The Marlboroughs’ marriage was a loveless one: Consuelo’s mother had been determined her daughter should marry a duke, but besides bringing $2.5 million of railway stocks to the union – Blenheim needed a new roof – she contributed very little to life there. “O dear me,” Gladys, then 14, wrote to her mother from school in America, “if I was only a little older I might catch him yet! Hélas! I am too young though mature in the ways of women’s witchcraft and what is the use of the one without the other?” Having been sent to New York to find himself a ‘dollar princess’ to keep his expensive Palace going, Sunny’s 1895 wedding to Consuelo Vanderbilt, the immensely rich heiress, and grand-daughter of the famous Commodore, was international news. The first child of rich but scandalous American parents living in Paris, her father shot her mother’s lover dead in a Cannes hotel room in 1892, the same year that Charles ‘Sunny’ (by name, if not by nature) Churchill inherited his title – just before his 21st birthday. Though the fiercely intelligent Belle Époque beauty didn’t become chatelaine until she was 40, she had been obsessed with the 9th Duke of Marlborough since she was a teenager. They promise costumed characters, sculptures, portraits, themed teas – and I am talking twice more about Gladys Deacon, that most elusive and mysterious of all Blenheim’s duchesses, whose brief but glamorous reign (1921-1933) coincided with that decade. The National Portrait Gallery is celebrating Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things, and Blenheim Palace is staging an exhibition called Let’s Misbehave, inviting us to explore the Roaring Twenties – a heady insight into the world of great changes socially, artistically and politically. In this health-conscious age, we may have to eschew lethal Black Ladies in favour of non-alcoholic spritzers but, just as after the Great War, a whole generation needs to relax a bit – any excuse to enjoy life is welcome. There seems to be a most welcome post-Brexit clarion call to get everyone partying in 2020.
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