FROM THE BEGINNING, the Explorers Club was conceived as a place for the frostbitten to meet the star-smitten. That's still how it plays out. Barry Clifford, the underwater-treasure hunter who in 1984 found the pirate ship Whydah off Cape Cod, told me about the time in the eighties when "Frank," a man he'd met at the club, showed up at a dive site and bought lobsters and champagne for the entire crew, then wrote him a check for $20,000. Frank turned out to be Frank Wells, the now-deceased president of Disney.

On most of the dozen nights I visited the club (all but three while Wiese was still president), Wiese was on the second floor, scoping the movers and shakers—"He knows the Anheuser-Busch people," he whispered about one fellow; "His family is Upjohn Pharmaceutical," he said of another. He was in his element, standing by the gilt-framed oil paintings that were preliminary studies for the famous dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. The walls also display some of the club pennants that have traveled the world: Roy Chapman Andrews's flag from the 1925 Gobi Desert trip, during which he found fossils proving that dinosaurs laid eggs; Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki flag from 1947; and the flag of the 1970 Apollo 13 astronauts, who never reached the moon and almost didn't come back. The club continues to bestow the flags on expeditions as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that can encourage others to write checks.

Which brings us back to publicity, the double-edged sword that Wiese calls "crucial" to exploration (and to the club) because it drives funding. Any successful modern expedition, he says, must generate "millions of media impressions."

That sounds crass, but it's nothing new. "Funding is related to visibility," Robert M. Anderson says. "That's been true since before Columbus. In those days, royalty funded expeditions; then it was governments. In the U.K., it's still the army sometimes. In the U.S., it's corporations."

But to the club's old guard, not all media impressions are created equal. Wiese learned that the hard way in 2003, when he was named to People's 25 Hottest Bachelors list. "The board thought it was distasteful or were somehow shamed by it," Wiese says, adding ruefully that he had a girlfriend at the time. "They thought I was reckless. I wanted to make the [club] a fun place. I didn't want to have to beg someone to come."

Two longtime members, who asked not to be identified, told me that Wiese had come to symbolize a generational split at the club. Some older members were uncomfortable with his style and his push to expand the head count at what was, after all, supposed to be a highly exclusive organization. Others objected to the commercialization of club events. There were grumblings that Wiese made too many club-funded visits to chapters in other countries. Not all the old-timers complained, however: Wiese recalls fondly that, after one party salted with Manhattan beauties, a pleased septuagenarian member declared, "I've got really deep pockets!" and then wrote a $2,000 check to pay for another party.

Overall, Wiese was "very good for the club, and most of the current members would agree," says former club executive director Steve Nagiewicz. People may remember him for People, but they do remember him. The bachelors list was a positive, Nagiewicz argues, since it introduced younger people to the idea of a "handsome guy who's president of a club for interesting people . . . For good or bad, Richard has taken the concept of exploration and brought in new people."