Beauty and the Beasts

Somewhere in the darkness outside, a big cat roared. The air was cool and still. Photographer Peter Beard was nervous. It wasn't the lions that bothered him, since Beard is on speaking terms with several big cats. It was the impending thunderstorm and the 60-mile-per-hour gusts that would hurtle across the Loingalani plain, threatening to topple the tents or, at the very least, fill them with icy rain. And when the storm finally broke, somewhere between Nairobi and Samburu, it was more ferocious than Beard had feared. He couldn't get to sleep. Iman, by contrast, welcomed the winds like an old friend. She was, after all, home. Ten years as a famous fashion model in New York hadn't erased her familiarity with this land's cold, windy nights and infernally hot days. Indeed, despite Kenya's inhospitable weather, Iman found it a very humane place compared with New York City, where she lives with her husband, pro basketball star Spencer Haywood. "Manhattan," she says, "is not a place to live. But if you want high-voltage energy, it is the best place. Still, if you live there long, you will get old before your time. The stresses will hit you. Everything is too fast."

In Kenya and neighboring Somalia, where Iman was born, everything is slow. The nomads (pictured with their prodigal daughter at left) travel by foot and by camelback. In fact, if the myth Peter Beard created around Iman were believed, she should not have survived culture shock. But the truth about Iman is a bit more complex.

Beard said he had discovered her in the northeastern region of Kenya, working as a goatherd; she was 6'1", unable to speak English and presumably possessed of few social graces other than her God-given beauty. Beard, a wily connoisseur of all things African, said he persuaded this lovely goatherd to let him make her a fashion model; a Nubian Eliza Doolittle, so to speak.

In fact, Iman is a diplomat's daughter with a college education in political science and fluency in five languages. She's 5'9". But Beard's promotional methods were effective. The New York press raved about Iman as high fashion's first black African model. Now, after a decade of regular appearances in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and other fashion magazines around the world, she's a widely recognized exotic perennial, rather, as she says, "like a black-cashmere sweater--never out of fashion."

After ten years in America, I man was invited to return to Kenya to be photographed by Beard. Filming with the eccentric photographer had its challenges. Passionate about wildlife, Beard insisted on close-up shots with real cheetahs, temperamental camels and amorous gerenuks (left). The hot, desolate shores of Lake Rudolf provided the background for several of the pictures, as did the dusty plains near the Amboseli Game Reserve, playground for Kenya's dwindling elephant population (right). Many shots were taken in Beard's tented camp on the outskirts of Nairobi, named the Hog Ranch out of respect for the horde of wart hogs that gathers each day to pig out on Beard's food scraps. The rustic camp affords a fine view of the Ngong Hills, of which you can see more in Out of Africa, a, new Universal film in which Iman appears in one scene with Meryl Streep. There, she modeled her latest contribution to camp couture, an African kikoi. The traditionally striped cloth is so versatile, she says, "It can be worn ten thousand ways." She hopes to begin marketing kikois in America before the end of 1986.

Life at the Hog Ranch wasn't all fun for the tawny, leggy model. Right after Iman had posed with a giraffe (overleaf, top left), it butted her with its horns; several days earlier, when Beard insisted she stand beside a camel, the beast became cantankerous and tried to bite her.

Beard, of course, is something of a madman. He has a reputation for toying with the bizarre and the dangerous. He takes perverse delight in allowing a giant beetle to crawl up his face (top left). In a more practical mood, he choreographed a lion attack for a pictorial in Vogue. Says Iman, "Peter shot a scene where the lion was climbing all over the trainer and didn't seem to notice that the animal looked hungry. I did. I was standing beside Peter, and the lion looked at me as if I might be lunch. I left. Peter's a bit crazy."

Actually, Beard just had his own way of doing things. The handwriting and drawings you see around Iman's photographs are Beard's personal diary of her return home. In a style that has become a trademark, he has included newspaper clippings, beer-bottle labels and other assorted souvenirs of daily life in Africa. As for Iman, she needs no postcards. Although she has returned to Manhattan, her memories of her homeland are indelible. In fact, she says she may someday return there permanently. "Although I'm a model and an American citizen," she says, "I am a Somali first."