by Paul Howard
Tara and Nicki occupied a small room with twin bunk beds in it – ‘suitable only for children’ – but they were so enthralled with each other that they didn’t seem to mind either the witchy decor or the cramped conditions. ‘In the morning, towards eleven,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Cold Cream, ‘they would tumble out of bed in their rompers, looking like illustrations to Wee Willie Winkie as they foraged for cornflakes.’
Soon afterwards, they found more habitable lodgings. Melissa North invited them to come and live with her. She was sharing the top two floors of 33 Thurloe Street, a Georgian house opposite South Kensington tube station, with Jacquetta, another friend, named Theodora Brinckman, and Camilla Wigan, Tara’s date for the Dublin Horse Show from the previous summer.
‘I was still in love with Tara,’ Melissa remembered. ‘That was the main reason I wanted him to come and stay. I went to the other girls and said, “Tara’s living in his car,” probably exaggerating, “and I want to offer him and his girlfriend my room, which means I’ll be sleeping in the sitting room from now on,” and everyone said, “That’s cool.” I was just so enchanted to have him near me. As long as he was staying there as my guest, then he was kind of my protégé.’
It didn’t take long for Nicki to unpack her belongings. All she owned of any real value, she remembered, were two pairs of blue jeans, two pairs of flat shoes and a white coat that looked like mink but was actually nylon.
‘She seemed so much older than us,’ Melissa said, ‘even though there couldn’t have been more than a year or two between us. But she was a very sophisticated girl. And then she just blew you away with her style, which had a sort of careless quality to it. She didn’t seem to have to make much effort. She didn’t seem to own very much. But she had a real look. She was an original.
‘And I could see how absolutely and utterly in love they were with each other. They always seemed to be in bed having sex. Then they’d get up at eight o’clock at night – they’d emerge from my room, maybe to get something to eat.’
By the time they moved into Thurloe Street, Nicki had had an uneasy first meeting with her future mother-in-law, who had made her feelings about the relationship clear. ‘Oh, I was a gold digger,’ Nicki said. ‘That’s what Oonagh thought. I was after Tara’s money. Which was a joke. There wasn’t any money. Tara was seventeen. He wasn’t due to inherit anything until he was twenty-five, which was eight years away when I met him. The reason we were squatting with Tara’s friends was because we didn’t have a bean. If he wanted money, he had to go to the Guinness trustees and beg. Half of them were family members who weren’t on speaking terms with Oonagh, including Maureen, her sister, who absolutely hated her.
‘They gave him a weekly allowance, almost all of which went on petrol for the car. No one gave a thought as to what he was supposed to eat. We had one and ninepence to spend a day on food. He’d phone them up and ask for more and the answer would be no. There was a cafe in South Kensington station called the SKR, which served this awful soup and that’s what Tara and I lived on. Sometimes, if we were lucky, it was two bowls a day – one in the morning and one in the evening.’
Nicki took a job as a waitress at an all-night coffee bar near Piccadilly Circus, where her shift ended after the Tube had stopped running. Tara insisted she take a taxi home, which accounted for most of her wages, so she decided she was better off not working. At least they could be together all the time. They spent most of the bitterly cold winter of 1962 living like vagrants under the bedcovers, watching their breath fog in front of them. The soup diet helped them maintain their slender figures, but they were constantly cold.
‘We were never happier than we were at that time,’ Nicki said, ‘when we had absolutely nothing. The flat was a wonderful mess. Theodora’s dad was called Napoleon. I remember when he came to visit, the shout would go out, “Napoleon’s coming!” and suddenly Theodora was busy sweeping the stairs.
‘There was an excitement about London at that time. Rudolf Nureyev had just defected from the Soviet Union and he was performing somewhere nearby. He used to walk by our house at two o’clock every morning. He had the most extraordinary bottom any of us had ever seen. We’d hang out the window, lusting after him. It was such a fun time for us. We just laughed all the time in that house.’
An occasional visitor to 33 Thurloe Street, Nicki remembered, was a thin and slightly gawky teenager from Dartford who was going out with Camilla’s friend, Chrissie Shrimpton. Mick Jagger was living in a filthy, mould-infested flat in Edith Grove, at the less salubrious end of King’s Road, with Keith Richards and Brian Jones. They were in an R&B and Chicago blues band called The Rollin’ Stones and had a regular set, performing mostly Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley covers in the Wetherby Arms on the King’s Road. He told Tara and Nicki that they should come and see them some time.
It might not have been evident to Tara as he careened around the West End in his Alfa Romeo that winter, but Britain was on the verge of a social and cultural revolution. In October, The Beatles, having signed to EMI, released ‘Love Me Do’, a stop-start, harmonica-led pop song with cloyingly simplistic lyrics. It did slow business, peaking at number 17 in the UK singles chart.
According to Nicki, ‘Tara absolutely hated it.’
8: ONE PLUS ONE MAKES THREE
It was the year the revolution began. The year when London became the coolest point on the planet. And it kicked off with one of the coldest winters on record. It had snowed on Boxing Day 1962, just enough to add a touch of romantic sparkle to the Christmas season. But three days later, a bitter easterly wind dumped seven inches of the stuff onto the city. New Year’s Eve had an eerie, almost post-apocalyptic quality to it, with no one prepared to brave the drifts – two feet deep in places – to reach Trafalgar Square.
Then, like some hellish Christmas guest, it outstayed its welcome by about ten weeks. Roads, railway stations and airports were shut. Rubbish piled up, uncollected and stinking. Power cuts became the norm. Even the Thames froze over. You could drive up it. And people did. There was even a car rally on it.
For Londoners, it was the longest, strangest winter in living memory. In January and February 1963, the city was mostly bathed in sunshine, yet the temperature barely got above zero. Tara and Nicki spent most of January sharing each other’s body warmth under a mountain of bed sheets in Thurloe Street, their teeth chattering during the regular electricity outages. Once or twice a day, swaddled in layers of clothing, they ventured across the road to the restaurant in the tube station for a bowl of soup, making it last, so they could remain indoors for as long as possible.
Oonagh was unhappy to see her son so besotted with a girl whom she was convinced was on the make. But Tara shared her stubborn streak. She knew that the harder she pushed, the more he would resist. And who was she to give out relationship advice anyway? Three times married and with her latest consort working his way through her money like some dilettante Saudi prince. It was likely just a phase. Hadn’t Garech once eloped with one of her staff? And hadn’t that run its course, as teen romances tended to do?
But his father wasn’t prepared to wait for him to come to his senses. When Dom heard about Tara’s living arrangements, he decided that enough was enough. The boy had been running wild since he arrived in London a year earlier: tearing around the West End in a sports car, hanging out with all sorts in the disreputable clubs of Soho and now shacked up with a postman’s daughter under someone else’s roof. And still only seventeen!
Men of Dom’s stripe had warned that this would happen when the government did away with National Service: young people free to run amok. Dom may have blamed Oonagh for not taking a firmer hand in their son’s upbringing, but surely when he looked at Tara he could see something of his louche, younger self reflected back at him. Either way, he knew just the thing to stop the boy’s gallop: school.
With an optimism that seemed endearingly misplaced, Dom put Tara’s name down for Millfield, a private, co-educatio
nal boarding school in Somerset, where he could sit his A-levels that summer. But Dom’s plan to bring his son to heel by institutionalizing him was doomed.
‘Tara could hardly write,’ according to Nicki. ‘Which isn’t to say that he was illiterate. Not by any means. He read a lot. But he’d forgotten how to write because he never really needed to write. It didn’t really come up much in the course of his life. Whenever he did put something down on paper, you just couldn’t read it.’
And anyway, Tara had news for his father. He wasn’t going anywhere if it meant being separated from Nicki even for one night. ‘He said I’m not going unless I can bring my girlfriend with me,’ she remembered. ‘I think Tara wanted me to enrol in Millfield, too. Well, obviously, Oonagh and Dom said no to that one.’
Tara dug his heels in and eventually they arrived at a compromise. He would move into a rented house in Somerset, where a tutor would home-school him to sit his A-levels at Millfield that summer. If he wanted to bring Nicki along, they were happy to turn a blind eye to it. They may have figured that, torn from the excitement of the London scene, Tara and Nicki would tire of each other and the relationship would burn itself out. If that was the case, they had a shock in store.
Much as she loved London, Nicki was keen to escape the city for a while. It seemed that Tara wasn’t her only admirer. ‘The clubs in Wardour Street tended to be full of gangsters,’ she recalled, ‘or at least very unsavoury types. There was some fellow who really was not a nice person but he was interested in me and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I’d met him through Ronan O’Rahilly and he had this gang and, well, I got rather scared of him and I wanted out of London altogether.’
So Tara and Nicki decamped to Somerset at the beginning of February, while a blanket of snow still covered the country. Their dramatic disappearance from London gave rise to the rumour that the pair had been bumped off in an act of mob retribution. The two weeks they spent in the south-west of England were an extension of what their life in London had been. Snowed-in indoors, they stayed in bed, enjoying lots of sex and eating very little.
The tutor never materialized and the only book Tara opened was Angelique in Love. Once Dom’s anger had cooled – and presumably the ardour of Nicki’s gangland suitor – they quietly returned to Thurloe Street towards the end of February, just as ‘Please Please Me’, the second single by The Beatles, was shooting up the charts and ringing the bell for the start of Beatlemania. The screaming had begun in earnest and so had the era of Swinging London.
While John, Paul, George and new boy Ringo were having their hearing assailed by the advance guard of hysterical teenage fandom, Camilla Wigan’s friend Mick and his band were doing rather well for themselves, too. The Rollin’ Stones (still no ‘g’) had played their first major billed gig at the Marquee on Oxford Street on the bitterly cold night of 3 January 1963 and they’d hardly had a night off since then, touring suburban pubs and West End jazz clubs, many of which were transitioning into rhythm and blues venues. The Red Lion in Sutton, Sandover Hall in Richmond, the Flamingo Jazz Club in Soho, the Ealing Jazz Club, then back to the Marquee again: they had plenty of change to feed the electricity meter at Edith Grove that winter. Mick’s shtick of yowling out Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Richard and Fats Domino covers in a black American accent was generating something of a cult following. When the band played the Crawdaddy Club at the Station Hotel in Richmond at the beginning of March, even Liverpool’s newest hit makers had to put their heads around the door to see what all the fuss was about.
But Tara had things on his mind other than music that spring. At the end of March – just a few weeks after he turned eighteen – his girlfriend told him she was pregnant.
It was a genuine accident, according to Nicki. ‘There was a time that winter when I was very pale,’ she said. ‘I was a really, really pale shade of white, because it was a freezing cold winter and we were living on soup. Tara said, “You should take some vitamin pills.” So I did. And whatever effect they had, as soon as I started taking them, I got pregnant.’
It was plausible. Certain vitamin supplements can render the contraceptive pill ineffective. But however it happened, the immediate question for Tara and Nicki was what they were going to do about it. ‘We discussed a termination,’ she said. ‘We went to see a doctor – it was somewhere in Park Lane – to talk about our options. He neither talked me into it nor talked me out of it. He just talked through the issues involved and in the end I said no, I wasn’t going to murder this little child.’
Once she’d decided to keep the baby, Tara was thrilled. ‘Except he said, “We’ve got a problem here.”’
Which obviously meant Oonagh. They resolved to keep the news from her – at least for the time being.
*
The thaw eventually arrived. So keen was Britain to see the back of the winter that Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’ went to the top of the singles chart in March while a sheet of snow still covered everything. It was the beginning of the end of Cliff’s reign as the nation’s favourite teenage heartthrob. The future belonged, not to the country’s Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly impersonators, but to bands: particularly one, who produced a sound that became very identifiably British, though it was, in truth, a blend of rock and roll, skiffle, R&B and doo-wop, with a driving four-on-the-floor beat that originated in the clubs of Hamburg. It was known as Beat Music, or, if you wanted to be geographically pedantic about it, Merseybeat.
The Beatles spent the first six months of 1963 touring the country, performing and doing hundreds of TV, radio and newspaper interviews. And somewhere on the road, John Lennon and Paul McCartney came up with a bit of stage business that would become their trademark, standing cheek to cheek in front of the same microphone, shaking their mop hair and going ‘Wooo!’ It sent teenage girls up and down Britain into paroxysms of high-decibel delirium. Within a year, they’d be doing the same in America.
Brian Epstein didn’t have just one hit band on his hands. He had also taken over the career of Gerry and The Pacemakers, their local Liverpool rivals and fellow veterans of the Hamburg circuit, who were similarly suited and booted to resemble a variety club act. They scored number one hits with their first three singles, the first of which, ‘How Do You Do It?’, had been passed over by The Beatles. It spent three weeks at the top of the charts in April 1963 before it was knocked from its perch by ‘From Me to You’, the third single by The Beatles. As a manager, Brian Epstein couldn’t lose – for a while, he only had himself for competition.
The record companies were quick to see that there was a popular wave to be ridden and they grabbed a piece of any band that could play its instruments and had the look. And, if they happened to be from the one-time cultural dust bowl of the north, then better still. They were signed up, dispatched to the tailors, then to the recording studio to get something down on vinyl. There was an explosion of new acts of varying musical ability: The Searchers, The Hollies, The Fourmost, Freddie and The Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, The Merseybeats, The Swinging Bluejeans, The Dave Clark Five. Some lasted, some were flashes in the pan. Most people thought the whole Beat thing would be over in a year.
By the end of the summer, in addition to a highly excitable teenage fan base, The Beatles would have a second number one single, ‘She Loves You’, and a number one album, Please Please Me, more than half of whose tracks were original Lennon-McCartney compositions rather than covers of American standards. Anticipating the so-called British Invasion by a good eight months, Melody Maker pronounced in June 1963: ‘The inferiority complex that British popstars have had about American music is already starting to disappear. Because the new wave have shown that they can beat America at its own national music game.’
The sense that, culturally at least, the country was no longer America’s milksop kid brother had a powerful visual metaphor to go with it that same month – the sight of Henry Cooper, a greengrocer from Lambeth, flooring a young American braggart named Cassius Clay at Wemble
y.
John Stephen and Mary Quant had been marching to their own beat since the 1950s, refusing to slavishly follow American trends, as Britain had done for generations, and setting their own template as to what was cool. By the spring and summertime of 1963, Carnaby Street was in full swing. Like London, it was suddenly a riot of colour. Clothes had once been a largely female or a gay preoccupation; now, thousands of straight, image-conscious young men made shops with esoteric names like Adonis, Mates and Gear their Saturday afternoon mecca, including Tara, who was by now a well-known face in all of John Stephen’s shops.
Similarly, further west, on the other side of Buckingham Palace Garden, Bazaar had become a compulsory destination for young women who wanted what was quickly being defined as the Swinging London look. Dropped-waist ‘sack’ dresses. Polo-neck sweaters. Knee-high cowboy boots with short skirts. High-waisted tunic suits with tweed knickerbockers. Pinafore dresses with plunging V necks. And, of course, those ever-northward-inclining hemlines.
Mary Quant’s mini harmonized perfectly with the spirit of the times – a skirt for the girl who was liberated, fun-loving and on the Pill. All of this was seditious stuff, even in the early 1960s. Victoria Ormsby-Gore, a friend of Tara’s, who spent most of her childhood in America, returned to London as a teenager and discovered that there were firm generational battle lines on the question of what was and wasn’t ‘proper’ to wear.
‘I remember being hit over the head with umbrellas,’ she said, ‘by men in suits with bowler hats. “Disgusting! How can you go out like that?” I remember being brought to a restaurant by my father and the maître d’s hand shot out and he said, “I’m sorry, you can’t come in.” My father said, “I’ve booked. What do you mean, we can’t come in?” And the maître d’ said, “Madam’s dress does not comply.” So then there was a major scene. I was obviously devastated, but for my father, who had a very libertarian view, it became a point of principle. You can’t discriminate against people based on race, or colour, or religious belief, or what they looked like, or what they wore – that was absolutely fundamental to him. So he stood there, not backing down, and eventually we were shown to a table behind a plant!’
