I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  Brendan Behan discovered that to his cost on Christmas Eve 1959, when Miguel finally exacted his bloody revenge for threatening him with the IRA. According to at least two eye-witness accounts, Brendan was wandering drunkenly around the snow-covered, cobbled courtyard at Luggala, singing his favourite Christmas hymn, ‘Adeste Fideles’, when Miguel suddenly emerged from the house and felled him with a punch to the head. ‘He got him down quite easily,’ according to John Montague, who watched the incident with Garech from an upstairs window. ‘Then he started kicking him mercilessly while Brendan lay on the ground.’

  John ran downstairs and stepped in to save him from any serious and lasting injury. Oonagh, who had heard the commotion from the courtyard, came outside and covered Brendan with a blanket. ‘She viewed the entire thing, as she did most things, with a certain detachment,’ John recalled. ‘And I don’t mean that in a critical way. She had that Anglo-Irish way of observing the world as a series of antics, rather like a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel.’

  Miguel claimed that Brendan had been ‘interfering with children’, implying that he had made sexual advances towards Tara. It was commonly known that Brendan had homosexual leanings from his time in a young offenders’ institution and occasionally he talked to friends about what he referred to as his ‘Herod Complex’.

  According to Ulick O’Connor’s 1970 biography of his life, the type of boy or man he admired sexually was the type he had met in borstal – ‘clean-skinned fresh lads’. Tara evidently fitted the profile. However, no one, including Oonagh, believed Miguel’s claim.

  ‘Brendan never made any kind of pass at Tara,’ according to Garech. ‘If he had, Tara would have told me. He certainly wouldn’t have confided it in Miguel. The story about Brendan interfering with children was something that Miguel came up with the following morning to try to justify his behaviour. The real reason he beat Brendan up was that Brendan had told him to get out of Ireland.’

  A crucial line was crossed at Luggala when Miguel violently assaulted such a beloved member of the household in full view of the other guests. In many ways, Oonagh’s bohemian idyll, the happy intellectual crossroads where writers and painters and the pleasure-seeking remnants of Ireland’s old aristocracy met to drink and talk and be enriched by each other’s company, died that night.

  In January 1960, Tara returned to Paris with his mother and her increasingly unpopular husband. There was work to do. Miguel may have been a gigolo, but he was a far from idle one. While he continued to enjoy the life of a libertine in Paris, he was also busy planning his entrée into the Paris fashion world. With his wife’s capital behind him, he set his sights high. In early 1960, not long after they returned to Paris, he tried to persuade his wife to buy him the House of Dior.

  The internationally famous fashion house had been in chaos since the death of its founder, Christian Dior, in 1957. But the name remained a synonym for luxury and style. Dior had founded his business in 1946, at a time when Paris had ceased to be the style capital of the world. After years of fabric shortages, when drably coloured, defeminizing clothes became a fashion of necessity, Dior invented the ‘New Look’ that helped make Paris the most important city in the world again when it came to women’s clothes. His designs were ‘ultra-feminine’ with rounded shoulders, cinched waists and full skirts that accentuated busts and hips. He revolutionized the way women dressed all over the world. By 1949, Dior’s international empire was so big that it accounted for 5 per cent of France’s total export revenue.

  Dior had an international client list that couturiers like Miguel could only fantasize about, including Hollywood celebrities and members of the British royal family. But by the spring of 1960 the business was in trouble.

  Christian Dior had died of a heart attack three years earlier, at the age of fifty-two, creating a leadership vacuum in the company. It was initially filled by Dior’s young Algerian-born assistant, Yves Saint-Laurent, who was promoted to the role of artistic director at just twenty-one. His debut collection was hailed as a triumph. Emboldened by his success, however, he began to take risks, resulting in the 1960s bohemian ‘Beat Look’, which drew its inspiration from the existentialists who frequented the cafes and jazz clubs of Saint-Germain des Prés. The archly conservative French fashion world was aghast. When Saint-Laurent was called up for his National Service shortly afterwards, no one in the company objected to him going.

  Miguel was convinced that he himself was the strong and visionary leader the company needed to steer it into the coming decade. But the Paris fashion world was notoriously unwelcoming of outsiders. ‘He saw himself as the head of a major fashion house,’ recalled Tara’s cousin, Desmond Guinness. ‘But companies like Dior were whales. Miguel was a minnow. And minnows cannot swim with whales.’

  Miguel’s interest in the business was very swiftly rebuffed. If his pride was hurt, his confidence remained undiminished. With his rich wife’s backing, he decided, he would simply establish his own label. If he couldn’t own the House of Dior, he would give the world the House of Ferreras.

  •

  The question of Tara’s schooling, or rather the absence of it, became an issue again during that first winter they spent in Paris. Although he was now approaching his fifteenth birthday, his father hadn’t quite let go of the idea of him going to Eton. At Dom’s urging, Oonagh hired a full-time tutor to prepare him to sit his O-level examinations. Dom’s hope was that, if he passed them, then the school might allow him to enrol for the more academically rigorous A-levels.

  Deacon was temporarily off the scene. ‘He tended to steer clear whenever Miguel was around,’ according to Garech. In his place, Oonagh hired Godfrey Carey, who had been a classmate of both Hugo Williams and Michael Boyle at Eton, and who would go on to become a QC.

  ‘Oonagh was a patient of my father,’ he recalled, ‘who had a practice in Connaught Square. Anyway, during a consultation one day, she was sort of musing with him and she said, “Do you know of anybody who might be a tutor for my son?” And he said, “Well, I’ve got a son – he might do.” So that was how I was engaged to try to get Tara through his O-levels. Because there was a feeling, even late in the day, that he might still go to Eton for the very last years.

  ‘I did a certain amount of research into the syllabus. Then I had a very erratic job interview, for which I was flown over to Paris to meet Miguel in a very good French restaurant called La Méditerranée. And then, having decided that I should have the job, he made a silly move, which was to take me to a club for a nightcap. I noticed the sort of club it was straight away – it was a homosexual club, not a woman in sight – and I made an excuse that my landlady insisted I was home by midnight. And from that moment on, even though Oonagh had already made the decision to hire me, Miguel was determined to make life difficult for me.’

  As it happened, so was Tara. In the five months that Godfrey spent visiting their flat on the rue de l’Université on a daily basis, Tara rarely opened a book. ‘I had agreed a plan with Oonagh,’ Godfrey recalled, ‘even before my supposed interview with Miguel, which was that I would arrive at their place first thing in the morning and that from 9 a.m. until midday, I would lecture him – and they would be hard lectures. Then he would go to the Berlitz school, which was nearby, to learn French for one hour. Then he was allowed to go to meet his friends for lunch. He had another appointment with me between 2.30 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., a break for half an hour, then we would work again between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. The evening was his own.’

  The schedule went out the window immediately. ‘I cannot remember any day in Paris when the programme was carried out,’ he said, still amused, more than fifty years later, by the memory of Tara emerging from his bedroom, rheumy-eyed, in the middle of the day. ‘I was quite a punctual chap and I would arrive at a quarter to nine every morning, when I’d be given my second café-croissant of the day by the maid. And I’d sit there waiting for Tara to get out of bed. He’d eventually show his face and he’d be full of apologies.
He had this way of saying sorry. It was like a drawl. It was, “Surrraaay!” He was invariably polite and, in his own funny way, terribly considerate. He just wasn’t always considerate about the things that I, as his tutor, wanted him to be considerate about!’

  Tara was having far too much fun with his new friends and his record player to give even a passing thought to his schoolwork. And soon, another young English aristo friend would join his Paris circle. Nineteen-year-old Mark Palmer moved into the rue de l’Université flat in early 1960. Mark was, in fact, ‘Sir’ Mark and had been from the moment he was delivered into the world by his war-widowed mother. His father, Major Sir Anthony Frederick Palmer, had been a member of the Special Operations Executive, a highly secret government agency that conducted espionage and acts of sabotage behind enemy lines. In May 1941 he was killed off the coast of Syria and Mark entered the world with the title of fifth Baronet Palmer, of Grinkle Park, Co. York and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He had been First Page of Honour to Queen Elizabeth II. He attended Eton and was following the usual upper-class trajectory towards either Oxford or Cambridge when he had a difference of opinion with his stepfather, who was of the view that a couple of years in the Rhodesian police force might toughen him up. Mark pretended to go along with the idea, then did a runner to France. He remembered living rough for a while in Paris, in shop doorways and on people’s floors.

  He eventually got some money together and enrolled in a French-language course at the Sorbonne, where he reconnected with Michael Boyle, an old classmate from Eton. Michael took Mark around to introduce him to Tara one evening. At the time, Mark was living with cousins in Paris, but he wasn’t happy. Tara suggested he move in with them. Mark couldn’t believe his confidence, how nothing appeared to faze him. Oonagh wanted Tara to have a mate, so she told Mark to go and fetch his bags, then make himself at home.

  And just like that, Mark became a kind of surrogate older sibling to him. There was no chance of getting Tara to do any schoolwork now.

  The only book that any of his friends remember him opening in Paris was Angelique, the first in a series of historical adventure stories by Anne and Serge Golon, which would have been considered racy for boys of his age. The heroine of the series was a French noblewoman described as being ‘half-angel, half-devil, and wholly woman’. He was also a fan of the syndicated American cartoon strip Peanuts, featuring Snoopy and Charlie Brown. But he rarely, if ever, cracked the spine of a school book.

  Eventually, feeling hopelessly redundant, Godfrey Carey quit as his tutor. In March 1960, he told Oonagh that he was going home. ‘I went to her and I said, quite honestly, “You’re wasting your money. I’m thoroughly enjoying being in Paris, because I’m a Francophile, but I’m being given quite a large salary and I’m not earning it.”’

  Oonagh asked him to reconsider. At Easter, she reminded him, his friends would be returning to England. And soon after that, she and Miguel would be taking Tara to New York, where she was planning to throw the first of a series of parties to announce Miguel’s ‘coming out’ as a couturier. There, removed from the distraction of his friends, she assured him that her son would settle down to work. Godfrey agreed to accompany them on the trip.

  One by one that spring, Mark, Hugo, Michael, Lucy, Frances and Judith left Paris, each of them with the sad sense that a gilded chapter in their lives was coming to an end. Tearfully, they said goodbye and promised to remain in touch.

  After a farewell party at Claridge’s in London, Oonagh, Miguel, Tara and Godfrey flew to New York. ‘The new plan was that we were to take up residence in two adjoining suites in the Drake Hotel,’ said Godfrey, ‘which of course seems totally appropriate to work! I said to Tara, “Look, we’ve got to please your mother, so when we get to America, let’s have the regime we were meant to have in Paris. There won’t be the same interruptions, because you won’t have the Berlitz school around the corner. You won’t have all your friends. You’ll only have me.”

  ‘On the first day, I woke up – he and I were sharing a room – and he was sitting on the floor at the end of his bed at six o’clock in the morning, having discovered that television channels in America didn’t shut down in the evening. He’d been up all night. So I could see that this plan was going to go marvellously!

  ‘I reported this to Oonagh and she said to him, “Oh, darling, you really must do your work.” But all he would ever say when she tried to remonstrate with him was, “Oh, Mummy, Daaarliiing!” Anyway, not long after we arrived in New York, he said to his mother, “Mummy, Daaarliiing, don’t you think I should be in London for Lucy Lambton’s coming-out party?” And Oonagh just gave in. So Tara flew back to London, never again to return to the Drake Hotel.’

  Tara made the cross-Atlantic trip alone, while Miguel and Oonagh remained in New York, along with Godfrey, who was under the mistaken impression that he was going to return. ‘I stayed, enjoying the New York social scene for two weeks, still thinking that he was coming back. I don’t think I ever saw him again after that. And my involvement with the family came to an end shortly afterwards when Miguel accused me, aged eighteen, of having an affair with Oonagh, aged fifty, and I thought, okay, this is more than I can stomach. So I left.’

  •

  Christopher Gibbs, the well-known London antiques dealer, aristocratic dandy and friend of the Stones, remembered catching his first sight of Tara at Lucy Lambton’s coming-out party in June 1960. ‘He was this charming, very young-looking, rather frail-looking child,’ he recalled. ‘Very blond, with big eyes and I think clad in something that put me in mind of Little Lord Fauntleroy. And he was dancing in a very wild and deranged fashion. I’d never clapped eyes on him before and I thought, “Who is this strange flower that’s suddenly sprouted in the garden?”’

  With Oonagh and Miguel still in New York, Tara was staying with Deacon in his Mayfair flat. He was fifteen, as free as the wind and London was his playground. Everywhere he went that summer, he seemed to be surrounded by a flock of privileged girls with cut-glass accents and perfect bone structure, usually the teenage daughters of artists, ambassadors and aristocrats whom Oonagh knew from the social round.

  He became especially close to Charmian Scott, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the portrait painter Molly Bishop and the granddaughter of Lord George Montagu Douglas Scott, once Scotland’s largest landowner. A society beauty, Charmian shared some of Tara’s worldliness, having spent two years in Florence studying art and several months learning drawing at the Chelsea School of Art. That summer, she was trying her hand at modelling.

  Another older teenage girl who entered his life in the summer of 1960 was Candida Betjeman. Oonagh knew her father, John Betjeman, from their days as Bright Young People and, later, from his time as the press attaché at the British Embassy in Dublin during the Second World War, when the IRA had seriously considered murdering him for being a spy.

  ‘Tara and I immediately clicked,’ Candida remembered, ‘even though he was almost three years younger than me. He was, I don’t want to use the word iconic, but he was, even at that age, this totally peculiar, young man about town. Blond, very petite, almost pocket-sized. And his style beggared belief. He was a hugely influential figure in my life in terms of how I dressed, what music I listened to, what I thought about people, what I thought about the world. I listened to him. And there he was, what, three years younger than me? How could that have happened? And at an age when a three-year age gap is huge. I mean, what other fourteen-year-old boy could influence people like that?’

  Theirs was an innocent, familial love. ‘I don’t remember him having any what we called liaisons around that time. He got on incredibly well with women, not in a gay way, but just as a terrific friend, chatting on the telephone and things.

  ‘And he made very elegant passes. He said he owned my breasts, I remember, and he was going to mortgage them. I don’t think either of us knew what the word mortgage meant, but that’s what he used to say. Later, I went to Paris and we slept on the same bed, but he
never actually tried anything.

  ‘We cuddled and laughed a lot. He was a terrific giggler. He used to call rhododendrons “Rosiedandrums”. I remember that about him. I really, really loved that boy. I mean, I really loved him. We had what I would call a brother-sister relationship. He was genuinely kind. There was absolutely not a glimmer of cruelty about him, which I think there could be in Oonagh.’

  That summer, Candida invited Tara, along with Charmian Scott’s boyfriend, Hercules Belville, to stay at the Betjeman home in Wantage, Berkshire, where the two young friends were introduced, bemusedly, to the idea of manual labour. ‘My mother used to embarrass me incredibly,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have people to stay unless they did chores. She thought it would be fun for them to make bonfires and things, which is what she made them do. And I remember Tara being absolutely amazed at being asked to do things. And so was Hercy, actually, because he wasn’t used to it either. “A good bit of manual labour,” she told them. “That’s what you need.” I think Tara was quite amused by it all.’

  Her parents were rather less than amused by the phone bill that he managed to run up while staying in the house. One of the things that Tara had in common with Oonagh was his love of the telephone. Every day, and sometimes several times a day, he enjoyed long, sprawling transatlantic conversations with his mother at daytime rates. John Betjeman, who would become Britain’s poet laureate in 1972, was lost for words when the bill arrived.

  The London that Tara tripped insouciantly around in the summer of 1960 was still a far cry from the city that would become the capital of Sixties cool. It was still a grey, buttoned-up, battle-scarred city. But socially, and culturally, Britain was changing, especially for Tara’s aristocratic girlfriends. The so-called Season – the round of balls and dances at which the sons of the ruling elite would choose suitable life partners, thus preserving the social stratification of the classes – was enjoying its last hurrah.