Whether he's at a New York nightclub or deep in the African wilderness, world-famous photographer and artist Peter Beard is surrounded by drugs, debts, and beautiful women. On the eve of a major retrospective of Beard's work in Paris, LESLIE BENNETTS finds the man described as "half Tarzan, half Byron" weighing his future at Hog Ranch, his Kenyan Shangri-la

Looking back, ominous portents abounded, although we didn't recognize them at the time. The night after I left Peter Beard in Kenya, a pregnant giraffe stumbled into the yard at Hog Ranch— the tent encampment where he lives outside Nairobi— and collapsed. After laboring all night to give premature birth, the giraffe, who had apparently been shocked by a neighbor's electric fence, expired.



"Hog Ranch was left with a grotesque morning scene featuring uniformed 'Old Etonians' performing autopsy Africanstyle—meat cleavers and saws/vultures, hawks, local dogs, and some lucky governesses with frying pans and plastic shopping bags—NYAMA!" Beard wrote me a few days later, using the Swahili word for meat. ''Luckily the long surrealistically twisted embryo was ideal subject matter for yours truly, the relentless parasite with 2 panoramic cams. " As a renowned wildlife photographer, Peter Beard has been obsessed with images of death and loss since he made his reputation more than 30 years ago with The End of the Game, his chilling chronicle of disaster at Kenya's Tsavo National Park, where tens of thousands of elephants starved because of encroaching civilization and conservation mismanagement. And as a lifelong adventurer, Beard has always been notorious for flaunting every caution. He thinks nothing of swimming in crocodile-infested waters, has personally witnessed less fortunate acquaintances being gobbled up, and once sprinted away as a colleague on safari was gored and thrown by a charging rhino.

But in September, after decades of defying danger with reckless abandon, Peter Beard finally succumbed to the odds. Photographing a herd of elephants on the Tanzanian border, Beard riled a cow elephant, who charged. As she tried to impale him, Beard—attempting to evade her tusks—hung on to her leg. She crushed him with her head, pressing him to the ground and fracturing his pelvis in five places as well as slashing his thigh. Other elephants crowded around, nosing him with their trunks. When Beard arrived at Nairobi Hospital, doctors warned that he was bleeding to death from internal injuries; as he was wheeled into the operating theater, he had no pulse.

Beard won $2,000 when Onassis bet him he couldn't stay underwater for four minutes.

But, after a long operation to piece his pelvis back together, using an external scaffold pinned to hipbones through the skin, the bleeding was stopped. The most immediate danger became the risk of infection: at the very least, Beard faced weeks in the hospital and up to a year of recovery.

As shocking as it was, the news proved less than surprising to Nairobians who have long watched Beard's antics with a mixture of fascination and horror. "People have been expecting it," says Terry Mathews, the former safari guide who was savaged by a rhino on a Beard expedition. "He was playing the fool with elephants 20 years ago, back when he was married to Cheryl Tiegs. Everyone knew he was either going to hurt somebody else or hurt himself. Now he's done it."

Only a few weeks earlier, Beard had been quite chipper as he welcomed me to Hog Ranch, a ragtag assortment of tents topped with thatched roofs. Fresh off a plane from Paris and the couture collections, which he photographed for French Elle, he rolled a joint and sipped a cocktail of gin and passion-fruit juice as we settled down in front of a campfire while a smiling African servant passed around a tray of hors d'oeuvres.

Just beyond the congenial ring of leather safari chairs, enormous warthogs snorted and snuffled around a mudhole, their tiny pig eyes almost invisible above their gnarled snouts, each of which sported a curly pair of tusks. In the distance, the four raised knuckles of the Ngong Hills turned intensely blue in the dusk; Beard's ranch adjoins the land once owned by Isak Dinesen, back when she was a coffee-plantation owner named Karen Blixen, and his view of the Ngong Hills is the same one she described in Out of Africa.

It has been more than 40 years since Peter Beard first came to Kenya as a teenager infatuated with the romance of Africa. More than three decades ago, he bought the 45 acres he has clung to ever since, despite the steadily encroaching suburbs, the rising land prices, his own increasingly desperate financial straits, and even some nefarious attempts to drive him off his property (including trumped-up charges which landed him in a Nairobi jail several years ago).

To a first-time visitor, Hog Ranch seems peaceful and exotic. Lying in an open tent in the middle of the night, gazing out onto a landscape brilliantly illuminated by a full moon, one hears the rustling in the underbrush and the voices of countless creatures chattering and yowling in the mysterious darkness. It is easy to imagine the leopards that used to stalk the place after nightfall; once one ate a monkey right outside the tent where I slept, leaving behind only a fluff of fur.

But Beard—whose endlessly repeated theme over the last four decades has been the destruction of the Africa he knew and loved—has never been mollified by the beauties of his adopted continent; he has always been preoccupied with the ravages of civilization. "Listen to those dogs barking," he told me just after my arrival. "The wilderness is gone, and with it much more than we can appreciate or predict. We'll suffer for it."

At 58, Peter Beard is remarkable for many reasons. "Half Tarzan, half Byron" is how Bob Colacello described the Beard of a quarter of a century ago in Holy Terror, his book about Andy Warhol. The wives have come and gone, the decades have rolled by, but Beard remains what he has always been: an internationally known photographer who has contempt for photography; a diarist whose densely adorned volumes have influenced artists as disparate as Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon; a rakishly handsome playboy; an enthusiastic drug user who always seems to have a joint lit (unless there are magic mushrooms or cocaine available); a trust-fund spendthrift who is perennially broke; a magnet for controversy.

And to everything, including the feuds he so relishes, Beard has always brought his characteristic exuberance. "One of his great attractions is his enormous passion and enthusiasm for whatever he involves himself in," says Lee Radziwill, a former lover, adding that Beard possesses "an extraordinary charm."

Equally at home in the hippest Manhattan nightclubs and the most remote reaches of the African bush, Beard is forever spouting dire warnings and apocalyptic predictions about the fate of a doomed planet. It is a vision he has always expressed most hauntingly with his work, an extremely eccentric oeuvre that transcends every genre and resembles nothing outside of its creator's fervidly bizarre imagination. This fall marks a certain milestone with a major retrospective exhibition opening November 5 at the Fondation Rothschild's Centre Internationale de Photographie in Paris. But even before his accident, Beard found himself poised uncertainly on the brink of his own future: sickened by much of what he sees in today's troubled Africa, even more broke than usual, since much of his trustfund income has been diverted to support his estranged third wife and child, and inching ever closer to the dismaying watershed of his 60th birthday. Should he replace the dilapidated safari tents at Hog Ranch or give up on the place entirely? Is it finally time to move on, to leave Kenya— the most sustained passion of his life—behind?

Such concerns have always evaporated quickly, driven from his mind by the haze of marijuana smoke and his intense desire not to confront reality; he'd much rather grapple with a crocodile. "I'm an escapist," he tells me unrepentantly, a bad-boy twinkle in his eyes. "I'm not a planner; I've never made a decision about anything in my life. The good thing about Africa is that you can escape forever. You can do what you want, without someone looking over your shoulder."

He flashes a dazzling smile. "I'm the most irresponsible person you ever met," he announces triumphantly.

Over the years, many girlfriends, several wives, and innumerable colleagues have counted on the possibility that Beard might actually grow up. Others were more astute. "I remember Truman Capote saying that Peter would never change," recalls Barbara de Kwiatkowski, who caused a minor social scandal a couple of decades ago when she left her first husband to run off with Beard, who was then Lee Radziwill's paramour.

Indeed, his name might as well be Pan. So far, Beard's resolute determination has outlasted them all.

The first day of my visit to Hog Ranch, Beard finally ambles out of his tent in early afternoon to begin the day. He is clad only in his usual kikoi, a colorful saronglike loincloth. His torso is sinewy and nut-brown, with not an ounce of extra flesh, and he looks surprisingly fresh for someone who stayed out until five A.M. Apparently, after I begged off at two A.M. to get some sleep, Beard stopped in at the Carnivore, a local hangout whose menu features zebra and ostrich and crocodile as well as a diverse array of Nairobi night crawlers. It isn't until the Ethiopian girls begin to wander out of his tent that I realize he didn't come home alone.

As more girls appear, I finally ask, "How many of them are there?"

Beard shrugs. "Four or five."

"Did they all sleep in your bed?"

Beard nods, grinning.

"Wasn't it crowded?"

"We were very cozy."

"Aren't you tired?"

"It's such a waste, sleep," he says dismissively. "You're just lying there."

In the coming days I will realize this is par for the course; leave Beard alone for a few minutes and women materialize around him like mushrooms after a heavy rain. The next night he turns up with an elegant young woman who works in Kenyan television; the day after that he appears with a 16-year-old German model. He never explains why they're there or what they mean to him; they are simply part of the landscape, like the drugs and the servants and the wildlife. Separated from his third wife, a descendant of Afghan nobility named Najma, Beard is currently embroiled in an acrimonious divorce which includes allegations that he molested their daughter, who is now eight. There is also a Danish girlfriend, but she's back in Denmark, and the general modus operandi seems to be, Love the one you're with.

As the young Ethiopians cluster shyly around him, Beard gives me a wink. "The last thing left in nature is the beauty of women," he says as he rolls a joint, his big, capable hands scarred and battered, his fingernails black with deeply encrusted dirt. And then he sails into his favorite subject as if borne on a gust of wind.

Beard has had admirers from Candice Bergen to Francis Bacon, who painted him more than 30 times.

"When I first came here in 1955, there's no way you could imagine how great it was," he exclaims, his face alight. "It was paradise, believe me. This was one of the heaviest wildlife areas in the history of the world, and now it's a parking lot. People think you're a whiner or a complainer if you mention it, but the speed with which we destroy nature is overwhelming, and we adapt to the damage we cause with unbelievable cunning. The obvious metaphor here is the elephant."

And off he goes, ranting about the elephant deaths at Tsavo National Park. Start a conversation on almost any topic and Beard will turn it into a tirade about the predations of man and the destruction of the environment. He is equally scathing about the attempt to salvage something. "Conservation is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses," he says derisively.

His abhorrence of what humans have done to his beloved Africa has driven him to the brink of drastic action. "I'm moving to Montauk," he claims, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that will soon confine him to a Nairobi hospital bed. "I'm out of here. It's so anachronistic, being here. It's evolving into kind of a joke. My driveway is like Bel Air: people with hard hats riding their horses, governesses wheeling their prams. Can you believe they've got go-slow bumps on this road now?"

"So why haven't you left yet?" I ask, knowing that Beard is about as likely to leave Africa as I am to become an astronaut.

"It's such an interesting microcosm of our own doom," he says. "It's a fascinating experiment. We're in deep shit."

This thought seems to delight him; the worse things get, the happier Beard appears to be. After all, he's been forecasting disaster for decades now. "I can kick a dead horse longer than anyone," he says with satisfaction.

In recent years, Beard's apocalyptic talk has acquired new dimensions; spend any time in Nairobi and you find that Topic A is local crime. Over lunch, the restaurant owner stops by our table to tell us how his dog got attacked by a leopard, his neighbor's cows were eaten by lions, and his restaurant was held up by armed thugs. You don't just get mugged in Nairobi; you get assaulted by a dozen guys wielding AK-47s. One night we walk into another restaurant and find a woman sobbing in a corner; she has just been robbed by 10 men who took her money, credit cards, passport—even her shoes. Apparently she was lucky; Kenyans can't wait to tell you about all the lurid incidents in which tourists on safari have been hacked up with machetes (Beard once saved a whole busload of Germans from being butchered) or assaulted in their hotel rooms—and then how the corrupt police shake down the victims afterward, while the government, fearful of discouraging tourism, covers up the atrocities.

At Hog Ranch, there has been one attempted murder with a hammer and another aborted assault in which Gillies Turle, an Englishman who lives on the property, and his girlfriend woke up in the middle of the night to find three guys preparing to bash their brains in with large rocks. Beard tells these stories with tremendous relish.

"Even in this horrendous compromise of concrete and horror, it's more real than the U.S.," he says flatly. "You don't get the thrill in the United States anymore; you get the lawyers. I'm like everyone else, except I just like to have a little more excitement than boredom."

It was the thrill that drew him here to begin with, lured by the whiff of romance he picked up as a child in the African Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. He came from a privileged and patrician background: his great-grandfather J. J. Hill had founded the Great Northern Railway, and Beard's grandfather was tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard, who founded Tuxedo, New York, and invented the tuxedo. Peter and his two brothers grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side in a nine-room apartment with Daumiers and Corots on the walls.

But his memories of those years are sour. "I was a robot," Beard says. "I went to every single school my father went to. I had it all handed to me. I was just too spoiled."

When I ask what his father did, Beard is dismissive. "Remarkably little," he says. "He was basically looking into his investments." As for his mother, she "suffered from lack of education and the disease of conformity. Her day would be ruined if you didn't have a clean suit on," he says dryly.

Since Beard is the kind of guy who wears the same filthy clothes for days at a time, his clashes with his mother were chronic; from early childhood he was labeled the black sheep of the family. "I always felt everyone was pretty much against me," he admits. Did that make for a lonely life? He shrugs. "It's a lonely life for almost everyone. But you can get a lot out of isolation. Maybe it's motivating. Motivation is valuable, however you get it—even if you get it by being slapped in the face."

Although he was a terrible student, Peter managed to squeak through Buckley and Yale, where he was a member of Scroll & Key, but his first taste of Africa changed him for life. "It was total authenticity—something totally real," he recalls.

"I'm an escapist. I've never made a decision about anything in my life."

His parents tried to steer him into a conventional mode by enrolling him in a J. Walter Thompson training course, but Beard quickly went AWOL. "I didn't even go to my graduation; I went right back to Africa," he says. He never actually said no to the advertising job; he just never showed up. Like most aspects of Beard's life, his course was determined by drift rather than decision. "I did not decide," he says proudly. "I did not decide to be a useless bum for my entire life; I've just become one. I'm not against bums, but I'm definitely a bum."

He is famously hopeless with money. On my first night in Nairobi, after a lavish dinner of oysters and crab and gin and wine, as I was preparing to pay the bill (when you're with Peter Beard, you always end up paying the bill), I asked him how much a Kenyan shilling was worth; only a couple of hours off an airplane, I hadn't yet had a chance to figure out the local currency. A resident of Kenya for more than 30 years, Beard had no idea. He prides himself on never having held a paying job in his life, and he is in debt to virtually everyone he knows. "He's $30,000 into me," reports Peter Riva, who describes himself as Beard's "manager, agent, and baby-sitter," as well as his close friend. "A check from Peter Beard is like an I.O.U.," observes Peter Tunney, whose SoHo gallery, The Time Is Always Now, features a permanent Beard exhibition.

Beard is also completely shameless about cadging whatever he can. Whenever you take him out to dinner, he shows up with 5 or 10 or 20 extra people, blithely assuming someone else will pick up the check. "He just loves to run up the bill," Tunney sighs. When you go to the grocery store, Beard gets you to buy the week's groceries, then tries to tack on months of back debts. Although he doesn't have his own car, he enjoys the use of Gillies Turle's ancient junker; on my first trip to Hog Ranch, the car died several kilometers away, and we had to hike the rest of the way, hauling my luggage. Beard hit me up for gas money, slipped in an oil change, and then tried to get me to pay for a new alternator for the car.

"I'm broke," he says cheerfully. "People think I m rich, but it's a very meager trust fund I've got; I've always just survived. It's amazing that I have gotten through without total bankruptcy."

According to Riva (who is Marlene Dietrich's grandson), the principal in Beard's account is currently around $1.2 million. That may not be everybody's idea of broke, but Beard's view always departs from the conventional. He doesn't even object to the most frequently repeated description of him over the years. "I don't mind the word 'dilettante.' A dilettante means someone who does what he loves," Beard protests.

And what he loves most has always been his own curious art form, a combination of photography and collage that is currently metamorphosing into the oversize works that will be shown in Paris. While the large scale is relatively new, the form is one Beard has used for decades, most notably in his notorious diaries, which are nothing if not original. "When you look at his diaries, you think, The man is mad!" observes his friend Iman with affection.

The diary habit began back when Beard and Radziwill were lovers and Jacqueline Onassis gave him a leatherbound journal he proceeded to fill with all manner of debris. Year by year, the diaries piled up, overstuffed volumes grotesquely swollen with the detritus of a life, each page densely layered with photographs and an astonishing assortment of other items: tiny rodent skulls, candy-bar wrappers, keys, buttons, flamingo feathers, a pocket from a pair of velvet jeans, peanut shells, dried leaves, plastic cocktail stirrers, a piece of a cereal box, mysterious newspaper headlines (WOMAN SAVED FROM SLIME!), bones and rocks, smears and dribbles of blood (always Beard's favorite artistic medium), intricate line drawings and elaborately inscribed quotations, cigarette butts, rubber gloves, matchbooks, fish skeletons, plastic ketchup packets, a desiccated lizard, a dung-beetle foot—the variety is endless.

A veritable time capsule of their era, the diaries are also crammed with pictures of the rich, famous, and beautiful people who have populated Beard's life. Always enamored of models, he was Veruschka's favorite photographer, a longtime friend of Lauren Hutton's, and pals with dozens of others, from Janice Dickinson to Paula Barbieri. A frequent guest on Aristotle Onassis's yacht, Beard spent months on the island of Skorpios with Jackie and Lee, and once won $2,000 when Onassis bet him he couldn't stay underwater for four minutes. (Jackie clocked him at 4:20.) Beard used to baby-sit for Caroline Kennedy and her brother, John, whose childhood drawing of a monkey is still tacked up in the kitchen at Hog Ranch.

Ever a heartthrob, Beard has had admirers of every description, from such girlfriends as Candice Bergen and Carole Bouquet to his buddy Francis Bacon, who has painted him more than 30 times. "Peter was one of the most beautiful men in the world," attests Barbara de Kwiatkowski, a former model. "He should have been a movie star." His guests at Hog Ranch have included Kennedys and DuPonts, Mellons and Rockefellers; his friends have ranged from Isak Dinesen to Bianca Jagger to Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. He seems to have caroused with everyone. "Mick arrived so drunk from an afternoon with Peter Beard and Francis Bacon that he fell asleep on my bed," reported Andy Warhol in a diary entry from the 1970s.

Fragments of all these experiences surface in Beard's work, which provides a felicitous metaphor for his life. "Every single moment of my life has just been getting through it; there's not a single moment of development," he maintains. "Whatever is there is just like a coral reef: accidental accumulation."

And accidental accumulation is the beauty of the diaries. "I'm an expert on futility, and I like the futility and the pettiness of my diaries," Beard says. "It's a sort of laundry list of the day. Totally meaningless, but it makes a texture, the texture of the day, and at the end of the year you have a lot to show for the year. It's life-thickening. I don't think of it as work; I've always just loved doing it. It's like being an addict."

He doesn't think of his diaries as art, either. "It's avoidance of art; that's what the diaries are all about. I've avoided doing art because I never liked homework," says Beard, who was an art major at Yale.

I don't mind the word 'dilettante.' A dilettante means someone who does what he loves."

Although photography—both his own and that of others—constitutes a major element in his work, Beard is equally disparaging about that art form. "Photography is such a retard profession, and the people in it are such parasites on technology," he says venomously. "Photography has become an all-money deal. Money kills creativity. All this technical equipment, dozens of crew—it's complete bullshit. It destroys the magic."

Beard's friends have often wondered why he isn't more successful; certainly he has failed to cash in financially to the extent that he could have, had he ever focused on marketing his work. "He has so much humor about himself and would never take himself as seriously as most successful people do, which also makes him somewhat of a rarity," observes Lee Radziwill.

Beard has, of course, taken abysmal care of his work over the years; the diaries that survive are crumbling, and many years' worth were destroyed when his millhouse in Montauk burned down in 1977. Although almost everything he lost was irreplaceable, including Picassos, Warhols, and Bacons, Beard refused to give in to any grief. "I remember having a little sob on my own for like three seconds," he concedes. "But you can either worry and moan and fuss, or totally avoid that by just not doing it. I swear to God I've never looked back."

Indeed, Beard is a firm believer in the efficacy of repression. "I've found denial is just unbelievably important," he says enthusiastically. "Tomorrow is another day, and most people don't really remember that when they get all excited and fuss. If there's a moment of emotion, so what? Repress it. Don't tell someone how jealous you are. Don't go around whining. Force a little perspective on yourself."

Such stoicism extends to his romantic life as well. "I'm a very jealous person, but I would never dream of showing it. That just means you're a jerk," he exclaims.

And, anyway, it's not as if Beard believes in monogamy. All of his marriages have ended badly. He was dismayed by the failure of the first one, to Newport socialite Minnie Cushing, but says he was absolutely delighted to get divorced from Cheryl Tiegs. "The institution of marriage should be reexamined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia," he declares. "The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It's an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically it's very unnatural. It's masochism and torture the way it's been organized."

"When you look at his diaries, remarks Iman, "You think, The man is mad!"

We've been sitting in Peter's tent, curled up on an ancient velvet sofa. Along with a vast array of animal skulls and bones, crocodile heads, gourds, Sudanese baskets, a woven baby's bed from Lamu, and even the full plumage of a peacock are old pictures of Zara, his daughter, scattered throughout the tent. He hasn't seen her "since March 19," he says, his jaw tightening.

One of the Ethiopian girls pokes her head in, looking for his jar of marijuana. She is wearing a long, clinging sweaterdress that reveals every curve of her taut behind. Beard gazes after it with admiration as she strolls off. "What an unbelievably beautiful ass!" he exclaims.

When I call Najma Beard, she is appalled to learn that Peter has been talking about the allegations of sexual molestation involved in their divorce. "It's so awful that he would put it in the public arena," she gasps, as if someone had kicked her in the stomach. "This was only meant to be a family issue." Her voice turns bitter. "But Peter has seen fit to talk about it in every restaurant, every nightclub, with a bunch of hangers-on and sycophants and third-rate human beings."

She starts to sob. "I don't want to say anything terrible about Peter, because he's Zara's father. But this is something that's very, very serious. I literally begged him to go and get help, but he didn't want to. I was completely crazy about Peter; I would have done anything to save our marriage. I did my best to help Peter out of this, but when he refused to deal with the situation that existed in our family, I had to leave."

Beard's friends, who dismiss the idea that he could be guilty of child abuse, accuse Najma of using the issue for tactical advantage. "That is completely untrue," exclaims Najma, a tall, striking woman who is 20 years younger than Beard and comes from a strict Muslim fundamentalist family who strenuously opposed their marriage. "I'm just not that sort of person at all! I've gained nothing with this! My daughter's lost a father; I've lost a husband. I have absolutely nothing!

"Peter's problem always has been too many drugs," she adds. "Anything that's out there, anything that anyone gives him, he'll do. I think it does erode a lot of your morals; you have no boundaries, and when I felt my child was in danger I had to do something about it. I have not turned against him; even today, if he were to go for help with her, I'd be all for it. But I think Peter has started believing his own hype. Once you become a public person, you create a persona as sort of a mask, and you can't get out of it. I love him very, very deeply, but he's hurt us so much."

She starts sobbing again. "There are two Peters: one is a completely loving, vulnerable human being, and the other is a complete publicity-hound monster who wants to be a celebrity, and to be around celebrities. That's his downfall. He's absolutely petrified of getting old; Peter wants to be young, and drugs are his escape. When we had an intervention for him, he said, 'I like my drugs, and I don't think I have a problem.' It's a complete avoidance of reality."

Najma maintains that Peter's decision to stop seeing Zara was entirely his own choice. "It's going to be between him and his daughter one day, and I would not like to be in his shoes," she says bleakly. "There's too much darkness there. But he has no remorse about anything."

"My life has just been getting through it. What is there is like coral reef: accidental accumulation."



Before I went to Africa, I had expected Beard would be reluctant to discuss the molestation issue, but to my surprise he brought it up himself. He actually relishes conflict and loves nothing better than to regale listeners with an endless litany of stories about fights and feuds, lawsuits and grievances. He seems completely without shame; indeed, he is happy to fill you in on the worst things anyone has ever said about him. "I've always hated people who hold back the truth of things," he says.

He has denied any sexual abuse: "What's really disgusting is the utilization of child molestation as a divorce technique!" Oddly, however, he has only nice things to say about Najma. "I love my wife," he says brightly. "She's a totally good person. I think she got spoiled by America."

Although Beard's next book is Zara's Tales, an autobiographical account of his life's adventures which he is writing for his daughter, he won't even admit to any sadness about losing his child. "You can adapt to negative things," he says brusquely. "I'm not into sadness."

Indeed, despite all the wrecked marriages, the damaged child, the hurts and the debts and the disappointments, Beard remains the personification of masculine imperviousness. "I've never felt guilty about anything," he boasts, lighting one cigarette after another. "I have no regrets."

Needless to say, Beard—who enjoys being what he calls "pleasantly pixilated"—also rejects the idea that his drug use is a problem. "People say I did, but I don't think I ever used drugs excessively," says Beard, whose 40th birthday party was held at Studio 54, complete with an elephant cake that descended from the ceiling. "I've met so many wonderful people on coke. I have nothing bad to say about it. I really enjoy coke."

His handsome, ravaged face brightens. "Got any?"

As Iman sweeps regally into the garden restaurant at the Essex House in New York, heads turn, as they always have. Impeccably groomed, she has a neck like a black swan, the whitest teeth I've ever seen, and a dazzling smile. Now married to rock star David Bowie, she has enjoyed a long career as an internationally famous model—a career she readily admits she owes to Peter Beard.

It has been more than 20 years since Beard first accosted her on a Nairobi street. "I have this man in a sarong and no shoes following me," she recalls. "He finally stopped me and said, 'Have you ever been photographed?' I thought, Well, I've heard lines, but this is ridiculous. What do these white people think? That my parents never took a picture of their family?"

The daughter of a doctor and a diplomat, Iman was a student at Nairobi University. Her family, in exile from Somalia, had just moved to Tanzania; Iman had earned a one-year college scholarship but was trying to muster the fees for further schooling. When Beard offered to pay her a year's tuition, she accepted.

But after sitting for a photo session, she started getting calls from the Wilhelmina agency in New York, asking her to come to the United States and become a model. After weeks of importuning from Wilhelmina and Beard, Iman agreed to fly to New York. There she found that he had planted an astonishing fairy tale about her in the papers.

"He hypes it that I'm six feet tall; I'm barely five feet nine inches," Iman says indignantly. "He claims I didn't speak a word of English; I spoke English, Italian, and Arabic, as well as Somali. He says he found me with goats and sheep—that I was some kind of shepherdess in the jungle!" She shakes her head, still amazed. "I never saw a jungle in my life. . . . But Peter lives in a fantasy world. He loves the idea of being my Svengali."

Iman, who was promptly hailed by Diana Vreeland as "Nefertiti rediscovered," became enormously successful, but Beard never had an affair with her and never profited in any way from her career; he seems simply to have enjoyed the drama of it all. And Iman eventually resigned herself, with a sort of amused exasperation, to his enthusiasms—even his nostalgia for the bygone culture of the British colonialists he so admires. "Peter loves the myth of Africa more than I do," Iman explains. "He 'loves' Africa, but we always have an argument about what Africa really is. Is it the animals and the landscape, or is it the people? He has no respect for Africans, but it's their continent—not his. For him, there are no people involved; they get in the way of his myth."

The question of Beard and his mythmaking has had eerie reverberations over the years, and in at least two disputes his veracity became a major issue. Nine years ago ABC filmed a television special called Last Word from Paradise: With Peter Beard in Africa. The producers engaged old friend Terry Mathews to serve as a consultant for the show. Stalking big game with cameras rather than guns, the team managed to enrage a massive female rhinoceros which was trying to protect her calf from the intruders. Beard got out of the way, but Mathews stood there yelling "Bugger off!" as the rhino charged. Goring him through the thigh, the beast slashed 16 inches upward into his pelvic and abdominal cavities, breaking six ribs as well as his leg and stopping within a quarter-inch of his heart.

Miraculously, given the extent of his injuries, he survived, but he and his wife subsequently filed lawsuits against Beard and ABC. The case dragged on for years and was finally settled out of court, but its repercussions still roil the social waters in Nairobi, where opinions remain polarized.

Beard blames Mathews alone for his fate. "This was an outrageous showoff blunder of total stupidity," he maintains. "The lawsuit was just an amazing crock of shit. There isn't one ounce of culpability on any of our parts."

Mathews tells a different story. "I think Peter wanted to get this animal to charge," he says. "When she chased after him, he ran back past me, directly toward the camera crew, who were loaded up with gear, and I felt responsible for those guys. I think Peter just wanted a sensational picture."

Another controversy arose in the early 1990s, when Beard and Gillies Turle published a book called The Art of the Maasai, which purported to reveal ancient tribal artifacts they were bringing to public view for the first time. Turle, a former antiques dealer, wrote the book, a hefty coffee-table volume published by Alfred A. Knopf, and Beard shot the photographs of a stunning array of items, from ceremonial pipes to medicine-mixing bowls, many carved from contraband materials such as ivory and rhino horn. "This is the most important African art discovery of the century," Beard insists. "These things are hundreds of years old. These are major museum pieces—collector's items!"

Both Beard and Turle have a significant financial investment in that view, since they've been collecting this material for years. But the academic community remains unconvinced. "I find it hard to believe that a class of art objects could be discovered so late in this century, when Maasai anthropologists have been around for well over a hundred years," comments Richard Leakey, the former director of the National Museums of Kenya. "Now there are thousands of these things on sale in art galleries all over the world. I'm just uneasy about it—why the Maasai I've talked to don't know about these things, and why there are suddenly so many of them. Are any of these things genuine? Some certainly must be fake, but are they all?"

Others are less diplomatic. "There isn't any controversy here," declares Donna Klumpp Pido, an anthropologist and expert on Maasai beadwork who wrote a scathing review of the book for African Arts magazine. "There is universal agreement in academic, scholarly, museum, and curatorial circles that these things are fakes. If you've handled a lot of stuff, you can tell a fake patina when you see one."

If the artifacts are fraudulent, the question then becomes whether their champions knew about the hoax. "When I wrote my review, I was making the kind assumption that Beard and Turle had been bamboozled by some Maasais, but it turns out that that's not the case," explains Klumpp Pido, who lives in Nairobi. "They're both perpetrating a fraud. I can't imagine they could be so dumb as to believe this stuff is real. They know bloody damn well it isn't."

Recalling Beard's fabrications about Iman, Klumpp Pido adds, "I must say, the guy's got balls: artistic balls, social balls, every kind of balls you can think of. He's a genius, but he's a fruitcake."

Beard and Turle scoff at such criticism, maintaining that further research will eventually vindicate them. "You cannot say a whole genre is fake without procuring evidence," declares Turle. "I think the history of these artifacts will be traced back hundreds of years, if not thousands."

Indeed, expert opinion is not quite as unanimous as Klumpp Pido claims. Roderic Blackburn, an anthropologist and former research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, did extensive fieldwork among the Maasai to investigate the artifacts. "I could not find any reason to doubt the authenticity of these objects," he reports. "I don't see much basis for the doubts that have been cast."

Meanwhile, Beard freely admitted to me that he has been smuggling Maasai artifacts out of Kenya; he was positively gleeful as he described how he sneaked them past customs at the Nairobi airport. But he claimed he's not selling them; he said he just wanted to include Maasai objects in his show this fall, along with his photographs and collages.

"The guys got balls: artistic balls, social balls, every kind of balls. He's a genius, but he's a fruitcake."

"I'm really into these collages now," he told me. "I've got so much material from my whole life stacked up. Time has made most of it so rare. It's just a lucky coincidence that most of the things I've photographed are destroyed—and rarity is value. The subject matter is over, but I can wheel and deal it now."

His mind buzzes with ideas; he has even toyed with opening a Hog Ranch Bar & Grill, with a gift shop and, behind the bar, a diorama of the Ngong Hills. Then again, considering the realities of present-day Nairobi, maybe that's not such a good idea. "It's like setting it up in Watts or Bedford-Stuyvesant," he conceded glumly.

His friends know such fantasies will never happen. "Peter is not a commercial person," says Iman. "That's his beauty and that's his downfall. He's an artist; he does not live in society; he doesn't play by their rules. He's like a wild animal. He doesn't own a pair of socks; in winter he's wearing sandals and sloshing around in the snow. He would rather have grand disasters than just have a mediocre life."

Back in Manhattan, I head down to SoHo, where Peter Tunney's gallery is stuffed with Beard artifacts. When Beard is in town, he often works here, holding court and sending fellow revelers out to service him: "I need some ink!" "I need 25 six-foot snakeskins!" "I need a quart of cow's blood!"

In between all-night bouts of working, Beard carouses, sometimes with unfortunate results. Last winter Beard was supposed to meet his girlfriend at Spy Bar one night, but the bouncers barred his way. "He makes a run for it, they grab him and beat the shit out of him," Tunney reports. "They punched him, they kicked him, and they snapped his biceps tendon, which required surgery." [Spy Bar publicists admit only that Beard was "pushed."] As he was wheeled into the operating room, Beard's last words before succumbing to unconsciousness were directed to the anesthesiologist: "Can I get some of this stuff to go?" he asked hopefully.

Despite his doctor's entreaties, Beard never showed up for the prescribed physical therapy. Indeed, whether he gets Lyme disease or malaria, "he just completely ignores it," says Tunney. This modus operandi wouldn't work for most people, but Beard has always specialized in flouting the limitations that constrain ordinary mortals. Last summer, he and his Danish girlfriend were out in Montauk, where Beard owns the last house on Montauk Point. "Peter's girlfriend started ragging him about all his bad habits," Tunney recalls. "She's this strong Danish chick with a spandex suit on, and she said, 'Peter, you smoke, you drink, you drug, you stay up all night—and you're almost 60 years old! You need to start taking care of yourself. You should go running, like me—five miles a day!' "

So Beard, wearing his usual dusty African sandals, obligingly accompanied her on a run. Tunney expected him to last about five minutes. "An hour later, the girlfriend comes back, dripping," Tunney reports. "I said, 'Where's Peter?' "

"He loved it," she gasped. "He said he just wanted to keep going."

But then came the confrontation with the elephants. Beard's surgeon at Nairobi Hospital turned out to be the same one who had stitched Terry Mathews back together. "What goes around comes around," the doctor commented grimly.

Mathews, who was immediately inundated with phone calls from fellow Nairobians about Beard's accident, couldn't resist some black humor. "The witch doctor had nothing to do with it," he said wickedly.

As for Beard, he maintained his customary sangfroid even in extremis. After the elephant herd pulverized his midsection, his safari guide thought Beard must be dead—until Beard looked up at him and remarked, "Don't worry, I'm not gonna sue."

He underwent several lengthy operations over the next few days, but not even general anesthesia was able to dull the vehemence of his aesthetic opinions. As he was being wheeled out of the operating theater after the second surgery, which lasted four hours, Beard asked the color of the room he was being taken to: turquoise. "Oh, God, can't they get a better color," he groaned.

Beard's social proclivities were also undimmed; to the consternation of Nairobi Hospital officials, he received 320 visitors during his first three days in the hospital, according to Peter Riva.

Beard has no medical insurance, of course, and the bills will be astronomical, but his major regret is that the brush with death didn't provide the kind of mystical journey toward otherworldliness some people have reported. "I was technically dead, but I had no tunnel, no light, none of the other-frequency experiences—I was so disappointed," he exclaims. "It was a big anticlimax. The one person who really wanted to have that experience and I got none of it!"

Despite his intense pain, Beard's philosophical sympathies remain firmly with his antagonist. "It was the elephant's revenge for all the things people have done to them," he says breezily.

And yet perhaps he can put the accident to good use after all. "I need a final tale for Zara's Tales, and I guess this is going to be it," he tells me one day on the phone. "I never really had a close call like this, and that's what I wanted her book to be—the most heightened moments, the most dangerous mistakes. All the stuff kids like best."

Having discerned the requisite silver lining, he pauses for a moment while a nurse rearranges his body; even Beard can't suppress a few loud moans. Soon he will be transported back to New York, where American doctors will apply the latest technology to his shattered body, but for now he is happy to be where he is.

"They have hundreds of nurses here; it's very nice," he adds. "You see, it's all Dr. Pangloss: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." All the way from Nairobi, I can hear the sardonic glee in his laugh.