Cecil Beaton was one of the great twentieth-centurytastemakers. A photographer, artist, writer and designer for morethan fifty years, he was at the center of the worlds of fashion,society, theater and film. The Unexpurgated Beaton bringstogether for the first time the never-before-published diaries from1970 to 1980 and, unlike the six slim volumes of diaries publishedduring his lifetime, these have been left uniquely unedited.
Hugo Vickers, the executor of Beaton’s estate and the author ofhis acclaimed biography, has added extensive and fascinating notesthat are as lively as the diary entries themselves. As one Londonreviewer wrote, “Vickers’ waspish footnotes are the salt on theside of the dish.” Beaton treated his other published diaries likehis photographs, endlessly retouching them, but, for this volume,Vickers went back to the original manuscripts to find the unediteddiaries.
Here is the photographer for British and American Vogue,designer of the sets and costumes for the play and film My FairLady and the film Gigi, with a cast of characters frommany worlds: Bianca Jagger, Greta Garbo, David Hockney, TrumanCapote, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, Mae West, ElizabethTaylor, Marlene Dietrich, Rose Kennedy and assorted Rothschilds,Phippses and Wrightsmans; in New York, San Francisco, Palm Beach,Rio and Greece, on the Amalfi coast; at shooting parties in theEnglish countryside, on yachts, at garden parties at BuckinghamPalace, at costume balls in Venice, Paris or London.
Beaton had started as an outsider and “developed the power toobserve, first with his nose pressed up against the glass,” andthen later from within inner circles. Vickers has said, “his eagleeye missed nothing,” and his diaries are intuitive, malicious (hetook a “relish in hating certain figures”), praising and awestruck.Truman Capote once said “the camera will never be invented thatcould capture or encompass all that he actually sees.”
The Unexpurgated Beaton is a book that is not only a greatread and wicked fun but a timeless chronicle of our age.
【作者简介】
Hugo Vickers is the author of Gladys, Duchess ofMarlborough; Cecil Beaton; Vivien Leigh; Loving Garbo; andAlice, Princess Andrew of Greece, among other books.He lives in London and Hampshire with his wife and his threechildren.
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