I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  His obsession with the music was quickly shared by Tara. ‘Glen became a kind of guru to him,’ Serena Gillilan recalled. ‘He took him to all these fabulous modern jazz places – dives, basically – where all these black musicians used to come from America to play. If you were interested in jazz at all, these people were legends to you.’

  Even for someone who had seen and done a lot more than the average young man of fifteen, the new world that suddenly opened up to Tara must have been beyond exciting. Glen, Tara and Mark’s faces became known in famous venues such as La Bohème, Le Chat qui Peche and the Blue Note, where they first saw Bud Powell, one of the founding fathers of modern jazz and perhaps the greatest bebop pianist of them all. Powell, a tortured veteran of New York’s Birdland, had just arrived in Paris. The old virtuosity had left him by then, a result of drug, alcohol and psychiatric problems, but his name was still revered.

  Tara started to add the latest jazz records to his orders from America. ‘He started off with Dave Brubeck,’ Glen recalled. ‘He was really just putting his toe in the water. Serious jazz people looked down their noses at Brubeck because he was pop and he didn’t pretend to be avant-garde, but he was good. And Tara was a kid who knew his own taste.’

  Soon, a new musical sound began to emerge from his bedroom in the rue de l’Université. The saccharine harmonies of ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’ and ‘A Teenager in Love’ were replaced by the melodic soloings of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the sunny, lyrical sound of Clifford Brown with Strings.

  They’d sit in his room, Glen teaching his young friend how to play chess, or maybe telling him about cars, while Tara ate thick slices of French bread, generously smeared with GYE, or Guinness Yeast Extract, an Irish version of Marmite, and listened to the syncopated rhythm played out on the trumpet, the piano and the sax.

  •

  Tara found a girlfriend that autumn. His first girlfriend. Her name was Melissa North, and she was an English country girl attending Mademoiselle Anita’s, a language school that was run out of a convent in Paris. She was first attracted to Mark, a posh boy with a studied coolness: red velvet suit, long hair and untalkative in a way that added to his allure. Saying very little – or, better still, nothing at all – was an irresistible quality for teenage girls who’d grown up worshipping the sulking images of Marlon Brando and James Dean. Mark and Melissa became friends, then one day he brought her to the rue de l’Université.

  ‘It was the most exotic thing I’d ever seen in my life,’ she recalled. ‘First of all, there was Oonagh, this tiny, ravishing, blonde woman who had shoes to match every dress, whether it was by Givenchy or Balenciaga. My own mother was a sort of gardener who wore my father’s shirts all the time. So Oonagh was unlike anyone I’d ever met. And she was married to this man who I’d heard was a dress designer and who liked to be bought very, very shiny sports cars, which he then immediately crashed. He was sort of boyish and petulant and they made a very exotic couple.

  ‘And then the other person who lived in the house was Tara, who was fifteen. The first two things that stood out about him for me were his voice and his laugh. He had this divine laugh and this rather sort of husky, rather sort of sophisticated, slightly drawly voice, so that everything he said seemed to be terribly witty. That was his style. And I fell madly in love with him.’

  At sixteen years old, her only romantic reference points came from pop music and films. Their love was the stuff of old Everlys 45s: full of yearning, but innocent and unconsummated. It didn’t progress beyond holding hands and kissing. ‘He never proposed having sex with me. There was a lot of lying on the bed, but there was no taking our clothes off.’

  They also listened to a lot of music at a very high volume. Like many others, he discovered the crossover between modern jazz and blues via Ray Charles. ‘He liked a lot of black musicians that I didn’t know,’ said Melissa. ‘John Lee Hooker. Howlin’ Wolf. And I remember Sam Cooke. “Only Sixteen”. “Chain Gang”. All this music was very new. He would receive packages that were obviously being sent from America. We’d sit in Tara’s room and listen to them until four o’clock in the morning, whacking up the sound.

  ‘And Oonagh never had any complaints. None at all. Tara was a mummy’s boy, but a mummy’s boy who told mummy what to do. Oonagh would come into the room at three in the morning. Tara smoked Salem cigarettes. Menthol. Oonagh would saunter in, clouds of smoke everywhere, very, very loud Howlin’ Wolf or whatever it was, and Tara would say, “Not now, Mum!” and she’d leave the room! In the Buckinghamshire countryside where I grew up, fifteen-year-old boys were like children. And they did what they were told. I was just amazed at this.’

  Like Tara’s other Paris friends, Melissa became quickly acculturated into the way things were done at the rue de l’Université. These new people she’d met seemed to exist in their own time zone. Soon, she was eating dinner around midnight with Tara, Miguel and Oonagh, in restaurants that were so exclusive their numbers were ex-directory. Or she was exploring the below-stairs Parisian jazz scene in the company of Tara, Mark and – whenever he happened to be in town – Glen, watching these impossibly cool musicians do their thing, then catching a taxi to Madame Buttercup’s Chicken Shack in Montparnasse, where Bud Powell was the house pianist and where customers could eat fried chicken and pork ribs while silently checking each other out.

  The place was a particular favourite of Tara’s. The proprietor, Buttercup herself, was an obese black woman called Altevia Edwards, who was Powell’s business manager and common-law wife, and who reputedly took all of his money and kept him locked up in a drugged-out state of dependence in the home they’d made for themselves in the Hotel La Louisiane. The nightly crowd would sit transfixed by the spontaneous brilliance of Powell’s playing, then, abruptly, mid-improvisation, the music would stop, and Powell was fast asleep at the piano, an apparent consequence of his washing down the tranquillizers he took for his depression with his beloved vin rouge. ‘He’d be playing the most wonderful piano any of us had ever heard,’ said Melissa, ‘then suddenly he’d go plonk and have a little snooze at the piano. Then he’d wake up again and go back to playing this fantastic jazz.’

  It wasn’t long before Mademoiselle Anita came to hear about Melissa’s nocturnal life. One night, one of the nuns from the convent was detailed to follow her. Melissa was observed ducking into one particularly disreputable dive in the company of two long-haired boys in velvet suits. She was summoned by the Mademoiselle, who told her that the boys with whom she was spending her time were mal élevé, or badly brought up. To which she replied: ‘One is a baronet and page to the Queen and the other is the son of a member of the House of Lords. How can they be described as mal élevé?’

  Even the threat of expulsion didn’t dissuade her from returning every day to the rue de l’Université flat, then out to wherever the night took them. She was having too much fun. ‘Oonagh would take us out for dinner at the George V,’ she recalled. ‘She’d be wearing one of her Balenciaga dresses with the tiny, matching shoes. Tara would wear his green velvet suit. Mark would wear his red velvet suit. And I was the dowdy one in the company of these terribly glamorous people.

  ‘Miguel was like the fourth child at the table. I was amazed that a grown man would make a scene in a restaurant like he always did in the George V. He’d get up and he’d throw his chair on the floor and it’d be, “This is disgusting” or, “The service here is a disgrace!” and Oonagh would just giggle. She thought it was funny – the car crashes, the dramas, the sort of strutting, the silliness. He was like her pet. The more silly and dramatic and spoiled he was, the more she just laughed it off.

  ‘I don’t think he was very bright, but he was rather gorgeous, I remember, and he was spoilt rotten. He was always showing off his new clothes, or his new, shiny cars, which lasted all of twelve days, then they were smashed, and then Oonagh would buy him another one.’

  Tara, she remembered, viewed Miguel’s behaviour with an attitude of bemused detachm
ent. ‘In his own way, he thought it was funny, too. Miguel’s fits and Miguel’s clothes and Miguel’s car crashes. Clearly, he didn’t like him, but he was also this incredibly non-judgemental person. In a very laconic way, he would say, “Oh, yes, Miguel’s car – this one’s gone now.” Or it was, “Miguel’s six new suits are very nice,” but not in a jealous way. It was never, “I can’t believe my mother keeps buying cars for this ridiculous, spoiled, South American gigolo.” It was always ironical and then with that great laugh.’

  Though she was still only sixteen and not yet wise to the ways of the world, she formed the impression very quickly that her boyfriend’s stepfather was gay. ‘One just felt that because you had to spend hours admiring his clothes. And he was always saying things like, “You must wear the emerald green tonight, Oonagh.” He’d sort of choose what she wore. And she loved that.’

  In fact, Miguel had a seamstress’s dummy made to his wife’s precise measurements, so he could work on clothes for her whenever business took him away from Paris. ‘He takes my body with him everywhere he goes,’ Oonagh told the Daily Mirror in 1960. ‘When he has an odd moment or two, he works on one of his creations. He designs everything I wear.’

  Melissa found the dynamic between them compelling to watch. ‘I couldn’t say whether she was in love with him,’ she said. ‘I was a sixteen-year-old girl with no experience. But she certainly adored him, because she never refused him anything. He would come to her and he would say, “I want to go gambling. Give me some money,” or something like that. And she’d just open her wallet and give him some money and then he’d disappear into the night, probably to look for boys.’

  •

  In October 1960, during a visit to New York with his wife, Miguel outlined his ambitious plans to Women’s Wear Daily, the international fashion bible. He was planning to go into business with Jacqueline, Comtesse de Ribes, who had acquired a three-storey building at 55 avenue George V to house his Maison Ferreras. At around the same time, he told the Sunday Express that his wife was ‘not involved in the new venture, either financially or in any other way’. It was yet another of Miguel’s outrageous fictions. Maison Ferreras was established through the medium of a Canadian company in which his wife had a five-million-dollar holding. Oonagh wasn’t just involved in Maison Ferreras – as would become clear in time, Oonagh was Maison Ferreras.

  On a visit to New York that autumn, she was content to play the part of the supportive, older wife on the arm of the hot-tempered, young dress designer, whose genius would soon be apparent to the world. She stood beside him, beaming proudly, while he announced to the American press that Maison Ferreras would present its first collection in the spring of 1961.

  While in New York, Oonagh got to visit Caroline Blackwood, who had married the composer Israel Citkowitz and had just given birth to her first child, a daughter named Natalya. Oonagh also attended the triumphant opening night of Brendan Behan’s The Hostage at the Cort Theatre on Broadway, with Garech, who flew to New York for the occasion.

  Tara remained in Paris, in the care of Deacon, who had returned to Paris as his tutor and was preparing him for his O-levels. Dom had elicited a promise from his son that he would sit his exams the following June, though Tara continued to keep essentially nocturnal hours, rarely going to bed before five o’clock in the morning and never surfacing before one o’clock in the afternoon.

  Inevitably, given how pervasive drugs were in the jazz clubs, it wasn’t long before Tara discovered for the first time the pleasures of getting high. Pills and dope were part of the modern jazz scene in Paris. For the equivalent of fifteen bob, or 75p, you could buy a mille, a matchbook filled with some illicit delight that could be put into a cigarette. Tara smoked his first joint in Paris. Later still, he discovered poppers, or amyl nitrate, which were enormously popular in the clubs of Paris. They always sent Tara into convulsions of laughter.

  In December 1960, he returned to Ireland with Oonagh and Miguel for Christmas. Brendan Behan was back in the house as the toast of the Great White Way. He had fallen off the wagon in spectacular fashion in New York, but he was back on the dry again for now. It would be his final sober Christmas.

  One thing that was clear to everyone at Luggala that Christmas was the extent to which Tara and Garech’s lives had diverged. Tara adored his older brother and the feeling was mutual, but their lifestyles couldn’t have been more different.

  ‘There were six years between them, but they could have been from different generations,’ said Nicholas Gormanston, who was invited to Luggala as Garech’s friend but soon discovered he had far more in common with his jazz- and blues-loving little brother. ‘At Luggala, you had a very straightforward formal dinner with his mother and everybody sitting down in dinner jackets. And Tara usually had some pretty girls over from England. And then, after dinner was finished, Tara and Garech would go their separate ways. Garech got into his Aran sweater and his Donegal tweed trousers and he went, with his little crowd, to a cottage in the grounds, which was designed like a Famine-era peasant’s cottage, with a cauldron over a fire, and people listened to traditional Irish music and danced. Tara got into his Levi’s and he went into his own private sitting room, which had an old-fashioned gramophone in it, and he’d listen to jazz and blues and drink Cuba Libre, which was white rum and Coca-Cola – absolutely disgusting – and smoke the most wonderful dope.

  ‘Even though I was the same age as Garech, I was far more interested in music from America and that’s what Tara had. I liked black blues music because I was brought up in the States. Then, in art school, I got into jazz. I said to Tara that I liked John Coltrane. He said, “No, no – you’ve got to listen to Ray Charles!” And, of course, he was right!’

  By the age of fifteen, Tara had learned a great many things, one of which was how to roll a good joint. ‘He introduced me to Durban Poison, which was grass that was imported in sherry bottles. It smelled of sherry. We smoked it that Christmas at Luggala. After Oonagh’s gracious dinner, we got stoned on it in Tara’s room, listening to rhythm and blues.

  ‘He was terrific company. He swore like a Glasgow docker as well. There was a famous story about him in Claridge’s as a child when he caused a scene by shouting, “I asked for cold vichyssoise, not hot, you cunt!” People dropped their spoons. And of course when they looked around, there was this kid who looked like something from the Westminster Choir. I don’t know where he picked it up from. I expect it was Brendan Behan.’

  Because he came across as so worldly wise, there was a tendency to forget sometimes that Tara was still essentially a child. When they returned to Paris in January, he badgered his mother to take him to see Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a movie so terrifying that there were reports of people fainting while watching the iconic shower scene. Because it carried an adult rating, Oonagh had to smuggle Tara into the cinema under her coat. ‘The movie started and very quickly he discovered that he didn’t like it very much,’ according to Tara’s son, Dorian, who heard the story from his grandmother. ‘He said, “Mummy, I think I’d like to go,” so they stood up to leave. But on the way out, there was all this booing and hissing from the other cinemagoers, who didn’t approve of my grandmother bringing a child in to see it.’

  Naturally, Oonagh thought it hilarious.

  Oonagh’s main focus in the early months of 1961 was helping Miguel to get Maison Ferreras up and running. Jacqueline de Ribes dropped out of the picture for reasons that were never clear and Miguel failed to present a spring collection as promised. Instead, he and Oonagh spent the early months of 1961 searching for premises with a prestigious address that matched his view of himself as the next Christian Dior. The search was suspended for a week in February, when Oonagh rushed back to England to visit Gay, who had fractured his spine for the second time in his career when he was thrown from a horse at Hurst Park. At the age of thirty-one, Oonagh’s eldest son, who was preparing to ride in the 1961 Grand National, was told by doctors never to race again – advice he wou
ld ignore for another four years.

  While Oonagh and Miguel were busy with the fashion business, Tara was left mostly to his own devices and he continued his rounds of the city’s jazz dives, though this time without his girlfriend. Melissa ignored Mademoiselle Anita’s injunction to stay away from her mal élevé English friends and she was expelled.

  ‘It was referred to as being sacked,’ she recalled. ‘I was sacked from Mademoiselle Anita’s. I was coming home at four o’clock in the morning and probably not being very attentive in school. And because I was sacked from Mademoiselle Anita’s, the admiral’s widow with whom I was staying as a paying guest, sacked me as well. So I was sent back to England in disgrace. And I’ll never forget the sadness I felt being parted from Tara and from Mark.

  ‘When you’re young, and you’ve grown up, first in the countryside, then at a posh boarding school with lots of other people from exactly the same background as you, well, your life has been rather sheltered. So when, at the age of sixteen, you meet extraordinary people, you think that there are probably hundreds of people in the world just like that, because you don’t have a context. Tara and Mark were the most glamorous and extraordinary pair of boys I’d ever met. And I thought, oh, this must be what it’s like to be a grown-up. Then you go out into the world and you realize that people like Tara and Mark were so extraordinarily rare that you were probably never going to meet anyone like them again. And I never did.’

  •

  The peer’s son who refused to go to Eton remained a source of fascination for the British and Irish press. At sixteen, Tara was a media celebrity in his own right and newspapers carried occasional updates on his father’s efforts to get him to sit his exams. In the summer of 1961, it was reported that he had taken his O-levels. Whether this was true or not remains a subject of conjecture. None of his family or friends can recall him ever sitting exams or receiving results. But Tara told a journalist that he did, while describing how difficult the experience had been for him.