The Dark Side of Cecil Beaton
The dark side of Cecil Beaton The photographer had a life of glittering glamour, but he had a nasty side fuelled by loneliness, the director of a new film explains Audrey Hepburn photographed by Cecil Beaton for My Fair Lady, 1964 It’s appalling, but it’s hard not to laugh. “I’ve always despised the Burtons for their vulgarity, commonness and crass bad taste. Richard Burton is as butch and coarse as only a Welshman can be. Elizabeth Taylor is everything I dislike, combining the worst of American and English taste.” Ouch. The words, of course, of the famous photographer, designer, illustrator, writer and aesthete Cecil Beaton. It’s a rotten thing to say — he also described her hair as “sausage curls”, writing in his diary after he photographed the couple at a party at the Rothschilds’ Château near Paris in December 1971 — but, whisper it, you can slightly see his point. He would have hated dying. He loved life so much “I’m not sure if [Taylor] were still alive that