Woman-child
Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough Hugo Vickers (Weidenfeld E8.95) 'I saw an extraordinary marionette of a woman — or was it a man? It wore grey flannel trousers, a wide leather belt, masculine overcoat, and a man's brown felt hat, and had a really frightening appearance, but the hair was golden dyed and long: what is wrongly known as platinum; the mouth was a scarlet scar. . . as 1 secretly examined this terrifying apparition, I recognised Gladys Marlborough, once the world's most beautiful woman . . . the toast of Paris, the love of Proust, the belle amie of Anatole France.' This passage in 'Chips' Channon's diary for 1943 fascinated Hugo Vickers when he read it as a boy at Eton in 1968; he wanted to know more about the transformation of this American of outstanding beauty, personality and intelligence, who had once dazzled society in Paris, Rome and London, into this witch-like creature. He discovered that the Duchess was in fact still alive, a patient in a psycho-geriatric ward at St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton.
Gladys (pronounced `Glaydus') was 94 when Mr Vickers began visiting her at St Andrew's in 1975; this exceptional young writer won her confidence by his sensitivity and strength of character so that they became, in the Duchess's words, 'friends for ever'. The few who were even aware of her existence ad mostly long since dismissed her as a madwoman, but Mr Vickers was privileged to hear the views of this extraordinary survivor from the Belle Epoque on Rodin (liked to precipitate himself on every woman he met. You know, hands all over you'); d'Annunzio ('spark, but not fire'); Gertrude Stein Chard and ugly, and a hard man or woman isn't worth bbthering about'); Winston Churchill ('knew him from top to bottom. . He was entirely out for Winston. . . He just had a certain faculty for making a noise') and his wife ('no opinions, only convictions'). Mr Vickers researched Gladys's life on the Continent and in America before learning the dread news that someone else was also writing a biography of the Duchess. He decided to persevere. Daphne Fielding's slight and unsatisfactory sketch, The Face on the Sphinx, is best forgotten and I see that Mr Vickers does not even mention it in the bibliography to his own immeasurably superior study. Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough tells the remark able story of how Gladys Deacon, an American born in Paris, became famous when her erratic father shot her mother's lover in Cannes in 1892; three years later, Gladys was regretting that at 14 she had been too young to .`catch' the Duke of Marlborough, who had become engaged to a family friend, Consuelo Vanderbilt. Soon, however, Gladys was being called 'the marvel' by Montesquiou, being painted by Boldini, loved by Bernard Berenson who thought of marriage.
Albert Element wrote that 'she traversed Europe like a meteor in a flash of dazzling beauty and of conversation no less exceptional'. Meteor is certainly the mot juste — incidentally, Mr Vickers is prone to serve up chunks of French in quotation without translating for those who have not had the benefit of his further education at Strasbourg University.
When she was 22, Gladys, in search of the perfect Grecian profile, had paraffin wax injected into the bridge of her nose; the long-term consequences were disastrous to her beauty; nevertheless she was to enchant an astonishing list of suitors. The 59-yearold Duke of Norfolk was made to pretend he was the Pope, wearing an antimacassar on his head and being addressed by Gladys as 'Marie'; he then was obliged to leave the room, remove his coat and return on all fours with a green cushion on his back, trotting around the room like a dog. Among the others who fell for Gladys were Roffredo Caetani, the Duke of Camastra, Bob Trevelyan and the philosopher Keyserling, who objected to being treated like 'a floating jelly-fish', There was a mild and innocent friendship with Queen Victoria's last surviving son, the Duke of Connaught, who comes across as an endearing old buffer (`You are so much more intelligent and cleverer than I am that I often feel that what I write is dull and perhaps too much about myself').
At last, when she was over 40, Gladys married the Duke of Marlborough, following his divorce from Consuelo. The schoolgirl dream of marrying 'Sunny' (what a misnomer) turned into a nightmare. Viscountess Churchill commiserated with Gladys as she knew 'all the ungentlemanlike tricks that the family we both had the misfortune to marry into can do — the lies and spite'. The person of whom Proust had once written, 'I never saw a girl with such beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm', now settled as a recluse in a squalid farmhouse from which she was removed (on the Ides of March 1962) to hospital, where she died in 1977.
Mr Vickers tells us that Gladys had been the mistress of the Duke for years before the marriage and that she had three miscar riages when she was Duchess, but he does not elucidate a remark of Mary Berenson's: 'She has never changed physically from a child to a woman, and her doctor said she probably never Three generations of Deacons ended their lives in sanatoriums so perhaps a little more psychology would, for once, have been in order. Mr Vickers has done an impressive amount of work and writes with an enjoyable relish. The book is attractively produced with some interesting illustrations; 'Cassandra' wrote for the Mirror, not the Mail, but I noticed no other slips and the index is exemplary.
Previous page
