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But suddenly the old duke, as many of his longtime friends observe, has a bounce in his step—and a dashing mustache, for the first time in his life.

“Sunny’s younger than springtime!” exclaims Mercedes Bass (who kindled her romance with her future husband, Sid, at a 1986 ball at Blenheim).

As longtime friend Taki Theodoracopulos observes, “He’s régéné—born again.” According to Palm Beach queen Terry Allen Kramer, “He seems like a man who’s not his age. He’s in the throes of love with a beautiful young woman.”

Mahtani, in turn, has quickly won over most of this crowd with her charms. “She doesn’t play the part of the duchess—and I mean that in a nice way,” says Kramer. “She’s a breath of fresh air—refreshing and fun.”

“Everybody at first was skeptical of her. She came from left field,” says Taki. “But she’s beautiful—and she’s not exactly broke. I wouldn’t put it past her to fix the roof.”

Bells and Whistles

With its 187 rooms, Blenheim was one of the first “great houses” of England to open its staterooms to visits from the paying public. By the late 1700s, crowds were turning up to gawk at the 64-foot-high marble Great Hall, the 180-foot-long Long Library, and the palace’s other colossally scaled rooms.

“Everything’s open except my loo!” barks Sunny jokingly. In fact, plenty has remained highly private, notably the East Wing, where the family lives—a 46-room, four-story block with 12 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms. A staff of 158, many of whom have been there for decades, still runs the estate by standards rarely seen today outside of Masterpiece Theatre. Overnight guests get to their rooms to find the contents of the luggage taken by the under-butler at the front door pressed and hanging in wardrobes or neatly folded in dresser drawers, while their shoes have been shined to a gleam. (Before departure their items are meticulously packed.) In the morning, a housekeeper or valet comes to draw the curtains and serve coffee, as well as, for ladies, the option of breakfast in bed. At 8:30 A.M., male guests are expected to join His Grace in the dining room, where copies of the Racing Post and all the London dailies also await.

And while they are not used as they formerly were, the 50-some “house bells” in the servants’ hall, connecting to most of the major rooms, can still function. “You have to learn your bells,” says Tim Mayhew, the head butler for 14 years. Each of the bells, he explains, has a different pitch, enabling staff to quickly discern if the call is emanating from, say, Lord Blandford’s anteroom or the Bachelor IV room. “But if you hadn’t learned your bells, you had to rush to see which pendulum was swinging before it stopped.”

Yet, for the duke, who remembers the days of his childhood, when the family inhabited the whole of the palace, this is somehow life in reduced circumstances. (While they were still flush with Vanderbilt cash, the family halted public visits until 1950. Today they bring in £12 million annually.) “Now we have this small area,” he says, almost apologetically. “But it’s quite warm and cozy, and quite effective as a family home,” he adds, seated in the Smoking Room. Indeed it is. Pictures by Stubbs and Wootton hang on silk-lined walls, and a fire crackles while a butler brings in tea and Jerry, a four-year-old yellow Lab, romps around.

He does not deny that Blenheim is a burden to maintain. “Yes, but it’s a labor of love and I adore it,” he insists. “All my life I have tried to assure its future, and ensure that it remains unique in the annals of British history. My famous ancestor won the Battle of Blenheim in one day—but his descendants have been fighting it ever since.”

To wit, repainting the interiors took seven years, and rewiring took another seven years. In 2009, he had to spend a million pounds to rebuild the Blenheim Dam and its adjoining cascade, created by “Capability” Brown, to comply with a law requiring that such structures be able to withstand a one-in-ten-thousand-year flood. “You never know when something unsuspected will turn up,” he says.

Not surprisingly, the duke can go on at length about his illustrious family tree. “There have been some black sheep, that’s for sure,” he says with a laugh. But he issues a curt “No comment” when asked about his distant relation Princess Diana. He fondly remembers, however, his grandmother Consuelo, who died in 1964. “She was a lovely, wonderful lady, beautiful, with long legs, tremendous taste, great kindness.” Although the unhappiness of her marriage is now common knowledge, she did remain loyal to Blenheim after her separation, in 1906 (and 1921 divorce), returning to visit her two sons, whom she adored.

Also warmly recalled is cousin Winston Churchill. Born at Blenheim, in 1874, he was the son of the eighth duke’s younger brother, and the presumptive heir to the dukedom until 1897, when Sunny’s grandfather finally produced a son, an event that much relieved the dowager duchess, for one. “It would be intolerable to have that little upstart Winston become Duke,” she snapped.

But the prime minister spent many of his happiest days there. “He used to come quite a bit,” Sunny says, “and during the war he asked us to Chequers and Downing Street. He was so nice to children. One Christmas, he drew me aside and gave me a lovely gold watch. One was in awe of him, too, for his complete control of the English language.”

Noble Weddings

It was in 1972 that Sunny inherited the dukedom and took the reins at Blenheim. By this time he had two marriages behind him. In 1951 he married WH Smith heiress Susan Hornby, with whom he produced two children, Lady Henrietta, who is now a successful decorator, and Charles James, the Marquess of Blandford, known as Jamie, who arguably became his generation’s most infamous wayward heir (on which more later).

In 1961, Sunny wed Athina “Tina” Onassis, née Livanos. The daughter of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Livanos, she had just ended her 14-year marriage to Aristotle Onassis, with whom she had two children, Alexander and Christina. (In 1971, following her divorce from Sunny, she would marry Onassis’s arch-rival, Stavros Niarchos—her sister Eugenie’s widower. She died in 1974.)

The new blended family settled into Lee Place, a handsome Georgian country house about five miles from Blenheim. As Henrietta wrote in her memoir, Blenheim and the Churchill Family: A Personal Portrait, the early years of the marriage were happy for everyone, especially Christina: “For the first time, she was having a relatively normal childhood—attending a local school, riding her horse Cobweb, and enjoying sport and pets as opposed to the high social life [She] adored my nanny, who, unlike anyone else, treated her like one of us, disciplining and punishing her and thus earning her respect.”

While Henrietta “hero-worshipped” her elder stepsister, there were already portents of the troubled days ahead: “She had quite an obsessive character, often playing the same song over and over…. She was also addicted to Coca-Cola and Mars Bars.”

A year after his 1971 divorce from Tina, Sunny middle-aisled it with Rosita Douglas, a painter and onetime fashion designer, with whom he has two children, Lord Edward and Lady Alexandra. Though Rosita has her fans, “starchy” is an adjective that has been applied to her.

While Rosita is said to have been a fine mother, her stepson must have been a handful, to put it mildly. By the mid-80s, Jamie was addicted to heroin and other drugs, and was regularly seen collapsed at the most fashionable parties, or combing the streets of Brixton in search of crack. Over the next decades he was in and out of rehab clinics and jails, on charges including theft, road rage, and drug possession.
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