Most of them as a matter of fact wanted dreadfully to be photographed

Oliver Messell, stage designer

All picnics should be like this!

"Subtle and understated" were their watchwords Stephen Tennant, Paula Gellibrand, Edward ‘Boy’ Le Bas, Baba Beaton (twice), Cecil Beaton, Georgia Sitwell

A plethora of "Bright Young Things".

They knew how to party!

...She almost wished in this new mood of exaltation that she had come to the party in fancy dress. It was called a Savage party, that is to say that Johnnie Hoop had written on the invitation that they were to come dressed as savages. Numbers of them had done so; Johnnie himself in a mask and black gloves represented the Maharanee of Pukkapore, somewhat to the annoyance of the Maharajah, who happened to drop in. The real aristocracy, the younger members of those two or three great brewing families which rule London, had done nothing about it. They had come on from a dance and stood in a little group by themselves, aloof, amused but not amusing. Pit-a-pat went the heart of Miss Mouse. How she longed to tear down her dazzling frock to her hips and dance like a Bacchante before them all. One day she would surprise them all, thought Miss Mouse...

...There were two men with a lot of explosive powder taking photographs in another room. Their flashes and bangs had rather a disquieting effect on the party, causing a feeling of tension, because every one looked negligent and said what a bore the papers were, and how too like Archie to let the photographers come, but most of them as a matter of fact wanted dreadfully to be photographed and the others were frozen with unaffected terror that they might be taken unawares and then their mamas would know where they had been when they said they were at the Bicesters' dance, and then there would be a row again, which was so exhausting, if nothing else...

...There were about a dozen people left at the party; that hard kernel of gaiety that never breaks. It was about three o'clock.

'Let's go to Lottie Crump's and have a drink,' said Adam.

So they all got into two taxicabs and drove across Berkeley Square to Dover Street. But at Shepheard's the night porter said that Mrs Crump had just gone to bed. He thought that Judge Skimp was still up with some friends; would they like to join them? They went up to Judge Skimp's suite, but there had been a disaster there with a chandelier that one of his young ladies had tried to swing on. They were bathing her forehead with champagne; two of them were asleep.

So Adam's party went out again, into the rain.

'Of course, there's always the Ritz,' said Archie. 'I believe the night porter can usually get one a drink.' But he said it in the sort of voice that made all the others say, no, the Ritz was too, too boring at that time of night...

Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies was published 90 years ago this year - it was Waugh's intention to satirise the antics of these 1920s hedonists, but in doing so provided inspiration for Noel Coward's A Marvellous Party and Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes, which is partially based upon the novel.

[NB Click on any of the photos above to embiggen]

A wish to be applauded on sight

Just hearing the marvellous Philip Hoare eulogising about the subject of Stephen Tennant at Polari on Monday was enough to get my juices flowing for a suitable tribute.

Who better to provide an overview of the "Brightest of the Bright Young Things" than that modern-day master of all things eccentric Mr John Waters? Here are some extracts from his review of Mr Hoare's biography of Stephen, Serious Pleasures, first published in the New York Times in 1991:

In 1910, when Stephen Tennant was four years old, he ran through the gardens of his family's Wiltshire estate, Wilsford Manor, and was literally stopped in his tracks when he came face to face with the beauty of the "blossom of a pansy." Thirty years later, so precious and high-strung that he sometimes took to his bed for months at a time, he was coaxed outside by a friend for a ride in the car on the condition that his eyes be bandaged, since passing scenery might make him too "giddy." Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Denton Welch - believe me, Stephen Tennant made them all seem butch.

According to Philip Hoare, the author of "Serious Pleasures," the witty and amazing life story of this great sissy, Cecil Beaton was one of the first to encourage Tennant's eccentric vocation of doing nothing in life - but doing it with great originality and flamboyance. Completely protected by class, Stephen Tennant couldn't care less what people thought of his finger waves, his Charles James leopard pajamas, his makeup ("I want to have bee-stung lips like Mae Murray") or his dyed hair dusted with gold. Who would dare criticize this "aristocratic privilege," this self-described "fatal gift of beauty"? As The London Daily Express in 1928 so succinctly summed up Tennant's attitude toward life, "you...feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."

Although many who knew Tennant later in life maintained that they "could hardly believe the physical act possible for him," the one real love affair of his adult life was with Siegfried Sassoon, the masculine, renowned pacifist poet old enough to be his father. Sassoon brought to their relationship "his fame, his talent, his position," while Tennant's only daily activities were "dressing-up" and reading about himself in the gossip columns. Looking at the photos of the two lovers in Mr. Hoare's book, Tennant posing languidly (vogueing, really), way-too-thin and way-too-rich, as Sassoon looks on proudly, even the most radical Act-Up militant might mutter a private "Oh, brother!" But the author makes us see that Tennant's extreme elegance was close to sexual terrorism, as it flabbergasted society on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century.

"Cherish me and introduce me to the glories of New York," Tennant telephoned a startled friend, David Herbert, as he crossed the Atlantic on the Berengaria. Herbert met Tennant at the boat and was embarrassed to see him walking down the gangway "'Marcelled' and painted...delicately holding a spray of cattleya orchids."

"Pin 'em on!" shouted a tough customs officer in homophobic disgust.

"Oh, have you got a pin?" exclaimed Tennant in complete disregard for the reaction of others. "You kind, kind creature."

After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. Sleeping Beauty forever. He had inspired enough fiction (Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate), met enough celebrities (everyone from Tallulah and Garbo to Cocteau and Jean Genet) and traveled the globe with Barbara Hutton and other rich dames for long enough; it was society's turn to come visit him.

"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure ("But I'm beautiful," he would reason, "and the more of me there is the better I like it!"), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewellery, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."

In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."

Philip Hoare has given his subject the ultimate final bravo in this meticulously researched and respectful biography, which manages to be both scholarly and hilarious at the same time. If only Stephen Tennant, always his own best audience, could have read Serious Pleasures before peacefully passing away (in bed, of course) in his 81st year. He probably would have fainted.

Stephen Tennant was an inspiration to us all...

Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant by Philip Hoare.

Old Queens

This week nine years ago, the country was draped in black as preparations were underway for the funeral of the dear old Queen Mum. Never in fact as “dear” or “sweet” as her mythology might suggest, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was actually a most fascinating and powerful character, as this article from author Philip Hoare, writing in The Independent on Sunday at the time, suggests...

Amid all the tributes paid to the Queen Mother, little has been made of one intriguing aspect of her life: the colourful friendships she enjoyed with some of the most flamboyant gay men of her day.

Three years ago, I watched the Queen Mother unveil a statue to the memory of her friend, Sir Noël Coward. It was the centenary of his birth, and the speech that she made at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was remarkable - not least because her voice was so seldom heard in the latter years of her life.

Hearing her speak, slowly, in measured, fluting and affectionate terms, of her friendship with and admiration for Coward, it struck me how much a part of that world she was; and how remarkable, in its own way, was her stalwart support for a man whose own official recognition - in the form of a knighthood - was delayed, according to many, by the fact of his homosexuality (and his rumoured affair with her own brother-in-law, Prince George, Duke of Kent).

The Queen Mother was an actress: that's why she got on so well with Noël Coward. She knew her lines, and played her part brilliantly; archive film reminds us just how well, just as it reminds us how far she is from us, and how difficult it is for a younger generation to understand her appeal and the frankly fawning nature of some of the tributes of recent days. Yet her relationships with other gay men - including Cecil Beaton, Benjamin Britten, and, perhaps most remarkably, the outrageous Stephen Tennant - indicate a camp sensibility that always lurked under that Establishment façade.

Isolated in her exalted position, yet able to surround herself with a self-chosen circle of friends, she felt flattered by gay men - and, indeed, was served by them, as one now-famous story goes. It is cocktail hour at Clarence House; the Queen (as she then was) is waiting for her gin and Dubonnet. She calls down to the servants' quarters: "I don't know about any of you queens down there, but this Queen up here wants a drink." Like her younger daughter Princess Margaret, and like Diana, Princess of Wales, she was, as a royal female, almost inevitably attracted by and attractive to gay men. It was a relationship of mutual convenience.

And it was Cecil Beaton, after all, who had reinvented her, in the image of the Edwardian actresses of his childhood, photographing her in Winterhalter-style scenes that distilled her romantic sense of royalty at a time when its image needed a drastic revamp. Not that Beaton had always been a fan. Seeing her wedding photographs in 1923, he had written, rather cattily, "She does look sloppy".

It was only when the couturier Norman Hartnell began to design his frothy confections for the new Queen that Beaton was inspired, and he fell fawning at her feet - even stealing one of her handkerchiefs from the session as a souvenir. And as Beaton's biographer, Hugo Vickers, notes, the Queen appreciated what Beaton had done for her image, and, indeed, for reconstructing the Windsors as a whole: "I feel that, as a family, we must be deeply grateful to you for producing us, as really quite nice and real people." Beaton's artful eye imparted a sense of style to the new Queen; he delivered the image that was to recreate the Royal Family for a new era.

To Beaton's patron, Stephen Tennant, the ultimate gay narcissist of the time, however, Elizabeth was "too royal to carve the joint". Stephen first met Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, as she then was, when they were both children, and he was taken to stay at Glamis Castle. Later, the aesthete Stephen recalled the "hideous Danish furniture" and "spinachy green and sour yellow tapestries" of the place - but this was an opinion coloured, in retrospect, by Elizabeth's jilting of his elder brother, Christopher.

In the early Twenties, Elizabeth had become a frequent visitor to the Tennants' house, Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire (which now boasts Sting as a neighbour). In this idyllic and lush river valley, with its sympathetic Arts and Crafts manor house built by their mother, Pamela, Christopher Tennant had pursued his suit to Elizabeth's apparent encouragement - only to find himself spurned in favour of "bigger fish", in the form of the Duke of York.

The episode underlies the equivocal attitude of English aristocracy towards the Queen Mother. Christopher's son, Colin, the current Lord Glenconner, once told me of the aristocratic reaction to the Royal Family under the Queen Mother's influence, how people such as Nancy Mitford and Diana Cooper were snobbish about "her sweet-pea suits, and so on". But there may have been darker and more specific reasons for his Uncle Stephen's antipathy: he may also have been aware, earlier than most, of the scandal in the Bowes-Lyon closet, when, in the early 1930s, he shared the same Kentish psychiatric hospital as the Queen Mother's mentally ill cousins.

Stephen Tennant

In later years, however, the increasingly reclusive Stephen (who by now had painted all the statues at Wilsford pink, and had imported palm trees and tropical lizards to its English lawns) appeared to have forgiven Elizabeth, and would send frequent gifts of laxatives to Clarence House, with his personal recommendation. Doubtless, he also appreciated her outfits, too. "She likes pink for evenings," noted her wardrobe mistress, "as it gives a bit of a glow." "Oh, pink," as Stephen declared to Rosamond Lehmann, "I almost faint when I think of pink."

For her part, the Queen recalled the decorative recluse with affection: "Oh, Stephen! I'd love to see him again," said the Queen Mother, recalling his carriage rides over the Wiltshire downs, "thinking lovely thoughts or whatever one did in those days". (Stephen's attitude to royalty did not alter enough to admit the Queen Mother's daughter, however. When Colin Tennant brought Princess Margaret to call, Stephen instructed his butler to tell the visitors that he was seeing only blonde-haired visitors that day.)

But it was with Noël Coward that the Queen Mother struck up her strongest relationship with a gay man. She may have criticised Wallis Simpson for her café-society commonness (and Wallis in turn called her "a fat cook"), but she was, in her own way, every bit the social operator; and in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of "emasculated" men and "masculine women", Elizabeth's social network inevitably included such people.

The historian Hywel Williams has written perceptively of this sensibility, noting that the Queen Mother "brought into the Royal Family a very 1920s style of brittle suppression, which was part of a wider culture. Embarrassed by Victorian ardour and emotion, its ancestors in literature are Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. Suddenly, it was smart to be hard - Noël Coward developed the style as a clipped heartlessness that has sunk deep into the Windsor consciousness". Williams even saw the then Duchess of York as an "emasculating femme fatale", as though she were herself one of Coward's hard-bitten heroines - Amanda out of Private Lives, or the equally divorced Larita of his earlier succès de scandale, Easy Virtue.

In this guise of world-weary mondaine, then, Elizabeth cast a blind eye to Coward's much-trumpeted (within their social circle) but brief encounter with her brother-in-law. Prince George was a part of the royal set that enjoyed the hedonism of the time - other members included the Mountbattens, Dickie and Edwina; and the then Prince of Wales himself, of course - all of whom have long been rumoured to have had homosexual inclinations. It was the Prince of Wales who rescued his brother George from drug addiction, and helped hush up an affair that George had had with a boy in Paris, after his "fling" with Coward.

The rumours about the affair between the playwright and the prince continued even after the latter's tragic death in a flying accident during the Second World War: one mutual friend told Coward, "You can't be the Dowager Duchess of Kent, you know". Yet, whatever Queen Elizabeth thought of this alleged affair, or knew of its details, played out so close to home, it did not affect her affection for Coward.

Coward's most obvious appeal to the Queen lay in his entertainment value - not least in the duets of My Old Man that they enjoyed singing together. But as her senior by just seven months, Coward also understood, as a contemporary, her tastes, which were ever-so-slightly common; he was, after all, a suburban boy from Teddington. And his relationship with Elizabeth was further strengthened by his unshakeable devotion to everything that she stood for, and also by his increasingly reactionary politics. For a man born in 1899, in the already fading glow of Empire, his friendship with the last Queen-Empress was one to be highly prized, and actively pursued.

Thus, the day in 1961 when the Queen Mother came to lunch at Coward's Jamaican home, "Firefly", was the social zenith of his career - although the lobster mousse melted before her arrival, and she was served curry made in a coconut. (As the cuisine in her own household often consisted of Ritz crackers and cheese spread, she probably felt quite at home with Noël's efforts at cooking, which, as Sir John Gielgud told me, were "disgusting".) Elizabeth did, however, heartily approve of Noël's "Bullshots", a potent vodka-and-bouillon cocktail, two of which she downed with delight. When she drove off, she "left behind her five gibbering worshippers".

Yet Noël Coward was ill-rewarded for his loyalty. He had written privately to a friend in 1955, noting that, while "the general public love me and are, I feel, proud of me... this does not apply to... the present darling royal family - or, if they are, they haven't made it apparent". Even Elizabeth herself seemed to have reservations. When Lord Wyatt told her that he was reading a book on Oscar Wilde and his trials, she said: "They were much too strict about those things then. But now I think they've gone too far the other way." For her, the status quo and a sense of discretion - if not suppression - was all-important; not for nothing was she known as "the imperial ostrich".

It was not until 1970 that her friend, entertainer and loyal supporter was awarded a knighthood, just three years before he died. Summoned to Clarence House for a lunch party to celebrate the fact, at the last moment the Queen Mother had to cry off with a cold, telling the about-to-be knight, "I'm afraid you'll have to make do with my daughters". The Queen and Princess Margaret duly presented Noël Coward with two gold cigarette boxes. When they suggested that he use the extra gift as a box for toothpicks, he demurred, "Alas, darling Ma'ams, too late, too late!".

To the end, however, the Queen Mother retained her affection for her loyal, bouffant-haired male retinue, who stage-managed the appearances of this royal version of Barbara Cartland. Yet she was no pantomime dame, for all the flowers and furbelows and winsome smiles. In that almost fey, whimsical and decidedly camp figure who would appear on birthdays and ceremonial occasions garbed in chiffon and bows, there was a sense of steel; what Truman Capote called an "iron-winged butterfly". And if, as Jean Cocteau once said, camp is "the lie that tells the truth", then she was the acid Queen in a fantasy Wonderland of her own making, and her greatest creation was herself.