The eldest and most eminent of the accused is the balding, bearded Angus McBean, 37, acknowledged in court as “the leading theatrical photographer in the country”. He is also renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for his witty, surreal portraits of famous beauties shown disembodied, buried in sand or floating through clouds, which only two years before were denounced as “charlatanry” by no less than the British Journal of Photography. Like his fellows in the dock, who range in age from 18 to 28 and include three servicemen, he has pleaded guilty to a variety of homosexual offences after being arrested in Bath in late November 1941.
The trial seems particularly vicious at a time when British officialdom might have more urgent things to do than prosecute a group of harmless young homosexuals who knew what they were doing when they went to bed with each other. McBean’s career – meteoric since his photographs in 1936 of the fellow Welshman Ivor Novello and a beautiful ingénue called Vivien Leigh made the front page of all five of London’s glossy magazines in the same week – is already “ruined”. His work has dried up. Many famous friends have melted away, leaving only Leigh and her new husband, Laurence Olivier, the actress René Ray, and the Sunday Times drama critic James Agate to show support by placing McBean’s name defiantly in their photo credits and writings as he awaited trial.
The photographer’s life has been stripped bare and reported at length in the previous day’s News of the World. After the “bitter tragedy” of an early marriage (in 1927 to a Clapham teacher and unconsummated), he has reverted to his “old ways”. Declared unfit for wartime service (interpreted by many as him failing to do his patriotic duty), he has been lodging and carrying on his photography in an uncle’s fine Georgian house in Bath, after closing his studio in Pimlico during the Blitz. According to the lord chief justice, the photographer became the “centre and patron” of a large circle of homosexuals in the city, “corrupting” a number of younger men.
These included a 19-year-old (also in the dock along with his subsequent 25-year-old lover, an army officer) and a 17-year-old (formerly McBean’s garden help at his cottage in Hertfordshire) who became the photographer’s lover after having an affair with a married woman.
What the court has not heard is that wartime naval intelligence HQ is just a few hundred yards from McBean’s house. The authorities took fright about supposed national security on discovering the existence of a jolly coterie of young men who met at the photographer’s flat/studio or a nearby basement cafe in the course of their otherwise innocuous lives. Nor has the court heard that the subsequent police round-up of nearly 24 homosexuals in Bath has already had appalling consequences. Of eight men who confessed immediately and were charged, an 18-year-old and a 23-year-old have already committed suicide.
Suddenly in Winchester Castle there is a moment quite as surreal as anything in McBean’s photographs. The lord chief justice, 66-year-old Viscount Caldecote, who was famously compared to Caligula’s horse when he was a notoriously inept Conservative defence minister, is literally full of wind as he delivers his judgment. Just before he starts his sentencing, he lifts one scarlet-mantled buttock from his throne and lets fly “a very audible fart”, as McBean was wont to describe it. The judicial flatulence in such high drama for an instant undermines the savagery of what follows. Fulminating that he is being lenient and that he expects more trials from the Bath circle to follow, Caldecote sentences the photographer to four years’ imprisonment with hard labour. The other accused receive much shorter terms of imprisonment or borstal.
McBean used to point out later with a wry smile that his own sentence was “twice as long as Oscar Wilde’s”. The photographer had become the clown prince of British high bohemia in the late 1930s – and in response, the British Establishment had once again punished a gifted man, whose craft was as irreverently subversive of accepted order as his sexual preferences.
But against all expectations, in 1942 McBean was not facing ruin. All was not lost.
An optimist, whose faith in the potential beauty of every sitter pervaded his luminous, highly finished photographs, McBean was always remarkably good at making the best of a bad job. Uncomplainingly, he served “only” 21/2 years of his sentence, mostly trenching fields around a bleak labour camp in Lincolnshire. He claimed this amounted to not too much hardship for someone who was always good with his hands and could never stop working. In a predictable twist of Caldecote’s myopic hope that the photographer would receive “help” with his sexual preferences in a penal settlement, McBean took a lover while inside.
In autumn 1944, he emerged, three months after his 40th birthday, “ utterly unscathed”, according to his friend Quentin Crisp. McBean himself chose not to talk publicly about his trial and imprisonment. Crisp, several years his junior and briefly a bedmate in the earliest months of the war, soon had the photographer
as one of his character witnesses in his own brush with the legal system: a prosecution for soliciting, of which the ornate commercial artist was triumphantly acquitted.
At the same time, McBean took a 21-year-lease (with £100 he had to borrow from his widowed mother) on a bombed building in Endell Street, Covent Garden, that he rebuilt as a studio. Within a year, he was triumphantly back in business with sensational portraits of Claire Luce as Cleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford, and atmospheric pictures of Peter Pears in Benjamin Britten’s new Peter Grimes at Sadler’s Wells. His conviction and imprisonment forgotten, he became the official photographer at both locations and in the next 20 years fulfilled the same function at the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne as well as at the courts of the Oliviers and the powerful West End theatre producer Binkie Beaumont. Virtually every performing star who appeared in London over the next two decades – among them Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas and Ingrid Bergman – came in front of his camera. Katharine Hepburn was so smitten with the results, she asked to marry him to keep him “in the family”.
So ubiquitous did McBean’s images become in programmes, magazines, books and on record covers that he was probably the most popular British photographer of the 20th century. Retained as a house photographer by EMI for a decade, he produced a famous image of the Beatles looking down the stairwell of the record company’s HQ in 1963 for their first LP; he also shot a reprise in 1970 for what was intended to be the group’s last album.
Certainly McBean’s work is the most influential of any British photographer of his time. A single image of Vivien Leigh in 1938, specially taken for her to send to Hollywood to win the part of Scarlett O’Hara, was transformed into the first sight of her in a huge hat in Gone with the Wind. (The picture, his favourite of his entire career, was used for a Royal Mail stamp in 1985 and will form the the key image of the long-overdue McBean exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.) His stage photographs, always specially directed by him, fixed camera angles for any films that followed in their wake, from A Streetcar Named Desire through The Prince and the Showgirl and West Side Story to the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor Dr Faustus. An image he made of a 20-year-old whom he picked out of a West End chorus line in 1950 for an advertisement for a sun lotion called Lacto-Calamine propelled his choice – one Audrey Hepburn – to her own stardom. In turn, that image was parodied in her musical with Fred Astaire, Funny Face. His romantic 1939 portraits of Crisp spurred Jonathan Cape to publish The Naked Civil Servant.
In 1947, McBean fell in love for a final time. But his beloved, David Ball, had another relationship that McBean had to accept. For over 20 years from 1963, the troika lived in a moated hall in Suffolk; McBean himself turned the house into a decorative fantasia on Greensleeves, in keeping with his own sartorial style – which grew ever more exotic after his beard turned white. The three-cornered relationship was to last until McBean’s death in 1990, on the night of his 86th birthday.
