[Cecil Beaton interviewed by John Freeman for BBC TV series 'Face to Face'.] Producer Hugh Burnett's copy of the typescript of the transcript of the interview, containing passages not present in the published version.

The present item is the producer Hugh Burnett's own copy of the transcript of John Freeman's interview of Cecil Beaton, broadcast in the BBC series 'Face to Face' on 18 February 1962. Duplicated typescript. 4pp, foolscap 8vo. Numbered, and headed 'CECIL BEATON', otherwise consisting entirely of the transcript, with no other details. Aged and worn, with punch holes for binder. On four leaves which were originally stapled together, but with the first and last leaves now detached. Page references 1-10 (presumably to a shorthand transcript) in the outer margin. The present transcript was prepared for Burnett's book 'Face to Face | Edited and introduced by Hugh Burnett' (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), but it includes several passages omitted from the version printed on pp.38-40 of that work. For example, the very first paragraph here is not present in the published version: 'I was very slow in finding a vocation, and I think I took the shortest cut in every direction. I wouldn't say that yet I know which is my real vocation . . . . . . There's an enormous amount of hazard in what I do. A whole lot of theatre jobs might come in succession, or perhaps writing jobs, I can never say, “Well, I'm going to spend March and April, doing one sort of job, and then switch.”' Other omitted topics are: lack of 'complete satisfaction' in his work; his 'well-off' chilhood and his difficult relationship with his father ('He was a great cricketer, […] but intuitively I went against many of the things that he stood for, and liked.'); how he was 'most objectionable' once he had 'discovered what I was about'; his father's business difficulties; his 'bizarre style of dress' and his diaries: 'I really looked upon my diaries from a technical point of view. I came across this board and I started reading them, and I was appalled by the person that was revealed there. But suddenly there would be a little patch that I thought had great vitality, that still seemed to be valid. So I collected them together, and even if I came out of them in a pretty unbecoming light, and I thought they were interesting, then I let them go in.'