The unvarnished picture

‘What-ho,’ says an Excess sub-editor appreciatively as Simon Balcairn files his sensational account of Margot Metroland’s party for the American revivalist Mrs Melrose Ape in Vile Bodies by Sir Cecil Beaton’s pin-sticking prep-school contemporary, Evelyn Waugh (variously described in these diaries as ‘my old arch enemy’ and ‘that swine’). Another ‘sub’ remarks that Lord Balcairn’s copy is coming through ‘hot and strong, as nice as mother makes it’. Beaton may have been the ‘self-created’ Harrovian grandson of a blacksmith rather than an 8th earl, like Balcairn, but these diaries from the 1970s, the last decade of Sir Cecil’s life, are certainly ‘hot and strong’ enough to cause a stir even in a publishing season dominated by diaries of one sort or another.

Their editor, Hugo Vickers (although he is not described as such, presumably because ‘edited by’ would have rather clashed with ‘unexpurgated’), Beaton’s biographer and literary executor, explains in his introduction that the aim has been to present the original diaries ‘in as raw a form as possible’. Just a tiny portion remains ‘too hot to handle’. Crikey!

Vickers points out that Beaton treated his previously published diaries in much the same way as he treated his published portrait photographs: ‘He retouched them shamelessly until he achieved the effect he sought.’ Whereas in the flattering version celebrated figures are hailed as wonders and triumphs, in the originals Beaton can be as venomous as anyone Vickers has ‘ever read or heard in the most shocking of conversations’.

So, pin back yer lug’oles, as Cyril Fletcher used to say. Katharine Hepburn, for example (one not entirely chosen at random, as she has never been a favourite of mine), is described as

the egomaniac of all time