The Beaton generation

By ROBIN MUIR

Beaton did not consider his first success an auspicious start. He was thrilled when a portrait of the distinguished don-to-be, George "Dadie" Rylands, was published by Vogue in 1924 but also surprised, because, as he recalled years later: "It was a slightly out-of-focus snapshot of him as Webster's Duchess of Malfi standing in the sub-aqueous light outside the men's lavatory of the ADC Theatre at Cambridge."

Nevertheless, it marked the beginning of Beaton's glittering career. From then, until shortly before his death in 1980, he was seen as one of the great creative figures of the 20th century.

Beaton, who was born in 1904, was tireless as a fashion illustrator, a witty caricaturist of social mores, a writer and stylist and commentator on taste; he won three Oscars for costume and design; he kept acutely forthright diaries; he was a theatre designer of world renown; he wrote plays and adaptations; and he was a self-taught garden designer and an enthusiastic horticulturist.

But his genius lay in fashion and portrait photography. People of consequence sat for Beaton - from Picasso to Edward VIII, Augustus John to Keith Richards, Winston Churchill to Rudolph Nureyev, Coco Chanel to David Hockney, Fred Astaire to Andy Warhol.

He cajoled his friend, Lord Mountbatten, to lie with him on a divan so he could photograph their reflection in a mirrored ceiling, and he persuaded the normally recalcitrant Greta Garbo to sit for an epic session.

His wide-ranging career, for which Beaton was knighted in 1972, lost momentum only after a debilitating stroke two years later. His famous memory became impaired. In conversation with a friend, Sir Michael Duff, he apparently described the Queen Mother as, "You know, that friend of your's whose daughter does a very important job."

Beaton recovered a little and, in the year before his death, had recovered sufficiently to learn to paint and write with his left hand and to photograph the couture collections again for French Vogue.

The Duchess of Malfi picture, which launched his meteoric career, is lost but the self-portrait with Mountbatten has just been shown in an exhibition at Sotheby's in London, Beaton at Large, and Cecil Beaton Portraits continues at the National Portrait Gallery until the end of May.

That any of Beaton's vintage prints still exist (with their negatives in pristine condition) is largely thanks to the auction house and its then expert-in-charge of photographs, Philippe Garner.

After his stroke, Beaton became anxious about financial security for his old age and, in 1976, entered into negotiations with Garner. In an unprecedented step for an auction house, Garner acquired Beaton's archive.

Portraits of the royal family were excluded and five decades of prints held by Vogue in London, Paris and New York. Garner, who had almost singlehandedly invented the photographic auction, assiduously oversaw the archive's preservation and partial dispersal, so Beaton's only tangible assets, and what he considered his life's work, would ensure him an annual income.

"Even from my teenage years," says Garner, "Beaton had been this heroic figure in British creative and cultural life. And that enthusiasm was crucial when the opportunity to make the purchase arose. It was a treasure of considerable international importance."

The first of five auctions was held in 1977 and it was a resounding success. The last took place in 1980, by which time Beaton was dead. But many of his extraordinary documents, even then relics from a lost age, remained in the care of Sotheby's. These included portraits of the Sitwells, a youthful Stephen Tennant, the striking shipping heiress Nancy Cunard, the shimmering society beauty Paula Gellibrand, Marquesa de Casa Maury (who Vaselined her eyelids for extra shimmer) and the exquisite actress and writer Diana Cooper.

In the 1920s, Beaton's recall for a name was at its sharpest. He left Cambridge without a degree and coped with salaried employment (in his father's timber business) for eight days.

He designed book jackets and costumes for charity matinees, learning photography at the studio of Paul Tanqueray, until Vogue took him on regularly in 1927. So rapid was his ascent at Vogue that, had he not been so mercurial and capricious, he might have made a superb editor-in-chief, and it was rumoured he was on the list of candidates in 1940.

But an incident that had occurred two years earlier put paid to any real ambitions there. He treated the cause of his troubles airily but in truth it was shocking enough to have halted his curve at Vogue dead in its tracks and to haunt him for years afterwards.

Beaton's arrival, fashion magazines in general, and Vogue in particular, relied on imported photographs from the US, most abundantly the decorative, soft-focus tableaux made popular by Baron de Meyer. These were supplemented with more restrained contributions from the society portraitists of London.

Beaton was, at last, a photographer whom Vogue could call its own. His photographic style was a seamless blend of Edwardian stage portraiture and European avant-gardism that was made British by an almost forensic examination of upper-class modes and manners.

In 1926 Beaton had met Edith Sitwell, the striking daughter of Sir George, and declared: "Here was the apotheosis of all I loved. With an enthusiasm that I felt I could never surpass, I photographed Edith playing ring-a-ring-of-roses with her brothers, plucking the strings of a harp and wearing an 18th-century turban and looking like a Zoffany, as in a huge four-poster bed she accepted morning coffee from a coloured attendant."

His world of pampered make-believe cushioned by a large private income, and Edith's eccentricities influenced Beaton as much as the cartes-de-visite of Edwardian music-hall actresses from his boyhood.

Under the influence of theatricality, he developed a vivid photographic (and personal) style: "My pictures became more and more rococo and surrealist," he recalled.

"Society women as well as mannequins were photographed in the most flamboyant poses, in ecstatic or mystical states, sometimes with the melodramatic air of a Lady Macbeth caught up in a cocoon of tulle ... ladies of the upper crust were to be seen in Vogue fighting their way out of a hat box or breaking through a huge sheet of white paper ... Chinese lanterns, doilies or cutlet frills, fly whisks, sporrans, eggbeaters or stars of all shapes found their way into hysterical and ridiculous pictures."

Beaton is as much known for these tableaux as for his Oscar-winning costumes for My Fair Lady and Gigi. But in the years before World War II and even for a while afterwards, Hollywood was ignoring Beaton. And it was all to do with the unfortunate incident.

The scandal erupted on January 24, 1938, and concerned the lettering on an illustration by Beaton for a society piece in US Vogue. Barely discernible without a magnifying glass was the slogan, "Mr R Andrew's Ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damn kikes in town".

A storm of indignation ensued. For days, accusations of anti-Semitism would not die down and journalists crowded Beaton's doorstep. The photographer did little to defuse the situation. Eventually, he was summoned to the apartment of Conde Nast, Vogue's proprietor, where his resignation was demanded. The following day, with Vogue's switchboard jammed, Nast pulped 130,000 copies of his magazine. As major advertisers prepared a boycott and Jewish organisations protested, Nast asked Beaton to leave town.

"You plunged me, as a publisher," he wrote, "into a political and racial situation completely out of character with Vogue and entirely at variance with, and distasteful to, my own feelings."

Beaton's articles were axed, photos dropped and, back in London, he was told he would not be designing the costumes for Orson Welles' production of Henry IV. The affair haunted him into the 1960s.

Beaton was especially unwelcome in Hollywood and it was the mid-1950s before he began to work there with any regularity. He was not popular with his peers, "gathering enemies", as Truman Capote put it, "as some people gather roses".

War probably saved Beaton's reputation. As a photographer attached to the Ministry of Information, he leapt at the chance to promote the British war effort. Though he never came under enemy fire, his photographs were vital to morale.

One, a portrait of 3-year-old Eileen Dunne, a Blitz survivor sitting up in her hospital bed, her head heavily bandaged, her hands clutching a teddy bear, made the cover of Life magazine and was pivotal for galvanising US public opinion in favour of Europe.

Beaton's war efforts moved and tired him, leaving him with little appetite for fashion in the dismal years afterwards. He argued with his editor at British Vogue and, in 1955, his contract was terminated - despite the anti-Semitic episode, it had been signed every year since the 1920s.

In the 1960s he enjoyed a renaissance, becoming friends with such figures as David Hockney, Mick Jagger and David Bailey. And even after his death his influence has continued, inspiring photographers including Mario Testino and Johnny Shand-Kydd. All have found in Beaton a link to an age of vanished elegance.

- INDEPENDENT