Review: Cecil Beaton’s garden party

Among his eclectic gang of regular guests had been the brilliant and the world famous: Greta Garbo, Truman Capote, Salvador Dalí, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Also invited to those infamous parties were Beaton’s contemporaries on the British creative scene of the 30s and 40s; people such as society florist Constance Spry and the choreographer Frederick Ashton.

The strong horticultural influence on Beaton’s work is recognised now in an exhibition, Cecil’s Beaton’s Garden Party, running at Lambeth’s Garden Museum from Wednesday, and it celebrates the importance of both the dilapidated properties that the great photographer and designer renovated in south-west England.

The advanced degree of dereliction of, first, Ashcombe House, and then Reddish House, were in fact strong selling points for any self-respecting Bright Young Thing of Beaton’s generation, and the gardens quickly became romantic stage sets for his social gatherings.

The most renowned of Beaton’s fancy dress entertainments was a fête champêtre of 1937, for which he designed the majority of the costumes. Garlands of net flowers bedecked the gowns, while a trademark trail of ivy ran down the front panel of the pale pink satin dress which is now on display in Lambeth, made for the actor Wendy Hiller. Other guests wore Dalí-inspired rabbit masks and coats smothered with roses or, perhaps, a shepherdess costume. The aim was to look as if the disguise had been thrown together quickly, but with great aplomb. So foil was better than real silver, and cellophane, newly invented, was better still.

Beaton explained the rules of this impromptu aesthetic in an edition of Vogue shown in the exhibition: “The successful costumes have frequently been the result of an idea rather than the handiwork of a hundred embroiderers.”

Vogue was his journalistic home, and he contributed both fashion and war photography, as well as caricatures, illustrations and articles. He started out in 1924 by submitting a picture of a fetching fellow Cambridge undergraduate performing in a production of The Duchess of Malfi, and he finished his work for the magazine in 1979, less than a year before his death.

Scenery and costume were key to any drama for Beaton, and floral effects took a leading role. Whether he was experimenting with a camera as a boy, taking shots of his sisters standing in the shrubbery, or later dressing Margot Fonteyn for an Ashton ballet at Covent Garden, the artifice was a major part of the point. Even when he photographed members of the royal family, the surrounding foliage was often more significant than any conventional stately symbolism. In fact, the bucolic settings were often in danger of outshining his establishment subjects, at least in the case of the Queen Mother, whom Beaton once treasonously described as looking “sloppy”.

Nowadays, the designer is possibly best remembered for dressing Audrey Hepburn so spectacularly in the film musical My Fair Lady. When her character, Eliza Doolittle, shouts out her coarse, flower-girl curses at the Ascot races, urging on her horse and shocking the crowd, it is all the funnier because of her audacious black and white outfit, with its huge, floppy hat, weighed down with bows and worn askew over a kind of floral bathing cap. It deliberately conjures up a sort of faux gentility, a bit of trickery perfect for an imposter such as Doolittle, but also at the heart of Beaton’s playful style.

My Fair Lady’s striking and influential designs were first worn by Julie Andrews, who played Doolittle on stage. When the musical premiered on Broadway in 1956, Beaton was pessimistic about its prospects, but it was an immediate triumph, winning him a Tony.

“I am grateful and overwhelmed,” he wrote in his diary when the reviews came in. The show’s script leant heavily on George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, but, as producer Irene Selznick wryly noted, for theatre critics it was often a case of “costumes by Cecil Beaton, play by…?” The show went on to wow London audiences, too, running there until 1963.

The age of the beatnik had arrived, but Beaton clung on to the opulent sweeping styles of the grand fashion epoque he was born into. My Fair Lady’s lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner, once noted: “It is difficult to know whether he designed the Edwardian era or whether the Edwardian era designed him.”

All the same, Beaton won an Academy Award for the film’s costumes, and his sketches for Doolittle’s wardrobe are in the Lambeth exhibition, as is the letter that Hepburn wrote to him after Oscars night, wishing he had heard the applause for him at the ceremony.

The Garden Museum’s curator, Emma House, points out that a Beaton design is never a wallflower: “They are so ornate and so dramatic. If we had put his Covent Garden opera costume for Princess Turandot in our exhibition, we would not have had room for anything else.”

Instead, Beaton’s detailed drawing of the vast, flowing red gown and its improbable, glittering diadem is hanging on a wall alongside a display case that contains a couple of rather homemade looking oriental headdresses of gold card and fake gems from the same production.

The designer wrote in his diary that he had always wanted “to break out of the anonymity of a nice, ordinary middle-class family” and so he took pleasure in upsetting people with “the inimitable way in which I adorned myself”. His diaries are candid for the era. Between all the proper discussion of pruning and flowerbeds, they reveal his feelings for his great love, Peter Watson. These feelings persisted, despite Beaton’s string of liaisons with glamorous women, including the actor Coral Browne, the dancer Adele Astaire (Fred’s sister), the British socialite Doris Castlerosse and, of course, Garbo herself, who stayed with him in Wiltshire for six weeks and remained a close friend.

Beaton’s near-contemporary, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who as a schoolboy had bullied him from the safety of the year above, also viewed the English aristocracy with the fascinated amusement that came with a little distance. Waugh’s response was to create Brideshead Revisited, while Beaton orchestrated his flamboyant, masked parties and revelled in the counterfeit splendour of the theatre. Both men managed to seed an enduring vision of the indolent rich that still holds sway. It was certainly there, for instance, in the fancy dress debaucheries of the hit film Saltburn.

Among the standouts of the Garden Museum show are the dress Fonteyn wore in the ballet Marguerite and Armand with Rudolf Nureyev. The well-known publicity stills from 1963 show the prima ballerina in a white tutu with a garland of white flowers in her hair. But the actual stage costume is black net with dark velvet bodice topped with silk roses on the shoulders.

In an exhibition like this the scenery clearly matters, so Emma House asked the Beaton enthusiast Luke Edward Hall to decorate the display rooms with 1940s-style, freehand sketches of lavish canopies of flowers. In one corner visitors will also meet Hall’s full-length outline of the casually elegant Beaton, looking on, paint palette in hand, admiring his own work.

Cecil’s Beaton’s Garden Party is at the Garden Museum, London, from 14 May to 21 September. Free with entry to the museum (£15, concs £8.50 to £12, see gardenmuseum.org.uk)

Photographs by Cecil Beaton Archive/Condé Nast