Irrepressible (42 page)

IN 1970, SAN Francisco was still absorbing scads of young people. Haight-Ashbury was in decline, but to its young émigrés, that meant cheap rent and easy-to-find drugs. Politicos and apoliticos made their accommodations; they shared garish, painted Victorians, rice and beans, and their mattresses on the floor. Even the most oblivious “
freek
-child” would throw on her glad rags and parade in the day’s demonstration against the war in Vietnam. The surliest Socialist Workers Party member knew a Sunday in Golden Gate
Park meant he’d probably lose a battle to a tambourine and end up with his shirt off in the sunshine. Most hippies and radicals agreed the music was still in ascendance; so were hallucinogens and the underground press. In the Bay Area, there were several underground papers, of which the
Oracle
was the most celebrated for its psychedelic design. The
Berkeley Barb
was starting to actually make money, thanks to the brilliant stroke of its editor, Max Scherr, to charge money for its sexy personals. The
Berkeley Tribe
was an earnest, seat-of-the-pants organization with a devoted radical staff and following. There was an acknowledged small-press revolution going on in the early 1970s. The little magazines and niche books introduced hundreds of new poets and titles like
How to Make Your Own Moccasins
and
The Anarchist Cookbook
, both of which landed a devoted readership outside the mainstream.

Decca, who was accustomed to the well-capitalized publishing houses of New York and London, was established on the commercial end of the bohemian spectrum. She didn’t have a daily column like other influential journalists, although she was offered one as a sports writer for the
Chronicle
. (Despite her knowing next to nothing about sports, the idea was that in order to keep Decca around, they would publish her wisecracks on just about anything. But when her first question to the section editor midway through the summer was, “When does the baseball season start?” everyone involved reconsidered.) Her latest projects and antic personality kept her in the news—she could enjoy the let-it-all-hang-out attitudes of the younger and emerging literati, but her work ethic was that of the disciplined veteran professional, no matter how much she drank.

Bob’s law firm was as busy as it would ever be, defending Black Panthers, professors, students, community organizers, hippies, and dissidents of all stripes. So, when a seventy-two-year-old woman approached him with the complaint that she’d been conned out of some money spent on a correspondence course for writers, she stood out in vivid contrast. A widow on a fixed income, she had originally welcomed the nice young salesman, who had told her about the Famous Writers School, where she could study on her own
time at home and receive personal guidance from best-selling authors. She had signed on, but then had second thoughts about the expense involved. When the Famous Writers School refused to return her money, she consulted Bob Treuhaft, famous in Oakland for tackling fraud.

When Bob summarized the case for Decca, she felt she’d heard this cri de coeur before in her conversations with the victims of funeral swindles. There were different promises involved, but the consequences of a con could leave a person feeling small and silly. The facts as they began to unfold showed that only 10 percent of Famous Writers School students completed their course. Those who had paid in advance but wished to withdraw were threatened with legal action if they demanded a refund. Still, the controversy surrounding it would never have gone so far and so fast if Decca’s first efforts to place an article about the Famous Writers School had not been met with some reluctance on the part of the editors of the
Atlantic
magazine. The publication had been accepting ads from the Famous Writers School for years. Yes, the editors agreed, perhaps the writing course was unethical, and they shouldn’t endorse it in the future. However, they wrote to Decca, “wouldn’t it be equally unethical to publish a piece blasting them!!!” (The exclamation points are hers.)

“I am
furious
,” Decca told everyone who asked. She had seen these kinds of shenanigans from people in power before. The funeral men had tried to quash her book, tried to suppress her articles, to silence her by red-baiting and other smears. She did not take kindly to threats of blacklisting or, in this case, blackballing in the writing world. The whisper of suppression was, to Decca, like the inspiring breath of an avenging goddess. Exposing such cruel deceptions appealed to the muckraker and gadfly in her prime.

Decca had her pick of publications, but the
Atlantic
editors soon patched things up to her satisfaction, and the magazine featured “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers” in their July 1970 issue. The project, Decca said, gave her “more pleasure from start to finish, than any other,” and in its composition, she was able to apply all her reporting techniques. Her interviewing style was to be well prepared and self-assured; she enjoyed the
chase. She asked graduated questions, from kind to cruel. It was her “special stroke of genius” to extract quotes that were less carefully cultivated or well thought-out and, as a result, were more revealing, funny, and sometimes embarrassing. Decca liked to call them “spontaneous and true.”

On a big article like the one on the Famous Writers School, she rarely worked alone. Her friends helped out by posing as aspiring writers passing along the feeble reports they would receive from their correspondence school tutors. The Famous Writers School ads proclaimed that a rewarding career awaited the well-trained scribe, and it all started with the completion of an aptitude test, which one could find on the inside cover of a matchbook. “Of course, the whole thing is a terrific fraud,” she wrote to Aranka.

Bennett Cerf, one of the Famous Writers School guiding faculty, was among the most important figures in English-language publishing. He was also president of Random House, which owned Decca’s publisher, Knopf. As editor of Nancy’s most famous book, he had come up with her book’s title,
Love in a Cold Climate
. That the highly placed Cerf endorsed and profited from what Decca called a swindle only made him more desirable quarry, and her interview with him is the article’s pièce de résistance. Decca asked Cerf how he could countenance both promising and charging so much to vulnerable idealists. Settling into a confiding chat, he agreed that sometimes, a beginning writer’s expectation was inflated, but in addition to producing publishable writers, their enterprise was to draw attention to their public-spirited guiding faculty, whose confidence in education and opportunity was well documented. As leader of the Famous Writers School faculty, Cerf also enjoyed the media attention. “I’m an awful ham,” he said. “I love to see my name in the papers.” As to the mail-order school’s material success and future, this depended on “a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible.” Realizing at once that the vulnerable idealists in his audience could be offended by the word
gullible
, Cerf asked Decca not to quote him. “Would you prefer to paraphrase?” she asked. He offered a long-winded alternative, to which Decca replied, “Sorry I don’t call that a paraphrase. I shall have to use both of them.”

The finished article read as if it were written by the bloodthirsty Addison DeWitt crossed with the staunch Honoria Glossop. (Or is she, as Alexander Cockburn suggests, a kind of “Aunt Dahlia”? Readers of P. G. Wodehouse may take their pick.) Decca called the finished article “one of the clear-cut successes however temporary of my muckraking career.” Its publication in the
Atlantic
magazine busted the organization. The school’s guiding faculty would briefly suffer the public mortification of cartoons and comedians. Its stock would plummet and plunge the enterprise into financial ruin.

On September 21, 1971, Decca wrote to Nancy: “Wasn’t it sad about Bennett Cerf croaking. I felt v. put out about that, as it takes almost as long in my experience to make satisfactory enemies as satisfactory friends, and there he’s not. By the way: those Famous Writers have gone bankrupt. I wish one cld. sink the prisons as easily.”

HUE NEWTON AND his friend Bobby Seale had started the Black Panther Party as a local organization in Oakland. Seale was in prison in Chicago, and Newton, convicted of killing a policeman, was serving his sentence in California. The campaign to “Free Huey” during his trial and appeals process had turned the charismatic leader into a national icon. In Newton’s absence, the acting chairman of the Black Panther Party was David Hilliard, whose leadership skills were underwhelming compared with the airy Newton, the inspirational Bobby Seale, and the brilliant Eldridge Cleaver, then in exile in Algeria. Hilliard, like Newton, had grown up in Oakland and knew of Bob Treuhaft’s defense of Jerry Newson. He also knew Decca to be an outspoken supporter of the Panther program. (In a letter to Virginia Durr—who had expressed concern that SNCC had rejected nonviolence to support the Black Panthers—Decca wrote: “I know in my heart of hearts that if I was their age and their colour I’d be with them 100%.”) When French writer and political activist Jean Genet came to California to speak for Huey’s
defense campaign, Hilliard knew who to call. Would Decca hold a benefit honoring Genet at her house for the Panther Defense Fund?

Decca had just begun research on her next book about the American prison system, and here, dropping into her lap, was this fascinating French author, jailbird, and outlaw. His subjects were sex and violence, coercion and liberation. He was extrovertly gay and opposed to American imperialism and creeping stupidity. Her dear friend Maya Angelou had even performed in a Genet play in the early 1960s off Broadway in
The Blacks
. The ideal guest! Her own French was quite good, but they’d have an interpreter on hand. The Panthers, Hilliard said, admired their French comrade-in-arms, though they’d had some trouble communicating.

Genet or “this cat,” as Hilliard called him, had peculiar hygiene, which the sartorially disciplined Panthers tried to accommodate. Genet’s biographer, Edmund White, said the writer “slept in his clothes, seldom bathed, and lived on a diet of Gitane cigarettes and Nembutals.” Genet was delighted to accept when Hilliard offered to suit him out in brand-new clothes for the Treuhaft affair. The FBI got wind of Decca’s party almost as soon as she had set the date: March 20, 1970.

White described the days before Decca’s party. At a Los Angeles fundraiser hosted by Dalton Trumbo, Genet had an enjoyable conversation in French with Jane Fonda. The following morning, Genet awoke, separate from his traveling companions. He was in some kind of chateau—he didn’t know where—and when he couldn’t find a Francophone, he called Fonda. To find his coordinates, she said, he should go outside and describe the swimming pool, which he did. “You’re at Donald Sutherland’s. I’ll be right over,” she said. The next night, Genet appeared at a party at Stanford, where Ken Kesey showed up high as a kite.
Ramparts
had provided a translator, who had her work cut out for her when Kesey exclaimed he was “wearing green socks, can you dig it? Green socks. They’re heavy, man, very heavy.”

The party at Regent Street was wall-to-wall people. Herb Gold guesstimated around 150 guests. To him, the party was “like a street fair,” with
newspaper hawkers sidling through the crowd, and advocates of one campaign or another circulating with petitions to be signed and requests for money. There was plenty to eat and plenty of wine for the growing crowd, which was, according to young Berkeley resident Jan Herman, composed of “Bay Area radicals, politicos, artists, poets, journalists, professors and other high-minded riffraff.” In the backyard, the smell of marijuana drifted around small clusters of newly made friends. The company was noisy with laughter and quarrels, reunions and denunciations. Gold remembers a fight. Not everybody knew about the guest of honor. Some, like Jan Herman, assumed the party was “to hear the latest news and to rally the troops, raise money, and generally show our solidarity with the leaders of the antiwar movement.” Stew Albert and his girlfriend Judy Gumbo, a Yippie and women’s liberationist, were already ensconced with a glass of wine when Hilliard and “Field Marshal” Donald Cox arrived with a couple of bodyguards. The Black Panther cohort wore matching military-style jackets ornamented with glittering red Mao badges, and “Free Huey” buttons. Black berets sailed upon their spherical Afros, and the men wore dark glasses indoors, which was customary. They were at once forbidding and beautiful to see, and with their arrival, Albert noted a distinct lowering of spirits.

Decca welcomed everyone with a few laughing words and a drink. She’d had some doubt about whether Genet would show, but Hilliard assured her he was on his way. Hilliard and his guard settled on a large couch and murmured to each other through the subsequent announcements and short speeches, before the main event.

Cox warned the Yippie couple that things might get nasty. Hilliard, he said, was in a bad mood. In his own reconstruction of the evening’s events, Hilliard admitted his “fuse” was “already short” and he was anxious to protect the Panthers’ financial interests (meaning contributions to Huey’s defense fund) once people from the antiwar movement started making speeches about Vietnam and donations started to flow.