Word: blenheim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...social evidence than most Italian palazzi or French chateaus. The ritual of public visits is not at all new. Some great houses have been open to curious strangers since the day they were built (even the 1st Duke of Marlborough was pestered by tourists in 1711 while building Blenheim...
Miss Jennie Jerome, daughter of a Wall Street broker, married one of the Churchills of Blenheim Palace, and a whole generation of debutantes sailed across the Atlantic in hopes of doing as well. By contrast, one of Ring Lardner's social-climbing heroines went to stay in an extravagantly expensive Palm Beach hotel in the hope of meeting a grandee like the Mrs. Potter Palmer of Chicago. When she finally did encounter her in a corridor, Lardner's narrator relates, the great lady only said to her: "Please see that they's some towels...
...wait until 1921, when she was 40 and he 49, for the Duke of Marlborough, a surly little man who hated "Yanks" but married two. His obsession was Blenheim Palace, and Gladys soon found she had married a house. As duchess, Gladys pruned roses, cultivated a rock garden full of snakes, and bred spaniels in the state rooms. Ennui soon turned to hatred. One night during a dinner party she placed a revolver beside her plate. Her startled partner asked her what she meant to do with it. "Oh! I don't know, I might just shoot Marlborough...