I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  •

  But there was no let-up in the pace of life at Luggala. The list of names in the visitors’ book grew exponentially through the 1950s and Tara’s childhood came to be coloured by a cast of bright, sophisticated and frequently inebriated artistic types. They included the painter Lucian Freud, whom Tara’s cousin Lady Caroline Blackwood married in December 1953, against the wishes of her mother. Maureen wanted her daughter to marry into the aristocracy and Caroline was only too pleased to disappoint her.

  At the time, Lucian, grandson of Sigmund Freud, was staking out his position as the greatest British portrait artist of his generation, a cold-eyed – some critics argued cruel-eyed – observer of the human form. He was immediately mesmerized by this shy, twenty-one-year-old aristocratic beauty.

  At least part of the attraction for Caroline was that Lucian was all of the things she knew would horrify her mother. He was a married man, almost ten years her senior, a penniless and avowedly anti-authoritarian artist, living in a dilapidated rental house in Paddington. And he was Jewish. Many of Maureen’s circle remained casually anti-Semitic even after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. In a letter to the writer Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘Poor Maureen’s daughter made a runaway match with a terrible Yid.’

  Though ostracized by Maureen, Caroline and Lucian were always welcome at Luggala. Caroline found a kindred spirit in her Aunt Oonagh, who was more interested in art and culture than the personages that fascinated her own mother. According to Garech, ‘Caroline always said she regretted that our mother wasn’t her mother.’

  She fantasized about this very thing in ‘How You Love Our Lady’, a short story in which a thinly disguised version of Oonagh features as the narrator’s mother, a woman who opened up her drawing room to a cast of ‘painters, poets and talkers’, scornfully dismissed by the narrator’s husband as ‘provincial Irish bullshit artists . . . living in a crazy Irish twilight’.

  The mother of Caroline’s imagining never tells her daughter when to go to bed, for she hates the tyranny of the clock, even as the narrator walks to school in the morning feeling weightless from lack of sleep. For the mother in the story, the greatest sin in life is ‘to allow the humdrum to see into your soul’. People who allow themselves to become trivial and mundane are like blighted elms, she believes, rotting from the inside out.

  Oonagh assembled a dramatis personae of interesting characters around her as if she feared that this, indeed, might be her fate. And when brilliant people came together in the intellectual hothouse of her drawing room, there was no telling what might happen.

  In 1951, Claud Cockburn, a former foreign correspondent for The Times, was staying at Luggala when John Huston came to visit. Cockburn had been broke since his Marxist newspaper, The Week, ceased publication during the war. In dire need of money, he had recently written a potboiler thriller called Beat the Devil.

  It was published under the pseudonym of James Helvik, for fear that the author’s Communist sympathies might hurt sales in the paranoid, early days of the Cold War. That weekend, he set about trying to interest the American director in the film rights to the book. In his memoir, Huston recalled that copies were placed all over the house – including one on his nightstand – in the hope that he might pick it up out of casual interest. ‘He badly needed the money that a motion-picture sale would give him.’

  Fortunately for Cockburn, Huston read the book and loved it. A few days later, still under Luggala’s spell, he phoned Humphrey Bogart, who had a film production company, and persuaded him to write Cockburn a cheque for $10,000, which Bogart did, without ever reading a word of the book.

  Two years later, Oonagh, who was thrilled to have made the match between writer and director, was invited to watch the movie being shot in Italy. She took eight-year-old Tara with her. It was filmed in Ravello, a small town south of Naples. Huston had decided that the movie – starring Bogart, Peter Lorre and Gina Lollobrigida – would be a parody of his famous noir film The Maltese Falcon. The plot involved four crooks who pose as vacuum cleaner salesmen to try to smuggle uranium out of East Africa and the farcical obstacles they must overcome along the way.

  The problem for the director as the first day of shooting loomed was that he didn’t have a single word of dialogue to give to the actors. As fortune would have it, while he was on the road to Naples, Huston and Bogart were involved in a car crash, which cost Bogart his front teeth and almost half of his tongue. During the delay in filming, the director persuaded Truman Capote, who was then living in Rome, to produce a script from Cockburn’s book. Oonagh and her son spent several days on the set. Tara was mesmerized by the sight of Bogart arm-wrestling the eccentric, velvet-suit-wearing and flamboyantly homosexual Capote for money, while the dialogue was somehow conjured up during breaks in filming.

  Brendan Behan joined Oonagh’s County Wicklow set in 1954, when he was on the threshold of becoming an internationally successful playwright. He first arrived at the house with Lucian Freud and quickly developed a friendship with Oonagh and her sons that would endure until his death a decade later.

  Brendan came with a notoriety that eclipsed even Lucian’s, having served time in an English borstal for plotting to bomb the Liverpool docks at the age of just sixteen. In 1942, a year after his release and expulsion from Britain, he was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude by a Dublin court for attempting to murder two members of An Garda Siochana, the Irish police, during a commemoration for Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism. He spent almost four and a half years in Mountjoy Jail and the Curragh Camp before he was released as part of a general amnesty for IRA prisoners and internees after the Second World War ended.

  A house-painter by trade, Brendan had designs on becoming a writer. He insinuated himself into the hard-drinking fraternity of literary and intellectual types who frequented Dublin pubs such as McDaid’s, Neary’s and the Bailey – and, when they closed, the subterranean late-night wine bars around Leeson Street and Fitzwilliam Square. This loosely knotted group of frequently squabbling friends and acquaintances included the poet Paddy Kavanagh, the novelist Flann O’Brien and the artist Sean O’Sullivan, as well as young literary turks like J. P. Donleavy, John Montague and Anthony Cronin. It was Brendan, with his quick wit and bawdy humour, who emerged as the stand-out ‘character’ in the company, as he settled into the habit of heavy drinking that would bring about his decline.

  It was in this smoke-filled netherworld that Brendan first met Lucian, who had moved to Dublin after becoming fixated with the work of the painter Jack B. Yeats. Five years later, shortly after marrying Caroline Blackwood, Lucian took Brendan along to meet Oonagh, Garech and Tara at Luggala. Brendan was in the prime of life. He was thirty-two years old and his first major play was about to be staged at the Pike Theatre in Dublin. The foul-mouthed, rough-hewn Dubliner was immediately charmed by Oonagh and her children and the feeling was mutual. Tara adored him from their very first encounter.

  Oonagh attended the triumphant opening night of The Quare Fellow that November and loved it every bit as much as the critics. Brendan – who, in his second play, The Hostage, would memorably define an Anglo-Irishman as ‘a Protestant with a horse’– became a regular presence at the Luggala table, especially at Christmas time, when Oonagh would send her chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to collect him and his wife Beatrice. He would enliven these gatherings with anecdotes from his IRA past, old songs culled from his Dublin tenement childhood and the occasional cry of ‘Up the rebels!’

  Sometimes he behaved badly, but Oonagh was a non-judgemental hostess who overlooked her guests’ trespasses, especially in the case of Brendan.

  •

  When Tara and Garech weren’t at Oonaghland, they were at Castle Mac Garrett with their father, who had married Sally Gray in secret in December 1951. Sally made her final movie the following year, a slow-paced thriller called, appropriately enough, Escape Route, in which she starred alongside the American actor George Raft, whom she
hated intensely. Afterwards, she quit acting, turning down a reported million-dollar contract offer from RKO Pictures in Hollywood, in favour of a quieter life in the west of Ireland as the third Lady Oranmore and Browne.

  Dom and Sally managed to keep the news of their marriage a secret, even from Oonagh, until the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. ‘Tara and I watched the parade from a shop window,’ recalled Garech. ‘I think it might have been Selfridges. And what I remember most is that it was the day that everyone first knew that our father must have married Sally, because she wouldn’t have been allowed to attend if they hadn’t been married.’

  But Dom’s third wife was an almost spectral presence at Castle Mac Garrett whenever Tara and Garech visited. In fact, she rarely ventured from her room. ‘I think she felt terribly guilty about taking our father away from us,’ said Garech.

  She also picked up on Tara’s hostility towards her. According to his half-sister Judith, he made his feelings for his stepmother plain. ‘Tara hated Sally. He used to sit at the dinner table and just stare at her until she would get quite upset. And I would have to nudge him and say, “Don’t start, Tara.”’

  Like many children with divorced parents, he became skilled in playing one off against the other. ‘He would say, “Oh, my mother said I don’t have to go to bed until eleven o’clock.”’

  By now, Tara was a bright and precocious child who loved anything that was new. ‘We used to play roulette, which he liked a lot,’ remembers his half-brother Dominick. ‘His little face would light up when he won. I thought, at first, it was because he loved the money aspect of the thing. But it wasn’t. He just had what I would call enthusiasms. Even at the age of six or seven, Tara was always excited by the latest thing.’

  That included the latest swearwords. From a young age, he had a salty vocabulary. ‘There was a very elderly West of Ireland lady whose job it was to bath him while he was at Castle Mac Garrett,’ his wife, Nicki, recalled. ‘Tara told me she could never get him into the bath without a fight. One day, while she was struggling to get his clothes off him, he called her a silly old cunt. She said, “Where did you hear a word like that?” And Tara said, “From my mother!”’

  Without a rich wife to subsidize him, Dom was forced to economize to remain in Castle Mac Garrett after his divorce from Oonagh. He sold his racehorses, reduced his house staff and worked doubly hard to try to make the estate work financially. But in the depressed economy of Ireland in the 1950s it was a difficult and ultimately doomed enterprise.

  He was, nonetheless, keen for his boys to know about the land. Tara took to growing fruit and vegetables with the same enthusiasm he had for spinning the roulette wheel. ‘We each had our own greenhouse at Castle Mac Garrett,’ Garech remembered. ‘We grew all sorts of things. Everything from castor oil plants to zucchinis. We had peach trees, which the gardeners showed us how to pollinate using a rabbit’s foot on the end of a bamboo stick.’

  Despite Dom’s greatly diminished circumstances, he continued to entertain lavishly, especially during the various shooting seasons. ‘That was when the work on the farm stopped,’ his former secretary, Philomena Flatley, recalled. ‘There was a pheasant shoot every November and the aristocracy from all over Europe would come and stay for a week. The dinners were extraordinary, all prepared by French chefs. Everyone dressed for dinner. There were cocktails in the drawing room. It was all very old-fashioned and aristocratic. Finger bowls. The best silver and china. I had to type up the menu every day and it would take me ages. I didn’t speak French and I was scared of making a mistake. Then I’d have to type up the shooting cards. I’d get a list from the gamekeeper of who shot how many of what, whether it was pheasant, duck, grouse, woodcock or snipe. Then, when the guests had gone, his Lordship would go back to work.’

  Tara and Garech’s visits to Castle Mac Garrett were an established part of their childhood routine. Occasionally they visited for the day. Oonagh accompanied them, but refused to enter the house, remaining in a hotel in the nearby town of Claremorris until they were ready for the cross-country drive home in her chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Throughout the summer, they stayed for weeks on end. It was during these longer visits, in the mid-1950s, that Tara and Garech fell in love with traditional Irish music.

  It was difficult to avoid it in Mayo. The music was in the air. Dom employed some 150 local townspeople, many of whom played button accordions, flutes, fiddles and tin whistles. ‘There was always a dance in the garage at Christmas for all the workers,’ remembered Garech, ‘and part of the entertainment was traditional music. My father loved those parties and he used to film them. So, through the people who worked on the estate, Tara and I met all these musicians from the locality, including George, who was a slater by trade and seemed to spend his entire working life up on the roof of our house. He introduced us to all these wonderful fiddle players, whom we would go to hear play whenever we visited my father.’

  On the other side of the Atlantic, the miscegenation of white country music with the black roots of gospel and blues had given birth to a new sound called rock and roll. But in 1955, while ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley & His Comets was announcing the coming wave of popular music that would change the world, sixteen-year-old Garech and ten-year-old Tara were glued to Ciarán Mac Mathúna’s weekly Irish music programme, A Job of Journeywork, on Radio Éireann. It featured live recordings of traditional music and songs collected from around the country. ‘When we were supposed to be asleep,’ Garech said, ‘we’d be leaping around our bedrooms to this wonderful music.’

  •

  While he was receiving a rich and varied social education, Tara’s school career was, like his brother’s, short and chequered. Several attempts were made to settle Tara and Garech in schools, usually at Dom’s urging. But neither boy was temperamentally suited to the formal education system.

  ‘The problem for us,’ said Garech, ‘was that these schools didn’t teach any of the things that we wanted to learn. And if God had meant us to be treated like sheep, then he would have created us as sheep.’

  Tara didn’t see the inside of a classroom until he was seven years old, by which time his older brother’s escape from the Institut Le Rosey – the prestigious boarding school in Switzerland where royal children from around the world were educated – had become the stuff of Guinness family legend. Garech sent himself a telegram that said, ‘Unforeseen circumstances. Come home immediately. Your loving mother.’ A flight to Ireland was duly arranged by the school. Garech never returned. He was thirteen.

  Garech was then enrolled at Bryanston, another prestigious boarding school, this time in Dorset, southern England. Oonagh placed eight-year-old Tara in nearby Port Regis, a co-educational preparatory school, in the hope that having the little brother he adored so close at hand might help Garech settle in better. ‘It didn’t last long,’ Garech recalled, ‘because I ran away again.’

  His departure this time was by taxi. In fact, he ended up staying the night with the driver and his wife in Salisbury, Wiltshire, before he struck out for London the following day and went into hiding.

  ‘When I spoke to my mother on the phone, I said to her, “I’ve got out of that bloody place.” She was perfectly sympathetic. She didn’t object at all.’

  Judging by his later behaviour, Tara was clearly taking notice. Garech was removed from Bryanston, Tara was taken out of Port Regis and they returned to Dublin. At the age of fifteen, Garech’s school career was over, but efforts to educate Tara continued on and off. Two years later, shortly after he turned ten, he was enrolled at St Stephen’s, a relatively new, English-style preparatory school in Goatstown, south Dublin. It was founded and run by the Reverend Hugh Brodie, a wartime naval chaplain, and his wife, Lettice, who spoke French fluently and had a passion for theatre. English by birth, the couple had moved to Dublin in 1945, following the Labour Party’s victory in Britain’s first post-war general election. Like many members of the well-to-do, ex-military class
es, they regarded this as a betrayal of Winston Churchill, the prime minister who led the country to victory in the war.

  The Brodies, rather perversely, chose to make their home in Eamon de Valera’s Ireland, memorably characterized by the writer Seán Ó Faoláin as a ‘dreary Eden’, a country with a special place in its heart for Gaelic games, the Irish language and the Roman Catholic Church. It was here that the reverend and his wife established a school dedicated to the Anglican faith, where children played cricket, rugby and hockey and received a classical English education from teachers with names like Maude Ivatt and Godfrey Proud, to prepare them for private, secondary-level boarding schools in Ireland and Britain.

  ‘It was an extraordinary little place,’ recalled Neale Webb, one of Tara’s first classmates. ‘It was an enclave of Britishness. A little bit of Union Jack in de Valera’s Ireland. Even though most of us regarded ourselves as Irish people, de Valera wanted Ireland to be a Catholic state for a Catholic people. There was very much an Us and Them feel about the country. Protestants still accounted for a sizeable enough part of the population. And they were proud that they had stuck it out after independence in 1922. They had money and a community and they were very keen that all their children should stick together, should be educated together and retain the Protestant ethic. So we all received a frightfully British education. Anglican prayers every morning. Lots of scripture, Shakespeare and endless games of cricket.’

  The vast majority of the school’s 120 students were boarders. But in his first few months at the school, the summer term of 1955, Tara attended as a day pupil, arriving from Luggala every morning in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. It made quite an impression on the other boys.