Irrepressible (43 page)

Genet arrived in a red convertible with an entourage including an interpreter, Newton’s lawyer Charles Garry, and several conspicuously armed
Black Panthers. Decca was justifiably pleased by the crowd she’d mustered on such short notice. Leading Genet through the crowd, she said, “Isn’t it nice that so many people have turned out to hear you?”

“All people are nice,” Genet replied, “until they start talking politics.”

The Frenchman was very short, and there followed some brief discourse between hosts and bodyguards concerning whether he ought to stand on an ordinary chair, with the result that Bob left to track down a stepladder.

Genet spoke persuasively and with great feeling. He believed the Black Panthers to be in the persecuted vanguard of a resistance movement and Huey Newton a prisoner of war. Concluding his remarks, the author agreed to take a few questions. A professor from one of the local colleges jumped to his feet. “What do you think we should
do
?” he asked.

“
You
ask
me
how to counteract racism in America? Asinine!” Genet grumbled. “I’m from France.”

Perhaps considering the level of inquiry, Genet stepped down. Having such a large and attentive audience, Bob Treuhaft suggested that Tom Hayden follow up with a few comments about the Chicago Eight trial, which had ended the month before. Hayden lived in Berkeley; he had just returned home after three weeks in jail. As Hayden ascended the stepladder, David Hilliard booed. This was a Black Panther’s fund-raiser, and Hilliard meant to keep the focus. “Why is Hayden free while Bobby Seale’s still in prison?” he shouted. As Hayden described his own sense of outrage about Seale’s shackling during the trial and continued imprisonment, Hilliard continued to bait and boo. Hayden, who looked to Jan Herman “composed as a turtle,” still resisted a public quarrel.

To some in the excited crowd, Hilliard’s antagonism seemed to represent the widening crack in the movement’s black and white alliance. “The alliance between black revolutionaries and their white supporters had begun to fray,” wrote Stew Albert. “Some white radicals were keeping their distance from the Panthers’ headquarters; partly the sandbags and automatic weapons put them off.”

Hilliard may have wished to appear decisive before his foreign guest, or he was just superbly pissed off. Whatever his reason, the acting chairman launched a gallon jug of wine toward Hayden. But his aim was bad, and instead, he struck Jane McClure, a twelve-year-old girl who was sitting on the floor by her father, poet Michael McClure. Instantly, the news rippled out to the outer reaches of the house and stretched with each retelling: The child was wounded; the child was nearly beheaded; the unarmed poet was facing down Hilliard and his bodyguards. Bob, who had stepped outside for a moment, reentered to see Jane McClure sobbing and many of his guests shouting and streaming out the doors. (Some of them expected a guns-blazing showdown.) Stew Albert saw Genet sitting “in the midst of madness, quiet and smiling . . . The old, balding gangster might just have written the script. When people started shoving he jumped to his feet with a boxer’s stance.”

The police had been called, someone said, and although that wasn’t true, the stoners in the backyard stashed their pipes and joints. Michael McClure was comforting his frightened daughter, whose head gash was treated by a doctor in the crowd. “It’s always the children who get hurt in wars,” the poet was heard to remark. As the Panthers’ red convertible sped away, Decca took her turn on the stepladder.

Thank you
, she said crisply to the remaining, scattered guests.
The party is over. Thank you all for coming . . . Everyone go home now. Do come again
.

Radical Chic
, Tom Wolfe’s satire of a high-society fund-raiser for the Black Panthers hosted by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, appeared in
Harper’s
magazine in the summer of 1970. The Bernsteins’ Manhattan apartment provided the setting for Wolfe’s report on a meeting of left-leaning socialites and intelligentsia and beautiful Black Panthers trolling for windfall profits. The objective of both the Bernsteins’ uptown evening and the Treuhafts’ bash was to raise cash for the Panther defense. Some guests who made the scene at Decca’s refer to its radical chic vibe, to emphasize how
distinctly of its time
the event was. The main connection between the
two parties was the prominence of Field Marshal Donald Cox. In Wolfe’s article, he appears at center stage as the initially bewildered then cagy Black Panther spokesperson. Decca didn’t record her response to Wolfe’s article. She enjoyed the party at her house and was happy to move on from it.

By now adrenalin was flowing, easily the most effective stimulant for the muckraker.

—JESSICA MITFORD,
POISON PENMANSHIP

I
N 1970,
TIME
magazine—then a hugely popular and widely circulated weekly—proclaimed Decca “Queen of the Muckrakers.” The coronation was a double-edged sword. In the national news, the contrast between her background as a baron’s daughter and her current gritty occupation made good copy, but Decca considered her reputation as a writer more than ever dependent on tireless investigations and exposés.

In February, Dinky and Jim Forman had a second son, Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman. In 1972, they moved with two-year-old Chaka and four-and-a-half-year-old James to Detroit, where Dinky attended nursing school. The couple’s relationship, after almost a decade together, was fraying, and as it worsened, they separated. Dinky graduated with an R.N. degree, but she was an unemployed single mother and at her “wit’s end,” when Decca and Bob sent airfare for Dinky and her sons to join them in London. This was the time leading up to the publication of Decca’s prison book.

In
Kind and Usual Punishment
, which was published in 1973, Decca argues that the California penal system is a sham and failure. Its goals “to protect the public, rehabilitate the prisoner and act as a deterrent to further crime” were all fraudulent since “they never mention punishment and that is the only thing it really does.” Midway through her research, she learned of abusive experiments involving drug trials on California prisoners. This was “hot stuff,” she wrote to Robert Gottlieb, which “nobody seems to know.” She ran with the subject in an article for
Atlantic Monthly
under the title “Cheaper than Chimpanzees” and then revised the material into a chapter of her forthcoming book about prisons.

The prison subject matter demanded stamina and a new kind of aggression. She interviewed staff, administrators, guards, and prisoners, in the process becoming a writer “more proud of sticking pins in those people she thought deserved it than being a prose stylist.” Her longtime editor Robert Gottlieb would eventually describe her best muckraking as the work of a “ruthless gutter fighter.” This description he meant as a compliment, and she appreciated it. “To be a muckraker,” she replied, “means you’ll fight on using any means at your disposal.”

Around that time, on any number of shows, a television interviewer, cigarette in hand, would lean in and confidentially inquire, “Miss Mitford,
Time
magazine has crowned you ‘Queen of Muckrakers.’ Is that a title you’re willing to accept?”

To some, she’d say the title gave her misgivings, since she had long since repudiated that kind of noble rank and status. Or, “I don’t think of myself as a muckraker . . . One just falls into these articles.” (Later, she would say she “rather loved” her new title: “If they were going to mention me at all I’m glad it was as a Queen.”)

But how, the interviewer might cajole, could a muckraker possibly be objective?

“I really don’t understand what objectivity means,” she’d reply. “I’m not terribly in favor of balance. (I may be unbalanced myself.) I believe in being fair and never distorting the facts.” She told another interviewer on the same subject of objectivity: “It’s difficult but one must be exact.”

“Miss Mitford, what about Bennett Cerf?” came one question.

“I’d got him,” she’d say with some pride.

Shouldn’t she have resisted publishing material that he had requested be off the record? Wasn’t she flirting with unethical journalistic behavior?

She never got flustered. “This hard heart,” she’d confirm with a smile, “felt then and feels now, not the slightest compunction for having recorded his words as spoken.”

The reporter Doug Smith wrote an editorial on Decca’s muckraking (which she thought got her “dead to rights”):

To Decca, journalism was a subjective practice and the discipline of sociology a lot of “bosh.” Yet as a famous prison reform activist (or in the words of some prison administrators, “our greatest know-it-all”), Decca was invited to bring her experience to bear as a “distinguished professor of Sociology” at San Jose State College. As part of the hiring process, there was paperwork to complete—including a loyalty oath and a request for her fingerprints. Decca looked these over and showed them to Bob, and they both had a good laugh. There was nothing in her contract to require such an invasion of privacy.

Her lecture class, called The American Way, was oversubscribed, and she arrived on the first day to find her lecture hall mobbed by students wishing to add or observe, day visitors who were both well-wishers and oppositional, curious fellow faculty, and members of the press. The lecture class was standing room only, so Decca played to the balcony. She had prepared assiduously for her two classes (the other a small seminar called Muckraking), imagining them as a cross between Mardi Gras and dinner at Swinbrook. She was unbuttoned, confiding, and passionate. As an unexpected bonus, her students would receive a real-time object lesson in confronting power that would be far more influential to those who were paying attention than anything in the course work.

After she’d been teaching for three weeks, the dean reminded Decca that she had neglected to sign the loyalty oath and file her fingerprints. In a series of casual conversations with her colleagues and the dean, she learned that
everybody signed in those days. It was a meaningless hoop to jump through, and when Decca replied that little on earth would induce her to sign such an oath, the dean cautioned that her professorship was in jeopardy.

The stalemate between Decca and the administration remained in effect through the fall semester. Her classes were popular and packed. She and her students formed a mutual admiration society. The dean, however, pushed by higher-ups who resented Decca’s public resistance, failure to conform, and defiance of authority (all the things that made her Decca and, by extension, such a popular teacher), said sign or else. She refused again and, in mid-December, heard that she would not be rehired for further classes.

At the beginning of Christmas break, when an embarrassed dean appeared before Decca and her class (packed to the rafters) to announce that she had been “de-hired,” the class erupted. Students shouted,
We want Jessica!
They thumped on the tabletops and paraded around the lecture hall. At one point, Decca asked for attention and declared, “They’ll have to pick me up bodily and toss me out to keep me from teaching!”

The day of her de-hiring was the day Patricia Holt (a publicist at the time, but later the editor of the
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
) had scheduled a meeting with Decca to drive her to Los Angeles for a series of interviews about
Kind and Usual Punishment
. Holt received a call saying that Decca’s class was mobbed and surrounded by police. So might they reschedule? (Holt would continue to try. The next time, the publisher had to cancel. The third time, there was a strike in Hollywood and Decca wouldn’t cross a picket line.)

James P. Degnan, a young journalist, was writing a profile of Decca. Not a Decca sympathist, he described the scene after the dean’s announcement satirically as the “gallant little Englishwoman fighting the fascist bully.” Later, sitting beside Decca as she drove on the Nimitz Freeway, Degnan observed, “Her hair is thin and of a peculiar filing-cabinet gray. She wears thick, gray, gogglelike horn rims, behind which blink the famous Mitford eyes—eyes a British writer once described as ‘blue and cold and crazy.’ Glancing at her profile I notice a triangle of white, delicate flesh under her chin.”

In Degnan’s portrait, Decca was a battle-ax who couldn’t open her mouth without declaiming some annoying witticism. “From a distinguished professor to extinguished professor in three short weeks,” she told him. And later, “Do come to class . . . We’re having some convicts in.”

Off in another ring, Bob was at work with Decca’s legal team combing through the regulations surrounding loyalty oaths. The press was mad for tales of her latest rabble-rousing, and she did interviews nearly every day. She was a gold mine for the college paper, which was solidly in her camp against the trustees of the university. Her lawyers argued that fingerprints were not a statutory requirement. When Decca suggested that she might be willing to substitute toe-prints, a student silk screen crew ran off hundreds of posters with the slogan “Jessica Thumbs Her Toes.” As Decca’s lawyers fought to reinstate her salary, they agreed with the court’s request that she allow her fingerprints to be kept in a sealed envelope in the court’s custody. The winner of the case, whether the trustees or Decca’s team, would be awarded the envelope and its contents.

Degnan and a goodly proportion of the Bay Area’s population waited with Decca for the judge’s decision. A TV cameraman Degnan interviewed said, “Every time she gets a chance she tries to stick that goddamn book [
Kind and Usual Punishment
] in front of the camera.” Degnan was scathing in his description: “With malice towards all, Jessica handles the college officials—just as she handles the undertakers and just as she handled the late Bennett Cerf.”