I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  In 1958, the Lord Chamberlain had announced an end to the 200-year-old practice of presenting the daughters of Britain’s well-bred families to the reigning monarch. The spectacle of well-spoken teenage girls in expensive dresses and white gloves, forming a queue along the railings in front of Buckingham Palace, with their top-hatted fathers and mink-wrapped mothers, was consigned to the past. It was a moment of profound historical and sociological importance for a class of people already coming to terms with the end of the empire.

  The Season would limp on for a few years yet. But rich girls who came of age in the 1960s were no longer interested in a stuffy coupling ritual in which marriages – often unhappy ones, as Oonagh and her sisters could testify – were made on the grounds of intangibles such as pedigree and prospects.

  Britain was on the cusp of an age of rebellion against old social codes and norms.

  In February 1960, Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a former fashion photographer, who, despite the hyphenated surname and the Eton and Cambridge schooling, was regarded by those who keep score in these matters as a ‘commoner’. The idea of the Queen’s younger sister stooping to conquer was cited as evidence that Britain was becoming a more socially democratic country, where the children of the entrenched upper classes would have opportunities to form friendships and even marriages outside the claustrophobic confines of their own social circle.

  In London in the coming years Tara and his friends would form close relationships with a new kind of aristocracy: the stars of rock and roll. His friend Lucy Lambton, in fact, got the ball rolling that summer when she fired a gun over the heads of The Everly Brothers.

  One night, not long after her coming-out party, she was at King’s Cross station, preparing to board the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh, when she noticed an unruly scrum of people on the platform ahead of her. She asked someone what was happening and she was told that Don and Phil Everly – huge favourites of both Lucy and Tara – were attempting to get onto the train, along with the members of the late Buddy Holly’s band, The Crickets.

  ‘They were being mobbed by fans,’ she recalled, ‘and I thought, “How am I going to attract their attention?” My mother had given me a little gun to shy off would-be attackers. It was made in Paris, only a few inches long and light as a feather. But it made a terrific noise. So when the Everlys and The Crickets were standing on the platform, I fired this thing over their heads. They got a real shock. Everyone was terrified. So I just said, “I’m honouring the great songsters who have given so much joy and so much pleasure to the people of England! Don and Phil Everly, welcome to The Flying Scotsman, one of Britain’s greatest trains!” So one thing led to another and I ended up sitting in their first-class sleeper with them and The Crickets, singing songs right the way through the night, all the way to Edinburgh. That was really my coming-out.’

  •

  In July 1960, Tara returned to Dublin, briefly, to celebrate Garech’s twenty-first birthday. There was a party in Jammet’s, at the time Ireland’s most famous restaurant. The evening was really a double celebration. His record label, Claddagh, had issued its first LP – Leo Rowsome’s King of the Pipers – and it would very shortly be sold out. After the party, Garech set off on a three-month trip to the Far East, his birthday present from his mother, who wanted her son to enjoy some of the experiences she had when she sailed around the world with her father and sisters as a thirteen-year-old girl.

  Dom and Sally were also at the party. They were marking a significant event of their own. Two days earlier, they had left Castle Mac Garrett for good and were on their way to London and a new life in the more modest surrounds of a flat in Belgravia. Almost all of the furniture and works of art from Tara and Garech’s childhood home were sold off during the course of a four-day auction. Shortly, the house would become a nursing home for the elderly.

  For Dom, the final straw had been money. ‘He got a nail on the door – a writ to pay a bill,’ said Garech. ‘And he had to face up to the fact that it just wasn’t possible to run a big farm in the west of Ireland in those years. There were no grants. He tried everything. He bred horses, but the west of Ireland was too far from the Kildare racing circuit. All the things he tried to do were too innovative or they were in the wrong place. But it’s also true that he couldn’t afford the upkeep because he was no longer with our mother. Her trustees were very careful to make sure he didn’t get hold of much after the divorce. Her input into the home would have been very valuable. My mother helped make the castle luxurious.’

  Her second husband may have been denied her money, but her third was cheerfully working his way through it. In July, Oonagh and Miguel were back in Paris, where they hosted a cocktail party at Chez Laurent, an exclusive restaurant on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, to once again announce Miguel’s coming-out as a couturier. On arrival, each guest was handed a magnifying glass, with which to view a collection of microscopically small paintings by the German artist Max Ernst, which Oonagh had purchased for twelve million francs. Asked about the connection between Ernst’s work and his own, Miguel said that, like great paintings, clothes, too, were art. He also told the press that he planned to open a maison de couture in the centre of Paris in September.

  Among the three hundred guests was Oonagh’s friend Jacqueline, Comtesse de Ribes, the French aristocrat, socialite and fashion icon, whose imprimatur Miguel was desperately seeking to try to establish his name in Paris.

  ‘The de Ribes is one of those slinky, sloe-eyed, beautifully-boned types who is forever in a Dior,’ the New York Mirror said in its report of the party. ‘Miguel is hoping she’ll be forever in a Ferreras from now on and it surely won’t hurt. Jacqueline is among the ten best-dressed women in the world. When one of those starts tripping into your salon, you have more or less got it made.’

  In August, they were back in Ireland for the Dublin Horse Show, one of the highlights of the Irish social calendar. The British upper classes had always regarded it as an extension – a kind of ‘away day’ – to the London social season. Its week-long round of cocktail parties, hunt balls and all-night house parties were a meeting point for Anglo-Irish landowners, the racing and horsey set and young debutante girls who were brave enough to make the trip across the Irish Sea for what the social commentator Nigel Dempster called ‘a wild, Rabelaisian week of total drunkenness’.

  Traditionally, the Guinnesses had the biggest and most talked-about parties of the week. In 1958, Oonagh’s sister Aileen had thrown a party at Luttrelstown Castle that cost a reported £10,000, or £200,000 in today’s money. Desmond Guinness and his then German princess wife, Mariga, regularly threw open the doors of their home, Leixlip Castle, to more than one hundred guests. The carryings-on at these parties was reported, usually in breathless gasps, by the British and Irish newspapers.

  Returning from her year abroad, Oonagh was determined that her party would be one to remember and was reportedly on the phone three times a day from France arranging the alcohol, music, menus and invitations for the week-long event. ‘My guests can come and go as they wish,’ Oonagh told the Daily Mail. ‘All I want is to ensure they enjoy themselves, dance, drink, eat, sing and be merry.’

  Tara invited all of his Paris and London friends. Judith Keppel, Michael Boyle, Frances Elliott, Charmian Scott and Candida Betjeman all visited Luggala for the first time, improvising beds on floors or wherever they could find them.

  Candida remembered the air of quiet foreboding in the Betjeman kitchen as her mother read the invitation. ‘From the moment she heard that I’d become friends with Tara,’ she said, ‘I think my mum was suddenly terribly worried about me falling in with a bad lot. She warned me about Luggala. I was seventeen and a half or eighteen at that stage. She said it’s very loose there. That was the word she used. She said you’ve got to keep your wits about you. She would have spoken to Judith Keppel’s mother, who was just as worried about her daughter going.

  ‘Although I was brought up in a bohemian
household, with artists and writers and the odd smart aristocrat thrown in, the Guinnesses were something else altogether. For instance, there weren’t any divorced people in my parents’ immediate circle. So divorced people, you know, I used to stare at them, because they were so rare. I think by that time Oonagh had been thrice married, was it? And so had Maureen, I think.’

  The guests included Brendan Behan, who appeared in Oonagh’s photographs smoking a large cigar, with a pink carnation in his button hole. It was the first time that he had come face to face with Miguel since the beating he received the previous Christmas. Brendan was temporarily on the wagon, having determined to stay sober ahead of the opening of The Hostage in New York later in the year. ‘We all sat on the floor of the drawing room listening to him telling stories and singing songs,’ remembered Judith. ‘A friend of his came for dinner one night – we all had to dress for dinner – and everybody said he was in the IRA. So that was atmosphere.’

  The day after Oonagh’s party, hung-over and weary, Tara and his friends, along with Oonagh and Miguel, drove to Russborough House, the spectacular Palladian home of the former Conservative MP Sir Alfred Beit, nearby in County Wicklow. Sir Alfred had one of Europe’s finest private art collections, which included paintings by Goya, Vermeer, Rubens and Gainsborough. Miguel had difficulty believing that the works of such masters could be found in a rural backwater such as County Wicklow. ‘He kept walking around,’ remembered Desmond Guinness, who was also on the trip, ‘examining the signatures on each painting, then saying, “No, not real. Is copy.”’

  Everyone, not least his wife, found it deeply amusing.

  Afterwards, Tara went to Marbella, where his father and Sally were holidaying. There, he met up with Hugo Williams, whose father, the actor Hugh Williams, had a villa nearby. ‘I remember one day,’ he recalled, ‘my father said, “Would you like a Coke or something?” And Tara, who was fifteen years old, said, “I’d like a Bloody Mary, if you don’t mind.” My father was obviously a bit taken aback. He started making it for him, but not to the standard that Tara was used to. Tara watched him rather sceptically in fact, then he said, “Would you mind if I made it myself?”’

  When the summer ended, Oonagh, Miguel and Tara were back in Paris, driving up and down the Champs-Elysées in Miguel’s white Lincoln Continental. Tara had said goodbye to one group of friends, but soon he would say hello to another. It was in their company that this little man-child who seemed determined to live his life as if aware of how short his time would be, completed his entry to the adult world, discovering what would become three of his greatest loves – fast cars, modern jazz and recreational drugs.

  6: ALL THAT JAZZ

  Tara was at last beginning to look like a teenager, even though he’d been one, it seemed, for most of his life. His physical appearance changed quite significantly during the course of his second winter in Paris. Puberty sheared the puppy fat from his features and left him with a thin, languid face that carried the same note of knowing mischievousness as that of his father. He grew several inches, while his voice dropped by an octave or two and he allowed his long pudding-bowl hair to grow into a more adult style.

  John Montague, who moved to Paris in 1960, remembers him strolling, arm-in-arm with his mother, through the streets of the city that autumn. ‘I was with them and we were walking down the rue Saint-Dominique. They spotted a house that sold caviar. Tara went in and bought a tin and he walked along eating it with his finger. He was fifteen and I’ll never forget that image of him, the very picture of a young fop, walking along, licking this caviar off his finger.’

  Paris became an even more exhilarating place for Tara in the company of Glen Kidston, a young, engine-obsessed English mod, under whose wing he would complete the transition from precocious mummy’s boy to one of the hippest cats in Swinging London. Cool was the great adulatory phrase of the day and it fitted Glen like it was custom-made. Mark Palmer remembered Glen as being withdrawn, saying very little, but with a strong aesthetic sense. He always dressed in black.

  Mark was back living with Tara, Oonagh and Miguel in their rue de l’Université flat and pretending to go to the Sorbonne. One weekend, he invited Serena Gillilan, a childhood friend from England, to come and visit him in Paris. She brought Glen, her boyfriend, who was the Eton-educated scion of a wealthy British shipbuilding and banking family whose name was famous in motor racing circles. His uncle was one of the legendary Bentley Boys from the 1930s.

  Glen’s first impression of Tara was that ‘he looked like something that had fallen from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’. He was nine years older than Tara but the pair hit it off instantly, so much so that Tara took him out that evening to Le Petit Bedon, where Tara scarfed down a plate of raw beef that he ordered in perfectly accented French. ‘He was like a king in his own terrain,’ Glen remembered. ‘He was miles ahead of his years. I’d never met anyone like him. He was completely unique.’

  Tara, similarly, was convinced that he’d made a rare connection. Glen was by far the most interesting person that he had ever met. He dressed in black, said only as much as the polite exigencies of conversation required and wore dark sunglasses that kept the world and its woes at one remove.

  Glen was one of the first wave of mods, or modernists: savants of cool jazz, who read Camus and Sartre, frequented Italian coffee bars, enjoyed movies with subtitles and were fastidious about their clothes and hair. They wore winklepicker shoes, narrow ties, drainpipe trousers and bumfreezer jackets, so called because they were cut above the derriere, and they hung out in Soho, where the music of modern jazz greats like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Chet Baker could be heard in cellar bars.

  ‘Glen was the essence of cool,’ said Hugo Williams, who remembered him at school. ‘He had this phrase that he used to say all the time: “That’s the way it goes.”’ At Eton, he was nicknamed Bugsy, after Bugsy Siegel, the charismatic, Prohibition-era mobster, whose pictures dominated his dorm wall. Much like his boyhood hero, a great many legends built up around ‘Bugsy’ Kidston. One was that he improvised a new way of clearing the high-jump bar almost ten years before Dick Fosbury made the back-first technique his own.

  ‘He always slouched around school, with this very long hair, combed straight back,’ remembered the future Mayfair tailor Rupert Lycett Green, a classmate who claimed to have witnessed Glen make sporting history. ‘This particular day, he was passing the athletics field, sort of sloping along, and he noticed all these people scissor-jumping over the high-jump bar, which Glen – despite having not the slightest interest in sports – could see was the least efficient method of getting your body over the thing. So he ran up to the bar, still in his ordinary clothes, and he threw himself backwards over it, clearing a height that no one else could reach. It was his version of the Fosbury Flop, which is what everyone does now, but it wasn’t legal then. And of course the athletics coach looked upon this as heresy and Glen wasn’t allowed to win the event. But he didn’t care. After reinventing the high jump, a lot of kids would have stuck around and tried it a few more times, basking in the glory of the thing. But that wasn’t his style. He did it once, then he just walked away. That was Glen. He was just effortlessly cool.’

  A jazz lover from childhood, Glen was a regular visitor to Paris and he was well acquainted with the city’s dark and interesting side. He became an instant guru figure to Tara, opening his ears to a different kind of music to the bubblegum pop records he’d been buying from America.

  Jazz was a freer form of music, in which the performer became the composer, and it reflected perfectly the skittish mood of a Europe freed from the terror of the Nazis. Most of the great black jazz artists of the 1950s, from Charlie Parker to Dizzy Gillespie to Louis Armstrong, spent time in Europe. Many set up home in London or Paris to escape racial discrimination in America. ‘They could be freer here,’ Glen remembered. ‘People like the great Dexter Gordon spent years in Europe. And in London and Paris there were all these great clubs where you could
listen to them perform this fantastic music live.’

  By 1960, modern jazz had been eclipsed commercially by rock and roll, the sound that a young Lennon and McCartney had just started beating out in the clubs of Hamburg, or its close cousin, rhythm and blues, the music that was inspiring the career ambitions of the teenage Jagger, Jones and Richards. Yet jazz remained infinitely cooler, especially in Paris, where it had been elevated to the level of serious art.

  The neighbourhood of Saint-Germain des Prés became synonymous with bebop – a style of playing that flourished during the first years of the Nazi occupation and that was characterized by its quick tempo and complex harmony, a happy counterpoint to the sound of German jackboots. It also chimed with the mood of existentialism in the city in the years that followed the liberation. Clubs sprouted up everywhere, sometimes in dingy basements that had held a sinister purpose during the war years. They were dark, smoke-filled places, their condensation-soaked walls covered with framed photographs of the greats who had played there. You could order the house special of chilli con carne on a baguette, with a rum and Coca-Cola, and listen to the brilliant improvisations of some of the American expat jazzmen who had chosen to exile themselves in the city.

  ‘I saw Lionel Hampton’s Big Band at the Olympia in Paris,’ Glen remembered. ‘He was a hero of mine from the 1940s, because he did boogie-woogie jazz, which, when you’re a kid, just bowls you over. The flashier, the better. The louder, the better. But for me, the best place was the Club Saint-Germain. You were paying more to get in there but you knew you were going to see five or six real giants of jazz in one night. It would be Lee Morgan and Benny Golson, with Art Blakey on drums and then on piano Bobby Timmons, who was the man for the soul stuff. These people were my heroes and I could just go along and see them.’