Irrepressible (47 page)

Every morning, Decca would work on some writing project—a chapter, an op-ed piece, an article—motivated by “anything which sniffs of phoniness or misplaced earnestness.” In the early days of the fatwa against
The Satanic Verses
, Decca went around wearing a button proclaiming “I am Salman Rushdie” to protest the Islamic clerics’ threats on the author’s life. Alexander Cockburn (son of Claud) reported on a lecture Decca gave—in defense of the First Amendment—based on her recent investigations into pornography:

In her own family, she was equally determined that nothing should be suppressed. She cherished her friendship with Debo, but chided her gently when the younger sister, as executor of Nancy’s estate, withheld (“banned,” in Decca’s words) some letters their niece Charlotte Mosley was editing for publication. These included “some v. catty items about me & Bob, many more about the royal family”:

(Charlotte Mosley doesn’t remember “showing Decca any letters with catty remarks about her and Bob.” Debo did ask Mosley “to take out some of Nancy’s jokes about members of the royal family because they were about their appearance. [Debo’s] view was that it was fair to criticize people for the way they behaved but not for their looks.”)

There were plenty of times when Decca’s friends and family wished she would allow her own self-censor a bit more leeway. Her writing day began with a 6:00 A.M. coffee, shortly after which she’d start sipping “delicious” vodka. Almost everyone she’d known as a young woman had hit the bottle, and certainly all writers drank. According to Katie Edwards, Decca told her young friend that “before an interview a drink made her think better, it calmed her nerves, clarified her mind.” In her seventies, Decca felt less and less inclined to indulge uninteresting company, attend boring events, or hide her impatience on that score. Sometimes when Decca was drunk, wit and cruelty would combine. She could lash out at old friends, as she did
against Barb Kahn at one dinner party. She was unpredictable, sometimes an impossible dinner guest, telling the same story for the tenth time. When she did haul herself out for a special occasion, she might mock the speakers, sometimes sending her dinner companions notes reading, “Help I’m trapped at this ghastly dinner.” Once, at a benefit for abortion rights, after many testimonials, the photographer Barbara Hall remembered how Decca, by then a bit bored by the company but enjoying the wine, casually addressed their table, “Have I ever told you about my abortion?” She began by describing the “grisly details” and concluded, “Of course we were going to America, and it was terribly inconvenient to be pregnant.”

In 1992,
Harper’s
asked Decca and other public intellectuals to write a short essay about abortion, and composing this piece stirred her memory. Fifty years earlier, when Decca had her dangerous soap-induced abortion, she hadn’t known there was a choice to be made between the care provided by a hush-hush upper-class doctor and a backstreet abortionist. She didn’t ask her sisters for help, and she wouldn’t tell her husband beforehand.

“An obvious omission,” Decca wrote to Robert Boynton, an editor at
Harper’s
magazine, “is that I don’t say why I wanted to have an abortion in 1938. However, I don’t want to go into that—too complicated.”

This letter’s casual phrasing discourages further inquiry. Perhaps because of her reputation or age, no further questions were asked. (Who was going to quiz this distinguished and famously caustic seventy-five-year-old woman who had made it clear she didn’t want to talk about the reasons for her abortion, for just a few more details?) Half a century later, in the days of the Clinton-era culture wars, Decca described her horrid experience and ended with this advice to younger women: “So get your safe, legal abortion and don’t feel guilty about it. But don’t forget that there are those who want to turn the clock back to the barbaric days of illegal abortions.”

In 1992, in the months preceding the publication of her book
The American Way of Birth
, Decca gave Boynton an interview. She was typically irreverent and challenging:

The American Way of Birth
had a short span of literary success, and its controversy was less than universal, but its influence was strong among the midwives and nontraditional medical practitioners, whom Decca always championed.

 

OVER THE NEXT couple of years, Decca had several falls and broke bones in her arm and leg. These accidents, she admitted, “were prob. due to being more than tiddly at the time.” She had a blood test, which came back “grossly inflated with alcohol”—a diagnosis of cirrhosis of the liver. She still confided in Dinky that there were worse ways to go. Dinky and Terry were settled in New York City, where Dinky worked at the emergency room of Bellevue Hospital. She would later specialize in pain management. If Decca had initial questions about her daughter’s choice of career (wishing her daughter had chosen something more “intellectual”), she had long since been impressed by Dinky’s achievement and come to depend on her daily advice. According to Kathy Kahn, “eventually Decca thought that Dinky was the strongest person in the world.”

Decca had another accident when she was wearing what she called her glad rags, long culottes. She had already been drinking a lot, and she tripped, badly fracturing her leg and requiring immediate surgery. Afterward, as she was coming to, Decca looked up to see Dinky sitting by the hospital bed. “I’ve ruined your life,” Decca said.

“Of course you haven’t,” replied Dinky. “You’ve ruined your life. You’re the one with the broken leg.” Decca’s doctor said she had to speak to the
addiction specialist, who told her she was an alcoholic and would have to enter a program. Decca said, “Doc, the cure sounds worse than the disease.”

Dinky tried to find a nontraditional twelve-step support group, but her mother insisted she could stop drinking on her own. She wrote Debo: “I know I wouldn’t be any good at it—all that appalling Frank Talk etc.”

“At least find a partner,” Dinky said.

“You’re my partner,” Decca insisted.

Dinky agreed to do what she could, but she had to return to her family and job. They spoke on the phone frequently and exchanged letters. In one letter, Decca described “a time aeons ago Pele & I both decided to give up smoking & agreed to be buddies if in dire need, we’d ring each other up. Usual advice was to ‘Dash to the drinks closet & pour a huge vodka or scotch.’ So I expect YOUR advice will be ‘Dash out & get a pack of Chesterfield non-tipped’?”

“I’ve gone on the wagon,” she wrote to her sister Debo. “I just decided to completely stop, nary a drop of anything, even wine at dinner. What decided me was the trouble I’ve caused Dinky and Bob,
terribly
tiresome for them having to scram about looking after me.”

Decca seemed to think that she’d have enough work to distract her from drinking and in fact planned to update
The American Way of Death
. After much negotiation beginning with a 1984 investigation by the Consumer Protection Bureau of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the funeral industry had been required at last to adopt “standard fair practices.” It had been a long fight, but for the muckraker, there was still more to do. Decca had become fascinated by the funeral industry’s new corporate nature, as represented by Service Corporation International (SCI), a company that owned chains of funeral parlors, flower shops, and cemeteries in Australia and England. In the United States, SCI had a growing share of the U.S. trade. In the months following her surgery, she planned a trip to the company’s U.S. headquarters in Houston.

Decca began her revision of
The American Way of Death
with a new research assistant, Karen Leonard, and the working title
Death Warmed
Over
. Robert Gottlieb signed on, and Decca hoped that Bob would muck in, too, but he resisted. That book had made them affluent and shadowed their lives for thirty years. The subject would never be exhausted, but he chose to avoid it for the time being. Leonard brought youth and enthusiasm to the project. On her first day of work, she arrived to find that Decca had broken her ankle. Her new employer excused herself after five minutes to go to a doctor’s appointment. On Leonard’s second day of work, Decca had to run off to “cut a Rock and Roll record”—not one of Decca’s witty remarks, but rather the truth, which answered the question, what do you do after you’ve become an institution? For Decca, who loved to sing and play and entertain, the answer was to join a kazoo band at the age of seventy-eight. In San Francisco, musician Kathi Kamen Goldmark had first invited Decca to sing lead vocals with a backup band at a literary talent show. For the occasion, they called themselves Decca and the Dectones. Decca showed up in a spangled dress. Among her numbers, she sang “Mean to Me” and wiped away crocodile tears with a pair of men’s boxer shorts.

After their debut performance, they went on to perform at the fortieth anniversary of the
Paris Review
and at a benefit for the
Nation
magazine at New York’s Town Hall. Of all Mitford’s legacies, her most joyfully arcane has to be her recording of the Beatles’ song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “The Ballad of Grace Darling” for the “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” Records label. Her wavering voice, once quite good, had deteriorated to a comic croak. (Writer Cynthia Robbins, one of the backup singers, described Decca’s range tongue-in-cheek as reaching “profound depths . . . which only bullfrogs could duplicate on a clear night.”) In an interview with rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres, Maya Angelou said that Decca “doesn’t have a lot of musical acumen. But on the other hand, she has the courage, the concentration, of somebody about to be executed in the next half-hour.”

Decca was having a blast and didn’t care what anyone thought. Some of her friends worried for her. Katie Edwards thought there was an unsavory aura of exploitation about Decca’s late performing career. In the audience at Town Hall, Gottlieb was embarrassed enough to exclaim, “Can’t you
make her stop?” She hit some notes, took a pass at others, but was always vivacious.

Bob was enjoying Decca’s new career. He drove her to gigs and gathered other stalwart friends, many in their seventies, to hear her perform, to sing along, and to lend moral support. As a way of celebrating her first record release, Bob and Goldmark set new lyrics to the tune of “Grace Darling”:

Decca and the Dectones had plans to record an album of more “inappropriate songs for special occasions.” She taped a couple of ribald music hall songs with Maya Angelou, but travel was becoming more difficult. One aspect of this escapade that Decca loved in particular was that her recording profits would go to her son Benjy’s new endeavor: Send a Piana to Havana.

In San Francisco, Benjy had studied piano rebuilding with Victor Charles, a piano maker and composer. When Charles died, Benjy inherited twenty-eight thousand dollars, which he spent on a piano for musicians to use in Cuba. He saw the piano delivered and, while in Cuba, observed that the U.S. embargo had produced a crisis in Cuban music. There were very few pianos in good condition, and for these, the embargo had made replacement parts almost impossible to find. The strings on many of the older instruments had rusted through, and the Russian pianos that had arrived before glasnost were almost all infested with termites. In 1995, Benjy began his campaign to collect donated pianos and transport them to Cuba. He organized a cohort of tuners and goodwill travelers to accompany each
shipment. Decca may have complained bitterly from time to time about Benjy’s unpredictable behavior and her inability to help him, but she and Bob were terribly proud of his project, tickled by its originality and purpose, and delighted by his defiance of the U.S. embargo.

 

IN OCTOBER 1995, Decca was invited to a seminar of morticians in Northern California. She wrote to her friend and then literary agent Frederic Hill about the experience:

After the seminar, Service Corporation International, having heard that she’d made some disparaging remarks about the company, sent her a letter to warn her off further such transgressions. This, of course, she found absurd and inspiring. A lawyer for SCI condescendingly suggested it would not be to her advantage to “cast SCI in a bad light clothed in wit and humor.” Decca toyed with these amateurs: