The American Way of Death Revisited (2 page)

Bob suggested that I write an article about the Bay Area Funeral Society, drawing on the trade magazines and their flights of rhetoric against the BAFS, the clergy, and anybody else who favored a return to simpler funerals. I did so, in a piece entitled “St. Peter, Don’t You Call Me,” which was rejected by every major magazine on the ground that it was too distasteful a subject.

It eventually found a home in
Frontier
, an obscure liberal monthly published in Los Angeles, circulation 2,000, in its issue of November 1958.

Prodded by Bob, the funeral society ordered 10,000 reprints and distributed these far and wide. An immediate consequence was an invitation for me to appear on Caspar Weinberger’s weekly television program, “Profile, Bay Area,” in a debate on the Bay Area Funeral Society featuring a Unitarian minister and myself versus two undertakers, who proved to be wildly comic adversaries.

Developments now came thick and fast. Terrence O’Flaherty, television columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
, reported that the program had generated more mail to his column than any public event since
The Bad Seed
was performed at a local junior high school. Roul Tunley, a staff writer on the
Saturday Evening Post
, read O’Flaherty’s column and decided that the funeral society would be a good subject for the
Post
. His article, entitled “Can You Afford to Die?,” came out in June 1961. Although I was actually sadly inactive in the funeral society, Tunley depicted me as “an Oakland housewife leading the shock troops of the rebellion to undermine the funeral directors, or ‘bier barons,’ and topple the high cost of dying.”

The public reaction was absolutely astonishing. The
Post
editor reported that more mail had come in about Tunley’s piece than about any other in the magazine’s history, and observed that it “seemed to have touched a sensitive nerve.” Bob got a call from the Oakland postmaster: “We have hundreds of letters here addressed simply ‘Jessica Treuhaft, Oakland,’ giving no street or number.” (They were eventually delivered. One envelope bore the stark direction “Jessica Treuhaft, Cheap Funerals, Oakland.”)

Surely this spate of letters showed enough public interest in the
subject to warrant consideration of a book? I wrote to Roul Tunley, urging him to expand his piece into a book. He replied that he was too busy with other assignments. “Why don’t you write it?” he suggested.

Bob and I discussed this possibility. I said I would consider it only if he would help and work with me on it full time. And so it was settled.

Aside from the usual difficulties that inevitably occur (at least in my experience) in the course of writing, a crisis of huge proportions threatened to sink the whole endeavor when the book was about half finished. At the outset, I had obtained contracts from the two publishers who had taken my first book,
Hons and Rebels
(in America,
Daughters and Rebels
), published in 1960: Victor Gollancz in England, and Houghton Mifflin in the U.S., with whom I was on the friendliest terms. They had both been pleased with the outline and first chapter of the funeral book. At some point I sent them more chapters, including a detailed account of exactly what happens in the funeral director’s inner sanctum, the embalming room, which is strictly off-limits to the public, and especially to the family of the deceased. Hoping to infuse this admittedly revolting subject with a touch of macabre humor, I cast the whole description in mortuary jargon (see
chapter 5
, “The Story of Service”).

To my extreme dismay, Victor Gollancz and the editor at Houghton Mifflin with one accord demanded the excision of this passage.

From Houghton Mifflin: “We think that you make your book harder to sell by going at too much length and in too gooey detail into the process of embalming.” From Gollancz: “The joke, such as it is, surely is going on far too long. I cannot imagine any publisher here wanting it.”

This was devastating news. As embalming is the ultimate fate of almost all Americans, the economic base of the funeral industry, and as practiced on a mass scale a uniquely American practice, to omit a description of it was unthinkable. We considered finishing the book and reproducing it for self-publication. At this point, my brilliant agent, Candida Donadio, stepped in. She found a publisher, Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster.

Thenceforward, all was plain sailing. Gottlieb, at the age of thirty
something of a prodigy in the publishing world, loved the embalming chapter and made an inestimable contribution to the book as a whole.

Months before
The American Way of Death
was published, the funeral industry became aware of the work in progress, and it was not long before the trade press rounded upon me in full force. A new menace had loomed on their horizon: the Menace of Jessica Mitford. Headlines began to appear in the undertakers’ journals:
JESSICA MITFORD PLANS ANTI-FUNERAL BOOK, AND MITFORD DAY DRAWS CLOSER!

When
Mortuary Management
began referring to me as Jessica
tout court
, I felt I had arrived at that special pinnacle of fame where the first name only is sufficient identification, as with Zsa Zsa, Jackie, or Adlai. Greedily I gobbled up the denunciations: “the notorious Jessica Mitford”; “shocker”; “stormy petrel.”

In an article headlined
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD BOOK?
the editor of
Mortuary Management
said there was little to fear because books about “the Profession” never enjoy large sales. He knew this because his dad once wrote a book about funeral service, and although he took an ad in the
Saturday Evening Post
, it sold only three hundred copies.

My husband Bob and I were inclined to agree with his estimate; we did not anticipate a readership much beyond Unitarians, funeral society members, and other advocates of funeral reform, a relatively tiny group. Not so Bob Gottlieb. A few months before publication, he rang up to say the first printing would be 7,500. Some days later, he told us this had been increased to 15,000. Then he telephoned again: the first printing was now set at 20,000. I found this slightly worrying; “Aren’t you afraid that we’ll end up with a final chapter, ‘Remainders To Be Seen’?” I asked him. I need not have worried. On publication day in August 1963, the book went out of stock, the first printing having been sold out.

The response was nothing short of thrilling. To my extreme pleasure, the reviewers not only lavished unstilted praise, they also got the joke. Thus the
New York Times:
“A savagely witty and well-documented exposé …”
New York Herald Tribune:
“Bizarre and fantastic … a wry account of the death business.”
San Francisco Chronicle:
“Explosive. Continually absorbing. Often very funny.”
Cosmopolitan:
“A brilliant book … written so wryly it is difficult to consider it an exposé …”
National Guardian:
“One of the strangest and funniest things in literature … astonishing, but exceedingly funny.”
The Reporter:
“She has the rare ability to make the macabre hilariously funny.”
Denver Sunday Post:
“Sane observations and witty … sardonic commentary …”

The American Way of Death
zoomed to No. 1 on the
New York Times
best-seller list, where it stayed for some weeks. CBS broadcast an hour-long documentary, “The Great American Funeral,” based on the book. Major newspapers
(Miami Herald; New York Herald Tribune; Denver Post; San Francisco Chronicle; Chicago Tribune; Cleveland Plain Dealer)
published in-depth reports on funeral costs and practices in their respective communities. For a while, funerals were topic A on radio talk shows, with listeners calling in to relate their own dismal experiences at the hands of morticians. Walt Kelly and Bill Mauldin mocked the funeral industry in syndicated cartoons. Elaine May and Mike Nichols produced a televised skit on “That Was the Week That Was” starring Elaine as “your Grief Lady.” TV and radio stations around the country featured debates between funeral directors and myself. Clergy of all faiths reinforced the major theme of
The American Way of Death
and denounced ostentatious, costly funerals as pagan. Membership in the nonprofit consumer-run funeral and memorial societies rose from seventeen thousand families to close to a million.

There came a delightful moment when a textbook for college students entitled
The Essential Prose
came clattering into my mailbox—an anthology, according to the editors, of “prose of the first order from the past and present.” There, tucked between Plato and Sir Thomas Browne, was the very description of embalming upon which my book had almost foundered. Furthermore, as of this writing, some fifty textbook editors in the past four years alone have chosen this selfsame passage for inclusion in their anthologies. Is there a moral here for the neophyte writer in his dealing with editors?

For me, most rewarding of all was the response of the funeral industry. The trade journals reacted with furious invective, devoting reams on how to combat “the Mitford syndrome,” as one put it.
Mortuary Management
was of the opinion that “actually, the danger to the equilibrium of funeral service is not in the book per se. It is in
the residual use of Miss Mitford’s material.… Newspapers, large and small, are reviewing the Mitford volume, passing and repassing its poisons among the citizenry,” which I thought was a good point.

Month after month, the funeral mags fulminated against “the Mitford bomb,” “the Mitford war dance,” “the Mitford missile,” “the Mitford blast,” and “the Mitford fury.” They condemned the movement for cheaper, simpler funerals as a Red plot, and found an ally in Congressman James B. Utt of Santa Ana, California. He read a two-page statement about my subversive background into the
Congressional Record
. As for the purpose of my book, “she is really striking another blow at the Christian religion. Her tirade against morticians is simply the vehicle to carry her anti-Christ attack.…” His statement ended with the ringing words, “I would rather place my mortal remains, alive or dead, in the hands of any American mortician than to set foot on the soil of any Communist nation.” (In 1970 Mr. Utt exercised that option. His obituary in the
New York Times
, with subhead “Attacked Mitford Book,” records that during his ten terms in Congress “his most newsworthy action came when he called Jessica Mitford a ‘pro-communist anti-American.’ ”) The Utt utterance had backfired when the
New York Times
ran an editorial captioned “How Not to Read a Book.” The
Times
derided Utt’s “McCarthyite attack” and noted that the book had “evoked high praise from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergymen, as well as from reviewers and other commentators in all parts of the country,” and declared that Utt’s “credentials as a book critic can safely be dismissed as nil.”

Nor was the subject neglected abroad. German television asked me to go on camera in a documentary they wanted to produce. “But I don’t speak German.” “No matter, we will send a text for you to study.” They sent a camera crew as well, and so it was that I found myself reciting,
“Ein teures Begräbnis
[a costly funeral]
ist ein status symbol, wie ein luxus Auto, ein schwimming pool im Garten, oder ein weekend in Miami Beach für hundert Thaler pro Tag.”

Enjoyable though it is to look back nostalgically at the immediate aftermath of publication of
The American Way of Death
, the basic question remains: Did it result in any fundamental improvements, any alleviation of the lot of the funeral purchaser? For a while, the answer seemed to be a qualified “Yes.” In 1977, fourteen years after
The American Way of Death
was published, I did further research on the funeral scene for an afterword entitled “Post Mortem” to a new paperback edition. Although the average cost, nationwide, of a funeral exclusive of burial plot had risen from $750 in 1963 to $1,650, in 1977, two major developments offered some hope for those who preferred a less cluttered and expensive send-off. The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Protection Bureau had promulgated a “trade rule” which promised to go far to protect the unwary funeral buyer in his dealings with undertakers. Cremation had almost doubled in thirteen years; seeing the potential profitability in this trend, an enterprising businessman founded the Neptune Society, a for-profit direct-cremation venture that enjoyed immediate success and soon attracted imitators throughout the country.

However, more recent changes on the funeral front should go far to dispel any feeling of complacency on the part of consumers. Cremation, once the best hope for a low-cost, simple getaway, has become increasingly expensive; furthermore, morticians are fast developing techniques for upgrading this procedure into a full-fig funeral. The Federal Trade Commission’s much heralded trade rule has huge loopholes. Most sinister of all is the emergence over the last fifteen years of monopoly ownership of hitherto independent mortuaries and cemeteries.

These developments are the main reason for this updated version of
The American Way of Death
.

W
hen funeral directors have taxed me—which they have, and not infrequently—with being beastly about them in my book, I can affirm in good conscience that there is hardly an unkind word about them. In fact, the book is almost entirely given over to expounding
their
point of view. It is chock a block with their Wise Sayings, observations, exhortations, and philosophical reflections culled from funeral trade magazines and interviews with individual funeral directors and official spokesmen.

I did mention that “like every other successful salesman, the funeral salesman must first and foremost believe in himself and his product” (
this page
–
this page
), and that “they long to be worthy of high regard, to be liked and understood, a most human longing.… Merchants of a rather grubby order, preying on the grief, remorse, and guilt of survivors, or trained professional men with high standards of ethical conduct? The funeral men really would vastly prefer to fit the latter category” (
this page
).