Greta & Cecil - Hardcover

Souhami, Diana

3.53

36 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297643649 ISBN 13: 9780297643647

Publisher: Orion, 1999

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Greta Garbo was a legend of beauty and elusiveness and Cecil Beaton a leading society photographer and authority on fashion and style. At the time of their first meeting in Hollywood in March 1932 both were involved in turbulent same-sex affairs: Greta with Mercedes de Acosta and Beaton with Peter Watson, a wealthy dilettante. She flirted and danced with Cecil, told him he was pretty, took a rose from a vase, kissed it, said �a rose that lives and dies and never again returns� and at dawn drove away brushing aside his pleas to stay. He took the rose home to England, framed it in silver and hung it above his bed.

They met again fifteen years later in New York and started a relationship whose boundaries were to merge between image and reality, fact and fantasy, male and female and art and life. For her it was an idle flirtation, for him it fuelled his ambition to photograph her, to be like her and to marry her.

Diana Souhami draws on diaries, letters, photographs and films to show how Greta and Cecil coded androgyny into their work and concealed it in their private lives and she paints beautifully a picture of these two remarkable individuals and their era.

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Review:

Think Garbo, think aloofness, eyelashes, huskiness, natural, "the smell of freshly mown hay". Think Beaton, think camp foppery, narcissism, extravagance, artifice, "a snotty peacock". They met once in 1932, then waited 14 years until they met again, after which they became embroiled in a thrillingly uneven relationship marked by projection, mismatched desire and masochism.

So what was the "terrible homosexualist" society photographer doing with "the divine" actress? Amateur psychologists, sharpen your pencils. Diana Souhami wisely does not allow herself to extemporise too wildly despite the understandable allure of such an alliance. Along with the Scandinavian shoulders and paddle feet, Garbo also possessed a Nordic cold melancholy, rendering her screen portrayals attractively distant and her own self frustratingly absent. The truth was that she did not possess a character to match her undoubted grace and beauty, however hard one tried to impose one and, boy, people did. Beaton, on the other hand, was instinctively bright and bursting with desire to be adored, matching her indolence with bustling industry, like an early sketch for Jeffrey Archer. At times, particularly in the recounting of his early days, his obnoxiousness borders on the unbearable and Souhami barely conceals her disgusted glee, but she is a superb at reining in such characters, as she showed in Gertrude and Alice, and thrives on the challenge of eliciting respect for the sheer indomitable life force of such individuals.

Beaton pursued the artificial throughout his life and nothing could be more superficial than the hollow idealised self he saw in Garbo through the lens of a camera and pursued in the flesh. Yet all the while, as the years passed, and the notion, absurd yet not quite ridiculous, of marriage to Garbo faded, his mother, the early subject of his obsessive imagination, grew old, drunken and demented at his home in England, his picture of Dorian Gray by proxy.

Absence pervades every quality of this book, physically, emotionally and sexually, and it is a quality which Souhami seems to intuitively understand and allows to provide its own chastening commentary on those it envelops. Her sympathetic and shrewd attentions coax a tragic and complicatedly familiar story from two masters of illusion who are united, then estranged, by their lonely natures, uncomfortable in their own skins, but ultimately unable to live in each other's. --David Vincent

Review:

“ Full of glorious details and tongue-in-cheek irreverence” -- New Statesman and Society

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