Dazzling duchess doomed to self destruct: Heart-racing new book reveals how socialite Gladys Deacon plotted for 15 years to wed the married Duke of Marlborough - before her success landed her in an asylum

  • The Crown Prince of Prussia and numerous aristocrats fell for Gladys Deacon
  • But in less than two decades the charming Duchess had been all but forgotten
  • She became a recluse and hid away in Chacombe, Northamptonshire

Usually, Gladys Deacon came out to walk round the village only at night. She looked terrible — no teeth, matted hair — and was dressed like a tramp, often in a boiler suit cinched with a strip of sacking, an old straw hat and wellington boots studded with red puncture-repair patches.

The local boys thought she was a witch and threw stones at her house. Once, Gladys retaliated by coming out with a shotgun — though she later claimed it wasn’t loaded.

It was hardly surprising that this terrifying apparition lived as a recluse, turning away most of her rare visitors.

Back then, in the late 1940s, no one could have guessed that this woman, by then approaching 70, had once driven men almost insane with desire. The Crown Prince of Prussia had fallen madly in love with her, as had numerous aristocrats, and she’d later become chatelaine of Blenheim, the second-largest house in England.

Gladys Deacon, pictured in 1913, once commanded the hearts of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the last surviving son of Queen Victoria and numerous other aristocrats

Gladys Deacon, pictured in 1913, once commanded the hearts of the Crown Prince of Prussia, the last surviving son of Queen Victoria and numerous other aristocrats

Yet within less than two decades, the charmer once hailed as ‘the world’s most beautiful woman’ had been all but forgotten. What, I wondered, had driven her to hide from the world? Why had she changed so radically?

I decided to find out — despite knowing nothing about her beyond a brief reference in a book to her ravaged looks and disappearance from high society.

The first step was to discover if Gladys could still be alive. I began my search in 1975 at her final home in the village of Chacombe, near Banbury, in Northamptonshire. She didn’t live there any more, but the local publican said he thought ‘Mrs Spencer’ had been taken to a hospital ‘up Northampton way’.

I traced ‘Mrs Spencer’ to St Andrew’s psychiatric hospital, though by then she’d reverted to her proper title, the Duchess of Marlborough. She was 94. Clearly, if I wanted to write the story of her incredible life, there was no time to be lost.

‘You’ll find her very ugly but she has beautiful eyes,’ I was told by a member of the hospital staff. ‘She’s very temperamental, the duchess. She may tell you she’s dead...’

The young Gladys could have walked out of a novel by Henry James. Her parents were rich, stylish and indolent Americans who spent most of their time in Europe, travelling from one high-society hot-spot to the next.

After 15 years of plotting she married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. The pair are pictured together above. Soon after the marriage Ms Deacon learnt that her new husband was both a snob and a bore

After 15 years of plotting she married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the ninth Duke of Marlborough. The pair are pictured together above. Soon after the marriage Ms Deacon learnt that her new husband was both a snob and a bore

Their apparently charmed life came to an abrupt end in 1892, when Gladys was 11. Her father, convinced that his wife had taken a lover, had burst into her hotel suite in Cannes at midnight, then fired three shots at a man he found lurking behind the sofa.

Mrs Deacon’s lover, who’d been trying to adjust his trousers, collapsed in a pool of blood and died a few hours later.

The resulting court case made headlines around the world, miring the entire family in scandal.

Henry James himself followed news of the tragedy closely, resolving to weave it into a short story. As it was, Mr Deacon served less than four months for his crime passionel, was awarded custody of three of his four daughters and returned with them to America, while his estranged wife continued to gad around Europe.

Already it was clear that Gladys, the eldest, was an exceptional beauty, with her fine features, golden hair and large, intensely blue eyes, described by some men as turquoise. She had a way of staring directly at the person she was talking to, seeming to look deep into their soul.

Unusually for a pampered rich girl, she also had a voracious appetite for knowledge, teaching herself Latin and studying mathematics with a tutor who declared her a genius. She would continue to study — with and without tutors — for years after she left school and become competent in seven languages.

But Gladys’s declared ambition to become a professor was never fulfilled. In October 1895, when she was 14, she spotted an item in a newspaper that changed her life.

She wrote to her mother: ‘I suppose you have read about the engagement of the Duke of Marlborough. Oh dear me, if I was only a little older I might “catch” him yet! But Hélas! I am too young, though mature in the ways of women’s witchcraft — and what is the use of the one without the other?’

However, the match did make her chatelaine of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, pictured

However, the match did make her chatelaine of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, pictured

To Gladys, Consuelo Vanderbilt’s engagement to Marlborough seemed the ultimate fairytale. The duke was portrayed as the most eligible bachelor ever to visit America’s East Coast, while his fiancée was a super-rich American heiress about to be elevated to the heights of the British aristocracy. This fired an ambition in Gladys to outdo Consuelo. She didn’t know her, but from then on she followed all reports about the heiress with avid interest.

In 1901, Mr Deacon died of a brain seizure, leaving $200,000 to each of his children. It meant the loveliest young American of her day was finally free to enter European society.

To Gladys’s relief, her parents’ scandal had no effect on how she was received. High society in England, France and Italy fell over itself to welcome the young enchantress, whose wit and charm belied her tender age.

Within a few years, two fashionable but now forgotten novelists had made Gladys the heroine of their new books. The society portrait painter Giovanni Boldini, who became a lasting friend, drew her picture.

Even at 16, she was clocking up conquests. The art critic Bernard Berenson fell in love with her, and later confessed to his wife Mary that he’d have very much liked to marry Gladys. Yet such was the girl’s charm that even Mary became a dear friend.

‘She is a radiant, wonderful creature, so amusing, so entertaining, so beautiful — I never get tired watching her,’ Mary confided in a letter.

In 1901, when Gladys was 20, her mother became concerned because she’d already turned down numerous offers of marriage. But her daughter still had just one, unattainable man in mind: the Duke of Marlborough.

She’d met both him and his wife Consuelo by the time she was 19, and had entranced them both. Consuelo later recalled: ‘Possessed of exceptional powers of conversation, [Gladys] could enlarge on any subject in an interesting and amusing manner. I was soon subjugated by the charm of her companionship.’

Before her marriage, Ms Deacon was fiercely interested in maths and spoke seven languages. At Autumn she described Blenheim (pictured) as 'almost murderous with heavy people and talk of guns'

Before her marriage, Ms Deacon was fiercely interested in maths and spoke seven languages. At Autumn she described Blenheim (pictured) as 'almost murderous with heavy people and talk of guns'

The precocious Gladys had entered their lives when the marriage was already under intolerable strain from Consuelo’s infidelities.

The truth was she’d never wanted to marry the duke in the first place, but had given in to pressure from her parents.

By 1900, Consuelo had told ‘Sunny,’ as he was known, that any further ‘close intimacy’ with him was ‘somewhat distasteful to her’.

Gladys, who, like her mother, spent much time travelling around Europe, paid a visit to Blenheim Palace the following year — the first of many that helped distract the Marlboroughs from their doomed marriage.

It was during one of these that another guest, the Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, fell in love with her — much to the horror of his father, the Kaiser, who insisted that he marry a princess.

The story of the lovesick prince eventually leaked, making Gladys world-famous. A manufacturer even produced a cardboard doll, with clothes that slotted onto it, called ‘Miss Deacon’. In the following years, Consuelo became one of Gladys’s closest friends, writing lover-like letters in which she cooed: ‘I have never cared for any other woman like you.’

Both Marlboroughs also helped launch the young American into London society.

In England, as in Italy and France, Gladys would never be short of suitors, among them a marquis, a prince, two counts, two ducal heirs, two dukes, the Russian ambassador and the last surviving son of Queen Victoria.

Such unremitting attention was enough to go to any girl’s head, and she was reported to spend hours on her bed, contemplating her own beauty in a mirror.

This may be why she suddenly decided to correct a slight hollow between her forehead and her nose. Her first step was to go to a museum in Rome and measure the distance between eyes and noses on Grecian heads.

Then she had paraffin wax injected into the small depression above the bridge of her nose to build it up and form a straight line from the forehead to the tip. The simple operation was a disaster, as lumps of paraffin began to slip and appear in her cheeks, eventually migrating to her chin. Worse, everyone in society was soon talking about what Gladys had done.

She married the Duke after Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was her friend. Ms Vanderbilt is pictured with her father W.K. Vanderbilt at the races in Paris

She married the Duke after Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was her friend. Ms Vanderbilt is pictured with her father W.K. Vanderbilt at the races in Paris

One waspish gossip claimed that when Gladys received a visitor while sitting by a fire, she had gently massaged the wax, melted by the heat, back into the bridge of her nose.

Her beauty may have been somewhat dimmed, yet she lost none of her power to captivate.

She also forged genuine friendships with artists and writers, including the sculptor Rodin, the painter Claude Monet and the novelist Marcel Proust, who confessed to a friend: ‘I never saw a girl with so much beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.’

By 1906, the Marlboroughs had separated and Consuelo’s friendship with Gladys had cooled. The duchess even spread rumours that her friend had stolen her husband — though this was untrue.

Gladys was loyal enough to her old friend to burn Consuelo’s incriminating letters to her about various affairs. But a year later, she was comforting Sunny in Paris.

Her mother was delighted. She boasted that Gladys was ‘all but engaged’ to Marlborough and could marry him whenever she liked.

The truth, though, was somewhat different: Consuelo would refuse to divorce the duke for many years, until she finally wanted to marry again herself. All that time, Gladys continued to play one admirer off against the other, and waited for her childhood dream of marrying the Duke of Marlborough to come true.

After a 15-year intermittent affair, the couple finally wed in Paris in 1921. Gladys was now 40, though she knocked five years off her age on the marriage certificate.

Suddenly, she found herself the mistress of Blenheim Palace, with 80 servants, 20 gamekeepers and, as she once commented wryly, ‘not one decent bathroom in the whole bloody place’.

She first became friends with the Marlborough's as a way of distracting them from their doomed marriage. (Pictured: Ms Vanderbilt dressed in robes for the coronation of Edward VII

She first became friends with the Marlborough's as a way of distracting them from their doomed marriage. (Pictured: Ms Vanderbilt dressed in robes for the coronation of Edward VII

From the start, she struggled to adapt. Sunny’s eldest son and heir, Lord Blandford, never liked her. And the villagers, estate workers and Oxfordshire society types — many of whom had been fond of Consuelo — saw no reason to take this rather eccentric duchess to their hearts.

Three devastating miscarriages, combined with boredom, helped tip Gladys into depression. Blenheim in autumn, she wrote in her journal, was ‘almost murderous with heavy people and talk of guns, game etc’.

Indeed, it was an intellectual wilderness. As for her husband, she’d realised too late that he was a snob and a bore.

One day, the head keeper at Blenheim Palace was ill and sent Sunny a message to say that he’d entrusted the business of the day to his deputy. ‘My compliments to my head keeper,’ replied the Duke. ‘Will you please inform him that the lower orders are never ill.’

For want of anything else to do, Gladys pruned roses and restored the famous rock garden. But, barely two years after her grand wedding, her marriage was already starting to disintegrate.

On a rainy December 27, 1922, she sat alone in the palace and wrote: ‘Most interesting to me is Sunny’s rudeness to me. Not very marked in public yet — but that will come. I am glad, because I am so sick of life here.’

By 1925, she was writing to her uncle: ‘I conclude that matrimony is a difficult and tricky business and that its success implies giving up all one’s personal existence — that living in an anodyne atmosphere flat as a steppe is the best one can hope it to be.’

Gladys sometimes cracked under the strain. One night, at a dinner, the duke was talking to guests about his political views.

From the other end of the table, she shouted at him: ‘Shut up! You know nothing about politics. I’ve slept with every prime minister in Europe and most kings. You are not qualified to speak.’

At another dinner, she produced a revolver and placed it beside her. A startled guest asked: ‘Duchess, what are you going to do with that?’ — to which she replied: ‘Oh, I don’t know! I might just shoot Marlborough!’

The duke began spending more and more time at his London home in Carlton House Terrace, Westminster, and having fleeting affairs.

He finally walked out on Gladys in 1932, declaring he never wanted to see her again — and took the Blenheim butler, under-butler, valet, chef and kitchen-maid with him. It was a pitiful conclusion to a relationship of 35 years.

At the age of 52, while her marriage to the duke began to break down, she moved into their London house while the Duke returned to Blenheim. (Pictured above is Blenheim Palace's entrance hall)

At the age of 52, while her marriage to the duke began to break down, she moved into their London house while the Duke returned to Blenheim. (Pictured above is Blenheim Palace's entrance hall)

While Gladys remained alone at the palace, in a profound melancholy, Sunny spread rumours that she was insane. His next step was to have her evicted, though she had nowhere to go except a hotel.

At 52, she made a valiant attempt to circulate in society again, to prove she wasn’t insane. Then, when the duke returned to Blenheim, she moved into their London house.

Sunny was furious: he sent round three thugs to lock up the linen, glass and china closets, cut off the electric light, and throw out the food in the larder. Next, he had the telephone and gas cut off.

Gladys then filed a divorce petition, claiming that the duke had treated her ‘with great neglect, cruelty and unkindness and frequently assaulted her’. But just as divorce proceedings were ramping up, Sunny died at age 62 from cancer.

At this point, Gladys, now the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough, seemed to vanish. In fact, she’d adopted the name of Mrs Spencer — half of the Marlborough name, Spencer-Churchill — and moved to the countryside.

After buying a farmhouse, she spent much of her time gardening and reading. Her dogs were fed on meat from the butcher’s, while she lived on boiled cabbage.

By the time war broke out in 1939, Gladys was increasingly eccentric. When the local constabulary complained about her refusal to black out her windows, she referred them to her late husband’s cousin, Winston Churchill, whose recent rise to power had left her unimpressed.

‘I knew him well enough,’ she recalled later. ‘He used to come to [Blenheim]. He was in love with his own image — his reflection in the mirror. I knew him from top to bottom. He was entirely out for Winston.’

One day in 1951, a young Pole was cycling through Chacombe on his way home from work. Gladys, who was trying to mend her front gate, called out and asked him to help. Andrei Kwiatkowsky, who’d been the victim of Russian press-gangs during the war, started working for Gladys as an odd-job man, though for two years she wouldn’t allow him into her house.

She warned him to trust no-one. ‘Friendship doesn’t last,’ she said. On a good day, she’d regale him with stories about Russian grand dukes kissing first the tips of her fingers, then her hand, and then up her arm.

She lived for a time at Blenheim Palace, where her husband's cousin Winston Churchill was born. (Pictured is the side of the palace)

She lived for a time at Blenheim Palace, where her husband's cousin Winston Churchill was born. (Pictured is the side of the palace)

Andrei’s fortuitous arrival meant that Gladys could retire indoors and never come out again. Instructions to tradesmen would be written on a blackboard, which she placed outside the house in the small hours of the night.

Heavy black curtains now covered all the windows, and once a year Andrei was ordered to drench them in oil to deter moths. Outside, the house was surrounded by yards of chicken-wire and pig-wire.

The only member of her husband’s family who ever checked up on her was Sir Shane Leslie, nephew of Lady Randolph Churchill, who visited in 1960. His verdict was that she was very poor, full of grievances but certainly not insane.

By her 80s, Gladys was becoming so frail that Andrei had to carry her upstairs and put her to bed. Eventually, in 1962, one of her nephews, concerned about her health, decided that she should be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

A further worry to her nephews and nieces — few of whom ever bothered to visit her — was that Gladys might incinerate their inheritance by accidentally setting fire to her house, which contained valuable jewellery and paintings.

The duchess fought like a wild animal as four men in white coats carried her out of her home.

Over the next 15-and-a-half years, she never gave up on her dream of returning to Chacombe, and made several attempts to escape the hospital.

Her sole ally was Andrei, who remained a faithful visitor, always wearing his Sunday best. Her nephews and nieces, however, seemed more concerned about the fate of her valuable possessions.

When, without her knowledge, they had her house cleared, an exquisite silver snuff box was found in a tomato-sauce carton on a cat bed, while her book shelves yielded an ancient edition of Chaucer, later sold for £32,000.

In hospital, Gladys largely ignored her fellow inmates or, as she called them, ‘the mads’.

Every day, she fed pigeons on her windowsill. Sometimes, they flew into her room and nurses would find Gladys sitting in bed, surrounded by them.

When I first met her at the age of 94, her eyes were still piercingly blue and her spirit unbroken.

She kept up with politics and world events, but over the two years I visited, talked only with reluctance about her past.

Typically, she might say: ‘Rodin liked to precipitate himself on every woman he met. You know, hands all over you.’ But if I said: ‘Ah! You knew him, then?’ she’d shut up like a clam.

Once, when I referred to the young Gladys Deacon, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Gladys Deacon?’ she said. ‘She never existed.’

She died in her sleep in 1977. At auction the following year, in one hour, her jewellery alone, which included a tiara that had once been part of the Russian Imperial jewels, raised £452,755.

  • Adapted by Corinna Honan from The Sphinx by Hugo Vickers, to be published by Hodder & Stoughton on January 9, 2020, at £25.

© 2020 Hugo Vickers. To order a copy for £20 (20 pc discount) go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until January 11, 2020; p&p is free.

 

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