Peter Beard took one of his most striking photographs, which he titled “I’ll Write Whenever I Can,” at Lake Turkana in northern Kenya in 1965. A self-portrait, it shows Beard prone in the dirt as he scribbles intently in a weathered journal, and as his legs are being swallowed by an enormous Nile crocodile. Beard, as handsome as a movie star, seems unbothered by this dire situation.
What is going on here? Who is this man? And why, a small voice nags at me, is my life not as interesting as this? Beard was once described by writer Bob Colacello as “half Tarzan, half Byron.” Before his death in 2020, at 82, he was famous for his supermodel lovers and drug-fueled nights at Manhattan nightclubs. He was infamous, too, for an almost suicidal recklessness.
There was the time, for example, when a photographic safari ended with him being trampled by a “nut-case elephant,” as he described the offending pachyderm to the New York Times from his hospital bed. His artistic work was extraordinary, but Beard himself was shallow to a Warholian extreme. He was the kind of beautiful blank, incapable of introspection, that people could not help but project their fantasies onto, in part because his life seemed to be one.
“In his id-unleashed quest for sex, fun, and consumption of all the drink and drugs in creation, a life unencumbered by guilt or regret,” Christopher Wallace writes in his spirited new book, “Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard,” “he became a kind of symbol of the male ideal, a James Bond of the jungle in a leopard-skin coat with an Alaïa model on his arm.” Wallace blends biography, art criticism, reportage and essayistic digressions to create a portrait of a man so disillusioned with civilization that he sought to “rewild himself,” not unlike the way “a gardener might seek to bring a plot of land back to its original and most harmonious state.”
Beard was born in 1938, into immense privilege, in New York, but he largely pursued this rewilding project in Kenya, where he lived part time on a ranch near Nairobi. East Africa was the subject of his most notable achievement, “The End of the Game” (1965), a pictorial study of the escalating wildlife crisis in places like Tsavo East National Park.
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The book remains an upsetting masterpiece, yet Beard’s reputation rests just as much on his other exploits: the deranged fashion photography (Janice Dickinson on a pile of anesthetized crocodiles), unlikely friendships with Truman Capote and Francis Bacon, elaborate photography collages that often featured the artist’s blood as paint. (He would stab himself for a fresh supply.)
This is the second biography of Beard to appear in less than a year. The first, “Wild” by Graham Boynton, was meticulously researched but oddly fixated on defending Beard against “woke sensibilities and political correctness.” Beard himself never came fully into focus because the book lacked a strong thesis about who he was and what he believed: his private self.
Wallace’s thesis about a playboy intent on living according to his untamed impulses — “Peter’s utter devotion to this topsoil consciousness, to existing on the same plane as, say, dogs” — is convincingly argued in “Twentieth-Century Man,” and Beard is sharper as a result. It helps that Wallace adopts a tone that seems exactly right for his unusual subject, a sort of “Can you believe this guy?” breathlessness that would be familiar to readers of GQ. Wallace also drops any pretense at objective distance, preferring something more intimate and brashly opinionated.
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At one point, reflecting on Beard’s relationship with the model Maureen Gallagher, Wallace pauses to interrogate his own feelings about the affair: “Maybe I’m being an uptight Gen-Xer worrying about things like their age difference or the power balance between a famous photographer on his home turf and a young model whisked away to a kind of wonderland.” Maybe? A reader’s tolerance for this kind of meta commentary will vary, though Wallace deserves credit for grappling so directly with many difficult subjects: Beard’s “fetish for exoticism,” his racism, homophobia, antisemitism and exploitation of women.
Wallace, a former executive editor at Interview magazine, is good at dishing up the gossip. His chapter on the Bouvier sisters — Beard had a thing with Lee Radziwill — is a highlight of the book. His writing about Beard’s “hyper-present-tense” journals, which were like free-association scrapbooks, is the closest thing to a convincing argument I have read about why we should take Beard seriously as an artist.
Less persuasive is the presentation of Beard’s ideas around conservation and the natural world. If you take away “The End of the Game,” there is precious little to his activism besides some nihilistic ranting on “Charlie Rose.” Beard thought we were all “bacteria on a slide.” He once claimed that AIDS, cancer and heart disease were “sent by nature” to counteract human overpopulation. Homosexuality was a “societal illness.”
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These comments show the darker side of Beard. He was a man who dropped friends for no reason, stole credit, hogtied a poacher on his ranch and ferociously punched his wife, which may have accounted for the miscarriage she suffered a few days later. “He felt himself to be completely outside of our moral scales of right and wrong, good and bad,” Wallace writes. “He simply did not recognize them.”
There is a word for this condition, and Wallace is not afraid to float it. Beard, that “avatar for a kind of teenage boy’s fantasy,” was possibly a sociopath, fascinating to read about, but ultimately a bit frightening when you survey all the evidence.
Lance Richardson is a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in New York. He is working on a biography of Peter Matthiessen.
Twentieth-Century Man
The Wild Life of Peter Beard
By Christopher Wallace
Ecco. 272 pp. $32.99
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