How I never met Peter Beard

For thirty years I searched for “The End of the Game” Peter Beard´s book of his illustrated diaries about Africa, with no luck. One year we rented a house on an island in the Caribbean and the book magically appeared in front of my eyes lying in the middle of a table. I contemplated everything. Offering to buy it, stealing it. I opted to fast read the whole opus, terrified we would leave the island before I got to the end. “When for the first time I ran away to East Africa…. the Mau Mau was burning Treetops.][ Today it’s a huge parking lot crawling with tourists”. And so, it begins. If you, my patient reader, have never heard of Beard, it is quite impossible for me to do him justice in a couple of paragraphs. Look him up. Photographer, aristocrat, illustrator, white hunter, a friend of Wharhol, Bacon, Capote and Dali, but most important friends with Karen Blixen who published the most refined stories and novels of the XX century and is perhaps its greatest writer. On our last day on the island my husband surprised me with a second-hand edition of Beard’s book he had found at an art gallery. I returned to Peru happily embracing the hefty 7 lbs load.

Beard graduated from Yale and right away purchased 45 acres in the hills nearby Nairobi and settled in Hog’s Ranch. He put up a huge tent filled with wild skins, artifacts and English leather with a refinement only found in great aesthetes and grand gentlemen. He erected an outside shower where he would shower naked. From time to time he would go back to New York and photograph the most sought-after models of the day. Extremely good looking, he was very lucky with the ladies. Legend has he discovered Iman in Africa, consequently he also became good friends with Bowie whom he photographed.

Upon my return to Lima I wrote a couple of columns about him; I wanted his work to be known among my readers in Peru. I translated them into English and on my next trip to New York I located his studio in the Meatpacking District and went straight there to ask him for an interview. Left everything with his assistant who promised to call back. A few days later his wife called the house in East Hampton where we spend summers. She was very cold bordering on harsh. “You write many inaccurate things about my husband”. I apologized profusely. Said I had found my info on the internet and in his own books. Insisted that I admired him very much and that my only wish was to share his work and his life with others. “I am a fan”, I protested, hurt. Her answer was that people in Peru were already familiar with his work. I thought this odd. I felt I had been so close to meeting him and now that chance was lost. I was devastated. Much later I learned that Beard was afflicted with dementia and realized that maybe his wife was trying to protect him from strangers like me.

On April 19 Peter Beard was found dead along Montauk Highway where he now lived. He had been lost in the brush of Long Island for 20 days. He died like the fierce creatures he cared about, alone in the wilderness but not far from East Hampton where we go in July.

Our paths crossed once more but never touched.