His nickname was “Walkabout,” an apt tag for the irrepressible spirit that was Peter Beard, as comfortable amid wild game in Kenya as he was behind the velvet ropes of a wild club. In 82 years, he beat the odds many times. An elephant attack broke his pelvis in five places, and he blew enough cocaine to impress Keith Richards. So it was puzzling and tragic when his body was found in woods near his Montauk home last spring. There was no sign of foul play—he’d simply, most likely anyway, wandered off.
Peter Pan, Lord Byron, Tarzan, Casanova, Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince, Ernest Hemingway: All have been invoked to describe Beard. But there is no template for an original like Beard, who possessed an insatiable appetite for drugs and danger. His art was sometimes overshadowed by his attention-getting exploits, antics that should be considered “dust in the lion’s paw,” according to the writer and Beard friend Paul Theroux. The precincts that entranced him, and formed his lifelong work, were Africa and women.
He was a participatory artist, using his own blood sometimes, a touch of the visceral that linked him to his hero and friend the Irish painter Francis Bacon. Even into his 70s, Beard held court at nightclubs. His entrenched use of drugs spoke to a remarkable stamina.
“He came through everything,” says Martine De Menthon, a friend and former co–editor in chief of fashion for French Vogue. “No sleep, taking everything, drinking. But he never lost his focus.”
“He created his myth,” says Ruth Ansel, who was the art director of Beard’s first supersized Taschen monograph, in 2006. “Others perpetuated it. I think 90 percent of the myth is true because he did live that life, he did behave that way, he was all those bad boy things that appear to be part of the story.”
Yet it is probably not surprising to learn that the man was more complicated than his legend allows, as new interviews reveal. Celebrated for his irreverence and sprezzatura, Beard is remembered as warm and generous, but there are also recollections of callousness, cynicism, and, when his mood pivoted, violence.
In June, Taschen issued a fourth edition of a monograph, 770 pages of pictures from Beard’s career, much of it focused on his diaries, the most consistent project of his life and his self-proclaimed “obsession.” At more than a hundred, the diaries are chaotic, their pages bursting with artifacts of his day or his fancy: photos, quill-pen drawings, animal bones, product labels, tabloid headlines, and phone numbers. So far, little scholarly analysis exists of Beard’s work, but the diaries are among a trove to be excavated in his estate, which he willed to his wife, Nejma. As to what extent Beard successfully navigated the pitfalls of a white artist depicting Africa and Africans, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, says that so far, there has not been enough critical scholarship on Beard’s oeuvre around the idea of “dismantling the ‘great white hunter’ model that enables some of his work.” That’s what makes Beard’s diaries—according to Lewis, his most important work—so urgent to understand. And to understand his diaries, you must understand his life.
Beard started out as a fashion photographer, but his images of a decaying Africa put him at the forefront of the environmental conservation movement, evincing what Lewis describes as his “complicated relationship with a primitive gaze on the continent.”
His great-grandfather was James J. Hill, who founded the Great Northern Railway, and his step-grandfather was tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard IV. The middle child of three boys, Beard grew up on Fifth Avenue and summered at his grandmother’s Gin Lane estate, La Dune, in Southampton. In a documentary about his life, he announced that he was “not a WASP,” describing his family as “mackerel snappers,” a derogatory term for Catholics. His schools were patrician: Buckley, Pomfret, Yale. Although it is consistently reported that Beard was rich, a family member said his inheritance yielded between $50,000 and $100,000 a year—never enough for a man with a wingspan from New York to Nairobi.
Africa was his lodestar and he riffed on its ecstatic beauty and deterioration throughout his life. Captivated by Isak Dinesen’s rendering in her book Out of Africa, Beard traveled to her native Denmark in 1961 to meet her. So impressed was she with Beard, Dinesen paved the way for him to buy about 45 acres outside Nairobi adjacent to her former coffee plantation. He named it Hog Ranch for the roaming warthogs.
Beard’s early years in Kenya overlapped with tense conditions: The country was establishing its independence from Britain; there was an increase in poaching ivory and rhino horn; and drought left human and species populations competing for scarce resources. He took a series of photographs that would become a book, The End of the Game, published in 1965. Around the same time, Beard began alienating neighbors, like David Sheldrick, a national parks warden, who banned Beard from Tsavo East National Park. Beard had a habit of tracking animals on foot and getting lost, causing Sheldrick to divert resources from the anti-poaching campaign to mount a search, says Sheldrick’s daughter, Angela Sheldrick, now chief executive officer at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, an elephant preserve.
“David started to see Peter Beard for what he was: someone who always wanted to sensationalize things,” Angela says. But the divide between Beard and Sheldrick went beyond rule breaking. The men had divergent opinions on conservation. As elephants were starving, Beard believed in culling or selective slaughter to reduce overpopulation. Sheldrick, a decorated soldier and former professional hunter, believed nature should prevail, concerned that culling could encourage ivory poaching. In the end, Sheldrick’s position won.
Alex Beard, an artist and nephew of Beard’s, who as a teenager lived for a summer at Hog Ranch, says his uncle’s insistence on “the brutality of fact made some people quite uncomfortable.”
A few years later, Peter ran into serious trouble when he found a man, Jared Nzioka, poaching on Hog Ranch.
“I put him in his snare for an hour and a half: big deal,” Beard would dismissively explain years later, in a 1993 interview with Charlie Rose.
But the specifics are chilling. Daniel Woodley, a security expert and conservationist in Kenya who was a young child when he met Beard, says Beard hung up the poacher by his thumbs. In a 2018 book, Jackie, Janet & Lee, J. Randy Taraborrelli reported that Beard “stuffed a glove in the poacher’s mouth and tied his hands and feet to two separate trees.” The crime for assaulting and unlawfully confining a poacher was severe enough to warrant a sentence of 18 months in prison and 12 strokes from a hippo-hide whip.
While not specifying how much of his sentenced he served, Beard told Rose that he served time and was “let out by JM Kariuki through [Jomo] Kenyatta. Very nice.” But a January 1970 news brief by United Press International said the sentence was suspended in exchange for a fine of $1,200. Glen Cottar, Beard’s longtime friend who owns a safari company, as well as Daniel Woodley and a Beard family member say Beard was never whipped, and that he served a few weeks, perhaps a month. The same Beard family member, who asks not to be identified for fear of upsetting Nejma, claims the Kennedy family may have intervened. Extensive efforts with Kenyan Court personnel to determine Beard’s exact prison time were unsuccessful.
The line was as blurry in his self-mythologizing as in his art: He sometimes staged pictures, a practice typically unacknowledged in his books and other work. Beard had a habit of getting close to game, his proximity resulting in an animal’s defensive ears-up, chest-raised image that conveyed drama.
“He would hot them up, piss them off,” says Woodley, whose father, William “Bill” Woodley, was a prominent national parks game warden in East Africa. “He had a 50-millimeter lens taped onto a Canon camera. That’s how close he got. He had amazing courage and bravery.”
Model Janice Dickinson recalls how she posed with wild animals for a 1988 Playboy shoot by Beard. “The crocodiles were anesthetized and—clunk—they fell asleep,” Dickinson says. “Then the locals wrapped their jaws shut with fishing wire.”
Woodley points out that Beard assembled more than 100 elephant skulls heaped in piles for pictures of an “elephant graveyard.” Other pictures feature trees piled up around a dried-up pond to illustrate damage done by elephants. In fact, Woodley says, elephants took down trees but not so many trees in one spot.
“You know the saying, ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,’ ” Woodley says. “That’s the artist’s prerogative, and Peter was very much an artist.”
But De Menthon, the Vogue editor, who worked with Beard on fashion shoots and the 2009 Pirelli calendar in Botswana, says: “He had tremendous intuition about animals. He loved them so much; he was thinking like them.”
The pictures Beard took in the ’60s and ’70s in Africa documented environmental challenges and were unprecedented in their grit, says Phillip S. Block, former deputy director for programs and director of education at the International Center of Photography. Beard, he says, made “visible the invisible,” partly through his social prominence. “He was a ‘concern photographer’ of a different fashion than a Henri Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa. In fact, it was only a denizen of Studio 54 that could’ve done what he did. His own celebrity and engagement propelled those photographs into the public consciousness.”
Hog Ranch was often the setting for his fashion photography as well. Anne-Laure Lyon, a fashion editor and friend, recalls arriving there to do a big shoot with Beard. The models were on set. The body paint was ready. He asked her, “What cameras did you bring? My cameras are all broken.” They managed to find cameras. “Peter created drama,” Lyon says. “He had a kind of electricity coming off his body.”
The bohemia of Hog Ranch drew models and celebrities like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia and even Neil Armstrong. Photographer Guillaume Bonn, who made a 1998 documentary with Jean-Claude Luyat, Peter Beard, Scrapbooks From Africa and Beyond, says, “Hog Ranch was like Andy Warhol’s Factory or the literary salon of Nairobi, where everybody dropped in for drinks and little canapés beginning at 6 p.m. when the giraffes stopped by to feed.” Beard drank bull shots, a cocktail of vodka and beef bouillon.
“Peter succeeded in Africa because he knew how to make friends, by being generous,” Theroux says in an email. “He spoke Swahili. Never mind the women, the stoners, etc. He could talk to anyone. He was brilliant and he was funny. You might call this charm. In fact, it is an expression of his humanity.”
But an element of the colonialist remained. Kamande Wa Gature, once Dinesen’s majordomo, worked for Beard at Hog Ranch. Beard collected Kamande’s stories in a book, Longing for Darkness: Kamante’s Tales From Out of Africa, published in 1975. (He used the spelling of “Kamande” chosen by Dinesen.) For many years, Kamande and other native Kenyans painted images on the borders of many of Beard’s photographs. In 1981, Kamande told the New York Times that he had never received any money from the sale of the book, which included an afterword by Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis. Kamande, who died in 1985, said he was given a monthly salary of $50 and was not allowed to keep animals or cultivate land for food. “When was I ever in any darkness?” he asked.
The model Cheryl Tiegs, who would become Beard’s second wife and who spent many months at Hog Ranch when she was with Beard, recalls the relative bargain prices Beard paid locals to help with his art. His pictures—which today sometimes fetch high six figures—sold for a few thousand at the time.
“He got a lot done in Africa for $20 a painting,” she says. “He brought those back to New York and sold them.”
All through this time in Africa, Beard had never fully forgotten his establishment roots. After a brief marriage to model and socialite Minnie Cushing failed, Beard spent time in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. Friends say he was despondent. Through her social secretary, Cushing Coleman (as she is now known) declined to be interviewed. In 1972 Beard bought a six-acre property in Montauk for $135,000. The small, shingled buildings are simple, but the spot is dramatic, high on a bluff of sandy cliffs that drop some 50 feet to the sea. Beard sometimes left his gate, with the words “Lands End” carved into its wood, open to surfers. Beard was inherently peripatetic, though, still traipsing continents, a trait Tiegs says she thought would fade.
Speaking last spring from her home in Los Angeles, she described him as “the most handsome man on the planet.”
They married three years after they met, in 1981, and Tiegs was enchanted, happy, she says, to toggle between the points of his life.
Beard’s nephew Anson H. Beard remembers being a kid, flying over the Montauk Hills with the couple in Tiegs’s red 1980 Mercedes 450SL convertible. “Peter would say, ‘Floor it,’ and Cheryl would tell me, ‘Buckle up, honey.’ ”
When Beard’s dear friend Bacon wanted to dine with the couple in London but expressed a dislike of eating in public, Tiegs rented a suite at London’s Connaught Hotel. She ordered extra furniture and hired caterers and butlers.
“He held out his hand, and he pulled me up to another level in my life,” says Tiegs. During days in Kenya, they would drive around in a Land Rover, searching for animals to photograph. They would keep the flaps of their “very Ralph Lauren” tent open and, from a four-poster bed, watch giraffes and warthogs pass by.
But Beard wasn’t able to stop vanishing. “For four days he’d be an angel. We would lie in bed, watch movies, hug, snuggle, but then he’d be off and running,” says Tiegs. “That’s not a marriage.”
In the weeks after his death, Tiegs says, she read through “beautiful letters” that he wrote to her from Kenya while she was in New York during a career high. In some of them, he urged her to return to him despite her professional obligations as one of the highest-paid models in the world.
“I wasn’t nice to him; he wasn’t nice to me. We had battles. We had love,” she says. “I think he liked to shock people.”
“Peter’s personality is so bizarre,” Tiegs says. “I don’t know if you could ever carve out all of the things that made Peter who he was. He was incredibly mean and incredibly intoxicating and interesting.”
To dissolve the tension, Beard and Tiegs met with a marriage counselor, who took down a book from the shelf, fanned through it, and said to Beard, “Have you ever heard of bipolar disorder?” (Beard was officially diagnosed with the condition in 2013.) Tiegs says Beard’s mood swings made him unpredictable and cruel.
“I loved him deeply but I didn’t know…” she says, trailing off. “He hurt me so much, so deeply.” He could be “brutal,” she says. “He was abusive, physically abusive…. The disappearing. It was emotionally abusive. It just got to be intolerable.” She says Beard was “desperate to become a father” but that she had a few miscarriages.
Was Beard’s violence the cause of any of them? Tiegs pauses before she quietly replies, “Possibly.”
The couple divorced in 1986. Mark Greenberg, a photographer who worked with Beard on The Art of the Maasai, says as part of their divorce, Tiegs took possession of her photos. Greenberg says Tiegs not only cut the negatives but removed postage-stamp-size images from proof sheets to expunge every picture Beard had ever taken of her. It took four days.
Not long after his divorce from Tiegs, Beard got married for the third time, to Nejma Khanum, a woman he had met in Kenya. (Nejma declined to be interviewed, stating through a spokeswoman that “she is not feeling herself.”)
From the start, their pairing was rocky. While the couple was dating, Nejma’s parents sent her from Kenya to Germany to get her away from Beard. Her late father was a judge of the Kenyan High Court and two of her brothers are lawyers in Nairobi. But Beard tracked her down in Europe, promising her he would be faithful, and “I believed him,” she said in Bonn’s 1998 documentary.
One year after they married, however, Beard began a relationship with Maureen Gallagher, then a 22-year-old model whose body Beard declared “a living sculpture.” In his famous photo Night Feeder, Gallagher, nude, offers food to a giraffe at Hog Ranch. That relationship would endure for 16 years.
“Impish” is the adjective Gallagher uses to describe Beard. She also describes him as headstrong. “He wanted his way and he wanted his way,” Gallagher says. “I treated him like a child sometimes.”
They did drugs together, sometimes too many, she says, her mood during our interview ranging between humor and tears. “It was a match made in heaven doing everything we weren’t supposed to do.”
“He needed women,” says Lyon, whose affair with Beard began in the early ’80s and grew into a lifelong friendship and professional relationship. “It’s not that he was a playboy.” Lyon later adds, “He was seeking to be admired, to be wanted.”
Barbara Allen de Kwiatkowski, model and muse to Andy Warhol, left her first husband for Beard, who was Lee Radziwill’s lover at the time. “I adored Peter,” de Kwiatkowski says. “Everybody did. He was incredibly handsome and so fun.”
Dickinson says she rebuffed his advances because his hands were always covered in blood and dirt. “He was gorgeous and so charming, but I’m a germaphobe,” she says.
Over time, however, the friends and girlfriends constantly buzzing about Beard began to grate on Nejma.
“Women didn’t like his lifestyle,” says Anatoli Davydov, an actor and friend. “He couldn’t belong to one woman; he belonged to everybody. He belonged to the world.”
As Tiegs put it, “I think he liked the beauty of women and he liked to spin the web, and then he would walk away once he ensnared you.”
In the beginning, Beard’s friends say, Nejma tolerated Beard and his need to be the center of attention and chaos. He had an affinity for picaresque characters: mobsters and partyers, night crawlers and drug chasers, who picked up the check and supplied him with cocaine or amusing tales.
But in 1988, the Beards had Zara, their only daughter, and began spending long stretches at Hog Ranch. Beard was working on a book with Gillies Turle, a Brit who was then an antiques dealer in Nairobi. They claimed artifacts they had discovered were authentically old and made by the Maasai people. The book, The Art of the Maasai: 300 Newly Discovered Objects and Works of Art, was published in 1992. It was authored by Turle with photographs and art direction by Beard. Greenberg says he was responsible for the images while Beard was the “brilliant” art director for the book. What was “new” became a question. Richard Leakey, a renowned paleoanthropologist and past president of the National Museum of Kenya, cast doubt on the authenticity of the art and artifacts, aspersions that Greenberg vigorously denies. The objects hail from the Laibons, who are the shamans of the Maasai tribe, Turle says, adding, “I collected these artifacts for 15 years. I attended ceremonies using these artifacts. If someone wants to say they’re fake, they’d better explain how the Laibons had them.”
Beard admitted to Vanity Fair in 1996 that he had been smuggling Maasai artifacts out of Kenya, describing how he sneaked them past customs officers at the Nairobi airport. But he claimed he wasn’t selling them; he said he just wanted to include objects in his show, along with photographs and collages.
Peter Riva, a producer and author (and the grandson of Marlene Dietrich), once described himself to Vanity Fair as Beard’s “manager, agent, babysitter, and close friend,” but he declined to comment for this story.
Riva wasn’t the only one who managed Beard. In the early ’90s, Beard met Peter Tunney, a former financier who opened the The Time Is Always Now gallery in SoHo in 1991 and devoted its entire space to Beard’s work. A year later, Tunney was the agent for Beard’s art, setting up exhibitions with Beard in places like Milan, Berlin, and Vienna and helping to arrange five or six fashion shoots. Beard was also taking giant Polaroids of models at a studio on Broadway and using them in his collages.
Beard amplified his photos with substances like paint, quill-pen writing, and blood, bovine and his own. His friend Lyon remembers that Beard, high on drugs, once cut himself so badly for a picture that he needed stitches. He was often casual in the handling of his finished artwork. One gallery owner, David Fahey, recalls Beard actually liked the “deteriorating state of an object” and once sent him photos “in various conditions” that had been left in crates outdoors in Montauk.
Beard called these additions “handworking” a picture, a creative effort that made each photo unique and was also financially rewarding. But Tunney’s gallery soon began to double as a gathering place for Beard’s friends and hangers-on.
“Peter had a hard time saying no,” Tunney says, “keeping the riffraff out.”
The gallery years were creatively productive for Beard, who sometimes had to be corralled into working and dissuaded from giving away his own art. But Tunney also says the heaviest drug use of Beard’s life occurred during these years.
As Tunney says, “If Nej didn’t come and break up the party, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead.”
By the time Zara was seven or eight, Beard was largely living apart from his daughter and Nejma, who told friends and his family that she planned to divorce him. It was during this time that Nejma accused Beard of molesting Zara, a claim that he and his friends strenuously denounced and one that she defended in the 1996 Vanity Fair story. In the same article, Nejma said it was Beard’s choice to stop seeing Zara.
A quarter century later, Zara sets the record straight for herself: “It is absolutely untrue,” she says of her mother’s accusation. “It’s disgusting. It absolutely destroyed him. He doesn’t deserve his name attached to that story.” Zara explains that there is a story around the false charge that she cannot discuss, emphasizing that her mother is not to blame.
At the time of the molestation allegation, Nejma and Zara moved into the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of Beard’s brother Anson M. Beard Jr., according to his son, Anson H. Beard. “Zara was evaluated at Yale New Haven Hospital and there was no evidence that she had been molested,” he says.
Beard’s friends and family say he adored his daughter.
“I don’t think he ever loved anyone,” Tunney says, “except Zara.”
In September 1996, Beard was trampled by a female elephant concerned about the safety of her young calf. She crushed his pelvis and pierced his bladder and hip. Bonn, filming for the documentary, caught the accident on tape. As a broken Beard was carried into the back seat of a car, he quipped to Cottar, “my days of screwing are over.” Perhaps not, but he would spend the rest of his life in pain.
When Beard returned to New York for further hospitalization and physical rehabilitation, he reunited with Nejma, and any divorce plans were called off.
Julian Schnabel, a friend of Nejma and Peter’s, is insistent that the perception of Nejma not be one of a controlling or long-suffering wife. After a lengthy interview, he calls back and says: “It doesn’t get reported, how cool she was and how much she brought to his life and how she gave him a family,” Schnabel says. “I think Peter expected her to clean up stuff for him.” He later adds, “I think she was trying to protect him from himself. If someone is being very self-destructive and you love them, where do you draw the line?”
“Of course, they had difficulties as a couple,” De Menthon says. “When you have a man like that by your side, you don’t have a normal life.”
It was Nejma who advised Beard to spend time in the South of France because too many people were dropping by the Montauk house.
“He needed inspiration and to get away from the parasites and harpies,” Nejma told the Wall Street Journal.
Beard stayed in Cassis for long stretches between 2004 and 2010.
“He was really happy there,” Lyon says. “He loved France.”
Nejma gradually took over as Beard’s agent. As prices for Beard’s work rose, she organized his archive, began selling his work directly to clients, reported stolen works to the Art Loss Register, and would sometimes insist that works Beard had loaned to friends weren’t intended as outright gifts. A number of lawsuits followed. Some resulted in judgments favorable to the Beards or confidential settlements, but at a price: Court records revealed tawdry or unflattering details about the couple.
In two cases dating from the same October 2013 photo shoot, where Beard was to take pictures of high-profile models, Beard claimed he was drunk while signing the contract and that he suffered from vision and hearing loss as well as “confusional episodes.” Other testimony indicated he had fantasies about strangling his wife.
In a separate case, Beard was commissioned by Bernie Chase, a collector, to take pictures and handwork his photos in the fall of 2013. The Beards successfully sued Chase, claiming he took three artworks to sell without Peter’s consent; the case is under appeal. Depositions reveal that 911 dispatchers were told that Beard was threatening suicide, an assertion he later denied. Other people asserted that Beard had friends manage money for him without Nejma’s knowledge. One friend, Elizabeth Fekkai, said she arranged for a sale of Beard’s work so he could pay a $26,700 dental bill. He also allegedly sold work without Nejma’s knowledge, including to pay a $10,000 bill for a girlfriend.
“A wall went up, put there by his wife,” says Nelly Pakh, a model and friend whom Beard photographed in Montauk. Pakh’s husband, businessman Imre Pakh, had trouble reaching him by phone in the fall of 2019. Concern mounting, Imre and another of Beard’s friends, real estate developer Jacques Guillet, drove out to Montauk. They found Beard sitting outside, playing with a dog, a caregiver not far away.
“He was so happy to have the company,” Imre Pakh says. Guillet recalls Beard joyfully pointing out surfers. Before Beard departed with Zara for a doctor’s appointment, the three men hugged each other goodbye. But the next morning, Guillet says he got a call from the state police with a request from Beard’s family: Could they call ahead next time and make an appointment?
Which brings us back to the diaries. “They are the key into some of the myths that he used to filter his understanding of the continent of Africa,” says Lewis. For Lewis, the oft-reproduced image of Beard at Lake Rudolf, writing in a diary while stuffed in the mouth of a dead crocodile, is an emblematic self-portrait of a risk-taking artist, one who aligned himself, viscerally, with a continent he didn’t fully understand.
Whether Beard’s legacy continues a presence in Kenya remains to be seen. Behind on Kenyan tax payments and displeased with suburban encroachment, Beard sold Hog Ranch in late 1996 for $500,000 to the nonprofit Africa Fund for Endangered Wildlife. AFEW funds Giraffe Centre, a conservation preserve that supplies the long-legged ungulates to the nearby luxury resort, Giraffe Manor. The money was to be paid in annual installments of $25,000. There was an agreement that Beard have life tenancy. However, Beard’s nephew Jamie Beard says AFEW has not met the payment terms of the contract; the purchase price has not been paid in full. Therefore, he says, the Peter Beard estate still controls the property.
“Our hope is that it ends up very amicably,” says Jamie Beard. “The most important thing to my uncle is that the land remain a preserve.”
Rick Anderson, who owns Giraffe Centre with his wife, Bryony, says the sale contract was never executed. Anderson concedes that at one time, receipts went missing and there was a question about whether Beard had received the payments. To remedy this, about five years ago AFEW put $75,000, the total remaining payments, in an escrow account. The money was to be released to Beard when Beard signed the title transfer. But Beard never signed it, Anderson says.
“It’s been five years,” Anderson says, “and Peter just died, so therefore his lease has expired.”
Beard’s death leaves other questions, these directed at his health and happiness during his last months. There were worries, some friends whisper, about his being lonely in the care of paid help. Khadija Adam, a former Miss Kenya, says his friends would have come to Montauk to take care of him had Nejma asked, “so he wasn’t left like that.”
De Menthon insists he was content because Zara had recently given birth to a girl she named Daisy. “I talked with Peter three days before he died,” De Menthon says. “He was very happy to be a grandfather.”
“Find out what really happened to him,” Adam implored, although Beard’s death, according to the police, is not a mystery.
In the 18 months before he died, Beard needed constant attention. He had a hip replacement in 2012 and prostate-cancer surgery in 2013. There was evidence of dementia, according to police. During the pandemic, when his regular caregiver had returned to her family, Nejma was looking after Beard. Usually she worked in the city during the week, staying at the couple’s apartment on West 57th Street, returning to Montauk on the weekends. Now Nejma was in Montauk during the week to take care of her husband.
When Peter first went missing, around 4:40 p.m., a family member said that Nejma looked for Peter and then searched with neighbors. The police were called around 6:25 p.m. Although multiple strokes and dementia had left Beard searching for words, he had many moments of lucidity. Initially some friends imagined he set out for excitement, without a phone or wallet, as usual. It was cold that night and several of the following nights, and he did not have his heart medication with him.
Dozens of police and volunteer drones, helicopters, dogs, and heat-mapping technology searched for him. Three weeks later, a local hunter spotted Beard’s body in Camp Hero State Park, in the brushy woods between the road to Beard’s home and Route 27. A death certificate is on file in Surrogate’s Court but remains sealed in compliance with federal privacy laws. In July, East Hampton Town police captain Chris Anderson reiterated that there was no sign of foul play.
Where was Beard going? One relative thinks Beard wandered off to investigate, because he’d been obsessed with the idea that someone was illegally building on his property. Another says he still took the occasional solo walk. A few people speculated that Beard didn’t want to get any frailer and might have committed suicide by swimming out into the Atlantic.
“He pointed out old people in push-chairs around town and said, ‘If I ever end up like that, I’ll just go into the sea,’ ” says Lyon, who lives in Montauk. “I told him, ‘The sharks will get you,’ and he said, ‘Annie, there are worse ways to go.’ ”
“I was hopeful he would never be found,” says Alex Beard. “That would have been the perfect epitaph.”
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