Word: beatonized
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AGAINST ALL HOPE, Armando Valladares A BOOK OF TRAVELLERS' TALES, assembled by Eric Newby CECIL BEATON, Hugo Vickers HOME, Witold Rybczynski KRAZY KAT, Patrick McDonnell WARTIME WRITINGS: 1939-1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupery...
...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...
This was the public Beaton. The private one could only be revealed posthumously, once the unexpurgated diaries came to light. Vickers can hardly be called indiscreet for ransacking them. After all, the diarist himself believed that his record of snobbism and social vaulting, of erotic triumphs and humiliations would make "amusing reading" someday. He was correct, but the most remarkable passages are not those of the invert. Fame was Beaton's aphrodisiac, and if heterosexuality was required for a brilliant conquest, well then, he would try that costume for a while. When he met Greta Garbo after World...
After the breakup, Beaton returned to his old inclinations. He became famous for set designs and costumes for theater and films--the ones for My Fair Lady won Oscars--and, on a tour of a San Francisco gay bar called the Toolbox, he met the 29-year-old "boy" who was to be his last great amour. The designermemoirist-photographer -artist went on to honors ranging from placement on the best-dressed list to high-priced one-man shows of his work. He acquired wealthy and titled patrons wherever he displayed his work or himself. But if he appeared elegant...
...course, there were. Beaton's photography, as Susan Sontag noted, could turn the most celebrated subjects into "over-explicit, unconvincing effigies." His drawing was often slick and derivative, and his stage work was best when it could borrow grandeur from a vanished period. But the great achievement was not in these efforts. It was for a long-running production titled Cecil Beaton!, with sets, costumes, lighting, direction and dialogue by the author. No epitaph by friend or critic could equal the one he ad-libbed for himself when a journalist reminded him that he had not been born with...