My Royal Past By Baronness von Bulop as told to Cecil Beaton

[Cecil Beaton]


My Royal Past is the spoof memoirs of Baroness Von Bülop, lady-in-waiting to her aunt Maria-Hedwig, Grand Duchess of Hansburg. The story of the philandering Aunt, the seemingly innocent Baroness and their eventual downfall by the hands of revolutionaries and communists was Beaton's riposte to the current trend for the real memoirs of Middle Europe's aged minor royals. The book is an amusing mix of words, drawings and photographs. The memoir is set during the early years of the twentieth-century and allowed Beaton to indulge to the full his love of Edwardian costume. Tony Gandarillas gamely dressed up as the Baroness and Tilly Losch was cast as the beautiful Aunt. Frederick Ashton, Christian Bérard, Lady Bridget Parsons, Francis Rose, John Sutro, David Herbert, Osbert Lancaster and Lord Berners were all enlisted to dress up in lace and feathers to pose for the photo montages.


Cecil Beaton. B. T. Batsford, Ltd. London. 1939. First edition. Hardback, small quarto; orange cloth-bound boards, dust jacket. xiv, 146 pages. Colour frontispiece, illustrated throughout with black and white photographs, line drawings and facsimile annotations to text. English. 255 x 195mm. 0.8kg. . Very good, in good dust jacket; light shelf wear to jacket, light wear to spine ends, forecorners and folds, small area of loss to head of spine and top edge of front panel, browning to spine, price-clipped, light spotting to verso; light dustiness to top edge, slight spotting to endpapers.