Consider the British families that are pillars of the publishing industry. The Windsors and the Churchills take top honors, but don’t overlook another contender: the Mitfords, six sisters raised in aristocratic obscurity between the wars. For decades, their extraordinary lives, ranging from the hilarious to the tragic, have been fodder for histories, collected letters, stage plays, films, and television shows, right up to this summer’s Netflix series Outrageous. Three of the sisters—novelist Nancy, Fascist Diana, and Nazi Unity—inspired biographies years ago. Now Carla Kaplan brings us Troublemaker, the first biography of Jessica, the runaway Mitford who decamped to America, joined the Communist Party, and became a successful author, named by Time magazine as “Queen of the Muckrakers.”
Born in 1917, the fifth of the sextet, Jessica was always known by her childhood nickname, “Decca.” Raised in rural privilege but deeply moved by rural poverty, she decided early to escape her insular world of servants, sisters, and peculiar parents, opening a “Running Away” account at the bank when she was 11. She made good on her plan at 19, running away to the Spanish Civil War with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s. They married and eventually left Spain for a working-class neighborhood of London, where they had a baby daughter. Julia Romilly died at three months in a measles outbreak.
In 1939, Decca and Esmond sailed for America. This break from family, class, and country was profound and permanent. Yet, Decca could not so easily discard the ties to her tribe of sparkling sisters, with their private language, multitude of nicknames, and endless teases. All through her life she longed for news of them, exchanged hundreds of letters, and managed several visits. Nor could she shed all the marks of her aristocratic upbringing. Her posh accent stayed with her, as well as the emotional restraint taught by her aloof parents, and a certain imperious quality—the legacy of a childhood surrounded by servants. Throughout the book, Kaplan emphasizes that these remnants of her class, always awash in Mitford humor, proved assets in the path she carved in America.
Decca and Esmond’s brief years together had the madcap quality of the screwball movie comedies of the time. They drove a rattletrap old Ford from city to city, charming new acquaintances while blithely stealing their household goods and writing witty articles for The Washington Post—annoying and endearing in equal measure. The war seemed far away but soon brought tragedy close.
Decca’s sister Unity had moved to Munich in the early 1930s and inserted herself into Hitler’s social circle. She adored the Führer and the Fatherland, but she loved her homeland too, telling her family that if the two countries went to war she would commit suicide. On September 3, 1939, the day England declared war, she shot herself in the head. She survived for 11 years but never fully recovered.
Meanwhile, Esmond joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. In 1941, his plane crashed in the North Sea, leaving Decca a young widow with a new infant daughter.
Decca always moved forward through difficult times, and in 1942 she found work in the New Deal bureaucracy as an investigator for the Office of Price Administration, sussing out potential war profiteers. She was in her element, defying plutocrats as she had once defied her parents.
In 1943, she married her boss, attorney Robert Treuhaft, with whom she had two sons. A bright and charming man, Treuhaft shared Decca’s humor and love of pranks and teases. They shared their politics, too, reading Karl Marx to each other in bed after joining the Communist Party. When the Civil Rights Congress was formed, they immediately signed on. Civil rights and party work consumed the Treuhafts well into the 1950s.
When they resigned from the party after revelations of Stalinist crimes, Decca needed a new focus. She decided to try writing. She turned her gift for anecdote to her own past and wrote the best-selling Hons and Rebels, a hilarious account of her eccentric family, whose private dramas somehow mirrored the great political rifts of their time. It garnered stellar reviews and brought many assignments for all manner of magazine pieces.
Decca, thrilled by the praise, began searching for her next book idea. She found it in an exposé of the rapacious funeral industry. Her deep research combined with her breezy style to produce The American Way of Death, a book both devastatingly on target and unexpectedly funny—an instant best-seller following its release in 1963. Suddenly, Decca was in demand as a speaker and for interviews on the radio and television. She adored public speaking and undertook a nationwide book tour. She accepted university-teaching offers and delighted her classes of muckrakers-in-training. It was the high point of her career as a writer.
Decca pursued new book projects that would advance the causes she embraced over a lifetime of activism, but she never again conjured that perfect combination of subject and timing. The Trial of Dr. Spock (1969), Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), The American Way of Birth (1992)—these worthy subjects lacked an essential ingredient: humor. “Not a lot of jokes,” Decca lamented.
In life, Decca clung to the jokes—though plenty of darkness tested her grip. Long after her early losses of Esmond and Julia, her 14-year-old son, Nicky, was killed in a street accident. Three of her sisters died. Bob revealed a long-standing affair. Her younger son, Benji, was diagnosed as bipolar. Through it all, Decca focused on life’s comedy with Mitford resolve, right up to her death from cancer in 1996.
As Kaplan shows, Decca found her legacy in the light: in her ebullient personality, her fight for social justice, the delight she took in her triumphs, and her deep connection with other people.
Robin Olson is a writer and painter
