Sara Wheeler

Celebrity photographer and conservationist: Peter Beard’s life of extremes

The New York socialite devoted much of his time to saving wild life in Kenya – though a new biography ignores some of his less reputable views

Peter Beard with his second wife, ‘the world’s first supermodel’ Cheryl Tiegs. [Getty Images] 
issue 03 December 2022

In 2005 the photographer Peter Beard invited me to his Thunderbolt Ranch in Montauk on the tip of Long Island. I was writing a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen’s lover, and Beard had known Blixen at the end of her life. When Graham Boynton began this biography he telephoned me, and I told him about that weekend I spent alone with Beard.

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