Books: Royal Siren | TIME
Royal Siren.
GLADYS, DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH by Hugo Vickers Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 308 pages; $12.95
One of the great lessons of fairy tales is to mind what one wishes for: one may get it. In 1895 a schoolgirl named Gladys Deacon read about the marriage of the reluctant Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough and determined that some day she too would marry well.
Gladys had no reason to think of marriage as a binding contract. Her own parents, part of that affluent late Victorian world of American expatriates, parted in sensational circumstances when her father shot her mother’s lover dead in the Hotel Splendide in Cannes.
Gladys was eleven when it happened.
At 16, with a beauty made disturbing by her blazing blue eyes, she was already a siren. Her conversation shone, her profile was just short of perfection. To make it impeccably Grecian, she had wax injected at the bridge of her nose. As the years passed it began to trickle chinward, ravaging her features. Yet a weird, mutilated beauty survived.
She had many admirers during her 25-year campaign to marry Marlborough when he and Consuelo were divorced. The art critic Bernard Berenson was mesmerized by the teen-age Gladys, and his wife, though jealous, felt the same. “She is radiant and sphinxlike … Enchanting, but tiring. A wonderful creature, but too much of a born actress to take quite seriously. But so beautiful, so graceful, so changeful in a hundred moods, so brilliant that it is enough to turn anyone’s head,” she wrote, adding perceptively that “part of her mysteriousness comes from her being, as it were, sexless.” There were other flaws. Gladys was a liar, cruel, selfish, perverse, vulgar.
Her friendships, though ardent, usually ended in disappointment. The philosopher Count Hermann von Keyserling begged her to marry him, but she danced mockingly out of reach. The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who saw in her “something of a lascivious young god in girl’s clothes,” confessed she caused him “a mysterious and sometimes very painful feeling of needing.” Proust, Montesquiou, Rodin, Rilke, Giraudoux and George Moore were all bewildered or enslaved.
Gladys had plentiful suitors with blue blood and fortunes too: the Crown Prince of Germany, three noble Romans, the venerable Duke of Norfolk, who got down on all fours at her order to play dog, and the Duke of Connaught, the late Queen Victoria’s son, whom she dismissed in a letter full of “cruel and seething words.”
She had to wait until 1921, when she was 40 and he 49, for the Duke of Marlborough, a surly little man who hated “Yanks” but married two. His obsession was Blenheim Palace, and Gladys soon found she had married a house. As duchess, Gladys pruned roses, cultivated a rock garden full of snakes, and bred spaniels in the state rooms. Ennui soon turned to hatred. One night during a dinner party she placed a revolver beside her plate. Her startled partner asked her what she meant to do with it. “Oh! I don’t know, I might just shoot Marlborough.”
He died before he could divorce her.
Her marriage, she later wrote, was “like a black heavy cloud leaving such a disgusted pain that for years & even now I cannot bear to even brush by it in thought.”
Along with Blenheim, most of her friends were lost to her. She burrowed into a remote cottage, wore rubber boots and a straw hat with an old court dress, bred dogs that she walked at night with an oil lamp. Finally she took to greeting callers with a shotgun. When at 81 she was hauled off to a psychiatric hospital, she seemed no more than a crazy old witch.
But if her early life was the stuff of a Henry James novel, so was her end. Twelve years ago, a boy of 16, fascinated by a reference to her, began to search for her traces. Eventually he found her living at St. Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, England, 94 and far from mad. “Sometimes something happens that is so awful that it cuts you off and after that you don’t care,” she said. She meant not her face but the marriage for which she had so heedlessly wasted her life. The 65 visits Hugo Vickers paid Gladys before she died gave her a final friendship and him the makings of this sensitive, highly intelligent biography.— Eve Auchincloss
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