter Catherine who, when interviewing Decca for an article, showed her a letter from Jonathan in which he warned her about Decca:

  She’s a very tough cookie [he wrote], a hardened and intelligent Marxist agitator who knows very subtly how to play on her upper-class background so as to enlist residual snobbery (on both sides of the Atlantic) in establishing Marxism. But this leads to problems of identity; to an ambiguity as to what is real and what is an act. All this was very evident in her TV appearance here. Bob Treuhaft came over better, at least he is what he is. He is one piece so to speak, the bright Jewish boy with his ready made ‘red diaper’ principles, seeing (e.g.) Chatsworth from the outside with the healthy irony of a social historian.10

  Decca interpreted this letter as implying that she was ‘a liar and not to be trusted’, though Jonathan did not use those words. One friend of many to whom she wrote about the affair, wisely counselled her: ‘He probably doesn’t understand the immensely important help you have given by instinct and design, to a host of people, for most of your life, and you will never understand that the very rich and powerful, in their isolation, also need succour.’

  For fear of alienating Debo again, Decca refused to review the book for the Guardian. Instead, she sent sheets of quotable material to her circle of literary friends in England for them to use in their own reviews of the book, which she described privately as ‘a puff job for the Mosley faction’. Several reviewers used extracts from these ‘crib sheets’ of Decca’s, and at least one major review was copied almost word-for-word from Decca’s comments. Decca knew her way about the world of English reviewing which she described as ‘a small pond where people scratch each other’s backs - or bite each other’s backs - and they all know each other. At least in California if your book is reviewed well you know it’s because they like it.’11

  She employed the same tactics two years later when Selina Hastings brought out a biography of Nancy. Decca was surprised to hear that Debo, Pam, Diana and some of their childhood friends and cousins liked the new portrait of Nancy. But her contemporary letters show that she had taken against the author even before she read the book, for quite another reason: in writing to Decca, and to a New York newspaper, the author had signed herself ‘Lady Selina Hastings’. This irritated Decca: she regarded it as snobbish and she was determined not to like the book. When the biography was published it contained a derogatory remark about Bob (Treuhaft) and as far as Decca was concerned the gloves were off. She wrote a review, ‘Commentary in Defence of Nancy’,12 which was a brilliant, scathing and, of course, amusing condemnation of the book, but unfair in that she based her criticism upon a few selected passages. She made no reference to the immense amount of fascinating new material about Nancy’s relationship with Palewski, including their private correspondence, which even Decca privately conceded was ‘amazing’. And, even accounting for personal taste, the Hastings biography was far more incisive than the previous one, written by Harold Acton shortly after Nancy’s death, which Decca found unsatisfactory. In case they should miss seeing her review, Decca copied it and sent it to all her Mitford friends and connections, some of whom - to their credit - wrote to disagree with her opinion. ‘Thank you for sending me your championship of Nancy,’ James Lees-Milne wrote, while also advising that she had misquoted him in her review. ‘The Redesdale motto should be “Decca Careth For Us”, instead of God,12 for whom I don’t suppose you have much use. And I admire your loyalty but, alas, I’m afraid we don’t yet agree even on [this] book.’13

  What makes this review, and those Decca wrote of other books at the time, especially interesting to a biographer is what it reveals about Decca’s tight and confident literary style. For all the success of her first book Hons and Rebels (in the opinion of many, including me, her best book) Decca’s literary voice then had been that of an apprentice compared to what it was to become. By the 1980s her irreverent flourish had developed a polish that placed her in a superior pantheon as a wordsmith. And although her books after The American Way of Death did not have the same massive success, they were generally profitable and, more importantly, because of them, she was in constant demand for nearly two decades as a journalist and speaker. A simple list of her published articles would cover a dozen pages and she never failed to be delighted when offered a huge sum of money for her words.

  It was at this point, in the mid-1980s, that I came into contact with her. She was warm, kind, bubbling. In interviews for this book I learned from numbers of people of her generosity to friends in trouble. Indeed, some months after our first contact, when she heard that my partner had died suddenly she was both hugely sympathetic and practical. She was, in fact, pretty well irresistible. This was the side of Decca that her friends saw, but woe betide an enemy. As an opponent Decca transformed herself into a determined avenger, able to use the power of words and her celebrity status as weapons. Her letters to friends are as full of spicy gossip as were Nancy’s.

  In January 1984 Decca flew to Nicaragua with a group of writers concerned with press censorship there and in neighbouring El Salvador. Within a short time of her arrival she suffered a deep-vein thrombosis while getting into an elevator: ‘It was a very odd experience,’ she said later, ‘first a hand went, then a foot . . .’14 Fortunately, it was only a minor stroke and within a few months she had recovered and was back to normal, apart from a moderate limp. But it frightened her. For years she had been drinking and smoking heavily - when short of words she found drinking helped, and she had been addicted to cigarettes from her youth. Now, three years short of seventy, these indulgences began to take an inevitable toll. Warned to give up smoking at least, she promised to try, and took to chewing a brand of gum marketed in the USA as an aid to quitting, ‘because I have been such a bore to Bob and everyone,’ she wrote to Debo. ‘He was a total saint this time but how can he be expected to be ditto if it recurs due to my own fault?’

  Apart from a few months for recuperation from the stroke, her work was unaffected. Later in 1984 she wrote Faces of Philip, an affectionate memoir of Philip Toynbee, Esmond’s oldest friend, and she followed this with a biography of her mother’s heroine, Grace Darling. Both books required her to spend long periods in England researching, and Grace Had an English Heart was eventually published in 1987. Neither of these latter books sold in quantity and Decca became bored with Grace Darling long before she completed the work. ‘Grey Starling is about to take wing,’ she wrote to her correspondents, ‘oh the amazing relief. Decompression.’ She was far more interested in the fulfilment of a long-held ambition: a trip to Russia.

  Bob and Benjamin, along with Dinky, her husband and two children, and her immense circle of friends in the Bay area, many of whom dated back to the days when she had first arrived in California in the early 1940s, were paramount in her life, but she relished any new controversy that reared its head in the news as natural fodder for her articles. In the spring of 1989 the Islamic fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie for his book Satanic Verses. On the day this was announced Decca appeared wearing an outsize cardboard lapel badge upon which she had printed ‘I AM Salman Rushdie’. Later the badge went into production and was worn all over the USA by those opposed to literary censorship, and subsequently Rushdie himself was absorbed into Decca’s vast international circle of literary and media friends. ‘About the Salman Rushdie badges,’ Decca wrote gaily to Debo, ‘I’d send you on
e, but I fear you don’t look much like him.’

  Some years earlier, in 1982, Debo had also broken into print with The House; it was part autobiography and part a contemporary history of Chatsworth. She had written it as a product for the Chatsworth shops but it sold well generally, both in the UK and the USA, and she suddenly found herself touring on the lecture circuit in its wake. ‘Nancy once told me,’ Decca wrote, ‘that if you ever became a writer you’d put us both in the shade.’ In response to frequent requests from visitors Debo also wrote The Estate in 1990 (and in 2001 was working on a revision of The House prior to its planned republication).

  When Andrew and Debo celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in 1991, the Duke spoke of their years together: ‘My wife and I realize how lucky we have been,’ he said. On thinking how best to celebrate the occasion he had had the idea of a ‘golden wedding party’ to which he and Debo would invite not friends and dignitaries but other Derbyshire couples who had married in 1941. He thought that, with luck, a dozen or so marriages might have survived fifty years and made the announcement. To the Devonshires’ surprise and amusement, nearly a thousand couples applied, not all from Derbyshire, and this resulted in a massive party, held in a marquee almost a quarter of a mile long, at Chatsworth. There are undoubtedly some who would dismiss this generous gesture as paternalism, but there is equally no doubt that the happy occasion gave pleasure to a large number of people, and the attitude of the Duke and Duchess towards each other at that event showed the depth of their affection for each other.