An opportunity lost: forty years ago, photographer Cecil Beaton asked author Hugo Vickers to write about his life. Three days later he died Cecil had had a stroke, and people would visit him at Reddish, his house in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, and read to him.
I had never met him, but I had written a book (lately reissued as The Sphinx) about Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, and he liked it, so I was summoned to see him in January 1980.
I was 29 and it was the day before his 76th birthday. He’d had the stroke several years earlier, but he’d got better – he had just been photographing for Vogue in Paris, Caroline of Monaco and Paloma Picasso, and he’d written to ask if he could take the photographs for the Queen Mother’s 80th birthday, which
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