Queen of Muckrakers

"Ah! There is the archvillain." said Publisher Bennett Cerf when he encountered Author Jessica Mitford a few months ago in Manhattan. "I hope you are not going to murder us."

Cerf had ample reason for apprehension. The scourge of the profession of undertaking had recently turned her journalistic skepticism toward one of Cerf's sideline ventures. As a result, in the current issue of the Atlantic, Miss Mitford dexterously deflates the Famous Writers School, a heavily promoted mail-order concern in Westport, Conn.

The school's "guiding faculty," as its advertisements stress, includes Cerf and such other U.S. literary figures as Faith Baldwin, Bruce Catton, Clifton Fadiman, Phyllis McGinley and Max Shulman. "There is probably nothing illegal in the FWS operation," writes Miss Mitford judiciously, but she encourages would-be writers to take state-university correspondence courses for a fraction of the cost.

High-pressure advertising and sales methods, she suggests, are largely responsible for the school's current enrollment of 65,000 students, each of whom is paying $785 to $900 for a three-year course. She concludes that a dropout rate of 66% to 90% (with few refunds) is largely responsible for the school's financial success. Prospective students are wooed by ads that imply guiding faculty members will help judge aptitude tests; there are also brochures that claim "all these eminent authors in effect are looking over your shoulder as you learn." In reality, writes Miss Mitford, the guiding faculty does no teaching and does not even take a hand in recruiting the school's regular instructors.

Ham in the Papers. Miss Mitford reports that when she spoke to guiding faculty members about the ads, they "seemed astonished, even pained, to think people might be naive enough to take the advertising at face value." She quotes Cerf: "If anyone thinks we've got time to look at the aptitude tests that come in, they're out of their mind!" And Faith Baldwin: "Anyone with common sense would know that the 15 of us are much too busy to read the manuscripts the students send in." And Cerf again, on mail-order selling in general: "The crux of it is a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible." Then why does he lend his name to the school's hard-sell proposition? "Frankly, if you must know, I'm an awful ham --I love to see my name in the papers!"

Pained by the article, School Director John Lawrence compiled a long but quibbling list of alleged errors or omissions. Sample: the school might have had 800 salesmen at one time, but the number now is 670. Bennett Cerf ruefully confirms that he was quoted accurately: "She even reported what I asked her not to.' Adds Cerf: "I told her I was suspicious of direct mail advertising. Now I'm even more suspicious of people who go out and do hatchet jobs and get paid for it." Actually, Jessica was paid twice, once by the Atlantic and once by McCall's, which originally commissioned the piece. Says McCall's Editor Shana Alexander: "I rejected it because I didn't think it was very good." Did Shana's friend Cerf apply any pressure on her not to run the article? "It was rather the reverse," says Mrs. Alexander. "I put some pressure on Bennett to resign from the school." He has not done so.

Miss Mitford had trouble once before selling a story. She wrote a muckraking piece in 1958 on the undertaking industry in the U.S. "The article was turned down by every major magazine as too dreary and unpleasant," she recalls. She finally sold it to an obscure journal called Frontier for $40. Then she used the article as an outline for her book that became a bestseller in 1963, The American Way of Death. Miss Mitford has since written another book, The Trial of Dr. Spock, and turns out several magazine articles a year. She is currently preparing a piece for Saturday Review on the civil rights of prisoners. "I don't think of myself as a muckraker," she insists. "One just sort of falls into these articles."

Eccentric Roots. Despite her disavowal, British-born Jessica Mitford, 52, has become a queen among U.S. muckrakers. The ingredients of her art include dry wit, sharp observation and a talent for pricking pretense in manners, morals and mercenary matters. She has been in the U.S. since 1939 and now lives in Oakland, Calif., with her second husband, Lawyer Robert Treuhaft. But she remains a quintessential Mitford, the offspring of an eccentric English baron whose six daughters were celebrated for their madcap escapades in a quarter-century of headlines.

Older Sisters Unity and Diana lived it up with Adolf Hitler. Eldest Sister Nancy became one of London's "gay young things" immortalized by Novelist Evelyn Waugh, then started writing successful books herself (Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire in Love). At 19, Jessica eloped to Spain with Winston Churchill's leftist nephew, Esmond Romilly (who was later killed in World War II). Her outraged father persuaded Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to dispatch a destroyer to bring her home, but Jessica resisted the captain's effort to lure her aboard.

A vengeful Famous Writer might consider doing a skeleton-rattling biography on the Mitfords. Except that Jessica told it all herself in a 1960 book, Daughters and Rebels. And she did it rather eloquently, without taking any correspondence course on how to write.

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