...we are always appreciating things too late,
belatedly seizing the quality of an experience or a person,
as though they had to grow in us with the years before
any fruit of meaning could appear.

The Glass of Fashion, 1954

Sir Cecil Beaton's most spectacular talent is little known in the present day. We know him, of course, as a prominent society and fashion photographer of the 1940's; we know his photographs of Prince Charles as a baby, of the wartime Churchill in various bulldog poses, of St. Paul's Cathedral in ruins, of thickly made-up socialites, and flocks of storklike models in Charles James evening gowns. We know him also as the Oscar-winning designer of Audrey Hepburn's fantastic costumes in My Fair Lady. Less so, but still, as the New York social climber, much detested by Truman Capote; as the prototypical overbred Englishman, a character part; a world-class dilettante, a shutterbug and dress designer rather than a serious artist, and--sans doute!--a raging queen.

The time is now come to reveal Cecil Beaton as one of the most gifted writers of the age; as a seminal arbiter of 21st century taste, and as one of history's great lovers.

My adolescence had its moments of mistaken snobbery.

The Glass of Fashion, 1954

There is much about our subject that inspired dislike. The young Evelyn Waugh joined with the rough schoolboys who taunted Beaton and made him cry (the lot of these latent ponces appearing to have had mixed feelings regarding Beaton's "long eyelashes"). And then, Beaton lasted exactly eight days in the family timber business, prissily revolted by the crass capitalism that had created his family's wealth. Even in 1907, at the age of three, Beaton was more interested in Real Photo Postcards of Lily Elsie than he was in selling lumber.

In the time-honored bohemian manner, Beaton grew up, dropped out of Cambridge and emerged as a full-fledged aesthete in what must have been record time. He went to New York, started taking pictures, and in between hung out with Christian Berard, with Anita Loos, with Diaghilev and Noel Coward and Oliver Messel. "Très chic, très snob," pronounced one irritated Frenchman.

Soon he had wrapped Edith Sitwell in plastic and photographed her; she pushed him forward. He took more and more pictures for Vogue and Vanity Fair. And all the time, he kept a diary.

The war came. Beaton went to England and took pictures of the heroes of the Battle of Britain. After El Alamein he went to the Middle East, had sad champagne suppers with old Cambridge friends who later died in battle, took propaganda pictures for the government--and all the time, he kept a diary. Reading it, one sees the spiky edges of this rare personality being slowly smoothed away by contact with the hard but improving world. Where there was hauteur, compassion has stolen in. Patience comes--and stays. Beauty is no longer the province of the fantastic alone, of Lily Elsie and Gabrielle Ray, covered in feathers and pearls. It has taken root in the world.

It would seem that art, however important,
is not life itself: and to set up a code of "art for art's sake"
can at times prove equally as inhuman as any political dogma which is fostered
and held above human values themselves.

The Glass of Fashion, 1954

As Beaton matured, his writing prospered; by this we mean in a technical sense, and not as an indication of commercial success. Although in time he gave lecture tours and wrote a surprising number of books, including the excellent Glass of Fashion, from which we have taken the liberty of quoting here, Beaton has never been valued as a writer. Condescending pats on the head from his literary inferiors (Cyril Connolly, et al.) appear as jacket blurbs on many of Beaton's books.

Glass of Fashion may really be his best, the relaxed and affectionate portrait of an age, a pocket manifesto, an almost Firbankian work of history. It is a vivid book, sensual, rich, absurd, philosophical and prophetic. Here he describes the famous soubrette whom he had most lavishly admired as a youth:

... something about Gaby Deslys' whole esculent appearance called to mind a basket of fruit, real or imitation ... her breasts were round, with unpointed nipples... Her silky hair was dyed a greenish marzipan gold, possibly like Dorian Gray's, but more like that of a child in a perambulator.

... her hat, resembling airplane propellers or a Brancusi bird... These huge constructions of gauze were rampant with the ubiquitous feathers of tropical birds, parrots or flamingos. She was, in short, a human aviary.

... If Gaby wore an ecru-coloured tussore suit with a coal scuttle of full-blown roses on her head, or a dress of velvet and diamante trellis, I might well feel I had discovered a new continent. Her fantasy spread to embrace even the little Chihuahuas she kept as pets, Mexican creatures so spindly and shivery that one felt certain they could not survive a winter in subtropical Nice unless they were wrapped in dark Russian sables. And they were.

 

These observations are interspersed with charming drawings of the subjects described: mostly women of fashion like Consuelo Vanderbilt and Cécile Sorel, but Poiret, Dior, Bérard and many others glide through its pages, each observed with the same sensuality, the same quiet, amused justice, and the same meticulous care.

The transcscendent quality of Beaton's writing is the same one that illuminated his photography; a keen, or as he might have said, "sifted", power of observation. He is as delicate as Proust, but with a sense of humor (and without the cork walls). No detail is too small to escape his notice, and his every pleasure or chagrin is transmitted as if by an electric current to the reader: a beauty's eyelids are "the colour of mushrooms", Churchill's hands, "feminine, with their pointed nails and fingers, holding a glass of champagne too near his face so that the exploding bubbles tickled him". Yes, he was a dandy, he loved frivolity and openly delighted in the superficial; but let us not be so shallow ourselves as to suppose for a moment that Beaton himself was superficial.

Ladies' Man

And so he climbed--alone, or nearly so. Beaton's published diaries record no love affair but one. There is a certain ambiguity of pronouns that speaks to the obvious theory of homosexuality. Until, that is, one arrives at the diaries of the 1940's.

Where indeed could such a man find a suitable companion? Even today, one mistrusts the sexuality of men who design clothes or sculpt or take photographs. And, bien sur, for good reason. The aesthetics of heterosexuality appear to demand that the female be the more delicate, the more refined of the two. A man who necessarily finds most women rougher and less elegant than himself is clearly in a difficult position. It requires a woman of unusual gifts to appeal to his subtle imagination. And a woman of parts, of intelligence, for he will expect her to share in his interests. He will want to arrange flowers with her, to draw her and take photographs of her, to cook a perfect, simple meal with her; and with all this, to find her beautiful enough, according to his high standards, to love.

At the sight of Garbo I felt knocked back, as if suddenly someone
had opened a furnace door onto me: I had almost to gasp for the next breath.
The warmth of her regard, her radiance, her smile-robbed me of equilibrium; I held onto
the back of a chair. Garbo made no definite sign of recognition but seems to glean
amusement from the mere sight of me. She took it for granted that once again I had
immediately fallen in love with her.

from Memoirs of the 40's

In the end it didn't work out between them, though they had many months of happiness and a long-drawn-out, incandescent affair. To read these blazing, joyful, candid, sharply focused openings onto another person's life is a little disquieting. But Beaton's memoirs are so beautifully written that one is (almost) absolved of prying; or at least, they provide a literary sensation far more than a tabloid one. The crystalline prose of this sensitive, intelligent, adult man in love--not quite an ordinary man, and yet only and absolutely an ordinary man--discloses one of the most touching personal accounts of a love affair ever recorded.

Greta and I dance for the first time. I am completely ecstatic,
like any young man in love who takes his girl out to a night club.
"If I Loved You" is the tune that will always remind me of this evening.
It became "our song."

When, at early dawn, we left Mona's house, situated so high uptown as to be almost in
Harlem, and embarked upon the long walk home, I was in such a state of elation that, in
the almost deserted streets, I sang, I improvised ballets and performed all sorts of
acrobatic stunts. I leaped in the air and swung on the struts of awnings outside apartment
houses and shops. Greta, shocked, surprised, and secretly delighted, would never have
guessed that I possessed such prowess-nor would I.

from Memoirs of the 40's

Who can read such words and remain unmoved? Who can read them, and suppose the writer to be a mere dress designer or indeed, anything but--a writer?

In the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up, scarcely anyone had a kind word to say for Cecil Beaton. The artifice he adored had been ripped off the cultural altar and unceremoniously tossed in the gutter; for one admired "naturalness" in those days. Now, of course, we can see quite clearly that the so-called "natural look" of the 60s and 70s was every bit as artificial as the most deranged concoctions of Horst, Bakst or Poiret (or of Rei Kawakubo, Jean-Paul Gaultier or Alexander McQueen, for that matter). Knowing what one knows now of psychology, of self-consciousness and the created effect, Beaton's pure, loopy, slightly unhinged aesthetic looks more splendid and more loving and open-spirited today than ever before.

And it is here that we can conclude with our proposal of Beaton as one of the 21st century's guiding lights. He was among the first to turn the inward eye outward; making of sensitivity and compassionate perception a moral and aesthetic position. The good and the beautiful for Beaton were a single value. It is this high plane that we shall attempt to reach in the coming century; we will bring beauty into the world not with the 20th century's self-obsessed and egotistial "performances", but with observation, craft and gentleness. Beaton's writings will assume a new importance as this change takes hold.

We shall come to seek his refinement and his simplicity ourselves. He loved cleanliness and spareness and beautiful proportions; exaggeration was all very well in its place, but his own house with its carefully tended garden was a haven of sumptuous austerity. A banishment of everything that was base or banal, and a corresponding elevation of the delightful. Like him we shall live with gaiety, glamour, elegance, generosity ... and love.

So ... is Cecil Beaton an angel?? We can hope--nay, we can suspect--that he is; but at least, we can know that he was gloriously and fully of this world.

This paragraph is from Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, but it seems to be about me:

Who can describe the charm of love? That conviction that we have found the being who was
destined by nature to be ours, that sudden illumination of life, that new value attaching to the
slightest circumstances, those swift hours, the details of which elude us in retrospect through their
very sweetness, leaving in our mind only a long trail of happiness; that playful gaiety which
occasionally mingles for no reason with our general feeling of tenderness; in our love's presence
such pleasure, in her absence such hope; such aloofness to all vulgar cares, such feeling of
superiority towards all our surroundings and of certainty that, on the plane on which we are living,
society can no longer touch us; and that mutual understanding which divines each thought and
responds to each emotion-the charm of love! Those who have known the charm of love cannot
describe it!

from Memoirs of the 40's