Like her childhood identification with communism, her writing began as something of a joke. She was completely devoted to the ideals of the party, but she also had a keen taste for ostentation, and she noticed that some of her comrades seemed more committed to social upward mobility than to curing society's ills. As a provocation, she wrote and self-published a satirical pamphlet, “Courage in Life, or How to Become a Man Just Because: A Study of Contemporary Usage of the L (or Left),” in which she satirized the posturing jargon that had come to dominate the party. According to her, instead of simple phrases, group members are prone to idle talk and self-serious verbiage. In a letter to her mother, Decca wrote that one of the funniest results of her stunt was that “the worst criminals like it the best.”
This became Decca's hallmark: writing with talent on serious topics, she attracted people's attention. The qualities she developed as a child—caustic wit, cheeky playfulness, a fiery confidence in her privilege—were put to use in defending the powerless. “As a writer, she could stand up for herself,” Kaplan writes, “face-to-face with her reader, drawing on her amazing research and self-confidence.”
Decca with husband Bob Treuhaft, May 1977.Photo by Mike Stevens/Stringer/Getty.
Decca's writing career began with the publication of Hons and Rebels in 1960. But it was her turn to report that made her a star. In 1962 she wrote a play for Esq about her travels through the American South, including the night she spent in a Montgomery church with Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders while an angry mob surrounded the building, throwing rocks and stink bombs. The following year she published “American way of death“, a book about the predation of the funeral business.
Decca explored every possible aspect of the burial process, from coffin materials to “burial linens.” She took pleasure in infiltrating funeral homes, posing as a potential client, and then allowing her subjects, as Kaplan writes, to “humiliate themselves.” Her book discussed the topic of embalming at length, and much of the manuscript was devoted to the bloody aspects of the procedure.
Decca's inclusion of such details caused a rift with her publisher, who asked her to “cut out the nonsense.” Decca refused. At the last minute, the book was saved by Robert Gottlieb, a young editor at Simon & Schuster (and later editor of that magazine). “We saw everything the same way,” Gottlieb said, meaning they both believed that good journalism should be annoying and fearless. “The American Way of Death” sold hundreds of thousands of copies, leading to a series of congressional hearings and prompting people across the country to ask for a simplified, inexpensive memorial that became known as the “Mitford Service.”
It makes sense that Decca, who felt devoid of knowledge and free will as a child, became like Time dubbed her the “Queen of the Garbage Pickers” in 1970. Curious and daring, she had a need to find out everything and tell everyone what she found. In a sense, journalism was the ultimate expression of her class betrayal. Aristocrats are raised to guard secrets, especially about those in power. She found a way to use the lively lingo of her youth for more than just banter; her prose was bait, but the facts were her justification.
The publication of “The American Way of Death” marks about halfway through Kaplan's book—Decca has lived quite a life after becoming a leading expert on what comes after. She wrote several more books, including Kind and Common Punishment (1973), an exposé of the prison system; The Brave Old Conflict (1977), a memoir of her work in the Communist Party, which she left in 1958; And “American way of birth(1992), in which she attempted to do for obstetrics what she had done for the funeral business. None of these works achieved the cultural ubiquity of “Death,” but they fed both her curiosity and what she called “the thirst to hunt down and destroy the enemy.”
Decca's writings made her rich—a strange outcome for a woman who had walked away from her family's wealth—and she often feared becoming complacent. “She always despised,” Kaplan writes, “radicals who had softened with age, calling them traitors, fools, or worse.” She refused to submit to management at every turn, even when it jeopardized her career. In 1970 she published an article in Atlantic entitled “Let Us Now Appreciate Famous Writers,” which scrapped a mail-order writing course that she felt exploited vulnerable populations; One of the faces of the course was Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, which acquired Decca publisher Knopf. The idea of destabilizing her patron did not stop Decca's pursuit; if anything, it seemed to excite her. Even after her death from lung cancer in 1996, she continued to act up. In a final punk gesture, Kaplan recalls, Decca ordered the assistant to send a posthumous letter to the country's most famous funeral company, asking them to repay all the attention she had given them.
Decca remained estranged from her sister Diana until the end, but remained soft towards the other surviving Mitford girls. A particularly painful episode occurred in 1976, when she learned that her sisters were angry with her for helping one of Unity's biographers. Pamela and Deborah accused Decca of stealing the family scrapbook to help a writer, leading to the threat of an irrevocable breakup. “I’m very sad,” Dekka wrote about the fight. “It's kind of a constant nightmare.” The scrapbook magically ended up in Deborah's mansion and the parties eventually made peace, but Decca wrote that the idea of never speaking to her siblings again shocked her deeply, calling the rift “one of the worst things that ever happened.” In the end, her defiance, which arose in tandem with and in opposition to her tribe, proved unmoored without one of his fellow Mitfords being able to pull the pigtail. The night before her death, Decca could no longer speak, but she still asked to call Deborah on the phone. “Decca’s words were inaudible,” Kaplan writes of this latest connection. “But she seemed to hear her sister well.” ♦
