Word: beatonized
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...Cecil Beaton, for whose camera she seemed to have been invented, described her as "a tall, graceful scarecrow with the hands of a mediaeval saint." She appeared to have sprung fully formed from the battlements and spires of her childhood home, Renishaw Hall, like a figure in a tapestry...
...Britain's longtime touchstone of taste and guru of grace, he prided himself on the beau geste. So it was not surprising when the will of Sir Cecil Beaton, who died in January at 76, was read that a special friend had been singularly remembered. After monetary bequests and disposition of paintings, photographs and papers accumulated in a lifetime of photography, writing and theater, Beaton made another gift. To Actress Greta Garbo, now 74, who in the 1940s rebuffed Bachelor Beaton's tender of love and marriage, went a remembrance: an exquisite oil of one red rose...
NONFICTION: Fin-de-Siecle Vienna, Carl E. Schorske ∙ My Many Years, Arthur Rubinstein ∙ Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, edited by Richard Buckle ∙ Show People, Kenneth Tynan ∙ The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey ∙ The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe ∙ White House Years, Henry Kissinger
...Beaton dines with Oscar Wilde's son, who tells him that when his father was disgraced, society was so outraged that even dogs called Oscar were renamed. He is with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor just before their wedding, and notes how hurt and surprised that naive gentleman was that so few of his friends had accepted invitations. He describes his rather comical romance with Greta Garbo, in which both of them circled like brilliant birds, not wanting to muss their pretty plumage with what would inevitably be a messy embrace...
Throughout, Beaton writes with a gift for image and metaphor. One woman has skin "as bright and smooth as the inside of a shell"; another "exudes the friendliness and sympathy of a firelit tea in winter." Virginia Woolf compared her diary to a "disheveled, rambling plant." Beaton's is more like a topiary, carefully trimmed to his own aristocratic profile. - Gerald Clarke