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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.