A Consummate Professional

I came to Cecil Beaton through Roy Strong, and Strong’s vastly entertaining diaries owe much to Cecil Beaton. In 1967, five months after he was appointed the youngest ever Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Strong made ‘juvenile jottings’ on some of the remarkable people he was meeting. The jottings became, a year later, something much more substantial. ‘Beaton’s diaries were in the process of being published at the time,’ Strong wrote, ‘and I was hypnotized by his ability to conjure up characters or a scene. His diaries were not daily, but occasional, made up of set pieces describing particular events or people . . . They were concerned, too, with a social panorama . . . It was that type of diary that I resolved to keep.’

Cecil Beaton kept diaries all his life. Here he is in 1972 on the funeral of the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII:

The vaulted chapel rather beautiful, and the music good. Then a clank as the trumpeters arrived. Then the louder clank, clank, clank could be heard as the procession started with the governor of Windsor Castle and the Military Knights in their scarlet uniforms, medals clinking, all marching with a loud stamp- shuffle. The slowness and the muffled metal sound were very impressive, and the fact that these Knights were all aged with clear pink skins made it all quite remarkable . . . Wonderful as the service was, I was not moved by the death of this man who for less than a year had been our King.

He does indeed do great occasions so well, but many of the diary entries are far more personal. They began when he went up to Cambridge in 1922 – ‘What a horror I was then!’ he wrote decades later – and in three years of theatricals, dressing up, extravagant par ties and encounters with extraordinary individuals he filled thirty-eight note books. He had gone up to read History, wrote ‘pages and pages of rot’ in his Finals, and came down without a degree, but he knew now what he wanted from life, and it wasn’t the solid middle-class Hampstead whence he came. Already he was a photographer, already sending pictures of his mother and sisters, dressed up for parties and coming-out balls, to the Sketch and Tatler – no one could have tried harder to climb Society’s greasy pole, and with an eventual commission from American Vogue he was on his way. In his diary for 1955 he recalls being told by a knight of the realm: ‘I hear of you everywhere, Cecil, you are getting so famous.’ ‘I hope I am,’ Beaton retorted. ‘I’ve worked hard enough for the damn thing.’ He was a photographer of everyone from William Walton to Gilbert & George, via countless beauties and the Queen. He was costume and theatre designer, painter, illustrator and cartoonist – some brilliant caricatures adorned Vogue’s pages. And he was a diarist of the first rank, publishing in all six volumes, recording his working life, his travels, friendships and love affairs for well over half a century. A page recording a visit to Tunis in 1953 shows the smallest, closest, most dense and barely legible lines of handwriting. Secretaries down the years transcribed it, the last and most important being Eileen Hose, who joined him that year and stayed until the end, becoming, as his biographer Hugo Vickers describes it, housekeeper, nurse, amanuensis, accountant and best friend. In his (excellent) biography (1985), Vickers writes: ‘Cecil treated the diaries in much the same way as he treated his published portrait photographs. He retouched them shamelessly until he achieved the effect he sought. Thus, in the published diary, opinions are softened, celebrated figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, whereas in the originals [he] can be as venomous as anyone I have heard or read.’ It was Vickers who long after Beaton’s death published some of these ‘originals’: two volumes of ‘unexpurgated’ diaries. The first is The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as They Were Written (2003), which covers the years 1970–80. The second is Beaton in the Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries (2004). ‘Unexpurgated’ sells copies, of course. And certainly there is plenty in these two volumes to satisfy a thirst to see the rich, the glamorous and the world-famous unmasked as appalling people. Here is Katherine Hepburn, with her ‘rocking-horse nostrils’, starring in the American stage production of the musical Coco, the sets for which Beaton designed in 1969. In rehearsals she was intolerable.

She is the egomaniac of all time . . . her performance . . . as unfeminine and unlike the fascinating Chanel as anyone could be . . . She knows fundamentally that she has no great talent as an actress. This gives her great insecurity so she must expend enormous effort in . . . asserting herself in as strident a manner as only she knows how. She must always be proved right.

As for Elizabeth Taylor, whom he was commissioned to photograph at a flamboyant Paris costume ball in 1971: ‘Round her neck was a velvet ribbon with the biggest diamond in the world pinned on it. On her fat, coarse hands, more of the biggest diamonds and emeralds . . . In comparison, everyone else looked ladylike.’ Roy Strong, who in 1968 made himself and Beaton household names with a fabulous exhibition of Beaton’s photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, once described him as ‘a great hater’. Scattered throughout these two volumes are indeed caustic remarks about dozens of the celebrities he came to know: ‘common little Lord Snowdon’; Vanessa Redgrave (‘Freddie Ashton thought her a well brought-up horse’), ‘beautiful one minute, quite hideous the next’; Nureyev, ‘a vague host, without manners or responsibility . . . he is a Tartar and is happy when drunk, when he has sex and 20 hours sleep, miserable when he goes to bed early and alone’. But although there is plenty of this there are also deeply affection ate and admiring entries: on those many friends he loved; on the death of his younger sister Baba; on the birthday party hosted in 1969 for an ancient aunt: ‘The blind old girl has shown such courage and such spirit and interest . . . I had to propose a toast and, as usual, made a fool of myself by not being able to overcome my emotion, but she replied with tremendous aplomb.’ In a lifetime spent in his first love, the theatre – sometimes as actor, which he adored – there are acute and illuminating observations: not of the diva or the egomaniac but the real thing. In 1970 he went to see Uncle Vanya at the Royal Court.

It is the best version of any Russian play I have ever seen. I have never known such remarkable acting . . . At one moment [Paul] Scofield, embarrassed, harassed at making a half-hearted love declaration, wound his arms in the air as if a cat was fighting. [He] sounds as if he was thinking and saying things for the first time . . .

Beaton can also be very funny. Edith Sitwell’s arrival at a lunch party in 1964 at his London house – the Queen Mother was among the guests – comes to mind:

A huge ambulance drove up to the house, as a group of stalwart men moved to bring the poet out into the daylight. A pair of very long medieval shoes appeared, and then a muffled figure, and finally a huge golden melon of a hat. Edith was wheeled into place and given two strong martinis.

And then there are the war diaries. In 1940 Beaton was appointed Official War Photographer by the Ministry of Information. Gone now were the beautiful society women, the models for Vogue, the film stars, actors and actresses of the Twenties and Thirties. Now he was photographing Anthony Eden, Ernest Bevin and Winston Churchill, whom he recorded staring into the camera ‘like some sort of animal gazing across from the back of its sty’. His pictures of the Queen were circulated all over the world; on the home front his image of a little girl recovering in hospital after an air raid appeared on the front cover of Life magazine. In 1941, taking photographs for the RAF, he deplored the waste of life: ‘Night after night these young fellows, kids many of them, are sent out to pay the price of the follies of old incompetent politicians.’ Then he was sent abroad: to the Middle East, and thence to Burma, China, India. Behind the scenes, or close to the front line, he recorded village life and the dead and the wounded. He himself came horribly close to death in a plane crash; he endured dysentery and blinding headaches. His wartime diaries, published as The Years Between, 1939–44, reveal how much those years did to develop him as a man. In May 1944, on leaving China, its poverty and discomforts, he wrote:

The toughness of the trip has been beneficial . . . For it does one no harm to get tired and to walk too much, to be either too hot or too cold, to go hungry for a few hours. I am heartened to realize how well my constitution stands up to these tests. But I have become painfully conscious of my limitations and mental weaknesses. My brain is a poor one, poorly trained.

In all, he took some 7,000 photographs, now housed in the Imperial War Museum. He himself came to regard them as his single most important body of work. And what of his personal life? Beaton was a consummate professional, and also a highly emotional man who wept easily and loved ardently. He had affairs with both men and women. But there were three great loves, whose photographs he kept by his bed until the end of his life. One was Greta Garbo. His account of their love affair occupies the greater part of his third volume of diaries, The Happy Years, 1944–8, though life with Garbo was often difficult. In New York in 1947 he records how over dinner at his hotel, ‘Our talk suddenly became intent. What was there to stop our living for the rest of our lives together . . . Greta explained, “You must realize that I am a sad person: I am a misfit in life.”’ His second love was Peter Watson, aristocratic art historian, co-founder of the ICA, charmer and sadist. He comes and goes through the diaries from 1930 to 1958, giving Beaton hell for much of the time. And the third was a young man called Kin, whom he met in a gay bar in San Francisco in 1963 while working on the film of My Fair Lady. Of the three, it is Kin, a sportsman and academic, whom one might describe as a fully human being; Christopher Isherwood found him ‘so exceptional and such a rare person’. He came to live with Beaton in London, while studying at the Slade, but it didn’t work, and his departure in 1965 broke Beaton’s heart. ‘Everything had dropped out of my world . . . I wept so much that breathing became difficult.’ It says much for them both that they got through this, becoming lifelong friends. Beaton’s other loves were his houses. He had a town house in Kensington and two manor houses in Wiltshire. The first manor, Ashcombe, a fine Georgian house, he fell in love with on sight in 1930; the second, Reddish House, he bought in 1947. In all, he entertained lavishly. But Reddish, his last and most beloved home, became for fifty years a true sanctuary from hectic London life. His diaries over and over again record the flood of relief on returning there, not least to the garden, maintained by Jack Smallpeice, steady and quiet in his corduroys, with whom he spent happy hours planning and planting. And it was at Reddish that Beaton ended his days. In 1974 he had a stroke, and thought his life was over. Roy Strong, on a visit, found ‘a tragic furrowed bundle’ gazing out over the garden. But willpower pulled him through and he learned to paint and write with his left hand. The last diary entry, on 11 January 1980, records the death of one Timothy White – not a celebrity, but his beloved cat.

He had his own ways, which could not be altered. He liked the sunny side of the street . . . Now . . . I was still alive, but Timmy had gone through to oblivion. He was perhaps lucky. Who knows?

One night a week later Beaton himself slipped peacefully away.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Sue Gee 2026