Beauty and the bitch

During a 1965 cruise around the Greek islands, Cecil found himself 'appalled by how destroyed her skin has become, covered with wrinkles, double chin, but, worse, the upper lip has jagged lower and the skin has perished into little lines...'

It may be that only as a society photographer could Cecil Beaton rise above his less than aristocratic origins. One grandfather was a blacksmith; the other ran a chemist's in Kilburn. His father was in the timber business.

He attended Hampstead prep school with Evelyn Waugh, who stuck pins in him (Cecil never forgave him: 'Died of snobbery' was his reaction to the news of Waugh's death).

He went on to Harrow, where he wore silk pyjamas and rouged his face. Terrified of having to do Army drill, he bought a pair of boots with irons in them so that he could masquerade as a cripple.

His schoolfellows left him alone because they recognised him as a true original, utterly self-centred and unswerving in his determination to create a personality for himself that disguised his background.

There was nothing he could do about his father who was unashamedly 'in trade', but he was determined to turn his mother into a society lady.

In 1923, when he was 19 and at Cambridge, he began sending details of his mother's engagements to the social pages, and followed up by sending the social editor of The Times a box of cigars.

When the Tatler rang to take his mother's photograph, Cecil was so excited that he dressed up, too, on the off-chance of being photographed.

In the studio, with its magenta silk curtains and its layers of muslin used to diffuse the light, he came face to face with his vocation.

The seed had been planted in 1913 by the Beaton family nanny. She loved photography and would lay her prints on the nursery windowsill to dry in the sun with Cecil helping her.

Cecil's greed for self-publicity was all- devouring. He sent photographs of himself to the newspapers (Nanny developed them in the bath) and when that didn't work, he dressed up his sisters and sent in photographs of them.

Pictures of Nancy and Baba dressed as medieval angels were published in Vogue, and triggered Cecil's long association with the magazine.

To Cecil's sorrow, his mother never made it to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, but Cecil was the Edmund Hillary of social mountaineers. His breakthrough came when he was introduced to Stephen Tennant, a moneyed gallant who collected beautiful people and beautiful things.

Tennant belonged to a circle Cecil had dreamed about - combining theatre, fashion and the arts.

At parties, the men wore mascara, dabbed their faces with powder-puffs and screamed with joy at the sight of an acquaintance.

They were cultivated and funny; more to the point, they had all the right connections. Cecil met the arbiters of that circle, the Sitwells, and his ingeniously-lit photographs of them established his credentials as a society photographer.

He was in his early 20s and the life of the party. Tall, slender and blond, with a high, affected voice, his fancy-dress was the most elegant, his gossip the most wittily malicious and his impersonations the funniest of all the bright young things.

In his novel Decline And Fall, Evelyn Waugh pilloried him as Lennox, the photographer who takes a picture of a society woman's head from the back. It was all grist to Cecil's furiously spinning mill.

There were exhibitions of his work, and an excursion to New York where he saw Mae West on stage: 'This fat, pink, creamy, fleshy creature looked so lewd and naturally, healthily, amorously lustful that in one scene where a Spanish lover mauled her, felt her breast and buttocks, one had to cross one's legs and scream hysterically with laughter.'

Cecil's own sex life was more low-key. Appearance was everything to him, and sex was problematical because it went deeper.

He'd had male lovers since his Cambridge days, but promiscuity repelled him all his life. He also felt very insecure about his homosexuality and wrote of his feeling that he was 'a felon and an outcast'.

By 1930, anyone less like an outcast than Cecil was hard to imagine. His pictures and columns were in all the magazines and he was renting Ashcombe, a beautiful, dilapidated Georgian house on the Wiltshire downs, now owned by Madonna.

During a return visit to America, he met Greta Garbo, and fell in love with the charming, cultivated, sinisterly unpredictable Peter Watson, heir to a margarine fortune.

Peter became Cecil's grand amour. Together, or flouncingly apart, they summered with the smart set in Le Touquet, Paris, Cannes, Monte Carlo and Venice.

Back in London, just to make Peter jealous, Cecil had an affair with the uninhibited Doris Castlerosse, who had married the Daily Mail gossip columnist Lord Castlerosse.

At a weekend party, the house guests tiptoeing upstairs heard Cecil squeal: 'Oh goody, goody, goody!' as Doris instructed him in the arts of love-making. Lord Castlerosse, seeing them together in a restaurant, commented sourly: 'I never knew Doris was a lesbian.'

Cecil escaped from Doris to New York in 1933, after his first Royal sitting - Prince George (later Duke of Kent) - which opened doors to more American commissions.

In November 1936, he photographed King Edward VIII's mistress, Wallis Simpson, and mischievously offered to pose her against an ermine background.

Later, he was invited to take the wedding portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in France. As always, Cecil focused on appearances: the Duke had bleary eyes and a disfigured thumbnail; the Duchess had broken out in spots.

Towards the end of his life, when the bile rose to the surface, he wrote of this woman whose commission had established his career: 'The Duchess came in and behaved like a mad Goya.

'She is more than ever a personality and a character but God, what she looks like - her face so pulled up that the mouth stretches from ear to ear.'

In 1938, came Cecil's first real setback. To a drawing for American Vogue called New York Society - an explosion of trombones, telephones, party girls and swizzle sticks - he added fluttering newspapers in which were some anti-Semitic phrases in microscopic type.

The presses were stopped and Cecil was sacked, despite his protestations that he was not anti-Jewish, just anti-Hollywood. None of his work could be published in the U.S., and it was several years before he was given any work in American theatre or films.

It could have ruined him if World War II had not intervened, and if Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) had not summoned him to Buckingham Palace to take pictures of her in her Norman Hartnell outfits.

This session, the most significant in Cecil's career, was intended to last for 20 minutes and ended up taking several hours.

It began a friendship which continued almost until his death - although that didn't stop Cecil waspishly describing her as only needing a wand to fly to the top of the Christmas tree.

During the war, he was employed by the Ministry of Information to record its effects at home, and his wartime pictures and portraits of the Queen restored him to Vogue's favour - and to a decent wage.

He continued to travel widely. In New Delhi, he photographed Lord Mountbatten lying with him on a double bed, their figures reflected in a ceiling mirror.

In China, he smoked opium and snapped Chinese celebrities. At the end of the war, he published albums of his travels - some of the more than 30 books he wrote.

By now he was desperate to be recognised for something more than his pictures, and his chance came when he was invited to design the sets and costumes for a lavish production of Lady Windermere's Fan in the West End.

The ecstatic reviews gave him the foothold in the theatre he longed for.

In 1946, Cecil met Greta Garbo for the second time in New York. She looked a little older and 'the scrawny hands a bit weathered, the ankles and feet a bit poor and bumpy-looking'. But he fell in love at once, and made the first of several offers to marry her.

It was the first skirmish in a long and eventually fruitless courtship of someone thought to be the most desirable woman in the world. Back in England, he bought Reddish, a beautiful Queen Anne house near Salisbury, and invited Garbo to visit.

She came to London but refused to see him. Then, in New York a few months later, she came to his room in the Plaza Hotel - and after months of depression and doubt, 'we were suddenly together in unexplained, unexpected and inevitable intimacy', he wrote.

'I was hardly able to bridge the gulf so quickly and unexpectedly. I had to throw my mind back to the times in Reddish House when in my wildest dreams I had invented the scenes that were now taking place.'

Garbo told him she loved him, and Cecil believed her, but she always went back to her devoted business agent and shadow, Georges Schlee. Each betrayed the other.

Garbo allowed Cecil to believe that one day she might marry him. Cecil quietly wrote everything down in his diary. Their New York relationship followed a pattern of walks in Central Park and sex in the afternoon.

Cecil thought of her as 'half-boy/half-woman'.

Back in England, Cecil set about turning Reddish into a marital home, taking his inspiration from his Lady Windermere's Fan designs. He had a long time to wait.

Not until October 1951 did she arrive. When he asked if she would marry him, Garbo thought she probably would - but she treated her two months with him as nothing more than a holiday.

If Cecil had not been so charmed by appearances, he would have realised that Garbo's genius for film acting did not extend to real life.

Perpetually dissatisfied with herself, she acted the lover without having the capacity to love, and Cecil's attempt to have an emotionally honest relationship was doomed to fail.

Professionally, Cecil's greatest triumph still lay ahead. Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe wanted him to design the costumes for My Fair Lady in 1955 because, as Lerner wrote, it was 'difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or the Edwardian era designed him'.

He repeated that success with the film version, which won him his second and third Oscar for costume design and art direction, the first having come for his costumes for Gigi in 1958.

Next to My Fair Lady and the exhibitions of his photographs, it is Cecil Beaton's Diaries which will survive out of all that immensely productive career.

Six volumes were published in his lifetime, carefully weeded for offence. At his death in 1980, aged 76, he left 145 more exercise books of closely-written diaries.

They reflect Cecil's love-hate relationship with English society, that hard, glittering, self-protective, backbiting, back- scratching enclave which lived by different rules and was nourished by snobbery, gossip and repartee.

As the years passed, and he became the icon of fashion, the eye he turned on society, always penetrating, became more unforgiving.

Lord Snowdon, as a younger rival photographer, almost induced apoplexy in Cecil by trumping his hard-won social eminence by marrying Princess Margaret.

In the Diaries, Snowdon becomes a 'common little man', 'common beyond belief' and finally the 'horrid husband'.

Cecil was enormously impressed to meet Mick Jagger and talk with him in Marrakesh about LSD.

He thought him terribly sexy, but when Jagger appeared by the swimming pool next morning, Cecil was appalled.

'His face a white, podgy, shapeless mess, eyes very small, nose very pink and spreading, hair sandy dark. He wore Chanel Bois du Rose.

'His figure, his hands and arms were incredibly feminine. He looked like a self-conscious suburban young lady.'

In 1969, he met Vanessa Redgrave, who had recently starred in Karel Reisz's film Isadora.

'Very beautiful and young one moment, quite hideous the next,' noted the diarist. 'Her lips the best feature, pale, young, sometimes wore glasses with a pad to protect her nose, hair a mess, dressing gown a mess, on strange terms of intimacy with the fat, moustachioed driver of her car.

'They kiss goodnight in a huge embrace. He says he'll be back later. What can it mean?'

For Cecil, looks were all. But he had passion and courage too, and when his own looks began to fade, and his body to fail, he still worked on.

After a stroke, he learned how to write, paint and photograph with his left hand.

Since his death, unusually, his reputation has grown: his photographs and sketches sell for much more than they did in his lifetime.

He captured the colours, costumes and faces of much of the 20th century, and, gazing into the mirror, he was as critical of himself as of all the rest.

Beaton In The Sixties: More Unexpurgated Diaries, ed. Hugo