She calls herself a ‘hermaphrodite’, but she isn’t that. She has never changed physically from a child to a woman, and her doctor said she probably never will. Part of her mysteriousness comes from her being, as it were, sexless. But so beautiful, so graceful, so changeful in a hundred moods, so brilliant that it is enough to turn anybody’s head. “A wonderful creature, but too young to talk to as an equal, and so much of a born actress to take quite seriously. Strange likenesses to her mother flit across her face. and she has been filling our time & thoughts. It could be helped but never properly removed.īernard’s wife, Mary, made many sharp observations of young Gladys in letters, “…she is perfectly natural, and is a frightening mixture of extreme youth and very dangerous womanhood.” and, “Suddenly Gladys came. Over the years it slowly leaked over her face causing red streaks and lumps which she disguised with makeup. Why can’t it be so?” This desire for perfection was to mar her beauty - there was a small dip in her nearly perfect Grecian profile and she tried an early plastic surgery treatment - injecting the dip with paraffin. She shared a dream of being a Hamadryad in a letter to Berenson – a term that had been used to describe her, “I wish I could die so as to be buried in the earth and return in the shape of a beautiful tree with a slender and glorious silhouette, or rather to emerge from its branch as a delicate and beautiful flower which, no sooner picked, would wilt in order to return the next year more beautiful still. ‘You are not a person to me,’ she declared, ‘you are a burst of soul and spirit.’ ”. But search and you will find that within the spiky exterior there lies a heart capable of feelings of fondness and serenity.’ “When Gladys was in Paris, she missed him and longed to see him. She explained: ‘I fear alas that even the thistle is not enough to adequately express my prickly disposition. “At one point Gladys sent Berenson a thistle from Paris as ‘a tiny souvenir of my pleasant character’. The teenaged Gladys was very fond of “Bibbins” and although he married someone else, he was in love with her. She felt very much at home at Berenson’s celebrated Villa I Tatti near Florence where an empyreal collection of intellectuals and artists of the age congregated. The quotes are all taken from Vickers’ book (links for all the books at the bottom). He was right, it was right up my alley and Gladys had quite a ride - from minor heiress to Duchess. I’m going to go down a different, slightly less gilded, fork in that road.Ī good friend has been pushing me to read about Gladys Deacon for years and I finally picked up the Hugo Vickers biography, The Sphinx (Vickers wrote the original biography in the 70s but went back and revised it a few years ago with new information and fewer objections from the now deceased characters – an opportunity few writers have). For the most part, once-famous family names and the sources of their vast wealth have dissolved into the tarnished murk of history – Work (Wall Street), or Leiter (commerce and real estate) or Jerome (Finance) are only known to their descendants and a few history nerds. I’ve investigated a few American heiresses and the British aristocrats who benefited from their family’s largesse before, and have a passing familiarity with the landscape ( Here and Here) Today, most of those “ dollar princesses ” have been forgotten. John Singer Sargent – Duke of Marlborough & Consuelo Vanderbilt 1905 it's an amazing time.Ĭelebrating Gilded Age gives me an excuse to visit an eccentric American/Anglo connection very different from the one that bought British titles and saved ancient family piles from rack and ruin with infusions of massive amounts of nouveau riche American cash. I hope it encourages you to dig around on your own. It will be a blast to see where Julian goes with it. The French statesman George Clemenceau observed that, “America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.” In the late 19th and early 20th century, many highly pedigreed British families may have agreed with Clemenceau’s assessment but held their noses and took the new, before-the-ink-was-dry money for their titles. Set in the Newport and New York of the 1870s and 80s, it’s a cakewalk through the America that gave us Cora of Downton Abbey - an America of newly minted, Anglo-mad heiresses that have been beckoning to Lord Fellowes since he started down the Downton Abbey road over a dozen years ago - compelling him to investigate their spawning ground and spin his addictive, gilded-thread story webs. After 5 years of a teasing and tantalizing pregnancy, Julian Fellowes is finally birthing/filming his Gilded Age series this year for HBO.
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