Born into an aristocratic British family, the six Mitford siblings included a sharp-witted novelist (Nancy) and the brand-building Duchess of Devonshire (Deborah); a lover of Nazis who delighted in scandal (Unity) and a great beauty who became an unrepentant fascist (Diana); an acclaimed investigative journalist (Jessica) and a poultry-loving country girl (Pamela). Beginning in the 1930s, their high jinks scandalized the British populace, who followed their adventures in the local and international news, and eventually in books written by the sisters themselves.
Decades later, the cartoonist Mimi Pond found herself fascinated by the sisters, whose lives seemed about as foreign and far away from her suburban 1970s Southern California upbringing as one could get. Even after Pond went to work producing comics for National Lampoon, wrote the first episode of “The Simpsons” and became an award-winning cartoonist at The New Yorker, her interest in the Mitfords only grew.
“Unity becomes pals with Hitler,” she said. “Diana gets married to Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, in the living room of Joseph Goebbels. Nancy rats out Diana during the war, and Diana doesn’t find out about it until Nancy is dead.”
“There are just so many stories,” she added. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Pond’s fascination with the Mitfords became such an obsession that, in 2019, she decided to write a graphic novel about them. The result, “Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me,” sprawls with spats, rifts, scandalous affairs and political intrigue. Far from a straight historical biography, the book is an imaginative, often cinematic romp, with detours into popular movies (“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) and pop culture (the hot rod icon Ed “Big Daddy” Roth shows up), as well as forays into Pond’s San Diego childhood.
The Mitford saga has already sparked a cottage industry of books about the sisters, with a new biography of Jessica Mitford coming in November; documentaries and TV shows (including this year’s “Outrageous”); and feature films inspired by their lives. Three mini-series alone have been adapted from Nancy Mitford’s most famous novels, “Love in a Cold Climate” and “The Pursuit of Love.”
Until Pond came along, however, nobody had thought to create a graphic novel about the sisters, even though their stories, with fantastic supporting characters (Winston Churchill! John F. Kennedy!) and gripping scenes (Jessica traveling with the Freedom Riders in Alabama; Unity stalking Hitler in a Munich cafe) call out to be illustrated.
Pond has her own ideas about why she’s the first.
“Because it was so much work,” she said, sitting at a banquette in her Los Feliz home. “Six years!”
All that effort, said Lyndsy Spence, the founder of the Mitford Society and author of several books about the sisters, was time well spent. “They’re mirror images, the way she drew them,” she said. “Jessica’s dissatisfied look, Diana and Nancy’s glacial ‘we’re so bored with it all’ expressions, their famous eyes, like cat’s — she captured everything.”
Pond first learned about Jessica Mitford through her parents, inveterate readers and big admirers of “The American Way of Death,” Jessica’s groundbreaking exposé of the funeral industry. Their precocious daughter fell in love with it too.
“Then when I was in my late 20s in New York, someone turned to me and said, you know she had sisters, right?” she added. “And I was like, whaaa?”
Pond continued to think about the Mitfords, even as she found work at National Lampoon in the early ’80s, wooed to New York by the cartoonist and editor Shary Flenniken.
“Shary was a great supporter of women cartoonists, which is ironic, because the Lampoon was just horrible in those days, just racist and sexist and stupid,” Pond said. “But that was the water we all were swimming in.”
In Pond, Flenniken found a kindred spirit. “People just recognized right away that she was really articulate and creative and talented,” Flenniken said. “And funny, of course. She was just a natural.”
When her husband, the cartoonist and artist Wayne White, went to work as a production designer for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” Pond was introduced to Matt Groening, who was starting work on his own new series. “We became friends, and then Matt began asking a number of his cartoonist friends if they wanted to do a script for this new show he was doing,” she said. “I guess I was the only one who said yes.”
That series was “The Simpsons.” And while Pond’s 1989 episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” was the first to air and garnered two Emmy nominations, she was not hired onto the writing team.
In 2014, after years as a cartoonist and brief stints as a TV writer, Pond published “Over Easy,” a graphic novel about her experiences working as a waitress at an Oakland diner in the 1970s; a sequel, “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” followed three years later. The books chronicle the adventures of the hippies and punk rockers, dreamers and dope dealers, who came in and out of the Imperial Café as employees and patrons.
“Everyone that worked there was like, ‘This should be a movie!’” Pond recalled. “But by then I had lived in L.A. long enough to realize that you could write a script and it would never see the light of day.”
Pond had a similar feeling about the Mitfords. This should be a movie — and, of course, it has been — but books were a surer bet, at least for her. And books, she knew. She began researching the Mitfords in earnest, reading biographies, novels, histories and collections of letters.
“It was so much more helpful to approach it from the point of view of personalities, rather than battles and troop movements and all that dry stuff that’s thrown at you in history class,” she said. “Just to learn that [Charles] de Gaulle’s nickname as a teenager was ‘the great asparagus.’”
The stories began to consume her. “I had read so much that we would have these dinner parties and I would find myself unable to shut up about them,” she said. “It was becoming a sore point in our marriage.”
Biographers have written entire tomes on a single Mitford. Pond was trying to write about all of them. “At one point, they said I could have 300 pages,” she said of Drawn & Quarterly, her publisher. “I told them, I don’t think that’s going to do it. I already had 100 pages, and I was only at 1926.” (At 447 pages, the book ends in 2014 with the death of Deborah at 94.)
The book grew and grew.
In went the affairs and scandals: scenes of Nancy ratting out the fascist Diana to British agents, helping send her to prison; Unity shooting herself in the head the day after Britain declared war on Germany.
But in the cartoonist’s hands, various Mitfords appear in the book also as goddesses, circus performers, gangster’s molls and period clocks; in one scene, de Gaulle makes an appearance as a female llama coming out of a shower.
“A lot of graphic biographies are nothing but talking heads,” Pond said. “Boring! I want to delight the eye. I want people to go, oh, what’s next?”
What’s next for Pond, however, is up in the air, now that she no longer has the Mitfords to obsess over.
“It’s really uncomfortable,” she said with a laugh. “I knew what I had to do every day, and now I’m faced with coming up with some new idea. For the past six years, I felt like I was someone with a regular job, which I’ve never had since I stopped waitressing.”
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