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PHOTOBIOGRAPHY (255 pp.)--Cecil Beafon--Doubleday ($6).

Little Cecil Beaton, aged three, hopped in bed with his "Mummie" one fine English morning and ran his eye over the day's mail that lay scattered on the eiderdown. There, in the shape of a photographic postcard of a popular actress, Cecil Beaton saw his fate. "The beauty of it," he recalls in Photobiography, "caused my heart to leap...My passion for Miss Lily Elsie and my interest in photography were thus engendered at the same moment."

Cecil Beaton never got over his boyhood crushes on Miss Lily Elsie and photography. He pursued the latter with such relentlessness that he became one of the world's biggest clicks in fashion and society photography. Beaton's pen portrait of Beaton, like those he makes with his Rolleiflex, shows such a dazzle of limelight about the subject's head that at times he seems not merely Beatonized, but beatified. Nevertheless, his book is a charming tattletale about the semiprivate life of a sort of celluloid Cellini; and the tale is adorned with plenty of gossip about the rich and famous people Beaton has photographed.

Corpse on the Linoleum. All during his adolescence Beaton kept snapping Kodak pictures of his Mummie and his two sisters. At Harrow, he found a willing subject in a schoolmate, and posed him, early one morning, half nude in the headmaster's garden. The headmaster's wife witnessed the scene, and Beaton took no more neoclassic pictures at Harrow.

Cambridge was more tolerant of Beaton's talents, but Beaton's father, a timber merchant, was not. After Cambridge, Cecil was put to work for a Mr. Schmiegelow, typing invoices for bags of cement. A young worldling of his acquaintance took pity. "Take it easy," he advised, "and become a friend of the Sitwells."

Beaton did. Soon he had his first show (full of such surrealisms as the famous photograph of Edith Sitwell--as a corpse on a strip of linoleum), and became notorious overnight as the wild man of British photography. In a few years puckish Cecil had captivated a good share of the rich society-photography trade in New York as well as in London, and had published a book of his photographs. One of Cecil's subjects, Lady Cunard, was so displeased with the book that she set her copy afire in the midst of a luncheon party, then seized a red-hot poker and ran it through from cover to cover, proclaiming: "He's a low fellow, and it's a terrible book!"

Monkey Tricks. The lady was wrong. Even in his earliest plates, Cecil Beaton showed himself to be a remarkably gifted photographer of women. His talent for the picturesque lie, his mastery of the cosmetic power of light, his ability to observe beautiful women with a severe detachment--almost as fine pieces of furniture--produced photographs that were sometimes as exquisitely unreal as the visions of Botticelli.

Beaton has been less successful in taking photographs of men. King George VI likes his work, but gruff old Winston Churchill gave him a bit of trouble. "Hey, damn you, young fellow!" he spluttered when Beaton tried to take a candid shot of him at work. "What the hell are you up to with your monkey tricks?...Wait till I'm prepared, the glass of port taken away, my spectacles so, this box shut, the papers put away thus. Now then, I'm ready, but don't try any further cleverness on me!"

Poet T. S. Eliot gently refused to be photographed. He said he couldn't decide whether to wear a hard or a soft collar.

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