The odds were a hundred to one against him. Brought up in bourgeois Bayswater by genteel parents, Cecil Beaton was effete, pink-and-white pretty, theatrical and mother-adored, with a stodgy brother (but a couple of compliant sisters) —a cliché of post-Edwardian sniffiness, a leer through raised lorgnettes.
A humdrum early education followed by Harrow might have formed him into a pliant carbon of his timber-merchant father, but Cecil escaped this. His personality, energy and burgeoning bravery led him far and wide, and often delightfully astray. It took just a few years for him to trample those early 20th-century taboos under his winged heel, and forge his curiosity-fuelled career.
Armed with a Brownie and a box of cellophane, spun-glass wigs, beauty spots and chutzpah, he ditched the rigid formal poses of the period and carved his niche in portraiture and fashion. Swayed by the glamorous sheen of Baron de Meyer’s work, Cecil’s was a fusion of Elsie Mendl’s Louis-the-Rococo, Syrie Maugham’s bleached modernity and the vibrant notes of the jazz age.
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