BEATON IN THE SIXTIES

A quintessential quidnunc chronicles his continent-hopping capers as photographer to the stars and the royals, as a designer of sets for Hollywood and Broadway, and as a fox in Celebrity’s henhouse.

Beaton (The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970–1980, 2003) was a skilled, imaginative artist—a photographer whose works were featured at the National Portrait Gallery, a designer whose clothing and sets enlivened My Fair Lady and Coco, a painter who sought ever to improve. But a writer? He rarely probes below epidermal depths, and any of his stunning photographs reproduced here are truly worth more than a thousand of his words. By far the best portions here deal with his involvement with the Broadway production of Coco in 1969, featuring a Katherine Hepburn he initially admires but grows to fear. Beaton provides an insider’s running commentary on the backstage bickering about colors and designs and sets and scenes—and, with surprising equanimity, writes about the negative reviews of the show, especially Clive Barnes’s shots at the very portions of the production for which Beaton was responsible. Also affecting are Beaton’s periodic laments about the break-up of his relationship with Kin, a San Francisco professor, who decides he wants to go back to California (after living with Beaton), where, Beaton complains, he fails to write with sufficient frequency. Beaton was at times a treacherous friend: he accepted the hospitality of aristocrats, plutocrats, and celebrities’ children—or socialized elsewhere with them—then returned to his quarters and waxed vicious in his diary. Noël Coward was “a fat old turtle”; Mick Jagger’s face was “a white, podgy, shapeless mess”; Vanessa Redgrave could look “quite hideous.” And so on. He writes respectfully, though, about Marianne Moore, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jon Voight, and a few others. Vickers, leaving nothing to chance, explains in his myriad footnotes who Richard Nixon and Queen Victoria were.

Usually fatuous, spiteful, and superficial, here and there piquant or instructive. (41 b&w photos throughout)