An arresting picture; it features in an exhibition at the V&A, Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, about Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book.
Malice in Wonderland, My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton, is Hugo Vickers’ account of writing a biography of Cecil Beaton from 1980 to 1985.
(Hugo’s father was a Vickers of Vickers, da Costa a successful stockbroking partnership until Big Bang when it was bought by Citibank. They promptly closed it in the wake of the 1987 crash.)
Malice is a book inspired by The Quest for Queen Mary, based on James Pope-Hennessy’s diaries written while he was researching his 1959 biography of Queen Mary and edited by Hugo Vickers in 2019. With time on his hands last summer at home in Wiltshire he remembered the diaries he kept while he was interviewing sources for his 1985 best-selling biography of Cecil Beaton. “I got the diaries out of the safe and made the selection … “. The book has a curious structure as there are quite long explanatory passages introducing many entries and, of course, many footnotes. It took me a while to get into the rhythm and spirit of the book but I was soon hooked. As almost all his principal sources are now dead, an exception being Clarissa Avon, he includes things that couldn’t possibly have gone into the biography, which needed a lot of attention from Peter Carter-Ruck before publication.
For five years he travelled the world interviewing key people who had known Cecil. He became close to some of them, notably three elderly aristocratic widows: Clarissa, Countess of Avon, Lady Diana Cooper and Laura, Duchess of Marlborough. The dividing line between assiduous researcher and attentive gigolo is sometimes blurred. What is clear is the immense trouble he took over the biography and while apparently enjoying himself, the work required to turn his research into a coherent picture. This was true of his subject too. Beaton often appeared to be a snobbish social butterfly but put in a lot of effort to achieve his fame. The same might be said of Noël Coward, of whom he was jealous.
Hugo writes: “it was a great joy … to relive an exciting adventure – my good fortune to have been given a passport into a magic world quite new to me”. I enjoyed accompanying him.
Cecil Beaton was interviewed Face to Face by John Freeman in 1962.