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
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 we’d have used that,” admits Lisa Immordino Vreeland, the director of a new documentary about Beaton, Love, Cecil, which draws on televised interviews, the photographer’s vast archive and his 150 volumes of diaries to paint a picture of a glittering but ultimately lonely life. Beaton’s diary entries are narrated, over a stream of his images, by the actor Rupert Everett.
Gobsmackingly bitchy as Beaton might have been (he also described Katharine Hepburn as “a freckled, burnt, mottled, bleached and wizened piece of decaying matter” and “a dried up old boot”), Love, Cecil is rather affectionate. A deeply complex man, for all his affected shallowness Beaton had a vein of what the model Penelope Tree (who professes a soft spot for him and whose career the photographer launched) calls “melancholy” running through him, a sweetness and a delight in life and beauty that contrasted with a deep insecurity and a regrettable tendency to recklessness
That word, “affected”, is important. From childhood Beaton was obsessed with theatre (one of the few traits he shared with his father, a prosperous timber merchant). Not just the greasepaint and velvet curtain kind, but a more fundamental kind of theatre — he firmly believed that a person could create a world of their own to live in, one that invites in others and transports them, and this idea permeated not just his photographs and his films but also his life.
Beaton was born in 1904 in Hampstead, north London, to Ernest and his wife, Etty. He described his childhood as “idyllic”, up until puberty, when it must have become painfully clear to Ernest that his elder son was never going to be like him.
“I found that very difficult,” Beaton said. “Intuitively I went against many of the things he stood for and liked.” While his younger brother, Reggie, cheerfully shared Ernest’s passion for cricket, Etty’s make-up box held “an uncanny fascination” for Cecil. When his father caught him painting his face one day, he was so enraged that he locked Cecil in his bedroom.
School was moderately unpleasant — and the source of his lifelong enmity with Evelyn Waugh, a fellow pupil at Heath Mount Preparatory School in Hertfordshire, who recalled with some relish the torment he and his friends meted out to Beaton — but university supplied him with the first opportunity to indulge his talent for reinvention.
He was already captivated by the camera, dressing up and posing his sisters, Nancy and Baba, and photographing his mother when she had parties and sending the pictures to the newspapers, so that she would occasionally be bemused to find herself written about in the gossip columns as a society hostess.
At Cambridge “I set about becoming a rabid aesthete”, Beaton wrote, and his self-portraits from this time are eye-popping — leopard print, dresses and pearls; pure Bowie, Marc Almond, Claude Cahun. It was at Cambridge too that he began to inveigle his way into the life he craved.
Stephen Tennant, the youngest son of the 1st Baron Glenconner and the brightest of the Bright Young Things, took a liking to Beaton and invited him into his glittering world. The wealthy BYTs lived a decadent fantasy and Beaton’s photographs played into that, revealing an ingenious talent for visual transformation — Rex Whistler, Edith Sitwell, Diana Cooper, the Mitford and Guinness girls all struck dramatic poses before his heavenly backdrops, created with crunched-up Cellophane or silver foil. They loved Beaton’s camera and it loved them back.
It was the beginning of a lifetime of being in the thick of, and observing, the most exciting events of the 20th century. Armed with the camera as a passport, an obsession with beauty (he once described it as the most important word in the dictionary) and what he called “an eye to publicity”, he was on his way. A trip to New York and “a terribly good contract” with Vogue would soon follow, but the ambiguity of the photographer’s position would always mirror his insecurity, and New York provided the stage for one of a series of telling episodes of self-sabotage.
Inexplicably, in February 1938, Beaton drew an illustration for Voguethat included a scrap of newspaper on which appeared an offensive term for a Jewish person. The letters were tiny, but it was spotted — too late. Vogue had to pulp 130,000 copies; Beaton was forced to resign. “Why did I do that? I was baffled,” Beaton later wrote, possibly disingenuously. “I can only tell you how sorry I am. It was done unconsciously, I am not anti-Jewish.”
It was a revealing act — foolish, arrogant, envious, ugly — but it was representative of a self-destructive streak that also surfaced in Beaton’s personal relationships. The three great loves of his life — the art collector Peter Watson, who strung him along at arm’s length for years; the Olympic fencer Kin Hoitsma; and, most improbably, Greta Garbo — were all in their ways unattainable. “Even though he had the urge to create something of himself, he always had this feeling that he wasn’t quite good enough,” Immordino Vreeland says. “So what does he do? He tries to marry the most important actress in the world. Who is a lesbian.”
After the Vogue scandal, Beaton didn’t work for a year and a half. His reprieve came from an unexpected quarter. “The Queen wants to know if you will photograph her tomorrow afternoon,” came the call in July 1939. His romantic portraits of Queen Elizabeth, subsequently the Queen Mother, began the transformation of the monarchy’s image from stuffy untouchables to modern family (sort of). And they established a relationship that led, nearly 20 years later, to him sitting in the high galleries of Westminster Abbey with his camera round his neck and his top hat stuffed with sandwiches and drawing materials, recording Elizabeth II’s coronation for her and for Vogue.
His reconciliation with the magazine had been cemented by his work during the Second World War. The conflict brought out the best in Beaton. “It was clear that in anything connected with soldiering I would be a real sad sack,” he not-very-ruefully wrote — instead, he resolved to be useful by photographing the damage, much to the delight of the Ministry of Information. “Beaton’s unique style would, it was felt, catch the eye,” says Hilary Roberts from the Imperial War Museum. “It was different to the usual press photography.”
“He’s an aesthete and he’s looking for beautiful things even in extremis,” says Hamish Bowles of American Vogue. Beaton took more than 7,000 photographs during the war, not just in Britain, but in Burma, China and Egypt, published eight books and wrote numerous features. His cover of Life magazine, featuring the stunned three-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne sitting in a hospital bed, her head bandaged, “grey faced and clutching a grey toy, perhaps all that remained of her former life”, was credited partly for American opinion towards intervention. And when the war was won, Beaton’s rehabilitation was complete.
Actress Katharine Hepburn was a ‘dried up old boot’
From that point he never stopped working. Hollywood beckoned and Beaton tripped the light fantastic with great satisfaction (though he later called Hollywood “ugly beyond belief”). Leslie Caron says in the film that “one of the greatest contributions to the quality of Gigi [1958] is the fact that the producer hired Cecil Beaton to do everything visual”.
Although Beaton and the director, George Cukor, had a mutual dislike, Beaton’s design for My Fair Lady in 1964 was almost the biggest character in the film — “If he hadn’t done photography, if he’d just done My Fair Lady, that would have been enough for me,” David Bailey says in Love, Cecil. The film won Beaton two Oscars.
Over his career, which lasted until the early 1970s, when he had a stroke that paralysed his right side, he exposed thousands of rolls of film, wrote hundreds of thousands of exquisitely crafted words and published 38 books, several of which, such as The Glass of Fashion, retain their status as bibles in their field today. What kept Beaton at the top of his game for so long was an unrelenting quest for the new and exciting.
Aldous Huxley, Walter Sickert, Marilyn Monroe, the Rolling Stones, Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Ninette de Valois, Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, Truman Capote (with whom, predictably, Beaton fell out), Jackie Kennedy, Francis Bacon, Picasso — the list of his sitters, the movers and shakers of the 20th century, is as astounding as it is long. But it wasn’t just about seeking the new, says his biographer, Hugo Vickers. “He was never confident that people were accepting him, but that’s also a driving force.”
This despite his immense popularity. Beaton could be charming and a loyal friend, and loved to surround himself with people. David Hockney remembers attending parties at Beaton’s home. “I met all kinds of people there,” he says in the film, his astonishment still evident, “Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, all kinds of film people. That’s where I met Mick Jagger, at Cecil Beaton’s.”
Beaton’s reaction to Hockney, recorded in his diary, is poignant. “It staggers me how this young man can be so at home in the world. He has the golden quality of being able to enjoy life.” Their similarities — born among the middle class outside the city, endlessly creative, homosexual — must have made this fundamental difference between them terribly stark to Beaton.
This sadness was always there, and even more so towards the end of his life. “It is awful how easily I weep,” he wrote after his stroke. “I was appalled by the sadness of life. Why should I feel sad about the passing of so much, rather than gratitude that so much has been fitted in to life?”
“He would have hated dying,” his former butler, Ray Gurton, says in the film. “He loved life so much and would have felt he was missing something by being dead.”
Beaton writes of this restlessness in his late diary: “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the slaves of the ordinary.” Say what you like about Beaton, you could never accuse him of that.
Love, Cecil is released in selected cinemas on December 1 and available on DVD on December 11
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