Going Wild with a Model

Never before has there been a wave of models as great as the ones we're seeing today," says photographer Peter Beard. "And Janice is just the greatest of them all." With plaudits like that, Janice Dickinson--whose face has launched half a thousand issues of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and practically every other fashion magazine in the Western world--might have been forgiven for becoming a stay-at-home, for sticking with the New York--London--Paris fashion axis that made her famous. Did she really need a grand Kenyan safari? She had conquered Vogue. She was that Cosmo girl whom the reader could only dream of being. Did she really need tsetse flies? A Brooklyn girl who reached the summit of her profession by dint of "hard work, the belief that I could do anything" and the "timeless beauty" she laughingly cites instead of giving her age, Janice could have settled cozily into the satin sheets of that world she knew best--bright lights, big cities, Blass menageries of designer duds and hourly wages that might make Don Mattingly blush. Instead, she took a flier. Before it was over, she had logged 14,000 frequent-flight miles, suffered some serious sunburn and endured several hundred insect bites--not exactly what she had anticipated at the outset. "There was an excitement to this that was unlike anything I'd ever done before," she recalls, "because it was Playboy, because it would take me to Africa, because I'd be working with Peter--I expected it to be the most unusual shoot I had ever done. And it was." She took the redeye to Nairobi (every flight to Nairobi is a redeye), a short distance from Beard's Hog Ranch near Kenya's Ngong Hills--a region made familiar to Westerners by Karen Blixen, who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Upon her arrival in Kenya, however, Janice's first thoughts were of getting Out of Africa. "It was not," she says, "the Club Med." Southern Kenya was, in fact, a vast wilderness dominated by wild beasts, strange sounds and men who killed without blinking an eye--much like New York but without hot-dog stands and Thai restaurants. Janice, a woman more at home in a limousine than in a mudencrusted Land-Rover, mentally itemized her luggage and realized she had forgotten to pack the necessities--things like matches, Pepto-Bismol and crocodile repellent. Here she was, a glamorous, worldly sophisticate in a land where Bazaar meant "a large tent where you haggle over used-camel prices." Nevertheless, there was no denying the grandeur of the place in which she suddenly found herself. This was the site of Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton's love affair--and of their filmic reunion, played out by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in the movie Out of Africa. It was a land both harsh and ineffably romantic. Life was simple in Kenya, where mosquito netting took the place of evening gowns, where animals you were accustomed to ogling in zoos might make dinner out of you. Janice Dickinson of Brooklyn, New York, gritted her teeth, stripped down to the bare essentials and set out to tame Africa.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," wrote Dinesen in Out of Africa. "The geographical position and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent." This is the land of Peter Hill Beard, 50, who settled on land adjoining Blixen's farm when he was 22 and has become renowned as one of the world's finest wildlife photographers. His 1967 collaboration with Romain Gary resulted in a legendary Life magazine pictorial devoted to Kenya's elephants. Photos from his book Eyelids of Morning, "The Mingled Destinies of Crocodiles and Men," were shot into space in 1977 as part of the Voyager probe's time capsule. His book The End of the Game, a record of 20 years spent observing the slaughter of Tsavo's wildlife, is a definitive document of man's inhumanity to nature. "A monument over the Old Africa which was so dear to my heart," Dinesen called it. Beard is also, not coincidentally, one of the world's best photographers of women. "Beauty or the beast? I have no preference," he says. "I love anything beautiful." His pictures of African model Iman, one of the most sought-after models on earth, in Beauty and the Beasts (Playboy, January 1986), affirm his point. For the present shooting, Beard called on Janice, "a great friend--one of the smartest women I know. And a joy to work with, a very good photographer herself." Janice says she enjoyed her African sojourn with Beard but was a little less than pleased to meet some of his friends. "I was allergic to the cheetah, and I kept seeing red ants that were big enough to ride."

Keeping her cool in Kenya

Playboy sends model to Africa, model gets bitten by mites from cheetah," Janice reports with a laugh. "I had to put ice cubes all over my body." Glamorous, indeed, is a model's life in Africa. The cheetah was spectacular; Janice was more so; the cheetah's parasites thought they were both delicious. "It wasn't the easiest shoot I have ever done," says the model. "At times, it was dangerous. I didn't know why I was doing it, but it was rewarding. Being in a place like that gives you a different perspective. It puts you in a whole new time zone, that's for sure. It took me two months to reacclimate myself to the world of people." She survived to return to the land of subways, Chipwiches and ants the size of, well, ants, to cement a few friendships (Janice became Iman's daughter's godmother) and to appear briefly with Beard and Iman in an upcoming ABC-TV special, With Peter Beard ... in Africa: The Last Word from Paradise, first of a projected series. Beard--back in the U.S. to work on the TV project--continues to rave about the woman he plucked from the cover of Vogue and took to lion country. "Janice is absolutely one of the finest models ever," he says. "Photography is subject matter, and when you're working with someone of that caliber, someone that far ahead of the pack, it's pleasure." Of course, pleasure and danger--as every big-game shooter knows--can be opposite sides of the same coin. To capture the look he was after, Beard put Janice on the back of a crocodile and exposed her to--and with--a cheetah that still had gazelle on its breath. Now, however, our heroine is safe and sound in America, near the foot of the Hollywood Hills, with a new husband, a lifetime supply of matches and memories of a land so vast it seemed to go on forever.

Peter Beard uncovers Janice Dickinson in his favorite haunt--The Animal Kingdom of Africa