My Royal Past: The Memoirs of Baroness von Bülof

by Cecil Beaton

105 pages, hardbound

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

People noted sets and costumes of British photographer, diarist, and theatrical designer Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton for My Fair Lady on stage in 1956 and on film in 1964.

Cecil Beaton first styled his sisters decadently. His unique flair for elegance and fantasy led him to the most successful and influential portrait and fashion of the 20th century. From Adolf de Meyer, baron, and Edward Jean Steichen as sources of inspiration, he nevertheless developed all his own style. He worked for Vogue for more than a quarter-century and also as court official to the royal family in 1937. A constant innovator, Beaton worked for five decades to captivate some figures of his time from Edith Sitwell to the Rolling Stones, Greta Garbo, Jean Cocteau, and Marilyn Monroe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_B...

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 2 out of 5]

What can I say about this absurd book? It is a time capsule of how refreshing Punk rock would be in the mid-1970's - I can just hear people 'screaming' at the pictures of Beaton in drag as various battle-axe Victorian era scions of Mittle European nobility - it is a tribute too and send up of the type of royal and aristocratic memoir popular before and just after WWI. That Beaton thought it worth producing in 1960 a send up of the memoirs of a lady of the courts of Potsdam and the Hofburg when the originals of these sort of books were cluttering up second hand bookshops in their hundreds and had barely any readership serious or comedic is demonstration of how completely cut off from anything real or important that was happening in the post war world.

And of course the drag was a big challenge and an ostensible denial - he would have loved someone to say how queer because the libel laws were so easy in the UK - even Liberace won a case in the UK denying he was queer! - just like his much trumpeted affair with Greta Garbo which he revealed not long before he died - it was all to show those who thought him just the pansy picture taker that he had captured the moist beautiful and mysterious woman in the world - so how could he be a pansy?! How much he adored Garbo as a woman, and how much he adored her as a legend, is open to question. There are no other great consummated heterosexual passions.

I am treating this silly book way too seriously - if you are a Beaton fan you'll love it - but for the rest of
us it is a bit of a yawn.

[Anita Dormer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wonderful
Eccentric laughable and lovable

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The renowned photographer Cecil Beaton had a bit of a lark with this one. Dressing himself and friends in period costumes (with himself often in drag), he took a series of "society portraits" and then created a fictitious memoir for Baroness von Bülop née Princess Theodora Louise Alexina Ludmilla Sophie von Eckermann-Waldstein. It's all very camp, and if a bit forced at times, still a good romp.

This is one I tracked down for my collection of fictitious memoirs, a particularly fine addition, I think.