Irrepressible (40 page)

At this point, Decca was going back and forth to England routinely. What did her friends there think about the riots in Chicago? her American friends would ask her. Why can’t the Brits understand that the word
negro
has been consigned to the dustbin of history? The people Decca knew over there all seemed fascinated by the Black Panthers and their fashions: berets and bandoleers, the way the Panthers paraded with their guns in plain sight. (
Can they do that? Yes, with a license
.) Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther
leader, had been telling friends that Bob was a childhood hero of his for his defense of Jerry Newson, whose case Newton had followed from the time he was a kid in West Oakland.

There was a lot of small talk and gossip. Someone had succeeded, someone had failed, someone had a brilliant idea, someone had been neglected, someone had seen something never seen before: at a gallery; on
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
; in a wild, psychedelic poster with curvy writing. They’d heard a song, heard a rumor. It was a time of marvels, new designs, new figures of speech: “far out,” “out of sight,” “hassle,” “right on,” “power to the people.” Decca chain-smoked to her heart’s content, gossiped to excess, ate party treats that were sweeter or saltier or fattier than routine fare, drank without inhibition.

Planning a sensational party takes a dedicated hostess. Decca was charismatic, self-assured, and unflappable. She gave parties because they were fun, a kind of service, and she was really good at it. Like a great stage director, Decca had a flair for analyzing social currents. She worked the room as diva, belle, English auntie, battling avenger, witty salonist. She listened carefully, roared at jokes, drank too much, and scattered compliments prodigiously. She might make one friend feel special by announcing his accomplishments and qualities to the assembled company, and another by retreating to a back room for quiet confidences.

At the Regent Street parties, guests found Bob just as funny as Decca but “quieter.” Bob would stay on the outskirts as Decca held court. In those days, when political, social, and personal liberation was wreaking havoc on a lot of marriages, Herb Gold thought the Treuhafts seemed “the most bonded couple,” but without any obvious “sense of intimacy.” Gold flirted as much as the next middle-aged male novelist, but he never felt a sexual vibe from Decca. She was not flirtatious. She had enjoyed two successful marriages and seemed content. Bob “enjoyed her fame and he was gracious and smart enough not to compete.” Adam and Eva Lapin’s son Mark thought Bob and Decca had a wonderful relationship. As a red-diaper kid, he saw the spectrum of party marriages and thought they were universally fraught,
the dynamic usually “strong women, men with their heads in the clouds.” Marge Frantz thought Bob could be a “cold fish,” but other women found him sophisticated and attentive, and he could always make a girl laugh. Parties are the stage for flirtations, and if Decca presided at the center, Bob was never bored or unoccupied at the margins. He liked the company of women.

While Gold talked to Bob “about law cases,” Gold and Decca “talked about writing, not literature. She liked to talk about money, agents.” Gold speculated about Decca’s consistent good humor: She was, he thought, “metabolically cheerful—self-medicated with alcohol, and protected by an adoring husband.”

Decca was nearly fifty years old, but she held to the dreams of her youth and often made new friends, many of them younger by decades. At Sonia Orwell’s home in London, she first met the writer Maya Angelou. Theirs was a friendship that would deepen and thrive and sustain Decca and would come to equal the love and affection she felt for her sisters. But it provided at times even more immediacy, intimacy, and intellectual justice. They respected one another without childhood wounds or armor. They played Scrabble and Boggle and sang show tunes and folk songs and would occasionally treat their friends to a grandly over-the-top recitation of “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” both their deep voices dramatically quavering on the line “The Arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.”

In the past, Decca had sometimes found the limelight beastly, but at her parties, she basked in it. She and Bob had achieved local fame for their hard-won accomplishments, and these celebrations were another way to share the wealth. “The thing I’m most afraid of in life is being bored,” she told Mark Lapin. For Decca and Bob, planning parties, throwing parties, even postparty anatomizing, was a way of keeping their marriage interesting. Through the 1960s, the Treuhafts’ parties gave a lot of people pleasure, while reserving their hosts a ringside seat on the increasingly youth-centric counterculture.

Decca was as desirable a guest as hostess. For her fiftieth birthday, her friends held a party on a ferryboat on the San Francisco Bay. They served a whole roast pig, and the entertainment included a Chinese dragon dance and fireworks. “It really did take the edge off the dreaded entry into Old Age,” she wrote.

IN 1967, THE Mitford sisters then living in France and England had among themselves a scandalous piece of gossip about Dinky and James Forman. Debo first informed Nancy that she’d heard from Sonia Orwell, who’d heard the news:

Nancy was languid in her response: “Is he
the
foreman or is he called foreman?” Decca wrote to clarify that she was not in the least unhappy with recent tidings: “Mrs. O. slightly mis-reported me.” Her concern was not the pregnancy but that Jim and Dinky still had no plans to marry. “I only said that now, if someone says ‘Would you want yr. daughter to marry a Negro?’ I could answer, ‘
Rather
.’”

Decca and Bob now called Forman their “common-law son-in-law.” They weren’t happy that Forman was still married to another woman, an arrangement that didn’t disturb Decca’s sense of propriety as much as raise fears about her daughter’s financial security. Decca always minded issues of money and independence. She never objected outright to her daughter’s arrangement, but she did complain to her friends. She didn’t think he was
much of a writer, and as an ersatz husband, he exploited her daughter. She told Marge that Dinky did the greater share of housework and that her contribution to Jim’s book wasn’t fairly compensated or acknowledged. Herb Gold said Decca and Bob both held “a lot of anger” against Jim. Benjy saw a different story at home. When his parents spoke about Jim’s work, “they were impressed by him and liked what he was doing.”

Decca would not denounce Jim directly to her daughter, but she fell into the habit of mean teasing, mainly about Dinky and Jim’s failure to wed. Mother and daughter’s quarrel escalated until Dinky and Decca “had a knock-down drag-out fight.” Dinky made it clear that her mother would have to keep her snide remarks about marriage to herself in the future. Decca argued hotly but conceded in the end. She wouldn’t risk losing her daughter’s friendship or contact with her new grandson, James Robert Lumumba Forman, born June 1967.

 

A SOON AS Decca landed the subject for her next book, the public announcement appeared in Herb Caen’s column and was duly entered into Decca’s FBI files as follows: “Caen mentioned subject after describing her ‘as one of our leadings citizens.’ He stated that subject was writing a book on DR. BENJAMIN SPOCK’S upcoming trial.”

She would attend and then write a book about the court case of the famous baby doctor whose work counseling young men to avoid the draft had resulted in an indictment for conspiracy “to disobey the draft law.” A few obstacles seemed certain. Most important, she’d have to unknot all the legal threads of the federal conspiracy laws. The six defendants—Mike Ferber, Dr. Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr.—had never all met together before their pretrial discussion with lawyers to plan their defense. Her job would be to illustrate the human cost when political dissidents were linked by thought.

The Boston court setting, the upright, well-meaning, and courteous defendants, did not at first promise much drama, but time would tell. She
would have to learn as she went, write on the spot, turn it around quickly, and publish while the verdict was still relevant. Decca thought her new project fascinating, though others, Nancy for one, might rule it a bore.

In the spring of 1968, Decca was visiting New York City with Dinky and grandson Jamie when President Johnson announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection. By the time Decca left for Washington to start research on her book, Martin Luther King had been assassinated. She’d hoped to interview counsel at the Justice Department and independent journalists like Andrew Kopkind and I. F. Stone, but both were too busy covering the revolution that week. Decca described the city after it had endured days of rioting: “Washington was rather extraorder, and beastly; what with the curfew, and rather dense smoke, one couldn’t get out much.” She went from there to Boston, where the riots had also spread and student strikers had occupied Harvard.

As the trial of Dr. Spock began, the world outside seemed tilted off its axis. Decca tried to do the necessary research. On June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot. Aranka’s husband, the unreliable Al Kliot, died the same week. Decca hadn’t had much to do with Al, but here was another loss, and she hated to see Aranka suffer. It did feel rather like the war again, the way people were dying horribly, disappearing.

Conspiracy laws are baroque and labyrinthine. The government does not have to prove that anyone did anything illegal, just that he or she agreed to commit a crime. Decca wanted, in 1968, to take this post-HUAC, New Left moment to speak against the use of conspiracy laws as an historic weapon that would attack the American Left and stifle dissent. Bob helped her out with some research, and together they wrote this summary: “The law of conspiracy is so irrational, its implications so far removed from ordinary experience or modes of thought, that like the Theory of Relativity it escapes just beyond the boundaries of the mind. One can dimly understand it while an expert is explaining it, but minutes later it is not easy to tell it back.”

The defense dismissed the conspiracy idea as irrelevant. “Spock and Coffin particularly were demanding (and I think expecting),” Decca wrote,
“a confrontation with the Govt. on the legality of the war, and hence of the Selective Service Act.” The defendants welcomed a public debate on the Vietnam War and the draft. They shared the belief that the United States was acting “in violation of international conventions” and was responsible for the “bombing of noncombatants, wanton destruction of civilian dwellings, and the use of torture in interrogation of prisoners.”

To the government prosecutors, trial court was not the place to debate the legality or morality of the Vietnam War. Decca had expected the antiwar movement in Boston to remonstrate and make a louder fuss. But Boston remained cool, proper, and dignified, following the lawyers’ preference to keep a sense of decorum. Decca thought this strategy wrong and old-fashioned. She appreciated Spock’s position that “the people in power are nothing to fear,” but did he have to be so serene about it? She labored to give the characters some drama, but it wasn’t easy. She tried color when drama flagged: Describing Judge Francis Ford’s courtroom, Decca quoted the
London Times
expression of “vaguely lavatorial.” During the trial, she made friends with other reporters, including Dan Lang of the
New Yorker
. “Dan has a low threshold of boredom and mercifully enlivened each day with his restive sotto voce comments: ‘Jessica would you ask the bailiff to close the door? I’m afraid if I ask him he’ll think I’m trying to avoid the draft.’”

 

THE JURY RETURNED guilty verdicts for five of the defendants, and as they filed their first appeals, Decca feared that the public’s interest in the trial soon would fizzle and her book suffer the same fate. Fizz was that most ephemeral of qualities. It was what characterized the best of sister Nancy’s books—delicacy combined with a funny sort of disinterest (an oblique glance that nothing escaped). Too much handling, worrying, attention, or time could flatten the fizz, turn a thing either campy or cold. Writing
The Trial of Dr. Spock
had been “a very, very uphill job,” she wrote Virginia Durr. Even Bob’s review was unenthusiastic: It was “a workman like job but not up to your best standards,” he said.

In August, she may have wished to drop the whole enterprise and go cover the 1968 Democratic convention, but she stayed in Oakland and wrapped up her book. By then she understood, along with everyone else who was paying attention, that the nature of the antiwar movement had changed into something considerably more militant—even the pacifists were more aggressive.
Revolution
was the word, and from her perch in Northern California, it certainly looked to be the deed. She and Bob had seen revolts rise and fall, but this one had a different energy; its subliminal voice saying
let yourself go
was so seductive. In her fifties, Decca could recognize the thrills and euphoria as well as the certain danger ahead for her young friends. As a Communist, she had been labeled a subversive, but as Bob liked to point out, they were always law-abiding. Decca had scoffed at some laws; she might have indulged her renegade nature by walking out on a bill or dressing down a snob, but as a Communist, she had simply represented the antagonist in that chapter of America’s war on dissent.