I’ve slept with every prime minister in Europe and most kings. Then subscribe from as little as £1 a week after thatĪt another dinner, when the Duke was talking politics, she suddenly shouted at him: ‘Shut up! You know nothing about politics. Rich, brilliant, easily bored, spoilt beyond all measure because of her amazing looks and damaged by tragedy, her later irrational behaviour becomes easier to understand, from exaggerated grief at the death of a spaniel to the pulling out of a revolver at a dinner party and laying it beside her plate (‘I might just shoot Marlborough,’ she told a startled guest). Gladys, to put it bluntly, was not good wife material - hardly surprising, considering her past life. It should have been a fairy-tale ending but alas, it was not.
Duchess of marlborough gladys deacon free#
When the Marlboroughs were finally divorced in 1921 the Duke was free to marry Gladys, now 40. The marriage had been doomed from the start: Consuelo forced into it at 18 by her ambitious mother, Marlborough, deep in debt, needing Consuelo’s $2 million dowry and both in love with others at the time.īy 1912, when she was 31, Gladys had almost openly become the Duke of Marlborough’s mistress. Her goal became a step nearer when there was a legal separation between the Marlboroughs in 1907. But nothing seemed to deter the men who pursued her - or her own determination to hold them off. As early as 1909, when she turned up at the Berenson villa I Tatti, Mary Berenson found her ‘impossible in manner & conversation’ and ‘gone off terribly in looks’.
Duchess of marlborough gladys deacon skin#
Sliding slowly down her face, the wax beneath her skin was making it blotchy, red and puffy in parts. The injections of paraffin wax were now taking their toll on her looks. But despite the entreaties of admirers and those of her mother - whose reputation and status would have been boosted by a ‘good’ marriage for her daughter - Gladys refused to tie herself down. Rodin sculpted her and Proust even got out of bed for her. She continued to ricochet round Europe, the list of her suitors growing longer and longer. She quarrelled violently with her sister and her social flibbertigibbet mother, but when her sister died - basically of meningitis - she was devastated. Gladys was clearly somewhat unbalanced, and her behaviour at times outrageous, but such was her charm that she got away with it. She had paraffin wax injected into the small depression - with disastrous consequences later.īlame the breed, not the owner: the truth about American Bully XLs Like so many beauties who complain of invisible flaws, Gladys found one - in her case a slight indentation between the bridge of her nose and her forehead - and decided to remedy it with the 1902 version of a tweakment, to achieve a museum-perfect Grecian profile. Then, that autumn, came the fateful step that affected the rest of her life.
Her success continued, with several dukes as well as less exalted suitors pursuing her. When she ‘did’ the London season of 1902, she was largely escorted by Consuelo, the Duchess, and when the Crown Prince of Germany fell in love with her, her name became known to everyone. She finally met the Marlboroughs at the turn of the century, fascinating them both. Rodin sculpted her, Proust even got out of bed for her, but despite her admirers’ entreaties she wouldn’t be tied down ‘Radiant’ was an adjective constantly applied to her. With her mother, she travelled round Europe, as she did so making a conquest of the noted art historian and expert Bernard Berenson as well as many others smitten by her charm and beauty. At the least, this meant a life jolted out of the norm. Over her hung an aura of scandal at one remove: when Gladys was 11 her father had shot her mother’s lover dead as he cowered behind the sofa. At a time when ‘accomplishments’ such as sketching, singing and needlework were considered all the armoury a rich, well-born young woman needed, she emerged with seven languages, a wide general knowledge and a lifelong love of art, literature and poetry, as well as the exceptional beauty that would eventually become her downfall. Gladys (born in 1881) was a star from the word go, extremely intelligent - her tutor called her a ‘brain genius’ - and avid to learn.
Both were obsessions that began young, that of the 16-year-old Vickers when he read of ‘The love of Proust, the belle amie of Anatole France’, and was so taken that he wrote his first biography of her 40 years ago, and that of Gladys when at 14 she wrote (of the Duke) ‘O dear if only I was a little older I might “catch” him yet’.’ The story of how Hugo Vickers eventually tracked down the former Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough is almost as fascinating as how Gladys nailed her duke.
0 kommentar(er)
