Death at Blenheim Palace (34 page)

 
Introduction to
Mrs. Brown: A Screenplay
Jeremy Brock

 
 
 
 
Susan Albert writes about two of the people in
Death at Blenheim Palace
:

When Bill and I first began this book, I knew nothing about Gladys Deacon, who in 1921 became the thirteenth Duchess of Marlborough. Sometime in the 1990s, I had read about the Marlborough marriage in
In a Gilded Cage,
a chronicle of the lives of five American “dollar duchesses.” This book led me to Consuelo’s autobiography,
The Glitter and the Gold,
which gave me the Duchess’s own sad report of her marriage and her life at Blenheim. I immediately felt that Bill and I ought to use the story as the centerpiece of a book about Blenheim Palace. It was quite by accident, however, that I stumbled across Gladys Deacon—specifically, Hugo Vickers’s
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough
—and realized that any story about Consuelo and the Duke would also have to include the Duke’s mistress.

The Marlborough marriage, engineered by Alva Vanderbilt, was doomed from the moment of the fabled wedding. The shy teen-aged bride was completely unfit for her job as mistress of Blenheim; the aloof, unfriendly groom seems to have cared for nothing but the continuance of the Marlborough line and the rescue of his beloved estate; and neither had any genuine feeling for the other. The unhappy marriage was ended by stages: a legal separation in 1906, a legal divorce in 1921, and a Catholic annulment in 1926.

Given the strictures of British law and the social horrors of divorce, however, the Marlboroughs might have remained married (at least for a longer time), if it had not been for Gladys Deacon. The story that Bill and I tell in this book is essentially true, if bizarre. At fourteen, Gladys declared in a letter to her mother that her heart was set on the Duke of Marlborough. At sixteen, she arranged to meet him at a London dinner party; at eighteen, she was romantically involved with him; and at forty, she married him. Gladys’s wedding veil had been a gift from the Emperor Napoleon to Josephine—not, perhaps, an augury of future felicitude. The Duke, when asked about the motorcar he gave his bride as a wedding present, remarked glumly, “We are both awfully poor.” Poor or not, Gladys had finally achieved her life’s ambitions: She had become Duchess of Marlborough and mistress of Blenheim Palace. She should have been happy.

But she wasn’t, of course. Gladys was no more prepared than Consuelo to take on the management of the Blenheim household, and the servants made her life miserable. The local folk had been fond of Consuelo and ignored the new Duchess. The Royals eventually received her, but their tepid acceptance did not result in the social recognition she expected. She suffered a miscarriage and fell into a deep depression, not least because her early attempts at facial reconstruction had ravaged her beauty. Consuelo’s sons did not like her, and within two years, she was voicing the same complaint that Consuelo herself had made about Marlborough’s rudeness, both in private and in public. Ten years after their marriage, the Duke fell in love with a Canadian actress named Bunny and left Gladys to console herself with her King Charles spaniels, to whom she gave the run of the palace, to the great detriment of the Vanderbilt-financed rugs and furnishings. Not long after, she was turned out of Blenheim, then out of the Marlboroughs’ London house. Within four years, the Duke was dead of cancer and Gladys, as her biographer put it, “seemed to the world to have disappeared into smoke.” She died in 1977, at the age of ninety-five, alone and friendless. But not entirely penniless: Her possessions were auctioned at Christie’s for seven hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds.

Consuelo fared rather better. After her legal separation from Marlborough in 1906, she became active in social work and philanthropy, setting up lodging houses for poor women and working girls, creating an insurance society for women domestic servants, establishing a school to teach mothering skills to women of the London slums. For her interest in children’s welfare, the newspapers dubbed her the “Baby Duchess.” Initially too shy to speak in public, she asked Winston to coach her, and became a first-class speech-maker. In 1909, she wrote a long piece on the rights of women, remarking that life does not end with marriage, “as fairy tales would make us believe,” and that a woman is robbed of power, strength, and influence when she “adjusts herself to man, to be judged by his individual standard and to conform her whole personality to his ways of thinking.”

When the divorce was granted in 1921, Consuelo married her long-time friend, Frenchman Jacques Balsan. Happy in this marriage, she continued her philanthropic interests and returned to Blenheim frequently after Marlborough’s death to visit her son, the tenth Duke, and her grandchildren. She died in 1964, at the age of eighty-seven. At her request, she was buried beside her son Igor in Bladon Churchyard, within sight of Blenheim Palace.

 
 
Bill Albert writes about the plot of
Death at Blenheim Palace
:

One of the most rewarding things about a writing collaboration is the opportunity to discuss the project with someone who has a vested interest in it. In the environment of the writing industry as it exists these days, such discussions seldom happen between a writer and his readers, his fellow authors, his agent, or even his editor. As collaborators, Susan and I have endless conversations about the writing process, discussing subtle shades of word meaning, quirks in human motivation and personality, and possible directions for developing the plot. To me, our most fascinating discussions involve postmortems on how it was that a particular book turned out as it did.

As you may have guessed, given the complexity of numerous subplots and multiple points of view that we include in these books, story development is not a particularly linear process. The analogy of a jigsaw puzzle may be trite, but it’s still a useful way of describing the process. We start with certain key pieces—hard facts about historical characters and the settings associated with them—and then begin to build outward in all directions. For us, research is essentially a search-and-fit process: We search through boxes of pieces (some of which don’t even seem to belong to our puzzle), picking up apparently unconnected historical facts and bits of information about people and events, and trying to fit them (often with a little reorientation) into our puzzle.

In
Death at Blenheim Palace,
Susan wanted to use Consuelo Vanderbilt as a main character. Initially, I had my doubts, for the twelfth Duchess was little more to me than a marble bust that I had glimpsed on one of the palace tours. I have long had a great affinity for Blenheim, however. I visited it with my parents when they were living in England in the 1960s, and again in 1985 when I was visiting my brother, who was studying at Oxford. There had been a rather heavy snow that week. I remember trudging down what seemed to be a back street in Woodstock, through the ancient wooden gates in a low stone arch and suddenly being confronted with the “finest view in all England,” as Jennie Churchill put it: the lake, the bridge, and the palace beyond, set in a blanket of white. If Susan wanted to include Consuelo in the story, that was fine, as long as I could have Blenheim.

But there were other pieces to our puzzle. Blenheim was always important to Winston Churchill (it was his birth-place), and when we learned that he was in residence at the time of our story, writing his father’s biography, we decided that he would play a major role in the plot. In his earlier accounts of his wartime exploits in India and the Sudan, Winston boasted that he had killed a number of men in combat; given these claims, his action at the end of the book does not seem to us out of character—although shooting Bulls-eye was not something he would want to see in print. (Endings always present us with a special problem: If a historical character were involved in a murder, how did this fact escape history’s notice?)

The Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, offered us another piece of the puzzle. We had long considered the possibility of including T. E. (Ned) Lawrence in one of our books, but were stymied by his youth: He was born in 1888. However, when we read
The Golden Warrior
and learned that Ned was living and attending high school in Oxford at the time of our book, that he had developed a passion for brass rubbing and a keen interest in archaeology, that he enjoyed reading police reports, and that he had a significant relation with the Ashmolean somewhat later in his life, it was obvious that young Lawrence was also going to join the cast. While there is no evidence that he and Winston Churchill met before the Great War, their casual friendship rapidly developed into a firm regard and affection, fired by mutual admiration. There is a marvelous photograph of the two of them, with Gertrude Bell, all three mounted on camels, taken just outside of Cairo at the time when the country of Iraq was being created from three Ottoman provinces. Winston, writing after Lawrence’s early death, described him as “a man who held himself ready for a new call.” Our knowledge of their later friendship gave a special poignancy to the scenes in which Ned and Winston are together.

We felt we had a powerful setting and a strong cast of characters, but the plot didn’t begin to emerge until we put together three unrelated pieces of the puzzle. The first was a brief description (which we encountered in Marian Fowler’s
Blenheim: Biography of a Palace
) of the Marlborough Gemstones, collected with great effort by the fourth Duke and flogged for a pittance by the seventh. The second was a charming anecdote I recalled from the BBC-TV production “Treasure Houses of England,” which related how the current occupants of a stately home were having a look round the house and came across a statue of two wrestling boys which was used as a doorstop. Upon investigation, the doorstop turned out to be a rare Japanese porcelain that was listed on a household inventory more than three hundred years before—and “lost” thereafter. These two bits spoke volumes about the careless treatment of inherited works of art by certain members of the British upper class. Finally, Susan happened on Ben Mcintyre’s biography of master thief Adam Worth, the prototype for Doyle’s “Napoleon of Crime,” an American who posed as an English gentleman and operated a successful and well-organized crime ring in London shortly before our period, staging jewel thefts, bank holdups, and postal robberies. When we coupled this casual view of inherited wealth with a daring and cunning (and quite secret) antagonist, we knew we had found a key piece that would tie the mystery together—and a character who will undoubtedly play a major role in future mysteries.

REFERENCES

Here are a few books that we found helpful in creating
Death at Blenheim Palace.
If you have comments or questions, you may write to Bill and Susan Albert, PO Box 1616, Bertram, TX 78605, or e-mail us at [email protected]. You may also wish to visit our Web site,
www.mysterypartners.com
, where you will find Reading Group Guides and other resource material.

 
Blenheim Palace,
Norwich: Jarrold Publishing, 1999.

 
Balsan, Consuelo Vanderbilt.
The Glitter and the Gold,
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952.

 
Bond, James.
Around Woodstock in Old Photographs,
Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1991.

 
Fowler, Marian.
Blenheim: Biography of a Palace,
London: Penguin Books, 1989.

 
———.
In a Gilded Cage: From Heiress to Duchess,
Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993.

 
James, Lawrence.
The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia,
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990.

MacColl, Gail and Wallace, Carol.
To Marry an English Lord,
New York: Workman Publishing, 1989.

 
MacGregor, Arthur.
The Ashmolean Museum: A Brief History of the Institution and its Collections,
London: Jonathan Horne Publications, 2001.

 
Macintyre, Ben.
The Napoleon of Crime: The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief,
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997.

 
Morgan, Ted.
Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry 1874-1915,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.

 
Rowse, A. L.
The Later Churchills,
London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1958.

 
Shelmerdine, J. M.
Introduction to Woodstock,
Woodstock: The Samson Press, 1951.

 
Vanderbilt, Arthur T, II.
Fortune’s Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt,
New York: William Morrow & Co. Inc, 1989.

 
Vickers, Hugo.
Gladys: Duchess of Marlborough,
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1979.