The late photographer Peter Beard was a lot of things—a charmer, a scenester, a world-class beauty, a bigot, a brute, possibly one of the most influential artists of his era, and a terrific subject for a biography. In the last years of his life when I got to know him a little bit—and then in the researching and writing of Twentieth-Century Man, my book about him that was recently published in paperback—I seemed to see a million different sides of Peter, a million different people within him.
Growing up as he did in Manhattan—heir to two American fortunes (rail and tobacco), best buds with Mick Jagger and Truman Capote, sometime boyfriend to Lee Radziwill, frequent visitor to Studio 54—Peter became for me a kind of entry point, an aperture through which to see and write about so much of the 20th century that fascinates me (thus the title of the book), from power and privilege to beauty, colonialism, and identity. Of course, there was about him, as there is of any person, so much that I couldn’t understand, certainly couldn’t identify with, and so had to read the way a critic reads a work of art—handy, actually, that analogy, as one of the these in the book is that Peter was himself his greatest work of art. What follows is an adapted extract from the book about Peter’s continual pursuit of danger, of drama, of lightning.
Peter Beard was a provocateur. Both in his personal life, and as a photographer of some of the most striking images of women and wildlife (and sometimes the two intertwined) of the last half-century, Peter was always pushing, pushing, pushing, looking for lines that those before him might not have passed, lines perhaps that one ought not to pass, entering into a world of transgression (against women, wildlife, and whatever else), all in the hopes of… what, finding something new? Something thrilling? Something never before captured on screen?
That might be dressing it up a bit more romantically than it was, actually. (This was, after all, a guy who after being turned away at the door of a downtown Manhattan hotspot in his late 50s jumped a velvet rope to make a mad dash to the bottle service booths, only to get battered and broken by the doormen for his trouble, so.) In the time that I came to know Peter, over the last five or six years of his life, and then in researching and writing a biography about him for the next two or three, I have thought a lot about the lines of propriety and even common sense that Peter approached, broached, and regularly thumbed his nose at. Not without consequence, of course, and not just from New York heavies—in his years of flouting the conventions of etiquette in the bush, around animals, whether while making images or just out wandering, Peter was not entirely unscathed. In the late ’80s, for example, he was implicated (and read the riot act by a court for his actions) in the goring and critical injury of a fellow outdoorsman, an event that cost Peter at least one of his oldest friends in Africa. And then, of course, he too had his own very personal encounter with an enraged adolescent elephant mother that, taking umbrage at Peter’s proximity to her newborn, chased him down, smashed his pelvis, gored him, and caused enough damage both internally and otherwise that, after a feverish dash from the Masai Mara to Nairobi—while Peter joked that “my screwing days are over”—when he was admitted to the hospital, Peter had no pulse.
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