THE LEGEND OF TYLER BEARD by GENE FOWLER
Looking at the fabulous cribs in Tyler Beard’s 2003 book, Lone Star Living, I remember with a chuckle an incident from the early 1970s. David Faulkner and I were rooming in a small house near Dallas’ Love Field. One night, upon returning home we discovered that the sparse furniture had been completely rearranged. A note left by Tyler Beard confirmed that he had perpetrated the caper de décor.
Like many who will visit this site, I first knew Tyler as Barry. (Actually, I knew his sister long before I knew him, as Debbie Beard was my square-dance partner in elementary school.) I’m not sure when I first became aware of Barry— he was four years my junior— but it would have been sometime during my and Joe Kennedy’s employment in the stockroom of Doubleday Bookstore in the Northpark Shopping Mall, roughly 1969 to 1971-ish. It somehow came to our attention that— because of the way we dressed, wore our hair, and swaggered through the mall with a quasi-dangerous, devil-may-care nonchalance— Barry and his teen friends regarded Joe and me as the “Mick and Keith of Northpark.” And I gotta confess I was kinda flattered by that.
Before long, Barry was playing drums in Joe’s band, Max Pageant, and attending the wild parties at our house on Flagpole Hill. Years later, he confided that he’d first seen his future wife Teresa on my arm at one of those soirees. I remember him from those days as a fun-loving mysterious kinda guy who refused to settle for the mundane or mediocre in any arena in which he participated. One had to be stubborn to be a Dallas glam rocker in the early 1970s. If I recall correctly, Barry even got thrown in the slammer once, simply for attiring himself too creatively. And when Max Pageant performed the music for a play of mine produced at the Unitarian Church in 1970, Barry’s artistic energy, though proving a little hard on the chapel building, presaged punk ‘tude with style and fury.
Like many who knew them, I lost touch with Barry and Teresa in the ‘70s, as they moved to New England and then trekked off to Egypt and other romantic outposts around the globe. Then sometime in the 1980s, they headed home, where in true Texas tradition Barry reinvented himself as Tyler Beard, cowboy bon vivant par excellence. Settling first in Comanche, T&T restored the ruins of the town’s oldest rock house, which soon appeared in coffee table books as the epitome of Old West digs. Scribblers began referring to the Beards as “the King and Queen of Western Style.” They became the go-to folks when Ralph Lauren boutiques needed an old wagon wheel or EuroDisney needed some cow skulls, as the Beards provided Old West curios to a worldwide clientele through their business True West.
Eventually, they moved on to Goldthwaite and then Lampasas, performing loving restorations on vintage structures in each location. And Tyler started a stampede of interest in sagebrush-under-neon fashion with his first tome, The Cowboy Boot Book, followed by 100 Years of Western Wear, Art of the Boot, and others. He became known as the “World’s Leading Authority on Cowboy Boots,” while his giant moustache and colorful cowpoke outfits made him an interview staple on TV stations throughout the West. Texas Monthly ran a full-page photo portrait as a sort-of anthropological nod to his Old-School Cowboy-Cool. But this transformation was much more complicated than simply playing dress-up. In all of his incarnations and interests, Tyler displayed an authenticity that bespoke a deep, genuine passion for a range of this life’s pleasures and phenomena.
In Art of the Boot, for instance, he profiled custom bootmakers. These are guys who have all the business they need, ain’t seeking publicity, and have probably the best b.s. detectors on the planet. Most would not have bothered to share their stories in such detail if Tyler had not approached them with a genuine respect for the folk-art traditions they labored to keep alive.
At Tyler’s Texas Book Festival appearance in 2004, Teresa mentioned that he was again thinking of changing his name in advance of the next metamorphosis. (As you can see by the imagery on this site, the all-out buckaroo panache had waned a bit to incorporate a streak of gentleman rocker sophistication. Tyler related around the same time that he was an Anglophile and was considering relocating to the British Isles.) But then in the early fall of 2005, whatever forces careened in Teresa’s psyche moved her to take her own life. The horrible shock of her death derailed that reinvention, as Tyler’s friends sought to provide comfort and passage through a difficult period made all the more difficult by recovery from his own treatments for throat cancer. I’m supposed to be in the business of effective arrangements of words and phrases, but I felt painfully inadequate in that effort. But ya do what ya can, and I’m sure Tyler appreciated all his friends’ expressions of support.
And now, sadly, Tyler too is gone too soon. Way way too soon. He was such an Interesting Person, a true one-of-a-kind maverick, I feel like a huge part of my universe has disappeared. I would have loved to discover what he was gonna do next. But in the spirit of “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” we know some eternal nugget of Tylerdom is right now admiring fine Western footwear in “a land that knows no parting.”
Vaya con botas grandes, hermano. Til we meet again.