Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough, Signed Presentation by Hugo Vickers
[Signed Presentation from Hugo Vickers to Glenn Horowitz] Vickers, Hugo. Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough. First American Edition. 1990. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition. Book is signed to Glenn Horowitz, a bookseller whose area of focus includes material related to Winston Churchill, with the inscription, “For Glenn, Vaguely another Churchill book, with best wishes, Hugo, Churchill’s birthday 1990.”
A Winston Churchill scholar once described Glenn Horowitz as someone who has “forgotten more about Churchill than most people have ever known.” Even so, it’s quite possible he learned something new from this entertaining book, Hugo Vickers’s first, a biography of Gladys Deacon, the disgraced widow of Winston’s first cousin, the Duke of Marlborough. The sharp-tongued Gladys detested Winston (though grudgingly admitted his grandiosity was the tailormade for World War II). Yet Churchill was only the tip of the iceberg of Gladys’s story. Considered one of the great beauties of her era, and equally intelligent, her list of admirers included Marcel Proust, Bernard Berenson, and (initially) Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough. With Consuelo, however, the friendship turned to acrimony when she became the lover of Consuelo’s husband, the Duke. A fortune teller once predicted Gladys would marry someone like Marlborough, and it became Gladys’s fervent wish to make that prophecy come true. Alas, it did, but only after decades of Sturm und Drang and the Vatican-sanctioned annulment of the Duke and Consuelo’s marriage. What the fortune teller hadn’t predicted, however, was how quickly Gladys's marriage would become desperately unhappy, nearly to the point of violence. After her ejection from the ducal estate, Gladys dialed up her eccentricity to full Grey Gardens mode (with the expected result). Decades later, Hugo Vickers, then in his early twenties, located an all-but-forgotten Gladys (then in her nineties) in a sanitarium and began visiting her regularly. After her death, he wrote this book, reestablishing Gladys’s reputation and making his.
“In old age, Gladys did not have a good word for Churchill. ‘He was in love with his own image—his reflection in the mirror.’ At Blenheim he always had to be in the centre of everything that happened. ‘I watched him all the time,’ said Gladys. ‘He took an instant dislike to me … I knew him from top to bottom … He was entirely out for Winston.”
--Hugo Vickers