I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  ‘It’s been pretty awful,’ he told the Dublin Evening Mail. ‘I’ve had to be in bed by nine o’clock most nights and ten at the very latest. I’ve hardly been at a party for weeks, but now, thank goodness, I can relax and enjoy myself for a while.’

  Asked about the prospect of going to university one day, the old-headed sixteen-year-old added, without any hint of irony: ‘I’ve lived long enough to know that in this life nothing is certain.’

  It was a subject upon which his stepfather Miguel could expound at length. But, for the moment, things appeared to be going well for Paris fashion’s newest arriviste. By the summer of 1961, he had found the premises from which he would launch his couture empire, at 11 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The location was a statement of Miguel’s ambition. Virtually every major global fashion house in the world had a presence on the street. Miguel’s first Paris salon was situated directly opposite Lanvin-Castillo and a catwalk’s length away from the offices of French Vogue. If he was going to fail as a couturier, it wasn’t going to be for the want of being noticed.

  Oonagh paid to have the retail unit fitted out in a style that was in character with the address, decorated in lush caramel and white silk and lit by an exquisite crystal chandelier, her gift to her husband to congratulate him on his arrival as a member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. At the back of the salon, she installed an indoor tropical garden, behind whose fronds – according to a New York Times article – ‘women sew to music’.

  The outlay didn’t stop there. Next, Oonagh hired Denise Hivet, the former private secretary to the Duchess of Windsor, to help publicize the new salon. The media were invited to view the place at the beginning of Paris Fashion Week. A photographer from the weekly magazine Paris Match captured several images of Tara, dressed all in black – a sign of Glen’s growing influence over him – with calf-high cowboy boots and a cigarette glowing between his fingers, while his friend, Charmian Scott, modelled a number of Maison Ferreras designs in the light of the magnificent chandelier.

  In case any of the reporters present missed the great historical significance of the moment, Miguel was on hand to remind them that he was the first American couturier to open a design house in the French capital since Main Rousseau Bocher in 1929. Then he proceeded to describe the way American women dressed as démodé, or out of fashion. ‘Society women who spend several hundred dollars on a ready-made dress have no imagination,’ he was quoted as saying in the New York Times. ‘They are lazy.’

  His clothes, he told reporters, would be an emphatic rejection of what he called the new fashion. He spoke often about his loathing for the androgyny that was creeping into women’s and men’s clothing at the beginning of the 1960s. A girl should not expect a boy to court her when she’s wearing blue jeans, he liked to say. For a young designer, on the threshold of a decade that would revolutionize the way both sexes dressed, his instincts seemed woefully out of step with the times.

  On 28 July 1961, with the last coat of paint barely dry on the salon, Miguel presented his first Paris collection. He was true to his promise that his clothes would represent a return to old-fashioned values, with a heavy emphasis on plastron fronts, architectural seaming, tunic overskirts, slightly raised waistlines and sleeves puffed to the elbow. The collection reflected his love, too, for full-length evening dresses, which, he said, made women feel more feminine and men feel more masculine. One of the few genuine innovations was a round-toe women’s shoe with a medium Cuban heel, a nod to his claimed heritage, while Irish tweed was also a theme, a gesture to the woman who was, after all, paying for all of this.

  That night, he, along with Oonagh, Garech and Tara, celebrated with a champagne reception for 350 guests aboard a Bâteau Mouche on the River Seine. The invitees included Jeannette Edris, the American socialite who was married to the politician and philanthropist Winthrop Rockefeller, and the Marchioness of Queensbury. Fireworks spelled out Miguel’s name in the night sky over Paris. Garech would remember the event primarily for its vulgarity. ‘In those days, the general opinion was that the Bâteaux Mouches destroyed the Seine,’ he said. ‘It demonstrates Miguel’s bad taste in some sense that he chose to have his party on one of them.’

  The reaction to his collection was mixed. In some newspapers, he was hailed as the new Balenciaga; in others, he was dismissed as a simple and unimaginative fabric cutter using his rich wife’s money to indulge his dreams.

  The most important question was contained in the subtext of most of the coverage: what was all of this costing Oonagh?

  ‘A vast amount of money,’ according to Garech. Some reports suggested that it may have been as much as £6 million by the time the shutters were finally pulled down on the place. ‘For which she got no benefit or pleasure,’ he added.

  •

  Tara had started driving Miguel’s cars. No lessons. No driving licence. No insurance. It may have been a small act of rebellion against the man he refused to regard as his stepfather. More likely, the intention was to impress Glen, who knew everything there was to know about cars, except how to drive one. It started that summer, in Sainte-Maxime, on the French Riviera, where Tara was holidaying with Oonagh and Miguel – a few weeks after the launch of Maison Ferreras. He invited Glen and Serena to come and stay.

  ‘The thing about Tara was that you never thought about how old he was,’ Glen remembered, ‘so it never crossed your mind that he was only sixteen and shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of a car. The first night I got there, I remember he was showing me around his mother’s place. We were looking in the garage and there was an Aurelia Spyder B24 in there and also a Chevy Corvette, which was Miguel’s. The keys were in it, so we just jumped in and off we went. It was automatic, very squishy, great engine, though not state of the art steering-wise. But Tara could handle it, even at that age. He was what I would call a natural driver.

  ‘He’d take the Lincoln Continentals out, too. Bear in mind, they were very large cars: you’re talking about the kind of car that Kennedy was shot in. They were easy enough to drive if you were in Paris, where it was all wide boulevards and straight lines. But in the south of France, it was all twists and turns. But even going downhill, at eighty miles per hour, Tara could handle those big cars.’

  He had the same fearlessness as his half-brother, Gay, who by that time was riding horses again in defiance of doctors’ orders. Serena remembered Tara driving a speedboat on adrenalin-fuelled trips to Saint-Raphaël, fourteen miles up the Mediterranean coast, thrilled by the danger of it. ‘He used to cross the bay in the dark,’ she recalled, ‘which was such a dangerous thing to do. I’ve always been scared of water, so I’d go in the car and I’d arrange to meet him in Saint-Raphaël. Tara was like one of those fearless toddlers. He was completely unafraid of anything.’

  Several of his friends visited him in France that summer, including Nicholas Gormanston. They went to the Antibes Jazz Festival. ‘We saw Ray Charles play,’ Nicholas remembered. ‘The man was strung out on heroin. He had to be carried onto the stage by two minders and placed in a sitting position at the piano. Then he started moving: you know, he did that nautical roll thing. Then he started to play. It was extraordinary to watch.’

  Tara returned to Ireland for the Dublin Horse Show in August 1961. The social diarists couldn’t help but comment on the world of difference that had opened up between Tara and his brother. On the night the festival started, Garech was at a fleadh ceoil in Miltown Malbay, County Clare, according to the Dublin Evening Mail, and dancing the Walls of Limerick. Meanwhile, Tara – ‘resplendent in tight trousers, an electric-blue shirt and a maroon tie’ – spent the night touring the round of parties and embassy balls with his date, Camilla Wigan, an English aristocrat and debutante.

  The new decade was two years old, yet the Fifties were only just beginning to cede to what would be remembered as the Sixties. Fashions were changing, the traditional giving way to the new. The conflict between conservative and modern values was neatly encapsulat
ed in the moment when Tara’s date was refused entry to the Kildare Hunt Cotton Dance in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. She and her friend, Camilla Rumbold, were deemed to be improperly dressed. ‘I’m not particularly worried,’ Tara told London’s Evening Standard, before the three headed off into the night. ‘But it seems the people on the door did not like my friends wearing slacks.’

  David Mlinaric, future friend of the Stones and interior decorator to the stars, sampled the hospitality at Luggala for the first time that week at the invitation of his friend, Garech.

  ‘It was always this mix of people,’ he said, ‘which is what made those parties so interesting. Oonagh understood that. And she had this thing about not being boring. In London, if you went to dinner in Eaton Square or something, I just remember walking around the square a couple of times to get my courage up before ringing the bell, because it was so dry and boring and the people were sort of formal and tense all the time.

  ‘English life at that point was very hierarchic. And very, very grey. And I was very shy of it. I think most people who’d been to boarding school came out pretty shy on the whole. I mean, we were extremely well educated, but there wasn’t much in the way of knowing how the world worked or how social life worked. There were all sorts of restrictions or things to make you feel inhibited. But there was none of that at Luggala.’

  Candida Betjeman was back for more that August in spite of her mother’s continuing misgivings about the Guinnesses and their reputedly loose ways. She could see how much Tara had grown up in the previous twelve months: from giggling boy to switched-on teenager. ‘We smoked a joint,’ she remembered. ‘I’m sure it was the first joint I ever smoked. It was with Tara and it was on that louche weekend at Luggala. So it turned out that my mum was quite right!’

  •

  Miguel was undeterred by the modest notices his first collection received and was soon talking about opening a second salon in England. In September 1961, Oonagh, Miguel and Tara were back in London, toasting the success of Maison Ferreras with a party in Claridge’s. The suite that Oonagh booked for the event was so full, the newspapers reported, that guests had to shout to be heard. They included Caroline and Israel, as well as Oonagh’s cousin, Lady Jeanne Campbell, who was there with her future husband, Norman Mailer. Also there was Talitha Pol, an attractive, Indonesian-born socialite, who, like Tara, would go on to become one of the ‘faces’ of Swinging London, a friend of Mick Jagger and the wife of John Paul Getty Jr, heir to what was believed to be the biggest privately held fortune in the world.

  A journalist from the Evening News likened Miguel to the Communist revolutionary who, two years earlier, had seized control of what Miguel still claimed was the country of his birth. ‘When I told my Cuban host,’ the newspaper’s social diarist reported, ‘that he has been described as the Castro of haute couture, he laughed and replied, “Castro is top man at the moment!”’

  Miguel must have felt that he was, too.

  When the summer of 1961 ended, Tara returned to Paris for what would be his final months at the rue de l’Université. Mark Palmer had left to go to Oxford, but September brought a new wave of upper-class English girls to the city’s finishing schools. At sixteen, he was now a year closer in age to the students at Mademoiselle Anita’s and Madame Fleurie’s. Totally at ease around women, he toured the various schools visiting girls he’d met that summer on the London social circuit.

  It was at Madame Fleurie’s that he became friends with Jacquetta Lampson, the daughter of Sir Miles Lampson, the former British Ambassador to Egypt who had overseen the abdication of King Farouk. Jacquetta, a society beauty who would become a muse for Lucian Freud, had been at boarding school with Tara’s old girlfriend, Melissa. ‘He came around one day to see someone else,’ Jacquetta remembered. ‘I think it was Sophie Litchfield, whom he was friends with in London. Anyway, he swooped us up and we went out that evening and it was the beginning of the whole fun time we had in Paris.’

  They followed the tramlines around the city that Tara had laid down with his other friends. As much as he loved blues and modern jazz, he remained partial to pop music. He still had his boxes of 45s and his portable record player.

  Noticing how enamoured she was by it, Tara told her to keep it. ‘He just said, “Oh, you like it? You can have it,” and he just gave it to me, which was very much Tara. People looking at him from the outside might have thought he was spoiled because he had absolutely everything. But he wasn’t corrupted by it. He’d give everything away.’

  He took her to the Blue Note and they tried to affect the cool poses of the jazz players.

  On those nights when Jacquetta and her friends couldn’t escape from the finishing school, they crept downstairs, slipped the catch on the door and smuggled Tara into their dorm room. ‘Which was absolutely not allowed, but Madame Fleurie would be sleeping. We did things like the Ouija board, which Tara also introduced us to. We would get terribly spooked as the glass started moving. We never knew who was doing it. I suspect it was Tara. But as the glass whizzed across the table, we were absolutely excited by it but also scared out of our wits.

  ‘Then one of us would sneak down to the fridge, where we’d hidden some beers, and we would make a night of it. It was terribly naughty. And poor Madame Fleurie. She must have had a terribly difficult job, because she was taking all of this money from our parents and, once Tara entered our lives, we were just living it up in the most spectacular way. And shortly after we left Paris, the school actually finished up. So Tara played probably a significant part in bringing Madame Fleurie’s to a close!’

  By the autumn of 1961, his mother’s marriage was once again in trouble. It’s conceivable that Tara spent so much time at Madame Fleurie’s to avoid going back to the flat and witnessing another of Oonagh and Miguel’s scenes. ‘They would have these tremendously passionate rows,’ Jacquetta remembered, ‘where shoes were flying across this wonderfully ornate, rather marvellous drawing room. And Tara would just be there, smoking, saying, “Oh, don’t worry. A shoe or two, that’s fine.”’

  At that time, Oonagh was drinking heavily. ‘A bottle of Haig Dimple whisky a day,’ according to John Montague, who saw her regularly in Paris during that period. ‘It was on the table in the morning.’

  Her drinking reflected her increasing unhappiness. The business was haemorrhaging money. According to Garech, she had also found out about Miguel’s secret sexual life, but she was by now massively invested in him, if not emotionally, then financially.

  ‘There was also the problem that she couldn’t prove adultery,’ Garech said, ‘because he only ever went to bed with men. If she could catch him in a hotel room with a woman, then it was an open and shut case. But if he was in a hotel room with a man, he could argue that they were sharing the cost of a room. It wasn’t considered irrefutable evidence that they were having a sexual affair, which it would have been if she’d caught him in a room with a woman. That was the law.’

  Jacquetta sensed a loneliness in Tara that autumn, as his mother’s time was increasingly taken up with her foundering marriage and business. ‘Oonagh clearly adored Tara,’ she said, ‘as he adored her, but in those days people didn’t have the same obsession with their children as we do now. Oonagh would lay on everything for us. I remember she used to say, “You must have a nice time,” and that was always the priority. At the same time, Tara was ignored at times. Oonagh and Miguel were very much getting on with their lives.’

  Then an incident happened, which, according to Tara’s wife, Nicki, caused a fracture in his relationship with his mother. On 17 October 1961, Paris exploded in violence, after the French police opened fire on a demonstration of 30,000 Algerians who were marching for independence. At least forty demonstrators were killed and the riots that resulted continued for days. Oonagh and Miguel were temporarily out of town and they left Tara in the care of Deacon, who had popped out just before the rioting started and was unable to get back to the flat. Tara lay in his bed, according to Nicki,
listening to the sound of bomb blasts and gunfire outside. ‘It was in cloud cuckoo land they lived,’ she said

  When they returned to Ireland at the end of 1961 for the traditional Christmas at Luggala, Tara had made up his mind that he wasn’t going back to Paris. He didn’t wish to be a witness to the slow unravelling of his mother’s third marriage. He preferred to be in London around Glen, Mark and the rest of his friends. Uncannily intuitive, perhaps he sensed, too, something in the air over Albion. It may not have been obvious to many people at the start of January 1962, but the city was about to become the cultural focus of the world again, the capital of cool. And Tara was about to become one of its best-known faces.

  7: VENUS IN BLUE JEANS

  London had no idea what was about to hit it. The decade may have been two years old, but the revolution in music, fashion, attitudes and behaviour that would come to be defined as the Sixties was not much in evidence in January 1962, when Tara moved into the flat his father shared with Sally in Eaton Square, Belgravia.

  London in the 1950s was a bleak and sunless place; in 1953, a full eight years after the defeat of the Nazis, the population were still eating rationed food, relieving themselves in outdoor loos and negotiating their way around the bomb craters left by the Luftwaffe.

  ‘You’d see houses that were blown wide open,’ remembered David Mlinaric, who was at art college at the time. ‘The top or the side of the building would be missing. You could see a fireplace up there with a little armchair next to it and the rest of the house was gone. Those kind of things were a feature of London until well into the 1950s.’