By Nicolas Kennedy
Photographer, artist, designer and socialite, Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born in Hampstead, London, on January 14, 1904.
His father was a very prosperous timber merchant, his mother was the daughter of a blacksmith. Like so many children of that era born into nouveau riche families, Beaton found it hard to reconcile himself with the reality that he came from a family of merchants only one generation removed from laborers. He began keeping a diary at an early age; in it he wrote “Even in my dreams I long to make Mummie a society lady and not a housewife” Beaton’s dreams were important to him.
Beaton’s nanny owned a camera…a Kodak 3A…. which she taught him how to use. Even at eleven years of age, he took to the camera easily and often had his mother and sisters sit for him. He continued to take photograph, mainly portraits of his family and friends, during his time at preparatory school at St. Cyprian’s and later at Harrow and Cambridge. At Heath Mount Preparatory School, Hampstead, and St Cyprian’s, Eastbourne, Beaton was given the freedom to explore his theatrical and artistic interests.
1926 proved an auspicious year for Beaton, as he entered the orbit of prominent people who responded with sympathy to his artificial aesthetic. On his arrival in New York on 9 November 1928, Beaton compared it with Venice and found Venice wanting: this is essentially modern, utilitarian and stark, and yet it possesses all the glamour of eighteenth-century palaces’.
A new continent afforded him a fresh start and, as a contributor to Vogue for over a year, he visited its New York offices on his first full day in the city.
When Beaton was summoned to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, in 1939, it must have felt like the summit of achievement for the middle-class snob’ desperate to get into society.
The event was a great success in itself, with praise in the press for the photographs, but also the starting point for Beaton to become the Royal photographer of choice.
It was he who photographed Princess Elizabeth in her uniform of Honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards in 1942, and he who was chosen to record her coronation in 1953.
After the Second World War, Beaton continued as before, albeit altering his style to fit with changing times. He also earned acclaim for his costume designs, winning Oscars for ‘Gigi in 1957 and ‘My Fair Lady’ in 1964.
Beaton’s brilliant eye, theatrical persona, ruthless ambition and addiction to social advancement kept him in work for over six decades. From Stephen Tennant and the Sitwell’s to Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones, from 1920’s flappers to Twiggy, Beaton straddled the 20th century, recording its heroes and starlets, fashions and tastes.
Beaton was almost as much photographed as he photographed others. He was one of the first to raise the role of portrait photographer from a man with a black cloth who entered by the tradesman’s entrance to a man who was asked to stay to lunch. By the time that one of his profession (Tony Armstrong-Jones) married the Queen’s sister in 1960, the status of photographer was assured – and films like Blow Up, not to mention the antics of David Bailey and Patrick Lichfield in the 1960’s, did nothing but enhance it. But Beaton hated to be thought of as merely a photographer. It came too easily to him. He had more earnest aspirations; above all, a love of the theater coursed through his veins. He tried for 30 years to write a passable play and failed every time. None the less, he enjoyed an important role in the theatrical arts as a designer of sets and costumes for stage, screen, ballet and opera.
The costumes of My Fair Lady, those subtle and outrageously funny black-and-white Ascot affairs, are the most remembered, but the best work he did was in the film Gigi, where he was forced to transfer his childhood love of Edwardian England to the world of Belle Epoque Paris. But there was more. Beaton moved easily and elegantly through many worlds of the 20th century. He was a traveler, arbiter of taste and fashion, war photographer, painter and exceptionally wicked caricaturist. He was able to mix with actors, painters, musicians, film stars, society figures and, later in life, the wilder representatives of the so-called “Peacock Revolution” of the 1960’s. He managed to elevate himself from being a star-struck young man gazing at his idols in the street to a favored guest at their tables. “He made you feel you were special by entertaining him,” said the American socialite Betsy Bloomingdale, a friend of Nancy Reagan. That is itself a considerable art.
In January of 1980, Cecil Beaton died at Reddish House, Broad Chalk, Wiltshire, on January 18, 1980. He will always be remembered for his huge influence on the world of photography and fashion. His incredible works personified elegance and grace – but his personal behavior was at times, anything but.
