EVEN KOFI ANNAN COULD BOMB at the Waldorf-Astoria, but Wiese was stumbling on a night when he wanted to dance. The day after the March dinner, he declined to run for a fifth consecutive one-year term as president. Instead, he's pouring energy into two new gigs: host of his recently launched TV show, Exploration with Richard Wiese, and guide for American Museum of Natural History Expeditions, the adventure-travel arm of the storied institution on Central Park. These are big steps for a man hoping to go it alone as the new sun-kissed face of exploration.

And what of the club without him? Ambitious, gregarious, annoyingly handsome, Wiese had succeeded in "giving the club an injection of adrenaline," says legendary WWII fighter pilot Burt Avedon, a club supporter for 30-plus years. "The club was a bunch of older guys who didn't have Richard's vision. They needed a big swift kick in the ass, and he gave it to them." He was elected in

Wiese's plan for energizing the club revolved around publicity. Meanwhile, the presidency gave him a high-profile platform for promoting the brand known as Richard C. Wiese.

March 2002, vowing to pump up the nonprofit organization's budget, which was then largely dependent on random bursts of philanthropic kindness. The club, which has chapters across the U.S. and in 12 other countries, owns its regal six-story clubhouse on East 70th Street outright, but expenses add up. An annual budget of $1.5 million to $3 million covers maintenance, a 13-person staff, lectures, events, endless mailings, and $100,000 in grants for students.

More important, Wiese had promised the club a future. At 42, he was the youngest president ever, at a point when club parties could have been mistaken for AARP socials. (Though numbers weren't well kept, Wiese claims that for some years in the eighties and nineties, dying members were on par with new recruits.) Unable to fund its own expeditions since early in the 20th century, and founded to champion the dramatic exploration "firsts" that have mostly been claimed, the club had an image problem: It no longer had an image. It was turning into a musty watering hole for superannuated expeditionaries.

Wiese, a former model who'd worked as a TV journalist and weatherman, sought to change all that. The presidency has always been an unpaid position, a laurel for retired explorers or wealthy benefactors who could shake Manhattan's money tree. Wiese had that talent, but his plan for defibrillating the club revolved around an aggressive new publicity campaign. By making the institution a highly visible supporter of modern exploration—in spirit, if not dollars—he would attract both corporate cash and new, younger members.

And, as he admits, the presidency was a great platform for promoting the brand known as Richard C. Wiese—the job was "an investment in myself," he told me—giving him a high-profile way to polish himself up as the go-to guy on global exploration. (Still flush from earlier careers, he could afford to volunteer.)

The match was hardly perfect. Though Wiese was a prolific world traveler, his CV was light on genuine field exploration. He can fumble his patter, using terms like "Pakistanians" or mangling the name of an obscure polar explorer, the kind of gaffe never forgotten by the icy perfectionists who make up the club's active core. Tack on his good looks and naked ambition and Wiese rubbed some older traditionalists the wrong way: Several times, members sent letters to the board of directors complaining about him and bemoaning the club's commercialization.

Such gripes are what Wiese calls "the penalty of leadership," and he shrugged the criticism off while moving ahead with his rescue mission. One smart early move was helping to get some Harvard Business School alumni (one a club member) to conduct a case study of the organization's finances. When the brains concluded that philanthropic funding was drying up, Wiese switched to a corporate-sponsorship model, signing new partners like Redwood Creek and Land Rover to join stalwart Rolex in underwriting events. In exchange, the companies got well-placed banners and booths, plus effusive plugs anytime Wiese was near a microphone. In 2003, he launched the Central Park BioBlitz, a 24-hour scavenger hunt that drew 350 volunteer researchers and students to feverishly dig, dive, climb, and crawl through the urban oasis counting life forms. It earned more press than all but half a dozen moments in club history.

Wiese also used his nose for novelty to boost his own profile. In 2005, the Boy Scouts of America asked him to help name the encampments at their annual national jamboree after noteworthy explorers; their final picks included Jim Whitaker, the first American to climb Everest, astronaut Jim Lovell—and Richard C. Wiese. Last fall, he earned a write-up in The New Yorker by installing a clear plastic-walled low-oxygen chamber at the clubhouse, which allowed him to acclimatize for an ascent of 18,700-foot Mexican volcano El Pico de Orizaba while doing paperwork.

For the club, the upshot of all the noise was a record number of members, 3,300, by early 2006, and a reduction in average age, from a retiring 67 to a Viagra-enhanced 59. Social events felt energized—even a bit hip. "I swear I see people hooking up," Wiese told me before he left the presidency. "It's starting to be a bit of a middle-aged pickup place."

In the words of mountaineer and member Robert M. Anderson, author of Seven Summits Solo, Wiese "did good by the club." But after four years of progress, Wiese claims he was still in "an absolute dogfight to take some of these people kicking and screaming into the 21st century." Disputes with the board of directors over financing, educational initiatives, and grants were refought every year, Wiese told me several weeks after he left his position, until he was exhausted by "petty politics" worthy of "any PTA meeting in America." Being president was "like herding cats," and there was too much "ego," "jealousy," and "testosterone." Citing a friend's analysis, he insisted that some board members "are so jealous of me. And they are sabotaging me."