The Happy Years (1944-48)

by Cecil Beaton

  THE HAPPY YEARS

  1944-48

  Cecil Beaton’s Diaries

  Volume Three

  Table of Contents

  Foreword to the New Edition

  Preface Note

  Part I: London and Paris, 1944-5

  Part II: England, 1945

  Part III: New York, 1946

  Part IV: Designs for Ballet, 1946

  Part V: California and New York, 1946

  Part VI: Fresh Fields in England, 1947

  Part VII: New York Idyll, 1947-8

  Part VIII: Californian Farewell, 1948

  ALSO IN THE CECIL BEATON’S MEMOIRS SERIES

  Foreword to the New Edition

  I welcome the republication of the six volumes of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, which so delighted readers between 1961 and 1978. I don’t know if Cecil himself re-read every word of his manuscript diaries when selecting entries, but I suspect he probably did over a period of time. Some of the handwritten diaries were marked with the bits he wanted transcribed and when it came to the extracts about Greta Garbo, some of the pages were sellotaped closed. Even today, in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, some of the original diaries are closed from public examination, though to be honest, most of the contents are now out in the open.

  The only other person who has read all the manuscript diaries is me. It took me a long time to get through them, partly because his handwriting was so hard to read. I found that if I read one book a day, I had not done enough. If I did two in a day, then I ended up with a splitting headache! This in no way deflected from the enormous enjoyment in reading them.

  Altogether there are 145 original manuscript diaries dating from Cecil going up to Cambridge in 1922 until he suffered a serious stroke in 1974. A few fragments of an earlier Harrow diary survive, and there is a final volume between 1978 and 1980, written in his left hand. 56 of these cover his time at Cambridge, some of which appear in The Wandering Years (1961). 22 books cover the war years, and were used for The Years Between (1965), and nine books record his My Fair Lady experiences, some of which appear in The Restless Years (1976) and were the basis for Cecil Beaton’s Fair Lady (1964). These six volumes probably represent about ten per cent of what Cecil Beaton actually wrote.

  The diaries attracted a great deal of attention when first published. James Pope-Hennessy wrote of Cecil’s ‘thirst for self-revelation’, adding that the unpublished volumes were surely ‘the chronicle of our age’. Referring to Cecil’s diaries, and those of Eddy Sackville-West, he also commented: ‘We could not be hoisted to posterity on two spikier spikes.’

  I have to tell the reader that these volumes were not always quite the same as the originals. Some extracts were rewritten with hindsight, some entries kaleidoscoped and so forth. Certain extracts in these six volumes were slightly retouched in places, in order that Cecil could present his world to the reader exactly as he wished it presented. And none the worse for that.

  Hugo Vickers

  January 2018

  Preface Note

  I started jotting down diary notes when I was still at Harrow School. But it was as a bewildered first-year undergraduate at Cambridge that I took to keeping a diary in earnest: in this my private and most trivial thoughts were confined. And so began the habit of a lifetime.

  Never while writing my diaries did it enter my head (not, at least, until recently) that these outpourings might one day be published. It was only eight years ago that I began to re-read my notebooks and realized, to my own surprise, that these youthful records of life in the twenties and thirties might have some public interest as a piece of personal period history. I decided to publish them.

  Then one thing led to another. That first volume was honest and frank, even if painful, and was not doctored for publication. Subsequent volumes, I was sure, must continue in the same vein. What I did not foresee was that time would so quickly catch up with me, and that soon I would be publishing intimate descriptions of people who might think my disclosures slightly premature.

  Some who appear in this volume may consider that things that were said, or happened, twenty years ago are still not sufficiently a part of history to be aired in print. If I have offended any friends I hope they will believe that it was far from my wish to do so. Least of all have I wanted to cause any pain to the woman who occupied my thoughts (and the bulk of my diary entries) in the years just after the war. I have tried to remain truthful, and I hope to publish future diaries. But if I were to omit the central character from this present volume it would cause a complete hiatus, and denigrate a relationship that was, for ten years, meaningful and pertinent, and reduce it to the level of an episode. Moreover, it would not be natural or justifiable to myself — and still less to her — if I effaced my recollections of this remarkable person.

  C.B. 1968

  Part I: London and Paris, 1944-5

  LONDON IN 1944

  September 1944: 8 Pelham Place, London

  The flying bombs and those beastly V2s, exploding from out of nowhere, have created new havoc in London since I left for the Far East nearly a year ago. After travelling home via the States and enjoying for a spell the glitter of New York life, I was stunned to see such wreckage to poor inoffensive streets which contain no more important a target than the pub at the crossroads. Miles of pathetic little dwellings have become nothing but black windowless façades. Old, torn posters hang from scabrous walls, the leaves on trees have changed to yellow under a thick coating of cement powder. Nothing has been given a wash or a lick of paint. Everything’s so shabby and sordid. The poverty displayed in shop windows — those that still have glass in them — reminds me of Moscow in 1935 and is just as depressing.

  After celebrating the liberation of Paris in New York I thought that things might be looking up a bit everywhere. But no. War in England is more total than ever, hardships always increasing. People look terribly tired and tend to be touchy and quarrelsome about small things.

  Yet, in spite of all the horror and squalor, London has added beauty. In its unaccustomed isolation above the wastes of rubble, St Paul’s is seen standing to supreme advantage, particularly splendid at full moon. The moon in the blackout, with no other light but the stars to vie with, makes an eighteenth-century engraving of our streets. St James’s Park, without its Victorian iron railings, has become positively sylvan.

  Even in the centre of the town there are aspects of rural life. While the buses roar along Oxford Street the gentler sounds of hens and ducks can be heard among the ruins of nearby Berners Street. There are pigs sleeping peacefully in improvised styes in the craters where seeds that have been buried for three hundred years have propagated themselves and make a display of purple milkwort and willow-herb. The vicar of St James’s, Piccadilly, counted twenty-three different varieties of wild plant behind his bombed altar.

  Each evening at nine, everyone stops — as for the muezzin call to prayer in Mohammedan countries — for the evening news. It is almost an offence to telephone at the hour of the BBC bulletins, and as you walk along the pavements the announcer’s voice echoes through all open windows. Every language is spoken on the pavements, and in some parts the English voice is seldom heard. Baseball crowds cheer in Hyde Park while in the long twilight of double summer-time Piccadilly Circus is transformed by the khaki figures squatting along the wall of sandbags around Eros’s statue, into the sleepy Southland from which many of these raw recruits have come.

  October

  Hugh Francis of the M. of I. still finds me odd ‘propaganda’ jobs. These take me to Jarrow, Nottingham or Bradford. Here my Rolleiflex is aimed at the continuing war effort: at unphotogenic scientists in laboratories, at weather men foretelling the future or measu
ring the invisible sun. But now that the end of war is in sight, at any rate on the European horizon, my particular contributions to the national cause seem more ineffectual than ever. My enthusiasm on these expeditions is becoming very forced, and I notice all the more keenly the pin pricks: trains are frigid, food unappetizing — surely even for animals — and the discomfort and tyranny inflicted on the unfortunate guest of the average English hotel is past being a wry joke.

  Now, however, Francis has given me a thrilling assignment — to organize an exhibition of photographs to show the French what happened to England during the last four years. France under the Germans has naturally seen nothing of this. As well as the scenes from the battle-fronts, the pictures at home — the bombing of London, Coventry, and of so much of our heritage — will come as a revelation. My difficulty is in sifting from the hundreds of thousands of pictures only a few hundred. So many Service and Press photographers have produced really great historic documents.

  ASSIGNMENT TO FRANCE

  October 28th

  The aeroplane moved through the cotton-wool mist above compact country houses with formal, stiff gardens and turreted farm buildings: all architecture appeared taller in proportion than at home. Some spidery poplars and other trees with feathery topknots passed below in rows, and rivers were winding intricately. This was unmistakably the familiar, yet almost forgotten, landscape of France.

  PARIS REGAINED

  British Embassy, Paris

  At Le Bourget a quick glance was enough to show how much had changed: airport completely destroyed yet nearby dwellings intact: roads almost empty: no private cars, no trams: families with their belongings crowded on the tops of lorries were being given lifts by the Americans. Lucky break for me to hitch a ride into Paris with the King’s Messenger. This most auspicious and noble title belongs to a small, querulous man whose life, to me, still unnerved as a result of that Dakota crash and hating every subsequent sortie into the air, would be a purgatory of almost unending fright.

  Nearing Paris, the King’s Messenger noticed many more signs of life than on previous visits: markets had opened which were not there a week ago. Confectioners were empty, but bakeries’ shop-windows were prettily dressed. Towards the heart of the city many bicycles. I looked for signs in faces of their domination by the Hun, but everyone appeared as before — the regard in eyes as clear and determined, showing no softening by suffering. In fact, people appeared just as ugly as equivalent English crowds would be.

  When France was occupied Duff Cooper was the British Representative to the Free French in Algiers. He has now been made our Ambassador in Paris and Diana, of the love-in-the-mist eyes, samite, wonderful complexion, and glorious goatish profile, is suddenly cast in the role of Ambassadress. Diana, recently arrived, and reluctant, especially after the Arab picnic existence that she loves, to take on the burden of a formal life, wanted me to encourage her with humanizing the grandeur of the Embassy in the Rue Faubourg St Honoré. Hurrying after her in her old velveteen pants, cotton vest, and Algerian peasant’s straw hat, down the enfilades of Pauline Borghese’s gilded suites, the tempo of existence accelerated. In a flash she has spread a warmth of character to these frigid rooms of state. By scattering her books and candlesticks, by hanging a favourite Victorian picture on a red cord over a mirror, by propping silhouettes, wax mask, and family photographs along a bookshelf, she has already transformed the place. And not only in matters of appearance is her love for the impromptu displayed. The rate of exchange is so crippling for the English in France that shopping is out of the question. Instead she has given enormous amusement to her staff and to herself by using the household stores for barter — exchanging soap, candles or whisky in payment for ice machines, typewriters or clothes.

  This afternoon she drove me to the outskirts of Paris in her toy car. When Diana appears there is no slacking: one is galvanized into activity and sharpening one’s wits: she injects life and entertainment into every situation. To go on an expedition with her is always a memorable event, and anyone she meets on the way is likely to remember it also.

  Diana combines, in a unique way, a gift for using her friends, and the amenities they have to offer, with a lack of selfishness. Someone has a car at the door: ‘Then can’t you take us round to the garage to fetch my Simca which is being repaired?’ The torrential flow of interesting conversation is not interrupted by any nonsense such as: ‘You sit in the back — I’ll be here.’ Her instructions are given in shorthand or semaphore. No delays brooked at the garage. As she walks down the cobbled ramp she shouts: ‘Hullo, hullo, hullo!’ commanding immediate attention. ‘You’ve not been able to mend the car? Well, we can’t wait. Here’s something for the poor box.’ ‘I love this car,’ she says, as we rush off without horn or brakes. ‘On the bat’s back I do fly. You creep in and out of all the traffic — nowhere you can’t go!’ We dart under the mudguards of oncoming motor buses. The cross-looking naan of whom she asks the way is surprised, stimulated, then amused. Likewise the gendarme, who at first is outraged that anyone should have the impertinence to even conceive that she could park in such a place, becomes a friend. Every expedition with Diana at the wheel has its own particular charm and excitement, for she makes her own rules of the road: a natural lawbreaker, she experiments without a qualm, and thinks nothing of squeezing past a line of traffic between curb and pavement as part of her own code of right of way. Today’s excursion was to visit a suburban, but friendly, dentist who would sell a particle of his gold supply, strictly allocated for gold teeth, in order to mend a friend’s ring.

  Diana is a card — a flamboyant eccentric — and a real professional extrovert in that the performance she gives is always of her best. But one must not forget that she is fundamentally a serious and noble character whose whole reason for existing is her love of Duff. Every thought is of him: everything she does is for his sake, her every action for his benefit.

  When first she met and loved this comparatively unknown young man, and even faced the opposition of her beloved mother in order to marry him, she recognized his extraordinary qualities, and the world has proven her right. Duff is considered by many who have a better knowledge of his potentials than I do to be one of the most remarkable men of his generation: he has political foresight, courage and wisdom that are unique. Diana knows this, and is all the time helping to make others see that, behind Duff’s shyness, there is a force that could make him worthy of leading the country.

  It was one of the most brilliant autumn days — a few leaves falling already, skies periwinkle-blue with dazzling white clouds gladdening the spirit. I had forgotten how beautiful Paris is. The cobble streets and silver façades, and the proportions of almost every building give an effect of consummate urban grace. Everywhere there seem to be lacy arabesques of ironwork balconies and statues luxuriously allotted in rows or in crescents. The clotted pâtisserie on walls and ceiling make the most modest cake-shop all the more inviting: every man in a beret in the street, every woman carrying a long loaf, seems to possess a natural reverence for l’esthétique.

  As we drive in the wrong direction down a one-way street Diana, oblivious to the shouts, talks about de Gaulle. In answer to Duff’s congratulations on the day he was recognized as Head of the French Republic the General said: ‘Oh, ça finira jamais!’ Diana admits that in Algiers she found it agony to converse with the General. ‘After childhood — which never fails — there’s nothing else.’

  THE BRITISH EMBASSY’S GUESTS

  Sunday, October 29th

  Duff, calm and immaculate, appeared by air from London. Diana ravaged with suspense until his arrival, was then beatified with joy — also at the arrival of the Aubusson carpets from her old home. They look well in these ornate, loftily gilded rooms.

  At drinks-time a few old cronies assembled in le salon vert to forge severed links of friendship. Although Diana takes her own unconventionality with her wherever she goes, awe of the British Embassy is obviously paramount in the minds of the
Parisians. As they mounted the imposing staircase the men, in black coats and striped trousers, were excessively formal, bowing from the waist and kissing hands. All seemed to have a conservative, even ceremonial, attitude that made one realize how much more relaxed and at ease would be their equivalents in London. Little wonder that an elderly Frenchman, arriving unexpectedly early, was surprised when Diana, unbuttoning her trousers to change into a skirt, asked him point blank: ‘And what can I do for you?’

  The women were a curiously dressed bunch in a fashion that struck the unaccustomed eye as strangely ugly — wide, baseball-players’ shoulders, Dürer-esque headgear, suspiciously like domestic plumbing, made of felt and velvet, and heavy sandal-clogs which gave the wearers an added six inches in height but an ungainly, plodding walk. Unlike their austerity-abiding counterparts in England these women moved in an aura of perfume. Women and men alike were all avid for the unaccustomed bounty, now presented on a marble-topped table, of chippolatas, petits fours and cheese biscuits garnered from the Naafi stores. ‘What we have suffered!’ they exclaimed, prodding their sausages with little picks.

  Sad were the ravages of time on some that I knew before. Marie-Blanche de Polignac, in a Salvation Army bonnet and widow’s weeds made by her mother, Madame Lanvin, had turned into a tearful little old lady. Baba d’Erlanger-Lucinge, just before my day, was the first to bring into fashion the exotic, simian grace of the jungle and thereby created an astonishing effect of originality and allure. Today, however, she had changed her type and appeared as a conventionally well-dressed, middle-aged mother. Baba nervously told of the petty humiliations that the Germans invented in an increasing determination to show themselves masters — how the French were made to walk in the streets while the pavements were roped off exclusively for the Krauts. The soldiers billeted next door to her enraged her so much that, at various times, she threw twenty of her Staffordshire-china poodles at them. I noticed with chagrin an habitual shrugging of her head and a tic nerveux — the result of a recent motor-bicycle accident.[1] However, Drian[2] (whose etchings and drawings epitomized for me as a child the fashions of the period before the First World War) seemed as critical, caustic and mundane as ever. The years have not sweetened him, neither have they aged him. As for darling old Marie-Louise Bousquet, she does not seem a day older than when I first met her twenty years ago. Like a marionette of La Fée Carabosse she hobbles bravely on a stick, her hip out of joint and her back hunched, but her complexion is as sweetly pink as a dog-rose and her large eyes have all the pathos of a young hare. In a guttural croak she expresses the vitality and heart of France.