The historian and author Hugo Vickers met Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough in 1975 when she was 95 years old and had been living in a private psychiatric hospital for many years. They became friends, with Vickers being her only visitor until her death two years later. In The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon – Duchess of Marlborough Vickers chronicles Gladys’ turbulent and ultimately unfortunate sad life. It was, however, certainly a dramatic life, from her father’s murder of her mother’s lover, endless travels around Europe as a beautiful, charming, rich, and spoilt socialite, the tragic death of her sister, numerous quarrels with her unstable mother, affairs with many admirers and suitors, and a botched plastic surgery. At the age of 14, Gladys read about the Duke of Marlborough’s marriage to Consuelo Vanderbilt and set it as her childhood ambition to marry the duke. She eventually met Marlborough and began an affair with him in 1912 by which time Marlborough and Vanderbilt were already legally separated. After the Marlboroughs divorced in 1921, the duke and Gladys were married. It was, of course, a doomed marriage. There were many angry arguments and much irrational behavior on the part of both parties, including Gladys musing to guests at a party about shooting the duke. In the end, Gladys had to be evicted from Blenheim, but the duke died before they could be divorced. After leaving Blenheim, Gladys became a recluse (despite her fortune) and was eventually admitted to the hospital where she lived her last years. Gladys did not like Winston Churchill, her husband’s cousin, complaining that “he was in love with his own image – his reflection in the mirror.” Churchill, for his part, was bored by the company of Gladys and her socialite clique, noting that they were “strange glittering beings with whom I have little or nothing in common.”
Churchill Review
22 Friday Jan 2021
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