![]() ![]() He somewhat achieved that, as in his youth (see the cover photo by Beaton), he was considered astonishingly handsome, and used cosmetics and hair dyes throughout his life to enhance his natural attributes. ![]() I think the most amusing and telling anecdote in the book comes when he was a mere tot of four: his father queried his sons on what they wanted to be when they grew up, and whereas Stephen's brothers opted for businessman and engineer, the precocious Stephen replied: "I want to be a Great Beauty, Sir". ![]() Tennant was perhaps the most flamboyant of the 'Bright Young Things' that came to be notorious following the First World War, and despite not having much of a career as either a writer (he spent fifty years composing and rewriting a magnum opus called 'Lascar', that remained unfinished at his death in 1987) or an artist, he continued to fascinate the English public due to his many eccentricities - and the fact he knew virtually everybody who was anybody - from the Queen Mother to Greta Garbo to Cecil Beaton to Virginia Woolf, etc., etc. I'd vaguely recalled the name of Stephen Tennant (he's mentioned once in Holroyd's exhaustive Lytton Strachey: The New Biography), but it wasn't until a recent viewing of Terence Davies' 'Benediction', his magnificent film bio of Tennant's lover, poet Siegfried Sassoon, that I became entranced by the subject - Stephen really steals the show in that film. ![]()
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