Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Leaving the newly married Bernard Berenson suitably subjugated at I Tatti, Gladys went to Blenheim for several weeks in August 1901. She immediately caused emotional mayhem (and attended the first great Unionist rally). She began by enthralling the Duke’s cousin, Ivor Guest. By 10 August 1901, the unhappy Duke of Marlborough was also helpless in the face of her beauty, intelligence, intensity and capricious charm. He removed himself to Harrogate for a health cure, and immediately wrote her the first of many letters. As in some of his later letters he started by apologising for his own dullness: ‘This is the first letter that I have had the pleasure of writing to you. I hope that you will not suppose that its peculiar dullness and stupidity is a correct specimen of me?? – but truly this place allows one little opportunity of writing anything of interest.’ But he changed to French to express his true feelings, quoting Rochefoucauld and expressing the sentiment that absence fanned the flames of grand passion, while diminishing mediocre sentiments, as the wind extinguished candles but fanned the flames of fire. He lingered on the hope of fire ‘and the possibility of its burning’ but remained pessimistic about his chances of success.30

  He was right to be despondent because two conquests were not enough for Gladys Deacon that August. The Duke returned to Blenheim from Harrogate to host a visit from the Crown Prince of Germany, arranged by the Kaiser himself. The house party was small – the Duke’s relation, Viscount Churchill and his wife Verena, Gladys and a selection of German courtiers including the German ambassador, Count Metternich, Count Mensdorff, Count Eulenburg and Colonel von Pritzelwitz. The Kaiser must have imagined that, supervised by such a committee, the Crown Prince could come to little harm, but he reckoned without Miss Gladys Deacon. Much to Count Metternich’s anxiety, the Crown Prince proceeded to fall under her spell like everyone else, assisted, according to a later magazine serialisation of the romance, by beautiful sunsets and games of tennis. Consuelo felt sorry for Count Metternich who had a harrowing week ‘anxiously preening a stiff neck in vain endeavour to follow a flirtation his Prince was happily engaged in pursuing’.31

  During the visit (and unobserved by Count Metternich) the Prince gave Gladys the ring his mother had given him at his first communion, while Gladys presented him with a bracelet. When they all went on a sightseeing expedition to Oxford, the Prince, who had never driven a coach before, let alone a coach and four, insisted on driving. Consuelo sat beside him ready to grab the reins at any point – a sensible precaution since the Prince constantly turned round to gaze at Gladys with a lovesick expression, to the great anxiety of the other passengers. The Marlborough groom had the presence of mind to clear the road by repeatedly sounding the horn which ensured that they all reached Oxford without any damage other than that inflicted on Count Metternich’s mental health. When the Prince returned to Germany, his father the Kaiser noticed that the ring had disappeared and demanded it back in a fury. Consuelo eventually arranged for its return through Colonel Pritzelwitz, who exchanged it for Gladys’s bracelet. ‘So ended a foolish and completely futile conquest,’ wrote Consuelo much later.

  Shortly after the Prince’s return to Germany, Consuelo and Gladys decided that this was just the moment to take a sightseeing trip to Berlin and Dresden. There followed one of the happiest interludes of this period in Consuelo’s life. In spite of the fact that their arrival in Germany made the imperial court extremely jumpy, and that they were assigned a most dour and irritating aide-de-camp ‘impervious to woman’s charm’ to keep them away from the Crown Prince, they explored San Souci and the galleries, and chatted about life and art from dawn till dusk. They took steamers down the Elbe and went to the opera in the evenings. Consuelo had never experienced this kind of friendship, and by the time their short holiday ended, and Gladys returned home to Paris, she was almost as entranced by Gladys as her husband had been earlier, exchanging locks of hair, referring to herself as ‘your old Coon’ and signing herself ‘your loving Consuelo’.

  Letters from Consuelo to Gladys in this period give intriguing glimpses of Consuelo’s state of mind. Although Consuelo was older, she clearly regarded Gladys as the teacher in the relationship, and teased her by calling her Pallas Athene, saying: ‘Do not bury yourself in study – you know quite enough already. I, who know nothing real of a good deal of life must still learn.’32 She asked Gladys not to accuse her of moods, writing: ‘I know only too well what it is to have them; but now that I am busy they do not assail me so often’, adding that ‘I have no-one to disburden myself to at all.’33 She entreated Gladys to be ‘the Dresden Gladys’ again, and here and there she dropped hints about the state of her emotional life, writing: ‘I am very good – like you – and although it irritates me at times – on the whole it is comforting?’ and: ‘Don’t laugh at me! I think I should have tried to have been a Vestal Virgin and forever nourished the fire of life and rejoiced in enforced virtue, recognised as such! Or – like Cleopatra – I hate the middle course.’34 In another letter Consuelo wrote ironically: ‘Vive l’amour!’ But then goes on to say ‘But I am not sure – I think I prefer la paix?’35 In October 1901, Consuelo added a wistful PS, writing: ‘I wish we were at Dresden! Please say you do too.’36

  After Gladys returned home to Paris, the Duke of Marlborough took his turn to call on her, returning with presents for his sons. Sunny was also penning notes of his own to Gladys, arranging another meeting in Paris, where he would be travelling with Consuelo, and signing off ‘am looking forward to Sunday with much pleasure and some feelings of excitement. Bless you. Fair friend.’37 On the surface, however, the Marlboroughs patched up their difficulties in 1902, finding distraction in the great ceremonial set pieces which the Duke particularly enjoyed, and starting work on Sunderland House. Gladys Deacon, meanwhile, returned to the Berensons who took her on a trip round Italy. Mary Berenson was both deeply attracted and appalled by Gladys and wrote some highly perceptive descriptions of her at this period in her diary: ‘So beautiful, so graceful, so changeful in a hundred moods, so brilliant that it is enough to turn anybody’s head. Part of her mysteriousness comes from her being, as it were, sexless. She has never changed physically from a child to a woman, and her doctor said she probably never will … Brought up by a mamma who thinks of nothing but Dress & Sex, her mind plays around all the problems of sex in a most alarming manner with an audacity and outspokenness that make your hair stand on end. She is positively impish.’38 Gladys held views about sex that were far in advance of her time. Even in old age she told Hugo Vickers: ‘One is changed by ecstasy. Physical love is the creator of all things. It is a recreation, and when I say a recreation I don’t mean a recreation, but a re-creation!’, though she regarded marriage as ‘something very different’.39

  It is not difficult to see that if such views were expressed to either of the Marlboroughs they would have had a somewhat unsettling effect. Mary Berenson was worried by persistent rumours about relations between Gladys and the Marlboroughs, and Gladys confirmed her fears by telling her in confidence that Consuelo was ‘nearly broken hearted because the Duke would make such wild love to her’.40 But Mary Berenson wrote that Gladys often told lies, and Consuelo does not appear to have been at all ‘broken-hearted’ as she escorted her friend round a brilliantly successful London season, before playing her role in the postponed coronation on 9 August. Not long afterwards, Consuelo made a trip back to the United States, on her own. It was the first after her marriage. She stayed with her mother in Newport, where her girlish demeanour and great elegance was the subject of much comment.

  The Marlborough marriage came under new pressure that year, however. In the wake of the visit to Russia in 1902, Consuelo caught a bad cold which left her slightly deaf. Instead of clearing up in the months that followed, the deafness became worse to the extent of becoming a serious handicap in English society where people spoke in subdued tones, particularly when addressing someone they regarded as exalted, or if they had something particularly interesting or scandalous to impart. ‘This wa
s not only tiring but also exasperating, not to say humiliating, and was causing me a great deal of anxiety, for to be cut off from human intercourse at so early an age appeared to me catastrophic.’41 Her anxiety was justified for in spite of seeing specialist after specialist, and a number of painful operations, it gradually became clear that nothing could be done to reverse the problem. Consuelo’s deafness soon came to irritate Sunny intensely, and there was little sympathy from the wider world. Queen Alexandra also suffered from deafness and in 1904 Town Topics suggested unkindly that it had become a fashionable affliction: ‘Mrs Paget is, dear soul, deaf! She is nothing if not smart, and not to be as deaf as Queen Alexandra and the Duchess of Marlborough is to be out of the running.’42

  Consuelo’s deafness would prove to be one more source of stress in a strained marriage, affecting relationships with those around her until hearing aids were developed to the point where she could hear almost normally again. ‘There were so many hiatuses that had to be filled in, so many half-tones that had to be divined, so much intensive guesswork towards significance, that even when the purport had been grasped the end barely justified the trouble. And later, when loved voices grew dim and I saw the flicker of annoyance that follows an unappreciated jest, I became withdrawn and lived in a world peopled with characters of my own choosing, at once apprehensive and apprehending. Solitude can become fiercely possessive … It became a solace for me to remain what Lord Curzon called a “black swan”, aloof in the soundless shadowed waters where I could choose the mirrored scene.’43

  In November 1902, Consuelo travelled to Austria for an extended course of treatment from a specialist, accompanied by her two young sons. Count Mensdorff had provided her with letters of introduction to Austrian society and she spent many pleasant evenings at the opera, at Viennese operettas, and at suppers afterwards in the company of its younger cosmopolitan circles. She was presented to the Emperor but she did not warm to the Viennese aristocracy. Though they were polished, well-educated and well-bred, she remarked scathingly that it was ‘a pity they could express their thoughts in so many different languages when they had so few thoughts to express’.44 This did not stop her flirting with at least one of its scions, as Daisy, Princess of Pless noticed when she met her in Vienna:

  … She is looking very well and I think fascinatingly pretty, with her funny little turned-up nose and big brown eyes. She had made friends with Z before I arrived. And her first words to me were: ‘Of course, Daisy, you know Prince Z? I have been saying to myself that I knew you would come and take him away from me.’ I replied: ‘You dear little silly, you can’t take away in five days a man who has been a loyal faithful friend to me for more than five years.’ As a matter of fact I had sent him ahead of me from Pardubitz to Vienna to take care of her; she leaves tomorrow for England, and from there goes to India for the Durbar.45

  Unlike Princess Daisy, when Gladys Deacon learnt that the Marlboroughs were going to India for the Delhi Durbar, she was disapproving. She wrote to the Duke: ‘Sterne says that 3 travel – Those who do so from Imbecility of mind or from Incapability of body or from Inevitable necessity. The first he says, comprise all those who travel by land or by water labouring with pride, curiosity, vanity or spleen. As for the 3rd class they are all the peregrine martyrs who live by the traffic & importation of sugar-plums, we’ll say, & boots. Does this explain the Durbar? You, of course, belong to the first & second, most obviously. Don’t you now?’46

  In the Marlboroughs’ absence, Gladys spent the winter in Paris with her mother and sisters. She became ill, however, causing her mother so much concern that she was eventually sent to a maison de santé for a complete rest. It was in this highly strung and nervous state that Gladys took a step which would come to haunt her. According to her biographer, Hugo Vickers, Gladys had long been fascinated by her own face. ‘Mabel Dodge Luhan wrote that “she was content to lie for hours alone on her bed, happy in loving her own beauty, contemplating it”. As she gazed, she worried about the slight hollow between the forehead and the nose, which, to her mind, denied her a true classical beauty. Her bizarre love of the classics, combined with a reckless vanity, set her to consider how she might achieve the perfection of the Hellenic profile she had so often admired in museums and galleries.’47 Gladys’s next step was to visit Rome where she explored the Museo delle Terme and measured the distance between the eyes and nose of a statue there. Returning to Paris, ‘she had paraffin wax injected into the bridge of her nose to build it up and form a straight line from the forehead down to the tip. At first the endeavour had a measure of success, but in the long term it was a disaster.’48

  When Mary Berenson visited Gladys in her sanatorium in April she found her greatly changed. Gladys lied to her about what she had done, although her nose was still swollen. Mary Berenson was more alarmed by her mental state, her inability to concentrate and her habit of saying half a dozen contradictory things in the course of one visit. By 8 April, however, Gladys discharged herself from the sanatorium. Another suitor, Lord Francis Hope, was pressing his case, and the Duke of Marlborough, recently returned from the Delhi Durbar, was due also to arrive in Paris for a few days. His appearance worried both Gladys’s mother (now using her maiden name, Baldwin) and Mary Berenson. Mrs Baldwin feared that in such a highly strung state Gladys was plotting to elope with him to spite Consuelo of whom Gladys now seemed to have become extremely jealous on account of her apparent hold over the Duke.

  ‘What a hateful silly muddle it is,’ wrote Mary to Bernard Berenson, ‘and poor Gladys with her excited brain drifting about in it with no one to guide her.’49 Gladys continued to be elated at the idea of seeing the Duke. It is unclear what transpired during his visit to Paris in 1903 but before long she was being courted by the recently widowed Duke of Norfolk and the prospect of upstaging Consuelo by becoming the wife of the ‘Premier Duke of Great Britain’ appears to have taken over from any desire to elope with her husband. Gladys returned to England in the summer of 1903 for a further period of recuperation, enjoying another successful season alongside her younger sister Audrey, followed by another stay at Blenheim. At the end of the year Mrs Baldwin decided she had tired of Paris, and moved her household to Rome where they occupied the Palazzo Borghese.

  The Duke of Marlborough, meanwhile, suddenly found himself occupied by politics. He became Under-Secretary to the Colonies in 1903 after Arthur Balfour succeeded Lord Salisbury, and his duties were more onerous than those as Paymaster General. During his period as Under-Secretary to the Colonies, the Colonial Secretary Alfred Lyttleton formed a good opinion of the Duke’s capabilities, writing that he was ‘proud of my lieutenant’ when he persuaded the House of Lords to accept Chinese labour for the Transvaal on behalf of the government. Balfour wrote in similarly glowing terms after a meeting in Bolton where Sunny was instrumental in setting up the Imperial Cotton Growing Association alongside Joseph Chamberlain. Later, Balfour would write to the Duke that he could not have wished for ‘a better or more loyal colleague’, that in the Lords he had ‘never made a mistake’ and ‘showed not merely great mastery of the subject but much tact and address’.50

  The Marlboroughs took possession of their great new London home, Sunderland House, at the end of 1903, and for a brief period it was used for political entertaining, the purpose for which it was built. The house was designed by Achille Duchêne ‘in eighteenth-century style’. It was as much Consuelo’s creation as the Duke’s, with up-to-date plumbing, adequate bathrooms and an American emphasis on bas-reliefs in the long gallery. Not everyone liked it when it was finished. Daisy, Princess of Pless could not stand the dining room which was ‘not high enough and the windows have always to be covered over with stuff as they are right on the ground and the people in a dirty little back street can look in’.51 Consuelo did not enjoy the role of political hostess either, later recalling: ‘Long lists of important officials and guests had to be memorised, for Colonials were proverbially touchy and had Mr Smith from New Zealand been prese
nted to Lady Snooks as coming from Australia, or vice versa, the result would have been disastrous. These receptions were by no means a pleasure.’ She found debates in the House of Commons rather more interesting, particularly when the members were arguing about Home Rule and both sides demonstrated furious eloquence. Political disagreements often extended to the ladies watching from above. ‘There were times when, sitting in the Speaker’s Gallery between Lady Londonderry, whose sympathies were for Ulster, and Margot Asquith, an ardent Home Ruler, I found it difficult to keep an impassive neutrality. It was a relief when Mrs Lowther, the Speaker’s wife, imposed the silence it was the rule to observe.’52

  Official receptions apart, the Marlboroughs appeared together in public less and less often from 1904. Increasingly, Consuelo was beginning to forge an independent interest in philanthropy beyond the confines of the Blenheim estate. Her first experience of this had come before Sunny left to fight in the Boer War, when she assisted Lady Randolph Churchill and others to equip a hospital ship to send to Cape Town. Wealthy American wives in London had never defined themselves as a group in this way. Equipping a hospital ship was no mean task and it was Consuelo’s first taste of an ambitious philanthropic undertaking which involved raising substantial funds, garnering expertise and wielding influence. It may have been little more than a taste – she still was young and inexperienced in the ways of charitable committees in 1899, and Jennie Randolph Churchill’s sister, Clara, described her in a letter as ‘about the most useless member of all’.53 Nonetheless, it gave Consuelo a glimpse of what could be done by deploying American energy and English aristocratic connections.