[ad_1]
Even at the age of 75, celebrity photographer Peter Beard wasn’t satisfied with a cup of cocoa before bed. Instead, he returned home at 4am with two Russian women he’d picked up in a New York nightclub.
Nor was the philandering playboy one to worry too much whether his third wife, Nejma, might not approve when she was rudely awakened by the trio.
Nejma was so angry she told the emergency services Beard was suicidal and had him admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The next morning, the old roué was on the phone to his ex-girlfriends, insisting there was nothing wrong with him and pleading with them to get him out.
Peter Beard pictured with his second wife, Cheryl Tiegs, in the Turksand Caicos
Dashing, impish and seemingly irresistible to women, Peter Beard was an artist, adventurer and African wildlife conservationist who was once described as ‘half Tarzan, half Byron’.
A scion of one of New York’s most august families, he spurned convention. He fell in love with the African wilderness, becoming known as the ‘wild man of the bush’, but never lost his appetite for more worldly pursuits: drugs, drink and celebrity friends including Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon.
His matinee-idol looks and devil-may-care personality made him irresistible to women, including actresses Candice Bergen and Bond Girl Carole Bouquet, socialite Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister) and supermodels Janice Dickinson and Cheryl Tiegs, who was his second wife.
When Vanity Fair magazine visited him in Kenya when Beard was almost 60, the reporter watched in amazement as four or five Ethiopian girls emerged from Beard’s tent after spending the night in his bed. ‘It’s such a waste, sleep,’ he said.
Beard’s heedlessness to risk almost cost him his life in 1996 when he was gored by an elephant and left ‘clinically dead’. When he died in 2020, aged 82 and beset by dementia — his body was discovered in woodland weeks after he’d disappeared from his Long Island home — those who knew him were only shocked he’d managed to live so long.
In a new biography — Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover — Graham Boynton chronicles the existence of an endlessly restless man.
n a new biography — Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover — Graham Boynton chronicles the existence of an endlessly restless man (Beard pictured with Iman)
Nejma Khanum (right) was so angry when her husband Peter brought home two Russian women that she told the emergency services Beard was suicidal and had him admitted to a psychiatric ward (Pictured: Peter Beard with Zara Beard, left, and Nejma Khanum).
‘Peter Beard had accelerated through the decades like a freight train, hunting wild animals, making art, taking photographs, celebrity friend-hopping . . . and effortlessly seducing some of the world’s most beautiful women,’ said Zimbabwe-born Boynton, who knew the photographer for years.
He revelled in his notoriety: no one loved an outrageous tall tale about Peter Beard more than the man himself. He claimed, for example, that he ‘discovered’ Somali supermodel Iman tending goats in the bush.
She was, in fact, a diplomat’s daughter who’d never been anywhere near the bush and was discovered by another photographer while temping at a travel agency.
Many people, especially the women in Beard’s life, had mixed feelings about the narcissistic, eccentric and mercurial charmer.
The advent of the #MeToo movement has made it unfashionable to celebrate womanising alpha males, although Boynton dismisses claims Beard was a sexual predator.
Yet he had a deeply sinister side that manifested itself in cruelty, ruthlessness and even violence.
One of his lovers — identified only as ‘Nancy C’ — was 21 and Beard 66 when he ‘relentlessly’ pursued her.
She remembers him as ‘truly sadistic’. His ‘sexual violence’, she said, was so extreme she needed antibiotics to treat his bites and the doctor who saw her urged her to press charges.
Beard pictured with his second wife, supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. Tiegs now claims her ex-husband once punched her so hard that she suffered a miscarriage.
Beard’s second wife, supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, told Boynton he Beard punched her so hard that she suffered a miscarriage. Another lover recalled with horror how Beard killed a neighbour’s cat by beating it to death with a rock.
Born into one of New York’s most illustrious families in 1938 — his great-grandfather was a 19th-century railway tycoon — Beard was educated at the best U.S. schools and Yale University.
Aged 17, he read Out Of Africa, Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen’s memoir of life in Kenya. He was deeply impressed and, attending a lecture by Charles Darwin’s great-grandson, Quentin Keynes, persuaded him to show him Kenya.
Beard liked it so much he bought 45 acres of land adjoining Blixen’s estate and created Hog Ranch, a stylish but sparse home in the bush where visiting conservationists, celebrities and models would gather round the campfire to share cannabis joints and listen to tales of Beard’s daring exploits.
Few could compete with him for drama: he’d hunt crocodiles at night, swimming through the water with his rifle resting on an inflated inner tube. Or come so close to elephants and rhinos that he could capture the moment they started to charge on film.
He also became famous for shooting sexy magazine spreads of women — often naked — on his estate with wildlife as props. Beard loved to decorate his photos with blood, once cutting himself so badly that he needed stitches.
He also became famous for shooting sexy magazine spreads of women — often naked — on his estate with wildlife as props
Beard hunt crocodiles at night, swimming through the water with his rifle resting on an inflated inner tube
In the 1960s, he published a celebrated book, The End Of The Game, that combined his stunning wildlife photography with his impassioned warnings about the modern world’s destruction of the African wilderness.
In 1967, he married socialite Minnie Cushing, though he was serially unfaithful. Within a year, she returned to New York. Beard followed her and, living with a pet bush baby that wrecked their home, they tried unsuccessfully to salvage their marriage. In 1969, Beard overdosed on barbiturates in an apparent suicide attempt.
Back in Kenya a few months later, he and a friend were arrested and flung behind bars, charged with assaulting and imprisoning a suspected poacher in one of his own wire snares.
Although he was found guilty and sentenced to prison and a flogging, phone calls by influential friends including Jackie Onassis, got him out of jail after ten days.
Perhaps it scared him off Africa temporarily as he went back to New York and stayed there for much of the 1970s, throwing himself into the city’s party scene.
Photographing a Rolling Stones tour for Rolling Stone magazine, he became friends with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Beard’s second wife, Cheryl Tiegs, was the world’s highest-paid cover girl when he married her in 1981. She joined him at Hog Ranch and had to put up with aggressive baboons, venomous snakes and an occasional leopard wandering into their tent.
Beard was friendly with Jackie Onassis, who once got him out of jail after ten days by flooding the authorities with phonecalls
Tiegs admits she was ‘naive’ about how reckless Beard was in his dealings with wildlife. A safari guide who was ripped open from thigh to sternum by a rhino horn blamed Beard for intentionally spooking a calf to get a better picture. Others agreed, damning Beard as a dangerous ‘adrenaline junkie’.
Back in New York, ‘he was constantly sleeping with other women’, said a friend.
‘They were two spoiled people — she [Tiegs] could have any man; he could have any woman. And they both did.’
Shortly before their wedding, they argued fiercely and — despite knowing she was pregnant — he hit her hard in the stomach. ‘Why he hit me there I don’t know because he wanted a baby badly . . . I had a miscarriage,’ said Tiegs.
When Tiegs broke it to Beard that she was divorcing him after barely a year of marriage, she armed herself with a can of pepper spray. ‘I obviously thought my life was in danger,’ she said.
Two years after their 1984 divorce, he married his third and final wife, Nejma Khanum. He’d intended to woo the Afghan-born daughter of a Kenyan High Court judge by climbing a ladder to her bedroom window one night and spiriting her away from her strict Muslim parents. But high on cannabis, he had to leave it to a friend to ascend the ladder instead and carry her down.
pWhen Tiegs broke it to Beard that she was divorcing him after barely a year of marriage, she armed herself with a can of pepper spray
In the 1960s, he published a celebrated book, The End Of The Game, that combined his stunning wildlife photography with his impassioned warnings about the modern world’s destruction of the African wilderness
Despite his promises to reform, he was soon back to his philandering ways.
Beard invited supermodel Janice Dickinson out to Hog Ranch to make ‘buckets of money’ posing naked for a Playboy photo spread. She certainly earned it, rolling around with the largest cheetah in captivity and straddling an anaesthetised crocodile after calming her nerves with a crate of beer.
Beard had his only child, daughter Zara, with Nejma, who later accused him of molesting the girl when she was three — a claim Beard strenuously denied.
Despite this shocking allegation, Nejma stayed with Beard. However, she cut him off from his friends, insisting she was protecting him from those who’d give him drugs.
In his final years, he had three strokes and his wild days were over.
‘The point about Beard,’ says his biographer, ‘is that the darkness was never far away.’ The man who could be the most entertaining of companions could also be as mean and dangerous as an angry rhino.
[ad_2]
Source link
