I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  If her real intention was to make her estranged husband jealous, then she couldn’t have chosen a better sailing companion. ‘Miguel hated me,’ Kenneth recalled. ‘But he hated me because I hated him. I could see he had no honourable place in that set-up. I had one tremendous row with him, over what I can’t remember now, but I’m not sure I didn’t threaten to hit him.’

  The party set off for Italy, where they chartered a 50-foot vessel called the Jastlone II. The boat set sail with Oonagh, Tara, Gay, Kenneth and a small crew on board. Garech was planning to meet them later on the island of Corsica. ‘Tara took an enormous amount of baggage with him,’ Kenneth recalled. ‘What it consisted of was six enormous suitcases filled with books. Whether he read them, I don’t know. But he certainly took them with him. He was a very bright little boy, very amusing and good-natured. And totally spoiled, of course. If we were in port, he’d only have to say to his mother, “I’d like an ice cream,” and a sailor was dispatched to go and get one for him.’

  But the cruise didn’t work out quite the way Gay envisaged. There was no love spark. ‘The boat was a great disappointment,’ Kenneth remembered. ‘We all expected it to be huge. But, as always, Oonagh had been swindled and it was not much more than a little trawler. I slept in a cupboard full of fish hooks.’

  On the way to Corsica, they were caught in a violent storm. ‘We came very close to capsizing. We were drifting towards some rocks. The engine had cut out and it wouldn’t start. We were drifting closer and closer. And I remember looking at Oonagh and Tara and Gay and thinking, “What an interesting bunch of obituaries we are going to make.” Then someone got the engine started just in time.’

  They were forced to take refuge in the Italian port of Livorno. Garech arrived in Corsica to discover there was no boat waiting for him.

  Kenneth spent a day on the phone trying to sort out the mess. The conditions were not conducive to new romance flowering. ‘She went back to Miguel shortly after that,’ he said. ‘He bounced back into her life in some kind of way.’

  They returned home in early September, just before the start of the new school year. To Dom’s great delight, Tara had passed the Common Entrance exam and been accepted by Eton. But he had a rude awakening in store. Tara returned from Italy and announced that he wasn’t going. Dom was livid.

  The Sunday Dispatch considered Tara’s eschewal of Eton worthy of half a broadsheet page. While students were flocking back to school for the start of the winter term, it was reported, Tara was feeding his budgerigars in the Mayfair home of Lady Veronica Woolfe, where Oonagh had deposited him once again while she went to New York to try to patch things up with Miguel. ‘I didn’t want to go to Eton,’ Tara told a reporter. ‘I wanted to go to school somewhere in London. And now Father has agreed.’

  In fact, Tara had made up his mind that he was never going to school again. ‘Tara doesn’t want to conform to pattern,’ Lady Veronica’s husband, Peter, told the newspaper. ‘Somehow I don’t think he’ll go to any public school. I’m not saying it might not do him a lot of good . . . But Tara’s like that, an individualist.’

  In the great Guinness tradition, Oonagh had raised her boys not to care a jot what anyone thought of them. Shortly afterwards, Garech was creating newspaper headlines of his own, having reportedly ‘run away’ with one of his mother’s parlour maids. Since May, he had been having a relationship with Margaret McCabe, the pretty, raven-haired daughter of a forest worker from the nearby village of Roundwood, who was employed as the second housemaid at Luggala. The news of the affair broke that winter. For weeks, the British and Irish press pursued the story of the teenage brewery heir and the local Cinderella, who earned £2.10 a week sweeping his mother’s floors and lived with her family in a two-room cottage with no electricity or indoor toilet.

  The newspapers eventually tracked Garech down to his mews in Dublin. He spoke about how he’d first fallen for Margaret on the night of the hooley to celebrate his mother’s return to Ireland with Miguel. ‘Since then,’ he told the Sunday Pictorial, ‘we have been going really steady.’

  Asked what their respective families thought of the affair, Garech said, ‘They don’t come into it. My mother has no objections to my going out with Margaret. Nor have her parents objected to me. We are not engaged. But anything is possible when you are in love.’

  Tara spent the next few weeks lodging with Lady Veronica and her husband in London and resisting Dom’s efforts to try to get him to change his mind about Eton.

  On 2 October, Brendan Behan’s new play, The Hostage, opened at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, in the working-class heart of the city’s East End. Tara and Garech were his guests for the evening, along with their mother, who was home from New York, her reconciliation talks with Miguel stalled. Brendan insisted on introducing Oonagh and her boys to everyone at the after-show party. He reached his career summit that winter. The Hostage received rave notices and would eventually transfer to the West End and to Broadway.

  Less than three weeks after the show’s successful premiere, the work he most cared about was published, his memoir of his teenage years in an English borstal. It was immediately acclaimed as a modern masterpiece. Tara and Garech were both at the launch party for Borstal Boy in London. While Brendan entertained the literati crowd with a rendition of ‘The Bold Fenian Men’, the Daily Express reported that ‘two teenage boys entered the room. Without pausing for breath, [Brendan] took two strong drinks from a passing waiter and handed them to both boys, Garech and Tara Browne. They accepted them without the slightest hesitation. Several respectable British middle-class ladies could not conceal their horror.’

  It was hardly surprising. Tara was still only thirteen.

  Oonagh was a notable absentee from the launch of Borstal Boy. She was back in New York, finally, with a weary inevitability, reconciling with her husband. ‘I think she was very much in love with Miguel in the physical sense,’ Kenneth Rose remembered. ‘He exerted a strong, erotic influence over her.’

  The couple were spotted toasting their reunion at the fashionable Colony restaurant off Madison Avenue. A reporter from the Daily Express phoned Oonagh’s suite at the Drake Hotel and enjoyed a brief exchange of words with Miguel. ‘We are living together again,’ he confirmed. ‘The marriage is good again.’

  Miguel denied reports that Oonagh had offered to buy him the haute couture design house of the late Jacques Fath. ‘Absolutely untrue,’ he said.

  What was true – and it might well have accounted for Miguel’s good mood when the Express phoned – was that Oonagh was about to start bankrolling his ambitions to become a rival to fashion giants like Christian Dior and Pierre Balmain. It was an act of folly that Oonagh would find herself paying for until the end of her days.

  •

  Miguel’s return to Ireland with Oonagh that winter cast a pall over life at Luggala. The battle for primacy between Oonagh’s husband and her teenage children continued. The conflict came to a head in the days before Christmas – Miguel’s first at Luggala. Tara and Garech were enjoying a party in Tara’s room with a group of friends that included Nicholas Gormanston, the young Irish peer, and Min Hogg, the future founding editor of the celebrated World of Interiors magazine.

  ‘It was well after midnight,’ Garech remembered. ‘Miguel came in and started shouting. He said we were making noise. And, of course, we were. You put twelve or fifteen people in a small room and that’s what happens. And, equally, it was Christmas. So Miguel was shouting and I was drinking port in a little Waterford Crystal glass. I finished the drink and I threw the empty glass on the floor, smashing it at his feet, and I said, I think, “Fuck you!”

  ‘So Tara and I left with the entire party – this was at three o’clock in the morning – and we went to Dublin and we all slept on the floor of my mews in Quinn’s Lane. And Miguel had to get up the following morning and explain to my mother why, two days before Christmas, there were suddenly no guests in the house. We went to Jammet’s restaurant in Dublin f
or lunch. My mother begged us to come back, but we insisted that Miguel apologize first.’

  Tara and Garech returned home for what proved to be a typically spark-filled Luggala Christmas. Miguel, who had been forced into a humiliating apology, kept a low profile at the dinner table while other guests provided the entertainment. Lady Veronica Woolfe had recently read Deacon’s book, The Rack, and was so depressed by its bleak descriptions of sanatorium life that she had returned to drinking after a long period on the wagon. When she discovered that the author was sitting opposite her, she flew into a drunken rage. Other guests pitched in to defend the book. The debate escalated until her husband attempted to stab Deacon with a butter knife. It was the kind of evening that Oonagh loved. The seating arrangements were likely orchestrated to achieve such an end.

  ‘Lady Veronica had brought along a friend of hers,’ Garech remembered, ‘who was called Waverly Provatorov. They were both of the Unionist persuasion and I suspect my mother sat them either side of Brendan Behan to see what would happen. Waverly became quite emotional as well. There was all this shouting – her on one side and Lady Veronica on the other. So Brendan leaned backwards in his chair, took their two heads and banged them together.’

  It settled the argument over Deacon’s book. But it also became abundantly clear that Christmas that there was something seriously wrong with Brendan. The man whom Tara and Garech regarded like a favourite uncle had ceased to be the ‘formidable little bull’, as his old friend the poet John Montague remembered him, ‘crackling with energy and affection for the world’.

  He was seriously ill. A GP had recently told him to give up alcohol, an injunction he chose to ignore. During the months that followed, the period of his greatest success, his life continued to spiral out of control.

  In the spring of 1959, The Hostage moved from Stratford to London’s West End, again enjoying rave critical notices. Brendan was at home in Dublin and missed the triumphant opening night at Wyndham’s Theatre. But shortly afterwards, he decided that he should go to London to savour the adulation. Beatrice, who was finding it increasingly difficult to manage him, thought it a bad idea. Brendan travelled alone. It was during this trip that he began the habit of interrupting performances of his plays, engaging the actors in banter and occasionally scrambling up onto the stage to sing a song or perform a step dance known as the Blackbird.

  Tara saw him at his worst in London that spring. Brendan had arrived at the theatre one night in such an inebriated condition that a doorman turned him away. The following morning, still drunk, he showed up at Oonagh’s house in Shepherd Market, where Tara was staying with Frances Redmond, the Irish housekeeper. ‘Tara was delighted to see him,’ said Garech, ‘as he always was, because he adored Brendan, just as Brendan adored him. But Brendan wanted a drink and he began hammering on Frances’s bedroom door. Frances said, “I can’t come out, Mr Behan, I’m naked.” She was a big woman. And Brendan roared, “I want to see you naked.”’

  Tara, who was then only fourteen, tried to persuade Brendan to have some breakfast, but Brendan quickly passed out. Fearing he was dead, Tara phoned Beatrice in Dublin and told her that he was unable to wake her husband. Beatrice contacted his London publisher, Rae Jeffs, who arrived at the house, then sent for a doctor. Once he was awoken, Brendan left the house in search of another drink, insulting both the doctor and his publisher on the way out. Within an hour, he was arrested. It was his first arrest in England for public drunkenness. He appeared at Bow Street Police Court the following day, where he pleaded guilty to being drunk in a public street and was fined. He returned home to Beatrice. Thirty carloads of reporters followed him to the airport, where he sang a rendition of ‘The Red Flag’ before boarding a plane to Dublin.

  Miguel despised him and the feeling was mutual. There had already been tension between the pair on the two or three occasions they had met. Brendan – who, at the age of fourteen, had set off on his bicycle for Belfast to enlist with the Irish Republicans who were planning to join in the fight against Franco – had taken an instinctive dislike to this new member of the household, who always seemed to be sunk in an armchair with a sullen expression on his face. One night in the summer of 1959, knowing the depth of Tara and Garech’s hatred for their mother’s new husband, and probably thinking he was doing Oonagh a favour in the long run, he threatened Miguel with the IRA.

  ‘Brendan came to dinner,’ Garech recalled of the night, ‘and he told Miguel that he was not welcome in Ireland, and that, if he was not out of the country within three days, he would “fucking get rid of him”. And that was because he knew how much Tara and I hated him. He told him that the IRA would kill him.’

  As far as the other dinner guests were concerned, it was more than idle drunk talk. Although Brendan was no longer active in the organization, he and Cathal Goulding, the IRA’s Quartermaster General and future Chief of Staff, were old friends, having served their time together as apprentice housepainters. ‘Brendan didn’t mean it as an idle threat,’ said Garech, ‘and Miguel certainly didn’t take it as one.’

  For once, Oonagh decided that it would be sensible to get Brendan out of the house. Another dinner guest that night was her friend Erskine Childers, the government minister and future President of Ireland. Oonagh asked him to take Brendan back to Dublin in his state car. ‘Brendan said something to Erskine as they were helping him into the car,’ Garech recalled, ‘and the Garda sergeant who was driving remarked that this was no way to speak to a minister. And Brendan said, “The minister is not a member of any fucking church I know of!”’

  It was an amusing punchline to what had otherwise been a horribly fraught evening. Miguel would bide his time before exacting a brutal revenge on the writer the following Christmas.

  •

  While Brendan was set on a downward course, Miguel was convinced that his own life was headed in the opposite direction. With Tara ensconced in London and Garech living in Dublin, he had Oonagh to himself and he spent much of the early part of 1959 figuring out how to use her fortune to gain entry to the exclusive world of haute couture.

  Oonagh still hoped to assimilate him into her world by building him a studio in the grounds of Luggala. She asked Alan Hope, the architect who oversaw the rebuilding of the house after the fire, to draw up plans for an elegant pavilion, where Miguel could work on his designs for at least part of the year. But the plan never made it off the drawing board. Miguel wanted to live in Paris. And, very soon, the antipathy of her friends towards him persuaded Oonagh that their future was indeed abroad.

  In September 1959, shortly after Brendan Behan threatened his life, Miguel got his way. Tara returned to Ireland, packed his belongings into more than a dozen large crates and set off for a new home in Paris, with his mother and the man he would never bring himself to call his stepfather.

  5: LA VIE EST BELLE

  They cut quite a dash in Paris, driving up and down the Champs-Elysées in a white open-top Lincoln Continental: the classically handsome Spanish gigolo, his attractive, middle-aged Irish wife, and her baby-faced teenage son, usually dressed in velvet, with a menthol cigarette burning between his fingers. Everywhere they went, they turned heads. And, for Miguel, that was the whole point of being there.

  They arrived in the autumn of 1959 at a time of high tension in the city. France was going through the painful paroxysms of letting go of its pre-war imperial past. The country teetered on the brink of civil war over its disengagement from Algeria, an issue that had already brought bloodshed to the streets of Paris.

  Oonagh rented a flat for them at 135 rue de l’Université, on the left bank of the Seine. And while she and Miguel plotted their entry into the world of Paris fashion, Tara familiarized himself with the city, spending hours each day exploring its tree-lined boulevards and narrow cobbled streets on foot.

  He also reconnected with Lucy Lambton, his old friend from Venice. She was in Paris to attend a finishing school, one of the private colleges where the British upper classes sen
t their daughters in the interval between leaving second-level education and entering society. The schools tended to be run by formidable female principals, fixated on preserving the virginity of the girls in their care. Lucy was attending one of the non-residential schools, boarding with a family in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and taking the Metro into the city each morning to learn about such matters as social skills, speech and deportment and how to look like a lady. There were lessons in French, musical appreciation, cookery and ballroom dancing, and regular visits to the Louvre, where the girls would listen to interminable lectures about art. Once Lucy re-established her friendship with Tara, however, she stopped going to school altogether.

  ‘I spent a year in Paris,’ she remembered, ‘and when I left I had no idea what Paris was like. I never saw it. Every single day, I would just go to Tara’s mother’s apartment and hang out with Tara.’

  The Sixties were just over the horizon and the world was changing, not least for the daughters of Britain’s upper classes. Lucy was part of the first wave of aristocratic English girls to rebel against the convention of the Parisienne hothouse turning out suitable young wives for the debutante circuit. Quite a number of the girls who followed her would also find their way to 135 rue de l’Université, where the relaxed atmosphere – the day beginning shortly before noon with vodka and tomato juice – was in contrast to the restrictive world of the finishing school.