Why so many in the artist’s community disregarded so much unethical behaviour is never completely explained in a dishonest biography of the playboy and photographer Peter Beard.
According to the late Justin Kaplan, “kill the widow” is the first law of biography. Meryle Secrest, another well-known biographer, loved the term so much that she adopted it as the subtitle of a book on her method.
In the life of Peter Beard, an eccentric artist, writer, and bon vivant who passed away in 2020 at the age of 82 after becoming lost in the woods close to his home in Montauk, the word “shot” reverberates with the ferocity of a lion’s scream. The Kenyan bush was Beard’s favoured location, along with Elaine’s on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he frequently hunted and had a second house. His major medium was photography, which he frequently embellished with blood (either his own or obtained from butchers). Additionally, he appeared to view the chase of women as a sport, being married three times while being blatantly disloyal to each of them.
Beard proudly said that Nejma would henceforth be “my Jacqueline, the Governess” as he was recovering at St. Vincent’s Hospital following an almost fatal tusking by a matriarchal elephant during a 1996 trip in the Masai Mara. Beard was making a reference to Pablo Picasso’s domineering second wife.
After slogging through “Wild,” a little book jam-packed with history, literature, rumours, and a dash of environmental science, I believe Beard’s assessment of himself as being on par with one of the greatest writers of the 20th century is, at best, premature, and, at worst, exaggerated. (For one example, Boynton notes that although some of Beard’s works fetch high prices, they have never been displayed in a “reputable museum.”) Only a small portion of his enormous inventory is displayed in “Wild,” maybe due to copyright concerns. However, it also conveys the cliche that a person’s greatest artistic achievement was their own selves. He had overtones of both Ripley and Zelig and was glitzy and vagabond, all-pervasive and mysterious.
The middle child of three brothers, Beard was born in 1938 into an old-money American family. His mother, toward whom he had an irrational hatred, schooled him at home before sending him to Buckley and Pomfret, with a brief but significant detour to an English preparatory school. He majored in fine art and afterwards became friends with Francis Bacon, a figurative painter. With high cheekbones and a floppy golden forelock, he had the appearance of a living Ralph Lauren advertisement. He also had a strange magnetism that charmed many people, including his first wife, the socialite Minnie Cushing, and Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. His lovers (two of them) say he exudes “an electric charge.”
In his adolescence, Beard had become enthralled by Karen Blixen’s autobiography “Out of Africa,” and he had seduced Quentin Keynes, the explorer and great-grandson of Charles Darwin, into giving him a tour of the continent. An enthusiastic, if rather erratic, naturalist who established his name with “The End of the Game” (1965), a photo collection of animals in environments rich in beauty and dread, he later purchased more than 40 acres of land in Nairobi and gave it the name “Hog Ranch.” His campfire gatherings there, according to Boynton, “were an African version of the Algonquin’s Round Table, drawing diplomats, local politicians, worldwide environmentalists, foreign media, and of course, global supermodels.”
In his adolescence, Beard had become enthralled by Karen Blixen’s autobiography “Out of Africa,” and he had seduced Quentin Keynes, the explorer and great-grandson of Charles Darwin, into giving him a tour of the continent. An enthusiastic, if rather erratic, naturalist who established his name with “The End of the Game” (1965), a photo collection of animals in environments rich in beauty and dread, he later purchased more than 40 acres of land in Nairobi and gave it the name “Hog Ranch.” His campfire gatherings there, according to Boynton, “were an African version of the Algonquin’s Round Table, drawing diplomats, local politicians, worldwide environmentalists, foreign media, and of course, global supermodels.”
But his most important connection in this field was with his second wife, Cheryl Tiegs, who shared with Boynton letters and anecdotes from the time she and Beard were known as the “Beautiful Americans.” She addressed him as Pita. When she was pregnant, he nicknamed her Churly and hit her in the stomach, resulting in a miscarriage.
This is by no means the only time Beard’s actions are so reprehensible that you begin to feel sorry for the enraged elephant that smashed his pelvis and punctured his spleen. Although Richard Avedon, a fellow photographer and Beard’s neighbour in Montauk, possessed a pet cat that strayed into Beard’s property, Beard beat it to death with a rock, another girlfriend regrettably informs Boynton. He and a wingman were arrested and temporarily detained after being found guilty of assault and unlawful detention of a poacher in late 1969.
Nejma threatened Natalie White, a teenage girl 50 years his junior, during one of Beard’s final affairs. In a later piece of art, Beard seemed to be making fun of his wife’s jealousy by referring to Nejma as a “Afghan trench-warfare terrorist” who fantasised about “devilishly drawn-out Kung Fu type STRANGLING” her rival “with windpipe-crunching knuckle dusters.” (Julian Schnabel, a painter who compares himself to Picasso, was not amused when Natalie unintentionally referred to one of his works as “crap.”)
One of this book’s great unsolved mysteries is Peter Beard’s next-level facilitation; only one pseudonymous paramour, who claimed she had to take antibiotics for his bites, seems to have regretted tangling with him, along with the veracity of the Masai artefacts he brought to market with another wingman, Gillies Turle.
After being sent to Payne Whitney due to a barbiturate overdose, one therapist diagnosed Beard as bipolar; nonetheless, some people believed he was psychopathic. Beard also derided psychiatrists as “non-doctors.” Longtime supporters including his agent, Peter Riva, and gallerist, Peter Tunney, were abruptly discarded. His jet set lifestyle, made “pleasantly pixilated” by narcotics, was constantly supported by other people. “Ecstasy, cocaine, peyote, crack, LSD, marijuana. He completed them all, says Boynton. But he never gave the impression of losing control. It seems like the magical pharmacological carpet he travelled on throughout his life separated him from the harsh vicissitudes of a world that he did not naturally approve of.
What about the current world, which might not automatically be supportive of Peter Beard and might perhaps stomp him? “Wild” is fresh meat, sometimes wonderful, sometimes hard to chew, affectionate and a touch bewildered, and it has many current interviews that are straight off the tape. How it will age is unknown.
