The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
In a bubble with the Bright Young Things
Decades after Cecil Beaton captured their heyday on camera, his most colourful characters took Hugo Vickers for a spin
The Bright Young Things, those youngsters who, in the Twenties, night after night, dressed up for costume parties and charged around London on madcap adventures, were a curious phenomenon. It is not easy to define them with accuracy, by which I mean some were bright, some weren’t, some went on to greater things, while some just flared up at the time and then fizzled out.
Theirs was the world depicted in the novels of Evelyn Waugh and the plays of Noël Coward; an era of fun, when it looked as though everyone was having a “ripping” or “smashing” time. It could not survive the financial crash of the late Twenties intact, and was obliterated entirely by the war clouds of the Thirties. One of their number, though, the photographer Cecil Beaton, preserved their fleeting moment like “a fly in amber”, as he put it, and they take a star turn in a forthcoming National Portrait Gallery show of Beaton’s work.
The Bright Young Things had one thing in common – they posed well. Beaton’s particular skill was to bring out the best in any of his subjects. He dressed his sets theatrically, and placed the sitters to good advantage: the Queen under the Delhi Durbar canopy in Buckingham Palace; desert commanders in exotic locations; actors and actresses on the sets of stage productions. When it came to the Bright
Young Things, he displayed them in the artificial world in which they belonged: against backdrops of costume materials, on cellophane, or surrounded by balloons.
I was lucky to meet many of the Bright Young Things in later years. In 1980, Beaton had invited me to be his authorised biographer. I began by visiting him for lunch on January 15. Three days later, he died. Not great! To pursue my research, I went around the country to visit those who had known Beaton in the Twenties, when he was a gilded youth.
At Wilsford Manor I talked to Stephen Tennant, once the very brightest of the Things, but by then a fat and heavily maquillé recluse in his haunted domain: staircases adorned with fishnets and straw hats, piles of leaves placed strategically, shells abounding and an atmosphere of pink.
Tennant would be slumped in bed, though his mind was still razor-sharp. He told me that the artist Rex Whistler – a fellow
Bright Young Thing – had once remarked: “Have you noticed that when a very smart fancy dress ball is impending and, goading us all to be deeply original and outstanding, Cecil says in a bored tone, ‘Oh yes, I love a fancy ball but I’m not taking much interest in this one – just a very dull outfit for me,’ while really he is designing a dazzling costume to emerge and eclipse us all dressed as a peacock?”
Beaton confessed that, in the Twenties, he was sometimes in costume for several days on end. Tennant himself was not averse to being styled as the youthful Shelley, posing dramatically for Beaton’s lens.
The Bright Young Things didn’t confine themselves to parties. They were forever hurtling around London in the middle of the night on some crazy mission – stealing the false teeth of the prime minister’s wife, for instance, or the socialite Laura Corrigan’s wig. It was probably the American gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, a frequent visitor to London and Europe, who inspired them to do so. She was very clever at getting the idiotic rich to enjoy themselves.
Loelia Ponsonby, meanwhile, who grew up in St James’s Palace and later became Duchess of Westminster, invented the concept of the “bottle party”, which survives to this day, whereby young people arrive at parties clutching an undistinguished bottle that is usually best not opened, but later taken undrunk to a similar event. It was to Loelia that fellow Bright Young Thing Zita Jungman wrote in the Sixties: “The terrible things we did are boomeranging on us now. I can’t help feeling that your mother must have regretted the circumstances that brought us together, she must have thought us horrid, and our goings-on intensely vulgar. We enjoyed it, of course.”
Zita and her sister, Teresa, also known as “Baby”, were photographed by Beaton lying on the floor, head to head on cellophane in 1926. He described the sisters as “a pair of decadent 18th-century angels made of wax” and wrote of Zita: “With her smooth fringes, and rather flat head, like a silky coconut, like a medieval page, and with her swinging gait, she looks very gallant, very princely.” In reaction to the pictures, Zita “lay back in a chair looking at them for ages, never speaking, just occasionally grunting a grunt of satisfaction”.
They were not always frivolous. During the Second World War, Zita
Beaton said that, in the Twenties, he was sometimes in costume for several days on end
drove a Polish ambulance and was declared “missing” for a while; in May 1940, she was one of the last to leave Le Havre. Teresa had two small children but also did as much as she could for the war effort.
It was an extraordinary experience for me when, in December 1987, the two sisters arrived in a little Mini to collect me from a hotel and drive me to Leixlip Castle, Co Kildare, and yet more extraordinary when, in 2004, I suggested they appear in a television documentary to mark Beaton’s centenary. We had been told not to film Zita asleep and this was a problem. She was 100, and awoke only from time to time. (Every day she watched The Sound of Music, though only parts of it, as she dozed off intermittently.)
Meanwhile, Teresa, a mere stripling of 96, had a deep reluctance to be filmed, or quoted in any way, but her inherent good manners meant that she relented, and stories emerged of the costumes that would be laid out on the bed at Wilsford for the next photographic session. In their heyday they had staged treasure hunts; used their connections to arrange a fake edition of the Evening Standard and had Hovis loaves baked to order with clues inside. Zita even attempted to stay overnight in the chamber of horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. But the two sisters disappeared from public view in the Thirties, living together in perfect harmony from 1947 to the end, fortified by their Catholic faith. You could imagine the one saying to the other: “Stop me if I told you this before…”
The Bright Young Things were awash with Guinnesses. Tennant remembered that at a party in London, Sacheverell Sitwell declared: “There are too many Guinnesses.” At that, recalled Tennant, “several Guinnesses in the room looked round angrily”. In 1983, I spent an afternoon with Tanis Guinness, the Jungman sisters and Loelia, and I read out extracts from Beaton’s diaries about his first visit to Wilsford Manor in 1927. They fell about laughing when he wrote that his speckled pyjamas entirely matched the decor of his bedroom.
Of the others, I visited Paula Gellibrand, by then contained in The Priory at Roehampton, because she could no longer cope with everyday life. I found her sitting under her Beaton portrait, full of funny stories. Beaton had loved her Modigliani-style good looks and her Vaselined eyelids and I thought her a beautiful old lady. He, on the other hand, could not bear to see her old, preferring to remember her in full beauty.
Steven Runciman, a Cambridge contemporary of Beaton’s, went on to become a distinguished historian and clubman. Allanah Harper, a regular in the pages of Beaton’s diaries in the midTwenties, came for a drink in my flat in London in 1984 dressed in a Chanel suit – she seemed such a remote figure from history yet there she was. I knew Diana Mitford for more than 30 years.
Her beauty, Evelyn Waugh had remarked, “ran through the room like a peal of bells”. She spent much of the Second World War in prison thanks to her second marriage to the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley (Adolf Hitler was a guest at their secret wedding) and later lived in intellectual and social exile in Paris.
Anne Messel, later Countess of Rosse – dubbed “Tugboat Annie” because she drifted from peer to peer – was the mother of Tony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon, who married Princess Margaret. Beaton chose to loathe Anne on account of his jealousy of her brother, Oliver Messel, whom he considered his rival in ballet design. In the Sixties, he painted wicked caricatures of her, one of which showed her at her dressing table, a witch’s brew of make-up beside her, false eyelashes and wig flying off at the news that
“Meg and Tony” were to split.
At lunch in London in 1983, where she was sitting between the writer Harold Acton (another Bright Young Thing) and me,
Acton leant across her to ask if I had seen these wicked images. I had. Anne was quite deaf by then, but nervously I caught her eye and could not tell if she had heard or whether she simply pretended not to. She gazed back with a blank stare.
As for Beaton, he moved on to greater things. By the time the war came, he had tired of picturing glamorous debutantes gazing through bowers of flowers. He became a distinguished war photographer for the Ministry of Information. After the war, he became the photographic equivalent of a court painter, taking stylish portraits of the Queen and the Royal family.
In the bleakness of postwar London, he cheered up theatregoers with a lavish production of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Later he designed the films Gigi and My Fair Lady, pouring into them the residual experiences and visual memories acquired from his youth as a Bright Young Thing. He achieved a subtle balance in creating costumes that were