Lisa Immordino vreeland on cecil beaton

Interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Photography by Cecil Beaton

Cecil Beaton wasn’t just a dandy photographer suffering the charms of the rich. He was also a romantic, a seeker of pleasure and a searcher of deeper meaning under the soft, supple silver bromide of his glamorous photographs. Indeed, his images were passionate, ardent still lives, at times candid and at times posed, capturing twentieth century decadence, war, rock n roll, and royal life with a joie de vivre that dances tipsily on the balustrade of fantasy. His portraits of a newly crowned Queen Elizabeth captured her majesty in a light that had never been seen before outside of painting. Beaton was also an aspiring actor, painter, Oscar award winning stage and costume designer for the “celluloid oasis,” and also a brilliant diarist. His multiple tomes of private insights into his own life are poetic and heartbreaking, but also show a biting satirical wit. In a new documentary directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Beaton’s diaries, archives and photographs come alive for the first time. I spoke to Vreeland about the life of one of the greatest and most prolific photographers that ever lived.

OLIVER MAXWELL KUPPER: So what brought you to Cecil Beaton? What prompted your exploration into his life?

LISA IMMORDINO VREELAND: Well you know at first I always loved his photography. Also, I love Beaton’s presence on screen. I thought, “Maybe I should do something.” I quickly understood that his archives were really rich, and because of that, that often dictates the reason to do a film for me, and besides his own personal story, there’s just such great material.

KUPPER: What I noticed right off the bat was how ahead of his time he was with using materials, like tinfoil and cellophane and building these massive sets that totally contradicted what a lot of the other photographers were doing at the time.  

VREELAND: I think he’s ahead in a lot of ways because if you look at the whole idea of the selfie. To me, honestly, I could have done a whole film just with the selfies. I mean they were just so great and two-fold, because he wanted to show how close he was with all these people but at the same time he was inserting himself into history…So you have both his ambitious side and his emotional side that’s playing a role. There was always this tug of both sides for him.

KUPPER: Where do you think Cecil’s thirst for glamour came from?  

VREELAND: Beaton’s ambition and desire to be somebody else was such a strong part of him and he created this life for himself. The life that he felt his parents were giving him didn’t, he felt, live up to the standard he deserved. This was he was born with and it never left his life. By the time he was in his twenties he was already making good money. He rented Ashcombe, which became his mis-en-scene for the life that he wanted to lead. His whole life was on a stage, so it wasn’t just what he was creating on film sets or cameras; it was how he thought his life should be. It was always just desire for beauty, this relentless seeking of beauty in whatever form it was. But at the same time he was covering up a piece of himself, so there was this emotional side that was not alive.

KUPPER: There’s this great quote in the New Yorker profile about him, that “he would sink his teeth into the hand that’s overfeeding him.” Do you think this came from a sense of insecurity?

VREELAND: He was just riddled with insecurity, and I think that was also the reason he couldn’t have a true love affair and could never just succumb to it completely, because he was on the make and never quite feeling satisfied. He was photographing the Queen and at the same time he was also photographing, lets say from Francis Bacon or Marylin Monroe. He was part of this whole creative dialogue of the 20th Century, but not just for a decade, for many decades. That’s also something that I found interesting, and I like that because I find that there are these visionaries that have this relevance today and it’s not just a fly by moment. This is somebody who from the 20s to let’s say the mid-70s was relevant and able to grab on to something within each decade and produce a solid, important body of work.

KUPPER: I want to jump back a little bit and talk about his place in the royal family because he really shook the image of the royal family in the 20th Century. I want to talk about that and about how you think the role of the court photographer has changed in this century.

VREELAND: He did change that role and was spending hours with them, he was having input, they were discussing things with him. So it was considered a sitting, it wasn’t: “you have half an hour with the royal family.” In England, the Royals were considered completely apart and now he dropped them down to almost the same level of the English population. They could finally see these images of the children at birth. It was just something more familiar. Today, I have no idea… I mean the name Mario Testino is not even mentioned of course… But Edward Snowden starts to take pictures and it was really only Beaton who had such long run and it was really a feather in his cap without a doubt.

KUPPER: Snowden was amazing and he was definitely more a part of that world, but he didn’t have Beaton’s talent by any means.

VREELAND: He didn’t. The one thing about Beaton was that he was not a photographer’s photographer. He didn’t think about technique. He used to joke about…he had this camera assistant, and he would just call him up and go “so at what speed do I have to shoot this film in France?” You know he wasn’t that kind of person. What he understood was how to frame a photograph and when I was doing my research at Sotheby's in London I saw that there were frames that were out of focus.

KUPPER: I want to talk a bit about the key relationships in Beaton’s life outside of the portraits that he was taking. They were touching, heartbreaking, tumultuous and he had this life long tension with these relationships. One of these relationships was with his Father.

VREELAND: Yes, definitely. That was a very tough relationship and we touched upon it in the film. He tried to work for his father and do the exact same thing that his father did, when he got out of university, but he didn’t really pass his university exams and he didn’t know what he wanted to do. His father helped him, was supporting him, and had arranged some jobs. But Beaton was always angry with his Father because he felt that he didn’t provide the life that he felt he deserved to have and he recognized this at a young age. And I just don’t understand how as a five or a six or seven year old you can already recognize that you are too good for the life that your father gave you.

KUPPER: Another relationship I want to talk about is Beaton and Greta Garbo, because I think that they had a really wild relationship. What do you think they both found in each other— was it just the fiery creativity?

VREELAND: I think it was. I know why he was attracted to her, because she was definitely bisexual. She leaned much more toward women than men, so she clearly was not heterosexual nor was he. That already was the attraction between the two of them. I think that the second thing was that she was a big star at that time. She was stopping at that point, but she had reached her stardom… So for him, this was another one of these dreams that was just so far-reaching. At St. Johns College in Cambridge where all of his papers are, there are copies of all of these letters he sent to her. Those were the days of carbon paper. He kept all of the letters— he wanted us all to see them. I always think about that. He wanted to be with her because she was Greta Garbo. What did she get? I think she got the attention. She was not a very kind person.

KUPPER: She didn’t seem that way.

VREELAND: No! She had this big love affair with this interesting character Mercedes de Acosta and she treated her so badly. Mercedes was destroyed— actually destroyed.

KUPPER: It seems like Beaton had sort of dark side too. There were two sides to him. I love Diana’s quote about him picking his enemies beautifully.

VREELAND: I think that’s his insecurity, Oliver. That’s exactly where it came out. It’s this shadow Ellis (?) cast on his life that was unfortunately regretful for him. What I really loved was when I was interviewing David Hockney, who is one of my heroes, and I was thinking, “Here’s a man who was openly gay, young— and he just embraced him.”

KUPPER: The interesting thing about David Hockney is that he came from a working class family background and wasn’t part of this glamorous world, he was able to go to school and explore that world. His parents were more supportive in a way.

VREELAND: And he came out at a young age. He said, “I’m gay” and that was that. It was so funny because there was a nephew of Beaton who I interviewed him for the film who saw a screening in London and he said to me, “wow I just don’t know you had to put in that gay part.” And I was just like “oh my god… this is so conservative.”

KUPPER: Even now? That’s so wild. Going back to Beaton’s diaries, which seemed invaluable to this documentary, there was sort of a lot of criticisms and comments and insults, but also high praise and compliments, it seemed like a big contrast.

VREELAND: Yes.

KUPPER: Were you surprised by his commentary?

VREELAND: No. In fact, I loved it. There were many times that I chuckled. The original diaries are at St. Johns and I never read the original diaries. I didn’t understand his handwriting. I read all of these published books that were excerpts from the diary. I wasn’t actually surprised the tone. What he did historically, was that he would do a photoshoot and then write about the photoshoot. That’s how he would be commenting on the people. Listen, some of the comments were really rough, but these were his personal diaries. I question the fact that— does he ever really feel like they’re only going to be his personal diaries? They are written in a way where he felt like there were going to be eyes on it. They’re such a great gift for all of us. Even the diaries during World War II, it’s great to read about what was happening at the time. There was a lot of emotional content in these pages of all these different books. That really was a gift, because it gave us all the dialogue for the film. Rupert Everett says pretty much everything, there could be pretty much three sentences that weren’t from his diary, which is amazing. It’s a gift when you have a film like this and you have somebody who gives you all this material, which you know, Beaton can sell.

KUPPER: A lot of people don’t leave that behind.

VREELAND: No, they don’t. I really get excited when you have these archives with so much material. One of my favorite parts is putting it all together and thinking about how it’s all going to come together. I’m a bit of a research nerd.

KUPPER: It seemed like throughout Beaton’s life, he was constantly looking for himself in a way. He had this talent for acting, but never really became an actor. He was prolific until he had a stroke. It seemed like he could’ve lived multiple lives, but never really found himself. He was really pushing and pushing towards the end of his life to find who he was. Do you think he ever found who he was?

VREELAND: I don’t think he understood what happiness was. I don’t think he was capable. In this whole desire to create, it was really just left on the side. This creative drive that he had, it was a deep seated need but a way to cover up his life. There’s something sad about it, but there are a lot of people who are deeply creative on that level who still aren’t able to have an emotional life.

KUPPER: But he left behind some gorgeous examples of his work.

VREELAND: Yeah, definitely.

KUPPER: And where do you see Beaton’s influence on photography today—or do you see it? I don’t think there’s anybody today.

VREELAND: His first job was at Vogue in London, and there’s this sense of beauty and romance. Beaton was not one to speak about philosophy, but it was this unending question of beauty, which pushes a lot of people forward. It certainly pushed Tim Walker forward…There are a lot of people… do you know this one photographer, Jamie Hawkesworth?

KUPPER: Yeah.

VREELAND: There’s a lot. For me, reasons why I wanted to do films like this is because it brings these names back into the world. There’s a reason that he should be known. It’s not going to be the same type of person who’s a huge fan of Penn because with Penn, there’s a precision. That was Mr. Penn’s world. That was not Beaton’s world. It was a real taste of the time and it was about creating this narrative. He was always looking forward. I think that he has a huge influence in interiors and theater. It’s a broad spectrum.

KUPPER: It’s that poetic romanticism…

VREELAND: I hope so.