Cecil Beaton - The Restless Years: 1955-63

Table of Contents

Foreword to the New Edition

I welcome the republication of the six volumes of Cecil Beatons diaries, which so delighted readers between 1961 and 1978. I dont know if Cecil himself re-read every word of his manuscript diaries when selecting entries, but I suspect he probably did over a period of time. Some of the handwritten diaries were marked with the bits he wanted transcribed and when it came to the extracts about Greta Garbo, some of the pages were sellotaped closed. Even today, in the library of St Johns College, Cambridge, some of the original diaries are closed from public examination, though to be honest, most of the contents are now out in the open.

The only other person who has read all the manuscript diaries is me. It took me a long time to get through them, partly because his handwriting was so hard to read. I found that if I read one book a day, I had not done enough. If I did two in a day, then I ended up with a splitting headache! This in no way deflected from the enormous enjoyment in reading them.

Altogether there are 145 original manuscript diaries dating from Cecil going up to Cambridge in 1922 until he suffered a serious stroke in 1974. A few fragments of an earlier Harrow diary survive, and there is a final volume between 1978 and 1980, written in his left hand. 56 of these cover his time at Cambridge, some of which appear in The Wandering Years (1961) . 22 books cover the war years, and were used for The Years Between (1965), and nine books record his My Fair Lady experiences, some of which appear in The Restless Years (1976) and were the basis for Cecil Beatons Fair Lady (1964). These six volumes probably represent about ten per cent of what Cecil Beaton actually wrote.

The diaries attracted a great deal of attention when first published. James Pope-Hennessy wrote of Cecils thirst for self-revelation, adding that the unpublished volumes were surely the chronicle of our age. Referring to Cecils diaries, and those of Eddy Sackville-West, he also commented: We could not be hoisted to posterity on two spikier spikes.

I have to tell the reader that these volumes were not always quite the same as the originals. Some extracts were rewritten with hindsight, some entries kaleidoscoped and so forth. Certain extracts in these six volumes were slightly retouched in places, in order that Cecil could present his world to the reader exactly as he wished it presented. And none the worse for that.

Hugo Vickers

January 2018

Part I: Changing Perspectives, 1955

HAIRCUT

January

Hurrying up the marble steps with nimble alacrity towards the Mens Hairdressing Department of Selfridges, my mind went back to the time oh, crikes! how long ago was it? when I started coming here to have my hair cut by nice, carroty Mr Massey. The expeditions as a schoolboy from Temple Court in Hampstead to the West End were always exciting and full of adventure. I really felt I was seeing life from the top of the bus as the bell ting-tinged down Finchley Road towards Baker Street and Oxford Street. Once the matine idol, the fair, wavy-haired Owen Nares, jumped on board. As the conductor came towards him I had the full benefit of the Greek-god profile as I heard him, in his plummy drawl, ask: One to Piccadilly Circus, please! It was a Wednesday and no doubt he was going to the theatre! What glamour life possessed!

London, to me, consisted almost exclusively of Selfridges. Gosh, what a feeling of sophistication it gave me to sit on a high stool and drink a real American ice-cream soda! Then I bought a large packet of equally American peanut brittle, and prowled around the Photographic Department and other counters in the hope of seeing Gladys Cooper shopping. It was always here that Reggie and I had our hair cut. Thirty years must have elapsed since that time when first my younger brother affirmed, with utmost urbane authority, that no one in London cut hair so well as Massey. Sometimes I have migrated to Trumpers where there is always an uncanny and exclusive smell of orange hairtonic. But one is never given a welcome; one is rather grudgingly accepted as a client; and so I return to my tactful old friend in the large white emporium on the first floor of Selfridges.

The usual talk: Has Mr Jack Gordon been in lately? When was it that Mr Selfridge himself ceased to come here for his daily trim?

As Massey turned me on the revolving chair to face the light from a huge window I saw my reflection in the glass opposite: I flinched. How could it be that I looked so hideous and so old? Had I really got such baggage under my eyes? Where did I get that bloat? It was not until the end of the haircut that I was pole-axed with the greatest shock of all. Massey pivoted me around again so that my back was to the light, and he produced a hand-mirror in order that I could see if he had clipped the nape of my neck to my satisfaction. I almost keeled over the edge of the chair at the sight in the reflected glass! A semi-bald man of twice my age and size sat in my place. I had not known that the hair on the crown of my head was becoming sparse. But this was a ghastly tonsure! I felt sick, as one does when an elevator rushes too quickly through space. Men suffer just as much as women at getting old and losing their appearance; every bald man is a personal tragedy.

Massey must have gauged the stricken horror in my voice as I moaned: It cant be as bad as all that! Oh, Christ! What can I do to be saved? Massey nodded compassionately; trying to console me, but making the situation more tragic, he said: I shouldnt have let you see, should I? It was a mistake to do that, wasnt it?

I crawled away down those marble stairs. The commissionaire asked: Taxi?

No, hearse please.

THE RIVIERA

January 1955

Echoes of former glories persist along the now comparatively shabby haunts of the Cte dAzur. A garden falling into a wilderness still possesses shades of King Edward VII; a crumbling mansion is a memory of the Duke of Connaught. A tall, locked gate leads to the shuttered Villa Lopolda where Clo de Mrode, the poule de luxe with the Leonardo hair-do, gave her purity of beauty to the ugly and unpopular King Lopold. At the time of the troubles in the Belgian Congo the crowds shouted Cleopolda! at the King.

In Nice the Hotel Negresco with its wedding-cake faade, though slightly cracked, is still like icing sugar in the sun. But the vestibule is almost empty. The Promenade des Anglais is sparsely populated with a few old cronies. The reaper has taken his toll, and economics as well as fashions have brought this sad change. Perhaps Monte Carlo is the last place where one can still see a few decrepit French dandies tottering on their last legs in crowsfooted shoes, stovepipe trousers, and curled trilby hats. Their hair is ginger-dyed and artificially waved; fingers are gnarled and heavily ringed. Women-folk are mere bags of bones with kohl-rimmed, blank eyes, marmalade wigs, tired tulle and wired linen flowers. They are the last survivors of the caricatures of Sem and Capiello.

Hidden away in various parts of the rocky coast are a few bastions of the old days of Edwardian glory. Muriel Wilson is pottering among her borders of antirrhinums and larkspurs. Today her Maryland garden is a mockery of its past grandeur, and the house is seedy and sad. So much has passed since she first came out here as a dazzling beauty, bringing with her her staff of servants from Tranby Croft, of card-cheating fame. She managed to escape the German invasion of France on a coal boat which took three weeks to reach Gibraltar; but her seventy-five-year-old butler remained behind to look after the house. The Germans did him no harm; he was too old to suffer, they considered. But after they had been in occupation a year a German soldier was shot in the village, so thirty-six Frenchmen, including the aged butler, were rounded up and taken to Buchenwald. The wretched man at the time of his arrest was wearing nothing but shorts and a summer vest. He was lucky to die of pneumonia after two weeks; others suffered for years before they died.