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Early life The Wyndham Sisters, by John Singer Sargent, 1899 (Metropolitan Museum) He was born into British nobility, the youngest son of a Scottish peer, Edward Tennant, 1st Baron Glenconner, and the former Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters and of The Souls clique. He was called "the brightest" of the "Bright Young People". HOARE, Philip Hamish Hamilton 1990 9.5" x 6.5" Stephen James Napier Tennant (21 April 1906 – 28 February 1987) was a British socialite known for his decadent lifestyle.

Well done, without one note of condescension.Pp. He spent his last 40 years as a palatial recluse. Truman Capote, when invited to Wilford Manor, was incredulous: ""He gave me a meal with candy violets in the soup."" Tennant never worked but wrote several slim, privately printed books, published one commerical book (""a hilariously drawn adult comic book,"" says Hoare), worked for half his life writing 500,000 words on seven drafts of an unfinished, never published Proustian/Firbankian novel. Even so, his greatest male friendships were with practicing homosexuals, such as society photographer Cecil Beaton and war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Despite his seeming hermaphroditism, it was said that Tennant was too delicate ever to have sex with anyone. His father died when Tennant was 11, and he later inherited the huge family manse, Wildord Manor, which he gradually turned into a peacock paradise with gold-star wallpaper, leopard and polar-bear skin rugs, and riotously showy ostrich feathers, satin curtains, and a bust of himself by Jacob Epstein. He was vain of his legs and had been, perhaps, the most stunningly beautiful child and youth in England, a comment often made. He also took up maquillage at a very early age, loved to talk makeup with girls, wear gold-dust in his hair: he wore rouge and blue eyeshadow until his death at 80, along with a vile Max Factor scent. As a child, Tennant was raised in skirts by his mother, who wanted him to be an outstanding artist. He was easily spotted as well in Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall, a book about Bright Young Things of the Twenties. Life of a British aesthete and Bright Young Thing of the Twenties, of whom the Daily Express said, ""And should he favor you with speech, with an epigram, perhaps, that reveals an intuition as searching as a woman's, you will feel that condescension, indeed, can go no further."" Some readers of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited who knew Stephen Tennant, as did Waugh, have suggested that Tennant was the original for the ethereal and aristocratic Sebastian Flyte, who habitually carries his teddy bear about with him, as did Tennant.