Word: beatonized
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Little Cecil Beaton, aged three, hopped in bed with his "Mummie" one fine English morning and ran his eye over the day's mail that lay scattered on the eiderdown. There, in the shape of a photographic postcard of a popular actress, Cecil Beaton saw his fate. "The beauty of it," he recalls in Photobiography, "caused my heart to leap...My passion for Miss Lily Elsie and my interest in photography were thus engendered at the same moment...
...Cecil Beaton never got over his boyhood crushes on Miss Lily Elsie and photography. He pursued the latter with such relentlessness that he became one of the world's biggest clicks in fashion and society photography. Beaton's pen portrait of Beaton, like those he makes with his Rolleiflex, shows such a dazzle of limelight about the subject's head that at times he seems not merely Beatonized, but beatified. Nevertheless, his book is a charming tattletale about the semiprivate life of a sort of celluloid Cellini; and the tale is adorned with plenty of gossip about...
Corpse on the Linoleum. All during his adolescence Beaton kept snapping Kodak pictures of his Mummie and his two sisters. At Harrow, he found a willing subject in a schoolmate, and posed him, early one morning, half nude in the headmaster's garden. The headmaster's wife witnessed the scene, and Beaton took no more neoclassic pictures at Harrow...
Cambridge was more tolerant of Beaton's talents, but Beaton's father, a timber merchant, was not. After Cambridge, Cecil was put to work for a Mr. Schmiegelow, typing invoices for bags of cement. A young worldling of his acquaintance took pity. "Take it easy," he advised, "and become a friend of the Sitwells...
...Beaton did. Soon he had his first show (full of such surrealisms as the famous photograph of Edith Sitwell-as a corpse on a strip of linoleum), and became notorious overnight as the wild man of British photography. In a few years puckish Cecil had captivated a good share of the rich society-photography trade in New York as well as in London, and had published a book of his photographs. One of Cecil's subjects, Lady Cunard, was so displeased with the book that she set her copy afire in the midst of a luncheon party, then seized...