The Sphinx: Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough, by Hugo Vickers
NICOLA SHULMAN The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough
Summer, 1968, and the youth is up.
In London, students storm the offices of the Daily Mirror to protest against the killing of German political activist Rudi Dutschke. Across the US, civil-rights protestors link arms in pride and fury, engulfing the city streets like rivers of lava. In Paris, the Union of High School students have joined the riots and are marching on the Sorbonne howling, ‘ Égalité! Liberté! Sexualité!’
And in Windsor, a fervent 16-year-old called Hugo Vickers is in the Eton College Library, heatedly researching the life of an elderly English duchess he’s read about in Chips Channon’s diaries.
Vickers eventually found her in a Northamptonshire nursing home, where she passed the time in baiting the nursing staff, pretending to be senile and, when Vickers arrived to pay suit for her past, batting him off like the old hand she was at rejecting suitors. She’d been the second wife of Charles ‘Sunny’ Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough; and, before that, the society phenomenon called Gladys (first syllable pronounced ‘glade’) Deacon – a rich American girl in Europe, whose lovely face, startling intelligence and magnetic presence made everyone wonder what, or who, she would become.
The environment in which Gladys and her sisters were brought up is most succinctly illustrated by an incident in her early life. After her father shot her mother’s lover dead in the Hotel Windsor in Cannes, her mother cancelled a luncheon appointment with the Princesse de Sagan. ‘She was generally criticised for this,’ reports Vickers. It’s a typical, deadpan Vickers touch. He’s rewritten this book (first published in 1979) from top to bottom, and on every page you sense his accomplished ease with these types of people, acquired in a 40-year career of writing about them.
When he follows the now-detached Mrs Deacon, dragging her girls through their restless, relentlessly social itinerary – Florence, Paris, the Italian lakes, Cowes, Rome and the Engadine – he understands the nuances of each place, parses each degree of social distinction and never gets a name wrong.
Gladys knew what her part was in all of this. She was to marry a European princeling, according to the usual arrangement of cash down and no questions asked about sexual inclination or personal hygiene. Perhaps recognising that all the excitements of life and her sole opportunity for agency rested in the drama of choosing a husband, she eked it out for years, semi-engaging herself to a number of titled prospects while expressing revulsion for the whole idea of marriage. In one of the many Jamesian touches in this story, a chorus to her evasive nuptial progress is supplied by the art historian Bernard Berenson and his wife, Mary, watching with fascination from front-row seats.
As time went on, their tune changed from ‘G is a radiant, wonderful creature, so amusing, so entertaining’ to ‘A lot of poisonous and innocent things mixed up… I never knew of a person who told so many lies’; and then ‘She pays no heed to her future and is spoiling all her chances… Her universal reputation is just as bad as it can be.’
You can only sympathise with Gladys’s reluctance to marry. Less so with the exception she was prepared to make. While still at school, she had formed an ambition to marry the Duke of Marlborough. Why? Impossible to fathom, and in no way explained when she does, at 40, eventually get her wish and marry what turns out to be – surprise! – a very large, cold house with one bathroom and many disagreeable incumbents, sited in ‘an intellectual wilderness’. After miscarrying three unwanted babies, she left an equally disappointed Marlborough to embark on a career of textbook battiness, with all the trimmings: filthy ballgowns, midnight wanderings, slammed doors, acquisitive nephews and dead cats.
Gladys’s prospects and conquests, her brilliant conversation, her mesmeric charm and her beauty – which she ruined by injecting paraffin wax, an unstable material, into the small depression between her nose and her brow – brought nothing but discontent. Today, there might have been a diagnosis, possibly of the same affliction her father had. Vickers doesn’t engage with that. The picture he leaves is of a woman – they still exist – who ‘could have done anything’ with her gifts, but lacked the circumstances and temperament for application.
It is telling that the one piece of published writing she left behind – an article about predatory females, or ‘Vampires’ – has none of the dandyish skill of her letters.