The Hepburn most associated with Cecil Beaton is Audrey, whose “purity and integrity,” whose “enormous understanding, tact and . . . willingness to learn” he hymned throughout “Cecil Beaton’s ‘Fair Lady’ ” (1964), the published diary of his time in Hollywood designing sets and costumes for the film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical. In “The Unexpurgated Beaton” (Knopf; $35), the diaries that the designer and photographer kept during the nineteen-seventies, his last decade, it’s the other Hepburn who shows up, and the result is, to say the least, a corrective to the more hagiographic recent obits: “She is the egomaniac of all time . . . a raddled, rash-ridden, freckled, burnt, mottled, bleached and wizened piece of decaying matter.”

via Deep Focus : The New Yorker.