The Mistress of Mayfair by Lyndsy Spence

Author:Lyndsy Spence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Doris at Faringdon, surrounded by Gerald Berners, Daphne Weymouth and Mad Boy.

In his diary, Beaton wrote: ‘Peter loves people that are not in love with him and I in my turn am now worshipped and adored by Doritizins [his pet name for Doris] for whom I hold no emotion whatsoever. It seems so terribly unfair that there cannot be a great straightening out and saving of waste.’14 In person, however, he played along with her, ‘if only to soothe the ache produced by years of rejection’ by Peter Watson. He went to bed with her ‘in desperation’, and he chastised himself when he realised he ‘could be so celestial with the bedfellow I love’.15 Although Watson had encouraged Beaton to have an affair, he did not imagine that it would have been with Doris, whom he loathed. It backfired on Beaton, and Peter, ‘so incensed’ by his ‘relationship with Doritizins,’ became ‘so bitter’ and refused to see him.

The affair between Doris and Beaton might have been founded on deceit, but their personalities and backgrounds were markedly similar. Born four years after Doris, in 1904, Beaton was firmly middle-class, his parents having risen from working-class origins (his grandfather had been a blacksmith; the other ran a chemist’s shop in Kilburn); and like Doris, his father was in trade. Like her own brother, Dudley, Beaton was afforded an education befitting an upper-class boy, though at the prep school which he attended with Evelyn Waugh, he was acutely aware of his lowly status in comparison to his schoolfellows. Waugh, the son of a publisher, overlooked his mutual rank with Beaton, and stuck pins in him. The inferiority he felt intensified at Harrow and he masked his feelings of inadequacy by dressing in silk pyjamas and rouging his face. And terrified of having to do an army drill, he bought a pair of boots with irons in them so he could masquerade as a cripple. Surprisingly, his schoolfellows left him alone because they admired his individuality.

Devoting himself to raising his rank in society, Beaton was determined to ignore his father’s profession in the timber trade – there was nothing he could change about that – but he made up his mind to turn his mother into a society lady. This Pygmalion experiment began when, at the age of 19 and at Cambridge, he began to send details of his mother’s engagements to the social editor of The Times, and following up on his initial contact, he sent along a box of cigars as a sort of bribe. It paid off when Tatler telephoned to ask if they could photograph his mother, and Beaton was so excited that he dressed up too, on the off-chance they might include him in the shot. It was in Tatler’s studio, with the backdrop of magenta curtains and lighting, that he discovered his vocation. However this curiosity for photography was founded in the nursery when his nanny, an amateur photographer, would lay her prints on the windowsill with a young Beaton helping her.

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