Dimensions
168 x 242 x 41mm
The swinging sixties uncensored - as viewed by celebrated photographer and diarist Cecil Beaton.
The 1960s contains some of the very best set pieces, including Churchill's funeral with which this volume will open. In the middle there is a day-by-day description of the making of the film, 'My Fair Lady', including rows with the director George Cukor, Rex Harrison's fondness for watching live sex, Cukor on Audrey Hepburn's figure etc. (Cecil was also the master at slicing up Hollywood social life at that period. He loathed it).
His partner Kin, who has spent a year with him in England, returns to the USA, leaving Cecil to loneliness - but not for long. He is soon travelling aboard Cecile de Rothschild's yacht with Garbo as a fellow traveller. David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Picasso, the Rolling Stones and others people these years, and Cecil is fascinated by this new generation testing the boundaries as he and his friends had done in the 1920s.
The socialites, who are very much part of his life, are beginning to die: Lady Juliet Duff, Mercedes de Acosta, Princess Marina, Evelyn Waugh. Many are given a dusty send off. Queen Frederika (Mum the Hun) is sliced up on paper, Cecil visits Czechoslovakia and Australia along with more usual haunts. Roy Strong, the extroverted young director, puts on a massive retrospective of Beaton's work at the National Portrait Gallery.
Then, in 1969, Cecil endures a miserable phase (described in minute detail) working on Coco with Katharine Hepburn, bringing us to the point where 'The Unexpurgated Beaton' takes the story into the new decade. The diaries are as lively, if not livelier than the ones for the 1970s.
