The frog prince

It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert ‘the Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy. Both gorgeous young men were known for their risky sexual escapades. What did ruffle feathers, however, was when Watson subsequently gave the Mad Boy a car. Cecil Beaton was so jealous that he demanded one too. And it was forthcoming: ‘Do please select any roadster which catches your fancy,’ replied the exceedingly wealthy Watson, who inspired lifelong unrequited love in poor Beaton. The Mad Boy’s long-term partner was Lord Berners, the famously eccentric composer, painter and writer, who retaliated by pinning Watson to the page of his wickedly satirical novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall. The young men of his circle (including Beaton and the Mad Boy) were transmogrified, with little disguise, into schoolgirls cavorting in lesbian trysts. Berners himself appeared as the love-struck headmistress.

Lankily elegant, dressed in exquisitely cut double-breasted suits, and with the face ‘of a frog just as he is turning into a prince’, Watson wafts in and out of other people’s stories, never staying long enough to provide the full picture. He features in many biographies, notably Jeremy Lewis’s marvellous Cyril Connolly and Hugo Vickers’ s Cecil Beaton, but Queer Saint finally places Peter Watson centre stage. It tells the fascinating tale of his bizarre trajectory from extravagant 1930s playboy to a wartime saviour of the arts.

Watson disliked Eton, where snobbish whispers circulated that his father Sir George, was nouveau riche. He was. His Maypole margarine was so successful that by the time the 22-year-old Peter was sent down from Oxford, he was one of the richest men of his generation. Swanning about in a ‘coral-coloured Rolls-Royce inlaid with gems & with fur seats’ (Nancy Mitford’s description), Watson’s hedonistic youth was marked by his love of travel and his penchant for dangerous, beautiful young men, especially Americans.