Peter Beard

Peter Beard is hard to categorize, a fact that no doubt delights him. He was born an American aristocrat, educated at American and British boarding schools, graduated from Yale. He abandoned his highborn station, however, and set out for East Africa--where he witnessed and photographed the decimation by modern civilization of the once wildly beautiful terrain and animal life. He chronicled his impressions in three books, Eyelids of Morning: "The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men"; Longing for Darkness; and The End of the Game: "Last Word from Paradise"--each, in its way, a eulogy for a particular area and its wildlife, with clear warnings to the next animals in line, human beings.

Despite his grim vision of our collective ecological undoing, Beard is an energy center, and those around him inevitably become swept up in his enthusiasm. He has two bases of operation: a wart-hog ranch (tented camp) outside Nairobi overlooking the Ngong Hills in Kenya and a home on the most far-flung point of Montauk, Long Island. In addition to his work as a photographer and existential naturalist, Beard seems to attract whoever is interesting at the time: artists, writers, socialites and, especially, awesomely beautiful women--most recently, Cheryl Tiegs.

While he was growing up, Beard acquired the habit of meticulously recording his daily activities in a diary--a habit he compulsively continues today. He includes whatever material strikes his fancy--his own photographs, images he finds in magazines (he's a particularly carnivorous viewer of Playboy and Out), notes to himself, his intricate drawings. Because of Beard's own involvement with the people who shape the events of his time, his diaries are a vivid record of a life lived at full tilt. Which is why it seemed such a loss when 20 volumes of the diaries--representing 20 years--were destroyed in a fire that gutted Beard's English mill-style Montauk house in 1977. Peter took the setback with characteristic nonchalance: "Just possessions," he said. But when Playboy asked him to reconstruct some of the diaries, he jumped at the chance.

On the following pages, we have reproduced some of the actual entries from surviving volumes, as well as some pages from the destroyed volumes especially prepared for Playboy. Each is a vivid record of one of the world's most fascinating men. To put them in context, Peter's friend and associate Terry Southern offers the following narrative:

•

During the two years before its fiery devastation, it was my good fortune to spend a great deal of time in Peter Beard's fabled Mill o' Stress at the farthest reaches of Montauk Point. The Obsessive Diarist (as Beard is often called) and I had just come off the last Rolling Stones coast-to-coast tour, and we were eager to incorporate our impressions into a film version of Beard's book The End of the Game--interweaving them with his experiences in Tsavo (the infamous wildlife preserve in Kenya, where over 20,000 elephants and rhinos died of starvation), and his experiences at equally uptight San Quentin Prison, shortly after the George Jackson Massacre--thus juxtaposing those two stress-wrought situations (as a sort of microcomposite of density-ridden human culture), then completing the triptych with the performance and music of The Rolling Stones--which, as everyone knows, is the supreme celebration of stress.

"I think you shall find conditions at the mill," Peter assured me in his most suave Count Dracula manner, "well suited to our craft and sullen art. May I suggest the room at the top?" A room like an eagle's nest, at the very pinnacle of the mill--the mill that was itself perched precariously, or so it seemed, on the edge of a 100-foot cliff.

In the days that followed, I soon learned that Peter's house was a sort of residential Studio 54, a mecca for the famous, the beautiful, the wealthy and, above all, the weird--and was, in fact, a grand shrine to stress. For example, prominent among the estate's embellishments was an open snake pit, usually seething with damnable vipers exotiques, as he called them--captured by Beard or sent by friends and well-wishers from the Dark Continent. And not far from the pit, stretched out over the 100-foot precipice, with only the jagged rocks below, was a standard Olympic-size diving board--absurdly springy, and split down the middle by a gigantic crack. Beard liked to deliver stressed-out diatribes--against industrial encroachment and the like--while pacing the board, gesticulating emphatically and bouncing with suicidal abandon. "Trying to talk to people about industrial encroachment," he would explain, "is like talking to the winds--that's why I choose this podium."

On one side of Mill o' Stress was the incredible Camp Hero--a kind of twilight-zone U. S. Army early-warning radar post, all very hush-hush and loony, manned by what appeared to be full-out dements, or heavily tranked zombie types--and on the other side, the no less twilighty--though certainly more active--Church Estate owned by Andy Warhol and occupied by Mick Jagger--and, of course, his so-called invités variés.

The following pages are a fair representation of what was "The Diary" (20 hefty volumes, one per year, each page a day exquisitely detailed), destroyed in the fire of July 27, 1977, and, as such, they offer a glimpse into the life and times of Peter Beard, obsessive bookmaker at home and abroad.