His journalist friend Bob Colacello called him “half Tarzan, half Byron”. His New York Times obituary called him an “amorous, bibulous, pharmaceutically inclined man about town… to whom the word ‘wild’ was roundly applied.”
Peter Beard preferred to call himself “an escapist”. He was a photographer, adventurer and socialite who was at home among great beasts wherever he found them – be it Africa or Manhattan; be they elephants, rhinos and hippos, or Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Mick Jagger.
Born in New York in 1938, Beard came from considerable wealth: his maternal grandfather founded the Great Northern Railway, his father’s family made their fortune in tobacco. At the age of 17, this allowed him to visit Africa for the first time, alongside explorer Quentin Keynes, great-grandson of Charles Darwin, taking his Voigtländer camera with him. Beard returned after graduating from Yale, befriending Out of Africa author Karen Blixen and buying a ranch next to her farm outside Nairobi.
From there, he took the photographs and wrote the diaries that appear in his haunting book The End of the Game, published in 1965, and now reissued in a magnificent new edition by Taschen. It is a brutal photographic record of the overpopulation, starvation and exploitation of wildlife, an elegy for a vanishing wilderness and a reluctant acceptance that even nature at its most defiant is unable to withstand the march of man.
He wrote: “The deeper the white man went into Africa, the faster the life flowed out of it, off the plains and out of the bush… vanishing in acres of trophies and hides and carcasses.”
Like the animals he photographed, Beard was beautiful, damaged, always close to disaster (drugs, fires, financial problems). All this brought him into the orbit of Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon, the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac, for whom he contributed images to the artwork for Tusk, including the cover’s barking dog and his archive photographs of ivory. These helped give the album its title – not, as the apocryphal story has it, because “tusk” was Mick Fleetwood’s nickname for his own penis.
Beard would have liked that one. His many lovers included the actress Candice Bergen and Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, he married heiress Minnie Cushing and model Cheryl Tiegs. A regular at New York’s fashionable places, he was close with Bianca Jagger, Iman and Janice Dickinson.
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He might have died when trampled by a charging elephant in Kenya in 1996. He actually did in 2020 when, beset by dementia, he wandered away from his mansion in Montauk, Long Island and was missing for 19 days before his body was found in a national park. “He died where he lived – in nature,” wrote his family.
If those seven words omit the unserious aspects of his life, they at least recognise that – as The End of the Game shows – Peter Beard was a serious artist.
The End of the Game by Peter Beard is published by Taschen
