7/6/2023 0 Comments Gladys deacon![]() ![]() Ward Willis, grace the grounds of the palace.Ī detail of one of Gladys Marlborough's eyes, as painted on the ceiling of the North Portico of Blenheim by British artist Colin Gill. A pair of long-necked lead sphinxes, cast in Gladys’s image in 1930 by W. Still the duke honored her presence in his life. (A morose and irritable man, the duke was perversely called Sunny, a nickname derived from his courtesy title, Earl of Sunderland.) The newlyweds soon realized the union was a mistake-Sunny's only passionate relationship was with Blenheim, to whose survival he was devoted at all costs. What became of the fascinating Miss Deacon is the stuff of “Gladys Deacon: An Eccentric Duchess,” which Vickers says should really be called “Gladys Deacon: The Lost Years.” (It includes the lady's numerous scrapbooks, which have never been seen before and are in Vickers's possession.) At the age of 40, on 25 June 1921, she married her lover Charles Spencer-Churchill, ninth duke of Marlborough, following the end of his marriage to her close friend the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt. "I decided to stop seeing Gladys Deacon when I convinced myself that in human relationships she offered nothing but an offensive arbitrariness, pursuing people in a flattering and ensnaring fashion, only so as to be able to break it off with them noisily when the fancy struck her." Art scholar Bernard Berenson, who met Gladys when she was 17, bitterly wrote of his disappointment in what he perceived as her capriciousness. The self-absorbed Gladys adored being adored, though she seems to have loved no one. The German kaiser’s eldest son fell head over heels for her though his father put an end to that infatuation the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou compared her beauty to that of an archangel. Writers, musicians, and politicians were in her thrall, as were several dukes and princes. ![]() In her heyday Gladys Deacon (the name was pronounced GLAY-duz) was an A-list personality, as renowned for her unsettling beauty-especially those great, staring, crystal-blue eyes-as for her impressive intellect. ![]()
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