Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough This is the story of Gladys Deacon (1881-1977) who became the second wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, following his divorce from Consuelo Vanderbilt. Hugo Vickers begins with life at Blenheim, in that great house by Vanburgh, which was Gladys's home from 1921 to 1933. He then shows a large Georgian building in Northamptonshire, where she spent her last 15 years, revealing that this is not a stately home but a psychiatric hospital. This was but one of the contrasts in a long and extraordinary life. Gladys was a beautiful American girl, born in Paris in 1881. Her childhood was complicated by the incident in 1892 when her father shot dead her mother's lover in a hotel in Cannes. She was kidnapped from her convent, sent to America for some years with her father, then returned to Paris, where she dazzled the great men of her day with her beauty - Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Robert de Montesquiou, Bernard Berenson and many more. Both the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough became fascinated by her, and the Crown Prince of Prussia presented her with a ring. But Gladys performed a terrible operation on her face, injecting paraffin wax into the bridge of her nose to create the perfect profile. The wax slipped and her beauty was permanently damaged. Her marriage to the Duke of Marlborough was unhappy and traumatic. Eventually he evicted her and she went to live a village near Banbury as a total recluse. And there is considerably more to the story ... Hugo Vickers made his way to the psychiatric hospital to meet her in 1975, when she was already 94. He talked to her for two years, while writing her life.