Greta and Cecil

Greta Garbo was a legend of beauty and elusiveness and Cecil Beaton a leading society photographer and authority on fashion and style. At the time of their first meeting in Hollywood in March 1932 both were involved in turbulent same-sex affairs: Greta with Mercedes de Acosta and Beaton with Peter Watson, a wealthy dilettante. She flirted and danced with Cecil, told him he was pretty, took a rose from a vase, kissed it, said ‘a rose that lives and dies and never again returns’ and at dawn drove away brushing aside his pleas to stay. He took the rose home to England, framed it in silver and hung it above his bed. They met again fifteen years later in New York and started a relationship whose boundaries were to merge between image and reality, fact and fantasy, male and female and art and life. For her it was an idle flirtation, for him it fuelled his ambition to photograph her, to be like her and to marry her.Diana Souhami draws on diaries, letters, photographs and films to show how Greta and Cecil coded androgyny into their work and concealed it in their private lives and she paints beautifully a picture of these two remarkable individuals and their era.