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This chapter focuses on Cecil Beaton’s famous photographs of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. These photographs offer a summary of the ideological motivations for the Sitwells’ artistic activism in the 1920s, a visual representation of their most fervent beliefs about the role of art in British culture. The chapter acknowledges that they were motivated by the desire for publicity and that their many public battles had less to do with deeply felt principles than with opportunism and an eagerness to turn real or imagined slights into highly publicized feuds; however, it argues that Beaton’s 1927 photographs of the Sitwells are also evidence of their investment in a thoughtful reappraisal of British culture after the Great War and in a vigorous revision of the role of the aristocracy within that culture.

Glenway’s autobiographical story (published posthumously) “A Visit to Priapus” reveals him living chastely under a spell cast by Monroe and George. Glenway’s journals show George frankly rebuffing Glenway’s sexual interest. Wescott sees himself as a falcon submitting to George, the falconer. This metaphor animates Glenway’s novella The Pilgrim Hawk. George is profiled in Coronet magazine, a condescending piece ambivalent about his work and rife with homophobic insinuation. Cecil Beaton publishes in Vogue an illustration with texts depicting New York nightlife including the term “damned kikes.” Condé Nast is forced to dismiss Beaton. The scandal requires reprinting of 130,000 copies and reveals the anti-Semitism of Café Society. The close friendships among the PaJaMa trio and “the boys” encourage Jared French to paint a triptych of frontal nudes of George, Monroe, and Glenway. Cadmus paints a scene of the three men lounging on Stone-blossom’s property. Titled Conversation Piece, it strongly evokes a domestic same-sex trio.

George photographs Cecil Beaton, who introduces his work to Edna Chase, Vogue’s editor-in-chief. In 1935–1936, George’s fashion obligations proceed apace with four pictures each in March editions of Town and Country and Harper’s Bazaar. Agnes Rindge arranges a demanding commission of photographing Vassar’s 1935 graduating class. Next, George photographs noteworthy artists for Chick Austin’s 1936 Hartford Festival program. Lloyd and Barbara Wescott purchase a large dairy farm in New Jersey and gift a nearby house to Glenway, allowing Monie and George continued familial relations with the Wescotts. George decorates and landscapes the “Stone-blossom” over time. In June 1936, Cocteau and his young lover, Marcel Khill, visit New York on a round-the-world tour. A group outing to Coney Island with Cocteau and Khill includes George, Glenway, and Beaton. George’s contribution to Alfred Barr’s historical survey show, “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism,” becomes one of his iconic images, The Sleepwalker, whose homoeroticism is unmistakable.

Nabokov left France in 1933 to lecture at the Barnes Foundation. Shortly afterward, his ballet Union Pacific, on a scenario by poet Archibald MacLeish, the first ballet on an American theme, triumphed in a choreography by Massine. Nabokov’s friendships in New York included photographers Cartier-Bresson and Beaton and composer Elliott Carter, to whom he always remained close. In 1936, after visiting his mother in Nazi Germany, he took up a position as music professor at Wells College, in upstate New York.

When it was performed in 1958, Barber’s opera Vanessa was the first new American work produced by the Metropolitan Opera since 1947 and only the twentieth since the opening of the opera house in 1883. It took Barber two decades to find a libretto, and his search finally culminated in his own backyard, as it were, when his partner Gian Carlo Menotti offered to write the libretto. This chapter narrates how Vanessa evolved, from the creation of the plot to the actors and sets. Set in an unnamed “northern country about 1905,” the story unfolds about two women: Vanessa, a lady of great beauty, who for twenty years of winter after snowy winter has awaited the return of her only love, Anatol; and her beautiful young niece, Erika. The concluding quintet is considered one of the most brilliant climaxes in the twentieth-century repertoire. The opera’s critical success led to the production of Vanessa at the Salzburg Festival, the first American opera performed there. There have been numerous productions in the United States and abroad since then, including a brilliant one at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2018.