The celebrity snapper who’d pounce on anything: men, women, fire hydrants...
At the age of 28 in 1979, Hugo Vickers was commissioned to write the biography of the flamboyant photographer and designer Cecil Beaton. Over the next five years, Vickers buzzed around the world interviewing Beaton’s friends and enemies – two categories that came with a large overlap. These frenemies were, for the most part, camp, wealthy, waspish, posh, arty and elderly.
Vickers paid two brief visits to the 76-yearold Beaton, and had just finished writing him a thank-you letter when the news came through that he had died. So Vickers’ first act as biographer was to attend his subject’s funeral.
Researching and writing the biography took him the next five years.
Fortunately, he kept a diary of all his meetings, which, now that virtually all his interviewees are dead and gone, he has chosen to publish. It’s a fascinating document, a window on to a lost world of glamour, grandeur and snobbery.
‘If you write a book about coal miners, you will spend a lot of time in coal mines,’ Vickers observes in his introduction. ‘If you write about Cecil Beaton, you find yourself in London, New York, Paris, Monte Carlo and San Francisco.’
Quite so. Over the course of his researches he encounters, to name but a few, the Queen Mother, Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn, Princess Margaret, John Gielgud, Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, Jeremy Thorpe, Princess Diana, Truman Capote, Lady Diana Cooper and Princess Grace.
For the most part they are full of gossip and general bitchery, much of it directed against their dear, departed friend. Often, an interviewee will kick off by saying how talented and charming Cecil was, before adding ‘Of course, he could be very spiteful…’ or ‘Of course, he was a crashing snob’. And then the vituperation gushes forth.
Even the Queen Mother couldn’t resist a poke at her old photographer. ‘What fun he was,’ she recalled, before adding: ‘Of course, there was another side to him. Pins going in here, there…’
One of the few interviewees still alive, David Bailey, told Vickers that he once asked Beaton why he hadn’t gone into the film business. ‘Because I can’t afford a new set of enemies,’ he had replied.
In death, Beaton reaped what he had sowed in life. His own diaries could be savage and merciless, particularly towards women. He described Princess Anne as ‘a bossy, unattractive, galumphing girl’, Katharine Hepburn as ‘a rotten ingrained viper’, and the Queen Mother as ‘fatter than ever, yet wrinkled’.
He seemed to look for the worst in everyone. ‘You might think Cecil is listening to what you were saying but in fact he’s counting the hairs in your nostrils,’ recalls one interviewee. Vickers includes stories of extreme rudeness: Beaton once wrote a letter to an old enemy saying he was glad she was sitting at home getting ‘older and uglier’. He signed it ‘Yours never’.
Small wonder, then, that these old acquaintances were often less than complimentary about him. Many of them were particularly nosy about his sex life. One New Yorker claims to have spotted him outside the Dakota building in New York ‘in a clinch with Laurence Harvey’.
Another said that he once boasted of having an affair with Gary Cooper.
Others suggest he had at least some interest
in women. The catty ballet critic Dicky Buckle tells Vickers that the actress Coral Browne had sex with Cecil. ‘He was just like a stoat,’ she said. ‘It was all over in two minutes.’ Truman Capote, not the most reliable of witnesses, declares that Cecil’s passions extended wider. ‘He’d pounce on anything: women, men, dogs, fire hydrants, Spanish puppies…’
He boasted of having had a longstanding affair with the reclusive beauty Greta Garbo. But most of Vickers’ interviewees doubt this. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ says Lady Ashton. ‘The thought of a woman would scare the pants off him.’ Roy Strong dismisses it as ‘a fantasy’. Among his rival photographers, Irving Penn thinks Beaton ‘never got anywhere’ with her and Horst scoffed at the idea: ‘He made it up.’
On the other hand, Truman Capote is adamant that the romance with Garbo was real. ‘Cecil was one of the few people who gave her any physical satisfaction.’
It’s all good fun, though these conflicting memories and impressions show the impossible nature of the biographer’s task. Who is telling the truth? On the one hand, the comic writer Anita Loos describes Beaton as ‘absolutely charming’, and his old Cambridge University porter remembers him as ‘a very nice gentleman, a very refined man’. On the other hand, the choreographer Anton Dolin speaks for many when he describes him as ‘a horror’.
The philosopher William James once said: ‘We have as many personalities as there are people who know us .’ Vickers’ diaries show how true this is. They also suggest that a patchwork of often contradictory reminiscences may well come closer to the essence of a person than anything more coherent, like an old-fashioned cradle-to-grave biography.
Malice In Wonderland also works well as an elegy, sad and comical, to a passing era. One of Vickers’ interviewees, the 93-yearold actress Cathleen Nesbitt, was once the girlfriend of the poet Rupert Brooke, who died in 1915. Vickers knocked on the doors of many elderly aristocrats on their uppers who had once been carefree beauties, with the world at their feet. ‘It is rather galling to think that having once owned 400 acres of Central London, I don’t even have a flat over a garage now,’ complains the former Duchess of Westminster.
Some of his explanatory footnotes are very funny indeed. He describes Doris Delevingne, Viscountess Castlerosse as the ‘one-time lover of Cecil, whose spirited attitude to sex was, “There’s no such thing as an impotent man, only an incompetent woman.” ’ Vickers himself is a beguiling mixture of innocence and sophistication, adoration and detachment. He has a keen ear for speech, noting how, in line with the aristocratic need to pronounce names idiosyncratically, the Queen Mother pronounces Osborne House ‘Osb’n’ and Anthony Eden’s widow, Clarissa, pronounces Cecil ‘Sissel’.
He is good, too, on the muddles and mis-hearings involved in any conversation. Talking to Enid Bagnold, the 93-year-old author of National Velvet (and great-grandmother, incidentally, of Samantha Cameron), he records this exchange about Cecil Beaton:
‘He was very touchy. He’s dead now, of course.’
‘I’m sad. I’d hoped to talk to him.’
‘You’re glad?’
‘No. Sad.’
‘Oh! Sad. I thought you said glad.’