When I visited Blenheim Palace and Bladon Churchyard over ten years ago, I had no plans to write about Consuelo, the ninth Duchess of Marlborough. I wish I had, because I would have come away with more than a few photos, memories, and a guidebook on the palace. I don’t even recall seeing her grave, because my husband is a Winston Churchill buff, and we were focused on his tombstone. By the way, there is a lovely photo of a young Consuelo and Winston chatting at Blenheim that can be seen by Googling Consuelo and Winston Churchill sitting together at Blenheim Palace. That mere photo told me they were good friends.
Although Consuelo buried Jacques in 1956, as he wished in the Balsan family tomb in the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris, before she died in December of 1964, she chose to be buried next to Ivor. She did commission a memorial to Jacques, a French hero, in the park at Chateauroux near his family’s estate. Despite the fact that Jacques was the love of her life, she did not want to be buried “indoors,” though she had three huge family mausoleums to chose from. Despite her problems with her first husband, she did love the grounds and people of Blenheim. How lovely and plain is her grave under the open sky at St. Martin’s Church, Bladon, England. Photos of it are available online.
Sadly, Ivor died at age fifty-eight just two months after Jacques. Ivor had married in 1954 to Elizabeth Cunningham, and they had a son, Robert, that year, but Ivor had an inoperable brain tumor, discovered just when he had decided to be bold enough to fly to see Consuelo in Florida. Nursing Jacques at that time, she did not see her dear Ivor again, but she fulfilled the request he makes to her in this novel when he says, “If I lie here someday . . . stay a while with me.”
I came across Consuelo’s fascinating story in research for another of my Victorian/Edwardian novels in the book To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace (Workman, 1989). Consuelo and the ninth duke are on the cover, and much about them is written in this photo-filled book. I then pursued this amazing woman’s story by reading her autobiography The Glitter and the Gold (St. Martins Press, 1953) though I am aware autobiographies can be slanted and even untruthful. Would you write some of the crazy or bad things you have done in yours?
So to balance that out, I also studied Consuelo: Portrait of an American Heiress by James Brough (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1979) and Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age by Amanda MacKenzie Stuart (HarperCollins, 2006). Besides these excellent resources, I enjoyed researching a woman who has a great online presence in places like Pinterest and in the fascinating Smithsonian Channel Series Million Dollar American Princesses. The segment on Consuelo’s Wedding of the Century is available for free viewing on the Smithsonian Channel website under Million Dollar American Princesses.
Besides visiting Blenheim to get a glimpse of Consuelo’s “gilded cage,” Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island, is open to the public as are other “cottages” there with Vanderbilt ties.
Scholars have long said that Consuelo is the subject of Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers, her last novel.
I also found Gladys Deacon to be a fascinating, if sad, character. She died in 1977 at age ninety-six, having spent a lot of time in a psychiatric geriatric hospital. Even in her youth, she had been in a mental facility in France, and yet managed to become Duchess of Marlborough.
George Curzon, a minor and rather likable character in this novel, also appears extensively in my previous book, The It Girls. However, another side of him entirely emerges in that novel. Also, I could not resist having George, Duke of Kent, remark on his beloved nanny, Charlotte Bill, who was the heroine of my novel The Royal Nanny. I would have given Charlotte a walk-on part in this book when Consuelo and the duke visit Sandringham, but that visit was the year before she arrived there. I do try to keep straight the dates of what happened when.
Winston Churchill also had a nanny who was truly his emotional mother. And I did not call Consuelo’s American governess Miss Harper just to please myself; that was the loyal woman’s real name. I rather like that bit of serendipity.
What to say about the formidable and amazing Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont? She deserves her own story, but I will leave her here as she is seen through Consuelo’s youthful and then mature eyes. How admirable that Conseulo could find it in her heart to forgive, admire, and love the woman who had so abused her in her youth. Despite Alva’s give-’em-hell reputation, she did a great deal to fight for the rights of all American women.
Many pictures of the famous Consuelo are available online. To see them, search for images for Consuelo and 9th Duke of Marlborough. A bio and excellent pictures of romantic and swashbuckling Jacques can be found by searching for his name.
I am very grateful for the encouragement and support for this novel from Annelise Robey, my agent, and Lucia Macro, my editor. And, of course, to Don for being my companion to all the places we’ve been in England and France.