FLORENCE KING: The American Way of Decca Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford
Sussman, Peter Y.
BOOKS IN REVIEW or eat, all Mitford, who was once disciplined by her AmDecca, was one of the six daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale, a family so dysfunctional that if a Mitford ed...
...The Hon...
...Another problem was her subconscious association of her aristocratic girlhood world with the gentrified Jim Crowism she found in America: “I simply loathe the old South and old Southerners, they are completely uncivilized and are too vile about the Negroes...
...It was all true—the sisters were tutored at home—but some might easily think she was the underprivileged daughter of a part-time janitor...
...As Decca described what ensued: Some serious old soul in North Dakota wrote to say that having thought it all over, she decided to bequeath her body to med...
...That did not stop enraged politicians from delivering their usual gems, however, like this one from California Congressman James B. Utt: “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...
...as the guest of progressive Alabamians Clifford and Virginia Durr, he a New Deal advisor on race relations eral set, and Decca’s title and English accent did the rest...
...She earned commissions masquerading as a saleswoman in an exclusive dress shop where all she had to do was be present and let herself be heard speaking...
...Whenever her subject is race relations, and it often is, she loses her lofty detachment, English understatement, and perfect dead-pan and turns into just the sort of two-faced, guilt-ridden, sycophantic crawler she claimed to despise...
...I’m sure the medical school will be so delighted to get it...
...D (KNOPF, $35) Reviewed by Florence King O NOT READ THIS BOOK WHILE DRINKING ing, else its pages will be splattered with whatever you were about to swallow when you came to an hysterically funny line and everything went down the wrong way...
...This last was too much for Baron Redesdale...
...The book and her many media appearances drew so much fan mail that she had to hire someone to answer it...
...Unfortunately, Decca does not go full-sailed into the political night, but founders on the shoals of her— wait for it—bête noire...
...A Nazi sympathizer himself, he had no quarrel with Diana and Unity, but up with Communists he would not put, particularly those related to instructing his solicitors to insert “except Jessica” after each bequest (“Peer’s Will...
...Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire Daughter Is Churchill, so he disinherited Decca, When England declared war on imprisoned and Unity tried unsuccessher brain and paralyzed her for the remaining nine years of her life...
...Handing Decca statements like that was like handing a baby a loaded gun...
...erican Communist Party cell for joking, was ready with the unanswerable...
...On job applications she wrote None under Education, explaining that her family did not believe in sending girls to school...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW or eat, all Mitford, who was once disciplined by her AmDecca, was one of the six daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale, a family so dysfunctional that if a Mitford ed healthy outdoor life and country man...
...Look at Lenin...
...She soon put the there in Oakland, masquerading as a prospective tenant to catch out landlords in racial discrimination, lionizing black folksinger Leadbelly, and making an American version of The Headline (“Sister of Hitler Girlfriend…”) when she wrote Churchill demanding that he keep her sister Diana in prison “where she belongs...
...and None under Father’s Occupation, adding, “Worked at times in the House of Lords...
...The Durrs knew everybody in the limousine-lib64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 collections include The Florence King Reader, Deja Reviews: Florence King All Over Again...
...So my sec’y writes back: “What a perfectly smashing idea...
...Jessica Mitford (1917-1996), known as girl wanted to be a rebellious nonconformist she had to be dull, sane, and stay out of the newspapers...
...They weren’t allowed to order “black coffee” or use figures of speech like “the dark days ahead...
...and Decca became a Communist and eloped to Spain with Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s “Red Nephew,” to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War...
...and Angelou exploded, “YOU are asking ME...
...school...
...To Decca’s (and everyone’s) surprise The American Way of Death found favor with clergymen, who considered many funeral practices pagan...
...In fact, they’re just like Empire Builders...
...The genesis of The American Way of Death was her husband’s legal defense of a local burial society that kept running into obstructive state laws lobbied into being by the powerful California Funeral Directors Association...
...One wishes the whole book were like this, don’t one...
...The woman asked, “But what can we DO about racism...
...Decca’s letters to Angelou are virtually unrecognizable as the words of one of the greatest wits of our time...
...All the best embalmers are Communists,” she said...
...Money was tight, so she stayed in suburban D.C...
...Some of the blame can be traced to her Communist Party training, which subjected members to a level of political correctness that would make our present-day rules seem like free speech...
...where they had spent time after their Spanish adventure...
...They moved to Oakland, California, where Decca joined the American Communist Party, a shadow of its former self but “the only game in town for civil rights,” now her cause célèbre...
...Her first success was getting “P.O...
...The book also earned accolades from the Kennedy brothers thanks to Decca’s sister Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, whose title would have gone to Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy if Kick’s husband, and Kick, had lived...
...Decca’s letter is a danse macabre of how to walk on eggs, a Euclidian treatise on how many JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...she cultivated the Meyerses, owners of the Washington Post...
...and she devised an ingenious way of Florence King’s STET, Damnit!: The Misanthrope’s Corner, 1991 to 2002, and, most recently, The American Way of Decca Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford Edited by Peter Y. Sussman , 744 PAGES BOOKS IN REVIEW emphasizing her lineage to impress those in the know while winning the sympathy of the uninitiated...
...Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and declared herself a Nazi (“Peer’s Daughter as Jew-Hater...
...Laughter is the last thing you would expect when politically solemn Communists cross swords with professionally solemn undertakers, but when the Communist is the English aristocrat who wrote The American Way of Deathbets are off...
...Angelou realized that she had a peer’s daughter for a whipping boy and behaved accordingly, as when she blew up at another white woman at a party and left Decca to plead for all whites...
...Unity moved to Germany and became a Hitler groupie (“Peer’sAdolf ’s Nordic Ideal...
...To avoid spending time dictating, she told the typist to make up suitable replies to each letter...
...A MAJOR CATALYST FOR HER RACIAL CONFLICTS was her friendship with Maya Angelou, the garrulous, gravel-voiced Poetess Laureate and non-stop autobiographer of the you-go-girl school of intellectual reparations...
...Only one sister managed this feat: Pamela, who enjoypursuits, was so pleasant and conventional and helpful to others that Decca and Nancy nicknamed her “Woman...
...Deborah had remained friends with the Kennedy family and Bobby read Decca’s book (which influenced him a few months later when he chose JFK’s coffin...
...Seeing her chance to do battle with her hated trifecta of greed, hypocrisy, and sentimentality, she rescued the subject from her husband’s lawyerly approach and quickly became the most notorious woman in the country...
...Germany, Diana and her husband were fully to commit suicide, shooting herself in the head, but the bullet lodged in Decca’s husband joined the RAF but, fearing for Decca if Germany should win, insisted she move to the U.S...
...The rest made headlines, one headline in particular: “Whenever I see ‘Peer’s Daughter...’ I know it’s one of you girls,” said their mother...
...Nancy, the oldest, moved to Paris, wrote novels, and had a long affair with a prominent French states(Decca told people she had gone “duke-hunting...
...for “please omit flowers”) into obits when former President Eisenhower included it in his mother-in-law’s...
...One in particular, in praise of Angelou’s third autobiography (Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas) is a gushing fan letter that opens with “Dear Miss Absolutely Amazing Thing,” and descends to girlish superlatives…“a lovely breath of life…most tremendous lift…totally fascinating...
...After her husband was killed in the war she married Robert Treuhaft, a radical labor lawyer whose firm would one day hire an intern named Hillary Rodham...
...The girl was intelligent enough, but she was also an English debutante...
...Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé of our overpriced funeral industry and its maudlin extortionary wiles was condemned as an assault on capitalism by a godless Red, a subversive harpy who wanted to deprive grieving loved ones of the beautiful “memory pictures” of American funerals and substitute the dismal primitive procedures practiced in the Soviet Union...
...and she a passionate advocate of abolishing the poll tax...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
