Irrepressible (36 page)

To her hometown papers, however, Decca was the story. The
Oakland Tribune
and the
San Francisco Examiner
reported that she had been one of the fifteen hundred people trapped in the church overnight. Decca’s FBI files provided a press round-up of her Montgomery experience and gave the last word to Herb Caen, a columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, in his May 25, 1961, piece: “Author JESSICA MITFORD TREUHAFT had joined the ‘Freedom Riders’ in Alabama and had to take refuge in a church to escape the wrath of ‘Ku Kluxers’ . . . ‘And only a howling mob,’ she adds ‘could keep me in church for 12 hours!’”

T
WO YEARS AFTER
Frontier
magazine published Decca’sarticle on funerals, the
Saturday Evening Post
planned its own feature. Writer Roul Tunley came to California to conduct his research and asked to meet the Treuhafts.

Tunley’s article began with a report on a televised debate between funeral industry honchos and “those who feel that burials in this country have reached a pinnacle of extravagance and tastelessness unknown since the days of the Pharaohs.” Decca, he called, “the sharpest thorn in the morticians’ sides.” The topics under debate included inflated prices (Tunley reported that in 1961, funeral bills represented the largest item an average family would ever buy, “excepting a house or automobile”) and alternatives to lavish funerals like cremation and co-op societies, for which, he wrote, Mrs. Treuhaft was also a “tireless recruiter.” In Tunley’s article, Decca at age forty-three appeared an immensely likable and informed champion on behalf of the vulnerable. She was also slightly wacky: an English auntie, fomenting rebellion “over the teacups,” not averse to going undercover in “widow’s weeds” to ferret out some backroom swindles at your local funeral establishment. Tunley’s portrait was an early version of Decca as the crusading eccentric, a characterization that would eventually bloom into “Queen of the Muckrakers” and jolly doyenne.

In June, after the
Saturday Evening Post
published Tunley’s article, an editor from the magazine told the Treuhafts that “Can You Afford to Die?” had generated “more mail than they had ever received on anything they had ever printed.” The subject’s popularity didn’t surprise Bob, who thought a book about American funeral practices would also be a surefire hit. First, Bob encouraged Tunley to expand his work, but once the writer demurred
(he said he had another subject in mind), Bob suggested to Decca that she write the book. The project would demand a lot of research and a certain sensibility—in fact, Bob thought it cried out for his wife’s special talents. Decca said she would write it on the condition that her husband agreed to help. The timing was right. The Romilly inheritance would enable Bob, after years of penny-pinching, to take a sabbatical. In his absence, Bob’s law partners, including family friend Dobby Brin Walker, could be relied on to keep their now moderately successful practice stable. As the book began to take shape, an FBI special agent assigned to monitor Decca’s activities filed a note to say the Treuhafts were plotting a joint venture, worth keeping an eye on.

 

DECCA’S CURIOSITY ABOUT funerals came naturally. Her childhood room had overlooked a cemetery. The younger Mitford daughters, Debo said, “were forbidden to watch funerals, which of course made them more fascinating, and we always did. Jessica and I once fell into a newly dug grave, to the delight of Nancy who pronounced that we should have bad luck the rest of our lives.” Very little bad luck attended the early days of Decca’s book about funerals. She was soon absorbed in her research, delighted by the details she could excavate in her own living room by turning the pages of trade magazines where she found editorials like “Children’s Funerals: A Golden Opportunity to Build Good Will.”

In the journal
Casket and Sunnyside
, she was delighted to discover “New Bra-Form, Post Mortem Form Restoration, Accomplishes So Much for So Little.” “They only cost $11 for a package of 50. Shall I send some?” she asked her goddaughter Kathy Kahn. Meanwhile, Bob spent a good deal of time in the library at San Francisco College of Mortuary Science. He’d do more, she told Kathy, “but he keeps saying they only maintain a skeleton staff there over the holidays.” On a research visit to Forest Lawn Cemetery near Los Angeles, Decca marveled at their February and March specials: “Thus making it worth one’s while, I suppose, to ‘pass on’ during one of these months!”

She and Bob already had a title, and it was a beaut:
The American Way of Death.
This was direct from Howard C. Raether, the unsuspecting mortuary executive who, with the boosterism of an industry with no natural enemy, pronounced, “Funerals are becoming more and more a part of the American way of life.”

The American way of life—such a capacious concept. In America, one could become anyone, rise to anything, go anywhere. Who better to comment on the irony than two ex-red menaces, themselves persecuted for unorthodox or impossible ideas? The Treuhafts may have been temporarily outmaneuvered, but now they would tell the world about the consequences of materialism, consumerism, commercialism, and rampant capitalism. Comparing extravagant funerals to the excessive and unnecessary ornamentation on Cadillacs, that international symbol of American triumphalism, Decca threw down the gantlet. “It’s a racket,” she exclaimed. “Why can’t we have funerals without fins?” Despite this arbiter-of-taste theme, there is about the emergent book very little of the puritan judge.

Decca reassembled her book committee, which as a group decided from the outset “to go for the jugular and expose, not the occasional miscreant, but the profiteering and monopolistic practices of the industry as a whole as exemplified by its most respectable and ethical practitioners.” One of the book’s most important themes would be questioning why so many American morticians insisted on embalming for hygiene. This procedure they held to be necessary and sanitary—another superior product to eliminate those germs that bedeviled Americans in daily life and (when the morticians could sell it) the hereafter. As Neil Brown, president of the San Francisco Funeral Directors Association, told Tunley, “I’m not concerned with what they do in England or France, any more than what they do in the Congo. In this country
everybody
can be embalmed. It’s the American way.”

Embalming was an art with its most particular connoisseurs and aficionados, accessories and products like Tru-Lanol Arterial Fluid. One testimonial that Decca came across was written by a satisfied customer to describe a very difficult case: “‘69-year old woman, was 40 hours in heated apartment
before being discovered . . . after 4 days of Tru-Lanol treatment, all was OK.’ He adds wistfully, ‘I wish I could have kept her for four more days.’”

Decca thought her readers would appreciate the offbeat direction her work was taking. Having confidence in her material meant she could follow the thread of an outré subject like embalming where it led. She was particularly amused by the attention paid by the champions of embalming to the importance of a “Beautiful Memory Picture.” This embodied the philosophy that the deceased would essentially be best remembered as a rouged and powdered doll. Decca satirized the theory (which seemed to her absurd), but it wasn’t an easy one to pry loose. Affluent Americans were generally advised not to view a body (even minutes after its death) unless embalmed, because that last imprint might obliterate all preceding memories. The argument didn’t make sense, but it was a tenacious one that folklore reinforced and the funeral industry exploited.

The favorable reception of the first hundred pages by Decca’s friends had been encouraging. When she sent these pages off to her British and American publishers (the same companies that had brought out her memoir), she anticipated some grumbling regarding the embalming chapter. Instead, she was shocked to hear that her British publisher didn’t like the chapters at all. Her agent James MacGibbon thought the work such a “bad and ghoulish joke” that he couldn’t represent it and resigned. Decca’s American publisher, Lovell Thompson at Houghton Mifflin, didn’t care for the book’s tone, either. His suggestion was that she cut out the “foolishness,” which led her to this defense:

Decca and Bob had a Plan B. They decided they would rather change publishers than alter the book’s tone, or if it came to it, a Plan C, in which they would mimeograph the manuscript and sell it themselves as they had with
Lifeitselfmanship
. They were used to working in an inky mess outside the system, and though the fruits of mainstream success could be enjoyable, such success wasn’t necessary. In any case, that scheme proved irrelevant when Decca’s new agent, Candida Donadio, negotiated a better deal with thirty-year-old Simon and Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, whose guidance seemed to Decca “like all the members of my Book Committee rolled into one.”

IN JANUARY 1962, segregationists in the South were firming up their defenses. In Alabama, the white riot at the Montgomery bus station had not resulted in a single conviction. Bull Connor, who was police chief in Birmingham at the time of the event, was running for governor on a platform that included acquiring a pack of “police dogs to sic on any freedom riders who ventured into Alabama.”

From its new national offices in Atlanta, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC pronounced “snick”) dedicated many of its resources to voter registration, and students and community organizers began to make their way south to work for them. It was typical for segregationists to accuse these community activists of Communism. There had been a great deal of discussion at the top levels of the mainstream civil rights movement concerning whether to accept the support of radicals and progressives (any of which might be perceived as Communists). The NAACP
leaders were concerned that such alliances would slow its progress. NAACP membership was typically older and more cautious, while the students at SNCC were more often urgent and passionate. They had something new to add to the careful design that their elders had plotted. It was their time, and not only would the SNCC leaders fail to be intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan and its political surrogates, but they wouldn’t countenance the deceit of the red hunters.

Just as SNCC had pondered the public perception of ex-menaces, so did Decca’s book committee. Was this finally the right time for Decca to declare that she had been a Communist? It was a sticky question, which hadn’t been relevant to her previous book. Anyone who had read
Daughters and Rebels
would have known she was a lefty, but apart from family controversies, she hadn’t had to defend any particular political position. By 1962, the country had distanced itself from the mad McCarthy years, but
Commie
was still a curse word. Khrushchev was perceived as the very model of a totalitarian leader: Dissidents were being shot trying to escape from East to West Germany, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco had done nothing to rehabilitate the reputation of socialism in the United States. At the same time, spies, world domination, and atomic annihilation were increasingly the subject of satire in cartoons and pulp fiction, in movies and on TV. Boris and Natasha were klutzy. If
The American Way of Death
had enough momentum to really challenge it, the funeral industry would have something to gain from discrediting the Mitford-Treuhaft past.

Decca decided it was only fair to prepare her new publishers, so she came clean to Robert Gottlieb. From the first, she’d found her new editor simpatico. He might have been young and full of himself, but he wanted to take risks. The admiration was mutual. Asked by filmmaker Ida Landauer to explain Decca’s appeal, Gottlieb said, “She has all her wits about her and most people have no wits at all.”

Decca found Gottlieb unsurprised by her disclosure, which must have felt like a jolt to her. So many people, herself included, had worked so hard for so long to keep their affiliations secret. Perhaps it was simply that
the intellectuals in Gottlieb’s generation assumed that most of their elders “were now or once had been [Communist].” In the same interview with Landauer, Gottlieb assessed Decca’s party membership: “Essentially she did it for a tease. I don’t think she would have been quite so ardent a communist, if she hadn’t known that quite so many people would be upset because she was one.”