Two weeks ago, Elizabeth Kerri Mahon of Scandalous Women, gave Edwardian Promenade the Excellent Blog Award and since then, I’ve been wondering who to give it to. And so, without further ado, I unveil my choices for the Excellent Blog Award:

Jane Austen’s World
Tea at Trianon
Regency Ramble
The Victorian Era
The Victorian Peeper
Dandyism.Net

She was known as the “fabulous Mrs. Lydig.” The daughter of a prominent New York family and descendant of the Dukes of Alba, Rita Lydig (née da Costa) was born for an opulent, dramatic life. At an early age she caught the eye of millionaire W.E.D. Stokes, collecting a cool million after divorcing him shortly after their marriage. She then promptly married sporting man and retired U.S. Army Captain Phillip M. Lydig with that million, and launched herself into a life of beauty, fashion and culture. She “belonged,” in the words of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield, “to the days and to the novels of Balzac, to the pages of Turgenev, the stories of Maupassant.” A romantic- and would-be literary- rival to Edith Wharton, she set Parisian society ablaze the moment she arrived at the Ritz loaded down with hairdresser, masseuse, chauffeur, secretary, maid, valet and forty Louis Vuitton trunks.

She was a confessed shopaholic, never ordering one thing of a kind, but duplications of each item by the dozens, often with the slightest of variations in materials, lace or design. It was not uncommon for her closet to boast twenty-five copies of a favorite coat. However Rita didn’t dress for display; she dressed for art. Each item was but a piece on the canvas of her body, to convey a mood perhaps, or a “look” she felt that day. For her own pleasure she would dress herself in an antique gown made of 11th century lace which cost her $9,000. Daily costumes included black velvet dresses for day, low-cut and bare-backed evening gowns, jackets and coats of rich and rare materials to be worn with velvet skirts by day or satin culottes by night, black lace mantillas, small sable hats, and an umbrella stick of platinum with her name set in diamonds on top. She also brought her own linens, books, silver and objects when she traveled, and filled her hotel rooms (an entire floor) with white flowers. “Politicians bowed to her, painters painted her and sculptors sculpted”.

But more than clothing and art, shoes were her first passion. True to form as a lady of society, Rita only walked short distances, yet she owned at least three hundred pairs of shoes. Each was specially crafted by the elusive Pietro Yanturni, the East India Curator of the Cluny Museum in Paris, who only created his feather-light, unique shoes for a select clientèle. Before he would even agree to add a woman to his list, he would demand a deposit of $1,000, from which he would subtract the price of each shoe or boot supplied, though delivery often took two or three years. If he accepted the lady as a client, he would make a plaster model of each foot, on which he would then work and mold his materials until they were as flexible as the finest of silk.

The shoes he designed for Rita were fashioned from costly 11th and 12th century velvets, the toes varying between long and pointed, or square with square heels. Evening and boudoir slippers utilized brocades of gold- and silver-metal tissue, some covered with lace appliqué and leather spats that fit like a silk sock. To house these delicate, expensive shoes, Rita would collect violins to use their thin, light wood as shoe trees, and then these would be placed in trunks of Russian leather made in St. Petersburg, closed with heavy locks and lined with a rich cream velvet.

In the midst of this opulent beauty, one would assume her life was a thing of beauty as well. By 50, her feverish pursuit of aesthetics led to financial ruin. She was barred from marrying Reverend Dr. Percy Stickney Grant by his bishop on the grounds of her previous divorce, and soon after, her health failed. Bankrupt and denied the pleasure of her life-long purchases, she died at 53 in relative obscurity in comparison to the fame of her earlier years.

Further Reading:
The Glass of Fashion by Cecil Beaton
The Power of Style by Annette Tapert & Diana Edkin
Step Lively: Pierre Yantourny by An Aesthete’s Lament

At the turn of the century, Sunny and Consuelo had yet to reach the pinnacle of their loathing for one another, but their marriage had grown uncomfortable enough for society to notice the mounting tension between them. An outlet was necessary to relieve tension, and this opened the door for the dramatic entrance of fellow American heiress Gladys Marie Deacon (pronounced Glay-dus).

The daughter of Boston aristocrats Edward Parker Deacon and Florence Baldwin Deacon, Gladys and her three younger sisters, Audrey, Edith and Dorothy gained notoriety at a tender age when their parents became embroiled in a homicide/divorce case that nearly caused an international contretemps between France and the United States.

Though Edward received custody of his three young daughters (Dorothy remained with Florence), the divorce and subsequent custody battle had sapped him of strength and he was committed to a mental health institute in 1897. Gladys, Audrey and Edith trooped dutifully back to their mother, who had reverted to her maiden name of Baldwin. Gladys spent the remainder of her adolescence in Europe, which allowed her to make an easier transition from girl to worldly debutante than most American girls brought over to marry a title. For one thing, Gladys had no incentive to marry. She was wealthy, well-fixed regarding social status despite her parents’ wretched divorce, and her mother was preoccupied with keeping her new lover happy, all of which permitted her an independence from meddling matchmaking many of her contemporaries would envy.

She was also dazzlingly beautiful, charming and erudite. By age twenty-one, Gladys had conquered London and captured the attention of the most sought-after bachelors in society–including the Crown Prince of Germany, whose gift to Gladys of a royal antique nearly caused a diplomatic scandal. Perhaps it was the challenge of the unattainable, the lingering childhood fantasy (on the day of Consuelo’s wedding, her diary notes her lamentation at being too young to catch Sunny), or maybe the friendship began innocently enough, but within months, Gladys had become an integral part of the Marlborough marriage–a shoulder for Consuelo to lean on when Sunny’s beastly behavior became too much, and an attentive, awed listener to Sunny’s overweening pride in Blenheim and his illustrious heritage.

Of this point in her life, Consuelo’s memoirs are frustratingly opaque, noting only “I was soon subjugated by the charm of her companionship and we began a friendship which only ended years later,” calling her “beautiful and alluring.” Judging by the copious accounts of her doings, Gladys was beautiful and alluring, but she was also a vain perfectionist, obsessed with the “kink” in her nose that kept her from possessing a perfect Grecian profile–an obsession that led to the ruination of her beauty before she was yet forty. No proof of a physical relationship between Sunny and Gladys exists, but before long, the combination of their inseparability and the continuing warm relations between Consuelo and Gladys both baffled and fed the gossip mill. This triangle waltzed on for many years until 1906, when Consuelo began to take the necessary steps for divorce.

This was a bold action for the time, as divorce was very difficult to achieve under English law, and it would be socially devastating. Pressure against the divorce was placed on Consuelo and Sunny from all avenues–the King, Consuelo’s father, Winston Churchill and his mother Jennie–but both were adamant: they hated the sight of one another and the thought of being yoked forever was repugnant. Because of their difficulties in obtaining a divorce, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough decided on a formal separation and joint custody of their sons. Not surprisingly, Gladys’ name was conspicuous by its absence in the press, as well as gossip concerning Consuelo’s aborted elopement with Viscount Castlereagh.

The post-war years witnessed a mellowing reaction to divorce, and a woman could now sue her husband on the grounds of desertion, provided she could also prove he spent a night at a hotel with another woman. To comply with the law regarding the divorce of a separated couple, Sunny and Consuelo went through the farce of moving in together for a few days and he then repudiating her desire for conjugal rights in paper. Consuelo and Sunny officially divorced in 1921, and after obtaining an annulment from the Pope (as Sunny had converted to Catholicism and the Balsan family viewed the marriage between Consuelo and Jacques as unsanctioned due to her divorce), Gladys finally became the (2nd) 9th Duchess of Marlborough at age 40. Ironically, after a clandestine relationship of nearly 20 years, their marriage deteriorated soon after the wedding, and relations between the two were so strained, supper was eaten with a loaded pistol at her plate.

Gladys became increasingly eccentric with the passing years. She bred Blenheim spaniels and allowed them to defecate all over the palace. The injection of wax in the bridge of her nose ruined her beauty as it slid down her face to rest in her chin, which aged her prematurely with discolored jowls, and she refused mirrors in the house. Dissatisfied, angry, and unhappy, Sunny took refuge in the cold cruelty he used as a shield all his life and abandoned Blenheim to Gladys, avenging himself by cutting first her funds, and then the electricity, sparking newspaper cartoons portraying the Duchess of Marlborough cooking over candlelight. Sunny died of cancer in 1934, and Gladys was no longer chatelaine of Blenheim Palace. It was said she left the estate with as much glee as Consuelo during her own departure, but by that time, Gladys had become a true eccentric, living in a haphazard manner until her death in 1977. As for Consuelo, she lived through equally tumultuous, though less tragic times, escaping Nazi-occupied France with her husband and settling in America. She was widowed in 1956, and when she died in 1964, she shocked her family to its toes by requesting to be buried in Bladon, near Blenheim Palace.

Further Reading:
The Glitter and the Gold by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart
The face on the sphinx: A portrait of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough by Daphne Fielding
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough by Hugo Vickers
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough: the aristocrat with attitude – The Telegraph