The Mitford Communist (With Carla Kaplan)

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. The Volkswagen Beetle started out as Hitler's dream car. It wound up as a beloved hippie icon and the best-selling car of all time. How did that happen? I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. On Business History, we tell the surprising stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy. And the story of the Beetle is truly surprising. It has so much in it. He says you should be able to mount machine guns on it. Sure. Not for the family vacation, but, you know, for other things. Listen to Business History on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

0:37Follow Business History and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman, a criminal, a hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who didn't do what John of God wanted them to do, they usually disappeared.

1:22John of God was once Brazil's most famous spiritual healer. But in this limited series podcast, we uncover the darker truth behind his global empire of faith and fear. From Exactly Right and Adonde Media, this is Two-Faced, John of God. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Menke. 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, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

2:14If you are someone who, like me, has been fascinated with the Mitford 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 Mitford sisters because they're just fascinating. And this book is just so brilliantly, comprehensively done, even though it focuses really on Jessica or Deca Mitford. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to be here today. So just to start, for audience members who maybe aren't familiar with who the Mitford sisters are, who are they?

2:49Why do so many people write and talk about them? 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 Mitfordiana, and we are in one. So there is my book. There is Peter Sussman's incredible book of Jessica Mitford's letters. There is Mimi Pond's 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 Muv. There was just a play in England, which I unfortunately didn't get to see, called Party Girls.

3:35And of course, as some of your listeners may very well know, there was the Britbox series called Outrageous, which was based on Mary Lovell's group biography and covered all the sisters. And if any of your listeners happen to see Outrageous, they get a picture not only of what beautiful, engaging, charming, brilliant, creative, often snarky, rebellious women 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 was very land-rich and somewhat cash-poor.

4:29and the parents were really old school. In fact, they were so old school that Jessica Midford, the sister about whom I write, called them Edwardians, which is quite a bit earlier than they were. But they were very old school when it came to gender roles. 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 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 pull down from nowhere.

5:23So we have Nancy who wanted to be a great writer, became a famous novelist. Pamela, who lived most quietly of them all, the country woman known as Woman, 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 Diana. The beauty of the family. 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.

6:06Just stunningly beautiful. And one of the most brilliant of them all. And one of the two who made some of the absolute worst choices. So Mary's very, very young. Mary's Brian Guinness, 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. 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.

6:52Diana goes to her grave, blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. And then, let's see, there is Unity, Dekka'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. And I mean, she's also a member of the aristocracy. Their father is a baron. I imagine that gave them some access. Exactly. Well, it also made her very interesting to Hitler because in his mind, he's thinking, OK, she's the daughter of a baron.

7:41I'm going to get some inside information. You know, fortunately for England, unity didn't have much inside information. What she did have was total dedication to Hitler. And when Germany and England declared war, she went into a park, 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 Chattelaine of Chatsworth estate. If anybody listening is going to England, do not miss the chance to see the hundred plus rooms at Chatsworth.

8:22It'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 lean to 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 19 with her second cousin, with whom she quickly fell in love and got married.

9:05They 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 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 1950s. and she takes it, she fills it full of the Mitford tease, the Mitford humor, and all of a sudden it's a brand new form. And she's a blockbuster success in 1963 and has a kind of third life as a writer.

9:47So she has one 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, 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 her causes. Can you speak to that sort of interesting contradiction?

10:27I 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 manor house 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.

11:12But 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, and she takes them right into her work as an American communist and right into her work as a muckraker. So she is the aristocratic communist. It's almost a contradiction 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.

11:58So 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 10 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, being such an American, that English upper crust 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.

12:41She's 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 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.

13:24People will accept. And she understood that in a really profound way. But she also enjoyed tweaking everybody around her. She never lost the Miss Ritford tease. So these girls were notorious teases, all six of them. Dekka never gave that up. So she would tease her comrades in the Communist his party. She would tease the very people she was organizing. She would tease her guests at fundraisers. And part of her tease was being a British aristocrat in a room full of commies. 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.

14:05If there was a joke to be had, including at her own expense, she always made the joke. One thing that I also love about Dekka 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? Unity was her favorite sister by far. And as far as we can tell, Unity never walked away from a dare, never walked away from a challenge. I think of all the six, as bold and as brave as Deathka was, and she was incredibly brave, Unity may have been even bolder.

14:51She didn't get to live out her life, so we 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 crack-up, very, very rebellious, like Dekka, absolutely incapable of bending the 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 Dekka.

15:35This was somebody she loved deeply. And when Unity came back from Germany through Switzerland with a bullet lodged in her brain, with the capacities sort of of an eight-year-old child, but sometimes of a two-year-old child. She had terrible temper tantrums. She didn't always know where she was. Sometimes she was herself. Sometimes she drove a car. So they actually let her drive, 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.

16:14In 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 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 50 cents for your drink, but then 25 cents to get rid of your empty glass. And if you went to the bathroom, you had to pay another 10 cents for toilet paper and another five cents to come out of the bathroom and another 50 cents if you wanted to leave the party.

17:01So that kind of pranking, that is the kind of thing she and Unity would do. And I think she kept her sister alive in her own mind and in 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. 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, Deka. So, you know, here she was, a devoted Nazi.

17:42Deka was a devoted communist and an anti-fascist and couldn't have been a stronger anti-Nazi, but they longed for one another. And that longing never abated. And even after Unity died, Deka was very tender about her memory. That's very heartbreaking in a way. You know, she sort of lost her sister three times almost. Exactly. Well, in fact, she lost them all. I mean, she kept trying to connect to them, not by pretending to be other than who she was. She didn't try to connect to them by imitating them or pretending that she, you know, was still pursuing the life they were pursuing. But she went back to England every year at great expense and great trouble.

18:26She wrote them constantly. She tried to keep them apprised of her life, and they never accepted her. They pretended to sometimes. Sometimes they didn't pretend to at 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, that piece of the story was actually the most heartbreaking. The way in which she kept trying to connect to her sisters and the way in which intimate playful, brilliant, word-loving, story-loving sisterhood marked the rest of her life.

19:28Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:11The Volkswagen Beetle started out as Hitler's dream car. It wound up as a beloved hippie icon and the best-selling car of all time. How did that happen? I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. On Business History, we tell the surprising stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy. And the story of the Beetle is truly surprising. It has so much in it. It has Nazis. It has the German economic miracle. And it features one of the most famous ads of all time. An ad that really redefined what advertising was in the United States. The calculation was that there was some number of Americans who were ready for something different, who were ready for something that was counter to the culture, if you will.

20:54Perfect timing. In this new decade of the 1960s. Listen to Business History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts, and watch episodes on YouTube. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here.

21:38Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

22:05What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

22:41It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Volkswagen Beetle started out as Hitler's dream car. It wound up as a beloved hippie icon and the best-selling car of all time. How did that happen? I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. On Business History, we tell the surprising stories behind the inventions and entrepreneurs that shaped our economy.

23:25And the story of the Beatle is truly surprising. It has so much in it. It has Nazis. It has the German economic miracle. And it features one of the most famous ads of all time. An ad that really redefined what advertising was in the United States. The calculation was that there was some number of Americans who were ready for something different. Who were ready for something that was counter to the culture, if you will. Perfect timing. In this new decade of the 1960s. Listen to Business History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. And watch episodes on YouTube. Segregation in the day, integration at night.

24:07When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping on another world. Inside Charlie's Place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:19do when she was there. Well put. It was definitely a didn't do. So Decca and her husband, Robert Trueheft, 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 York Communist Party or Chicago or Minnesota. The East Bay Communist 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 Bay Communist Party, she discovered some of her skills.

26:00She discovered there, as well as in the Office of Price Administration for the U.S. government, what an incredible investigator she was. She was indefatigable. You sent Jessica Mitford 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 muckraking. It's part of why she succeeds as such a great muckraker. 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.

26:39And she is promoted 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. These positions have 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 Un-American Activities Committee. She expects to be. She's fully prepared for it. All of their friends have been called up.

27:19Some 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 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 Mitford.

27:54There is just no way that Jessica Mitford is going to name a single name. This is never going to happen. So she shows up at the HUAC hearing with no files at all, not a file to be seen. She'd been subpoenaed. and she is in her absolute best outfit. And that entails her best dress bought with her sister, Nancy, probably in Paris because Nancy had the taste. And she's wearing her finest hat. And her finest hat is from her mother-in-law, Aranka Truhaft, who is a milliner, a very famous, very high society milliner in New York City. This is Bob's mother. So she's dressed to the nines. She's got her pearls on.

28:31She's got her best handbag. I mean, the whole thing. And she gets into the committee room and they're asking 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, in frustration, ask her, well, are you a member of the East Bay Tennis Club? And they meet her ironically because the tennis club is very right-wing. And they know that maybe she'll say no to that. Well, she doesn't hear them correctly.