Snob's Progress

By Gerald Clarke

SELF PORTRAIT WITH FRIENDS THE SELECTED DIARIES OF CECIL BEATON Edited by Richard Buckle Times Books; 435 pages; $17.50

"Keep a diary and some day it'll keep you," said that great American philosopher Mae West. But it is the Eng lish who have a unique talent for scribbling to themselves. To the long list that includes Samuel Pepys, James Boswell and Virginia Woolf must now be added the name of Cecil Beaton, who died last month at 76. For half a century he roamed the halls of fashion and fame with a folding Kodak and an acidulous pen.

An early student of the rich, Cecil was following the adventures of dukes and duchesses in the society magazines while other middle-class boys were reading about cowboys and Indians. Theirs was a fantasy world he longed for, and after leaving Cambridge, he found his entree -- the camera. His lushly romantic portraits, with just a touch of surrealism, be came fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic; eventually he became the favor ite photographer of the British royal family. Country houses opened their doors to him, and Mayfair hostesses vied for his company. He had entered, in short, into snob heaven.

There is something to be said for snob bery: it often makes the best diarists. Bea ton is intolerant, wicked-eyed and totally devoid of a social conscience that might make him hedge his words. With acid and pastel, he describes people not as they should be, or would wish to be, but just as they are.

Recounting Jacqueline Kennedy's triumphant visit to Europe as First Lady, for example, Beaton cannot help adding a few words about her "big, boyish hands and feet" and "the suspicion of a mustache."

Winston Churchill is duly eulogized as Britain's savior; but Beaton also observes "his feminine hands with the pointed nails and ringers" and the cracks in his patent-leather shoes. He also records the great man's uncensored political comments. Speaking about the Nazi war criminals, then on trial in Nuremberg, Churchill was typically direct. "Bump 'em off," he growled, "but don't prolong the agony." Evelyn Waugh, an old enemy from school days, receives the worst treatment, and for a telling reason. "In our own way we were both snobs," Beaton admits, "and no snob welcomes another who has risen with him." When the novelist dies in 1966, he writes: "So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery."

Over the years Beaton was lucky enough--or adroit enough--to find himself in most of the right places at most of the right times. He was in Hollywood during its heyday in the '30s, and in the '40s he covered all the war fronts for the British propaganda office. In the '50s he astonished the fashion world with his magnificent costumes for My Fair Lady and Gigi, and by the '60s he had fully established himself as a waspish, infallible arbiter elegantiae, the Petronius of Britain's comfortably padded decline.

Six volumes of Beaton's diaries preceded this abridged collection, but in this case less truly is more. The dull passages have been excised, and only the best remain, glittering stories about glittering people. Cocteau and Colette, Coward and Capote, Garbo and De Gaulle. Advising the young Beaton about clothes, Noel Coward, for instance, sounds like one of his own characters. "One would like to indulge one's own taste," he says. "[But] I take ruthless stock of myself in the mirror before going out. A polo jumper or unfortunate tie exposes one to danger."

Beaton dines with Oscar Wilde's son, who tells him that when his father was disgraced, society was so outraged that even dogs called Oscar were renamed. He is with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor just before their wedding, and notes how hurt and surprised that naive gentleman was that so few of his friends had accepted invitations. He describes his rather comical romance with Greta Garbo, in which both of them circled like brilliant birds, not wanting to muss their pretty plumage with what would inevitably be a messy embrace.

Throughout, Beaton writes with a gift for image and metaphor. One woman has skin "as bright and smooth as the inside of a shell"; another "exudes the friendliness and sympathy of a firelit tea in winter." Virginia Woolf compared her diary to a "disheveled, rambling plant." Beaton's is more like a topiary, carefully trimmed to his own aristocratic profile. -- Gerald Clarke

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.