I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  With or without a husband, adopting a newborn baby had proved far from straightforward. Oonagh was too old to adopt in either Britain or Ireland and was forced to cast her net further afield in search of a country with a more liberalized adoption regime. She tried to adopt in Greece but was turned down on account of her age. ‘She also went to Denmark,’ according to Nicki, ‘because she wanted a child who looked like her own bunch: blond. They refused her as well. Too old.’

  Oonagh had all but given up when, late in 1963, she received a telegram from her old friend, the movie director John Huston. The previous year, he had invited her and Miguel to Mexico, where he was filming The Night of the Iguana, starring Richard Burton and Ava Gardner. Over dinner one evening, she confided in him her desire for another child. John had investigated the possibility of her adopting in Mexico, where he kept a home in the remote fishing village of Puerto Vallarta. In December 1963, he phoned her to tell her about a set of newborn twins – a boy and a girl – who were born into extreme poverty in a nearby town and were in need of an adoptive family.

  Oonagh filled in the necessary paperwork and waited. In the first week of July 1964, shortly after Tara and Nicki returned to London, she travelled to Paris to collect the babies from a Mexican social worker at Orly Airport. They were small and sickly, having weighed just two pounds each at birth and had spent the first few weeks of their lives in an incubator.

  Oonagh decided to name them Manuela Marienne and Desmond Alejandro. She took them back to Sainte-Maxime, again leaving Miguel in Paris, where he was reportedly finalizing his Autumn/Winter collection. Oonagh was the happiest she had been for years. She showed off the twins to the newspapers, explaining in tender terms how she mashed up carrots for Desmond, because he suffered from colic. ‘In a few months,’ she told the Irish Independent, ‘when the twins have settled down, I shall adopt another baby. There is so much misery in the world.’

  Within days, she had done something about her own misery. She banished Miguel from her life for good. By then, according to Garech, she had finally faced up to the truth about her husband’s sexual wanderings. She discovered he had recently spent a night with another man in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes and charged the suite to Oonagh.

  Now that she had the babies she’d been longing for, she didn’t need him in her life anymore. At that point, Miguel was more than happy to move on anyway. It wasn’t true that all of his affairs were with people of the same sex. Miguel went to bed with at least one other woman while he was still married to Oonagh – a woman who happened to be in a far better position to bankroll his foundering career as a couturier.

  Flor Trujillo was the daughter of the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated after robbing the tiny Caribbean country blind for years. Miguel met Flor early in 1964 in the Drake Hotel in New York, where he and Oonagh were staying in their usual suite. According to Oonagh’s version of events, her husband told her that he had to return to Paris on urgent business, packed his suitcase, then decamped to Flor’s more impressive suite on a higher floor.

  ‘He told Oonagh, “I have to go back to France to get my collection together,” then he went to [the room of] this other millionairess,’ remembered Nicki. ‘Except this woman was filthy, filthy, filthy rich – she had the kind of money that Oonagh could only dream about. You couldn’t help but laugh at the cheek of the man.’

  In August 1964, within days of the arrival of the twins, Oonagh instructed her American solicitors, Whyte & Case, to initiate divorce proceedings and extricate her from the expensive mess of her husband’s business affairs. It was only when they began investigating Miguel’s background that they managed to excavate the secret of his previous life as a former Nazi soldier who had stolen his alias from a dead man to escape Franco’s Spain. Joaquin, his best man, whom Miguel claimed was his brother, signed an affidavit, admitting the subterfuge. A solicitor even found the real Miguel’s mother, selling newspapers in Madrid. She confirmed that the man whom Oonagh married wasn’t her son at all.

  Initially, Oonagh tried to get the marriage annulled on the grounds that she couldn’t have legally married a man who was dead. ‘Under English, Irish and French law,’ said Garech, ‘there was no marriage, because he wasn’t Miguel Ferreras. You can’t marry a man who’s dead. But it was quicker to just go to America and get divorced than to go through the process of trying to prove that the marriage was null and void. The advice she got was just to get rid of it, so that’s what she did.’

  Hugo Williams received a call from Tara shortly afterwards, when the divorce business turned ugly. ‘He remembered what I had told him years earlier about Miguel sitting on my bed and putting his hand on my knee,’ he said. ‘Tara called me up on the phone – I was sitting in my office – and he asked me would I go into court and say that Miguel had done this? And I just couldn’t be bothered. I thought it would be embarrassing and boring and I said no, I didn’t want to do it. And I never heard from Tara again, which makes me incredibly sad that that was the last conversation I ever had with him.’

  It’s difficult to place an exact figure on what her five and a half years with Miguel cost Oonagh in financial terms. Garech agreed that the figure of £6 million sounded about right. It was certainly enough to force Oonagh to live out her final years in considerably reduced circumstances in Guernsey.

  Unsurprisingly, Nicki, who would one day be corresponding with Oonagh’s solicitors herself, had sympathy for the way Miguel was summarily dispatched. ‘I know he wasn’t God’s gift to humanity,’ she said, ‘but he was just another one from the wrong side of the tracks who they eventually did down. The story was that he’d spent all her money – millions and millions of pounds, they said. But he didn’t steal it from her. She gave it to him. And she didn’t mind dragging him around New York, Paris, London, Venice and the south of France either, with him on her arm. I knew Miguel was gay. Tara knew Miguel was gay. Oonagh knew he was gay, too. Of course she did. Miguel was treated like dirt. A king for a day and then he was beheaded. No compassion whatsoever.’

  Compassion was the last thing Miguel needed. While his wife reverted to her former name of Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, Miguel fell out of one rich heiress’s bed and straight into another. Within weeks, the New York World-Telegram reported that he was planning to marry Flor. Unfortunately for Miguel, access to her money was rather less straightforward than it had been with Oonagh and her trustees. Rafael Trujillo – the self-styled Great Benefactor – had sired a lot of progeny with his three wives and many mistresses. Flor was locked in a legal battle with eight siblings and half-siblings for her cut of his estimated billion dollars in stashed loot.

  While Oonagh announced that she planned to continue running Maison Ferreras herself, Miguel told the New York Daily Mirror that he would continue ‘dressing the very rich’ and hoped to open a salon soon in Manhattan using capital from Switzerland. He was presumably referring to some of the $100 million that Flor’s father was reported to have hidden there and elsewhere in Europe.

  The following summer, Suzy Knickerbocker – the nom de plume of New York Daily Mirror gossip columnist, Aileen Mehle – reported that Miguel and Flor had been spotted in Maxim’s, one of Oonagh’s favourite restaurants in Paris. They were discussing, with their American lawyer, how to get their hands on Flor’s share of the money that her father had salted away in various European countries. Their dinner date, an eavesdropper reported, was hoping to use his influence to persuade President Franco to allow Flor to sue her brother Radhames for her share of a reported $58 million on deposit held in Spain. According to the report, Miguel and Flor’s lawyer was on good terms with the Generalissimo, having helped negotiate the country’s entry into the United Nations back in 1955.

  The man couldn’t have come cheap. It was Richard Nixon.

  •

  In September, Tara saw The Rolling Stones play for the first time in the Astoria Theatre, Finsbury Park. Shortly afterwards, he was introduced t
o Brian Jones. The band had recently fallen in with some of Tara’s upper-class dandy friends who frequented the clubs of Soho, including antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs, Mayfair art dealer Robert Fraser, and Julian, the eldest of the Ormsby-Gore children. It should have been no real surprise that the band, who were fast earning a reputation as dangerous delinquents, should have hit it off so famously with Tara’s circle of switched-on, Chelsea decadent friends. After all, the hedonistic lifestyle that the Stones had so lustily embraced was how Britain’s upper classes had lived for generations. ‘The thing that people often forget about the Sixties,’ said Marianne Faithfull, ‘is that the permissiveness that was supposedly new was there all along. The only thing that happened in the Sixties was that it suddenly went public. It hit the masses.’

  It was Mick and Brian who made most of the early running in the relationship, realizing that these party-loving bluebloods had something to offer them. More than any of the Stones, Mick had the social-climber’s desire to be taken to the bosom of the aristocracy. Marianne, his future girlfriend, once characterized him as someone who would ‘attend dinners given by any silly thing with a title and a castle’. For Brian, the ‘posh’ Stone, it was about curiosity, according to Anita Pallenberg, who entered his life to following year. ‘He wanted to know everything,’ she said, ‘which is why he wanted to meet people who were different from him. He was always investigating the truth about things.’

  The relationship wasn’t all one way. People like Tara, Christopher Gibbs and Robert Fraser were as flattered by the Stones’ passing attention as the Stones were by theirs. They were at the centre of the action. They had all the girls.

  ‘A lot of these aristocratic kids had a lot going on in their heads,’ Marianne said. ‘People tended to think of them as being the idle rich – privileged, but with nothing to say. But Tara and Christopher Gibbs and Mark Palmer, they were all incredibly bright people. And they were meeting these musicians on equal terms, because they had all the same things in common – they were all young, good-looking and rich.’

  Tara and Brian hit it off instantly. With their Carnaby Street threads and their identical pudding-bowl haircuts, they looked like twins. In the dark recesses of the Ad Lib, they were often mistaken for each other.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a stranger would say, interrupting Tara, mid-conversation, ‘aren’t you that chap from—?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Tara would answer, cutting them off, ‘I’m actually the chap’s younger brother.’

  ‘They were very alike because they were both small, blond and pretty,’ remembered Jane Ormsby-Gore, who was soon to become the voice of modern youth at Vogue. ‘But they were different in that Tara was quite shy. He didn’t come into a room and make a big noise. He was a ray of sunlight rather than a blast. Brian was more of a blast. He’d come in and the room would move a bit. Whereas Tara would slip in unnoticed and work his magic in a totally different way.’

  They had a lot of common interests, especially rhythm and blues music and fast cars. Like Tara, Brian was a fearless driver. He’d recently taken delivery of a sleek E-type Jaguar, which he’d managed to roll over onto its roof and was fortunate to escape with his life.

  Brian became a regular visitor to Eaton Row whenever the Ad Lib closed. He and Tara would drink the finest Hine cognac, listen to Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys and play with Tara’s latest Scalextric set, shoving all of the furniture against the wall to lay down a track on the new carpet.

  ‘I don’t know if you believe in astrology,’ said Nicki, who remembered being kept awake many nights by their pot-fuelled giggles, ‘but their birthdays were within three or four days of each other. They were both Pisces. Free-spirited. Very moral in their ways, without ever being sanctimonious. They were like brothers to each other.’

  However, Anita thought the friendship was based on the differences in their nature. Tara was the rock that Brian needed as the Stones became phenomenally big and he began to show signs of unravelling.

  ‘Tara was such a mellow kind of person,’ she remembered. ‘Brian never had that. He was tortured. Very paranoid. Very sensitive. But he would have loved to have had the peace of mind that Tara had. That’s why he wanted to always spend time with him. Brian didn’t have many friends. And the friends he had, he didn’t keep them for very long, because he was too messed up.’

  Even by Tara’s standards, Brian had lived a full and interesting life. He grew up in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the son of an aeronautical engineer father and a mother who worked as a piano teacher. From early childhood, he showed signs of being musically gifted. Highly intelligent but complicated, he rebelled against his middle-class upbringing and by the age of twenty-two he had fathered four children by four women, with a fifth on the way.

  He got his first guitar for his seventeenth birthday and began to think that music might be his escape from uptight, buttoned-down Cheltenham. Eventually, after a series of dead-end jobs, he moved to London, reimagining himself as slide guitar player Elmo Lewis in the anonymity of the big, fog-filled city.

  ‘Brian was the grown-up one,’ Anita said. ‘Mick and Keith were still kind of schoolboys. Brian had all these illegitimate children and he was already driving a car and dressing in suits. He was way ahead of his time, which is why Mick and Keith were very jealous of him. They were still tinkering away on their guitars. Mick still wanted to be an accountant or something, so there was a big gap in wisdom and knowledge and lifestyle between Brian and the others.’

  But that night when they first saw him play slide guitar in Ealing was two years earlier – and two years must have seemed like a terribly long time ago as The Rolling Stones started to become huge and Brian felt the band’s creative centre of gravity slip away from him. It had been a breakthrough year for the band. Their New Year’s Day appearance on the first ever Top of the Pops was the start of a hectic six-month period in which they scored their first top-ten hit with a cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’, then, in June, their first number one, with their twist on The Valentinos’ hit ‘It’s All Over Now’. Their debut album, consisting mostly of R&B covers, went straight to the top of the charts on the back of 100,000 advance orders and they even made inroads into America with a two-week tour at the start of the summer that took in seven states.

  But for the Stones, the most significant day of 1964 had come in early January, when their manager, Andrew Oldham, locked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards into a kitchen (metaphorically, according to Jagger; literally, according to Richards) and demanded they start producing more songs of their own, as John Lennon and Paul McCartney were doing. The result of this unusual, gun-to-the-head commission was a melodic ballad called ‘As Time Goes By’ that sounded so far removed from a Stones song they decided not to record it. Instead, Oldham changed the title to ‘As Tears Go By’ to avoid confusion with the song from Casablanca and gave it to Marianne Faithfull, then a pretty, seventeen-year-old, former convent schoolgirl and Ad Lib regular, whom he was convinced he could turn into a recording star.

  It became a top-ten hit for her in August 1964. By then, Mick and Keith were starting to find their stroke as songwriters, although it would be a whole year before they wrote a song they considered a worthy single for a band that took its musical cues from Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

  Their emergence as songwriters changed the internal dynamics of the band. Over the next two years, the Stones would become less and less centred on the savant musical genius of its founding member, Brian, who didn’t write songs, and more on the creative abilities of Mick and Keith, who were starting to show that they could. In addition, while Brian had always been the most popular Stone with the female fans, Mick’s growing confidence meant that he was becoming the group’s main aesthetic reference point.

  The more successful the Stones became, the more Brian would feel estranged from the band he created. Over the next two years, he would come to lean more and more on his new friend, a young man who was cool and self-contained and utter
ly at ease with himself; all of the things, in fact, that Brian wished he could be.

  ‘Tara wasn’t trying to get on any trip,’ remembered Michael Rainey, who spent many nights with him in the Ad Lib. ‘That’s why people like Brian and Paul McCartney weren’t frightened of him. He wasn’t trying to ride their glory. He already had his social position. He was financially secure, which I think gives a man a relaxed air. He was an extremely good-looking young man. He had all those things in his favour. He was like a young prince really. So they saw him as a complete equal.’

  •

  In October 1964, young, hip and happening Britain had a new prime minister when Labour squeaked home in the General Election, bringing to an end thirteen years of Conservative rule under a succession of patrician elders. At forty-eight, Harold Wilson was ancient by the standards of the young Londoners keeping the tills ringing in Carnaby Street and the King’s Road, but a mere child compared to Britain’s last four prime ministers. Better still, while he was a Yorkshireman, he was from ‘up the same way’ as The Beatles – an MP for Huyton in Merseyside, who went to Wirral Grammar School, just six miles from the centre of Liverpool. He even managed to capture something of the wisecracking, irreverent tone of the times when he stepped through the front door of 10 Downing Street for the first time and proclaimed, ‘Nice place we’ve got here!’

  The new PM had already made his views on Britain’s old class system clear. ‘Everybody should have an equal chance,’ he said, ‘but they shouldn’t have a flying start.’

  That same autumn, as if heedful of the changing political wind, Tara – the son of a peer and heir to a million-pound fortune – applied for a job as an apprentice mechanic. He hadn’t been joking that summer when he said he wanted to find something to do. The prospect of having not just a wife and son but a family had given him an urgent sense of purpose. He applied for a job with Rootes Motors Limited, a car manufacturing plant in the West Midlands. He was still keen on becoming a full-time racing car driver and he thought it would help if he learned everything he could about cars and how they worked.