![]() ![]() ![]() oFielding dismisses this fact with a sentence to the effect that Mrs. Deacon was let off in the French courts with a year's imprisonment (even that sentence aroused groans of sympathy) and was subsequently granted custody of his three eldest children. In those not so distant times, French lovers inept enough to be found with another man's wife, deserved to be shot. Vickers argues, more plausibly, that Edward Deacon was pathologically jealous and early on showed signs of the madness which later claimed him. Gladys Deacon's father is portrayed by Fielding as a sweetly reasonable man pushed past his limits by a flighty wife. His study is far fuller, better detailed and more thoroughly researched than Fielding's earlier one. In the Deacon biographical sweepstakes, Vickers wins hands down. He knew, however, that another biographer was at work, causing him to apply himself in earnest. Nor can one understand how Vickers could have been patient enough to endure, through 65 visits, the opinionated utterances of an old lady, especially after she "launched into one of the most fluent onslaughts on my character that I have had the misfortune to endure." Vickers provides no clues. Why Gladys Deacon should have become an obsession for a teen-age boy - he first read about her in 1968 in the diaries of Sir Henry Channon - for the next decade of his life, is an unanswered question. Hugo Vickers, by contrast, was impelled by what seems a sincere and continuing determination to find the real woman behind the rumors. What, then, was the magic of Gladys' biographical allure? Daphne Fielding's interest apparently dates from the moment she heard the name first fall from the lips of her husband, the Marquesss of Bath. Plenty of others have always known better. The fact that some of these belles have been indoctrinated since infancy with the idea that their only worth is their beauty makes their fates only marginally more interesting. Having fulfilled their ignominious marital ambitions, they become predictably miserable, age quickly and develop such alarming eccentricities that they have to be carted off - as Gladys was - to insane asylums, mad as hatters. In pursuit of ever-more-perfect exteriors, they experiment ruinously - in the cast of Gladys, with wax injections to the bridge of her nose. Born comely, they accept the verdict that their worth is the sum of their physical parts. Gladys, in short, pursued the familiar path of primrose heroines who believe their own publicity. Dozens of equally attractive unknowns, buried under the multilayered trivia of library collections, can boast of equally scandalous pasts and something more substantial, by way of accomplishment, than (as in the case of Gladys) the ability to look alluring, chatter amusingly and marry the richest man in England. There is strong argument that Gladys Deacon barely warrants one study, let alone two. The crown prince of Prussia gave her a ring, but the kaiser made her give it back. In the meantime, she became a celebrated beauty and was the kind of mocking flirt once considered the zenith of a girl's ambition. ![]() She eventually did, although it took her another 26 years to bring it off. Gladys soon give evidence that she too had some of the family's demonic obsessiveness when she decided, at the age of 14, to become Duchess of Marlborough one day. (The Face on the Sphinx, by Daphne Fielding, was published in 1978.)įor those who came in late, Gladys Deacon first entered the news in 1892 at the age of 11 when her father, a half-mad Boston millionaire, shot and killed his wife's French lover in Cannes. Such thoughts are occasioned by the appearance of Gladus: Duchess of Marborough by Hugo Vickers, the second account of the life of the American heiress Gladys Deacon to appear recently. We would then be more likely to ask whether a life is worth writing at all, why someone would want to write it and, by inference, whether the result is worth reading. IF THE MYTH OF objectivity did not continue to befuddle any discussion of the biographer's craft, we would all know by now that writing someone's life is a partial, haphazard and entirely subjective business. Image: Woman looking at a drawing by Edgar Degas, Photograph Oana Damir © Pallant House Gallery.Is writing a biography of art historian Kenneth Clark. This talk was recorded at Pallant House Gallery on Thursday 14 July 2016. Many 20th century figures, including the Queen Mother, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough and Cecil Beaton. Hugo Vickers is a writer and broadcaster who has written biographies of This talk by Hugo Vickers coincided with the acquisition of a drawing by Edgar Degas that had been formerly owned by Deacon. She was friends with artists and writers including Auguste Rodin and Marcel Proust, and later became the Duchess of Marlborough. The unconventional socialite Gladys Deacon was a prolific female collector. ![]()
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