Born January 14: Cecil Beaton

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars dressed in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as Webster's the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world in design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

(If you can tear your eyes away, study his use of ordinary backgrounds and negative space.)

   

Comments

[Sandy]

One late-summer week in the waning 1980s, when Vincent Price was in Boston to wrap up his 'Mystery!' intros for public television, he'd brought "my wife, the actress Coral Browne" (as he always put it) along. I wrote VP's intros, and I loved Coral and always looked forward to her last-week-of-taping visits each summer. Plus, I'd just read in 'Time,' in a review of Cecil Beaton's recently released diaries, that she (along with Garbo and others) had been a one-time lover of CB's. We were having lunch in the green room and I brought the subject up.
SL: "Coral, I was reading a review of Cecil Beaton's diaries..."
VP: "Careful."
CB: "Yes?"
SL: "And it said that you had had a liaison with him."
CB: "Yes, that's right."
SL: "Forgive me, but I always thought he was gay."
CB: "He may have been gay, darling, but he was like a rat up the drainpipe with me."

[fraught]

Sandy: lol, Stop you're killing me.

[columnist]

Gary Cooper was indeed a very good-looking man. It is sad to read of the secret lives gay men (and women presumably) had to live because of social mores, but good that in many places these restrictions no longer apply or matter. That said, bigotry and hatred still exist in spades in some communities, including in the dear old U S of A, when up until about 10 years ago, I never would have thought it was an issue there.

[Sandy]

Fraught: Thank you. Remember, Coral was Australian after all.

[Rosemarie]

hello, I'm doing a research project on Cecil Beaton, and i have been trying to find his portrait of "George "Dadie" Rylands" dressed as the Duchess of Malfi.. would you be able to tell me if the photo you have above (on the right) is the image i am after..? That is the image i am always coming across when i search for it.
Thanks

[Band of Thebes]

Rosemarie, apologies for not identifying the photos. In addition to Beaton's self-portrait I show (left to right) Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, and Greta Garbo in white. I think the Ryland photo you seek is here: http://gvarts.blogspot.com/2010/03/cecil-beaton-1904-1980-photographer-set.html