She turned to breeding Blenheim spaniels, and was so successful that they overran the Palace and drove the duke to distraction. Marriage-wreckers: Gladys’s Blenheim spaniels. These… creams keep my complexion so vigorous and healthy.’ In 1927 ‘the charming mistress of historic Blenheim Palace’ raised a few eyebrows by posing in her wedding gown in an American advertisement for Pond’s cosmetic creams: ‘I never have to think of windburn and chapping. After spending several decades consorting with some of the world’s most distinguished artists and politicians in the capitals and casinos of Europe, the new duchess soon began to tire of Blenheim and country life, while three miscarriages in four years put an end to any hopes she had of motherhood. Gladys was forty years old when she married, and Sunny was fifty. There were house parties at Blenheim and receptions at Buckingham Palace – in 1923 she was presented to George V and Queen Alexandra, ‘wearing a classically draped dress of silver lamé with a ceinture of silver embroidered in diamanté’. The newly-weds settled in at Blenheim Palace and Carlton House Terrace, and Gladys took up the role of duchess with ease. The procedure was not a success: the wax slipped and left her with a permanently bulky jaw. Years before, Gladys had tried to improve on her considerable good looks by having paraffin wax injected in her nose. ‘The Court train is of gold tissue, and the veil, of old needle-point lace, arranged like a coronet.’ That veil hid a slight but curious secret. Her bridal gown was ‘of gold tissue specially woven in Italy for the occasion’, announced The Times. It took her nearly twenty-five years, but on 25 June 1921 she finally achieved her objective when the couple were married in Paris. In the 1890s, when she was only sixteen, Gladys met Sunny, then just married to Consuelo, and decided that she wanted him. She later claimed she had slept with every prime minister in Europe – ‘and most kings.’ Bernard Berenson and the Crown Prince of Prussia wanted to marry her. ![]() When Gladys was still a teenager, drifting around Europe, Proust and Rodin were captivated by her beauty. Her mother went off with an Italian nobleman. Her father, Edward Parker Deacon of Boston, went to prison for shooting dead her mother’s French lover in their suite at the Hotel Splendide in Cannes, and then went mad. Gladys Deacon was a society beauty with a complicated past. Less well-known is the fact that within months of losing one American wife, Sunny found himself another. To many aficionados of the 20 th-century country house, those words conjure up Blenheim Palace and Consuelo Vanderbilt’s ill-starred marriage to ‘Sunny’ Spencer-Churchill, 9 th Duke of Marlborough, which ended in divorce in 1920 after the bride’s father had stumped up a dowry of $2.5 million. ‘I never have to think of windburn or chapping.’Īmerican beauty. By 1962, she had become mentally ill, much like her father and paternal grandmother, and was forcibly moved to St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, where she died in 1977, aged 96.Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough poses for a Pond’s Cream advertisement. She started retreating from the world, and eventually became a complete recluse. She moved with her dogs, first to north Oxfordshire, and later to the Grange Farm at Chacombe. Finally, the Duke moved out of the palace, and two years later evicted her. Later that year Gladys and the Duke of Marlborough were married in Paris.Īfter the Duke converted to Roman Catholicism in 1927, he and Gladys grew apart. As Consuelo and the Duke were unhappily married, they were eventually divorced in 1921. Gladys became the Duke's mistress soon after moving into the palace. It was said that her beauty and fierce intelligence left Proust and Rodin obsessed. Later the wax slipped, destroying her legendary good looks. In 1903, at the age of 22, Gladys underwent plastic surgery in which her nose was injected with paraffin wax to create the perfect Grecian profile. In the late 1890s, the Duke of Marlborough invited Gladys to Blenheim Palace, where she became friends with his wife Consuelo. Gladys and her sisters returned to France to live with their mother. Edward Deacon soon became mentally unstable and was hospitalised at McLean Hospital in Charlestown, Massachusetts, dying there in 1901. Custody of the three older children, including Gladys, was granted to Edward, who took the girls to the United States, where they remained for the next three years. ![]() Gladys’s parents were divorced in 1893, following a dramatic incident in which her father had shot her mother’s lover dead in a hotel room in Cannes in 1892. She had three sisters, and a brother who died in infancy. Gladys Marie Deacon was born in Paris, the daughter of American citizens Edward Deacon, and his wife Florence, daughter of U.S.
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