But, unlike most swineherds, Beard often arrives back at the
ranch having, say, shot the latest couture collections for French
Elle or American Vogue. The rich, famous and beautiful have always
been suckers for Beard’s raffish charm and charisma: “Peter was one
of the most beautiful men in the world,” asserted Barbara de
Kwiatkowski, a former model. “He should have been a movie star.” He
was Veruschka’s favourite photographer, a longtime friend of Lauren
Hutton, and a confidante of dozens of other models, from Janice
Dickinson to Paula Barbieri. He “discovered” Iman, Somali model and
wife of the late David Bowie, on a Nairobi street, though she
perennially debunks his claim that she was an illiterate Amazonian
goatherd: “I spoke four languages. I never saw a jungle in my life.
Peter likes to live in a fantasy world,” she says, fondly.
Beard’s guests at Hog Ranch have included Kennedys (he used to
baby-sit for John, Jr. and Caroline) and Rockefellers; a frequent
guest on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht, Beard once won $2,000 when
Onassis bet him he couldn’t stay underwater for four minutes (he
was clocked at 4:20). He attended bullfights with Picasso. Mick
Jagger and Jerry Hall met at the millhouse he keeps in Montauk. His
girlfriends have included Candice Bergen and Carole Bouquet, and
he’s been married three times, to the socialite Minnie Cushing, the
supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, and, latterly, to Nejma Khanum, a
descendant of Afghan nobility; she acts as his agent, gatekeeper
and earthly representative, and the couple have a 22-year-old
daughter, Zara. Despite — or perhaps because of — this wealth of
nuptial experience, Beard claims not to be enamoured of the
institution: “It’s unnatural,” he’s lamented. “It’s overwhelmingly
claustrophobic, the way it’s been organised...it’s masochism
and torture.” But then, Beard has always practised a rigorous form
of free-spiritedness. In the ’70s, he partied hard with the Studio
54 crowd (he celebrated his 40th birthday party there, complete
with an elephant-shaped cake that descended from the ceiling). He
photographed the Rolling Stones on their infamous, heroin-infested
American Tour 1972. He’s mentioned 30 times in the index of the
Andy Warhol diaries (those who follow up any given entry will find
lines like “Mick [Jagger] arrived so drunk from an afternoon with
Peter and Francis Bacon that he fell asleep on my bed”), while
Francis Bacon, with whom Beard shared a bittersweet-fatalistic view
of the imperfectability of man, painted him more than 30 times.
Beard’s career has embraced high, low, and middle — there can be
few photographers who’ve gone from shooting a Fleetwood Mac album
cover (Tusk) to serious sub-Saharan documentary work for LIFE
magazine with barely a blink. He tosses back the pejorative epithet
most commonly levelled at him — “I don’t mind the word
‘dilettante’; to me, it means someone who does what he loves” — but
the extraordinary arc of his life and work finds material form in
his diaries and photo-collages. His diary fetish began when he
and Lee Radziwill were lovers, and Radziwill’s sister Jackie
Onassis gave him a leather-bound journal which he proceeded to
overstuff with all matter of arcana; photos of exotic flora and
fauna, from beautiful women to Baobab trees, densely layered with
dried leaves and insects, tiny rodent skulls, flamingo feathers,
transcribed telephone messages, line drawings and quotations,
newspaper headlines, rubber gloves, jeans pockets, ketchup sachets,
cigarette butts, fish skeletons, bone and stone fragments, and —
Beard’s signature touch — dribbles and smears of his own blood.
The diaries are encrusted time capsules of Beard’s relationships
with Africa, the fashion world, Hollywood, the golden years of the
Kennedy administration; the many worlds he’s darted in and out of
like an itinerant imp. They’re momento mori of a life still very
much in high gear, if recent self-portraits are anything to go by;
Beard still sports the passion-fruit skin tone, sinewy frame, and
subversive twinkle of the intrepid seducer, and the ruggedly simple
yet perfectly pulled together uniform — fraying bespoke jacket,
mismatching, artfully stained tuxedo trousers, gladiator sandals —
of the irrepressible flâneur. A recent call to his office to elicit
information as to his current activities was met with an enigmatic,
but inevitable, rejoinder; as far as anyone knew, the
septuagenarian Beard was off in some part of the world, camera in
tow, in search of another adventure.
