I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  Like the front-of-house staff in upmarket restaurants, the mainstream fashion industry initially scoffed at the new clothes. But eventually they had no choice but to copy what was happening on Carnaby Street and the King’s Road.

  By the summer of 1963, all of the ingredients that went into making London the hip capital of the world were in the pot and coming to a furious boil: music, clothes, contraception and a thousand or so Beautiful People who were determined to enjoy every minute of their freedom.

  And against this backdrop, Tara, who had just turned eighteen, a baby by the standard of the times, was coming to terms with the fact that he would soon have a baby of his own.

  •

  Whenever the prospect of being a father became too much for him, he could at least escape in the car. Behind the wheel of his Alfa Romeo, he could banish his fears about the future and focus instead on the speedometer and the road ahead. There was only one way he liked to drive and that was fast. ‘He used to drive through Piccadilly,’ according to Melissa North, who shared the car with him many times, ‘and he’d see if he could get the car up to one hundred and ten miles per hour.’

  He especially loved the drive west through Hammersmith to London Airport, now Heathrow, one of the few places where you could order a cooked breakfast – or roast beef and Brussels sprouts, if you were in the mood – in the early hours after the Soho clubs had closed. He timed his journey there and he timed his journey back, a Chuck Berry record on the turntable, maybe a little John Lee Hooker, perhaps a joint burning between his fingers as he steered, running red lights and laughing excitedly if he managed to set a new personal best time.

  He and Glen had become good friends with Camilla Wigan’s boyfriend, another cool customer named Martin Wilkinson, who shared their interest in fast cars, rhythm and blues music and smart clothes. When Martin started dating Tara’s housemate, their lives sort of bled into each other. ‘Tara appeared in my life fully formed,’ he remembered, ‘as if from an egg. I mean, obviously, he had to have evolved, because he must have been a child once. But he had this quality about him – it was as if he’d already lived several lives before he got to you. He had the kind of self-confidence that derives from a lifetime of experience. And he obviously got that from all of the adventures he had travelling the world with his mother, the range of things he must have seen, the very sophisticated people he must have met.

  ‘At the same time he was totally unselfconscious. He dressed in a way that was very different. I remember we were trying to be like that – me and about five or six of my friends. We were trying to find a style and he was there already.

  ‘And Glen, his friend, was a singular and extraordinary man. In a way, he was the perfect older companion for a teenager like Tara. He probably modelled himself a bit on James Dean or one of the characters he played. Very shy – he always spoke into his chest – but very cool. And he always wore black. He was what we would have called a Beat really.’

  Tara, Glen and Martin were on the same wavelength when it came to all of the things that mattered to them: clothes, music, and especially cars. Martin was something of an adrenalin junkie himself, having struck out for Spain as a teenager to try to become a bullfighter. They sharpened their driving skills at Brands Hatch, the racing circuit in Kent that would host its first British Grand Prix in 1964. For a fee, you could drive the track in your own car, hitting speeds and performing manoeuvres that would have got you arrested on a public road.

  They went to the motor shows at Earls Court, to admire the latest, state-of-the-art automobiles on revolving platforms: the Vauxhall Viva, the Hillman Imp, the Mercedes 600, the S-Type Jaguar, the Aston Martin, the BMW Grand Tourer, the Rover 2000, the Austin 1800 and the NSU Spider, with its revolutionary rotary engine.

  ‘I wanted to be a racing driver from very early on,’ Martin remembered, ‘and it was the same for Tara. The difference was that he had access to all this money to indulge it. Glen and I were looking at these cars and, you know, sort of dreaming. Tara could write a cheque and drive any one of them away. Tara had the Alfa Romeo, I had a Mini Cooper and Glen had a particular make of Lancia that was very rare at the time. We used to go for long drives and there was a sort of lingua franca that developed between the three of us, just from admiring the way one or other of us was driving, maybe even criticizing how you took a particular line.

  ‘We’d go out to Gerrards Cross, before the motorway was built. We’d go out past London Airport and we’d do a big circle about fifteen miles wide, pretty much smoking dope all the way. And every corner, it was like, “I’m going to take it like this” – you know, we were like wine buffs discussing a good vintage. It was about the way the car moved, the line you took, the sound of the engine. And, of course, the speed.’

  Breaking the speed limit gave vent to feelings of aggression for which young males of their generation had few other outlets. ‘Unlike our parents and our grandparents, we had no war to fight. You simply cannot overstate the significance of that. We never took much account, if any, of consequences.

  ‘To us, taking a Mini Cooper around Belgrave Square, through the rush-hour traffic on Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly to Soho, at eighty or ninety miles per hour, without touching anything or anyone, was a poetic gesture, rather than a lunatic speed-addict’s unconscious attempt to kill himself.’

  Yet, as the petrol station attendant had warned Glen a year earlier, there were consequences to tearing around the roads at high speed, even if they chose not to consider them. They’d all suffered bumps and knocks, some even worse. Michael Beeby had started going out with Tara’s cousin, Lady Henrietta Guinness, and the couple were lucky to escape unhurt early that summer when Michael rolled her powder-blue Mini Cooper onto its roof in Putney. The next time they had a crash, they wouldn’t be so fortunate.

  ‘Mike was the most dangerous driver I met,’ according to Glen Kidston. ‘He had no fear. But then we didn’t really either, even though everybody I watched racing cars while I was growing up was killed. One by one, they all died.’

  But for a young man like Tara, facing the very sobering prospect of becoming a father later in the year, the notion of the road, even with all of its attendant dangers, was very liberating. When he felt the weight of his impending responsibility pressing down on him, he could do something impulsive, like jump into the car and hop across to France on a Channel ferry. One night, Melissa’s boyfriend, a young architect named Tchaik Chassay, was in the house in Thurloe Street, extolling the wonders of the 700-year-old Chartres Cathedral, one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in Europe.

  ‘We decided that we were going to go to see it,’ Tchaik remembered. ‘We might have been smoking something.’

  Early the following morning, when the dope fog had cleared, Tara was waiting outside, warming the engine for the drive. ‘We had breakfast in the SKR with the car ticking over outside. By the time we’d finished our breakfast, it was ready to drive.

  ‘We got to France, we went to his mother’s place in the rue de l’Université. Oonagh had bought Miguel this incredible new car, which was white, and Miguel told Tara he could borrow it. We jumped in, top down, and drove to Chartres. I remember people just staring at us in this car in absolute amazement. We felt like film stars.

  ‘When we arrived in Chartres, there was suddenly a smell of burning and we didn’t know what it was. It turned out that there was no oil in the car and we’d burned the engine out.’

  Tara couldn’t keep the smile from his face as he dropped the keys into Miguel’s hand.

  •

  By the June of 1963, Nicki had started to show and they realized that it wouldn’t be possible to conceal her pregnancy for very much longer. They made up their minds to tell Oonagh in July while they were visiting her in her holiday home in Sainte-Maxime. Nicki braced herself for her reaction.

  The summer of 1963 was, fittingly enough, a season for scandal. In the first week of June, John Profumo, Britain’s Secretary of State for War,
admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a West End call girl whose affections he happened to be sharing with a Soviet spy named Yevgeny Ivanov. At around the same time, back in Ireland, Tara’s brother Garech was embroiled in a tabloid intrigue of his own. At a traditional music festival in County Mayo, he had enjoyed a brief dalliance with a married mother of three. Now, her solicitor husband was suing him for criminal conversation, an ancient common law action that allowed cuckolded husbands to sue adulterers for damages. Oonagh was sufficiently tickled by the story to stick the newspaper clipping about it into the family album. Her reaction to Tara’s news was rather different.

  As Nicki anticipated, Oonagh was convinced that she had become pregnant deliberately to ensnare her son and get her hands on a chunk of Guinness money. She urged them to consider their options again. Tara was too young to be a father, she argued.

  ‘What she wanted me to do,’ Nicki claimed, ‘was to have an abortion. We were in the south of France and she had this doctor who was coming to give me an injection that was going to terminate the pregnancy. I was lucky that he was a French Catholic, because there I am sitting in the south of France, faced with this injection, and I said to him, “I don’t want this,” and he said I didn’t have to have it.’

  Nicki told Oonagh that she was keeping the baby; in which case, Tara announced, he wanted to marry her. Because he was still under the age of twenty-one, he required the permission of both of his parents to get married. One night, he tearfully poured out his feelings to his mother. ‘He told her he loved me,’ according to Nicki. ‘And he said if you don’t let me marry her, I’ll never speak to you again for the rest of my life.’

  Oonagh gave in, certain, as she was, that the relationship wouldn’t last the course. The scandal of a divorce was far less great than the scandal of a baby born out of wedlock. ‘All she wanted was to legitimize the child,’ Nicki said. ‘She thought, “We’ll get the baby legitimized and then I’ll break them up.”’

  Oonagh sent a telegram to Tara’s father in London, telling him that Tara and Nicki wanted to get married. Dom, who’d finally given up his dream of his son one day attending Oxford, replied that they had his blessing. And so Tara and Nicki found themselves engaged to be wed.

  ‘I didn’t give a damn if I was married or not,’ Nicki remembered. ‘It wasn’t going to change the way I felt about him. I loved him.’

  When they returned to London, they set about arranging a quickie wedding. Oonagh knew just the venue: St Ethelburga’s, a small medieval church in Bishopsgate, very discreet, close to Liverpool Street station. Tara and Nicki made an appointment to see the rector. ‘When we met him,’ Nicki said, ‘he told us we couldn’t do it there because we weren’t resident nearby, although I suspect the real reason was that I was very obviously, heavily pregnant.’

  Nicki had experienced a difficult second trimester and was in no condition to stand through a lengthy ceremony anyway. So they decided to simply sign the necessary documentation at Islington Register Office. They made an appointment for 31 August 1963. But while they counted off the days until they were husband and wife, some terrible news reached them from the south of France. Michael and Henrietta had been involved in another car accident – and this time it was serious.

  On a Sunday afternoon, the couple had driven from Paris to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to see a bullfight along with Glen and his girlfriend, Serena. They were on the way home. Michael was at the wheel of Henrietta’s brand-new bottle-green Aston Martin, testing the limits of the engine. Meanwhile, Glen and Serena, following behind in another car, were admiring the unexpected sight of hundreds of flamingos wading in the shallow waters of the Camargue, an area of wetland half an hour south of Arles.

  At some point, Glen noticed that the Aston Martin was no longer on the road in front of them. Michael was a fast driver, but not so fast that he could have been out of sight. Fearing the worst, he pulled in, turned the car around and went back to investigate. A short distance down the road, he and Serena heard the sound of a car alarm coming from the bottom of a steep ravine.

  Glen got out to investigate and spotted the Aston Martin in the water below him, its windscreen smashed and its front misshapen. He made his way down to the water and switched off the engine. Henrietta, wearing a fashionable jockey hat, was still in the car. Glen thought she was dead. He looked for Michael, but he couldn’t see him. Then he heard groans coming from a short distance away. He spotted what he thought was a newspaper, but it turned out to be a shirt. Michael was lying face down in the water, drowning. Glen managed to pull him to the safety of the riverbank while Serena tried to flag down passing cars to raise the alarm.

  Michael had a fractured skull and was taken by ambulance to Montpellier. Henrietta had, amongst other serious injuries, a broken back. She was given the last rites on arrival at the hospital in Arles. When her mother, Elizabeth, arrived in France to see her daughter, Glen had to explain to her that Michael was her daughter’s boyfriend. Henrietta had never mentioned him.

  The couple eventually recovered from their physical injuries, though it was said that neither was ever the same again, especially Henrietta, who was left mentally damaged by the accident. Forbidden from ever seeing her again, Michael slipped from the London scene for a quieter life in Bath. Fifteen years later, after turning her back on her society life and moving to Italy, Henrietta committed suicide by jumping off an aqueduct in the town of Spoleto.

  The crash should have served as a warning to Tara and other teenage leadfoots that they weren’t invincible, however much they felt it. Some heeded the lesson and eased off the accelerator. Tara wasn’t one of them.

  Still estranged from her family, Nicki told her parents nothing about the impending wedding. ‘They didn’t know she was married,’ according to a friend of Nicki’s mother, Nan, ‘until they saw it in the paper.’

  On the final day of the summer, the deed was done.

  It was a far cry from the society event that Oonagh must have envisioned for her darling son. A shotgun affair. A pregnant bride. A child-faced groom with the air of a little boy lost.

  No Saint Margaret’s, Westminster. No crowds of smiling people waiting in the sun for a look at the dress. No pretty daughter of some noble family being escorted up the aisle in a breathtaking white creation. No Garech. No Glen, Mark or Martin. Just Oonagh, and her friend Deacon Lindsay there to witness it.

  ‘We had a lovely day,’ according to Nicki, ‘and once it was over, Oonagh decided, “Now I’ll get rid of this woman!”’

  •

  There was no honeymoon for the newlyweds. ‘We didn’t need one,’ said Nicki. ‘We were on honeymoon the entire time we were together.’

  She couldn’t have faced one anyway. She was too sick. The doctors told her she needed to put some more meat on her bones. It was unnatural to be so thin. The third trimester was even harder than the second. September dragged. October felt like it would never end. Tara suspected the baby was going to be a girl. Nicki was convinced it was going to be a boy. They passed the time considering names for either eventuality. They couldn’t agree on one.

  Finally, in the second week of November, Nicki went into labour. On 13 November 1963, she gave birth to a baby boy, weighing eight pounds and three ounces. ‘It was such a long labour,’ she remembered. ‘The best words I ever heard in my life were when I woke up afterwards and Tara said, “We have a son.” And then he went out and got completely pissed with Glen Kidston.’ The following day, they returned to the job of choosing a name for their baby. ‘We considered family names,’ Nicki said. ‘The Brownes just seemed to rotate the same names down through the ages. It was Dominick, Geoffrey, Dominick, Geoffrey – generation after generation. We wanted something different. So we thought, okay, what goes with Browne? We couldn’t think of anything we both liked. So then we thought what other surnames are colours? Black. Grey. And I thought of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, a book I loved. So I said,
“What about Dorian Browne?” and we both liked it.

  ‘Then we needed to come up with a middle name. Tara really loved modern jazz, before all the rockers came into our lives. And there was a trumpet player, who was his favourite musician, called Clifford Brown. So he said, “Can I put Clifford in there somewhere?” So we called him Dorian Clifford Browne.’

  They went to Ireland for a couple of weeks, to allow Nicki to recover her strength. One night, Tara and Garech were in Galway, wetting the baby’s head in Fox’s Bar in Eyre Square, when they noticed that the landlady and several customers were openly weeping. They asked what was wrong and were told that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Garech said they couldn’t understand why Irish people could be so upset about a dead American president.

  As Swinging London’s coming-out year wound down, a second-generation Irish girl with a blonde bouffant and a figure like a jewellery box ballerina, born plain old Mary O’Brien, but calling herself Dusty Springfield, appeared on television for the first time, clicking her fingers, swishing her mini dress and singing ‘I Only Want to Be With You’. The song became a hit, in Britain and America, even though the sentiment it expressed was out of step with the spirit of the times. Monogamy was out. Young people were having fun, sleeping around and avowedly not settling down.

  And, while his friends were enjoying their freedom and promising not to make the same mistakes their parents had made, Tara found himself, like his mother, married in his teens to someone he didn’t know terribly well.