Last of the hellraisers

When Graham Boynton heard that his old friend, the artist Peter Beard, had disappeared from his home in Montauk, on the far tip of Long Island, he laughed out loud. He assumed that Beard was up to his usual tricks again and had vanished into Manhattan to go clubbing. “He’d done it before,” he wrote, “and anyone who knows him will tell you that even in his diminished state, in his 80s, his instinctive wildness, his reflex flirtation with recklessness, would have him do it again.” But this time was different.

The old hellraiser was found dead in the woods three weeks later, in April 2020, bringing to an end one of the most vivid, spirited, and storied lives of his generation. Beard was an artist and photographer, steeped in Africa and its wildlife. His work is instantly recognisable: diaries and pictures made up of phantasmagorical collages, what the writer Owen Edwards describes as “a combination of adolescent daydreaming, fiendish detritus, cosmic dandruff, frantic tangible psychotherapy and visual novas”.

The news of his death let loose torrents of tributes, obituaries, and social-media remembering. His lovers were legion; his enemies too. Beard was the scion of American aristocracy, privately schooled and educated at Yale. He was stomach-droppingly handsome, athletic and lithe, with an innate restlessness. He was a romantic who found in the writings of Karen Blixen, otherwise known as Isak Dinesen, the spark that lit his lifelong passion for Kenya. He bought land that adjoined her farm on the outskirts of Nairobi and named it Hog Ranch, with a view of her beloved Ngong Hills.

He built a basic tented camp, centred around a perennially burning fire, that became a mad mix of safari and salon, drawing to its flames celebrities and supermodels, politicians and conservationists, foreign correspondents and passing remittance men. Cocktails were mixed and spliffs were passed around. Hors d’oeuvres would appear, usually basted with Hellmann’s mayonnaise sent over by Andy Warhol, and the nights wore on and on. Beard “discovered” future supermodel Iman in Nairobi and photographed her and other splendid women with the animals and in the bush.

He married supermodel Cheryl Tiegs after the failure of his first marriage to society “It girl” Minnie Cushing. For decades he straddled not only continents but also wildly different cultures, equally at ease with the clamorous celebrity tribes of Studio 54 as with camping in the bush with a tracker or climbing the ruins of abbeys in the French countryside near Cassis. His inborn ease, what the Italians call sprezzatura, slid him into any company, even if he was dressed in his trademark grubby kikoi and sandals.

He was kryptonite to women, but he was a serial philanderer and behaved appallingly to his wives and girlfriends. He would not be contained. He would not be tamed. He had no boundaries. He took epic quantities of drugs, preferring to spend his waking hours “pleasantly pixilated” on dope and cocaine. He slept little, hurtling through the days on what Boynton calls a pharmaceutical magic carpet that distanced him from the harsh vagaries of life and enabled him to make — and live — his art.

As lurid as it was, it wasn’t his personal life that got Beard into trouble but his antics in the field of conservation. From the early 1960s, when he began visiting Africa, he criticised what he believed was the postcolonial mismanagement of game. He wrote a scorching book about the disappearing wilderness called The End of the Game and routinely lashed out at Western environmentalists’ interference in African affairs, calling them “do-gooders… lords of poverty and the alms race”. He sneered at “the whole industry of doing good… Oxfam… Save The Children. To be an environmentalist is to be a joke.”

He fell out badly with the conservation community in Kenya, mainly because of his reckless behaviour in the presence of wild animals. He was banned from Tsavo National Park because of his foolhardy close encounters with dangerous animals; when he was almost gored to death by a matriarch elephant in 1996 many said it had been a long time coming.

Boynton, an old Africa hand himself and close friend of Beard’s, has written an exceptional biography. In Wild: The Life of Peter Beard — Photographer, Adventurer, Lover he spools out the threads of the artist’s knotted life right until its depressing end. After he had suffered several strokes, his third wife, Nejma, kept him isolated from friends she deemed a bad influence. She purged his gallerist and manager and at one stage had 44 court cases running over the use and ownership of Beard’s artwork. She was clawing back works that he had given as gifts, or in payment of restaurant bills and such debts, incinerating years of friendships.

Who knows what he was thinking when he wandered off that day, like an old elephant, to die in his wilderness? Philippe Garner, a leading photo-graphic authority, said after Beard’s death: “The world doesn’t seem to create characters like that anymore. There’s no room for them. The world is too restrictive. He was a wonderful spirit. An adventurer. A wild man.”

• Michele Magwood is an award-winning literary critic

• From the April edition of Wanted, 2023.