Customer Reviews

The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries as He Wrote Them, 1970-1980

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It should be judged for what it is, not what it could have been or what one thinks it should be. It is the diary of an aging aesthete: of course he is snide & jaded during his winter years. To his credit Beaton has a wonderful writing style, and uses woebegone turns of phrases that are today amusing to hear. You can sense in reading the 1970s how grand his life must have been in previous decades when the Gratin still impressed him, before he became fatigued by all those years in their gilt parlors.

For mere mortals like me it is interesting to learn the attitudes and mores, and to have conveyed the exactitudes of his judgements -- which are quite harsh. He expected more of the super-rich; i.e., He was shocked by the Baroness de Rothschild's habit of referring to surrealist masterpieces by their current owners, and rightly so. I think it is only he among a select few, who could level such abuses at these exalted personages, and we should be thankful we can read them. Of course he can be outrageous and camp and cruel to the point of being ludicrous, as in his famous passage about Elizabeth Taylor looking "like a peasant in Peru suckling her young." But this is why I bought the book! He does have some good things to say about some people. He has wonderful things to say about nature, about gardens, about birds. Truly, references to flowers throughout the tome were always scintillating. Flowers were the true superstars of his world and it was good to see something deeply pleased him; blooms, well-drawn gardens were the utlimate chic to him, usually beyond reproach (except some showy flowers Queen Mary would have rolled over in her grave to see). Yes, a very good read for the snob at heart. Chockablock with culture and 20's 30's 40's and 50s references. He could have said more about Vreeland, Dali and Warhol. He didn't give Diana half as much attention as I thought she'd get. Oh well.

This final volume of Cecil Beaton's diary, which takes us through the photographer-designer-artist-bon vivant's final years, heartily makes one wish that his earlier journals could be re-released similarly unexpurgated. Beaton waxes evil about (among others) Katharine Hepburn, worries about the aging and death of friends and contemporaries (not to mention his own), and records his sometimes unlikely encounters with seventies pop culture. The book is satisfying both as a good, dishy read on its own and as the summing up of a notable artist's long, productive, and generally fascinating creative life (how many people, after all, got to photograph one of Queen Victoria's daughters AND Viva?).

Mr. Beaton's diary offers several entertaining passages, but it is mainly a chronicle of his physical complaints, his declining health, and sadly, his bodily functions. Boring and depressing. If you really want to read this book, wait for the paperback.

Much of the diary deals with its author's dismay at the ravages of time on himself and his contemporaries. But if you've followed Beaton's life through the Vickers biography and the earlier years of diaries, you must read this book. What I missed at the end was any sort of epilogue revealing the sort of funeral Beaton had designed for himself -- or indeed, whether he'd even done so. The book mentions one song he'd asked be performed, but no other mention of the last rites appears. But I can't imagine a theatrical designer leaving his own farewell appearance to the whim of others.

This volume represents that last of a lifetime of diary publications. It's a wonderful snapshot of the final decade of the famous photographer's life. It's also somewhat of a snapshot of the last of the style and taste makers that were still living from the 1920s and the glorious time between the two world wars. Beaton retains his wanderlust and true joie de vivre with the only tough slogging being his prostate surgery and the endurance of the painful headaches that preceded his debilitating stroke. There is a real feeling of loss at the end for both the photographer/artist and the era he represented.

I eagerly read this book because of the title. I still can't pronounce the word.

Shades of Truman Capote (who is mentioned in Beaton's diaries a few times)! But this wasn't quite the "bitch-fest" we were all hoping for. I hated to read about Diana Cooper's decline, and all the others, the Edwardian actresses, the Windsors, and then a few snippets tucked in about the Guinesses and Rothschilds. Beaton is delightful when his subjects are still well away from death's door, but so many of his entries deal with the impending death and decline of former bright lights. I skipped the pages on his operation. Vickers overplayed the title on this one. I hardly think its worth publishing, though I'm sure he'll make a mint with the delightful P.L. Travers -tyle cover.

I thought this would be fun, that through the bitchiness there would be nuggets of delicious information. However, Mr. Beaton's continual references to Jewishness prove that the famous 1937 incident where an anti-Semitic word was discovered in a drawing of his was not just an isolated abberation, but revealing of his bigotry. Such words as "Jew," Jewess" or "Jewishness" appear many times -- examples: "(Leonard Bernstein" tossed his old Jewish locks"; "(Nureyes) gave me a look of boredom at the way the Jewess Vogue editor carried on"; "(Cecile de Rothschild) in typical Jewish vein, prodded and probed" -- the Rothschilds are a particular target -- and there are many more examples. This is the last Beaton book I read -- horrible man!