Homemade Cecil Beaton

"I do so want to make my name--and a full-page thing of me as the Marchioness looking like a Madonna would make the most terrific sensation and I should hold my head high all the season." There, in a diary entry made at the age of 20, is the essence of Cecil Beaton: ambitious, foppish and unstoppable. He was appearing in an undergraduate production of Pirandello's Henry IV, for which he had also designed the sets and costumes, and it is typical of the man's combination of luck and manipulation that the play was agreeably reviewed in the Spectator and witnessed by Lytton Strachey. Wherever Beaton went, celebrity seemed to hover--or was he the one who contrived to be in the slipstream of the famous?

With thoroughness and grace, Hugo Vickers, a British critic and journalist, traces the answer back to Beaton's obscure beginnings and follows it to a precipitous summit. Cecil was the grandson of a blacksmith and the son of a timber broker. There was nothing to be done about ancestry, but the future was another matter. Young Cecil confided to his diary, "Even in my dreams I long to make Mummie a society lady and not a housewife."

He attended St. Cyprian's with George Orwell and Cyril Connolly and made his way into Harrow with honors by some inventive cheating on tests. At Cambridge, he was too concerned with applause to bother about academics. In his senior year, Vickers notes, Beaton was cast in drag for a student revue. "He began to practise high kicks for his show and found himself incapable of preparing for his exam: 'I've done absolutely no work!' Then he went to London to buy bright peppermint pink chiffon for his dress."

But once in London, Cecil proved to be an iron butterfly. He clerked for his father and later for a friend of the family; in the evenings he cultivated those who could advance his name. Photography seemed the speediest escalator. His soft-focus portraits made the magazines, appeared on dust jackets and in galleries. Edith Sitwell posed for him, projecting a "haggish" aura but displaying her medieval ivory hands to great effect. Tallulah Bankhead postured against a background of balloons. He exuded charm: "Not only do I take photographs but I am an entertainer as well and this afternoon my performance was much appreciated and the audience laughed at all they should." By working assiduously for years, always looking out for the main chance, he became the overnight darling of the salons.