Hugo Vickers Hodder & Stoughton £25
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At the age of 28 in 1979, Hugo Vickers was commissioned to write the biography of the flamboyant photographer, designer and aesthete Sir Cecil Beaton.
Vickers paid two brief visits to the 76-year-old Beaton, and had just finished writing him a thank-you letter when the news came through that he had died. So Vickers’ first act as biographer was to attend his subject’s funeral.
Over the next five years, Vickers buzzed around the world interviewing Beaton’s friends and enemies – two categories that came with a large overlap. These frenemies were, for the most part, camp, wealthy, waspish, posh, arty and elderly: many of them had been born in the 19th Century.
When Hugo Vickers was commissioned in 1980 to write the authorised biography of Cecil Beaton, he was granted privileged access to the photographer’s friends and staff and all his private diaries and letters.
Many of Beaton’s circle had been the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 1920s. Others were louche aristocrats, renowned former beauties, movie stars and writers, not to mention Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother.
By then in their 70s and 80s, most welcomed the chance to gossip. Over the next five years, Vickers asked them about everything from Cecil’s homosexuality to his extraordinary costume designs for My Fair Lady and his bizarre love affair with Greta Garbo. Many of their recollections duly appeared in Vickers’ best-selling biography.
The Mayfair Suite
Picture the scene. It s 20 April 1931, and Lady Astor is cutting the ribbon to open the capital s newest and grandest hotel: The Dorchester. The Terrace is humming with liveried waiters sharpening carving knives and sniffing corks, while Jack Jackson and his orchestra (The Dorchester s resident swing band) provide a background serenade. The moment is instantly iconic. When Sir Robert McAlpine conceived this soaring landmark on Park Lane, constructed in steel and concrete (unlike the other London landmark hotels, which were made of Victorian brick and Portland stone), it represented sheer extravagance, 1930s hubris, Mayfair gone mad.
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The hotel hit the big time in the war years, when it became the social nexus of the capital, with Cecil Beaton commenting on the mixed brew who moved in; from government ministers to General Eisenhower (who used it as his wartime base). Lord and Lady Halifax (who relocated from Belgravia and took nine suites, convertin