The Glass of Fashion

by Cecil Beaton

  Philosophers tell us that as we grow older we come closer to childhood. I was still a child when King Edward’s death closed the covers of the book of opulence, if not forever, at any rate for my lifetime. I am glad that my early roots were Edwardian, for that period gave me a sense of solidity and discipline and helped to crystallize a number of homely virtues and tastes by which, consciously or unconsciously, I have been influenced in my life.

  CHAPTER II

  A LADY OF FASHION: MY AUNT JESSIE

  AUNT JESSIE was my mother’s eldest sister. She was too short to be considered beautiful, inclining towards the petite and the plump; but her nose was one of the most beautiful noses I have ever seen—straight and small, of perfect classical proportions—and her personality, at any rate, was built on heroic proportions. There was something Falstaffian in Aunt Jessie’s laugh and her infectious sense of the comic; she was grand and gaudy and gay. Though in later years she was to become a tragic little figure, it was tragedy imposed from the outside, the common tragedy of the passage of time, and not one which was innate in her. During her lifetime, and especially the first half of it, she was an ardent devotee of fashion, scurrying to keep up with the latest hats from Paris, much as the Red Queen raced across the squares of Lewis Carroll’s chessboard.

  Aunt Jessie had startled her family by marrying a Bolivian, had gone off to South America, where she was reputed to be the first white woman who had ever sailed up the green-walled Amazon in a canoe and had succeeded in keeping her poise on a mule’s back while moving through remote Andean mountain passes that were quite likely too narrow for her hat or her hair-do. When she reappeared in London, it was in the official position of the wife of the Bolivian minister, and with a marked foreign accent that haunted her native English tongue whenever she spoke it for the rest of her life. True to her flexible nature, Aunt Jessie became hostess to a whole tribe of South Americans who sat around with their tongues clacking like castanets in their native Spanish, or roaring with laughter at whatever makes South Americans laugh. She was rich and flamboyant, with a heart of gold; and so full of the joy of living that a child at once became overexcited in her presence.

  MY AUNT JESSIE IN THE FASHIONS OF 1913

  It was Aunt Jessie who provided the greatest treats and pleasures for me when I was a child. She was my tante gâteau, and was probably regarded askance as not being the best influence on me. For, had I been left to my own devices, I would surely have spent all my time at Aunt Jessie’s, where I was certain to be stuffed and petted, returning home with too much enthusiasm and an understandable colic. If she had borne children, she would doubtless have spoiled them, even as she spoiled her pet animals. She was empress in a domain that could only be a Cloud-Cuckoo-Land for a child, where the rare and the special were always to be found.

  Even to wash one’s hands in her house was a treat. Instead of the yellow soap we had in the nursery, a cake of that wonderful, wine-coloured Pears soap, with a texture of petrified jelly and an elusive but magical scent, was placed on the side of the washbasin, whose blue and white irises were forever embedded in its china surface, the whole lifting up to revolve on a pivot and empty into the unknown below. Likewise, how pleasant it was to go to her lavatory, with water lilies decorating the porcelain pan, surrounded by a solid encasement of mahogany and equipped with a gold handle which one pulled up in order to bring about a discreetly gurgling flush of water.

  Downstairs there were enormous gilded baskets with silk bows, filled with pineapples and mangoes, custard apples and Brazil nuts, while the air was redolent with white lilacs out of season. Aunt Jessie provided wonderful grown-up things, things to eat, like Dutch chocolates and marrons glacés, a cuisine of highly spiced or peppered Spanish dishes, and exotic-tasting sweets (on the tongue of a child her food was always excessively hot or excessively cold).

  My aunt had an assortment of pets, many of which she had imported from South America, including a marmoset that would chatter and shiver and shriek from a vantage point on her shoulder or keep itself half hidden in her muff. This minute creature was named Chinchilla after Aunt Jessie’s favourite fur, which she wore on every possible occasion as a stole, a muff, or in the form of trimmings on dresses or hats. Her selection of dogs included Ronnie, a fluffy black ball of a Pomeranian, a small yapper called Tiny, and a shivering, black silk skeleton of a Chihuahua with protruding eyes. Later there was a bright red squirrel with the appropriate name of Tango, who used to run up the green silk brocade walls of her drawing room and around the elaborate cornice of the ceiling, believing itself to be still in the jungle beyond La Paz or Cochabamba.

  MY AUNT JESSIE

  On special occasions I would be allowed to come into her dining room at the tail end of a luncheon party, just in time to savour the aroma of melon and cigar smoke. Such brief glimpses would be enough for my imagination to build upon, and I created a mental picture of the aura of fashion and luxury in which she lived, an aura that surrounded her like the spirals of cigar smoke created by the men of the party, all so foreign and enigmatic, yet amused, in their black morning coats, striped trousers, and pearl tiepins.

  To Aunt Jessie I owe my first real glimpse of the world of fashion, of that whole grown-up world from which a child is so often excluded while he waits for the key of the years to open it for him, like an Alice too small to reach the table top where the key lies waiting. I had no idea then that Aunt Jessie was not entirely representative of the most restrained in taste, though when I finally made the discovery it did not matter very much. She was one of those women who enjoyed fashion, and managed to give you a sense of her sense of fun; so, good taste, bad taste, Aunt Jessie’s taste for life was, at any rate, always impeccable. In the end she not only resisted judgment, but was outside its laws, making it invidious to laugh at her instead of with her, in those great gales of laughter that swept up from nowhere and carried you along in their wake.

  Several times a year my aunt would make buying trips to Paris, and her return was always something of an event. I have no idea how her servants managed to haul the enormous black trunks with gilt hinges and locks up the stairs, past the stained glass window on the landing, for it was surely a feat comparable with bringing the Queen Elizabeth into harbour.

  AUNT JESSIE’S HATBOXES

  Most of these gargantuan coffins were filled with dresses, others with shoes and corsets, ribbons and ruffs, and aigrettes done up on black tissue paper, or materials with which to make more dresses; beaded embroidery by the yard, and lengths of velvet, brocade, lamé, and chiffons gaily iridescent with sequins. One particularly large box was entirely filled with face lotions, pots of cream, boxes of powder and beautifiers of every description. Then there were the hatboxes—great square containers that held six hats apiece. In those days, mesh moulds were pinned on the sides, top and bottom of a box so that the crown of a hat could be placed over the mould and fixed into place by a long hatpin piercing the mesh. In such manner, six hats could travel in a box without being crushed. And such headgear! Vast discs covered funereal plumes of black ostrich feathers or white ospreys; hats for the evening and hats for the afternoon; hats for her garden parties.

  Aunt Jessie’s garden parties were special events for me, since I was persona grata and allowed to circulate among the guests, while all the South American children (none of them Aunt Jessie’s, for she was childless) peered with envy from the windows above a marquee which was set up on these occasions as a place for rest and refreshment. I remember once seeing an enormous American woman with grey hair, named Madame Triana, seated in the marquee eating an ice and wearing a dress of pale grey and apricot. I had never before seen a combination of those two colours, and their effect on me was extraordinary. Frederick Ashton was to observe to me years later that certain childhood experiences are of such a nature as to pay dividends for the rest of one’s life. Thus I was to remember this apparently extraneous moment and make use of it again and again.

  LILY ELSIE, GERTRUDE GLYN, MY AUN
T JESSIE, AND MY UNCLE PEDRO FROM A SNAPSHOT TAKEN AT BIARRITZ

  Aunt Jessie was a martyr to fashion in the grand style of Sainte Geneviève. On holidays, in order to reduce, she would put on a rubber corset, take her racquet in hand, and go out and play strenuous sets of tennis until the sweat poured in cascades from her head. For long hours she would cover her face with cold cream or a special mask of white ointment. Sometimes chicken fat would be in vogue as a beautifier, and she smeared her features with that. Throughout the years you could always find the rind of a lemon left by her washstand, a telltale clue to some astringent process or other.

  Aunt Jessie loved to dress up to the hilt for any special occasion, and she relished the fact that her appearances involved hours of preparation. For reasons more of splash than of economy she did not frequent the best Paris dressmakers, often preferring to buy six “models” rather than one good dress. Then it was her habit to convert her sitting room or an extra bedroom into a makeshift workshop, where odd little women, who looked as though they could be hatched only from the world of needle and thread, bobbin or paper pattern, would come to copy in ever more flamboyant colours her existing dresses and elaborate evening gowns.

  It was a great treat to watch behind the scenes, but the greatest excitement of all was when I was allowed as a child to go down in the morning to see her being dressed for court, since at that time the court drawing rooms were held at noon. On these occasions it took her four or five hours to make herself ready.

  By the time we had arrived, she would be standing in front of a cheval glass, her hair already arranged and the plumes fixed in places, her face a mask of powder and rouge, desperately set and serious, for the court days were scarcely a laughing matter and the customary gales of laughter were banished from the scene. My father disapproved of women painting their faces, a moral judgment that could only be calculated to intrigue me, and it was delightfully shocking to see how Aunt Jessie would cover her face, neck arms and back with a thick paint which by some was called enamel but which my family referred to as whitewash. Her eyelids were painted mauve, her cheeks a bright carnation pink, while the lips were cerise. Her jewellery would already be round her neck or hanging from her ears. Aunt Jessie had a rather odd collection of stones embedded, after the fashion of that period, in rather small diamond settings that showed an art nouveau influence in their arabesques. She was fond of black pearls and would have a pendant, necklace, and earrings with enormous black pearls as the centre of the ornament.

  Now the dressmaker would be sewing the court train onto her shoulders, a train sometimes made of rather surprisingly flimsy material. One train, I remember, was of embroidered chrysanthemum design in black and silver sequins that were shaped like tadpoles, the whole being edged in swansdown. At a somewhat later period she wore an entirely magenta court dress and train, while her hair (which was always going through some new phase of russety tinge) had been dyed a shade of dark brick red to complement the dress and was set tight on her skull with Spanish kiss curls around the forehead and in front of each rouged ear.

  LILY ELSIE AS THE MERRY WIDOW, 1909

  I have Aunt Jessie to thank, not merely for spoiling me by giving me a glimpse of the grown-up world, but for introducing me to my great childhood heroine, Lily Elsie, who at that time was queen of London’s musical comedy, the English creator of The Merry Widow, and perhaps the first actress of her genre to captivate the popular imagination by means of her ladylike restraint and dignified grace. At a children’s party given in the Carlton Hotel I found myself, one Christmas, comparatively soon after I could walk, undergoing the extraordinary sensation of having favours bestowed upon me by a beautiful actress. I rose to the occasion by peremptorily ordering my Bolivian uncle to buy her an enormous bunch of Parma violets.

  With the passing of the years Aunt Jessie was to suffer a serious reversal of fortune. My uncle’s Bolivian investments failed; without his money and, accompanied by his wife, he returned to South America, where he died. After his death Aunt Jessie came back alone, bringing her black and gold trunks with her, calling early one morning from the garden before anyone in the household was awake, a strangely pathetic creature in her tussore coat and skirt, her cream-coloured calfskin shoes with their high patent-leather heels and blunt, round knobs of toes. They were old and out of fashion by then, those shoes—a relic of the past—like the trunks that she had brought back with her, out of which she was to live for the rest of her life. She had panama hats that lasted her lifetime, and there were things of such quality that, indeed, they saw her through to the end.

  It was as a comparatively penniless widow, however, that Aunt Jessie had come to stay with us. Though the former dazzle and glitter of her life were no longer available to her, she managed to enjoy herself. Even when she was well over eighty years old she continued to savour, with the greatest relish, all of the simplest things that life offered. She would apotheosize a garden, or a leaf, literally anything, with that extraordinary knack of making the best of things. Everything can be used in a lifetime, Aunt Jessie seemed to imply; and so she utilized all the relics of her former grandeur, though the black pearls were eventually sold, while the chinchilla stole turned yellow with age as she steadfastly refused to give it up. Somewhere amid these things the black ostrich feathers could still be found in a box, together with the embroidery left from the magenta dress.

  Perhaps the most tragicomic touch of all was that the mesh shapes—those souvenirs of great hatboxes carried up the stairs past the stained-glass window on the landing—came into their utilitarian own at last: they were used for straining the soups and sauces when she concocted Spanish and Argentine dishes in the kitchen. For in her widowed days Aunt Jessie loved to cook.

  I remember bringing a friend from Harrow School home to luncheon. My adolescence had its moments of mistaken snobbery, one of them being that I was a stickler for formalities. I had hoped for a gracious meal with all the odds and ends attended to by the servants, while my mother and aunt would converse sedately with the young but sophisticated guest. It seemed scarcely proper for Aunt Jessie to be bustling about the kitchen, straining things through her hat meshes and tossing up empanadas and Spanish puddings, though I was later to realize that the gesture was far more in good taste, more natural and unaffected, than my own stilted and genteel proprieties. One of the sad things about life is that we are always appreciating things too late, belatedly seizing the quality of an experience or a person, as though they had to grow in us with the years before any fruit of meaning could appear. The more I think about Aunt Jessie, the more retrospect reveals her great gifts to me. In her own unintellectual way she had a rare wisdom and philosophy; she knew a lot about life and people and possessed qualities of gaiety, pluck, and courage.

  Aunt Jessie lived on until well after the Second World War. She was constitutionally as strong, not as the proverbial ox, but (I think she would approve of the simile) as a Rolls-Royce engine, a fact one doctor was to observe; and, were it not for cancer, she might have lived to be a hundred. Although her last days were passed in frightful pain, she never complained, sipping a spoonful of tea as though it were nectar, while any little attention was an anodyne to her suffering. One dark, drab morning in midwinter she was obliged to be taken from her bed of agony to the hospital for X-ray treatments. Instead of lying back resignedly in the ambulance, she sat up, peering interestedly through the windows for a glimpse of the bare branches of the winter trees, or some sight of that outside world which she must have suspected was already diverging forever from her own.

  Visiting her as she lay dying was an experience that was to be most haunting for me. She lay in bed, ravaged. Above her head a photograph depicted her at the height of her youth, with diamond stars in her hair. Having dispensed, by her good nature, with any sense of style, she had accumulated around her, through the years, all the flotsam and jetsam of things that she had liked. Her room might have been some strange beach where extraordinary objects had been washed up wi
th the tide of the years: madonnas collected in South America were to be found juxtaposed with pictures of herself or her family: relics and rustic souvenirs mingled without the slightest self-consciousness. She was ardently Catholic, and I like to think of her as having had a “catholic” taste.

  When Aunt Jessie died, a part of my childhood died with her. She represented something that even my own parents could not supply, for parents are often, of necessity, the arbiters of reality and must keep a certain discipline for the sake of the grownups their children are to be. By contrast, Aunt Jessie was the outsider, the magic relation who provided those special treats and fantasies that are so dear to childhood. She made one feel that one went back to reality after leaving her.

  When Pandora’s box was opened and let forth all the evils into the world, Hope was left behind in the bottom of the casket. It might equally well have been Aunt Jessie’s chinchilla stole. Grey and apricot, marmoset and mesh moulds, and Aunt Jessie dressing for court—I suppose I am guilty of being more utilitarian than sentimental, for I keep all these memories as my aunt kept her shoes, or her ostrich feathers, or her magenta train. After all, everything can be used in a lifetime, and Aunt Jessie was of such quality that she will see me through till the end.