I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  While Oonagh’s main focus that autumn was her husband’s career ambitions, Lucy ensured that Tara never wanted for company. She introduced him to a whole new circle of friends, mostly English girls and boys, who were attending either finishing schools or French language courses. All were instantly enchanted by Lucy’s tiny, besuited friend.

  ‘The first time I ever heard of Tara Browne,’ said Michael Boyle, who was studying at the Sorbonne, ‘was when Lucy told me about this Little Lord Fauntleroy character whom she’d first met in Venice. I think she said they had palazzos opposite each other. He was this little guy who wore velvet suits and they used to wave to each other from the balconies of their palazzos. Anyway, they’d become friends and he was now in Paris and she said he wants us to go around to his flat for dinner.

  ‘So we went and I discovered that Lucy hadn’t exaggerated him at all. He looked like a small boy. I suppose he was still a small boy. But he was someone who liked the company of adults terrifically. He had no interest in friends of his own age. He’d outgrown them. He was fourteen and we were sixteen or maybe seventeen. But there was never any question of you thinking of him as a child. You immediately saw him as an equal.’

  The months that Michael spent discovering Paris in the company of Tara, his mother and her mercurial Spanish lover were like something that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have conjured up, with Oonagh as the Gatsby figure at the centre of it all. ‘It was, “Come to dinner”, then it was, “Come to lunch”, a constant flow of invitations,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’d be walking up the Champs-Champs-Elysées, going nowhere in particular, then you’d look behind you and there would be this white Lincoln Continental, with Miguel at the wheel, Oonagh in the front passenger seat and Tara in the back. It’d be, “What are you doing, Michael?” and my answer was usually, “Nothing”, because I was supposed to be at the Sorbonne, but I think I only went once. Then they’d say, “Well, come with us!” and you’d climb in and off you’d go.’

  Often, they headed to Le Drugstore, a forerunner to the modern-day shopping mall, a maze of trendy boutiques and chic cafes on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where they drank seemingly endless cups of café crème. Or they pointed the car in the direction of the United States Embassy on the Place de la Concorde, where the canteen sold milkshakes that were so thick that it hurt their cheeks to suck them up the straw.

  Soon, more friends joined in the fun. One day, early in 1960, Lucy brought Judith Keppel, a finishing-school classmate with aristocratic ties and a navy lieutenant-commander father, to the rue de l’Université. Judith – who, forty years later, would become the first jackpot winner of the British TV quiz Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – was rendered silent by the worldliness of this little boy, who was three years younger than her but seemed somehow, almost impossibly, older.

  ‘I remember talking to him once,’ she said, ‘it might have been that first time I met him – and he dropped into the conversation the fact that he’d been in Venice and he was talking to Igor Stravinsky, you know, at age fourteen or something. Tara was not only young, he was also very young-looking. He was quite small and he had lovely, sort of golden hair. So when you heard these things coming out of his mouth, it was really unbelievable.’

  The word spread about this extraordinary little character who looked like a boy but talked like a man. His new friends began to bring their own friends to the rue de l’Université to meet him. Judith took Lady Frances Elliot, the daughter of the ninth Earl of St Germans. They immediately hit it off. Michael Boyle took his school friend Hugo Williams, and he too joined their little coterie. Hugo, who was later an award-winning poet, remembered being in awe of this little Billy Budd character who was unlike any fourteen-year-old he had ever met. ‘At a time when I was learning about life for the first time, he was very, very influential on my development,’ he said. ‘He allowed me to flower a bit. I was extremely backward socially and so uptight around women. At seventeen or eighteen, I had no idea how to talk to them. And Tara talked me through it all. “Oh,” he said, “you just make jokes all the time. That’s what they want. They want to laugh.” Because they were so quiet, the girls in those days. They all had long hair and big eyes and they sighed a lot. The sigh was their weapon of choice if you were failing to impress them. Tara taught us how to make them laugh. He’d say, “If you can’t think of anything funny to say, just tickle them or something.”’

  Hugo was in Paris to study French at the Alliance Française. He switched to the Sorbonne because Michael was there, and attended one lecture about French culture, which passed completely over his head. Then, like Lucy, he stopped going to school altogether, choosing to spend his time in Paris hanging out with this little Irish boy, who introduced him to the idea of total freedom.

  Hugo was writing occasional articles for the Brighton and Hove Gazette, but had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Michael had been thrown out of Oxford after twice failing his Preliminary exams. The range of options open to aristocratic girls like Lucy, Frances and Judith, meanwhile, was narrow. The conventional wisdom was that educating a daughter to the same level as a son was unnecessary and might even render her undesirable to potential husbands. ‘Most girls in those days were told that they might as well get a little job until they got married,’ said Judith, who had just completed her A-levels and would be returning to England the following spring to take up the classic stopgap option of a secretarial course.

  Hugo, Michael, Lucy, Frances and Judith resolved to simply enjoy themselves for as long as they were in Paris. ‘It was a wonderful moment in our lives between school and reality,’ Hugo remembered. ‘We all knew there was a ghastly future waiting for us when we went home, one in which we’d all have to grow up and become adults.’

  Very quickly, they all assimilated to the rhythm of Tara’s world: the long, lazy days in the flat, doing nothing at all; the afternoons in Le Drugstore drinking milky coffees and listening to Edith Piaf’s ‘Milord’ on the radio; then the late nights, with Tara, Oonagh and Miguel, in fine restaurants and smoke-filled clubs.

  When the heat of the city became oppressive, they went to the Eden Roc swimming baths in the Île-de-France, Tara and his friends wedged together on the back seat of the Lincoln Continental, their teenage eyes being opened to a world on the threshold of a social and sexual revolution. ‘Eden Roc was an extremely glamorous place,’ said Hugo, recalling one formative visit there. ‘I saw Jean-Paul Belmondo [the French actor] stroking a girl’s tits in public through her bathing costume. It made an impression on me, I can tell you. That was a typical sort of jaunt, where we all set off in this beautiful car, battling through the Paris traffic, in search of pleasure somewhere.’

  Nights out with Tara were full of excitement. He and his friends went to L’Eléphant Blanc or to the Club Saint-Germain, two of the most fashionable jazz clubs in the city. Tara drank Coca-Cola, smoked Gauloises menthols and engaged in conversation with the grown-ups, always on equal terms. Usually, Oonagh and Miguel were with them, but occasionally it was just Tara. On these nights, it may have appeared that they were chaperoning him, but it was, in fact, the other way round.

  ‘He sort of led us in a way because he knew so much more about the world than we did,’ remembered Judith. ‘We’d all just left school and we’d never been allowed out on our own before, so you can imagine what a fabulous thing it was for us to be going to nightclubs. My parents would have been horrified had they known. French nightclubs in those days were much racier than English ones, although I was terribly short-sighted and refused to wear my glasses, so I suspect I missed an awful lot of things!’

  Tara, who had acquired his mother and father’s love of clothes, was always stylishly turned out. ‘He had a very developed aesthetic sense,’ said Hugo. ‘He was years ahead of everyone in the way he dressed. Black drainpipe trousers, mauve shirts, green suede jackets. Brocade ties. He liked turquoise a lot. He used to write me letters in turquoise ink. Looking back, he had incredible social poise. He must h
ave had that as a child. You don’t suddenly get it at fourteen. I think it was a personal characteristic as much as anything.’

  As his childhood friend Lucy Hill had correctly divined, he was very interested in girls. He enjoyed female company enormously and the feeling was mutual. ‘He wasn’t at all macho,’ Hugo remembered. ‘He was rather unthreatening to girls, I would think, because he was quite short and a little bit androgynous with these waves of blond hair. He didn’t make any attempt to be manly. But he didn’t need to. He was just so comfortable in his own skin.’

  He had a large collection of stock lines that would elicit a smile from even the most socially awkward pre-debutante. ‘He would look at you very seriously,’ Michael remembered, ‘and he would say something like, “Can you keep a secret?” And you’d say, “Yes, of course I can keep a secret.” And he’d say, “Well, there’s no point in telling you anything then, is there?”’

  He had also, it seems, picked up some of his father’s legendary raffishness. ‘There was something about him being not quite a gentleman,’ remembered Hugo, ‘which was part of his fascination. By “not quite a gentleman”, I mean he wasn’t like the uptight public schoolboys that these girls would have been used to meeting. Here was this little chap who was completely liberated at fourteen or fifteen. He was what we called international. But that was combined with these Irish characteristics of being extremely sociable and amusing, which I presume he got from his father. I don’t know if Tara had any liaisons as such at that age, but he was rather keen on girls and girls seemed to like him a lot. A good time for him was putting on a nice record and having a dance and getting all the girls around him.’

  Music began to matter to Tara more than almost anything else. At some point in 1959 he discovered the pop music that was coming to Europe from across the Atlantic. He bought a portable, battery-operated record player that played 45s. ‘At the time, nobody knew they existed,’ said Peregrine Eliot, Frances Eliot’s brother and the tenth Earl of St Germans, ‘let alone owned one.’

  Tara started spending much of his still considerable weekly allowance buying records by mail order from America. Boxloads of vinyl – all the latest singles from the Billboard Hot 100 – would arrive at the rue de l’Université flat each week. Most of these records Tara bought without ever hearing them before. There was a great thrill of discovery for him in placing the needle into the first groove of each disc, never knowing what he was going to hear.

  There were songs of young love and teenage longing. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy, then boy or girl meets someone else. There was ‘Dream Lover’ by Bobby Darin, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by The Platters, ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’ by Connie Francis and ‘Bye Bye Love’ by The Everly Brothers. Then there were songs with insidious beats and infectious hooks that you could dance to: ‘At the Hop’ by Danny & the Juniors and ‘Splish Splash’ by Bobby Darin.

  Tara and his friends took the portable record player out into the city’s grand squares and listened to the music with the volume up high. ‘He took it everywhere,’ said Peregrine, whose sister reminisced about those days right up until the time of her death in 2004. ‘They would all jive in the park, on river cruises and anywhere they damn well liked – to the astonishment of bystanders.’

  They listened to ‘Donna’ by Ritchie Valens, ‘Poison Ivy’ by The Coasters and ‘A Teenager in Love’ by Dion and the Belmonts. These songs would forever remain the soundtrack of their memories of Paris. Some records they played over and over again, including ‘Cut Across Shorty’ by Eddie Cochran, in which a country boy named Shorty and a city boy named Dan have a race to win the hand of a girl named Lucy. Not surprisingly, it was Lucy Lambton’s favourite.

  Sometimes, late at night, Hugo remembered, when Oonagh and Miguel were otherwise engaged, they headed for the Aérogare des Invalides, where they put the record player down on the deserted floor and kept the party going, dancing with the cleaners and the jaded airline staff, drinking coffee from the vending machine and creating souvenirs of the night’s fun in the airport’s black-and-white photo booth.

  ‘I thought of him as one of my best friends,’ said Michael Boyle. ‘Even though I was coming up to nineteen and he was essentially still a child, I thought of him as an absolute equal. He wasn’t spoiled at all. Well, of course, he was spoiled in one way, in that he seemed to get everything he desired. But he also wanted to share it with you. He never said, “This is mine.”

  ‘I remember the rest of us began to say, amongst ourselves, you know, we can’t keep taking money off this young boy. So we started saying, “Come on, Tara, enough now – you paid yesterday. It’s time to go home.” And then there’d be this scream from Lucy. She’d say, “Look what I found!” And Tara would have left a dix milles note down on the pavement on the Champs-Elysées for one of us to find. So suddenly it was our money and there was no need for us to be embarrassed. That’s what he was like. He didn’t give a hoot about money. He wanted to spend it on his friends and to see them enjoying themselves.’

  •

  All of this fun took place against a backdrop of political tension and social unrest in France. For years, the country had been engaged in a brutal war in Algeria, which had seen elements of the army revolt. This crisis triggered the collapse of the Fourth Republic, which had overseen the rebuilding of France since its liberation.

  In 1958, former president Charles de Gaulle had agreed to come out of retirement and was invested as prime minister by the National Assembly with full power to rule by decree for six months and to draw up a new constitution for France. In 1959, de Gaulle became the President of the Fifth Republic. The return of the statesman who led the Free French Forces during the Second World War was greeted with jubilation by French Algerians, who were convinced that he would stand unwaveringly behind the cause of retaining its North African colony.

  However, shortly afterwards, at just about the time that Oonagh, Miguel and Tara were making their home in the city, de Gaulle offered Algeria and its Muslim majority the chance to decide its own fate. It was seen by many as a betrayal of France, would lead to another abortive army coup and eventually to riots on the streets of Paris, which Tara watched one night from his bedroom window overlooking the rue de l’Université.

  Miguel, who now had access to Oonagh’s money, lustily embraced the playboy lifestyle. Drunk or sober, he tooled around Paris in the big American automobiles that she bought him, forever seeking pleasure and regularly finding trouble. He went through a lot of cars – two Lincoln Continentals, a Rolls Royce Corniche, two Chevrolet Corvettes – often abandoning them where he crashed them.

  ‘He was always on the wrong side of the road,’ said Garech, who shared a car with him many times, ‘passing something out on a bend in the road at about ninety miles per hour. He was always lucky that nothing was ever coming the other way.’

  He drank his way into bar fights and he satisfied his wandering sexual appetite in the gay bars of Paris. Oonagh professed to know nothing about Miguel’s interest in men, although among Tara’s friends it was an open secret. Once, he even made a clumsy pass at Hugo. ‘He tried it on with me,’ he remembered. ‘I stayed the night in the flat when I was on my way somewhere and he was there. I was eighteen at the time. He came into my room and sat on the bed and put his hand on my knee. I remember telling Tara about it but in a kind of jokey way.’

  Those who observed Oonagh and Miguel together were fascinated by the odd symbiosis they shared. ‘Miguel was just a nightmare person,’ Lucy Lambton remembered. ‘He oozed slime. But there wasn’t the bad atmosphere between them that one would perhaps expect. He never seemed to be nasty to her, even though he was opulently repellent to everyone else.

  ‘She was very coquettish around him. I can remember her looking at him, fluttering her eyes, with her lips pursed. I always remember that look. She was in love with him. That was clear. I mean, none of us took him seriously. But she did. There was an element of her leaning on him because she needed a man of
the house.’

  The dynamic between Tara and Miguel was equally compelling. After Miguel’s failed stand on the issue of his pocket money, Tara understood that his mother would always choose him over Miguel. It gave him a certain self-assurance around him. ‘Tara would have been completely uninterested in what was going on with Miguel,’ according to Michael Boyle, ‘because he knew he always had the ace, which was that his mother absolutely adored him. Miguel wouldn’t have dared lay a finger on him because he would have been decapitated and torn apart in a second by Oonagh. When it came to Tara, she would have been a tigress of the first order. So Tara could afford to be completely unfazed by Miguel.’

  A close acquaintance of Miguel’s during this period was the grandiloquently titled Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, Baron de Watteville, a young playboy aristocrat, who, like Tara, would go on to become a face on the Sixties London scene and a close friend of Brian Jones and the other Rolling Stones. Stash, as he was popularly known, was born in 1942, in Berne, Switzerland, the son of Balthus, the Polish-French modern artist who was regarded as one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, and Antoinette Von Watteville, a member of one of Switzerland’s most venerable aristocratic families. In 1960, Stash was eighteen, living in Paris and leading the life of a rich, pleasure-seeking sybarite. It was perhaps inevitable that at some point in their night-time ramblings he and Miguel would cross paths.

  ‘Miguel was unavoidable really,’ he remembered. ‘He got himself into insane situations. Oonagh was extremely tolerant of him. How she put up with him and his goings-on, I’ll never know. He was always blind drunk and behaving scandalously, either fighting or crashing cars. He was very prodigal. Bisexual, of course. And very disreputable.

  ‘At the same time, I liked him. He had a flamboyance about him. He would distribute wads of banknotes to people. He was an extraordinary character. Probably unsavoury on some levels. He had a Scarface side to him. You know, he was a Cuban gangster type. I think we all had a grudging respect for his antics. He was very successful at his trade. I mean, he was no mere ordinary confidence trickster. Conmen play it very safe. He didn’t play it safe at all. He was larger than life. And he was always ready to fight.’