Sunday 6 November 2022 10:34 PM New book suggests photographer Peter Beard had a sadistic taste for sexual ... trends now
Even at the age of 75, celebrity photographer Peter Beard wasn’t satisfied with a cup of cocoa before bed. Instead, he returned home at 4am with two Russian women he’d picked up in a New York nightclub.
Nor was the philandering playboy one to worry too much whether his third wife, Nejma, might not approve when she was rudely awakened by the trio.
Nejma was so angry she told the emergency services Beard was suicidal and had him admitted to a psychiatric ward.
The next morning, the old roué was on the phone to his ex-girlfriends, insisting there was nothing wrong with him and pleading with them to get him out.
Peter Beard pictured with his second wife, Cheryl Tiegs, in the Turksand Caicos
Dashing, impish and seemingly irresistible to women, Peter Beard was an artist, adventurer and African wildlife conservationist who was once described as ‘half Tarzan, half Byron’.
A scion of one of New York’s most august families, he spurned convention. He fell in love with the African wilderness, becoming known as the ‘wild man of the bush’, but never lost his appetite for more worldly pursuits: drugs, drink and celebrity friends including Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon.
His matinee-idol looks and devil-may-care personality made him irresistible to women, including actresses Candice Bergen and Bond Girl Carole Bouquet, socialite Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister) and supermodels Janice Dickinson and Cheryl Tiegs, who was his second wife.
When Vanity Fair magazine visited him in Kenya when Beard was almost 60, the reporter watched in amazement as four or five Ethiopian girls emerged from Beard’s tent after spending the night in his bed. ‘It’s such a waste, sleep,’ he said.
Beard’s heedlessness to risk almost cost him his life in 1996 when he was gored by an elephant and left ‘clinically dead’. When he died in 2020, aged 82 and beset by dementia — his body was discovered in woodland weeks after he’d disappeared from his Long Island home — those who knew him were only shocked he’d managed to live so long.
In a new biography — Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover — Graham Boynton chronicles the existence of an endlessly restless man.
n a new biography — Wild: The Life of Peter Beard: Photographer, Adventurer, Lover — Graham Boynton chronicles the existence of an endlessly restless man (Beard pictured with Iman)
Nejma Khanum (right) was so angry when her husband Peter brought home two Russian women that she told the emergency services Beard was suicidal and had him admitted to a psychiatric ward (Pictured: Peter Beard with Zara Beard, left, and Nejma Khanum).
‘Peter Beard had accelerated through the decades like a freight train, hunting wild animals, making art, taking photographs, celebrity friend-hopping . . . and effortlessly seducing some of the world’s most beautiful women,’ said Zimbabwe-born Boynton, who knew the photographer for years.
He revelled in his notoriety: no one loved an outrageous tall tale about Peter Beard more than the man himself. He claimed, for example, that he ‘discovered’ Somali supermodel Iman tending goats in the bush.
She was, in fact, a diplomat’s daughter who’d never been anywhere near the bush and was discovered by another photographer while temping at a travel agency.
Many people, especially the women in Beard’s life, had mixed feelings about the narcissistic, eccentric and mercurial charmer.
The advent of the #MeToo movement has made it unfashionable to celebrate womanising alpha males, although Boynton dismisses claims Beard was a sexual predator.
Yet he had a deeply sinister side that manifested itself in cruelty, ruthlessness and even violence.
One of his lovers — identified only as ‘Nancy C’ — was 21 and Beard 66 when he ‘relentlessly’ pursued her.
She remembers him as ‘truly sadistic’. His ‘sexual violence’, she said, was so extreme she needed antibiotics to treat his bites and the doctor who saw her urged her to press charges.
Beard pictured with his second wife, supermodel Cheryl Tiegs. Tiegs now claims her ex-husband once punched her so hard that she suffered a miscarriage.
Beard’s second wife, supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, told Boynton he Beard punched her so hard that she suffered a miscarriage. Another lover recalled with horror how Beard killed a neighbour’s cat by beating it to death with a rock.
Born into one of New York’s most illustrious families in 1938 — his great-grandfather was a 19th-century railway tycoon — Beard was educated at the best U.S. schools and Yale University.
Aged 17, he read Out Of Africa, Danish aristocrat Karen
