'Queen of the Muckrakers' Jessica Mitford had the Last Laugh
BY
DONNA HOROWITZ
From The Oakland Tribune's
series:
"East Bay Faces of the 20th Century", 5/25/99
Even in death, Jessica Mitford, known as the "Queen of Muckrakers" for her scathing brand of writing, continues to assail her favorite target: the funeral industry. The final book from the longtime Oakland resident generated a whole new wave of interest in funeral homes and the multinational corporations that run them. Published posthumously last year, "The American Way of Death Revisited" updated her original bestseller of 35 years earlier. After Decca, as she was know, contracted cancer, her husband, Robert Treuhaft, retired from his law practice to finish the book.
During a recent interview at his Oakland home, Treuhaft pointed with
glee to an online printout showing the precipitous drop of Service
Corporation International's stock prices. Houston-based SCI, the world's
largest funeral company— and a particular target of Mitford's—
saw its stock prices fall from a high of $47 a share in 1998 to a
low of $14 last March.
"This is the kind of thing she would have loved," Treuhaft
said. "She never followed the stock exchange, but she would have
loved a picture like that."
Mitford died three years ago at 78, but she continued to toy with
SCI to the end. A last request to Karen Leonard, her book researcher,
was for her funeral bill to be sent to SCI.
"After all, think of all the fame I brought them," she
told Leonard.
As word of Mitford's death spread, calls started coming from her
biggest adversaries. And what did the funeral directors want to
know? "Who did Decca?" Some even offered to handle arrangements
at a discount, Leonard recalled. But Mitford had picked Pacific Interment Mortuary and Crematorium
in San Francisco. And for $490 she was cremated and her ashes were
scattered at sea— at far less cost than a traditional funeral,
which can run almost $5,000, plus an additional $3,000 to $4,000
in cemetery fees.
This summer, Leonard, who also is executive director of the Redwood Funeral Society, and Mitford's friends plan to unveil the "Jessica Mitford Memorial Project"— a cemetery and crematory to be built in Sonoma County with funeral costs to be offset by a theater. Already, students at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland are working on preliminary designs for the cemetery.
Although Mitford is best known for skewering the funeral industry, she also wrote other muckraking books: "The Trial of Dr. Spock", "Kind and Usual Punishment" (about prisoner's rights), and "The American Way of Birth."
Born into an aristocratic British family with fascist sympathies, Mitford might never have become a writer had she not lost her first job, selling classified advertising for a newspaper, in the communist scare of the early 1950'. Though she later became disillusioned with the Communist Gary, she would ally herself with politically progressive causes throughout her life. After she lost her job, Decca, inspired by her sister Nancy, a respected novelist and biographer, wrote two autobiographical memoirs— "Daughters and Rebels" and "A Fine Old Conflict"— that told of their colorful, upper-crust British upbringing.
Children of Lord and Lady Redesdale, Mitford and her five siblings lived the English country life of privilege. One sister, Diana, married Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British fascist movement; another sister, Deborah, married the Duke of Devonshire. A favorite sister, Unity, became the "Nordic Goddess" of Adolf Hitler; she shot herself in despair when his feelings toward her cooled. She survived the suicide attempt but died young.
Decca Mitford, always rebellious, joined the Communist Party in her early years. At 19, she eloped to Spain with her cousin, Esmond Romilly, the nephew of Winston Churchill's wife, Clementine. Her parents persuaded Churchill to send a British destroyer to retrieve the couple, but they later married anyway. They had one child who died in infancy and another, Constancia Romilly, called "Dinky", a nurse in New York. Esmond died in 1941.
By the 1950's, Mitford was living in Oakland with her second husband, labor attorney Treuhaft. The marriage lasted 53 years. Both were active in social causes. Mitford, who headed an East Bay civil rights group, was questioned by the government during the McCarthy era about her communist leanings. Among other causes, Mitford supported the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960's, opposed the UC loyalty oath and was part of a sit-in at the Berkeley campus intended to pressure the regents into divesting investments with companies doing business with South Africa. She also demonstrated against the Vietnam War and US intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
The Treuhafts had one surviving son, Benjamin, a piano tuner in New York with a passion of his own. On a trip to Havana, he discovered pianos in disrepair. He since has shipped 49 pianos to Cuba— an achievement that would have made his mother proud, according to his father.
Mitford went out in style— something her friends organized to play a joke on the funeral industry. Her memorial service at Delancey Street in San Francisco was attended by almost 500 people, who formed a procession behind a New Orleans-style marching band, the whole cortege led by an antique carriage drawn by four black horses festooned with fancy black plumes.
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