I came across Gladys Deacon when researching my first book, A Paris Apartment, a novel based on the real-life discovery of an abandoned apartment in Paris. Inside this home, among hundreds of other magnificent relics, was a previously unknown Giovanni Boldini portrait, which eventually sold for more than €2 million at auction.
While digging into Boldini’s life, I studied every luminary he brought to canvas. Amid renderings of such notables as Sarah Bernhardt, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, one woman outshone them all, her background every bit as colorful as the painting itself. This woman was Gladys Deacon, the Duchess of Marlborough.
Born to a wealthy Newport family, the dazzling Miss Deacon considered herself continental through and through. Though privileged, no one would accuse her of being sheltered. By age twelve, Gladys Deacon found herself in the middle of a worldwide murder scandal. At fourteen, she declared her love for the Duke of Marlborough, her future husband. She was living independently in Paris at twenty, finally married at forty, and turned up in a dilapidated Oxfordshire manse at almost a century old.
Here was a woman who carried a handgun, went temporarily blind due to excessive reading, and declared herself “a miracle”: “Differential calculus was too low for me!” Her political savvy was no less impressive. “Of course I’m well-informed! I’ve slept with eleven Prime Ministers and most Kings!” She used this extensively gathered information to heckle her chief nemesis, Winston Churchill: “[Hitler] had the whole world up in arms. He was larger than Winston. Winston could’ve have done that!” All that, and they say she could’ve prevented World War I.
Because of these and many other details, when it came time to write, I immediately honed in on Gladys Deacon as the story’s heart. Hugo Vickers’s captivating biography Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough helped ignite the spark. The book contains a seemingly endless collection of duchess quirks and quotes and also inspired the character of Win Seton, but he is in no way meant to represent Vickers.
While my book is a work of fiction, I’ve used many of Gladys Deacon’s actual mannerisms and adventures. She did tour the world with Coon. Proust did try to detain her in Rome by having her arrested. The kidnapped POWs, passion for firearms, and proliferate spaniels are all historically accurate as well.
Many of Gladys’s direct statements are also included. She did indeed think “education smooths a life” and most of the barbs directed at Churchill are taken verbatim. Several of her letters are quoted throughout this novel, as are comments and opinions made by others. In the words of Virginia Woolf: “One does fall in love with the Duchess of Marlborough. I did at once.” I know exactly what she means.
I tried to stick closely to another character in the book—Gladys Deacon’s final home. As depicted, the Grange was in fact a run-down monstrosity and Gladys every bit as welcoming as her fictional likeness. The real woman treated visitors to reams of chicken wire, hails of bullets, and at least one “fuck you” sprayed in the lawn with weed killer. The contents of Tom’s barn and Tom himself are also taken from fact.
Alas, this is a work of fiction so I did fudge dates and other elements for the sake of the plot. And while she had a difficult relationship with her stepsons, the true Marlborough family is no doubt far more delightful than what is portrayed in these pages. All other inaccuracies and fabrications are mine alone.
If you’re intrigued by the woman who inspired this novel, I encourage you to read Vickers’s biography. For a look at Gladys Deacon through the eyes of a probable “frenemy,” check out The Face on the Sphinx by Daphne Fielding. All that plus a little Googling will show exactly why Gladys Deacon was once considered the most beautiful—and tempestuous—woman to ever exist. There’s even a selfie or two to prove it.
One of my characters says “I always had the sense she was more legend than woman.” While that could well be true, I personally found the craziest stories the most believable. Of course, the duchess would try to persuade us otherwise. When Hugo Vickers tracked “Mrs. Spencer” down in 1975 to inquire about her life: “she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and said slowly: ‘Gladys Deacon?… She never existed.’”
It is exactly the comment one would expect from a woman who insisted: “I was not born. I happened.”