2021-07-18
Encounters with the rich and famous alongside the noted photographer, painter, and costume designer.
In 1979, impressed with Vickers’ recent book, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) invited the author to become his biographer. Although Beaton died within weeks, the young author ended up with access to voluminous papers, diaries, and letters as well as to Beaton’s celebrated friends. Beaton, Vickers writes gratefully, “guided me (albeit posthumously) into a PhD in lifestyle, new values, new experiences, new challenges.” Setting to work immediately, he followed Beaton’s footsteps in London, New York, Paris, Monte Carlo, and San Francisco, keeping journals of his interviews, often conducted in grand country houses or sumptuous apartments. Mining those 51 volumes, Vickers has created a lively, gossipy portrait of Beaton’s glittering world. “For Cecil Beaton,” he writes, “every day was a birthday, every afternoon a matinée, the red velvet curtains opening on a new set, every evening a first night, champagne waiting in the wings.” Vickers admits to being occasionally star-struck: Princess Diana, for example, made him feel “as though one had met the girl of one’s dreams, never believing such a thing possible.” Audrey Hepburn, whose costumes Beaton designed when she played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, was “so sweet and adorable and so nice about Cecil.” Grace Kelly was “very friendly, simple, easy to talk to, open, eager to help.” Vickers can be catty: Princess Margaret “lived up to expectations. She looks like a beautiful monkey, with very pretty eyes, good and unmoving hair and pouches under the eyes.” Her laugh, he adds, was vulgar, “done on purpose.” Sir John Gielgud, less intimidating than Vickers anticipated, “smoked a cigarette almost in the style of one who expected his headmaster to catch him.” For the edification of contemporary readers, Vickers supplies footnotes to identify the many individuals whose fame has dimmed.
An assemblage of star-studded recollections of a faded world.