Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Political discussions at Blenheim, particularly those with Winston Churchill in the eye of the storm, made her long for something beyond what she described as traditional but superficial public duties. After being told one day by a vicar presiding over a bazaar that she put him in mind of his favourite fruit the strawberry (found in a ducal coronet) Consuelo decided it was time to do something more ambitious and accepted an invitation to speak about technical education to a club of blind men in Birmingham. Cousin Winston went to great trouble to help her with this speech, telling her that no professor could have done better. Unlike her husband, who had to brace himself for contact with the ‘lower orders’, Consuelo warmed to her audience in an instant. ‘I immediately felt in touch with them. And when, at the end, they greeted me with a storm of applause it made all the nervous anticipation worthwhile and encouraged me to continue.’13

  This tentative step into public life was one of several strategies by which Consuelo distracted herself from the unhappiness of her marriage. Freedom to be alone was difficult to arrange. ‘With a page in the house, a coachman or postilion to take me for drives and a groom to accompany my rides, my freedom was quite successfully restricted.’ There were two ways of escaping endless surveillance. One was long walks in the park, which she could take unaccompanied. ‘I loved to wander through the bracken among the great oaks with the lake shimmering below and to day-dream of past centuries and of the persons who had then haunted those green glades.’14 The other was the electric car sent across from America by Alva. Because no protocol had grown up around ladies and cars, there was no objection to Consuelo driving out in it alone.

  Another strategy, pursued by both Marlboroughs, was to spend increasing amounts of time apart. In Consuelo’s case this sometimes meant going to Paris to see her father who was playing an ever greater part in French horse-racing, had an apartment on the Champs Elysées and moved to France permanently after he married Anne Harriman Sands Rutherfurd in 1903. She would go with him to race meetings at St Cloud and Maisons-Lafite and she loved the cosmopolitan life and relaxed atmosphere of Paris. William K. continued to look so young and handsome that on one occasion the Duke of Marlborough was refused admission to a private dining room where father and daughter were eating together by an over-zealous maître d’hôtel who feared a scene. ‘When speeding homewards over the golden wheat fields to the white town of Calais I invariably felt sad at leaving a people whose civilisation I believed had truly assessed the values of life,’15 wrote Consuelo later.

  Early in 1900 the Duke sailed to South Africa to serve with the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War. The gossip in London, according to Town Topics, was that the Duke of Marlborough’s decision to go to war had much to do with his marital problems and that Alva had rushed over from New York to sort things out. ‘London persistently gossips that there has been trouble between the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough; that this was the reason for Mrs O. H. P. Belmont’s hurried visit and for the Duke’s determination to risk his life in the Transvaal,’ it related. Town Topics was not, of course, so simple-minded as to believe such stories itself. ‘The cabled reports of the Duke’s departure, last Saturday, state that he left his “bachelor flat” and that this seems to give some colour to the stories; but a “bachelor flat” does not necessitate a bachelor life.’16 At the same time, Colonel Mann was at a loss to see how Alva’s presence might help since she was known to be a forceful advocate of the Boer cause. It is true, however, that Alva and Harold were at Blenheim in January 1900, and years later Town Topics reported more gossip that Consuelo had been ordered by Alva to travel to Southampton for a public gesture of farewell to her husband.17 Though she would later evince little enthusiasm for the Boer War herself, saying that no-one in England was very proud of the campaign, Consuelo did her duty before the Duke’s departure and attended a farewell dinner in Woodstock for those from Oxfordshire who had volunteered for active service with the Imperial Yeomanry and presented a wrist watch to each man.

  The Duke departed for South Africa on the Kinfauns Castle on Saturday 20 January. Regardless of Town Topics’ speculation, the Duke, like many of the 800 others on board, had volunteered for active service amid the upsurge of patriotism that followed unexpected reverses in South Africa in December 1899; over 3,000 British soldiers had been killed in ‘Black Week’ alone, administering a profound shock to the aristocratic certainties of the Victorian Age.

  On arrival in South Africa, the Duke, who was a lieutenant in the Imperial Yeomanry, joined the commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts, and subsequently became his assistant military secretary on 16 April. This led to criticism in The Times, for it was felt that the appointment should have gone to a military man. Taken together with objections in the radical press at the unduly aristocratic nature of Lord Roberts’ staff (it included the Duke of Norfolk and the Duke of Westminster), the Commander-in-Chief decided to leave the Duke of Marlborough out of the march on Johannesburg and Pretoria. This distressed him greatly but thanks to the intervention of Winston Churchill – then working as a war correspondent for the Morning Post – he was reassigned to the headquarters staff of General Sir Ian Hamilton alongside Cousin Winston. They thus saw some sharp military action in each other’s company. They rode into Pretoria together as it capitulated, and liberated a prisoner-of-war camp from which Churchill had earlier made a daring and somewhat controversial escape:

  Marlborough and I cantered into the town. We knew that the officer prisoners had been removed from the State Model Schools, and we asked our way to the new cage where it was hoped they were still confined. We feared they had been carried off – perhaps in the very last train. But as we rounded a corner, there was the prison camp, a long tin building surrounded by a dense wire entanglement. I raised my hat and cheered. The cry was instantly answered from within. What followed resembled the end of an Adelphi melodrama. We were only two, and before us stood the armed Boer guard with their rifles at the ‘ready’. Marlborough, resplendent in the red tabs of the staff, called on the Commandant to surrender forthwith, adding by a happy thought that he would give a receipt for the rifles. The prisoners rushed out of the house into the yard, some in uniform, some in flannels, hatless or coatless, but all violently excited. The sentries threw down their rifles, the gates were flung open, and while the rest of the guard (they numbered 52 in all) stood uncertain what to do, the long-penned-up officers surrounded them and seized their weapons. Someone produced a Union Jack, the Transvaal emblem was torn down, and amidst wild cheers from our captive friends the first British flag was hoisted over Pretoria. Time: 8.47, June 5. Tableau!18

  The Duke was later mentioned in dispatches for the part he played in the Boer War, and returned home in late July 1900, when it seemed (erroneously) that the campaigns of Roberts and Hamilton had brought Boer resistance to an end. He sailed back in the company of Lady Sarah Wilson who had been in Mafeking reporting for the Daily Mail, and had been taken prisoner by the Boers and released after she wandered behind enemy lines. When she read about Lady Sarah’s experiences, even Queen Victoria was heard to comment that she thought Lady Sarah Wilson was quite capable of looking after herself.

  In addition to the Duke, Lady Sarah Wilson and Winston Churchill, Lady Randolph Churchill was now in South Africa, in part to see a young subaltern, George Cornwallis-West, whom she would later marry. This left Consuelo on her own in England without house parties to host. The only visitor of note to sign the Blenheim visitor’s book in the five months the Duke was away was the French painter, Paul Helleu, who came to stay on 11 May 1900. Helleu, a friend of John Singer Sergent, was an established society portraitist whose sketches of society women had become extremely fashionable. He favoured a technique known as dry-point etching which allowed him to sell limited editions. ‘Helleu was a nervous, sensitive man with a capacity for intense suffering that artistic temperaments are prone to,’ wrote Consuelo. ‘He thought himself something of a Don Juan, and with his black beard, his mobile lips and sad eyes he had the r
equisite looks, but he was too sensitive for the role.’19 In spite of the fact that some of his warmest and most touching drawings are of his wife, Helleu was thought to have affairs with some of his beautiful and fashionable clients, though he did not have the salacious reputation of his friend and rival Boldini.

  Helleu’s daughter believes that he and Consuelo probably had an affair between 1900 and 1901. While he was staying at Blenheim he is thought to have done two pastels, five dry-point etchings and several drawings. Some of these are delightfully tender and intimate, particularly a drawing of Consuelo dozing on a sofa at Blenheim, a dog asleep on her lap. Consuelo went to Paris herself on 9 June 1900, and other drawings have backgrounds that match photographs of Helleu’s studio. It was either in his studio or at Blenheim that he produced his most famous dry-point etching of Consuelo in a high black feathery hat with a long feathered peak and a fine fur wrap around her neck – textures lending themselves to the velvety lines produced by the diamond stylus of the dry-point etching technique. In the more relaxed atmosphere of Paris, there would have been no objections to going alone to Helleu’s studio for a sitting, or having lunch together in a café afterwards. For a time, it was, at the very least, a great friendship. Helleu was a well-known wit, a yachtsman and a cultured man who was a friend of Proust and other artists of the belle époque. He offered companionship when she needed it as well as limitless admiration of Consuelo’s blossoming beauty. Their friendship later soured, when he persisted in making copies of the dry-point etching of Consuelo in her feathered hat into the 1920s without her permission – to raise money – but during the first period of their friendship she celebrated it with gifts, notably a slim cigarette case which he could carry in a jacket pocket.

  By the beginning of 1901 the gossip mongers were back in business reporting further trouble between the Marlboroughs. It was suggested that the Duke was bitterly disappointed at being passed over for the job of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He felt his chances had been ruined by the American press and was holding Consuelo responsible: ‘Sunny … is not the best tempered of men, and the young Duchess has to bear a lot of ill-natured remarks from her lord and master about things American generally and about American journalists especially.’20 According to Town Topics, select items from American newspapers suggesting that Consuelo was already considering herself the ‘Vicereine’ and looking forward to having her hand kissed were shown to ‘Old Judy’ by the Earl and Countess of Dudley, who were anxious to secure the appointment for themselves. The Queen was said to be furious at the presumption on display, and all further discussion about the Duke of Marlborough’s appointment came to an abrupt end.

  There may be little truth in this, since the Queen’s strength was already ebbing away around this time and she died on 22 January 1901. In her memoirs, however, Consuelo alludes to Lady Dudley’s manoeuvring at Queen Victoria’s funeral: ‘[She] seemed preoccupied, interrupted all my conversations and never left me a moment alone with those who wished to speak to me. I discovered later that she was anxious to have her husband appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and, knowing that Marlborough was spoken of as a candidate, she feared that I was pleading his cause with the political personages present.’21 The Earl of Dudley subsequently held the post until 1905 leaving Sunny excluded from a post that had been held by his grandfather and later by his cousin, Ivor Guest.

  The Duke may well have chosen to blame both the US press and his wife for this and let his vituperation show. ‘It is hard lines on the Duchess of Marlborough that she should be placed in this awkward position for she is in no manner to blame for it … Strawberry leaves are, no doubt most becoming to the American girl, but was it worthwhile to pay so big a price for a coronet of them, only to be abused in vile language by her husband in public?’ asked Town Topics.22 It is clear, however, that Consuelo was unenthusiastic about a move to Ireland for she later wrote that it was a ‘relief’ when Lord Dudley became Lord Lieutenant and her husband was given the Garter and appointed Under-Secretary of the Colonies. This may have been held against her by her husband, for it would have damaged his chances of being appointed had she made her feelings known.

  Whatever the cause, the rift between the Duke and Duchess early in 1901 was sufficiently serious for The New York Times to remark in April that the Marlboroughs were now travelling together from Paris to London and that ‘the fact is regarded as indicating that if there was any ground for the rumour of discord between the two the unpleasantness has been smoothed over’.23 The amount of time the Marlboroughs had been spending apart was causing concern, the newspaper noted, hinting strongly that they did not sleep under the same roof in Paris, and were only reunited when it was time to leave. ‘The Duke of Marlborough, after travelling for a month in the South of Spain, came to Paris a week ago and stopped at the Hôtel Bristol, on the Place Vendôme. While the Duke was in Spain the Duchess was in Paris. The last three weeks prior to her departure for London she spent at her father’s mansion in the Avenue des Champs Elysées. After the Duke returned from Spain he visited his father-in-law, and there saw the Duchess. This morning the Duchess drove to the Hôtel Bristol, whence she and the Duke proceeded to the railway station in company.’24 It was against this background of rumour and gossip that Gladys Deacon came to stay at Blenheim in the late summer of 1901.

  Gladys Deacon first appeared in London society in the autumn of 1897, just after Consuelo gave birth to her first son, Blandford. Gladys met the Duke of Marlborough while Consuelo was recovering at Blenheim and charmed him. On discovering that Gladys was not only American but an old Newport neighbour of his wife, the Duke invited her to Blenheim to provide some companionship for Consuelo, which meant that Gladys first arrived at Blenheim when the Marlboroughs were at their happiest.

  Strikingly beautiful, Gladys (pronounced ‘Glaydus’) was intelligent and cultivated, a perfect antidote to those English sporting types who regarded culture with dark suspicion. She was, according to Consuelo, ‘a beautiful girl endowed with a brilliant intellect. Possessed of exceptional powers of conversation, she could enlarge on any subject in an interesting and amusing manner. I was soon subjugated by the charm of her friendship and we began a friendship which only ended years later.’25 It is very likely that Consuelo knew something of the Deacon family background before she met Gladys, because it was highly scandalous. Although Gladys Deacon was American by birth and had lived in Newport, she was not an heiress, although her mother was very well off and she counted at least one captain of the revolution among her distinguished forbears. Born in Paris, and European in upbringing, Gladys was one of four daughters of Edward Parker Deacon and his wife Florence, who mixed with the gratin of belle-époque society. Edward Parker Deacon was unstable and violent, or so it was alleged by Mrs Deacon. He once beat his wife when he disliked the way she had done her hair, and again when he found her crying after their only son had died.

  Gladys’s upbringing was dogged by her parents’ marital difficulties, for if Edward Parker Deacon was unstable, her mother was adulterous. When Mrs Deacon took one Emile Abeille as her lover Mr Deacon followed them both to Cannes and – in the face of considerable provocation and many lies it must be said – proceeded to shoot Emile Abeille dead in the Hôtel Splendide before giving himself up to the police. Naturally the entire affair gave rise to a murder trial that was publicised internationally (and also attracted the interest of Henry James). It ended with Edward Parker Deacon being sent to prison for unlawfully wounding Abeille, though the court accepted that he had not intended to kill him. Mrs Deacon’s adulterous behaviour counted against her however, and when Mr Deacon was released from prison he gained custody of his three eldest children, including twelve-year-old Gladys. He removed her from her mother to live in America, precipitating a long and bitter custody struggle.

  Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, Gladys was educated in America, first in Newport and later at a boarding school in Massachusetts. By 1895, when she was fourteen, she was already showing si
gns of becoming cultured and clever. She also, according to her biographer, Hugo Vickers, developed the beginnings of an obsession. In October 1895, she read about Consuelo’s engagement to the Duke of Marlborough in the newspapers and wrote to her mother: ‘O dear me if I was only a little older I might “catch” him yet! But Hélas! I am too young though mature in the arts of woman’s witchcraft and what is the use of one without the other? And I will have to give up all chance to ever get Marlborough.’26 After Gladys left school in 1896, her mother successfully regained custody and took her back to Paris. She never saw her father again, for by 1897 his behaviour was becoming more and more eccentric. After he fell into an uncontrollable fit he was admitted to the McLean hospital in Boston where he later died of pneumonia.

  Though she would become a regular visitor to Blenheim, Gladys spent several months in Germany after her first visit, completing her education. She learnt to speak and read in German and Italian, and took up Latin. Though Bernard Berenson said rather sourly of her later: ‘She did not really know how to “learn”, but she would retain everything which would be useful to her in making an effect,’27 Gladys continued to study with tutors for several more years emerging with seven languages, exceptionally wide general knowledge, a great interest in mythology and a life-long love of art, literature and poetry. Since she was a very great beauty – a perfectly moulded face with large grey eyes and a ‘rose-leaf’ complexion – and an outstanding conversationalist, Gladys soon began to attract attention. She was taken up by the poet, nobleman and aesthete, Comte Robert de Montesquiou, a friend of her mother’s; she was drawn by Boldini, and met Bernard Berenson, the great connoisseur and art critic in St Moritz in 1899.

  Although Bernard Berenson was already in love with Mary Costelloe and would marry her the following year, he became infatuated with Gladys, later telling his wife that he had even thought about marrying Gladys instead. Gladys’s infatuation with Berenson (‘You are not a person to me, you are an état d’esprit et d’âme’28) survived a three-month trip to California and his marriage to Mary, however, and in March 1901 she and her mother went to stay with the Berensons at their villa, I Tatti, near Florence, where mother and daughter forged a friendship with them both. After Gladys left, Berenson slipped into lethargic gloom. ‘Even Gladys has faded out of his grasp,’ wrote his wife, who was fascinated and disconcerted by Gladys in turn.29