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Carla Kaplan, "Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford" (Harper, 2025)
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- [00:02]
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Tom Tossena
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Tossena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Carla Kaplan, the author of the Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford In Troublemaker, Kaplan tells the wild and unlikely story of Jessica Mitford, fifth of the six famous Mitford girls, a British aristocrat turned American Communist. Famous for exposes like the American Way of Death, this biography brings her astonishing self transformation to life with a riveting, often hilarious account of trading wealth and status for a life of radical activism. Jessica Mitford, always known as Decca, was brought up by an eccentric English family to marry well and reproduce her wealth and privilege, not to advocate for the rights of others. Decca ran away to America to forge a rebel's life. As this richly researched book details, Decca broke the Mitford mold. Instead of settling for a life of professional beauty, she fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, became an American Communist and pioneered witty, hugely popular journalism, including her 1963 blockbuster, the American Way of Death. Decca dedicated her life to social justice and proved herself an immensely effective ally, but she also injected laughter into all her political work, annoying some activists with her relentless antics but encouraging many others to find joy in the struggle. Mining extensive untapped sources and with nearly 50 new interviews, Kaplan's passionate biography beautifully illuminates how Decca's hard won and self taught social empathy offers a powerful example of female freedom, the dramatic, novelistic story of an extraordinary woman of her time who is remarkably relevant and resonant today. My guest, Carla Kaplan, is an award winning professor and writer who holds the Stanton W. And Elizabeth K. Davis Distinguished Professorship in American Literature at Northeastern University. She has published seven books including Zora Neale, A Life in Letters and Miss Anne in the White Women of the Black Renaissance, both New York Times Notable Books. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowships, Kaplan has been a Fellow in Residence at the Cullman center for Scholars and Writers, the Schomburg center for Research in Black culture and the W.E.B.
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Interviewer
Du Bois research Institute.
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Tom Tossena
She is A fellow of the Society of American Historians and serves on the board of Biographers International. She divides her time between Boston and Cape Cod.
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Interviewer
Carla Kaplan, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Carla Kaplan
Thank you so much for having me.
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Interviewer
So I'm going to start by saying, honestly, I don't read a lot of biographies. I think that's probably a bad thing to say to you, but I don't. But I do want to say that once I got this book, I couldn't put it down for several days. And to tell you what a joy it was to both read the book and to learn about the life of this extraordinary woman. This, I know, was a long project for you. So what brought you to the life of Jessica Mitford?
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Carla Kaplan
So, first of all, I thank you for what you just said. Biographers hate to hear that readers couldn't put their books down right. We hate that. So in a funny way, I have to tell you, I had been looking for Jessica Mitford my whole life before I ever found her. And I didn't know she was the one I was looking for. Let me tell you what I mean. I had always wanted to write a biography of a woman activist who was funny and playful because there's a myth out there, and I'm sure you've run into it, that women activists or women professionals are grim and gray and cheerless and no fun to be with. And I've always thought as a lifelong activist, well, wait a minute, I'm kind of fun. And I also thought that was a completely wrong headed stereotype. So I had in my mind, I want to write a book about a fun woman activist. But there was also another way in which I had been looking for her. My previous trade book, the book I published 10 years ago, was called Miss Anne in Harlem, the White Women of the Black Renaissance. And it was a group biography from the 1920s and 30s about a bunch of white women who looked at the Left bank and they looked at Greenwich Village and they said, no, no, I want to go be part of the black Harlem Renaissance. It's a very unlikely choice. And many of them went without a lot that they could offer. They had fascination with black culture, but they didn't necessarily know very much about it. They may not have had much in the way of resources. What they went with were their good intentions. And it really ended up being a group biography of the limits of good intentions, particularly the limits of good intentions when it comes to the history of American racism, because good intentions are never going to dismantle a racist system. And that's what these women learned. And in a way, I had written this entire group biography of failed allies, women who wanted to be allies but didn't, for the most part really succeed. And I knew that there was no way I was writing another book on failed allies. Couldn't do it. I had to have a successful ally. So without even knowing it, I had been looking for Jessica Mitford, a funny activist, unbelievably successful ally, and somebody who made an extraordinary self transformation from one world to another. She goes from being a British aristocrat to an American communist in Oakland, California. And she lives sort of three lives. She lives a life as a British aristocrat, which she leaves behind at 19, rather dramatically. Then she lives a life as an activist, mostly a civil rights activist with the American Communist party for about 20 years. And then in midlife, she becomes a phenomenally successful writer and lives a third life as a muckraker and an advocate and a journalist. And I just thought, what a great story to get to tell somebody who does all of that and who leaves us this really important legacy, which is every single day of her life. From the time she was 19 years old, Jessica Mitford got out of bed ready to fight fascism. And, and this is the critical part, and looking for the fun every day, she was ready to have a good time. And for those of us who are feeling despondent and despairing and we'd kind of like to pull the covers up and we're really afraid to open the newspaper because, you know, is there going to be another Nicole Good or Alex Preddy or canceling of federal data? Are they going to take down more murals about enslavement? Right. We just don't want to face the day. Jessica Mitford's this incredible model because she actually lived through even worse times. And she got up every day ready to fight the fight. And so she was just an incredible gift to get to work on somebody I didn't know I was looking for, but I was looking for all my life.
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Interviewer
So again, it really is an extraordinary story that you tell here. I don't read a lot of biographies, but I do read a lot. And I have done a lot of podcasts on labor studies. Roundabout way of getting to this. And I am always very sympathetic to the authors that I talk to for having to sort through the veritable Alphabet soup of different labor organizations and keeping it all straight. I had a very similar feeling of sympathy for you reading this book. In trying to get through what I would describe as Mitford Ease so Tell us all of those, like, trying to figure out who was Susan in a particular sentence, who was the old bod in another one. It was just. It must have been a tremendous amount of work to get through all that. But tell us a little bit about the Mitfords.
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Carla Kaplan
So thank you for the sympathy. I will take it. Let me give you my home address. Please send more. So let me tell you about the Mitfords and I'll start with some of the getting through the. That research. And then there's a whole other mountain of research that had to do with Jessica Mitford's life and her subjects and her archive. But she was born into a family that, particularly in the uk, has spawned an entire industry of fans, some of whom are extremely obsessive. Jessica Mitford called it the Mitford industry. She was fairly derisive about it. She also fed into it and became part of it. So we can come back to that. But the Mitford industry has been, for almost 100 years now, devoted with real passion and detail to documenting the life of the six Mitford Girls, as they were known. And Jessica Mitford, my subject, had five sisters and one brother. We're not going to bother much with the brother. The brother is killed in Burma in World War II. He's actually not the most interesting Mitford. We're going to put him aside for now. We're going to talk about the six sisters, because they were the famous ones. And each of them has had multiple biographies written about them. There have been plays, there have been movies. There's a recent Britbox series called Outrageous that came out over the summer that some of your listeners may have seen. It's a little bit thin. There's been just a wild industry of interest in these Mitford girls, partly because they were so beautiful. And in that way, they were the kind of hundred years ago version of the Kardashians. Famous for being famous and famous for being beautiful, they also became famous, and people became obsessed with them because they speak to a set of complicated social histories, particularly class and gender. So the Mitford Girls were born into an aristocratic, very eccentric, very insular British family in the Cotswolds. Their parents wanted nothing to do with the outside world. In fact, their father, Baron Reidsdale, referred to the outside world with a capital E, as elsewhere, and he pronounced himself against it, as if elsewhere were a position statement. And they wouldn't let the girls have any education, which was not uncommon among the aristocracy. That anti education for girls was a feature of life in the early 1900s. They weren't raised for careers, they were raised to marry well and reproduce their class. But these six girls, these Mitford girls, as they were called, were all not just beautiful, they were brilliant and creative and wildly energetic and filled with all kinds of ambition. And they really wanted a wider scope than marriage and family. And they had no outlets. So what people have to imagine is they live in this manor house in grand style. The family had thousands of acres of land but very little cash, but they had a gorgeous manor house. But they also live in a very cosseted, self enclosed world, because the manor house is the top of the village. And everybody else in the village either works for the family or is indebted to the family, literally is farming the family's land. So it's not considered appropriate for the girls to have any kind of social communication with anybody but one another. So they're totally thrown back on one another without an education. And they're very inventive and creative, so they push each other to invent lives for themselves. And every one of them reaches up into the air and out of thin air, invents a life. And the reason they become so famous, aside from their beauty, is every one of them who pulled this imaginary future down from thin air realized it. And that makes them very interesting. Unfortunately, some of their imaginary futures could hardly be more despicable. So let me try to do the rundown of the other five, because it is on the one hand, it is from these girls that Jessica Mitford ran, but she always carried something of that tribal girlhood with her. So understanding her sisters is sort of critical. The eldest one was Nancy, and she pulled out of thin air that she wanted to be a writer. And she became a very famous novelist. Pursuit of Love. Love in a Cold Climate. Many other novels. Second sister, Pamela, the least. In the public eye, Pamela was actually known as the country woman, the woman who raised horses and dogs. Wasn't interested in having her name in the press. Well, Pamela was kind of an interesting figure. She married an extremely wealthy physicist named Derek Jackson, who she left for an Italian woman, perhaps explaining why Pamela stayed out of the public eye. Then we have Diana, the most beautiful of them all, very statuesque, stunning, who also makes a, you know, textbook perfect marriage. When she's barely 19, she marries Brian Guinness, and Brian Guinness is heir to the Guinness Alcohol fortune. One of the great fortunes, you know, of the British Empire. They have two sons. And then Diana does the unthinkable in her class at her time. She leaves her marriage for a married man and the Married man for whom she dumps, Brian Guinness is Oswald Mosley, who is the head of the British Fascist Party, who is married and who is at this time having a very well known affair with his wife's sister. So Diana dumps Brian Frostwald Mosley. He eventually does marry her. In fact, they marry at Goebbels house with Hitler in attendance. She spends her entire life as an unrepentant fascist. Diana goes to her grave insisting that the Holocaust was the fault of the Jews. So talk about not making choices worthy of her talents, right? It gets worse. So it actually gets worse. So Jessica Mitford's favorite sister was her sister named Unity. And Unity's given name was Unity Valkyrie Mitford. You cannot make this stuff up. And Unity Valkyrie Mitford was conceived. Are you ready for this? In Swastika, Canada. So her parents, Baron and Baroness Reidsdale, had gone to Swastika, Canada, to be miners. They knew absolutely nothing about mining. I know more about mining than they do, and I know nothing about mining. But Baron Reidsdale, who, again, land rich, cash poor, was always filled with crazy get rich quick schemes, completely insane get rich. None of them worked out. One of them was gold mining in Canada. So they bought a mine they set up, and the only thing they managed to achieve was they conceived Unity Valkyrie Mitford. So Unity Valkyrie Mitford, when she's 15, reaches up into the air and says, I want to be a Nazi. To which Jessica, 14, says, I want to be a Communist. And Unity, like her sisters, achieves her goals. In fact, achieves her goals. Sort of an ensign. She goes to Germany, she starts stalking Hitler at his lunch cafe. He must have noticed her immediately because she was his Aryan ideal. Six foot tall, blonde beauty with the Mitford eyes. All the Mitfords had aqua blue eyes. They're hard not to notice. Eventually, he does go over to her table. He invites her to his table. They become intimates. When Germany and England declare war, Unity goes into a park in Germany, sits down on a park bench, takes a tiny pistol out of her large handbag, puts it up to her temple, pulls the trigger. The bullet goes all the way through her brain. It lodges at the back of her skull and it doesn't kill her. She lives with a bullet lodged in her brain for eight more years. Very diminished capacities. And the youngest sister had reached up into thin air and said, I want to be a duchess. And lo and behold, she becomes Duchess of Devonshire, Chatelaine of Chatsworth House, one of the most famous houses in England. So these are. This is the Group of sisters from whom Jessica Mitford learns to tell stories, to play with language, to tease, to make jokes, to be intimate, to fight with, to love. And they have an enormous imprint on her. But she's cut from a completely different political mold.
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Interviewer
Yeah, it's astonishing, right?
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Carla Kaplan
So unlike these, the other five Mitford girls, Jessica Mitford, from the time she is a toddler, she's that child who looks around her and says, well, this isn't right. This doesn't make any sense. And some of us have been that child, some of us have known that child. A child who says, well, wait a minute, why do we have so much? And everybody else in the village has basically nothing. This doesn't make any sense. And she was alone amongst her family in having that perspective, and she never abandoned that perspective. So she never becomes the adult who says, well, I guess that's the way the world works. She holds onto that sense of fairness and unfairness all her life. So she says, I gotta get out of here. I gotta get away from all this wealth and privilege and status and the Cotswolds and, you know, being the pinnacle of the village. So she opens her running away account. Literally, that's what it's called. She opens it at the Drummonds bank under the title Running away Account. And every time she gets a spare penny, you know, she's putting it in the running away account. And when she's 19, she runs away from this Mitford clan with her second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a famous British rebel. He published his first book before he was 16 years old, who had been fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was invalided home from the war, one of only two members of his battalion to survive the horrible battles of Boadicea. And they meet at a weekend. A weekend. This is a classic thing of their class. He's headed back to Spain. She says, will you take me? He says, I will. And that's it. And she runs off with Esmond Romilly. And maybe I better pause there for a minute. Yeah.
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Interviewer
Because again, the story of the Mitford family is just so fascinating. Down from the Duke and the Duchess themselves and their relationship to so many things that are going on at the time. And the way that Jessica was just. I mean, just in terms of. There's an antisemitism that runs throughout all of the Mitford, both the parents and all of the children, except for Jessica.
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Carla Kaplan
And in fact, the antisemitism starts in the grandparents on both sides, the Baron and the Baroness have as fathers. So Jessica Mitford's Parents have as grandfathers two famous antisemites. So Tom Bowles, known as Tapp, and Bertie Mitford, known as Bardi. Mitford is the way it was pronounced then. And there were famous antisemites in their day. So this antisemitism is a strain that runs through the family. And Jessica Mitford's first husband was a young man, very much of her class, very much of her attitudes. He was her model for rebellion. He did not live very long. And her second husband was a Jewish American left wing lawyer. So she, in every way, she's unlike the Mitfords. And yet part of her, the secret to her success is that even though she leaves behind the money and the privilege and the status, she carries away from that aristocratic background a certain set of protocols and preferences and ways of doing things, including a kind of fearlessness that partly comes from believing you're untouchable. That serves her in remarkable stead as a communist and a muckraker. So part of what makes her such an amazing person to spend the last 10 years with, least for me, is this mix of American commie, activist, writer, Oakland, California and then these just traces and hints and whispers of her aristocratic background and her love of her sisterhood and tribe. And she's always a little bit of both.
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Interviewer
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about her time with Esmond, because, again, you know, just telling the story, there's enough.
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Tom Tossena
In here for a novel.
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Carla Kaplan
Yes. And I think there has been talk at various times from some people who have tried to do either a movie of just the Esmond and Decca years or a play. There's absolutely enough in their four short years together for a novel. Their time together was short but completely remarkable. So, as I mentioned, Esmond had already been fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was one of the very first British volunteers. He, in fact, he volunteered so early to fight in the Spanish Civil War that there wasn't yet a British brigade. He fought with a brigade that was mostly Italian and German languages. He spoke not a word of, by the way. He managed to make himself at home in any social circle he was in.
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Interviewer
Yeah, he was an interesting character himself.
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Carla Kaplan
Amazing character, Incredibly charming, funny, brilliant. Also very ruthless and unscrupulous and determined to have his way. He was extremely handsome. He was funny as hell. He was very good at leaving things behind. He had dropped out of English boarding school before he was 16. He had left behind his family. He was just a kind of remarkable character who was both very brave and very much a warrior. But Also danced through the world a little bit like a fairy character, with a very kind of light touch. He was a real mix of qualities and a kind of perfect first husband for Jessica Mitford, who was in his thrall. So in their marriage he was very much the boss. He said he determined when they would leave Spain, they went back to England. They lived in working class England, in a commune. Esmond was just an irrepressible gambler, so he was trying to run a gambling house in working class England. They had an infant daughter who unfortunately died of measles. It was a terrible tragedy that marked Jessica Mitford all her life and of which she basically never spoke.
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Interviewer
Yeah, it's that concrete upper lip.
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Carla Kaplan
Right, concrete upper lip. And then they went to the United States. So Esmond, all the ideas were his and he always had ideas. He had a slightly manic side, maybe more than slightly. And one of his big ideas was they would go to the United States, they'd go to America and they'd make their fortunes as lecturers on the British class system. Now, they did make their way to America with their British letters of introduction and they did not become lecturers. They took a series of odder and odder and odder jobs. So Esmond found work as a door to door silk stocking salesman. He was profoundly persuasive and Decca was rather horrified to see him sucking money out of working class women who didn't have it. He's very persuasive. He got a little training as a bartender. They actually ran a bar in Miami, Florida. Decca sold tweeds at the World's Fair in New York. She sold dresses. She was a dress model. They did all kinds of odd jobs. They wrote a column for the Washington Post about their madcap adventures where they really presented themselves as sort of happy go lucky bohemian adventurers. And when war was. And they basically had a grand time, and when war was declared, Esmond joined up very quickly with the Royal Canadian Air Force, as he had joined up very quickly in Spain. Told Decca, don't worry, I am untouchable. Had training as a navigator, which meant he was the one on bombers who was determining the route. He was ill suited for that job in the extreme. He was very quickly shot down and killed over the North Sea in November of 1941. So now she's alone, she's in the United States. She had given birth to their young child who was a baby. She has no money, it's wartime, she can't get money from Britain. She couldn't go back to England if she wanted to. She blamed her family, the filthy fascists, she called them, for Esmond's death, really quite rightly. After all, Diana was married to a fascist leader, and she had to make her way completely on her own and completely heartbroken. And one of the things that's so extraordinary about her is from that moment on, we see the same pattern in her life in which she pulls herself up, decides to move forward, and brilliantly takes advantage of any opportunity that comes her way and makes a life for herself. And it's a really amazing thing to watch.
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Interviewer
So there's a lot of different ways that sort of think of you described earlier on, that there's sort of three phases to her life. And I was thinking about that and I was starting to write questions about basically sort of framing it in terms of relationships. There's an important one that starts to crop up here, though, with Virginia Duer.
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Carla Kaplan
Yes. And she's so lucky that her first girlfriend, her first friend, who's not a relative, is Virginia Durr. So when she and Esmond make their way to the United States with their letters of introduction, some of the first, they're very interested in the New Deal. They want to talk to people who are involved in the New Deal. They're fascinated by this, and they have the fantasy that they're going to be given offices in the New Deal, which they think is a building, and that they're going to help run the New Deal. Well, that also doesn't happen again. They don't have any training or education or skills or background. They have a lot of enthusiasm. But through these networks, they quickly meet Virginia and Clifford Durst, civil rights icons, and Virginia Durr and Jessica Mitford. Although they were separated by nearly 15 years, there were certain similarities between them, which in Virginia Durr's case, Virginia had been born into the kind of Southern white aristocracy. She was born into a world also of privilege. Not the kind of wealth and status the Mitfords had, but a kind of Southern, you know, old money and privilege and deep racism. And like Jessica Mitford, she could see the wrong of American racism. And she had dedicated years to trying to defeat the poll tax, which of course is now coming back. Right. She was trying to defeat the poll tax and work for voting rights for African Americans. She was a very successful anti poll tax worker and a very successful activist. And they had made friends with the Ders early on. And when Esmond signed up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, he said to Virginia Durr, will you look after Decca for a weekend And Virginia Durr sort of said, well, okay, just a weekend. And the weekend became two and a half years, because after Esmond was killed, Virginia didn't have the heart to throw Decca and her daughter Constancia out on their ear. And at that point, they had become very close. And for Decca, it was an incredibly important first friendship. Virginia was, in many ways the older sister she needed. She had left behind her sisters. She had never stopped longing for her sisters. She didn't want to be part of them. She couldn't support their politics. She knew that they couldn't see or recognize her, her or her choices. But she longed for them every day of her life. And with Virginia Durr, she got some of that closeness, that sisterly intimacy, that care and political training. The Durs had a great political library. They knew everybody in Washington, dc, so they opened a lot of political doors for Decca and Esmond. And then after Esmond's death, for Decca, they helped her get her first job, which was with the Office of Price Administration, where she found out she was a brilliant researcher and investigator. And so the Durers were just a very important stepping stone. And they were lifelong friends.
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Interviewer
You know, again, this is one of the things that you mentioned, is her desire to remain a Mitford girl while at the same time carving her own path. And there's this ongoing tension that exists in her life, doesn't it, that she just. She wants that sisterly companionship. She wants to love her sisters, I think, while at the same time recognizing that they are, in fact, filthy fascists. And some of the things. It must have been terribly difficult to read the passages of what her sisters said about her.
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Carla Kaplan
You know, I'm often asked what was the most surprising thing in the archive. And it was that, combined with what I discerned and believe was her longing for them, that she had been so deeply imprinted by the sort of magic of being one of the six. And it was a kind of magical little insular tribe with its own languages and games and storytelling and outfits and imaginary lives and reading and poetry, and they would write plays, and it deeply imprinted her. And they could never see her once she ran away. She became quite obtuse to them, and it was a kind of a willful blindness. They were unable to see that the choices she made, which were a rejection of their choices, were much more fulfilling than the kind of lives many of them had carved out for themselves. The thing about Decca, as she was always known, I mean, that's so telling in itself. This communist muckraker Oakland radical, never gave up the childhood nickname given to her by her sisters. All her life, this famous radical was known as Deka Mitford. And she was holding on to little pieces of that past. And of course, it's a very classic aristocratic thing, all the nicknaming. And she repeated it in her own family. She repeated it with her own daughter, who's actually not known by anybody who knows her as Constancia. She is named for Constancia de la Mora, who was a Spanish aristocrat who gave up wealth and privilege to fight with the Spanish Republic. She's always known by her nickname, but that too was a sort of holding on to that piece of the past. And the sisters, it's almost as if they needed not to see Decca, as if they couldn't bear to see that leaving behind the wealth and the privilege and their racism and the classism and the antisemitism was a path to happiness. If they had seen it, they might have had to question their own choices. And so they sort of saw Deca through half closed eyes. And in the archive that I worked with, I found the letters in which they snipe about Deca behind her back. And it's remarkably cruel. And deca found out about some of it while she was still alive. Not all of it, but some of it.
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Interviewer
So she works for the office of Price Administration and meets the next love of her life and moves to Oakland. Well, San Francisco at first, yes.
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Carla Kaplan
So she's working in the office of Price Administration. She's got a job as an investigator. She finds out she's fabulous. Investigator. Of course, this comes in handy both with the Communist Party and as a muckraker. Right? And she meets this very funny, playful left wing Jewish lawyer named Robert Trewhaft and there's quite a spark. And it hasn't even been a year since Esmond's death. So she thinks about the spark and she says nope. And she gets on a train with her daughter, who's just a toddler, and she takes herself off to San Francisco and accepts a job transfer to the San Francisco Opaque. And Bob follows her out there and they declare their love for one another and they elope and they very quickly get married and he turns out to be a second fabulous choice as a spouse, but a very different kind of spouse. So where Esmond had been the sort of idea man in their marriage and the leader, by the time she meets Bob Trewhaft and it's only a year later, she is completely her own woman and she is not taking anybody's direction. And in fact, they establish from day one a marriage that in some of its features, not all, but in some of its features, is remarkably modern. So Bob figures out very quickly that deca is no housekeeper. And that's to put it mildly. Again, you know, she was raised by servants, with servants. She doesn't know how to do any of this stuff and she's not, she's not interested in learning. So Bob takes over all the domestic chores in that relationship from day one. He does the cooking, he does the shopping, he makes the phone calls, he makes the appointments. All this sort of emotional and household work that usually falls to women. Bob says, no, I'll do that. And along with Decca, Bob is always on the lookout for places where she can shine, for places where she can develop her skills and be recognized. And he's really very, very supportive of her. He's very supportive of her activist work for 20 years and her work in the party. They join the party together and he's very supportive of her once she becomes a writer, which only happens after they both leave the Communist Party. So they have more, nearly 20 years in the Communist Party in the Bay Area, which is probably the only place in the country that Decca could have survived the party for 20 years. Because the one thing Deka Mitford could never do was follow anybody else's rules. And the Communist Party is kind of famous for its rules, which she made fun of. Her first publication ever was a send up of its language and its rule bound sort of ways of doing things. But the Bay Area was a little looser and the Bay Area Communist Party already had many women leaders. So the California Communist Party was famous for women leaders like Dorothy Healy. So it becomes a place very early on where Decca can contribute to the causes that matter to her. She knows she's making a difference. She's actually fighting racism. She's working in Oakland, California on labor issues, on police brutality issues, on housing issues. She's working very effectively. She's a great organizer, she's a great fundraiser. But it also gives her a sphere in which she is free to demonstrate her talents and be recognized for them. And she's quickly recognized by the party as an incredible organizer, partly because she is the most fun person in the room. Everybody wants to be in the room with Jessica Mitford all her life. So she uses that.
- [40:00]
Interviewer
Yeah, and some of her, the way that she did her fundraising were just like something about the drinks that she was like, you paid something for a drink and something else for not drinking. Or I don't remember the details, but.
- [40:15]
Carla Kaplan
So she and Bob were both deeply, deeply social people. They were happiest in a room full of people with a drink in their hands when they could just talk. That was their idea of heaven. And they threw the most famous parties in the Bay Area. They were famous for their fundraising parties and their social parties. Their house was always filled with other people. And Decca would have these fundraising parties at the house and she came up with an idea for the fundraising party. The normal way you would have a fundraising party was there would be an admission to get into the house and a cash bar. And I think we're pretty familiar with that. That tradition continues to this day. Right. We had one this weekend and Decca thought, well, maybe I can do a little better than that. So you paid a ticket price, but then when you got to the house, you had to pay something to get in the door. And. And when you got in the door and someone took your coat, you had to pay them to take your coat. And then it turned out you had to pay to cross the living room. And then, of course, you had to pay for your drinks. But having had a drink, if you wanted to use the bathroom, you had to pay to use the bathroom. And, oh, yes, you do have to pay for toilet paper. And then if you wanted to leave, you had to pay even more to leave than you had paid to get in. So she became absolutely famous for these kind of crazy fundraising parties. And at what point she was asked to apologize for her excessiveness. And Decca, her way of apologizing was saying, well, if everyone will give me the amount of money another one of these parties would cost, I promise never to do it again, you know.
- [42:01]
Interviewer
Yeah, and she pulls it off, and.
- [42:03]
Carla Kaplan
She totally pulls it off. But. But one of the things I could see having also muddled about in her childhood was how much the antics of her communist organizing and that party and her other fundraising antics, they came right out of her sisterhood. Those were the kind of practical jokes that she and her sisters would try to play on one another. Those were the kinds of parties they would have thrown. So she was carrying into the Communist Party this peculiar tribal playfulness of the Cotswolds aristocracy and making great use of it in a completely different world in milieu.
- [42:46]
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- [43:39]
Interviewer
And so you've already mentioned a little.
- [43:42]
Tom Tossena
Bit about her writing career, which I.
- [43:44]
Interviewer
Guess we could say started a little bit with the series in the Washington Post where I think if I remember, her columns were somewhat more popular than her husband's. And then of course, the sort of pamphlet brochure, whatever we want to call that the Life Itselfmanship.
- [44:03]
Carla Kaplan
Yes, it's very funny. I recommend it to your listeners. It's very funny.
- [44:08]
Interviewer
But her writing career starts off with a memoir.
- [44:12]
Carla Kaplan
Yes. And to the outside eye, it looks like she does these columns in the Washington Post in the late 30s and 40s and then doesn't publish again until 1956, this Little Life Itselfmanship pamphlet. And then 1959 when she does the family memoir. So essentially 20 years, however, during all of her time in the Communist Party, when she's an activist with its Civil Rights Congress and she's a very important figure in the Civil Rights Congress, she's writing and she's doing the background research on the incarceration of black men, on police brutality cases, on housing discrimination cases. And she's working with this whole generation of black activists and community organizers who turn out now she has no way of knowing this is going to be the case, but they turn out to be the parents of the Black Panthers. So many of the Black Panthers turn out to be the children of the people Jessica Mitford had worked with in the 50s, but without any byline and without her name on any of this. She's doing all this research and she's writing up these case studies. So she's honing her craft for 20 years with no credit. She's fine with that. It's part of her work as what she calls an activist foot soldier. That's her phrase. And she does write this very funny pamphlet, life Itselfmanship, which is a mockery of Communist Party lingo and sort of pompousness. And then when she and Bob Truehaft leave the Communist Party after the KHRUSHCHEV revelations of Stalin's atrocities. When the Communist Party in the United States is decimated, when most people leave, she's at loose ends. The Communist Party has not only been her way of making a difference, it's been her whole life. She went to the California Labor School. It's where she got the education she always waited for. Her comrades were her social world. Those were the people she went away with on weekends and had dinner with. And those were the friends who looked after her two kids. She and Bob had another child, so there were two children in the house. It was her work and it was her whole life. And it was suddenly gone. And she was very much at loose ends. And Bob had his law practice to retreat to, and there were no scarcity of police brutality cases, which is what he specialized in in Oakland. So he had lots of stuff to do. And she was at loose ends. And she said, well, I'm gonna try writing. And she wrote a memoir of her family called Huns and Rebels. It's also published as Daughters and Rebels. And it is both very critical of her family and its privilege and its blindness and its insularity. And it's also, at times, very tender. And it takes an outsider's view of the aristocracy that can only have the perspective it does. Cause she's also an insider, so she manages to be outsider and insider at once. The book has a certain amount of success in the United States, more so in England, where there's already a thriving Mitford industry. Her sisters hate it. Her sisters say it's a cold, spirited book. It's a mean account. It's inaccurate. I've read Hans and Rebels more times than I want to tell you. I can't find the mean spiritedness in it. I find it actually a remarkably tender account of a family that she eschewed. But she has some success with it, and she's still kind of at loose ends. And the book that makes her fortune and sets out her path and turns her into one of the great muckrakers of America is a book that she publishes in 1963 that she's most famous for called the American Way of Death. Absolute blockbuster, breakout, phenomenal success. She never intended to write it. So the thing about the American Way of Death, it was a book she actually initially had no interest in. So the way that book comes to happen, I mean, she's sort of scrambling. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do in my life? What's my mission? Where's my purpose? What do I Do without the party. And of course, she's politically involved, but the party had given her life an incredible structure and a scaffold, and she was without that. And part of Bob's legal work was representing great numbers of clients who were widows of union workers. And when union workers died, this remains true in what's left of American unions, which, you know, you have to put on a microscope to see now. But what's left of the union world is when a union worker dies, there's a death benefit that the union provides to the. To the family, to the. In that case, it was usually in the 50s to the widow. And Bob had a number of clients who were widows and they had this death benefit. And whenever they went to make funeral arrangements for their dead union worker husbands, invariably the undertaker would charge for the funeral exactly the amount of the death benefit. And Bob would come home every day saying, how did they know? How did they know that it's $871.43. How do they know that? But whatever it was, that was always what they charged. And he would come home, you know, very upset about these stories. And deca would dismiss it. She called it Bob's funeral thing, Bob's death thing. She wasn't very interested until one day. Can I tell a grisly story? Okay. So one day Bob comes home as usual, with, you know, he's got a story from work. They loved sharing their day with each other. You know, they would each start telling each other about their day, and often they talked at lunch to share their day with each other. So he wants to tell her about his day. He had just been working with a client. She was another union widow, very, very distraught client who had gone to the undertaker with her death benefit, $963.43 or whatever, right? And she really needed to keep it to live, to have groceries, to pay the utilities. She was trying to keep as much of it as she could. And the undertaker's trying to get every cent of that death benefit away from her knees, guilt tripping her about everything. No, no, you can't do without an usher. And you have to have these flowers and you have to have a printed program. She's trying to claw some of this money back. And she says to the undertaker, well, look, this casket you're selling me this incredibly expensive metal and satin and, you know, couldn't I put my husband in a simpler wooden box? And the undertaker says to a grieving widow who had lost her husband less than 48 hours ago, well, lady, I can put him in that box, but I'll have to cut his feet off to do it. So Bob comes home with this story, and that's it for Deka. She says, that's it, Bob. We're writing a book. And what I want listeners to notice there is what's going on with her is she is rising to the defense of working class widows. That's what's getting her on her feet. And it's often. That's who she's defending. She's defending working class women. That's where her rage comes from. And she says, we have to write a book on these smarmy characters and their terrible ways. And Bob takes a year off from his law practice, and they write the book completely together. Bob's name would have been on the book, except that their publisher said, nope, we think it'll sell better with Jessica's name on. And Bob says, I don't care. I'm not a writer. I don't care whose name's on it. He didn't care about stuff like that. And so the book carried her name. And of course, it launched her incredible celebrity as a writer, because, to their shock, it was a bestseller for months. It went through something like 17 printings. And it changed American funeral law. It changed consumer law. Ralph Nader owes Jessica Mitford an enormous debt of gratitude. Cause it really launches the consumer rights movement, and it changes John F. Kennedy's funeral. The reason Kennedy was taken out of the Texas casket and that the undertaker had put him in one of these metal gleaming and put in a simpler wooden box, which we're always reminded of, was part of his funeral, was because Robert F. Kennedy, the real Robert Kennedy, not the one we're stuck with, but the real Robert Kennedy, had read Jessica Mitford's book, was very influenced by it, and didn't want the ridiculous excess and ostentation of the kind of funeral she had always mocked. And it was because of Jessica's book that Robert F. Kennedy said, no, I want you to put my brother in a simpler wooden box. So she had profound impact. It gave her a platform. She became a kind of an instant celebrity. And she spent the rest of her life both making a great deal of money as a writer, which she enjoyed enormously and was happy to get, but also always looking for ways she could use her platform to continue the fight for social justice against fascism and against racism. And she was able to use that platform up until the day she died.
- [54:06]
Interviewer
Again, that book and that moment sort of sparked again, almost any phase of.
- [54:13]
Tom Tossena
Her life would make for a novel.
- [54:16]
Interviewer
And this latter half just as likely.
- [54:20]
Carla Kaplan
Absolutely. You could just start in 1963. Right. With the unlikely breakout success about a book about death. And, of course, what made the book so remarkable was her touch, which Bob also had, which is they took a subject that was very chilling and important, and they researched every possible fact and history pertaining to that subject, and then they managed somehow to take the subject of death and make it one of the funniest things you've ever read in your life. That was Decca's touch. She could take anything and find a joke in it or find the fun in it. And the thing about the American Way of Death, which is a brilliant expose and it absolutely excoriates the morticians and the undertakers in the funeral industry and anybody who would prey on working people. It's really excoriating capitalism itself. But at every page, you're laughing so hard you can hardly stand it. And it was that genius of bringing together the laughter and the advocacy. That was her trick. That was the Mitford trick. And she uses combinations of that through the rest of her life. Not every book is funny. She writes a number of books that aren't at all funny, and she knows it, and she knows it's gonna be a problem for her fans. But in her activism, she's always the person who is telling jokes and keeping everybody's spirits up. So she's always bringing these pieces together.
- [55:57]
Tom Tossena
We could use a little of that right now.
- [55:59]
Carla Kaplan
Exactly. That's why I say she's so important today. You know, she's the person who's ready to fight them every day, but she's also ready for us to have fun. You know, she is not gonna let them take away her joy at a good dinner party or a good fundraiser or a conc. She's not going to stop singing. In fact, at the very end of her life, she is part of a rock band called Decca and the Deck Tones. She's always looking to live a very full life and enjoy herself, and she's fighting them every single day. And it's a really, really good model for right now because we are in this for the long haul. This is not gonna be over quickly. And, you know, if we don't keep our spirits up, we may not have the energy to see this through. And she knew that. She really understood that.
- [56:54]
Interviewer
And again, I completely agree with you that there's so much in her life and her orientation towards the world that I think we could use a great deal more of. At the same time, though, And I want to ask this question, and it's even hard to articulate. She suffered some tremendous losses. Horrible two children. The estrangement from her family, Bob's affair and her first husband, and the loss of her first husband. But she doesn't seem to. Boy, I'm trying to think of the right way to say this. She doesn't seem to spend a lot of time reflecting on it.
- [57:42]
Carla Kaplan
So she always described herself as somebody who was disinclined to introspection. And I have to say that's a real understatement. She saw introspection and interest in her own feelings as a self indulgence. And it was something that was gonna hold her back. The only way she was gonna survive the tragedies in her life, to which I would add as a sort of personal loss for her was the loss of the Communist Party. It was an entire life for her, and it was very disorienting. To have that suddenly be gone was to keep moving forward. And she was actually a person of very deep feeling. She was a person who took things very much to heart. And she believed that if she dwelled on those things, she wouldn't be able to keep moving forward. So she developed a remarkable capacity for moving on in the face of tragedy and difficulty. The two children, her family, her husband, the Communist Party. When really difficult things would happen to her, she tended to bracket them very quickly and to move on. She was sexually assaulted. She refused to press charges because she was not gonna be another white woman responsible for incarcerating a black man. She wasn't gonna do it. She once was on a road trip with friends and was pregnant, which she hadn't mentioned to them. She hadn't been pregnant for long and she experienced stomach pains. She locked herself in the bathroom of a gas station bathroom. Miscarried, got back in the car and didn't say a word about it. Not a word. They just went on with the trip. So she had a remarkable capacity for sort of suppressing her own pain in the interest of moving forward. It could make her sometimes not the warmest or most sympathetic friend or mother. She was not that much interested in the sort of emotions of other people. She didn't want to hear a lot about people's sadness or their anguish or their anxiety. She wanted them to do practical things that would make them find their footing again and feel better about the world. So if her friend was suffering emotionally, she would say, you have to fundraise for the workers. Or if somebody was wondering if their marriage could survive. She would say, you'll see how it works out. Now go collect shoes for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. She was not the most emotionally sensitive person, and it was part of the way she survived. It worked for her. She thought it might work for other people. It didn't work for everybody in her circle. She had friends who were much more open to introspection than she was, and they teased her about it. She had three lifelong best friends, Virginia Durr, who you've mentioned, Marge France, one of the founding figures of Women's Gender and sexuality and Lesbian studies, and Maya Angelou, who was always happy to talk about feelings, and Maya would just tease her about it.
- [61:08]
Interviewer
Yeah. Again, it's. Well, I know that you started this project over 10 years ago, and I'm sure that you couldn't have imagined how important it is for us to read about a figure like this in our times.
- [61:21]
Carla Kaplan
No, I didn't imagine we would be. In my wildest nightmares. I didn't imagine we could possibly be where we are today. Very important for today, you know, exactly.
- [61:33]
Tom Tossena
That's.
- [61:33]
Interviewer
I was going to say to thank you for. You've given us a very important. A touchstone, I think, for thinking about, and if not even thinking about, a sort of attitude to take towards some of the things that we're going through.
- [61:46]
Carla Kaplan
Right now and maybe a little bit of hope. She got through even worse times than we've yet faced. We may face times as bad as what she. But she lived through the Red Scare, always expecting to be imprisoned, and she lost many friends to the Red Scare. People who committed suicide, left the country, went out of their minds, lost their jobs, disappeared. I mean, the Red Scare devastated people across the left and in ways that today we're just beginning to see from the terror of Minneapolis, you know, and other cities and the way that terror is keeping some people indoors for months. This was a feature of left life in the 1950s in America, and she did get through it. And so it's good to remember there were anti fascists in our past who got through it.
- [62:40]
Interviewer
Well, again, I want to thank you for your book and, of course, for taking the time to talk today. Carla Kaplan, it's been a delight.
- [62:48]
Carla Kaplan
Thank you so much.
- [62:49]
Interviewer
Once again, my guest today has been.
- [62:51]
Tom Tossena
Carla Kaplan, the author of the Fierce Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. My name is Tom Decenna, and you.
- [63:01]
Interviewer
Are listening to the New Books Network.
- [63:03]
Carla Kaplan
Sam.