In 1939, the photographer Cecil Beaton received a telephone call that he at first thought was a prank. "Mr Cecil Beaton?" the caller asked. "We’d like you to come and photograph the Queen [Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother] tomorrow morning." Cecil put the phone down without saying anything. But it rang again, and this time the caller was more insistent. "Cecil realises that this is actually a summons to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth," the photography historian and contributing Vogue editor Robin Muir tells HELLO!. "And so he does."
The next day, the photographer goes to the Palace, where he has been given an hour with the Queen. "That hour turns into virtually the whole day," Robin continues. "Cecil runs out of film twice. The Queen is absolutely entranced. They change clothes many times, go inside, go outside.
"The only reason the session stops is because a carpenter comes to do work on the throne room – and word came from the King [George VI] that: ‘Was he expected to have his tea alone this afternoon?’"
Like so many high-profile figures of the 20th century, among them Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, the Queen had fallen under the spell of the portrait photographer, who, as Robin explains, captured his subjects "at the peak of perfection; the most beautiful [they] have ever wanted to be and the most beautiful they ever should be".
Now, his groundbreaking work is being celebrated in a new exhibition, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The show has been curated by Robin, a former Vogue picture editor whose formative work at the publisher Condé Nast was to photocopy and photograph Cecil’s images from its archive for a book.
"There have been many shows on Cecil Beaton, but this is the first that delves into his fashion photography and the stylish people who wore the clothes," he says.
The timeline of the show follows Cecil’s stratospheric rise as he captured society’s Bright Young Things in the 1920s, and concludes in 1956, when he turned his attention from fashion to the performing arts (he would go on to win global acclaim – and Academy Awards – for his costume design and art direction of My Fair Lady).
"One of the most exciting areas about Cecil is his early life, when he’s just finding out what he can do with photography and what photography can do with him," Robin says.
High society
Born the eldest son of a timber merchant in Hampstead in 1904, Cecil gained the patronage of the Sitwell family in 1926, after meeting the poet Edith Sitwell at the house of a mutual friend.
Edith was part of the society crowd known as the Bright Young Things, who were famously captured by Cecil in his early work. She became one of his most significant early sitters, and she and her family "introduced him to this extraordinary coterie of people he would never have met", Robin says.
Within a year, Cecil was under contract to Vogue, and by the end of 1927, he had held his first exhibition, in a gallery in Mayfair.
"Everybody who was everybody came to that exhibition," Robin says. "That really put him on the map."
"It is to his photographic portraits that the people of the next century will turn when they want to rediscover the character of this one," Sir Osbert Sitwell wrote of Cecil’s first exhibition. By 1928, Cecil had moved to New York, where he was "picked up by society matrons and American Vogue put him under contract for an enormous sum of money", Robin says. "By then, he’s as much of a star as the people he’s photographing, like Fred Astaire and Adele Astaire. Noël Coward comes to see him. Everyone wants to be photographed by him."
A celebrity favourite
A veritable galaxy of stars surrounded Cecil. There was Audrey Hepburn, whom he first met in 1954 when he was asked to create a profile of her. "He thinks she’s what femininity should be," Robin says.
When they came to work together on the film version of My Fair Lady, they bonded "magnificently. He's absolutely entranced with her. And she really makes the whole thing for him. I mean, she has endless patience. He photographs her in every costume he makes, all the ones that the extras are going to wear. I think they took 350 different pictures over two days."
He was also "great friends" with Marlon Brando, being "bewitched by people who have a charisma that’s different from normal". He wasn’t quite so charmed by Elizabeth Taylor when they met in the 1950s. By this point, Robin says: "Cecil’s pretty grand himself. I think, when he’s confronted with behaviour that might be described as ‘diva’, he does not respond well. He’s absolutely scathing about her."
Elizabeth, however, loved the pictures, and a few years later, her people asked Cecil if he could photograph her again. "Cecil quotes a fee so astronomical that they can’t possibly agree to it and so that sitting never actually happens, which gives Cecil great pleasure," Robin says.
One of his greatest sittings was with Marilyn Monroe, whom he finally met in the 1950s, when Sir Laurence Olivier was keen that Cecil work on her costumes for his film The Prince and the Showgirl.
"She came to his hotel room at the Ambassador hotel in New York, an hour and a quarter late, and Beaton is completely fascinated by this part-delightful and exuberant, part-incredibly vulnerable Hollywood star," Robin says. "They only have two or three hours together, and he takes one of the most beautiful sets of pictures ever taken of her at that time.
"He writes a very perceptive essay [about their meeting] and ends up saying that it will probably end in tears, which of course is very prescient."
Of the exhibition, Robin says: "I want people to come away thinking, actually, the 20th century was a rather beautiful, amazing time full of great, creative people – and Cecil made them look their best.
"Cecil’s not just a photographer – he’s a celebrity in his own right, and one of the great figures of 20th-century British culture."
Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is at the National Portrait Gallery until 11 January; npg.org.uk
Pick up the latest issue of HELLO! on sale in the UK on Monday. You can subscribe to HELLO! to get the magazine delivered free to your door every week or purchase the digital edition online via our Apple or Google apps.