I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  ‘He was obsessed with engines,’ Nicki said. ‘Our brand-new pearl and lavender colour theme didn’t last very long. He’d bring these engines home and dismantle them in the middle of the living room. Puddles of oil all over the beautiful new carpet. We had this ghastly German woman who used to come in and clean and she’d get so angry with the mess. Tara would just laugh and say, “Oh, put a bean bag over it!”’

  At the beginning of October, he drove to Coventry to sit an interview, then he waited for word. Shortly afterwards, he and Nicki returned to Dublin for the christening of Desmond and Manuela at St Patrick’s Cathedral. All of Oonagh’s children – Gay, Garech and Tara – had agreed to act as godparents to their new, adopted siblings.

  By then, the secret of Nicki’s pregnancy was out. She couldn’t hide it any longer, even in the loose-fitting short coat she wore on the day. Oonagh was furious. ‘She thought she’d get me married to Tara to legitimize Dorian,’ Nicki said, ‘then set about breaking us up. What she didn’t bargain for was me getting pregnant again.’

  All of the main national newspapers covered the christening of Oonagh’s adopted twin. Even in the new era of pop superstardom, the lives of the Guinness family remained the subject of media fascination, the twists and turns in their lives reported as though they were bona fide celebrities. Tara chatted to a reporter from the Daily Express about their own forthcoming arrival and also about his recent interview in Coventry. ‘It will be my first job if I get it,’ he said. ‘I expect my wife and I will rent a flat there.’

  When he returned to London, a letter had arrived at Eaton Row to say that the job was his. He and Nicki found a cottage in the West Midlands countryside, then they turned their backs on Swinging London, the Ad Lib and the all-night parties with their pop star friends. From the time of his childhood, Tara had always been a nocturnal animal. Now, he was giving up the late nights for a 7 a.m. alarm call, eight- to ten-hour shifts on a factory floor and evenings poring over engineering books and car manuals.

  ‘People in London thought he was mad,’ Nicholas Gormanston remembered. ‘This aristocrat, walking around with dirt under his fingernails. They just couldn’t understand the fascination.’

  But the job didn’t last long. According to Nicki, it was less than two weeks. ‘The plan was to start at the bottom,’ she remembered, ‘which was always the Guinness way, even with the bosses – they all had to do menial work on their way up. Well, starting at the bottom in this case meant cleaning out these whopping great vats of God knows what. I just remember it was horrible work and Tara didn’t like it at all, especially the fact that he was meant to start at eight o’clock every morning.

  ‘We had this crappy, rundown, rented bungalow that we had to live in. The heating wouldn’t work. It was a ghastly place. We had Dorian living with us and I was pregnant at the time and I said to Tara, “I don’t think this is very nice, do you?” And he said, “I couldn’t agree more.” So he quit after, I think, ten days and we went back to London.’

  Tara began to consider an alternative route into the motor industry, looking around for a garage to buy. And the parties resumed at Eaton Row. Peter Sellers and his wife, Britt Ekland, who were living around the corner at 25 Eaton Place, popped in from time to time. Roman Polanski, who was in London to shoot his first English language feature, Repulsion, was another regular caller.

  Every Friday morning, Nicki bought five dozen eggs to make breakfast for whichever guests had improvised beds for themselves on the living room floor. ‘The house was always strewn with bodies,’ she remembered. ‘You never knew who was a Beatle, who was an Animal, who was a Trogg and who was a Pretty Thing.’

  Life was chaotic – too much so for her disapproving mother-in-law. Oonagh believed Tara and Nicki were making a bad job of parenthood and now they were about to bring a second baby into the world. She then did something that, in hindsight, was only going to make a difficult relationship even worse. She bought a mews across the road.

  ‘Her intention’, said Garech, ‘was to keep an eye on things whenever she happened to be in London and to make sure the children were okay.’

  Not surprisingly, Nicki saw things rather differently.

  10: FULL SWING

  Nicki thought her second pregnancy was going to go on forever. The baby was more than a month overdue. Tara took her across London in his Lotus Elan to Cable Street in the East End – the scene of a famous battle between Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and anti-Fascist protesters back in 1936 – and they drove up and down the cobbled road. ‘Someone told us that you could induce labour that way,’ she remembered, ‘driving over cobbles in a low suspension car. Of course, it didn’t work.’

  In the end, the baby was delivered by caesarean section on 1 March 1965, three days before Tara’s twentieth birthday. It was a boy. They named him Julian Dominick: Julian after Tara’s friend, Julian Ormsby-Gore, and Dominick after Dom, the baby’s grandfather.

  They went to Ireland to allow Nicki to recuperate at Luggala. Tara had some business to attend to in London and he arrived a day or two later. Nicki was waiting for him in the arrivals hall of the then tiny Dublin Airport when she fell into conversation with an American teenager, who was waiting for his French girlfriend to arrive on a flight from Barcelona. He told her that his name was Rock Brynner.

  ‘Nothing to do with Yul Brynner?’ Nicki wondered.

  Rock laughed in an embarrassed way. ‘Actually, yeah,’ he said, ‘he’s my dad.’

  Growing up, Rock had become fixated with Ireland. He loved the plays of Samuel Beckett and, at the age of sixteen, knew his way around James Joyce’s Ulysses. So he enrolled in Trinity College in Dublin and moved into a flat in Rathgar, south of the city, just a couple of miles from the nursing home where Tara first entered the world.

  ‘I had this wonderful French girlfriend,’ he remembered, ‘who was extraordinarily beautiful, who lived with her parents on the Costa Brava and who used to commute backwards and forwards to Dublin to see me. And this particular evening, I was waiting at Dublin Airport for her to arrive when I got chatting to this girl, Nicki, who was waiting for her husband, Tara.

  ‘Nicki was from – I think – an Irish farming background, but she didn’t sound like a girl from an Irish farming background. She sounded like she was English upper class – like a young, crazy aristocrat. And I suppose that’s part of what made London so exciting in the 1960s. You could reinvent yourself like that. You know, men could wear furs and doormen didn’t blink an eye!’

  Tara eventually arrived. Nicki made the introductions and Tara invited Rock and his girlfriend to come with them to Luggala. Over the course of the weekend, Tara introduced him to hashish, and, as they bonded over a joint, they discovered how much they had in common. ‘We came from different social backgrounds,’ Rock remembered, ‘but our place in those societies was much the same. Tara, like myself, was often the only child in a room full of remarkable adults – adults who didn’t usually tolerate the presence of a child. Because of who my father was, I’d spent a lot of time with some of the most interesting people in the world. I looked after Salvador Dali’s ocelot. Jean Cocteau was my godfather. My babysitter was Marlene Dietrich. At eleven years old, I was bartender for the Rat Pack. So that had been my life. And Tara had had a very similar upbringing, always around very, very smart, sophisticated people. And in his case, it rubbed off. To me, he was the Prince of Ireland. That’s how I looked on him. And I was the Prince of God knows what kingdom Yul Brynner was the king of.’

  It was, he remembered, a magical weekend, at the end of which they all vowed to remain in touch. What Rock probably couldn’t see, amidst the haze of hashish smoke in the breathtakingly picturesque Wicklow valley, was that Tara and Nicki’s marriage was coming apart at the seams.

  A few weeks later, when Julian was christened at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Nicki was absent. She was described as ‘indisposed’ by the Daily Mail, though the truth was that she and Tara had had another of their now incr
easingly frequent rows over her mother-in-law’s interference in their marriage. It was Oonagh who held Julian at the font and who posed for newspaper photographs with Tara and the baby after the ceremony. In hindsight, there was something very ominous about her playing the role of surrogate mother for the day.

  Oonagh was a busy woman in the spring of 1965. She had two young babies of her own, not to mention a couture house to run. She was determined to make a success of Maison Ferreras, if just to prove a point to the man whose name remained over the door. ‘I have never worked before,’ she had recently told Hebe Dorsey, the celebrated fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune. ‘I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure it will be great fun.’

  She had appointed Jacques Fougeriol, a thirty-four-year-old former assistant to Miguel, to the position of Creator-in-Chief and he had put together a collection for Spring/Summer. But it would be the last collection ever presented by Maison Ferreras. In the summer of 1965, the Guinness trustees – but mostly Oonagh’s sister, Maureen – decided that they’d been flogging the dead horse of Miguel’s couturier business for too long and they cut off the money.

  Tara went into business himself that spring, shortly after Julian’s arrival, making good on his promise to do something useful with his life. Although he wasn’t due his £1 million Guinness inheritance until the age of twenty-five, he was allowed to borrow money from the Trust to buy a share in a garage in Bayswater, which was owned by a man he knew from the motor trade.

  Len Street was a former mechanic with the Lotus Formula One team. Tall and gregarious, with blond hair swept back from his forehead, Len was on friendly terms with Lotus founder Colin Chapman and Jim Clark, who was then the world’s leading racing car driver. For six years, he worked as a foreman at the Lotus factory in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, overseeing the production of the company’s ultra-light, two-seater road cars, first the Elite and later the Elan. In 1964, he quit the factory to set up Len Street Engineering, a garage and Lotus dealership, along with his half-brother, an amateur boxer with the gift of the gab named Alan Oliver.

  The business operated out of a mews garage in Bayswater. Len serviced cars and Alan sold them. They were the official Lotus dealers in London, so young swingers who wanted one of the sleek little two-seaters driven by Emma Peel in The Avengers invariably ended up at Len Street Engineering. Tara was a regular caller. Then one day in the spring of 1965, he arrived with a proposal for Len and Alan. He wanted a piece of the company.

  Buying into a garage business meant Tara could serve his apprenticeship as a mechanic on his own terms. There would be no early mornings, no menial work, such as cleaning up oil spills, and – most importantly of all – no books. The perfect employment conditions, in fact, for a rich young gadabout who liked to stay out late, then sleep in the following morning, and who couldn’t have faced the classroom element involved in a formal apprenticeship.

  The injection of Guinness money meant that Len Street Engineering could move to a mews garage in the more upmarket area of Drayton Gardens, between the Fulham Road and the Old Brompton Road in Chelsea. Tara paid himself a lackey’s wage of £9 a week (about £150 in today’s money), pulled on a set of overalls and set about learning the business of car mechanics from Len and his team. He was far from work-shy. Sometimes he went in seven days a week. Engines fascinated him. ‘Everyone in London wondered,’ said Nicholas Gormanston, ‘why on earth Tara wanted to get his hands dirty by, you know, actually working for a living. Everyone else was flouncing around in lace and satin and there was Tara, in the garage overalls, under the bonnet of a car, tinkering with the engine.’

  The year that Tara bought into Len Street Engineering was the heyday for a certain kind of criminal celebrity in London. The Krays and the Richardsons ruled over vast criminal empires and flaunted their wealth in the same extravagant manner as the pop stars of the age. In the new, non-judgemental milieu, in which the lines between the social classes became blurred, a host of underworld figures – arsonists, armed robbers and racketeers – blended in with the London ‘in crowd’, old money, new money and dirty money happily wadded together. So incestuous was the relationship that when Reggie Kray married Frances McShea in April in Bethnal Green, it was David Bailey – the most famous photographer in Britain – who took the official pictures. ‘I know people will hate me for this,’ Bailey said at the time, ‘but I like him. I suppose that’s like saying I like Hitler.’

  He was far from alone in feeling an affinity for old-fashioned London gangsters. In July, Ronnie Biggs, one of the Great Train Robbers, used a rope ladder to break out of Wandsworth Prison. Millions of ordinary, law-abiding Britons revelled in the daring nature of the escape, as Biggs underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance and slipped out of the country for a destination as yet unknown.

  As it turned out, the garage that Tara bought into started to attract a rather interesting clientele. Dubious characters would show up in their motors from time to time: stereotypical east London geezers with fingers full of sovereign rings, who were known to have done a bit of bird. They would have unusual and very specific instructions for the work they wanted done.

  ‘They wanted their cars turned into getaway cars,’ according to Nicki, ‘which was something Tara happened to have a gift for. He could tinker with the engine of an old Anglia to allow it to do one hundred and twenty miles per hour, then conk out after twenty minutes when you didn’t need it anymore. He used to come home with these stories of all these villains who came in, wanting their cars done up for bank robberies and whatever else.’

  •

  Winston Churchill had died in January following a stroke at the age of ninety. If there was a single moment that marked the passing of the London of air raids and smog to the London of miniskirts and Beat music, then it was the death of Britain’s wartime leader. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Britons filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall at the heart of Parliament. As flags were lowered to half-mast across London, there was a resurgence in pride for the Union Jack, which suddenly became co-opted into the iconography of the swinging city.

  The death of Churchill was another indicator that Britain was now in the hands of a new generation. But not everyone was pleased with what they were choosing to do with the freedom he had helped secure for them. In March 1965, on their way back from a gig in Essex, Brian Jones, Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman got themselves in trouble for urinating in a petrol station forecourt in East Ham. Mick reportedly informed the attendant, ‘We will piss anywhere, man!’ The three were later found guilty of public indecency and insulting behaviour, fined £5 each and issued with a schoolmasterly rebuke by the magistrate: ‘Just because you have reached an exalted height in your profession, it does not mean you can behave in this manner.’

  Andrew Oldham milked what was really a minor public order offence for all the publicity value he could. It was just the kind of notoriety he was looking for in his efforts to turn his band into the anti-Beatles, happily colluding in the media’s presentation of the Stones as a threat to public morals, common decency and the happy feeling engendered by the chirpy Beat bands.

  The Beatles were the exemplars of the new, re-emergent Britain that was happy, confident and forward-thinking. While The Rolling Stones were being upbraided by a magistrate, The Beatles were receiving the ultimate pat on the head from the Establishment. In June 1965 they were informed that they were each to receive an MBE, an honour that was originally awarded for meritorious service in war. After twenty years of peace, Britain was finding new heroes to pin medals on, prompting a number of previous recipients – members of the old order – to return their honours in disgust.

  For The Beatles, it was just one more date in the diary of yet another phenomenal year. They had recently been in Austria and the Bahamas, making a film called Help!, an absurdist comedy that was intended to cash in on the commercial success of their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. It premiered on 29 July at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus, causin
g the usual crowd chaos outside. Two weeks later, on 15 August, they produced another watershed moment in musical history when they played the first ever stadium pop concert. The scenes at New York’s Shea Stadium were almost beyond belief – 56,000 people crammed into every available seat, not to watch a ballgame, but to listen to music, or rather not listen to it, since even The Beatles themselves couldn’t hear their instruments over the din of screaming teenyboppers.

  ‘At Shea Stadium,’ John Lennon reportedly said, ‘I saw the top of the mountain,’ which wasn’t to say that he enjoyed the view. In fact, in the blue light of that Queens evening, he confessed his misery at what his life had become when he sang ‘Help!’, the cri de coeur of a man who wanted to get off the carousel of touring and produce something more interesting and enduring.

  Similarly, the Stones were also coming to the end of their own musical adolescence. The breakthrough moment for the Jagger and Richards songwriting partnership came when they reworked an old gospel standard and called it ‘The Last Time’. It was released in March and it provided the band with their first number one in Britain and their first top-ten hit in the United States. Their confidence sky high, they put their heads together and came up with ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, with its irresistible, three-note opening guitar riff. It spent four weeks at the top of the US charts in July and would become the band’s musical calling card for all eternity. More significantly, in the popular mind, it marked the moment when Mick Jagger replaced Brian Jones as the leader of The Rolling Stones.