December 23, 2025 • 33 mins
The glamorous Mitford sisters—six daughters of a Baron—have captivated the public imagination for decades. One became a duchess, one a famous novelist, one retired into a life of privacy, two become fascists, and one became a communist. Jessica "Decca" Mitford is a character larger than life, and the subject of the new book, TROUBLEMAKER, from Carla Kaplan.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised, Welcome to
a very special episode of Noble Blood. I am so
thrilled to be talking today with Carla Kaplan, the historian, writer, professor,
author of the incredible new nonfiction book Troublemaker, The Fierce
(00:23):
Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. If you are someone who,
like me, has been fascinated with the Midford Sisters, this
is absolutely going to be a book you're going to
want to read. I feel like I learned so much.
I had been circling, you know, information about the Midford
Sisters because they're just fascinating. And this book is just
so brilliantly comprehensively done, even though it focuses really on
(00:45):
Jessica or Decca Mitford. Thank you so much for joining me, Thank.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You so much for having me. What a pleasure to
be here today.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So just to start for audience members who maybe aren't
familiar with who the Midford Says are, who are they?
Why do so many people write and talk about them?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And why has it been going on for literally one
hundred years now? So it has been sometimes called Mitford Mania.
Jessica Mitford, the sister about whom I write, called it,
somewhat derisively, the Mitford industry. And there have been waves
of Midfordiana, and we are in one. So there is
(01:25):
my book. There is Peter Sussman's incredible book of Jessica
Mitford's letters. There is Mimi Ponds Do Admit, which is
a graphic group biography of all the sisters. There is
in Great Britain now a biography of their mother, just
appropriately simply called Love. There was just a play in
England which I unfortunately didn't get to see, called Party Girls.
(01:47):
And of course, as some of your listeners may very
well know, there was the britt Box series called Outrageous Yes,
which was based on Mayor Lovel's group biography and covered
all the sisters. And if any of your listeners happened
to see Outrageous, they get a picture not only of
what beautiful, engaging, charming, brilliant, creative, often snarky, rebellious women
(02:16):
the six Sisters were, but they also get a sense
of a kind of split screen reality that these sisters
were born into the British aristocracy, into a very eccentric
and a very isolated family, which in classic aristocratic tradition
(02:37):
was very land rich and somewhat cash poor, and the
parents were really old school. In fact, they were so
old school that Jessicamitt for the sister about whom I write,
called them Edwardians, you know, which is quite a bit
earlier than they were. But they were very old school
(02:58):
when it came to genders. They did not believe in
any education. For these six amazing young women who were
brilliant and creative and full of energy and full of ambition,
and denied formal education really of any kind. So what
did they do? So these six beautiful girls essentially reach
(03:19):
up into the air and they pull imaginary futures out
of thin air. And part of why I think we're
so fascinated with them is almost all of them achieve
exactly the imaginary future they pulled down from nowhere. So
we have Nancy, who wanted to be a great writer
(03:39):
became a famous novelist. Pamela, who lived most quietly of
them all, the country woman known as women who stayed
in the country and stayed out of the press, left
a very wealthy marriage for a German woman that could
have been part of why she stayed out of the press.
Then we have the notorious.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Diana, the beauty of the family.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Although they're all beautiful, I mean, every one of them
is sort of drive your car into the curb and
gape at them beautiful, you know. But Diana was extraordinary,
and she looked like a statue and she actually was
that way all her life. Just stunningly beautiful and one
of the most brilliant of them all, and one of
(04:25):
the two who made some of the absolute worst choices.
So Mary's very very young. Mary's Brian guinnis heir to
the Guinness fortune, leaves him for a man named Oswald Mosley,
head of the British Fascist Party. When she leaves Guinness
for Mosley, Mosley is married, he is carrying on an
affair with two of his wife's sisters. He's really something else,
(04:50):
and it's an incredibly scandalous thing for a young woman
of the aristocracy with two children to do. But she
lives all her life with Oswald Mosley as a fascist,
never apologizes for her fascism, completely unrepentant. Diana goes to
her grave blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. And then
(05:10):
let's see, there is Unity, Decca's very, very favorite sister,
who went even further than Diana. So Unity falls from
a distance. She's completely enamored of Adolf Hitler. She goes
to Germany, she stalks him for months until he finally
notices her. Now she's pretty hard not to notice. She's
six feet tall, she's gorgeous, and she's staring at him NonStop.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I mean she's also a member of the aristocracy.
Their father is a baron. I imagine that gave them some
access exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well. It also made her very interesting to Hitler because
in his mind he's thinking, Okay, she's the daughter of
a baron. I'm going to get some inside information, you know.
Fortunately for England, Unity didn't have much in gie information.
What she did have was total dedication to Hitler. And
when Germany and England declared war, she went into a park,
(06:08):
took a tiny pistol out of her handbag, put it
up to her temple, and pulled the trigger. And she
didn't die. The bullet lodged in the back of her
brain and at the back of her skull, and she
lived for many years with diminished capacities. The youngest sister
became the Duchess of Devonshire, the Chatelaine of Chatsworth Estate.
If anybody listening is going to England, do not miss
(06:31):
the chance to see the hundred plus rooms at Chatsworth.
It's an extraordinary place in one of the great, great
old aristocratic noble houses of England. And that's Debo's life.
So here comes Jessica Mitford, my subject, who doesn't share
any of her sister's politics. All her sisters leaned to
(06:52):
the right. She leans as far to the left as
she can get, and she doesn't really share their values
or their protocols like them. She is beautiful, she's quite gorgeous,
like them. She could have been a society beauty and
spent her life in that way, but she wasn't interested,
and so she ran away from home at nineteen with
(07:13):
her second cousin, with whom she quickly fell in love
and got married. They fought in the Spanish Civil War.
They made their way to the United States. He died
in the war Second World War. She became an activist
and then a famous, famous American muckraking writer who proved
that she could carry all the wordplay of her childhood
(07:35):
right into muckraking so she takes a form of writing,
of journalism. It's almost dead when she touches it. Nobody's
doing muckraking in the nineteen fifties, and she takes it.
She fills it full of the Midford tease, the Midford humor,
and all of a sudden it's a brand new form.
And she's a blockbuster success in nineteen sixty three and
(07:56):
has a kind of third life as a writer. So
she has life as an aristocrat, she has a life
as an American communist and a civil rights activist, and
then she has a life as a famous writer. And
if you were putting this in a novel, your editor
would say it's too much. Now.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
What I find so fascinating about Decca Midford, and I
think listeners might find interesting, is the thought of this
beautiful young aristocrat becoming a communist. But she didn't really
dismiss or make excuses for her childhood or her personality.
She sort of used her privilege for the benefit of
(08:35):
her causes. Can you speak to that sort of interesting contradiction.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think it's a great question, and it's one of
the most interesting things about her. It's one of the
reasons actually, I think She's so useful today because here
is someone who, on the face of it, goes about
as far from her background and her family of origin
as you could go. She goes from a our house
(09:00):
in the Cotswolds to a middle class home in Oakland, California.
It's pretty hard to go much further than that. And
on the face of it, it looks like she leaves
everything behind. She certainly leaves behind her rank and her
privilege and all of the comforts of the aristocracy. She
pays a very high price for the trajectory she chose.
(09:25):
But as you say, one of the things that makes
her so interesting is even though she throws it all away.
She says, I don't want any titles, I don't want
that money, I don't want that land, I don't want
those aristocratic protocols. I'm setting all of that aside. She
takes aristocratic mannerisms and certain aristocratic privileges of risk taking,
(09:48):
and she takes them right into her work as an
American communist and write into her work as a muckbreaker.
So she is the aristocratic communist. It's almost a addiction
in terms, and she knows it. And she knows that
by being so many different things at once. She becomes
even more noticeable than she would have been otherwise. So,
(10:10):
as you say, she never attempts to hide that she
is of a very different background than the people she's organizing.
In fact, one of the things I discovered in my
research over the ten long years it took me to
write this book was that every year that she was
an American working as an activist, working as a writer,
(10:31):
being such an American, that English uppercrest accent it got
deeper every year. Fascinating right where most people work to
lose it. She didn't. She increased it and she used it.
So here she is this former British aristocrat. She's organizing
in Black Oakland, California. She's working on labor issues, she's
(10:54):
working on housing issues, and she's very much dedicated to
working on police brutality issues. So she's interviewing Black Oaklanders
who've been beat up by the Oakland police, and she
comes into their homes with her English black handbag, with
her a line skirt, with the pumps, you know, with
(11:14):
the whole thing right and the accent, and they're not
put off for the most part, they're actually quite taken
to her because what she understands, and it really is
useful today, I think is that authenticity works. That if
you're not selling a story, if you just are who
you are, people will accept your differences, people will accept
(11:37):
And she understood that in a really profound way. But
she also enjoyed tweaking everybody around her. She never lost
the Miss Richford tease. So these girls were notorious teases,
all six of them. Decca never gave that up. So
she would tease her comrades and the Communist Party. She
would tease the very people she was organizing. She would
(12:00):
tease her guests at fundraisers, and part of her tease
was being a British aristocrat in a room full of comies.
And she knew right, She knew that that was a funny,
odd thing, and she loved to play it up. It
was part of who she was. She couldn't resist a joke.
If there was a joke to be had, including at
her own expense, she always made the joke.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
One thing that I also love about Decca, and that
I found so striking in your book is just the
visual knowing that if we zoom back to her childhood,
she was sharing a bedroom with unity, the sister who
then grew up to be the most fascist. What was
their relationship like when they were growing up?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Unity was her favorite sister by far, and as far
as we can tell, Unity never walked away from adare
never walked away from a challenge. I think of all
the six as bold and as brave as Deco was,
and she was incredibly brave. Unity may have been even bolder.
She didn't get to live out her life, so we
(13:05):
don't know what would have happened to her, but she
took everything to extreme. Unity was the one who everybody
had an idea, and Unity was always the first to
actualize it. Unity was apparently a complete card, a total crackup,
very very rebellious like Decca, absolutely incapable of bending the
(13:27):
knee to anybody or anything. And they were incredibly close
in childhood, so that when Unity did what she did,
when she not just allied herself or aligned herself with Hitler,
but became his intimate and was totally devoted to him,
this was heartbreaking for Decca. This was somebody she loved deeply.
(13:50):
And when Unity came back from Germany through Switzerland with
a bullet lodged in her brain, with the capacities sort
of an eight year old child, but sometimes of a
two year old child. She had terrible temper, tan terms,
She didn't always know where she was. Sometimes she was herself.
Sometimes she drove a car, so they actually let her drive,
(14:12):
which is kind of amazing to think about. We wouldn't
do that today. But Decca kept in touch with her,
so unlike her sister Diana, who Decca completely renounced and
blamed for her first husband's death, she kept in touch
with Unity. In fact, they wrote each other very loving letters,
and I think part of what she did was keep
Unity alive. By remaining a prankster. Decca kind of remained
(14:37):
loyal to the games she and her sister had played
with one another. Now she took them into a different world.
She took them out of the nursery and into places
like the East Bay Communist Party, not where you expect
to find them, but some of her pranks, like the
kinds of fundraising parties she would have where you paid
a dollar to get in, but then fifty cents for
(14:59):
your drink, but then twenty five cents to get rid
of your empty glass, and going to the bathroom you
had to pay another ten cents for toilet paper, and
another five cents to come out of the bathroom, and
another fifty cents if you wanted to leave the party.
So that kind of pranking, that is something kind of
thing she and Unity would do. And I think she
kept her sister alive in her own mind and in
(15:22):
her heart by keeping alive a certain playfulness and insisting
on it. They couldn't have been closer and Unity even
when she was most brain damaged. The person she wanted
to talk to most was not Hitler, although she did
phone him. They did have phone conversations after the attempted suicide.
(15:42):
There's not a record of them that anybody knows about.
There's a lot of fake records of them, I'm sure.
But the person she wanted most was her sister Decca.
So you know here she was a devoted Nazi. Decca
was a devoted communist and an anti fascist, and couldn't
have been a strong her anti Nazi. But they longed
for one another and that longing never abated. And even
(16:05):
after Unity died, Decca was very tender about her memory.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
That's very heartbreaking in a way. You know, she sort
of lost her sister three times almost.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Exactly well, in fact, she lost them all. I mean,
she kept trying to connect to them, not by pretending
to be other than whom she was. She didn't try
to connect to them by imitating them or pretending that
she was still pursuing the life they were pursuing. But
she went back to England every year, at great expense
(16:38):
and great trouble. She wrote them constantly. She tried to
keep them apprized of her life, and they never accepted her.
They pretended to sometimes, sometimes they didn't pretend to it all.
Sometimes they're quite mean to her directly. They were almost
always mean about her behind her back, and she kept
trying to still have them as her sisters. And for me,
(16:59):
that piece of the story was actually the most heartbreaking,
the way in which she kept trying to connect to
her sisters, in the way in which intimate, playful, brilliant,
word loving, story loving sisterhood marked the rest of her life.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Well, fast forwarding a bit after Decca came to America,
I want to talk a little bit about the fact
that she was summoned to testify in front of the
House on American Activities Committee, which is a pretty exciting
incident in her life. Can you talk a little bit
about why she was called and then what she did
or rather didn't do when she was there?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Well put, it was definitely a didn't do. So. Decca
and her husband, Robert Truhaft, Jewish American progressive left wing lawyer,
were both members of the Communist Party. They were deeply
involved in the East Bay Communist Party. I don't think Decca,
by the way, would have survived in the New or
Communist Party or Chicago or Minnesota. The East Bake Communist
(18:05):
Party was not as rule bound as others, and it
was more playful, and there was more creativity, and it
was much less tied to central leadership or the Soviet Union.
So she was able to flourish there. And in the
East Bake Communist Party she discovered some of her skills.
She discovered there as well as in the Office of
Price Administration for the US government. What an incredible investigator
(18:27):
she was. She was indefatigable. You sent Jessica Midford on
a mission, and she is going to get the answers
by hook or crook, or any means necessary. If she
has to hide in bathrooms, if she has to steal files,
if she has to pretend to be somebody she's not.
She carries all of that, by the way, into her
muck raking. It's part of why she succeeds as such
(18:48):
a great muck raker. But in the Communist Party she
discovers that she's a great investigator, that she has journalistic skill,
and that she's a really, really good organizer. And she
is mooted over and over and over again in the
Communist Party. Now, for someone like her who never had
a responsible position and no education, those promotions are enormously meaningful,
(19:11):
These positions of great responsibility. So she is the acting
executive Secretary of the East Bay Communist Party. This is
a highly important job. She has a lot of responsibility,
and it is her job to have all the files
and records of the local organization. So of course she
is called before the House on American Activities Committee. She
(19:33):
expects to be She's fully prepared for it. All of
their friends have been called up, some of their friends
have flown the country. They're living in Mexico, they're living
in South America. Some of their friends unfortunately killed themselves.
This is a piece of the Red Scare that sometimes
people forget that the terror of having their lives ruined
and losing their jobs and their families and being called
(19:55):
up drove people to suicide. So she and Bob were ready.
She gets called up and most of what they want
her to do is name names. They want her as
the secretary of the party. She knows everything to come
in with all her files and name names. Now they
don't know Jessica Midford. There is just no way that
(20:15):
Jessica Mitford is going to name a single name. This
is never going to happen. So she shows up at
the huec hearing with no files at all, not a
file to be seen. She'd been subpoened. And she is
in her absolute best outfit and that entails her best dress,
bought with her sister Nancy, probably in Paris because Nancy
(20:36):
had the taste. And she's her finest hat, and her
finest hat is from her mother in law, Aaron Ka Trueheft,
who is a milliner, a very famous, very very high
society milliner in New York City. This is Bob's mother.
So she's dressed to the nine. She's got her pearls on,
she's got her best handbag, I mean, the whole thing,
and she gets into the committee room and they're asking
(20:56):
her a million questions and she refuses to answer any
of them, I'm sure, and they're getting more and more
and more angry at her. And there's quite an audience
there to see all of this, because she's a well
known celebrity locally by the time. And they finally, infrustration,
ask her, well, are you a member of the East
Bay Tennis Club? And they meet ronically because the tennis
(21:18):
club is very right wing and they know that maybe
she'll say no to that. Well, she doesn't hear them correctly.
He thinks they've just asked her if she's a member
of the tenants club like your's association. So she refuses
to answer that too, So the whole room erupts in
hysterical laughter because she even refuses to answer that. Now
(21:41):
everybody's laughing at the committee chairman, and they're ridiculous questions.
She has the whole room cracking up, and they're very
frustrated with her, and they throw her out of the
room and they forget to ask her for her files.
So she uves as quickly as she can. She knows
what just happened. She goes into four days of because
(22:01):
she knows that when they realize they haven't asked her
for the files, they're going to call her back in.
She sort of escaped the entire HUAC thing and going
to jail, she was prepared. She had no files, she
was supered for the files. She could have been jailed
for up to twenty five years. She goes to that
(22:21):
curing room expecting that she's going to spend the next
few years in prison. I mean, she's ready to do that,
but because she's so funny, she escapes it. So her
humor all her life got her into trouble and occasionally
her humor got her out of trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
And I think there's also a remarkable power that she
had in being able to dress herself that way. I
think it was very disarming to people. It was using
her privilege to protect herself and her organization.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yes, she made sure that she looked like an aristocrat
from the Cotswolds, not a comedy from Oakland. She was
very warm when she won wanted to be. She brought
people right in when she wanted to be. But she
also knew how to make people uncomfortable and put them
on edge and make them not sure of themselves, and
she used that very effectively.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
There was also another incident I found fascinating which involves
a riot led by the KKK and a Martin Luther
King rally. Would you mind explaining how Decka Mitford found
herself in that situation.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Jessica Mitford was very close to Virginia and Clifford Drr.
And Virginia and Clifford Dur came from the South, spent
years and years and years in the Washington, DC area,
and they were amazing civil rights workers. In fact, Virginia
Der was the person who was really single handedly finally
(23:49):
responsible for getting rid of the poll tax, which kept
poor and people of color from voting. I don't know
if you've been following this, but we're looking at new
versions of the poll tax coming back around in the
attacks on voting rights right now. So Virginia Wolf must
be absolutely rolling in her grave in disbelief because she
finally got rid of the pull tax, and here it
(24:10):
is coming again. And Jessica Mitford lived with the Durs
for a couple of years and would go back south
to visit them. After she moved off to Oakland, she
would go often to visit and she was visiting in Montgomery, Alabama,
during the period of the incredible famous bus boycotts and
during the period of the Freedom Rides. So this is
(24:33):
the Snick Freedom Rides which follow the bus boycotts, and
one of the bloodiest incidents in the history of the
Freedom Rides and of the Snick Freedom Riders, who were
trying to make a case for integration by riding the
buses together throughout the South, black and white young people,
mostly who had left college to do this work in
(24:55):
the South. The Freedom Riders were coming into Montgomery, Alabama,
and by the KKK and other racist groups, the buses
were attacked. This was one of the periods where John
Lewis was almost killed. This is one of the periods
where famously John Lewis was beaten over the head to
unconsciousness and others. There was actually a white woman activist
(25:16):
who was killed in Montgomery at this demonstration. And there
was a just a horrible race riot, a horrible not
a race ride, but a white attack, a horrible mom
attack on black people, just a terrible racist, not race riot,
but racist riot. And Jessicamick sort of threw herself into
the middle of it. She was right there she was
(25:36):
in it. And it was followed that evening by an
evening service and meeting at the church, and Martin Luther
King was there, and all of the Freedom Riders were there,
and it was a very important gathering to assess this
attack and this riot. And as the community of protesters
(25:59):
gathered in the church, a white mob assembled all around it.
And the white mob tried to kill everybody in the church.
They threw in pipe bombs, they threw in smoke bombs,
they threatened they were armed. They took a car and
they turned it upside down and they set it on
fire in an attempted church on fire. Turned out that
car was the car Jessica Mitford had been driving. And
(26:23):
over three hundred people was trapped in this church overnight,
including Jessica Mitford and Martin Luther King. They kept calling
Bobby Kennedy and they kept saying, please, You've got to
send the National Guard. And it wasn't until dawn that
they were finally rescued by a cadre of National Guards
people who pushed the white mob the rioters away and
(26:45):
got them out, and Jessica Mitford wrote an essay about it.
It ended up never being published, it was not one
of her most successful Everybody always wanted her to be funny,
and it was not an evening she wanted to be
funny about. Wasn't much funny about that night. So she
had a hard time placing that essay. But like her
(27:06):
time in Spain, where she saw people volunteer from all
around the world and put their lives on the line
for democracy and to fight fascism, I think that night
you're talking about left an indelible mark on her. I
think what she looked at, the risk people were taking
just to be able to vote, just for the right
(27:27):
to have their voices heard in this country. That left
her real mark on her, and it influenced the work
she later did.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Before I let you Go, there's one more, like you said,
three different lives she lived when she was a muckbreaking journalist.
Her most I would say, maybe her most famous and
influential story was an expose on the funeral industry. Would
you mind telling us a little bit how she got
into that topic and then what she discovered?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
And you're absolutely right. The book was a blockbuster. It
was the It was the top of the best seller
Life for nearly a year. It was called The American
Way of Death. She published it in nineteen sixty three.
It's never gone out of print. It's still taught in
university classrooms across the country. What's remarkable about it It's
an hysterically funny, laugh out loud book about death and
(28:16):
dying and funerals. So she manages to do two things.
She manages to expose the exploitation of the funeral industry.
It was preying on poor people who would lose all
their death benefits to fancy funerals they didn't need, but
which they were talked into. And at the same time
it managed to expose them by just mocking them using
(28:39):
the midfor tees. The book is sometimes quite gruesome. It
was co written with her husband, Robert Truhaft, and it
came to her through him. He was the lawyer for
the Bay Area Memorial Society, a co op designed to
help people do essentially diy funerals and escape all that exploitation.
And he would come home with the stories, and for
(29:01):
months she would dismiss them, until one day he came
home with a story she couldn't dismiss. He came home
with a story about a client, a grieving widow wanted
a cheaper coffin. She was being talked into a coffin
she could not afford, you know, one of these fancy
caskets with the silk and the gilded and the all
of the stuff. And she said, no, I want that
(29:23):
simple wooden one. And the undertaker said to this grieving
woman who had just lost her husband, well, lady, I
can give you that wooden one, but I'll have to
chop his feet off. And when Jessica mcford heard that story,
she said, that's it. We have to write a book
about these guys. We have to write a book about
what they're doing. And it was really her leaping to
(29:45):
the defense of grieving widows. And she wrote that book
with her husband, and it started her career as a muckraker,
and for the rest of her career she went after
people who were exploiting and taking advantage of others, and
she did it often with humor. She was remarkably effective,
and of.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Course, her first husband had died, she could be very empathetic.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
And she had lost two children, so something she almost
never talked about. It's hardly in her books at all,
but she had lost an infant daughter and then a
son who wasn't even a teenager yet. And she knew
a great deal about loss, and she knew a great
deal about what felt to her like both the dignity
of dying and the dignity of living. That you know,
(30:27):
she thought it shouldn't be something that people made a
profit out of.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Very well said, before I let you go, one last question,
what was her funeral like?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Well, she made a joke about her funeral. She always
used to joke about it. And the joke was, I
want the whole cortege, I want you know, six horsemen,
and I want the glass hearse, and I want the
whole thing. And it was a joke. Well after she died,
when she left very explicit instructions that she wanted the
cheapest cremation possible, her friends thought, oh, we can't resist
(30:59):
one last joke. We have to have one last piece
of fun with Decca. So they did a kind of
mock version of the fancy fancy funeral, including with a
New Orleans style band and you know, the glass hers,
just the whole thing. Unfortunately, some of the American press
didn't realize it was a joke, and so some of
(31:19):
the American press after her death said, well, we don't
really understand it. She was against fancy funerals, but then
she left instructions to have one. It was a joke,
but she did have a sort of mock version of
the fancy funeral. Two enormous memorials. She was a deeply
beloved figure and her death was very devastating people. But
(31:41):
she also had the deaths she chose. She refused a
lot of interventions. She wanted to be able to write
and think and joke and laugh and sing up until
the end. And she died with her friends all around
her bed singing her favorite songs.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
That's beautiful. Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker, The Fierce Unruly
Life of Jessica Mitford, truly deca Mitford a character larger
than life. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by
me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick,
Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Milaney. The show is
edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima
(32:45):
Il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised, Welcome to
a very special episode of Noble Blood. I am so
thrilled to be talking today with Carla Kaplan, the historian, writer, professor,
author of the incredible new nonfiction book Troublemaker, The Fierce
(00:23):
Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford. If you are someone who,
like me, has been fascinated with the Midford Sisters, this
is absolutely going to be a book you're going to
want to read. I feel like I learned so much.
I had been circling, you know, information about the Midford
Sisters because they're just fascinating. And this book is just
so brilliantly comprehensively done, even though it focuses really on
(00:45):
Jessica or Decca Mitford. Thank you so much for joining me, Thank.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You so much for having me. What a pleasure to
be here today.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
So just to start for audience members who maybe aren't
familiar with who the Midford Says are, who are they?
Why do so many people write and talk about them?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
And why has it been going on for literally one
hundred years now? So it has been sometimes called Mitford Mania.
Jessica Mitford, the sister about whom I write, called it,
somewhat derisively, the Mitford industry. And there have been waves
of Midfordiana, and we are in one. So there is
(01:25):
my book. There is Peter Sussman's incredible book of Jessica
Mitford's letters. There is Mimi Ponds Do Admit, which is
a graphic group biography of all the sisters. There is
in Great Britain now a biography of their mother, just
appropriately simply called Love. There was just a play in
England which I unfortunately didn't get to see, called Party Girls.
(01:47):
And of course, as some of your listeners may very
well know, there was the britt Box series called Outrageous Yes,
which was based on Mayor Lovel's group biography and covered
all the sisters. And if any of your listeners happened
to see Outrageous, they get a picture not only of
what beautiful, engaging, charming, brilliant, creative, often snarky, rebellious women
(02:16):
the six Sisters were, but they also get a sense
of a kind of split screen reality that these sisters
were born into the British aristocracy, into a very eccentric
and a very isolated family, which in classic aristocratic tradition
(02:37):
was very land rich and somewhat cash poor, and the
parents were really old school. In fact, they were so
old school that Jessicamitt for the sister about whom I write,
called them Edwardians, you know, which is quite a bit
earlier than they were. But they were very old school
(02:58):
when it came to genders. They did not believe in
any education. For these six amazing young women who were
brilliant and creative and full of energy and full of ambition,
and denied formal education really of any kind. So what
did they do? So these six beautiful girls essentially reach
(03:19):
up into the air and they pull imaginary futures out
of thin air. And part of why I think we're
so fascinated with them is almost all of them achieve
exactly the imaginary future they pulled down from nowhere. So
we have Nancy, who wanted to be a great writer
(03:39):
became a famous novelist. Pamela, who lived most quietly of
them all, the country woman known as women who stayed
in the country and stayed out of the press, left
a very wealthy marriage for a German woman that could
have been part of why she stayed out of the press.
Then we have the notorious.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Diana, the beauty of the family.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Although they're all beautiful, I mean, every one of them
is sort of drive your car into the curb and
gape at them beautiful, you know. But Diana was extraordinary,
and she looked like a statue and she actually was
that way all her life. Just stunningly beautiful and one
of the most brilliant of them all, and one of
(04:25):
the two who made some of the absolute worst choices.
So Mary's very very young. Mary's Brian guinnis heir to
the Guinness fortune, leaves him for a man named Oswald Mosley,
head of the British Fascist Party. When she leaves Guinness
for Mosley, Mosley is married, he is carrying on an
affair with two of his wife's sisters. He's really something else,
(04:50):
and it's an incredibly scandalous thing for a young woman
of the aristocracy with two children to do. But she
lives all her life with Oswald Mosley as a fascist,
never apologizes for her fascism, completely unrepentant. Diana goes to
her grave blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. And then
(05:10):
let's see, there is Unity, Decca's very, very favorite sister,
who went even further than Diana. So Unity falls from
a distance. She's completely enamored of Adolf Hitler. She goes
to Germany, she stalks him for months until he finally
notices her. Now she's pretty hard not to notice. She's
six feet tall, she's gorgeous, and she's staring at him NonStop.
Speaker 1 (05:36):
And I mean she's also a member of the aristocracy.
Their father is a baron. I imagine that gave them some
access exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Well. It also made her very interesting to Hitler because
in his mind he's thinking, Okay, she's the daughter of
a baron. I'm going to get some inside information, you know.
Fortunately for England, Unity didn't have much in gie information.
What she did have was total dedication to Hitler. And
when Germany and England declared war, she went into a park,
(06:08):
took a tiny pistol out of her handbag, put it
up to her temple, and pulled the trigger. And she
didn't die. The bullet lodged in the back of her
brain and at the back of her skull, and she
lived for many years with diminished capacities. The youngest sister
became the Duchess of Devonshire, the Chatelaine of Chatsworth Estate.
If anybody listening is going to England, do not miss
(06:31):
the chance to see the hundred plus rooms at Chatsworth.
It's an extraordinary place in one of the great, great
old aristocratic noble houses of England. And that's Debo's life.
So here comes Jessica Mitford, my subject, who doesn't share
any of her sister's politics. All her sisters leaned to
(06:52):
the right. She leans as far to the left as
she can get, and she doesn't really share their values
or their protocols like them. She is beautiful, she's quite gorgeous,
like them. She could have been a society beauty and
spent her life in that way, but she wasn't interested,
and so she ran away from home at nineteen with
(07:13):
her second cousin, with whom she quickly fell in love
and got married. They fought in the Spanish Civil War.
They made their way to the United States. He died
in the war Second World War. She became an activist
and then a famous, famous American muckraking writer who proved
that she could carry all the wordplay of her childhood
(07:35):
right into muckraking so she takes a form of writing,
of journalism. It's almost dead when she touches it. Nobody's
doing muckraking in the nineteen fifties, and she takes it.
She fills it full of the Midford tease, the Midford humor,
and all of a sudden it's a brand new form.
And she's a blockbuster success in nineteen sixty three and
(07:56):
has a kind of third life as a writer. So
she has life as an aristocrat, she has a life
as an American communist and a civil rights activist, and
then she has a life as a famous writer. And
if you were putting this in a novel, your editor
would say it's too much. Now.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
What I find so fascinating about Decca Midford, and I
think listeners might find interesting, is the thought of this
beautiful young aristocrat becoming a communist. But she didn't really
dismiss or make excuses for her childhood or her personality.
She sort of used her privilege for the benefit of
(08:35):
her causes. Can you speak to that sort of interesting contradiction.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I think it's a great question, and it's one of
the most interesting things about her. It's one of the
reasons actually, I think She's so useful today because here
is someone who, on the face of it, goes about
as far from her background and her family of origin
as you could go. She goes from a our house
(09:00):
in the Cotswolds to a middle class home in Oakland, California.
It's pretty hard to go much further than that. And
on the face of it, it looks like she leaves
everything behind. She certainly leaves behind her rank and her
privilege and all of the comforts of the aristocracy. She
pays a very high price for the trajectory she chose.
(09:25):
But as you say, one of the things that makes
her so interesting is even though she throws it all away.
She says, I don't want any titles, I don't want
that money, I don't want that land, I don't want
those aristocratic protocols. I'm setting all of that aside. She
takes aristocratic mannerisms and certain aristocratic privileges of risk taking,
(09:48):
and she takes them right into her work as an
American communist and write into her work as a muckbreaker.
So she is the aristocratic communist. It's almost a addiction
in terms, and she knows it. And she knows that
by being so many different things at once. She becomes
even more noticeable than she would have been otherwise. So,
(10:10):
as you say, she never attempts to hide that she
is of a very different background than the people she's organizing.
In fact, one of the things I discovered in my
research over the ten long years it took me to
write this book was that every year that she was
an American working as an activist, working as a writer,
(10:31):
being such an American, that English uppercrest accent it got
deeper every year. Fascinating right where most people work to
lose it. She didn't. She increased it and she used it.
So here she is this former British aristocrat. She's organizing
in Black Oakland, California. She's working on labor issues, she's
(10:54):
working on housing issues, and she's very much dedicated to
working on police brutality issues. So she's interviewing Black Oaklanders
who've been beat up by the Oakland police, and she
comes into their homes with her English black handbag, with
her a line skirt, with the pumps, you know, with
(11:14):
the whole thing right and the accent, and they're not
put off for the most part, they're actually quite taken
to her because what she understands, and it really is
useful today, I think is that authenticity works. That if
you're not selling a story, if you just are who
you are, people will accept your differences, people will accept
(11:37):
And she understood that in a really profound way. But
she also enjoyed tweaking everybody around her. She never lost
the Miss Richford tease. So these girls were notorious teases,
all six of them. Decca never gave that up. So
she would tease her comrades and the Communist Party. She
would tease the very people she was organizing. She would
(12:00):
tease her guests at fundraisers, and part of her tease
was being a British aristocrat in a room full of comies.
And she knew right, She knew that that was a funny,
odd thing, and she loved to play it up. It
was part of who she was. She couldn't resist a joke.
If there was a joke to be had, including at
her own expense, she always made the joke.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
One thing that I also love about Decca, and that
I found so striking in your book is just the
visual knowing that if we zoom back to her childhood,
she was sharing a bedroom with unity, the sister who
then grew up to be the most fascist. What was
their relationship like when they were growing up?
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Unity was her favorite sister by far, and as far
as we can tell, Unity never walked away from adare
never walked away from a challenge. I think of all
the six as bold and as brave as Deco was,
and she was incredibly brave. Unity may have been even bolder.
She didn't get to live out her life, so we
(13:05):
don't know what would have happened to her, but she
took everything to extreme. Unity was the one who everybody
had an idea, and Unity was always the first to
actualize it. Unity was apparently a complete card, a total crackup,
very very rebellious like Decca, absolutely incapable of bending the
(13:27):
knee to anybody or anything. And they were incredibly close
in childhood, so that when Unity did what she did,
when she not just allied herself or aligned herself with Hitler,
but became his intimate and was totally devoted to him,
this was heartbreaking for Decca. This was somebody she loved deeply.
(13:50):
And when Unity came back from Germany through Switzerland with
a bullet lodged in her brain, with the capacities sort
of an eight year old child, but sometimes of a
two year old child. She had terrible temper, tan terms,
She didn't always know where she was. Sometimes she was herself.
Sometimes she drove a car, so they actually let her drive,
(14:12):
which is kind of amazing to think about. We wouldn't
do that today. But Decca kept in touch with her,
so unlike her sister Diana, who Decca completely renounced and
blamed for her first husband's death, she kept in touch
with Unity. In fact, they wrote each other very loving letters,
and I think part of what she did was keep
Unity alive. By remaining a prankster. Decca kind of remained
(14:37):
loyal to the games she and her sister had played
with one another. Now she took them into a different world.
She took them out of the nursery and into places
like the East Bay Communist Party, not where you expect
to find them, but some of her pranks, like the
kinds of fundraising parties she would have where you paid
a dollar to get in, but then fifty cents for
(14:59):
your drink, but then twenty five cents to get rid
of your empty glass, and going to the bathroom you
had to pay another ten cents for toilet paper, and
another five cents to come out of the bathroom, and
another fifty cents if you wanted to leave the party.
So that kind of pranking, that is something kind of
thing she and Unity would do. And I think she
kept her sister alive in her own mind and in
(15:22):
her heart by keeping alive a certain playfulness and insisting
on it. They couldn't have been closer and Unity even
when she was most brain damaged. The person she wanted
to talk to most was not Hitler, although she did
phone him. They did have phone conversations after the attempted suicide.
(15:42):
There's not a record of them that anybody knows about.
There's a lot of fake records of them, I'm sure.
But the person she wanted most was her sister Decca.
So you know here she was a devoted Nazi. Decca
was a devoted communist and an anti fascist, and couldn't
have been a strong her anti Nazi. But they longed
for one another and that longing never abated. And even
(16:05):
after Unity died, Decca was very tender about her memory.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
That's very heartbreaking in a way. You know, she sort
of lost her sister three times almost.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Exactly well, in fact, she lost them all. I mean,
she kept trying to connect to them, not by pretending
to be other than whom she was. She didn't try
to connect to them by imitating them or pretending that
she was still pursuing the life they were pursuing. But
she went back to England every year, at great expense
(16:38):
and great trouble. She wrote them constantly. She tried to
keep them apprized of her life, and they never accepted her.
They pretended to sometimes, sometimes they didn't pretend to it all.
Sometimes they're quite mean to her directly. They were almost
always mean about her behind her back, and she kept
trying to still have them as her sisters. And for me,
(16:59):
that piece of the story was actually the most heartbreaking,
the way in which she kept trying to connect to
her sisters, in the way in which intimate, playful, brilliant,
word loving, story loving sisterhood marked the rest of her life.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Well, fast forwarding a bit after Decca came to America,
I want to talk a little bit about the fact
that she was summoned to testify in front of the
House on American Activities Committee, which is a pretty exciting
incident in her life. Can you talk a little bit
about why she was called and then what she did
or rather didn't do when she was there?
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Well put, it was definitely a didn't do. So. Decca
and her husband, Robert Truhaft, Jewish American progressive left wing lawyer,
were both members of the Communist Party. They were deeply
involved in the East Bay Communist Party. I don't think Decca,
by the way, would have survived in the New or
Communist Party or Chicago or Minnesota. The East Bake Communist
(18:05):
Party was not as rule bound as others, and it
was more playful, and there was more creativity, and it
was much less tied to central leadership or the Soviet Union.
So she was able to flourish there. And in the
East Bake Communist Party she discovered some of her skills.
She discovered there as well as in the Office of
Price Administration for the US government. What an incredible investigator
(18:27):
she was. She was indefatigable. You sent Jessica Midford on
a mission, and she is going to get the answers
by hook or crook, or any means necessary. If she
has to hide in bathrooms, if she has to steal files,
if she has to pretend to be somebody she's not.
She carries all of that, by the way, into her
muck raking. It's part of why she succeeds as such
(18:48):
a great muck raker. But in the Communist Party she
discovers that she's a great investigator, that she has journalistic skill,
and that she's a really, really good organizer. And she
is mooted over and over and over again in the
Communist Party. Now, for someone like her who never had
a responsible position and no education, those promotions are enormously meaningful,
(19:11):
These positions of great responsibility. So she is the acting
executive Secretary of the East Bay Communist Party. This is
a highly important job. She has a lot of responsibility,
and it is her job to have all the files
and records of the local organization. So of course she
is called before the House on American Activities Committee. She
(19:33):
expects to be She's fully prepared for it. All of
their friends have been called up, some of their friends
have flown the country. They're living in Mexico, they're living
in South America. Some of their friends unfortunately killed themselves.
This is a piece of the Red Scare that sometimes
people forget that the terror of having their lives ruined
and losing their jobs and their families and being called
(19:55):
up drove people to suicide. So she and Bob were ready.
She gets called up and most of what they want
her to do is name names. They want her as
the secretary of the party. She knows everything to come
in with all her files and name names. Now they
don't know Jessica Midford. There is just no way that
(20:15):
Jessica Mitford is going to name a single name. This
is never going to happen. So she shows up at
the huec hearing with no files at all, not a
file to be seen. She'd been subpoened. And she is
in her absolute best outfit and that entails her best dress,
bought with her sister Nancy, probably in Paris because Nancy
(20:36):
had the taste. And she's her finest hat, and her
finest hat is from her mother in law, Aaron Ka Trueheft,
who is a milliner, a very famous, very very high
society milliner in New York City. This is Bob's mother.
So she's dressed to the nine. She's got her pearls on,
she's got her best handbag, I mean, the whole thing,
and she gets into the committee room and they're asking
(20:56):
her a million questions and she refuses to answer any
of them, I'm sure, and they're getting more and more
and more angry at her. And there's quite an audience
there to see all of this, because she's a well
known celebrity locally by the time. And they finally, infrustration,
ask her, well, are you a member of the East
Bay Tennis Club? And they meet ronically because the tennis
(21:18):
club is very right wing and they know that maybe
she'll say no to that. Well, she doesn't hear them correctly.
He thinks they've just asked her if she's a member
of the tenants club like your's association. So she refuses
to answer that too, So the whole room erupts in
hysterical laughter because she even refuses to answer that. Now
(21:41):
everybody's laughing at the committee chairman, and they're ridiculous questions.
She has the whole room cracking up, and they're very
frustrated with her, and they throw her out of the
room and they forget to ask her for her files.
So she uves as quickly as she can. She knows
what just happened. She goes into four days of because
(22:01):
she knows that when they realize they haven't asked her
for the files, they're going to call her back in.
She sort of escaped the entire HUAC thing and going
to jail, she was prepared. She had no files, she
was supered for the files. She could have been jailed
for up to twenty five years. She goes to that
(22:21):
curing room expecting that she's going to spend the next
few years in prison. I mean, she's ready to do that,
but because she's so funny, she escapes it. So her
humor all her life got her into trouble and occasionally
her humor got her out of trouble.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
And I think there's also a remarkable power that she
had in being able to dress herself that way. I
think it was very disarming to people. It was using
her privilege to protect herself and her organization.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yes, she made sure that she looked like an aristocrat
from the Cotswolds, not a comedy from Oakland. She was
very warm when she won wanted to be. She brought
people right in when she wanted to be. But she
also knew how to make people uncomfortable and put them
on edge and make them not sure of themselves, and
she used that very effectively.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
There was also another incident I found fascinating which involves
a riot led by the KKK and a Martin Luther
King rally. Would you mind explaining how Decka Mitford found
herself in that situation.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Jessica Mitford was very close to Virginia and Clifford Drr.
And Virginia and Clifford Dur came from the South, spent
years and years and years in the Washington, DC area,
and they were amazing civil rights workers. In fact, Virginia
Der was the person who was really single handedly finally
(23:49):
responsible for getting rid of the poll tax, which kept
poor and people of color from voting. I don't know
if you've been following this, but we're looking at new
versions of the poll tax coming back around in the
attacks on voting rights right now. So Virginia Wolf must
be absolutely rolling in her grave in disbelief because she
finally got rid of the pull tax, and here it
(24:10):
is coming again. And Jessica Mitford lived with the Durs
for a couple of years and would go back south
to visit them. After she moved off to Oakland, she
would go often to visit and she was visiting in Montgomery, Alabama,
during the period of the incredible famous bus boycotts and
during the period of the Freedom Rides. So this is
(24:33):
the Snick Freedom Rides which follow the bus boycotts, and
one of the bloodiest incidents in the history of the
Freedom Rides and of the Snick Freedom Riders, who were
trying to make a case for integration by riding the
buses together throughout the South, black and white young people,
mostly who had left college to do this work in
(24:55):
the South. The Freedom Riders were coming into Montgomery, Alabama,
and by the KKK and other racist groups, the buses
were attacked. This was one of the periods where John
Lewis was almost killed. This is one of the periods
where famously John Lewis was beaten over the head to
unconsciousness and others. There was actually a white woman activist
(25:16):
who was killed in Montgomery at this demonstration. And there
was a just a horrible race riot, a horrible not
a race ride, but a white attack, a horrible mom
attack on black people, just a terrible racist, not race riot,
but racist riot. And Jessicamick sort of threw herself into
the middle of it. She was right there she was
(25:36):
in it. And it was followed that evening by an
evening service and meeting at the church, and Martin Luther
King was there, and all of the Freedom Riders were there,
and it was a very important gathering to assess this
attack and this riot. And as the community of protesters
(25:59):
gathered in the church, a white mob assembled all around it.
And the white mob tried to kill everybody in the church.
They threw in pipe bombs, they threw in smoke bombs,
they threatened they were armed. They took a car and
they turned it upside down and they set it on
fire in an attempted church on fire. Turned out that
car was the car Jessica Mitford had been driving. And
(26:23):
over three hundred people was trapped in this church overnight,
including Jessica Mitford and Martin Luther King. They kept calling
Bobby Kennedy and they kept saying, please, You've got to
send the National Guard. And it wasn't until dawn that
they were finally rescued by a cadre of National Guards
people who pushed the white mob the rioters away and
(26:45):
got them out, and Jessica Mitford wrote an essay about it.
It ended up never being published, it was not one
of her most successful Everybody always wanted her to be funny,
and it was not an evening she wanted to be
funny about. Wasn't much funny about that night. So she
had a hard time placing that essay. But like her
(27:06):
time in Spain, where she saw people volunteer from all
around the world and put their lives on the line
for democracy and to fight fascism, I think that night
you're talking about left an indelible mark on her. I
think what she looked at, the risk people were taking
just to be able to vote, just for the right
(27:27):
to have their voices heard in this country. That left
her real mark on her, and it influenced the work
she later did.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Before I let you Go, there's one more, like you said,
three different lives she lived when she was a muckbreaking journalist.
Her most I would say, maybe her most famous and
influential story was an expose on the funeral industry. Would
you mind telling us a little bit how she got
into that topic and then what she discovered?
Speaker 2 (27:55):
And you're absolutely right. The book was a blockbuster. It
was the It was the top of the best seller
Life for nearly a year. It was called The American
Way of Death. She published it in nineteen sixty three.
It's never gone out of print. It's still taught in
university classrooms across the country. What's remarkable about it It's
an hysterically funny, laugh out loud book about death and
(28:16):
dying and funerals. So she manages to do two things.
She manages to expose the exploitation of the funeral industry.
It was preying on poor people who would lose all
their death benefits to fancy funerals they didn't need, but
which they were talked into. And at the same time
it managed to expose them by just mocking them using
(28:39):
the midfor tees. The book is sometimes quite gruesome. It
was co written with her husband, Robert Truhaft, and it
came to her through him. He was the lawyer for
the Bay Area Memorial Society, a co op designed to
help people do essentially diy funerals and escape all that exploitation.
And he would come home with the stories, and for
(29:01):
months she would dismiss them, until one day he came
home with a story she couldn't dismiss. He came home
with a story about a client, a grieving widow wanted
a cheaper coffin. She was being talked into a coffin
she could not afford, you know, one of these fancy
caskets with the silk and the gilded and the all
of the stuff. And she said, no, I want that
(29:23):
simple wooden one. And the undertaker said to this grieving
woman who had just lost her husband, well, lady, I
can give you that wooden one, but I'll have to
chop his feet off. And when Jessica mcford heard that story,
she said, that's it. We have to write a book
about these guys. We have to write a book about
what they're doing. And it was really her leaping to
(29:45):
the defense of grieving widows. And she wrote that book
with her husband, and it started her career as a muckraker,
and for the rest of her career she went after
people who were exploiting and taking advantage of others, and
she did it often with humor. She was remarkably effective,
and of.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Course, her first husband had died, she could be very empathetic.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
And she had lost two children, so something she almost
never talked about. It's hardly in her books at all,
but she had lost an infant daughter and then a
son who wasn't even a teenager yet. And she knew
a great deal about loss, and she knew a great
deal about what felt to her like both the dignity
of dying and the dignity of living. That you know,
(30:27):
she thought it shouldn't be something that people made a
profit out of.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Very well said, before I let you go, one last question,
what was her funeral like?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Well, she made a joke about her funeral. She always
used to joke about it. And the joke was, I
want the whole cortege, I want you know, six horsemen,
and I want the glass hearse, and I want the
whole thing. And it was a joke. Well after she died,
when she left very explicit instructions that she wanted the
cheapest cremation possible, her friends thought, oh, we can't resist
(30:59):
one last joke. We have to have one last piece
of fun with Decca. So they did a kind of
mock version of the fancy fancy funeral, including with a
New Orleans style band and you know, the glass hers,
just the whole thing. Unfortunately, some of the American press
didn't realize it was a joke, and so some of
(31:19):
the American press after her death said, well, we don't
really understand it. She was against fancy funerals, but then
she left instructions to have one. It was a joke,
but she did have a sort of mock version of
the fancy funeral. Two enormous memorials. She was a deeply
beloved figure and her death was very devastating people. But
(31:41):
she also had the deaths she chose. She refused a
lot of interventions. She wanted to be able to write
and think and joke and laugh and sing up until
the end. And she died with her friends all around
her bed singing her favorite songs.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
That's beautiful. Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker, The Fierce Unruly
Life of Jessica Mitford, truly deca Mitford a character larger
than life. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by
me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick,
Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Milaney. The show is
edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima
(32:45):
Il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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