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.
