Homemade Cecil Beaton

By Stefan Kanfer

"I do so want to make my name--and a full-page thing of me as the Marchioness looking like a Madonna would make the most terrific sensation and I should hold my head high all the season." There, in a diary entry made at the age of 20, is the essence of Cecil Beaton: ambitious, foppish and unstoppable. He was appearing in an undergraduate production of Pirandello's Henry IV, for which he had also designed the sets and costumes, and it is typical of the man's combination of luck and manipulation that the play was agreeably reviewed in the Spectator and witnessed by Lytton Strachey. Wherever Beaton went, celebrity seemed to hover--or was he the one who contrived to be in the slipstream of the famous?

With thoroughness and grace, Hugo Vickers, a British critic and journalist, traces the answer back to Beaton's obscure beginnings and follows it to a precipitous summit. Cecil was the grandson of a blacksmith and the son of a timber broker. There was nothing to be done about ancestry, but the future was another matter. Young Cecil confided to his diary, "Even in my dreams I long to make Mummie a society lady and not a housewife."

He attended St. Cyprian's with George Orwell and Cyril Connolly and made his way into Harrow with honors by some inventive cheating on tests. At Cambridge, he was too concerned with applause to bother about academics. In his senior year, Vickers notes, Beaton was cast in drag for a student revue. "He began to practise high kicks for his show and found himself incapable of preparing for his exam: 'I've done absolutely no work!' Then he went to London to buy bright peppermint pink chiffon for his dress."

But once in London, Cecil proved to be an iron butterfly. He clerked for his father and later for a friend of the family; in the evenings he cultivated those who could advance his name. Photography seemed the speediest escalator. His soft-focus portraits made the magazines, appeared on dust jackets and in galleries. Edith Sitwell posed for him, projecting a "haggish" aura but displaying her medieval ivory hands to great effect. Tallulah Bankhead postured against a background of balloons. He exuded charm: "Not only do I take photographs but I am an entertainer as well and this afternoon my performance was much appreciated and the audience laughed at all they should." By working assiduously for years, always looking out for the main chance, he became the overnight darling of the salons.

This was the public Beaton. The private one could only be revealed posthumously, once the unexpurgated diaries came to light. Vickers can hardly be called indiscreet for ransacking them. After all, the diarist himself believed that his record of snobbism and social vaulting, of erotic triumphs and humiliations would make "amusing reading" someday. He was correct, but the most remarkable passages are not those of the invert. Fame was Beaton's aphrodisiac, and if heterosexuality was required for a brilliant conquest, well then, he would try that costume for a while. When he met Greta Garbo after World War II, he energetically seduced her. "I am so unexpectedly violent and have such unlicensed energy when called upon," he boasted to himself. "It baffles and intrigues and even shocks her." But the liaison was impossible. For one thing, there was her decor. "Don't you want to come and live in this apartment when we're married?" she asked. "No," he replied, looking "with horror at the pink lampshades."

After the breakup, Beaton returned to his old inclinations. He became famous for set designs and costumes for theater and films--the ones for My Fair Lady won Oscars--and, on a tour of a San Francisco gay bar called the Toolbox, he met the 29-year-old "boy" who was to be his last great amour. The designermemoirist-photographer -artist went on to honors ranging from placement on the best-dressed list to high-priced one-man shows of his work. He acquired wealthy and titled patrons wherever he displayed his work or himself. But if he appeared elegant and unconcerned to staring onlookers, he was demoralized when alone. Gazing at the mirror, he noted, "The upper lip has become longer. The mouth a thin bitter line, the eyes tragic, old and wild and of a great sadness. Were there no redeeming features? No."

But, of course, there were. Beaton's photography, as Susan Sontag noted, could turn the most celebrated subjects into "over-explicit, unconvincing effigies." His drawing was often slick and derivative, and his stage work was best when it could borrow grandeur from a vanished period. But the great achievement was not in these efforts. It was for a long-running production titled Cecil Beaton!, with sets, costumes, lighting, direction and dialogue by the author. No epitaph by friend or critic could equal the one he ad-libbed for himself when a journalist reminded him that he had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. True, Beaton acknowledged. Then he added the irrefutable punch line that summed up a life: "But I managed to put it there."