I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  By the summer of 1965, the British Invasion was slowing down and popular music was about to completely reimagine itself. In April, Bob Dylan had released ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, an angry protest song loaded with political references. It marked Dylan’s shift from folk to rock and it blew the minds of the listening Beatles. On 9 May, they sat starry-eyed in a box when he played the Royal Albert Hall. It was one of those game-changing moments, when all four Beatles – and John Lennon especially – glimpsed the potentiality of music, of what a song could sound like, of what an album could be.

  At the end of April, speaking at a music industry event in London, Goddard Lieberson, the Columbia Records president who was credited with inventing the LP, said something that would prove extraordinarily prescient. ‘There will be a growth in album sales,’ he predicted, ‘such as you’ve never seen before.’

  Singles were still the bread and butter for most pop acts. Traditionally, albums contained two or three retrospective hits and a lot of inferior-quality filler. But music was about to witness the birth of a new era in which artists cut every track on an album as though it was going to be a single in its own right. It would change the way music was recorded and the way people thought about records. And for bands like The Beatles and the Stones, it would create great testaments to their music that would last for fifty years and more.

  Brian Wilson had already gone through the same feelings that John Lennon was experiencing in the summer of 1965. On a flight to Houston the previous December, he collapsed, sobbing in the aisle, at the thought of embarking on yet another Beach Boys tour. He told his band mates that he was finished with live performing and he retired to the studio in search of a new sound for the band. In November 1965, The Beach Boys would start recording Pet Sounds, an album that would set the bar at a new height for The Beatles and for everyone else.

  •

  The Ad Lib’s time had come and gone. By the summer of 1965 it was no longer the place where the hippest of the hip went to get their groove on. Tara and the rest of the in-crowd had migrated to the Scotch of St James in Mason’s Yard, near Piccadilly, which opened its doors for the first time on 14 July. The Scotch was decked out in the Caledonian style, all tartan lampshades, bagpipes and stag’s heads on the wall, resembling, in David Hockney’s memorable phrase, ‘a rhythm and blues Angus Steakhouse’.

  The Ad Lib would limp on for another year or so, but in Swinging London, fashions changed quickly, and the Scotch was suddenly the place where The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Animals all went to let their hair down. An officious door policy gave the place an air of exclusivity that its habitués loved. Inside, it was necessary to maintain a dispassionate, even unimpressed, air around the celebrity clientele. Do something as uncool as asking Keith Richards or Ringo Starr for an autograph and you could find yourself being escorted to the door by one of the club’s tartan-waistcoated lounge staff. If you were absent for even one night from the Scotch, you knew you had likely missed something vital. The answer was to make sure you were there every night. And Tara did.

  It was in the Scotch one night in the summer of 1965 that he first met Gerard Campbell, a public relations executive with the advertising firm Hobbs and Bates, who was to become one of his closest friends. ‘He made me laugh,’ Gerard recalled of their first meeting. ‘There was a song out at the time by Otis Redding called “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” and Tara, with that sly smile of his, told me it was about the difficulty of performing coitus interruptus. That was Tara. He’d say things like that. He was just a lot of fun.’

  •

  By the mid-summer of 1965, Britain was revelling in the outbreak of positive feeling and the explosion of style and colour that was the Swinging Sixties. The miniskirts and bob haircuts, the Chelsea boots and the suits with tapered waists, the Mini Coopers in Union Jack colours, the cinema crowds flocking to see Sean Connery in Thunderball and Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, the use of contraception as a lifestyle choice, the teenage girls pursuing the malnourished look of Twiggy, the model of the moment – all of these things were common features of life up and down the land.

  But against this happy, optimistic backdrop, Tara and Nicki’s marital difficulties were becoming worse. A second child had only increased the strain on them. Tara still loved Nicki, but he was beginning to question his haste in marrying her and his mother’s contributions on the subject didn’t help ease his mind. He began to spend more and more time at the garage, according to Nicki, with his head under the bonnet of a car, or drinking in the Scotch with Brian Jones or whoever happened to be in town.

  ‘You could see it was going wrong,’ remembered Martin Wilkinson. ‘I think it was the pressure of living in a small house and having two children and being so young themselves.’

  But Tara bore his troubles far more ably than Brian, who had recently given an indication as to the lie of his mental landscape when he told Peter Jones, a writer with Record Mirror: ‘No one would choose to live the life I live.’

  In May, Brian was served with affiliation papers by the mothers of two of his children, who were seeking to establish proof of paternity and a right to child support. During the band’s tour of America that summer, he shambled baggy-eyed around the stage, under the influence of drink and drugs, his increasing use of which only heightened his paranoia that he was being manoeuvred out of the band.

  But his love life, at least, was about to take a happy turn. On 14 September he met Anita Pallenberg backstage at a Stones concert in Munich. Anita was a model with a toothsome smile and a worldliness that seemed almost impossible in a girl of just nineteen. She was born in Rome in 1944 while her father – a travel agent, but really a frustrated composer – was away fighting in the war. As a teenager, she was sent to boarding school in Germany, but was expelled at sixteen. By the time she appeared in the lives of the Stones, she’d already tasted life with the La Dolce Vita crowd in Rome and with Andy Warhol’s Factory circle in New York and knew her way around Swinging London, too. Brian and Anita had already met each other, briefly, in Paris. They had mutual friends in Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs and the socially omnipotent Ormsby-Gores, with whom she’d stayed during an earlier visit to London.

  Anita was initially drawn to him, not because she found him more attractive than the other Stones, but because he spoke German.

  ‘That was the first thing that struck me about him,’ she remembered, ‘after his hair, of course. And also that he was very well-spoken – more so than the others. He wasn’t like, “Innit.” He didn’t have a London accent like Mick and Keith. He wasn’t a Dartford lad or whatnot. He spoke very well and he chose his words very carefully.’

  After the concert, he took her back to his hotel. ‘The first night I was with him, he cried all night about Mick and Keith and what they were doing to him. At that point, there was a lot of competition. There was Mick and Keith and Brian and Andrew and the four of them never got on together at the same time. Sometimes three of them would get on, but one was always excluded and usually it was Brian.’

  When the Stones returned to London a few days later to start a three-week tour of England, Anita had become a permanent part of the band’s comet tail. Brian seemed happier than he had been in years. ‘Anita was this sophisticated, exotic, international creature,’ said Stash de Rola, who saw the change in his friend that autumn. ‘She demanded intellectual stimulation. They were the kind of relationships Brian was looking for. He was a very gentle person who enjoyed conversation and his mind was avid for an esoteric kind of love. In Anita, I would say he found a lot of the same things he found in Tara – someone who was intelligent and well-read, with a high degree of refinement and sophistication.’

  She moved into his rented house in Elm Park Mews, just off the Fulham Road in Chelsea, with its gold wallpaper and its radiogram, a state-of-the-art record player and radio that was designed to resemble a piece of furniture. Occasionally, Tara and Nicki called round. One night that O
ctober, Nicki remembered, Brian played Tara a record he loved called ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’, by the American folk rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful. Then Tara handed everyone a small thin square made out of gelatin and they all went on a trip together.

  Anita Pallenberg wasn’t the only exotic thing to land in London in 1965. LSD arrived, too.

  11: LONDON TAKES A TRIP

  By October 1965, Tara, along with every other young Londoner in the know, had caught wind of what was happening in a basement flat in Pont Street, a short distance away from his mews in Belgravia. The flat was the home of Michael Hollingshead, a British-born researcher in psychedelic drugs and hallucinogens at Harvard University, who had recently arrived in London with a plan to turn the country’s youth on to the consciousness-altering effects of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, a then perfectly legal drug that had been used in the treatment of psychiatric patients.

  Hollingshead was an apostle of Timothy Leary, a lecturer in clinical psychology at Harvard, who, through a number of experiments, had become an advocate of the drug’s value in changing people’s perception of the world around them. Leary, who coined phrases such as ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ and ‘think for yourself and question authority’, would later be described by Richard Nixon as ‘the most dangerous man in America’.

  Hollingshead travelled to London to prepare the ground for Leary, who was planning to arrive in January 1966, renting out the Albert Hall for a psychedelic jamboree at which, he hoped, either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones would perform. At the climax of the evening, Leary would be introduced to the crowd as the High Priest of the psychedelic movement.

  Armed with quite probably the largest quantity of LSD in private hands in the world, Hollingshead’s mission was to educate young people in London about the spiritual benefits of the psychedelic experience.

  Leary gave Hollingshead a set of marching orders, which included setting up a centre where people could take LSD in a quasi-liturgical setting, involving, among other things, acid-laced grapes; music by Ravi Shankar, Debussy and Bach; readings from various mystical texts; and slides projected onto the ceiling of Tantric yantras and Tibetan mandalas.

  He rented a large flat at 25 Pont Street, where he opened the World Psychedelic Centre, along with two old Etonians, Desmond O’Brien – London’s self-proclaimed ‘Mr LSD’ – and Joey Mellen, a proponent of trepanation, a medieval surgical procedure that involved drilling a hole in the human skull as a means of relieving pressure and inducing a permanent high.

  Always ahead of the curve when it came to the latest thing, it wasn’t long before Tara found his way to Hollingshead’s door. ‘Hollingshead was the only source of LSD in London at the time,’ remembered Martin Wilkinson, who accompanied Tara the first time he went around there. ‘Pont Street was basically an acid factory and it was pretty saturated with people. Hollingshead used to put acid on the door handles – very, very strong acid on the door handles, then you touched it and you went and stood in front of a thing that was called a scroll. It was about twelve feet high. It started off with a whole skull down the bottom, then gradually worked up to a skull at the top with rays coming out of it, which meant total consciousness.’

  Tara wasn’t much interested in the mystical dimension to Pont Street, but he did rather like LSD, which was available to buy in the form of Windowpanes, coloured gelatin squares that contained enough acid to induce a consciousness-altering experience lasting up to eight hours.

  Hollingshead believed that his aristocrat regulars like Tara, Nicholas Gormanston, Julian Ormsby-Gore and Christopher Gibbs could become important proselytizers in the mission to spread Leary’s psychedelic gospel. His initial impression of them was that they were self-regarding and shallow, being only interested in grooving, getting high and making the scene. But he changed his mind, describing them in his autobiography, The Man Who Turned on the World, as ‘intelligent’ and ‘profound’.

  ‘It was a period when people paid attention to dress,’ he wrote, ‘and clothes were no less essential than their bodies – it was a means of expression, and their dressed condition mirrored in their consciousness the outer expression of themselves. “By changing his clothes, he changes the man within.” The mode of dress assisted in expressing certain traits of his being. In this way, the process of dressing-up can not only heighten or lessen the individual’s power of expression: it can indeed bring about self-realization.’

  Soon, anyone who was anyone was calling around to Pont Street in search of self-realization. Very quickly, London became saturated with acid. Gerard Campbell remembered a night in late 1965 when Tara turned him on to it. ‘One evening, I was with Martin Wilkinson and Tara had managed to get his hands on some LSD, which I’d only heard of before. These little bits of blotting paper – where he got them from, I don’t know.

  ‘Everyone else was seeing all these wonderful colours. Nothing happened for me, so I took another one and I ended up nearly overdosing. I had all these visions – things moving on the walls. Then we went, all of us, to Bob Fraser’s flat – Groovy Bob, as he was known. He had that art gallery and he had this machine in there that reacted to the beat of the music and shot lights on the walls. It was kind of frightening but very exciting, too.’

  Acid would change the landscape of Swinging London utterly. ‘You took acid and you actually thought you were very close to God,’ said Jane Ormsby-Gore, an early visitor to Pont Street. ‘You saw God, practically. And suddenly everyone realized something that I think Tara was probably aware of all along – that you didn’t have to live your life in a regimented way. You didn’t have to live your life in a box. You took psychedelics and you could see how your skin was made. You could see pieces of the atmosphere. You could see how we’re all part of each other. There’s no separation. It was the great social leveller.’

  Acid blew away what remained of outmoded social concerns such as status, tradition, ambition – and the notion of an aristocratic class. ‘This rather strange, cosmic explosion,’ said Christopher Gibbs, ‘blew away the flimsy structures that separated us all in a way that drink never would have. They made a lot of social niceties seem as absurd as they were. We suddenly understood, you know, why on earth am I thinking that this matters and that matters when obviously they don’t? A lot of young people became suddenly aware of the fact that, like A. J. Balfour said, “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.” And life becomes so much more interesting and exciting with the freedom of knowing that.’

  •

  Nicki was fed up with spending her holidays in the south of France in the company of her disapproving mother-in-law. For almost two years now, she and Tara had been searching for a holiday home of their own somewhere on the continent. They had seen a villa they loved in the French hilltop village of Ramatuelle, but in the end Nicki decided it was still close enough for Oonagh to make her influence felt.

  Another time, while they were in Sicily, Tara found what he thought was the perfect holiday home for them – a medieval tower, halfway down a steep hill that plunged towards the Mediterranean below. He and Nicki climbed down the hillside to reach it and discovered it was empty. Captivated by the view, they decided that this was where they wanted to spend their summers together. Nicholas Gormanston, who knew the island well, offered to make some enquiries locally as to who owned the place. The answer came back quickly. It belonged to Joseph Bonnano, the boss of one of the New York Mafia’s Five Families. Tara and Nicki decided not to make an offer on the place after all.

  In the autumn of 1965, Nicki was tired of the constant rows with Oonagh, who was now at a loose end after the closure of Miguel’s couture business and was in a position to judge her efforts at being a mother from the house across the road. Oonagh could see everything, including how often Nicki went out, what time she came home and how little time she was spending with Dorian and Julian. ‘She was living right on top of us,’ Nicki remembered. ‘Literally ten feet away.’

  Dorian and Julia
n began to spend more and more time at their grandmother’s place. Tara and Nicki didn’t have a garden in which they could play, whereas Oonagh, conveniently, did. They also had the company of Oonagh’s adopted twins, Desmond and Manuela. There were occasional rows over Oonagh’s choice of nannies, but the arrangement suited Nicki, who could come and go as she pleased. What Nicki didn’t know was that Oonagh was taking notes.

  ‘She had already made up her mind what she was going to do,’ she said, ‘which was to break up my marriage and to take my children for herself.’

  ‘She led an absolute campaign against Nicki,’ remembered Rock Brynner, ‘and she drove them apart by just weirding the situation out. Telling Tara constantly that he was with the wrong woman. Look, were they one hundred per cent faithful to each other? No, they probably weren’t. It was the Sixties. Infidelity was not unusual at the time. But Oonagh used it to damage not only their connubial relationship but also their friendship.’

  Nicki tried to persuade Tara that they should make a permanent home for themselves and the children abroad.

  ‘By then, I was sick of London,’ she said. ‘I was tired of waking up every morning and finding all these people I didn’t know sleeping on our living room floor. One day, I took away all the drink. I hid it. And I said to Tara, “Let’s see how long everyone stays when there’s nothing here for them.” A crowd arrived from the Scotch. When they realized there was no booze, they left after ten minutes and it was just Tara and me looking at each other. I said, “This is nice, isn’t it?” I put the drink back in the sideboard and the next night the house was full again.’

  She had become enamoured with the Costa del Sol, a region in southern Spain that was becoming popular with young Britons as an alternative to the old English seaside holiday standbys of Margate, Southend and Clacton-on-Sea. She was interested in opening a small boutique, cheap and cheerful – nothing on the scale of Maison Ferreras – in Marbella, which was then just a village. But Tara wasn’t ready to move abroad. In his mind, Spain was where old people went to retire. London, on the other hand, was a city pulsing with excitement. All of his friends were there. The garage was there.