American Beauties

Ladies and gentlemen, the American Dream:

The scene is Montauk, a fabled and historic spot on the extreme eastern verge of Long Island, one of those magic places whose very name suggests lobster bibs, yachting caps, the swelling splendor of the sea. The time is late afternoon on a perfect summer's day, the sun going slightly hazy, the breeze beginning to wheel offshore. We are on a little-traveled road, a gravelly affair that smells of salt and honeysuckle. The road has no name and leads nowhere except to the handful of estates that occupy The Cliffs-- those privileged perches facing south across the Atlantic, with nothing this side of Bermuda to impede the view. The road is silent except for the occasional chatter of locusts.

Suddenly, though, the afternoon stillness is shattered by the revving of an engine being pumped and primed with splendid indifference to the latest EPA mileage figures. The vehicle comes screaming around a curve, and we see that it is the inevitable car for a road like that--a Mercedes convertible, topless and sleek--and, moreover, that its inhabitants are the classic fantasy-fulfilling complements to that sort of machine. The driver is a woman. Her face is not only killer-diller but famous, recognizable even in the shade of a vast straw hat and a pair of sunglasses large enough to cast entire Western counties into shadow. She is so tall as to suggest a new phase of evolution, and she is barelegged; muscles twitch above her knee as she rocks her foot back onto the accelerator. In the passenger seat is an ageless man with a suntan the color of rosewood. His even-featured face is right out of the Preppy Handbook, but sun, surf and decadence have weathered it to a more durable handsomeness. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt with none of the buttons done; he's sitting with his bare feet on the dashboard, as assured and imperturbable as a pampered cat.

One glance at this pair is enough to let you know they have just dined on oysters and champagne and, further, that this has been their breakfast.

In a moment, the vision has departed. The car has whizzed by and disappeared beyond another curve. The road is now wreathed in a fine and sandy dust, but somehow one knows that the dirt will not dare settle on the golden pair who have just passed by, nor even on their gorgeous car; no, there are certain apparitions, certain species of confidence and loveliness, that the very grit of the earth respects and will not violate.

Through the sandy haze, though, one begins to doubt the reality of what has just occurred. It was a little too perfect, jibed a little too thoroughly with our wildest daydreams of luxury and escape. Did it actually happen?

Yes, indeed, it did.

The woman behind the wheel was Cheryl Tiegs--mannequin, pinup girl, erstwhile TV personality, cultural icon and mainstream madonna. Her passenger, and husband, was Peter Beard--photographer, conservationist, inheritor of giddy wealth, grand-scale eccentric. They were driving down that road because they live at the end of it, in the easternmost house on all of Long Island, as close as you can get to Europe without a passport.

Yes, it all sounds like fantasy, that's true; but it happens to be the way they live. And if the American Dream may be said to take place against a background of that sort of weather in those sorts of places, and to consist of a heady blend of excitement and illusion, accomplishment and hype, flaming successes and the secret disappointments that lend pathos even to the most glittering of lives, then Mr. and Mrs. Peter Beard are it.

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Fittingly enough--since we are dealing with a tale that is spangled with the trappings of wish fulfillment and wrapped in tendrils of the Dream--Cheryl Tiegs and Peter Beard met on television.

Well, not exactly on television, but in the course of making a television show, back in 1978. Tiegs, who up till then had been a highly successful print model and had recently hit it huge with the famous bikini poster, was in the process of trying to become 3-D in the eyes of the world, and ABC had obliged her with a multiyear contract. As the sweet fates decreed, all this happened at a time when the network had decided to produce a (continued on page 230)American Beauties(continued from page 224) show called Africa: The End of the Game, loosely based on Beard's book, which had been based on his two-decade obsession with the tragic mismanagement of African wildlife, particularly elephants. Tiegs got the nod as the pretty face that would make palatable the rather gruesome truths contained in Beard's vision, and the crew took off for the Dark Continent.

Now, we will here resist the temptation to limn scenes of tent hopping in the savanna, of passion among the wildebeests and dik-diks; suffice it to say that, as a setting for dream romance, the wilds of Africa outscore even the Montauk cliffs. And by the time the returning ABC jet touched down in New York, Tiegs was wearing an elephant pendant around her neck and the golden pair were an item.

This was a tad awkward, as Tiegs was married at the time--to adman-turned-director-turned-cocaine arrestee Stan Dragoti. But love conquers all, including marriage; offering the world the laconic explanation "One never knows in life" and demonstrating a downright Mozartean ease of transition, Tiegs moved from California to Manhattan, where she bivouacked at the stately Hotel Carlyle, and where she and Beard were what the more polite papers refer to as constant companions. Thus it remained until the splendiferous couple were wed this past May. (Beard, by the way, had also been previously married, to Newport socialite Minnie Cushing, but had been his own man again for more than a decade.)

From the very beginning, Tiegs and Beard had been darlings of the gossip columnists and paparazzi, who stalked them at Studio 54 and similar haunts, and who agreed that the glowing duo classed up any gathering to which they lent their presence. Those who probed even a centimeter beneath the skin, however, could not help acknowledging that, in some ways, at least, the photographer and the model made a rather unlikely pair. Oh, they looked smashing together, they seemed to get along--but there were some rather striking discrepancies in their, ahem, socioeconomic backgrounds. As the old song says, two different worlds, they came from two different worlds.

The world that Beard had come from was the one in which old money talks and nobody walks. Beard's great-grand-father, James J. Hill, was one of the 19th Century's great railroad magnates, known out of their relatives' earshot as robber barons. Another member of Beard's far-flung clan--Pierre Lorillard IV, the tobacco maven--built and for many years presided over Tuxedo Park, the posh New York State village that has been called "the nonpareil of the secluded enclaves of the rich." (Tuxedo Park, by the way, was not named in honor of the tuxedo. It was the other way around, and, in fact, it was another of Beard's relations, a fashion plate known as Uncle Griswold, who, back in 1886, first sported the set of abbreviated tails that have since come to be synonymous with opening nights and upscale bar mitzvahs everywhere. Tuxedo itself--the word, that is--has a quaint but unglamorous origin, being an esoteric term for wolf.) Anyway, by the time Peter came along, the rugged business of dynasty building had long been completed and the basic family traditions--Yale and prudent investing, for example--had long been set. The bright young man had absorbed culture through his pores. He had entree anywhere. He had the resources to do anything: motivation is another story, but we'll get to that.

Cheryl Tiegs, on the other hand, was a child of the suburbs, a product of the world of mortgage payments, Chevrolets and little squares of lawn, and she was imbued by her upwardly aiming context with motivation to burn. She knew there was more gusto to be grabbed than Alhambra, California, afforded her; she ached to know what dazzling treasure had been stashed behind door number three. Not that little Cheryl lacked for much as a child--her family, in fact, was thoroughly comfortable. It's just that the rather blah realities of suburban life fell somehow short of the excitement and glamor of a young girl's dreams. Tiegs's father was a mortician. Her mother helped pretty up the corpses by working in a florist shop. Nothing ever seemed to move around the Tiegs household, and maybe that's why modeling--still photography, holding a pose--came so naturally to Cheryl, why she chose it as her escape route to a livelier life.

And God knows she went after it with a passion. While still in high school, she strutted for free in fashion shows at local department stores. She took charm lessons. She took commercial lessons, practicing for hours to master the knack of a sincere expression. At 17, she registered as an English major at California State College in Los Angeles, but this seems to have been purely a holding action; as soon as the modeling offers started getting serious--which they did in her freshman year--it was bye-bye, higher ed: The real world was beckoning, success was looming large and no way was the suburban lovely about to waste the best years of her life discussing onomatopoeia. She dropped out of school and into the jet set.

Thus, the union of Peter Beard and Cheryl Tiegs may be seen as a slightly wacky intertwining of blue-blooded and red-blooded versions of the Dream, a collision of literary forms. Beard, gentleman polemicist and somewhat disaffected aristocrat out of a gated village and the Ivy League, could easily pass for a character from Fitzgerald; Tiegs, working girl par excellence out of Alhambra High and a fly-by-night modeling school in Pasadena, is a natural as the heroine of a bourgeois fantasy dreamed up by a staff writer at Seventeen. How, then, did it happen that these two disparate characters ended up as prince and princess of the same romantic tale? What force was powerful enough to bond them into a single story?

Money alone couldn't do it, as any nouveau riche who has tried to leap into the haut monde could surely tell you. It's safe to conclude that it wasn't a burning communion of intellectual pursuits. No, there is only one force basic, mighty and sweepingly democratic enough to have brought these two together. Helen of Troy knew what it was; Grace Kelly also knew what it was; and as things turned out, the paparazzi knew, too.

It's called beauty.

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Still, we are all victims of our upbringing, and if we take a closer look at what each member of our golden couple does, and how, it's clear that they've both been stamped by the circumstances in which they came of age.

Peter Beard, 43, is a perennial amateur and dilettante. If those words sound deprecating, it's only because their original meaning is wasted on us slobs who work for a living. An amateur, after all, is just a guy who isn't scrambling for a buck; a dilettante is someone who pursues what delights him. What delights Beard is taking pictures, keeping diaries, writing about ecology and piecing together weirdly beautiful books that don't make best-seller lists and that probably lose money for all concerned. What seems to delight him even more--and is perhaps where his real gift and true (continued on page 268)American Beauties(continued from page 230) vocation lie--is offending people. Beard is in the rare and enviable position of having nothing to gain by being tactful, by feigning good behavior. His is the difficult freedom to rant the truth--his version of the truth, that is, which more often than not is at stunning variance with almost everybody else's.

Beard's career--as photographer, curmudgeon and prophet--has centered almost wholly on the spectacle of emerging Africa. He went there, in 1961, full of the stirring mythology of Teddy Roosevelt and Hemingway, and it would not be facetious to speak of him as the last of the great white hunters. Settling in to a 50-acre campsite on the outskirts of Nairobi, he donned a pair of native sandals and prepared to live a life of high adventure. But then something happened: The 20th Century caught up with Africa, and with Beard. Tribes were coalescing into nations; roads were being built, fences were cropping up. The old Africa was vanishing forever, and it was Beard's either very good or very bad fortune to be present at its passing. He became obsessed with the costs of modernity, with the ugliness and desolation that were the price of the Dark Continent's enlightenment.

The fate of African wildlife became Beard's special province. By the early Sixties, much of Africa's fabled game had been herded into massive preserves intended to attract millions of tourists with their Nikons, Instamatics and dizzying assortment of foreign currencies; the entire continent was being pawned off as a giant zoo. According to Beard, however, there was one small problem with those game preserves: They were totally artificial constructs, set up with an utter disregard of the principles of population dynamics, and the animals inside them were reproducing like crazy, ravaging the environment, then slowly starving to death.

This was an unattractive process--bad for business--and African authorities chose to believe that it wasn't really happening. Beard took his camera into Kenya's Tsavo National Park--a preserve the size of Massachusetts--and started photographing dead elephants and rhinos. When he had pictures of several thousand corpses to support his case, he showed them to the Kenyan government, which thanked him for his trouble by banning him from the park. No longer permitted to enter Tsavo through the gates, Beard did what any self-respecting Fitzgeraldian hero would have done: He got hold of a plane and continued documenting the die-off from the air, taking the hauntingly detached and weirdly abstract pictures--hieroglyphs of doom--that would later become The End of the Game.

Beard also managed to run afoul of the authorities while doing another book, Eyelids of Morning, based on a study of crocodiles made in the surreal isolation of Kenya's Lake Rudolf. While ostensibly dealing with reptiles, Beard's book also managed to address itself to the ecological and sociological consequences of certain policies of the Kenyan government--for example, foisting the concept of "poaching" on tribesmen who'd been hunters for thousands of years, thereby making them all criminals. The government responded by accusing Beard of illegally selling hides--an unlikely charge, considering his aristocratic disdain of commerce--and yanking him off the project.

If Beard offended only governments, though, he'd be no different from any number of photo journalists of the watchdog school. But no, Beard goes much further. He pisses everybody off. A rabid ecologist, he has earned the eternal loathing of many conservationists by advocating the thinning of herds, which would be accomplished by the systematic shooting of animals. He's made himself something of a pariah among serious lensmen by letting it be known that he "was actually more interested in drawing, but photography was just too easy to ignore." High-culture figure that he is, you might expect that he'd be allied with the New York gallery establishment, but he tends to dismiss that clique with a single pejorative word descriptive of their sexual preferences; ditto the critics, whom, for convenience' sake, Beard lumps together as a bloc of coreligionists. He often talks about suing his publisher and he exchanges vitriolic letters with Moral Majority types who object to sexy pictures of his wife.

For all his choler, however, Beard hasn't been able to scare off everyone. He still has his niche, his following among certain segments of the avant-garde and certain confirmed adherents of the tragic view of art and life. He's something of a gourmet cult figure, foretelling apocalypse over Dom Pérignon, discussing doom in better restaurants--a pessimist who smiles. These days, though, there's one small problem with Beard's career: He's chosen not to have one. You can't say he's retired, because that's a bourgeois concept; he's simply chosen not to work. Why bother, when the earth is going down the tubes, anyway ... and when it's so much more pleasant to stay abed and have shellfish and champagne for breakfast?

Now, as to his companion in all of this, it will be noted that her fresh-scrubbed career-girl approach to things is dramatically different from her husband's. First of all, Cheryl Tiegs rarely offends anyone. Having learned her manners in the decorous solemnity of suburban living rooms (to say nothing of the corridors of mortuaries), she is relentlessly nice, invariably diplomatic: the Walter Cronkite of the modeling world. In further contrast to her spouse, she is--despite her laid-back, mellowed-out California image--one of the most determined and quietly ambition-crazed ladies on the planet.

Consider her persona: The Cheryl Tiegs who smiles back at us from photographs is incredibly unself-conscious, so generous with her looks as to seem either a blatant exhibitionist or a saint, so confident of her unstudied grace that she can effortlessly open herself to the hungry gaze of an admiring world. That's the image; here's the history: As a child, Tiegs was an abject failure as a seller of Girl Scout Cookies; she was so debilitatingly shy that she'd ring people's doorbells, then run away before they answered. As for that native athletic grace, suffice it to say that Tiegs's high school nickname was Behemoth. No, Cheryl Tiegs--though her eyes are captivating and her long shanks are the stuff of dreams--is not some mythical Venus sprung whole from the sea; she has worked on herself, pieced herself together, molded her very flesh into a commercially viable package. She's her own Pygmalion, and she has done her sculpting with an incredible instinct for psyching out what mainstream America wants to look at.

It must be said, though, that she hasn't done this quite by herself; history has been her constant ally in the process. Part of being successful as a model has simply to do with having the right look at the right time, and the Seventies played right into Cheryl's hot little hands. In the Sixties, models--take Veruschka as an example--tended to be exotic, extreme, vaguely terrifying; they were the visible projection of a mind-set that held that beauty was dangerous, high fashion was inherently S/M and sex really was as nasty as your mother had told you. In the Seventies, for better or worse, all that changed. The sense of sin was sweated out in Adidases and washed away in Jacuzzis; drug culture yielded to yogurt culture; sex came to be regarded as just another form of exercise, good for everything from weight loss to lower-back pain. The stage was thus set for the emergence of a healthy mannequin, and Tiegs was ready. She was the California sunshine girl, the one with the let's-go-jogging smile and the unanemic breasts, the wholesome honey with the uncluttered features suggestive of an uncluttered psyche.

She took off. Typically, it was the women who discovered her first, clamoring to see her face on the covers of Glamour, Harper's Bazaar, Ladies' Home Journal and other such august barometers of taste. By mid-decade, the Tiegs countenance was well enough known so that advertisers sought her out to shill for everything from make-up to cigarettes to Scotch. At that point, she had arrived at an "Oh, yeah, there's whosi-whatsis" sort of celebrity; 1978 was the year America learned her name.

In making the leap from mannequin to phenom, Tiegs adopted a wise and time-honored strategy: She got sexy. It started with a picture in Sports Illustrated's annual bathing-suit issue--she was displayed in a spiffy little fishnet number, and through the mesh, her breasts were clearly visible, looking rather like a pair of bemused puppies nuzzling at a screen door. Following this profitable exposure; Tiegs donned a bikini, gave a belly-dance tilt to her hips and produced the poster that was destined to replace Farrah's as the righthand companion of choice in college dormitories across the land. And now a full-scale media blitz got rolling. In the same week, Newsweek featured her in "Life/Style" and Time put her on the cover, going so far (a shade too far, as usual) as to anoint her "the nation's muse." People started keeping tabs on her, informing a breathless public of fast-breaking developments in her private life. Simon & Schuster anteed up 75 thou for a Cheryl Tiegs beauty book, but that figure seemed suddenly meager when stacked up against the $2,500,000 served up by ABC for a suitably vague five-year commitment. The mortician's daughter from Alhambra, who had scratched the violin in the school orchestra and waved pom-poms at the football games, had hit a staggering peak.

Depressing thing about peaks, though: There tends to be a downward slope just beyond them. It's not that Tiegs's popularity as a model suddenly slipped, not at all; in fact, at the unlikely age of 33, she's still at the very top of a profession that is notorious for going through talent the way McDonald's goes through chopped meat. But the Great Tiegs Diversification Plan, the woman-for-all-seasons number, just hasn't panned out.

There is a rather unkind paradox that pertains in our society, and that applies in spades to Tiegs: We place a terrifically high value on beauty, yet we tend to snicker at people who are merely beautiful; we seem to goad them into being versatile, into proving to us and to themselves that they can shine in lots of ways--which they seldom can. Providence, after all, just isn't that generous. In any case, to put it gently, Tiegs has not shined in her side careers. On television--she's done health-and-beauty spots on Good Morning, America and some sports color, as well as the Africa show--she's been grim, combining the dulcet tones of Minnie Mouse with the spontaneity and verve of an unwatered house plant. Tiegs fans who wanted to keep their fantasies from going limp were wise to turn the channel. Her beauty book, while no sillier than others in the genre, is no less so, either, and hyping in women's magazines has not sufficed to bring it past its first printing. In 1979, Tiegs was quoted as saying, "This is the year for my movie," but said movie has yet to be made, a fact that is almost certainly merciful.

Her Mercedes, her millions and her swashbuckling husband notwithstanding, Tiegs has come back to earth. In fact, in a rather droll and exalted way, she's come back to the self-same part of earth whence she began. Born and raised in station-wagon country, she veered off into the rarefied realms of international glamor but has now returned as the figurehead of that bastion of burgher values, that sober haven of durable clothes, rational shoes and well-made tools for home and garden: the Sears catalog. The Sears catalog?! Marketing makes strange bedfellows, apparently, and Sears, a highly remunerative if unglittering employer, not only has bought Tiegs's face, but has licensed an exclusive line of Cheryl Tiegs sportswear--sportswear that is no doubt coveted by millions of little girls who pore over the catalog in the warmth of snug suburban houses, who scratch the violin in the school orchestra and hope to grow up pretty enough to wave pom-poms at the football games....

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Back at Montauk, now, on a sultry summer's evening:

Outside, the waves are crashing, their sound diminishing along the height of the cliff, reaching the Beard homestead as a soft and lulling rumble. Mikey, the Beards' pet goat, is tethered in the moonlight, keeping himself amused by a random succession of hops, humps and whinnies. The Mercedes is parked in the gravel driveway, as low slung and expectant in its stillness as a hunting spaniel; someone--probably Peter, with his perverse delight in kitsch, his odd affection for the symbols of mainstream culture--has taped a plastic bride and groom to the top-grain leather dash.

Inside, Mr. and Mrs. Beard are having a quiet evening at home. Peter, unbridled in a kikoy, or African wraparound skirt, is sumptuously sprawled on the living-room sofa, sipping a gin and tonic and perusing television by remote control. Cheryl, in the kitchen, in track shorts, a T-shirt and no make-up, is writing belated thank-you notes for wedding presents. A fellow named Tony, a friend and caretaker, is sipping Chablis and shooting mosquitoes off the wall with a small plastic gun that nails the little bastards every time--but not always soon enough: Everyone is spritzing bug spray on his ankles and trying not to scratch.

When Cheryl finishes a note, she dutifully takes it into the living room, to Peter. She reads it aloud in that reedy little voice of hers, which grated so on television but which at home sounds cozy and endearing. With a touching and, it must be said, characteristically female insecurity, she reads back her own words in a tentative tone, deferring to her husband's judgment in matters of grammar and sentiment alike. But Peter is paying her only half attention. His wife may be one of the world's most lauded beauties, but Beard is still an American husband, and he only grudgingly lifts his eyes from the TV screen to look at her; even when he does look at her, you can tell he's sneaking glances around her famous torso so as not to lose the thread of what's happening onscreen.

And suddenly, with the mosquitoes buzzing and the decidedly unromantic smell of 6-12 in the air, with 60 minutes drowning out the surf and the gazes of husband and wife not quite linking up, with not a hell of a lot happening and with a midevening sleepiness already setting in, the patina of specialness, the hoaxy coating of glamor, seems stripped away from our golden couple. They stand before us life-sized, regular, sympathetic, waiting out the night like the rest of the species, holed up in a house not so different from others....

But maybe it would be better to leave that last unsaid, not to allow the ordinary to intrude on our vision of the handsome pair; better to let them drift off in a moonlit mist, draped in fantasy, wrapped in the Dream. Not for their sake--it hardly matters to them--but for the sake of the rest of us, us Joes who look on and admire, who keep the Dream stoked with our own ambitions, our own fiercely cherished yearnings, and who gladly and even gratefully foot the bill so that beauty can be royally rewarded, so that those we elect to fame can live on cliffs. Why do we do it? We do it because, in spite of ourselves, we are all philosophers, hungry for a whiff of the sublime. Oh, we can tell ourselves our passion is for that sweet Mercedes, our lust is for that famous flesh; but no, it's more than that: Our craving is to fly above the everyday, to inhabit a realm where bellies never bulge and breasts never sag, where ideas crackle and conversation never mires, where time races and men are comradely, women bold.... And when we choose our idols, those to whom we entrust the heavy task of representing us, of standing in as our prize specimens, we do so because there is something in their manner and their bearing that reassures us that those possibilities might, in fact, be lived, that the Dream--however hyped, however slippery--still exists.

Do Mr. and Mrs. Peter Beard--she with her devastating eyes, comely form and endlessly beckoning smile; he with his Gatsbyish dash, his cranky flamboyance, his intriguingly odd blend of passion and detachment--do they fill that difficult prescription? The reader will finally decide for himself. One thing, though, is certain: To a degree not easily matched by another twosome on the planet, our couple look the part.

"Those who probed a centimeter beneath the skin found that Beard and Tiegs made an unlikely pair."