A good few years back I interviewed Peter Beard ‘on stage’ in a bookshop in New York. (Yes, yes, my life used to be far more glamorous than it is now). Beard was absolutely the easiest man to interview. Any question, whether about Africa, or Andy Warhol, Karen Blixen or the elephant that gored him, produced a long, articulate and (naturally) highly opinionated answer. I could just have held up flash cards. I now realize I should have asked him about walking.
I didn’t walk with Beard but I often walked in SoHo and went into his gallery-cum-archive: The Time is Always Now.
But he was obviously something of a walker. He was known to his friends as Walkabout for his tendency to wander off on adventures.
And when he wandered off from his home in Montauk a little while ago, and we know that wandering is a symptom of dementia, a number of us thought he might have decided to end it all by walking into the sea – a very brave and elegant way to go. But in fact no, he walked into the woods, where he was found dead not so very much later, by a hunter.
But the thing I remember best about my Beard ‘conversation’ was when he said he’d been into a toy store in Manhattan, probably Toys-R-Us which was still in business at the time, and tried to find a toy animal that in any way resembled a real animal. He had of course failed to find one because all the toy animals were cute or cuddly or anthropomorphic. This made him very angry. And as the years have gone by I’ve come more and more to think that his anger was absolutely justified. And if an elephant gores well, that’s exactly the kind of occupational hazard an animal lover has to expect.
This is him, recently gored:
