Word: cecile
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...make my name--and a full-page thing of me as the Marchioness looking like a Madonna would make the most terrific sensation and I should hold my head high all the season." There, in a diary entry made at the age of 20, is the essence of Cecil Beaton: ambitious, foppish and unstoppable. He was appearing in an undergraduate production of Pirandello's Henry IV, for which he had also designed the sets and costumes, and it is typical of the man's combination of luck and manipulation that the play was agreeably reviewed in the Spectator and witnessed...
With thoroughness and grace, Hugo Vickers, a British critic and journalist, traces the answer back to Beaton's obscure beginnings and follows it to a precipitous summit. Cecil was the grandson of a blacksmith and the son of a timber broker. There was nothing to be done about ancestry, but the future was another matter. Young Cecil confided to his diary, "Even in my dreams I long to make Mummie a society lady and not a housewife...
...once in London, Cecil proved to be an iron butterfly. He clerked for his father and later for a friend of the family; in the evenings he cultivated those who could advance his name. Photography seemed the speediest escalator. His soft-focus portraits made the magazines, appeared on dust jackets and in galleries. Edith Sitwell posed for him, projecting a "haggish" aura but displaying her medieval ivory hands to great effect. Tallulah Bankhead postured against a background of balloons. He exuded charm: "Not only do I take photographs but I am an entertainer as well and this afternoon my performance...
...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 a silver spoon in his mouth. True, Beaton acknowledged. Then he added...