BY CHARLOTTE FOX WEBER
SOCIETY
I STILL HAVE THE GREEN DRESS I WORE WHEN I FIRST MET Peter Beard. It was a crisp November evening in 2004. I was 21 and had just moved to New York City. My father invited me to join him at Beard’s book party at the Explorers Club. A photographer and an artist—he was sort of a big deal in the ’70s. I’d never heard of him.
I felt a jolt the moment we were introduced. Beard had a clear-cut, electric face. Sixty-six years old, he was a dominating presence. “Tell me about you,” he said. His focus on me was startling.
When my father left to drive home to Connecticut after the party, he assumed I’d join, offering to drop me at the apartment I shared with my friend Kristina in the Village. I told him I would stay. He questioned my choice and told me to be careful. I really believed myself when I said I would. It was already too late.
Peter Beard died in April 2020, and I have been haunted by his memory since—my own memories, but also the way the world remembers him. To most, he was a charismatic, larger-than-life womanizer whose bold, subversive art offered a degree of cover for the way he lived. Obituaries classified him as a playboy, a bad-boy bon vivant. I knew him as those things, but also so much more. A biography by Graham Boynton, Wild: The Life of Peter Beard, released last fall, included my story; the author, who defied our agreement to allow me to control what he used from our conversation, calls me Nancy C. (Boynton denies violating any agreement. “I told a very small part of her story, carefully concealing her identity,” he says.) Another biography of Beard is due to be published in July. I’ve never spoken with the author. Instead, I’ll tell my story in my own words.
BEARD WAS MARRIED, but he convinced me that he and his wife had an understanding that allowed him to do whatever he pleased, and I accepted this.
Soon we were seeing each other regularly and intensely. Unlike men my own age, Beard was unafraid to show his interest. He played Leonard Cohen songs on my voice mail, and he called at all hours. “The girl of a thousand faces!” he would say, looking at me. I felt seen, elevated.
I was curious about his work. Most of his images were of African wildlife, and he imbued them with an eerie combination of beastliness and beauty. Lions ripped apart smaller creatures. Crocodiles appeared to snack on human limbs. He smudged his pictures with blood—typically animal blood from a butcher, but sometimes his own. He also photographed women: gaunt models curved around rocks, stretching out thei
