The Restless Years (1955-63)

by Cecil Beaton

  Lunch in a five-star restaurant in the Chinese quarter which is crowded out every day with thousands of people having exquisite meals.

  In an old-fashioned, 1900, mahogany chambre-particulière, the swing-doors open and a waiter comes in with a tray of the most delectable foodstuffs imaginable. Egg roll, pork ribs, suckling pig, chicken, shrimps in pasta, vegetables in pastry. There is no subtlety of the culinary art that is not understood and appreciated.

  Visit to Government House

  The ADC is overdoing things. ‘The dining room is to the left. Their Excellencies are entertaining a small party of six. This is the plan. You will sit on Her Excellency’s right. As you go into the room you will see the table in front of you. Their Excellencies’ chairs are a little higher than the others.’ We proceed. ‘Your Excellency, Mr Beaton,’ bellowed at close quarters.

  The decoration of the house is preposterous. Her Excellency has a passion for pink. One reception room might be that of a powder room in a night-club. Panelling and portraits in dining room, baby-toys on sideboard. Bad English food.

  The ADC has soldier’s boots. He disappears at lunch, but appears immediately afterwards so that the guests can be got rid of as soon as possible.

  BANGKOK

  A baffling, sprawling place without planning, it is difficult to know which is the centre of the town. The main hotels and restaurants are in a shabby little street of third-rate shops. The native quarters sprawl in endless activity. The business areas have enormous empty streets. The Government and Royal buildings are in splendid isolation.

  We are told that this is the ‘cool’ time of the year, but imagination boggles at what life must be like here during the summer.

  A few strenuous efforts to get a key turned in a lock, or a walk of a few yards, and one is bathed in sweat. It is heat of 120° in the shade.

  Our spirits were raised by the utterly delightful expedition we made down the river to see the ‘Floating Market’. Here people dwelling on the river-edge bring their ‘shops’ onto a small boat, and paddle themselves around, selling vegetables, fish, hardware, bottles of drink, and flowers.

  The water gives life to this otherwise parched country, and everything grows in tropical profusion in the humid heat. The river is the life source. On its banks the denizens live in shacks of teak and matting on stilts. They use the water for everything except drinking.

  THE TEMPLES

  The Victorian Temple of the Dawn was our first glimpse of the architecture we expected to find in Bangkok. In the sunlight the pinnacle and minarets looked as they should — brilliant, glittering and confetti-coloured. The effect was gay and delightful. But staggering in its impact as this huge monument on the river bank is, it is naive and crude in detail and design. Like a circus temple it is made of strange fantasies — elephants, Chinese gods, and formalised flowers. Much of the decoration is cracked china. Victorian dishes have been broken to form rosettes. The dragons’ tongues at the roof edges give a tremendous lightness and sweep to the whole architecture.

  The mystery of the orange-draped priests was something that gave life to every temple one saw. However ugly they were, the presence of these quiet people made everything peculiar and curious.

  But to me the whole palace was made particularly memorable by the presence of a number of gold women-dragon-bird figures on the terraces of one of the shrines. Leaning slightly forward, with their cocks’ tails, bejewelled bodices, globe-like bosoms, neat heads with the tall, spiked head-dress of Cambodian dancers, they created an extraordinary atmosphere. Posed in the most exaggerated Diana Vreeland-like attitudes they were life-like and seemed at any minute about to strut off and perform in some ballet.

  FLOUR FACTORY

  We saw, suddenly, from the boat, a boy blindingly white, hanging up some washing on a line. He was from another world. We steered the boat around and landed, and I followed the white boy down a white lane where everything, the trees, the windows, and the walls, had become white from the primitive flour-factory at the farther side of the lane.

  The first white boy was followed by others who came out of the door to stare. They were, with white faces and white bandages over their noses and mouths, an extraordinary sight. Silent and pondering, they smiled inhumanly.

  Inside, the haze of white dust blinded one at first. Men were working barefoot among the mountains of powder. The flour was heaped on the floor and with a strange ritual was being put into carefully folded sacks. Women were sitting on sacks sewing other sacks; a naked child hanging about covered with flour. It was a ghostly, dream spectacle. I fear my camera will not be able to convey the scene, but it will always haunt me as being one of the strangest sights of this strange oriental world.

  ANGKOR WAT

  From the small aeroplane we caught our first glimpse of Angkor Wat. The plane circled over the jungle and suddenly an enormous Versailles-like structure shot by. It had huge grey terraces and towers among the forest green. Again we circled. Another temple sped by among palm trees and coconuts. A thrilling juxtaposition of a great past civilisation and the forces of nature.

  Rickshaw tour to see the villages built on stilts. A river, in which people were quietly washing their clothes in the dusk, gives place to lights on stalls in the market square. All the children are particularly pretty, but Cambodian women are like lesbians with hair cut short, and the men, taller than Thais, are ape-like. All the population, from the age of ten it seems, favour gold teeth.

  These gold teeth came into their own in the theatre when the performers, in their brightly-coloured costumes and carefully whitened faces, started to talk. Their teeth flashed like brilliant jewels.

  Designs of scenery were crudely and garishly painted, with silk curtains, in holes, attached to doors. The play seemed to have a caricatured King of Thailand as the chief character.

  The towers that we had seen last night silhouetted against the full moonlit sky were now touched with the early rays of sun. The green, jungle-cleared roads smelling fresh and pure after the night’s cool were bordered by tall trees and flowering bushes.

  We came to the lake which surrounds Angkor Wat; the pale green moss and foliage at the water’s edge, with the blue of the sky reflected in the water, made a Monet-like scene. There were thousands of pink and white water-lilies.

  Angkor Wat, the greatest monument left of the Khmer, was built by King Surya-Varman (1112-82) at a time when in England men were still living in a very primitive state, burning cakes in a cave and wearing fur loincloths. Of a darkish grey stone, porous like pumice, with the patina of a thousand years upon its surface, the scale is prodigious.

  Splendid flights of steps lead higher and higher to the great pyramid of decorated stone, which towers over a vast sea of jungle and can be seen for miles. From photographs the great towers had seemed clumsy and formless, like mounds of worm-mould, or marrons glacées. But in the more brilliant sunlight they were gigantic and hugely impressive, and a fitting culmination to the great paths of serpent-lined vistas.

  To see the whole magnificent construction takes a long time. Nevertheless, in two hours we climbed the highest pinnacles and took a hundred photographs of every photogenic vista, and of the extraordinary detail of the friezes; elephants, nagas, warriors; but to me the most interesting were the yard-high figures of celestial dancers (all like the Duchess of Windsor) in their posturing attitudes, wearing tall headdresses, jewellery, and elaborate, tight dresses. They were in the height of today’s fashion. There is little reason to think that we have progressed much in the art of decoration and fashion since then.

  HONOLULU

  The wind was blowing the palm trees in violent gusts of anger. The rain lashed. The tropical island was at the height of its tourist season and in the middle of its rainy season too.

  The tourists looked worse than ever in a covering of transparent mackintosh; the trash in the shops more than ever appalling.

  By degrees the ubiquity of aloha and hula dancing and twanging guitars becomes so
overwhelming that one is nauseated.

  The Hawaiians are so pleased with themselves, their leis, their looks, for the incessant adoration of the tourists feeds their egos and they are sufficiently childlike to enjoy continual praise. But, oh, the wood-carvings, the hibiscus behind the ear, the palm frond hats, the portraits on black velvet, the crowds on the beach singing in unison, the stench of sweat and scent! There is nothing to surprise one any more.

  The flight back to Honolulu was seventeen hours long. We arrived there two hours earlier than we left Japan.

  Our eyes have changed. On the outward trip, accustomed to our own comforts, much that we saw seemed drab, rather squalid even. But the farther we travelled to the Orient, the more accustomed we became to the prevailing shabbiness.

  The hotels in Bangkok and Angkor reached the lowest level with rusty bath-tubs, brick-coloured, cold water and an impoverished towel the size of a handkerchief. After the peeling walls, the broken-down beds and general decay, the return journey has been a great adventure in mounting luxury.

  Things that had struck one as rather poor before, now seem the acme of luxury, the trip back to Honolulu like a return to the womb. The shops now seem so wonderfully elegant, whereas we were somewhat patronising about them on the journey out.

  Part IV: ‘Gigi’, 1957

  GIGI

  August 1957

  The sun of Beverly Hills was shining above the sentinel palms and through the Venetian blinds into my bungalow. The stillness was broken by large blue birds which darted from scarlet hibiscus to emerald blades of the banana tree and back to the feathery heads of a nameless tropical plant.

  Six months previously Arthur Freed had asked me to design the musical film version of Colette’s novel Gigi. Alan Lerner was to write the book and Fritz Loewe the music. I was well aware that it would be Colette’s own world that I should have to re-create, and by degrees I began to see with her avid eyes; the colours and the atmosphere should be hers, not mine. Little girls in tartan dresses, in broderie anglaise with black boots and stockings, and great jewelled ladies supping at Maxim’s or airing themselves in all manner of équipages in the Bois.

  Together with Vincente Minnelli I drove to the Musée Grevin, to the Skating Rink, to the Parc Monceau and other landmarks looking for locations. ‘This is where Gigi might have lived!’ Minnelli mused and pointed to a tall seventeenth-century house overlooking Le Cour de Royan. An ‘art moderne’ building suggested Aunt Alicia’s apartment. Gaston, with his sugar-merchant parents, most likely would have inhabited the grandiose Victorian mansion that now housed the Musée Jacquemart.

  Preparations were exhaustively detailed. Major additions had already been made to the cast of stars. We winnowed from a crowd of Folies Bergère girls and fashion models the beauties who were to portray demi-mondaines. We searched among the army of extras for the warts, wrinkles and noses that would give an authentic Sem character to the ensemble.

  I returned to England with a sheaf of notes about Minnelli’s requirements.

  ‘The Bois: 150 people, dogs, prams, respectable family, two or three aristocratic men on horseback, two women in habits, twelve children.’

  ‘Maxim’s: 20 characters, caricatures, nobility, actresses, Indian, Polaire, Lady de Grey?’

  ‘Trouville: Bathing machines, tennis, diabolo, alpaca swimming costume, etc.’

  During May and June I was busy at work on the pinchbeck life of Paris and Trouville of half a century ago. Time was short and I dabbed paint on a hundred drawings as if I were a Japanese factory-worker. Then almost before the paint was dry I would fly off again to Paris to present the designs to producer and director before handing them on to the costumiers. Customs and Passport authorities got to know me well during those weeks.

  As a result of the tests, I began to avoid certain dangerous colours. Experience showed that most bright reds became claret colour; greys inexplicably turned to Prussian blue; chartreuse yellow wound up like a Jaffa orange, and turquoise blue predominated with such force that it had to be labelled ‘for external use only’.

  Previous experience had shown me that designing for films is quite different from theatre work. Seldom, for instance, is a costume seen full length in the average motion picture and elaborate ornamentation on a hem is wasted effort. It is the same with the scenery. The focal point on the screen is inevitably about eye level. Yet no detail may be left to chance. The camera not only picks up shoddiness but it detects lack of sincerity or shallowness of feeling. This applies ubiquitously to the work of director, performer or designer.

  By the end of July, when all had been set for an August 1st ‘opening day’, we discovered that in Paris the summer holiday is taken very seriously indeed. Madame Karinska had been persuaded to make more costumes than she had ever intended, but at a given moment, her hordes of Russian helpers vanished.

  To add to our stress, Paris was now suffering from a fierce heatwave. The Parisiennes who were being fitted into wine-glass corsets were unable to breathe. When Madame Karinska, with artistic ardour, pulled the strings to her satisfaction, the actress would swoon. A tumbler of water and a patter of smacks on the face would not succeed in ‘bringing round’ the fallen lady before a heavy thud proclaimed another victim — ‘Encore une autre est tombée!’

  At long last, after the last detail had been worked out, the first day’s shooting was scheduled.

  It was a brave new world of indomitable spirit that foregathered in the Bois de Boulogne at dawn’s early brightness. Producer, director, cameraman and huge technical crew, together with a vast sea of extras, had been waiting expectantly in a roped-off section of the park.

  It was an historical scene. There were calèches of every sort, men and women on horseback, crowds of passers-by in 1900 costume. Cameras moved by on cranes, while megaphoned instructions added to the din.

  By evening, the ‘take’ had been re-shot countless times. Carriages bowled by with clockwork precision, grandes cocottes looked like empresses in their elegant barouches, Chevalier continued to greet the passers-by with the same grinning spontaneity. Assistant director Bill McGary, in shirt-sleeves and turned-in toes, shouted himself hoarse. ‘Send for the Stock Girls! Give us a dozen cocottes!’ Grand ladies in huge hats would materialise. ‘There’s one cocotte missing!’ ‘Anybody seen a cocotte?’

  Another part of the Bois was decorated with bunting and flags. A dozen carriages, entirely covered with real and artificial flowers, stood waiting for the Battle of Flowers.

  It proved to be another kind of battle. A strong August wind blew hats off in every direction. Angry bunches of lilies swayed ominously, leaves fell from the trees to give warning that summer was near its end. But nature was ignored while a windblown director and crew, on high with moving camera, followed the procession of carriages.

  As Queen of the Carnival, dressed in a tall muslin bonnet, a beauty sat in a lily-bedecked carriage. By way of homage, someone heaved a huge bouquet of roses into her lap.

  Abruptly, ominous clouds blanketed the sky. A deluge was at hand.

  The fashionable crowd made tents of newspapers and took refuge under the streaming trees. Spartan horsemen were soaked while still in the saddle. The Battle of Flowers ended in a waterspout.

  Locations varied daily, but at the end of each day’s shooting we would motor to St Cloud to see the rushes of the previous day’s work. Far from being anxious and serious, the atmosphere in the projection room was one of jocularity. A democratic audience of technicians and performers would jeer and shout unflattering things about each other’s efforts and appearances.

  As part of ‘la belle époque’, Maxim’s was closed to the public for four days while bright lights transformed its mellow ‘art moderne’ interior into a background for rich French bankers, gay ladies, zouaves, Egyptians, Ouida guardsmen over from London, and the moral refuse to be found in the best restaurants of the world. Supper-table roses wilted in the arc lights. Extras drooped or fell into sprawling attitudes of sleep during
the intervals between takes. The confusion, noise and heat in this inferno continued until all participants were prostrate with exhaustion.

  The heatwave that had enveloped Paris had given way to a spell of icy cold winds and the company found itself suffering from la grippe. A doctor went the rounds giving injections. Nevertheless on the appointed hour the miracle happened. Maxim’s was once more open to the public, and the Gigi company was suddenly on its way to do the remaining interiors in Hollywood.

  We had, while working in France during these past three months, completed nearly half of the film. But now the most important dramatic scenes were to be shot in the comparative calm of the Californian Sound Studios. A week later I found myself in Hollywood.

  A bright young man named Bill Shanks was summoned and he presented himself as the Assistant Director on the picture. Bill Ryan turned out to be the General Manager, a kindly avuncular type, ready with assistance and advice. The chief property man, Harry Lazarre, was a marvel. He was indefatigable and stood at the ready with knees bent and legs apart like an expectant goalkeeper.

  It was strange to come back as an employee to this city within a city, where, twenty years before, I had been a zealous sightseer. In my film-fanatic enthusiasm I had dogged the publicity staff, and a young man named Howard Strickling (now head of the department), had arranged interviews and photographic sittings with some of my favourite stars. When he took me to the studio cafeteria for a club sandwich and ice-cream in the company of medieval peasants, cowboys, ladies in white wigs and crinolines, German spies and the entire Barrymore family, I felt I was really seeing life from the inside. Little did I expect that one fine day, as set and costume designer for the musical version of Gigi, I would eat my Elizabeth Taylor salad or Cyd Charisse sandwich here each noon for weeks on end as a matter of course.