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

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.

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?).