October 27, 2003

Sit Still, Say Cheese and Don't Dare Leave the Room

t is a truth universally acknowledged, that an acid-tongued, note-taking gay man in proximity to great fortunes and great beauties must be in want of a publisher.

Thus Cecil Beaton, the photographer known for exquisitely glamorous (and artfully retouched), genteel portraiture, joins the ranks of Andy Warhol and Truman Capote when it comes to curtsy-and-tell writing about his friends. When his biographer and co-literary executor, Hugo Vickers, says that Beaton "gave pleasure to the world, and he did no harm," he is understating the obvious. Beaton also scratched, clawed, flattered and gave great dish.

Clearly he intended that his diaries be published; how else to explain passages like "I think about my early life and how magical all the childhood period now seems to be, and I try to think of the things I have forgotten"? But the six volumes that appeared during his lifetime were contrived to give minimal offense, as Mr. Vickers illustrates here with an amended passage about Marlene Dietrich. Original version: Dietrich is a legend; Beaton watched her enraptured; she is all artifice yet still ageless. New, gloves-off version: she suffers the effects of not-great plastic surgery around her mouth, which is now stretched too tight to smile. And: "She's a liar, an egomaniac, a bore, but she has her points."

As inevitably as swallows return to Capistrano (or as Beaton returned to play houseguest at the grandest estates and yachts of his most well-to-do friends), the often slow and innocuous "Unexpurgated Beaton" will be seized upon for its most corrosive displays of name-dropping bitchiness. On Katharine Hepburn ("a dried-up boot") alone: "In life her appearance is appalling, a raddled, rash-ridden, freckled, burnt, mottled, bleached and wizened piece of decaying matter. It is unbelievable, incredible that she can still be exhibited in public."

Elizabeth Taylor is described as "this great thick revolving mass of femininity at its rawest." Meanwhile, one of the book's snooty and high-handedly minimalist footnotes — for instance, "Bob Dylan (b. 1941), folk icon of the 60's" — sighs about Ms. Taylor and Richard Burton, her equally Beaton-loathed husband, "They were, for a while, part of the beau monde."

Then there is Princess Margaret, glimpsed by Beaton at Princess Anne's wedding in a jutting hairdo that reminded him of a teapot. "This triple-compacted chignon was a target for all passers-by to hit first from one side, then another," he writes. "The poor midgety brute" — that's Princess Margaret — "was knocked like a top, sometimes almost into a complete circle."

There is more in this vein, on a sliding scale of poisonousness that quantifies Beaton's various jealousies and resentments. ("The inferior being, Laurence Olivier" is his single favorite target.) But this book, which spans the last 10 years of Beaton's assiduously pampered life, is over 500 pages long. That leaves a lot of room between ad hominem attacks and backhanded praise of supposed friends. How pityingly he writes of Enid Bagnold, the author of "National Velvet," that "I feel sorry that she should have spent so much time writing plays at which she is no good."

The troubles with this book are that a) Beaton's acid-free observations are by no means as interesting as his snide ones, and that b) he spent an awful lot of time describing menu items and extolling the joys of gardening. His hypochondria, another much-indulged passion, does not make for riveting reading, either. And the vanity that leads him to surmise it may be time to start dying his eyelashes ("if I want emphasis") makes for similarly slow going.

The unexpurgated aspect of this book also reveals something more sour than Beaton's gossipy eagerness to slice and dice. Observations about "the usual American vermin" — and the "typical Jewish vein" of one Rothschild's conversation — are mere throwaways; meanwhile, he can wax truly rhapsodic about the right floral arrangement or "the pie crusts most romantic and beautiful." Nature looks to him like a decorative landscape painting, and his moral priorities allow for fury over the aesthetics of dinner ("Carrots with salmon!") and deep concern about the yellow fluff of Muscovy ducks at his country house. On the other hand, he can write that "by the time I got to bed, I was too exhausted to be depressed or to give a damn about Northern Ireland, Ethiopia's famine or the way the world was heading for doom."

If there is a single most damning entry here, it is the one about visiting a prison and admiring the "very chic appearance" of a man "astonishing looking with the narrowest hips, long legs, high cheekbones, a Genghis Khan mustache and beret worn over his long curly hair at just the right angle." That the man was " `in' for murder" seems to strike Beaton as only a secondary matter.

In a book that spans his life from 1970 to 1980, the aging Beaton (who was born in 1904) inevitably discusses the declines of close friends and relatives. His observations about their diminished capacities are the diaries' most poignant aspect, even if he is breathlessly quick to pounce on ways that women lose their allure. And his observations, even when unkind, are sometimes sharp enough to justify this whole enterprise. About Audrey Hepburn, so unforgettable in her Beaton "My Fair Lady" regalia: "Great animation, but my eagle eye spotted a certain amount of grimacing, which is fast making her into a caricature. She will not be a beautiful old woman."

Nor was he a beautiful old man.