would wake them up in the morning by walking on their heads. They started to feel so much at home that they took out citizenship papers. England had begun wartime rationing of food and clothing. Decca sent little luxuries like gloves and canned tuna fish in care packages to her mother.
In early summer, Esmond found a job as an executive with an advertising firm called Topping and Lloyd. This enterprise was a calculated tax dodge, designed to efficiently launder his employer’s money, then vanish. (Esmond had wondered why no work was ever required of him, but put it down to the American way of doing business.) For the short term of his employment, the couple managed to save Esmond’s weekly hundred-dollar salary while they lived on Decca’s more modest paycheck. By then, she had moved on to a job at the 1939 World’s Fair selling tartans in “Ye Merrie England Village.”
In terms of minutes and hours, Esmond and Decca hadn’t had much of a courtship. They had eloped after knowing one another for a few days. While they had always laughed and joked and their sexual attraction was intense, they were also always either fighting a war or waiting for one. In the United States, they were amazed by the degrees of frivolity available for connoisseur and amateur. The pursuit of self-fulfillment and personal happiness was for some Americans a way of life—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, no less. They were busy that year finding their feet, and along the way, the two of them also became great friends.
EUGENE MEYER BECAME fond enough of Decca and Esmond to become something of a patron. In the summer of 1939, Meyer commissioned the
Romillys to write a series of articles for the Sunday Washington Post about their first year in the United States. The job provided some advance money to travel. Meyer ran the series about nine months later under the headline “Blueblood Adventurers Discover America,” with a sidebar introducing “Two Youthful Escapists Who Fled to America with a Song in Their Hearts.”
The earliest articles were illustrated by cartoons of the couple in action: exclaiming over tea; daydreaming over U.S. guidebooks; persuading the U.S. consul (framed by portraits of Washington and Jefferson) of their commitment, exemplary conduct, and financial stability; and then waving au revoir from aboard the SS Aurania . Subsequent features included cartoons of Esmond smoking in bed as he fantasized about winged horses winning at the track, and Decca flogging plaids at the World’s Fair. The nation was still in the grip of the Depression, and the tiresome and often disappointing rituals of job hunting, employment, and unemployment seemed sparkly and amusing when the working man and woman involved were famous young British aristocrats who seemed to have walked right out of a film comedy.
The first week’s feature, in addition to its many illustrations and oversized photographs, offered a boxed biographical summary of the couple’s life-so-far and this additional hearty introduction: “A gay and exciting salute to reality by two front-page young lovers who bought the world for a song and are making their dreams come true in America where slammed doors and empty pockets have only been fun to two top-drawer immigrants.”
Esmond had already written many articles, but these were Decca’s first publications. She’d honed her brisk, amusing style in letters. In the feature titled “English Adventurers Stalk Job in Wilds of New York,” she reported on her job at the World’s Fair. In her description of “Miss B,” the American manager of Ye Merrie England Village who would “discourse eloquently on the necessity of knowing only the right people,” Decca began what would become a lifelong habit of skewering snobs in print. Her job was to sing “the merits of Highland Hand-woven Tweeds.” Miss B was shallow and
deluded. Sales at the booth were slow, the manager claimed, only because “the best
In early summer, Esmond found a job as an executive with an advertising firm called Topping and Lloyd. This enterprise was a calculated tax dodge, designed to efficiently launder his employer’s money, then vanish. (Esmond had wondered why no work was ever required of him, but put it down to the American way of doing business.) For the short term of his employment, the couple managed to save Esmond’s weekly hundred-dollar salary while they lived on Decca’s more modest paycheck. By then, she had moved on to a job at the 1939 World’s Fair selling tartans in “Ye Merrie England Village.”
In terms of minutes and hours, Esmond and Decca hadn’t had much of a courtship. They had eloped after knowing one another for a few days. While they had always laughed and joked and their sexual attraction was intense, they were also always either fighting a war or waiting for one. In the United States, they were amazed by the degrees of frivolity available for connoisseur and amateur. The pursuit of self-fulfillment and personal happiness was for some Americans a way of life—enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, no less. They were busy that year finding their feet, and along the way, the two of them also became great friends.
EUGENE MEYER BECAME fond enough of Decca and Esmond to become something of a patron. In the summer of 1939, Meyer commissioned the
Romillys to write a series of articles for the Sunday Washington Post about their first year in the United States. The job provided some advance money to travel. Meyer ran the series about nine months later under the headline “Blueblood Adventurers Discover America,” with a sidebar introducing “Two Youthful Escapists Who Fled to America with a Song in Their Hearts.”
The earliest articles were illustrated by cartoons of the couple in action: exclaiming over tea; daydreaming over U.S. guidebooks; persuading the U.S. consul (framed by portraits of Washington and Jefferson) of their commitment, exemplary conduct, and financial stability; and then waving au revoir from aboard the SS Aurania . Subsequent features included cartoons of Esmond smoking in bed as he fantasized about winged horses winning at the track, and Decca flogging plaids at the World’s Fair. The nation was still in the grip of the Depression, and the tiresome and often disappointing rituals of job hunting, employment, and unemployment seemed sparkly and amusing when the working man and woman involved were famous young British aristocrats who seemed to have walked right out of a film comedy.
The first week’s feature, in addition to its many illustrations and oversized photographs, offered a boxed biographical summary of the couple’s life-so-far and this additional hearty introduction: “A gay and exciting salute to reality by two front-page young lovers who bought the world for a song and are making their dreams come true in America where slammed doors and empty pockets have only been fun to two top-drawer immigrants.”
Esmond had already written many articles, but these were Decca’s first publications. She’d honed her brisk, amusing style in letters. In the feature titled “English Adventurers Stalk Job in Wilds of New York,” she reported on her job at the World’s Fair. In her description of “Miss B,” the American manager of Ye Merrie England Village who would “discourse eloquently on the necessity of knowing only the right people,” Decca began what would become a lifelong habit of skewering snobs in print. Her job was to sing “the merits of Highland Hand-woven Tweeds.” Miss B was shallow and
deluded. Sales at the booth were slow, the manager claimed, only because “the best
Similar Books
