The prince of poison
A major exhibition celebrates the genius of Cecil Beaton, who was the royals’ favourite photographer. What it won’t tell you is that he was also...
Sir Cecil Beaton, that late polymath of artistic talent, has many claims to the fame he still enjoys. Artist, writer, Oscar-winning designer for the screen, acclaimed designer for the stage, the man who transformed the art of royal and society photography, and — above all else — the most devastating diarist of his age.
Not for nothing did the French novelist Jean Cocteau describe Beaton as ‘Malice in Wonderland’. The sheer venom distilled in almost every line of his diary entries still has the power to shock and astonish us, even in this era of unrestrained insult.
The American writer Truman Capote observed: ‘ There are very few people that are total self-creations and he certainly is one because nothing in his background would in any way lead one to suppose that this person would emerge out of this cocoon of middle-class life’.
Beaton’s father was a timber merchant who made a good enough living to send his son to Harrow.
A snob on the grand scale, Cecil was unaware that his grandfather was a blacksmith. When, later in life, he discovered this, he was anything but pleased. it did not accord with his view of his gilded place in international society.
This month, an exhibition is running in London that provides confirmation of Cecil Beaton’s greatness. A collection of 30 of his photographic prints, stored in America for more than 60 years, will go on display for the first time at a Mayfair gallery, selling for prices of £2,500 to £25,000 each.
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from his earliest photographic heyday in the 1920s to the 1940s, the pictures have a unique and breathtaking style. One shows Mary Cushing, a socialite and philanthropist married to one of the fabulously wealthy Astors, in a shimmering haze of fairytale fancy dress in 1938. Another, also dating from the 1930s, is a portrait of the novelist H. g. Wells.
in stark contrast, there is a picture of a young girl with a bandaged head and a toy in her hand, sitting up in bed at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital after being injured during the Blitz in 1940.
The collection explains why Beaton was chosen by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to photograph their wedding in France in 1937. Any association with the exiled Windsors following the Abdication might prove fatal to career prospects, but Beaton turned the scoop to his advantage by trading on its exclusivity — although he described Wallis Simpson in his diaries as ‘ a brawny great cow or bullock’ and a ‘ common, vulgar, strident second-rate American’.
He also survived professional disaster in 1938 when he inserted tiny but legible antiSemitic phrases into American Vogue at the side of an illustration about New York society. The issue was recalled and Beaton was fired.
Despite this, the turning point in his career came when the Queen, later the Queen Mother, invited him to Buckingham Palace in 1939 to photograph her. That photoshoot, showing Her Majesty in filmy and sparkling Norman Hartnell- designed Winterhalter crinolines, established her personal style for decades to come, and secured Beaton’s reputation worldwide.
On the outbreak of war, it was the Queen who recommended Beaton to the Ministry of information, enabling him to become a leading war photographer, best known for his images of the destruction caused by the german Blitz.
Beaton would go on to photograph all the present Queen’s children, from Prince Charles to Prince Edward, and to be chosen as the official photographer at Elizabeth ii’s Coronation in 1953.
Any clear understanding of Cecil Beaton’s frustrations and of the extreme views in his diaries — which he started at an early age, and never tired of writing — lies in the vexed question of his sexuality.
This was a man who wanted above all to be heterosexual and for some years deluded himself that he was.
Cecil’s tall, thin, willowy figure, long hair, delicate walk, and expressive use of his hands in conversation infuriated some of the young bloods at a ball at Wilton House, Salisbury, for the coming of age of the Earl of Pembroke’s heir, and they resolved to teach him a lesson.
He was grabbed by three of the male guests and ducked in the river. He returned to the ball with water coming out of his shoes. Lady Pembroke was furious and asked all three assailants to leave.
it may have been this incident that made Cecil determined to persevere with the opposite sex. He lost his virginity on his second visit to America to one of two obliging women; Marjorie Oelrichs, ‘plump and beautiful’, who resembled a high society version of Mae West, and Adèle Astaire, sister of Fred Astaire.
These efforts were in vain, for in the summer of 1930, Cecil met the man who was to become the unrequited love of his life and remain so for 26 years, though they were never lovers. Victor William Watson,
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always known as Peter, four years younger than Beaton, was a rich art connoisseur and the son of a baronet. Cecil was introduced to him by the stage designer Oliver Messel, uncle of Antony Armstrong- Jones, the future husband of Princess Margaret.
Cecil fell in love with Peter while they were in a mirrored hotel lift in venice.
They shared a bed together in Paris, but nothing happened. Although Peter was fond of him, Cecil was not his type. Watson went in for rough trade. Clearly hoping that Cecil would get over his sexual longing for him, Peter told him: ‘I’d be delighted if you had an affair’.
Cecil, hoping to make him jealous, did exactly that. He plunged headlong into high jinks with the sexually voracious Doris Delevingne, viscountess Castlerosse, three years his senior, who maintained that there was no such thing as an impotent man — only an incompetent woman.
She seduced Cecil in a room filled with headily perfurmed tuberose flowers. Their scent intoxicated him. eavesdroppers tiptoeing outside their door heard Cecil crying out: ‘Oh! Goody, goody, goody!’
Doris’s estranged husband, the corpulent gossip columnist viscount Castlerosse, seeing his wife dining with Cecil in a restaurant, observed caustically: ‘I never knew Doris was a lesbian!’
At a dinner-party in Palm Beach, Cecil encountered the Guinness heiress, Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When Cecil walked her back to her rooms at the everglades Club, he told Maureen: ‘I see the bedroom.’ Before she knew what was happening, Cecil threw her onto the bed.
‘Utterly astonished and a little fearful,’ she later recalled, ‘the chief thought which flashed through my mind was that no one, least of all my husband, would ever believe my plight.’
Maureen, a shrewd observer who knew perfectly well that Cecil was homosexual, shrieked with nervous laughter. Cecil, his pride wounded, stalked out of the bedroom. The next night, at a small dinner-party, Maureen was horrified to find herself confronted by Cecil again. As they sat down, Cecil declared to all and sundry ‘in his high nasal voice’: ‘Do you realise that you have here, in Maureen Dufferin, the biggest bitch in London?’
Cecil Beaton was nothing if not a self-publicist. He longed for a great love affair with a famous woman and believed he had found one with Greta Garbo, whom he first met in 1932, at which time she was involved in a lesbian relationship with the American poet, playwright and novelist Mercedes de Acosta.
To what extent we should accept unreservedly Cecil’s accounts of the alleged intimacy between Garbo and himself, and the possibility that they might have married, is doubtful, since Garbo herself confirmed none of it.
The suspicion remains that she was toying with him for her own amusement. In September 1968, Beaton confided to his diary his own disillusionment with the woman he claims to have loved. ‘All the nicest things about her are lost in a haze of her selfishness, ruthlessness and incapability to love ... let her stew in her own loneliness.’
And even knowing, as he did, that ‘Greta would no doubt resent so bitterly’ the publication of their relationship in his diaries, he still went ahead and published. In the end, she refused to see him or to return his calls.
The worst blow he could face had already happened on May 3, 1956, when the love of his life, Peter Watson, was found drowned in his own bath, a death judged by the coroner to be accidental, but which is now believed to have been murder by his jealous and grasping boyfriend Norman Fowler. Cecil attended the funeral alone in a catatonic state and never wholly recovered from Peter’s death.
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losing Peter, Cecil’s written comments became more and more extreme. A particular target for his vitriol was Lord Snowdon’s mother, Anne, Countess of Rosse. Margaret Duchess of Argyll, who was sitting with Cecil on a liner sailing from New York said: ‘Here comes Anne Rosse, looking lovely in a black cape with a chartreuse-green lining.’
Cecil, who considered her loathsome and reptilian, responded tartly: ‘ And a chartreuse-green lining to her mouth, no doubt.’
The Guinness heiress Maureen Dufferin’s sister, Aileen Plunket, who had sued a friend of Cecil’s, received a spiteful letter from him, hoping she would be happy as she sat alone at home getting older and uglier, signed: ‘Yours never.’
After Cecil had designed the Broadway musical Coco, on the life of fashion designer Coco Chanel, he had this to say of its star Katharine Hepburn: ‘ She is a rotten, ingrained viper. She has no generosity, no heart, no grace. She is a dried-up boot . . . I hope I never have to see her again.’
Cecil lambasted ‘the coarseness and vulgarity of the inferior being, actor Laurence Olivier . . . shifty, unreliable, cowardly, and burnt up with jealousy and envy, he is a disaster at running a theatre.’ He deplored ‘ the vulgar Diana Dors’ and branded Marlene Dietrich ‘a real phoney. She’s a liar, an egomaniac, a bore’.
As for elizabeth Taylor, he felt ‘disgust and loathing at this monster. Her breasts, hanging and huge, were like those of a peasant woman suckling her young in Peru. And this is the woman who is the greatest “draw”. In comparison everyone else looked ladylike’.
At a ball at Windsor Castle in June 1970, he recorded: ‘The first woman I saw was the loathsome Lady Adeane, the wife of the Queen’s private secretary.
‘She is coarse beyond belief. She was wearing a brocade tube of gold and white stripes, which bulged in the bosoms, stomach and buttocks. Her hair was ironed. Her arms bulged above her white kid gloves. Her feet, in large silver leather slippers, plopped the ground heavily. I am told this snobbish, horrible woman simply splits her sides at all lavatory jokes.’
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caustic observations about his photographic subjects were relentless. Actress Grace Kelly’s face on one side looked like that of a ‘bull calf’. He admired the surrealist artist Salvador Dali’s originality, but was ‘ terribly put off by his really appallingly bad breath’. Actress Julie Andrews was ‘ unbelievably naive and simple’.
even Cecil’s adored Queen Mother did not escape the indiscretions recorded in his diary. When she was telephoned by the deranged earl of Leicester, the royal operator heard the earl say: ‘Is that you, you fat old cow?’ The operator heard the click of HM’s receiver being put down.
Knighted in the New Year’s Honours of 1972, Cecil’s excesses may have been due to health. After a series of blinding headaches, he suffered a grave and serious stroke in July 1974. Cruelly robbed of the use of his right hand, he bravely and laboriously taught himself to write with his left. His cameras were adapted, and he took his last photographs — of Princess Michael of Kent — at Kensington Palace on November 13, 1979.
His beloved white cat, Timmy, his friend and companion for 17 years, was put to sleep by the vet in January 1980.
On January 17, 1980, three days after his 76th birthday, Cecil’s manservant, William Grant, summoned the local GP, Dr Christopher Brown, to Cecil’s 18th-century home, Reddish House, at Broad Chalke, near Salisbury, as he had difficulty with his breathing. A few minutes later, with both in attendance, Cecil slipped peacefully away.
For all his failings, he was one of the greatest photographers and designers who ever lived.
As this month’s exhibition demonstrates, the genius of Sir Cecil Beaton lives on.
THE Cecil Beaton exhibition runs till May 20 at Beetles+Huxley Gallery, 3-5 Swallow Street, London W1B 4DE. Call 020 7434 4319.
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