Irrepressible (46 page)

When Philip Toynbee died in 1981, Decca had reason to apply those theories of biography she had once recommended to Kevin Ingram. She
compiled the eulogies and obituaries written about her old friend for a privately published volume. When no biographer happened along, she expanded these into a memoir. By focusing on the parts of her life that intersected with Toynbee’s, she would have another go at the way people viewed their youth together. How, in fact, did one write a biography? “Start with
the
” was advice she commonly gave to amateurs. Then “chuck in all sorts of fragments, memories, images, remembered lines as into an enormous soup.” One standard of originality was sister Nancy’s book
Madame de Pompadour
, about which critic Raymond Mortimer said her “narrative style is so peculiar, so breathless, so remote from what has ever been used for biography. I feel as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone.” But, Philip? All that scrutinizing, all that gin, all those all-night debates about the least little thing, all passionately important. She complained about it to her publisher:

Decca’s version of Toynbee, the philosophical and charismatic journalist, is of a mischievously brilliant, sometimes clumsy, childhood friend (who hardly ages and never seems separate from Esmond) and whose adult choices she regards indulgently, at a distance.

In his last years, Toynbee cultivated an interest in spiritual matters and joined a rural commune. Decca didn’t understand these pursuits, and her effort to explain what attracted him never lifts off. Toynbee had a much better understanding of Decca. Certainly, his talent for portraiture was superior, especially concerning her:

Philip was one of the few people to ever see Decca clearly, and in writing about him, she produced her favorite book.
Faces of Philip
doesn’t change the common view of Decca and Esmond as rogue and scamp. She’d have to see whether Ingram could make that case.

As Esmond’s biographer turned up new Romilly-related facts, another literary event gave Decca a shot at replaying history. In 1983, her old friend Michael Straight published a book called
After Long Silence
, in which he admits that as a young man in the late 1930s, he was the only America student recruited into the Cambridge spy ring. This meant that he was working for the KGB (or Soviet Secret Service) when Esmond and Decca shared his and Binnie’s apartment in prewar Washington. Straight admits he was unsuccessful at the spying game and was abandoned by the Communist International (Comintern) organization early in his career. He kept his secret quiet for forty years, through employment in several high-level political appointments, including deputy chair of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Nixon administration. In March 1981, he was publically outed by the English newspaper the
Daily Mail
, after which he wrote his own account.

Reading Straight’s book forty years later, Decca was surprised by her old friend’s weird status as a deeply covered spy, of which she had been unaware. The account to some extent also explained why, when they had once been such good friends, Straight had cut her out of his life after Esmond’s death. Straight’s life had been much more complicated than she’d
imagined. And though he had in his autobiography written of who he had been in his youth and what he had believed in, in Decca’s opinion, he hadn’t really succeeded. She recognized that if there were to be a more satisfying explanation forthcoming, it wouldn’t come from him. Decca thought he might have conducted himself differently, come to different conclusions. In any case, she wanted him to know she had still been “riveted,” by his revelations, adding, “I, of course, should have loved to be a spy; but nobody asked me.”

DEEP IN ThE Reagan era, Decca was on the road lecturing about prisons, funerals, and the Old Left and protesting the U.S. government’s intervention on the side of the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinistas. In 1984, when she was sixty-seven years old, Decca joined a women’s delegation to visit El Salvador and Nicaragua. It was a demanding tour, hot and crowded with day trips to observe revolutionary collectives, cultural centers, and political events. During the trip, Decca suffered a minor stroke, which “caused temporary loss of feeling in her right hand, and a permanent weakness in her left leg.” From then on, she’d rely on Catherine “Katie” Edwards, her new full-time assistant, to organize and help manage the details of her career as writer and celebrity speaker. Although Decca was slowed down by her stroke, this only meant starting a new book that might be neither “indictment nor an exposé,” an affectionate treatment of her favorite ballad and party turn.
Grace Had an English Heart
, a benign foray into historical research, posed an opportunity for Decca to remark on what she’d learned of image and celebrity. A reader familiar with the Mitford sisters would have compared the emblematic role Grace Darling played in her day as a sort of Victorian “It girl” with the emblematic roles the Mitford sisters played in their nation’s psyche.

While Decca was recovering from her stroke, Kevin Ingram made a return visit. His mother had knitted Decca a multicolored blanket, which
he presented with his finished manuscript. The blanket was as endearing as the book, now called
Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly.
Decca found it to be “SURPRISINGLY good,” and urged just two further additions. Why not add a lively personal note about how Ingram had first discovered Esmond and then hitchhiked cross-country to visit her? To give it a bit more status, he might also include a foreword written by Peter Stansky, an eminent scholar of the Spanish Civil War. She had already arranged that part, and once Ingram agreed, it would be a cinch to add. Katie saw that Decca adored Ingram and that Decca was disappointed when he wavered. He told her he was happy with what he had written, “happy that he’d finished it.” Perhaps she’d already weighed in so much on all aspects of the book, that her influence over the “style of work may have become too strong.” Decca thought Ingram was foolish not to take her advice. She had hoped to influence the way history would regard Esmond, but had also hoped to sway Ingram—a surrogate son—in a way she found all but impossible to do with her own son.

 

BY THE EARLY 1980s, Benjy had moved out of state and was keeping his distance. When Decca received a “SANE and AMUSING” letter after a long silence, she believed her son had turned a corner. “You know how desperately worrying he was (manic depression-wise),” she wrote to Robert Gottlieb. “Well he’s been absolutely OK for more than 2 years, despite adamant refusal to go the lithium route. He is so smashing when he is his dear self, so you can imagine how v. delighted we are. But it is a bit puzzling—how that dread disease came & went; he was approx. 28 when it all started, is now 33.”

One night during Ingram’s stay, Decca and Benjy had a titanic quarrel at Regent Street. She demanded to know how he could be so sympathetic and sensitive on one hand and then “dreadful, and absurd,” when his “disgusting manic episodes” came upon him. She said she had believed his episodes were behind him. It was this feeling of being sideswiped that drove her fury. Weren’t there remedies? Wouldn’t he listen to anyone? He said
she didn’t understand what treatment meant or what it was like in those “snakepits,” where “they shoot you full of thorazine and lithium.” Is that the life she wanted for him?

Once Benjy slammed out of the house, Decca wrote him a letter. She was still furious. They had a guest staying, she told him, Esmond’s young biographer. She couldn’t possibly introduce them, since “you wouldn’t be remotely interested in anybody but YOU.” By then, she was exhausted, and her tone became more conciliatory: “Dear Benjy, you are hardly ever out of my thoughts . . . it goes without saying that if you should ever tire of the manic condition & wish to get back to ordinary life, which wld. doubtless require some sort of therapy, we would absolutely stand behind you & do all possible to help.”

As Ingram was preparing to go to sleep, he found a letter face up on the bedroom table, written by Decca and addressed to Bob. Not for his eyes, but he sneaked a look. She said she was trying to give up vodka and that she’d found out about Bob’s affair. Ingram put the letter back down on the nightstand and hoped no one would come looking for it in the night.

Decca had discovered Bob’s affair through the gossip of mutual friends. For someone who had rarely doubted herself in the past, the circumstances were devastating. Dinky said, “Bob’s affair was very very painful to Decc in a very deep bedrock way.” Decca, wishing to wound Bob, had subjected him to hotly emotional sessions that she called her “X-exams” (or cross-examinations). She ridiculed his girlfriend as “the Loved One” and relished descriptions of Joanne as a snob “only interested in meeting people she conceived of as important.” Bob was still very fond of Joanne, and there were several false endings to their relationship, which Decca associated with lies and the “SQUALOR of it all.” During the time of her affair with Bob, Joanne had managed to keep their secret from her husband, Victor Rabinowitz. Decca planned lacerating letters to her rival and exposés to Rabinowitz, but did not send them. She was disheartened but agreed with Bob to make an effort to repair their marriage, “given persistence & good will (no snappishness on my part; a modicum of lying on his).”

By the end of August 1984, Decca would believe they had begun to restore their old relationship, but she still had to wonder “if it was easier & less painful for him to give up J. than for me to give up smoking?”

A
T THE END of the 1980s, Dinky, who had been working as an emergency department specialty nurse in Atlanta, went back to school to earn a graduate nursing degree. Terry, who had been a working for the phone company, also returned to school to earn an advanced teaching degree. He would eventually head the mathematics department at an alternative public school. Their youngest sons, Ben Weber and Chaka Forman, were in high school, and James Forman attended Brown University in Providence. Dinky and Terry moved to New York in 1991, into a Lower East Side building that Bob and Decca had bought in 1968, a while after the sale of Inch Kenneth.

In the Bay Area, Benjy remarried. His four-year-long first marriage to Sue Draheim, which “began in a cocaine storm, ended in [1984] in a manic storm.” His new wife, Jungmin Kim, born in Korea, was a piano-tuning associate. Their marriage lasted for only a few years and was over by the late 1980s. Decca had liked Sue, but she never felt much rapport with Jungmin. During this time, Decca and her friends marveled over the romance of twice-divorced Pele and fellow artist Byron Randall, both of them in their seventies. They had moved together to Sonoma County, where they lived a blissful idyll in the refurbished chicken coop they had converted into an artist’s studio.

As the 1990s began, Decca launched into research of what would be her final book,
The American Way of Birth.
Reporting on historic swindles and the overselling of technology, Decca decried the corporate nature of modern obstetrics and championed the practice of midwifery. Her book argued for a national health-care policy, in sympathy with her old acquaintance Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose effort to reform American medical care
was scuppered in Congress. In 1992, Decca wrote a letter to
Harper’s
magazine, objecting to author Christopher Lasch’s attack on Rodham Clinton’s contention that children and adolescents in the justice system deserved the same rights as adults:

In 1993, for a “Diary” column in the
London Times
magazine, Decca repeated the announcement originally published in the
American Spectator
that “Hillary Clinton had interned in the law firm of Bob Treuhaft . . . husband of England’s most famous red snob Jessica Mitford.” In her version, Decca added italics: “
Nobody can yet say how much of Mitford-Treuhaft rubbed off on Hillary during her summer internship in 1970
.” Decca was sure that more would be made of Hillary’s internship, and it surprised her when no witch-hunt-style scandal was whipped up. Decca’s friend, the novelist Diane Johnson, said, “I think Decca probably (wishfully) thought working for Bob T. was more radical, hotter stuff, than it was by the time Hillary worked for them.” (There is some anecdotal evidence that the information collected about Hillary’s internship was suppressed by Republican operatives during the first Bush campaign and presidency, in the belief that smearing Hillary would backfire.)