When playboy Peter Beard was gored by a Kenyan elephant, he turned into a great photographer. By his friend Anthony Haden-Guest
Debbie Dickinson particularly remembers her gig with Peter Beard (1938-2020), the playboy, conservationist, photographer and subject of a new biography. Unsurprisingly so. She was a model in her early twenties when she met him, already a veteran of Vogue covers and campaigns for alpha brands. The shoot was outside Beard’s place in Montauk, Long Island. Jackie O and Truman Capote had come to dinner there. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street there. On that day, Beard climbed a ladder, leant into his camera, took out a penknife, sliced his wrist and splattered blood onto the wide-open pages of his current diary below. Dickinson asked, ‘Uh, why?’ ‘Cause and effect,’ Beard said blithely. This was characteristic of the way he worked up his diaries into artefacts. He got on with the shoot, led her down the vertiginous cliff path to the beach, put a finger to his lips, seated...
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