I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  And there was something else that was becoming obvious to Nicki in the latter half of 1965. Tara was disengaging from the relationship. Stories of his wife’s unfaithfulness had reached his ears. LSD – Hollingshead’s prescription for self-realization – may even have helped him see the truth more clearly, that, while he still loved Nicki, their marriage wasn’t working. And a change of scenery wasn’t going to save it.

  But Nicki persisted and persuaded him to at least consider the idea. At the beginning of November they headed for Spain, Tara for some winter sun and Nicki to investigate local properties. They rented a house in Marbella and, as if to emphasize the space that had opened up between them, Tara invited his friends Gerard Campbell and Theodora Brinckman, as well as Mark Palmer, to go with them. They all had a thoroughly miserable time. ‘When we got there,’ Gerard remembered, ‘it was cold and wet and raining and the house didn’t have any heating.’

  They spent their days in the local bistros and tapas bars. Tara, who had a sweet tooth, had never much liked the taste of wine, but Gerard, who was something of a connoisseur, did his best to educate him about such matters as balance, depth, complexity and finish, while they sat indoors and waited for the sun to reveal itself. It never did.

  The tension between Tara and Nicki made the week even more unbearable. ‘It was no secret that his family weren’t keen on her,’ Gerard said. ‘That song by Sonny and Cher was out at the time: “I’ve Got You, Babe”. And they both liked that song, I remember, because it was like their reply to the world.

  ‘Anyway, while we were there, they had a terrific fight – as they did from time to time – and they decided they were going home. Theodora and I went to Seville. We were quite happy to get out of there because the tension was awful.’

  This row, however, was more serious than one of their usual run of the mill disagreements over Oonagh’s interference or Nicki’s occasional affairs. Tara had fallen for somebody else.

  A few months earlier, one afternoon in June, Tara arrived home and told Nicki that he’d just seen the most beautiful woman in the world. She was having lunch in a restaurant on the King’s Road with April Ashley, a transsexual who had once been George Jamieson, a merchant seaman from Liverpool and one of the first people in Britain to have sex reassignment surgery. April was a familiar figure on the London scene, but Tara had never seen her friend before. He described her to Nicki as being about six feet tall, with long blonde hair and slightly Oriental features. ‘I was jealous,’ said Nicki. ‘Of course I was, I was his wife. But I tried not to let it show. We were able to say things like that to each other. We were best buddies.’

  Two days later, Nicki was reading a copy of the Daily Express, featuring a picture of a woman who worked as a striptease under the name Peki D’Oslo in Raymond Revuebar in Soho. She was photographed leaving court after giving evidence against two men accused of stealing the mink stole she used in her act, as well as jewellery, cash and a flick knife.

  ‘I think she was French-Vietnamese,’ Nicki said, ‘with this long, blonde hair. I had to admit she was a very beautiful creature. Tara saw the picture over my shoulder and he said, “That’s her! That’s the girl!” and from that moment on he was totally infatuated with her.’

  The girl for whom Tara had fallen was Amanda Lear, model and, later, a muse to the artist Salvador Dali. One of the most fascinating figures to emerge from the Sixties, she revelled in the aura of mystery and sexual ambiguity that she created for herself. Even her memoir, My Life With Dali, begins when she’s twenty-five, with no reference whatsoever to her childhood, her parents, or even where she was born. During the course of her life, it has been variously reported that her mother was French, Vietnamese, French-Vietnamese, Chinese and English, and that her father was French, Indonesian, English and Russian. Her place of birth has been variously given as Hanoi, Hong Kong, Paris and Saigon.

  However, by far the greatest matter of conjecture surrounding Amanda was whether she was born a boy or a girl. One popular account of her life had it that she had sex reassignment surgery in the early 1960s. Amanda always denied it, but for a time was happy to trade on the infamy that the story generated. ‘Dali and I built the Amanda Lear persona,’ she once said, ‘into something very intriguing and very ambiguous and it worked.’

  It wasn’t that Amanda moved through life without leaving any footprints; it was just that she had a tendency to deny that the footprints belonged to her. April Ashley has claimed that she worked with Amanda in the 1950s at Le Carrousel, as part of a transvestite revue in Paris. In her book April Ashley’s Odyssey, she claimed that Amanda was originally a man named Alain Tapp, who, like her, had had sex reassignment surgery, then stripped under the name Peki D’Oslo – a reference, it was said, to her half Chinese, half Scandinavian heritage – before she reimagined herself as Amanda Lear.

  However, Amanda later denied that she was ever a man, or that she ever stripped, or that she was ever Peki D’Oslo. ‘I was going to sue,’ she later told an interviewer, ‘but I thought, what is the point? People don’t want normality. They want people from Mars.’

  What is known for certain is that she first fetched up in London in the mid-1960s, where she studied fine art, rented a small flat in Sloane Avenue and fell in with Chelsea’s hip crowd, the kind of people who, according to the writer Jonathan Meades, ‘once shared a line with someone who shared a line with a Rolling Stone’.

  According to April Ashley, her ambition was to be a respectable English lady with a British passport. As fate would have it, the woman for whom Tara had fallen in a King’s Road restaurant in June happened to be in Spain that November.

  There was a scene developing in Marbella. It was where regular King’s Road habitués, such as Michael Rainey and Jane Ormsby-Gore, went to get away from it all. April Ashley had a bar there and Amanda was an occasional visitor.

  On the beach one afternoon, Nicki saw her emerging from the water. ‘She caught me staring at her as she came out of the sea,’ Nicki remembered. ‘She said, “I’m Venus – who are you?” I had to admire her. Of course, the story was that she’d been born a boy. I thought, “Well, she looks good for a girl!” Tara’s birthday was coming up. I thought to myself, “What do you get a twenty-one-year-old who has everything for his birthday?” And I said to her, “You are going to be my husband’s twenty-first birthday present.” And of course it all backfired on me because he went and fell in love with her.’

  Amanda remembered events very differently. She had an affair with Tara, she said, which started that week in Spain, but it wasn’t as a birthday gift and it didn’t happen at his wife’s instigation.

  ‘One evening,’ she recalled, ‘I was in the Marbella Club and this beautiful girl offered me a drink. She was very friendly – and that was Nicki Browne. We became good friends, Nicki and I, and then her husband, Tara, whom she introduced me to that night. Mark Palmer was staying with them in the house. We spent a few days together and we got to know each other very well. We had a good time, smoking joints together and just having fun.

  ‘First, I think, I was fascinated by Tara. He had such a charming smile. He had such good manners. He was really sweet. There was a feminine side to him. He was very soft and very well-spoken and he had very long hair. He was slim and good-looking and a typical Pisces – a bit of a dreamer. And what happened was that very quickly I fell in love with him. We started having an affair behind Nicki’s back, which was not nice, of course, but I could not help it.’

  Amanda denied that Nicki had any knowledge of the affair, though friends assumed it was the source of the row between Tara and Nicki in Marbella. Whatever the truth of the matter, one thing was clear: Amanda and Tara were besotted with each other. ‘I said to Tara that I should leave,’ Amanda remembered, ‘because the situation was getting out of hand. Years later, Nicki told me that Tara was completely infatuated with me. She said, “He lost his head for you, Amanda.” But then who knows with men?’

  Amanda left Marbella with Mark.
They went to Paris then on to Portugal, while Gerard and Theodora headed for Seville, relieved to escape the fractious atmosphere in the house.

  Nicki remained in Marbella while Tara returned to London alone. It’s quite likely that the newspapers had heard the rumours that the marriage between one of London’s hippest young couples was in trouble. A day or two after Tara walked out on her, Nicki announced her plans to open a boutique in Marbella the following spring. She told the Daily Express she had also identified a home where she hoped to live and was involved in negotiations with the owners. ‘It is a delightful, old house,’ she said, ‘and the Spanish family are really delighted to be moving into something more modern.’

  All of which came as news to Tara, back home in London. He, too, had a visit from the Daily Express, who ran a story, headlined ‘Young Mr Browne – he’s a Guinness heir – plays nannie (sic),’ alongside a photograph of Tara, looking more than a little miffed, as he watches over Julian and Dorian in their playpen. He was reported to be bathing the children himself and pushing them around Hyde Park in their pram. ‘My wife, Nicki, is in Spain looking for premises where we might open a shop in Marbella,’ he told the reporter, presumably through gritted teeth. He added that, whatever happened, he wouldn’t be giving up the garage.

  While Nicki remained in Spain, Tara bought himself an early Christmas present – an AC Cobra, a British-manufactured sports car with a 4.7-litre, V8 engine. It was green in colour and even more powerful than the Lotus Elan. Mike McCartney was with him when it was delivered on 11 November.

  ‘Tara said to me, “You have to have a go of it, Michael. It’s fantastic.” So I got behind the wheel. He said, “Just press on the accelerator, like it’s an ordinary car.” So I put it into first gear, put my foot down and – whoa! – talk about power. The whole front of the car lifted up. I just got out and said, “Sorry, that’s too much car for me.”’

  Tara’s heart was still set on becoming a full-time racing car driver, using his inheritance to finance his career, just as Gay did to train and ride racehorses. On his visits home to Luggala he had become friendly with Gore Taylor, the local postman, who was an expert on car mechanics. In December, Tara wrote to him, offering him a full-time job as his manager and mechanic when he eventually made the leap into Formula Three. In the end, it came to nothing. While he knew how to handle a car, Glen Kidston wondered if Tara had the discipline to give up the late nights at the Scotch and the regular trips to Pont Street.

  ‘He would have had to modify his lifestyle if he was going to do it,’ he said. ‘There were a lot of gentlemen drivers, it’s true. He could have done that, but you can’t take liberties with, let’s just say, your intakes and stay on the road. Once you’re racing, you’ve signed on the line and agreed to leave all that stuff to one side. Tara had bottle. But if you have bottle, you also need luck. And you won’t have luck if you weigh the odds against yourself.’

  Tara was undoubtedly searching for a new focus as he felt his marriage listing. Nicki arrived home from Spain a week later. Even those who weren’t privy to his holiday fling with Amanda could see that Tara and Nicki were on the rocks.

  ‘As an alliance between two people,’ said Christopher Gibbs, ‘it bore no relation to any marriage I’d ever encountered, so I guess I’d never really taken it particularly seriously. It was two waifs in a storm hanging on to each other, whose union had been blessed – in inverted commas – with two nippers. And I can’t remember the nippers being paraded around in the arms of either parent, because the parents were too busy having a good time – as you are when you’re twenty.’

  •

  On a rainy Saturday lunchtime that December, a group of Chelsea football fans on their way to a match were stopped dead in their tracks by the sight of three outlandishly dressed individuals putting a sign up over a retail outlet in World’s End, at the unfashionable end of the King’s Road. The sign, written in red art deco script, said, ‘Granny Takes a Trip’.

  ‘Weirdos!’ was among the cleanest comments shouted.

  If only the fans had looked inside. The shop was fitted out to resemble a New Orleans bordello as seen through the eyes of someone who had just had something off the menu at the World Psychedelic Centre. The decor was grotesque, opulent, erotic; the marble-effect walls adorned with Aubrey Beardsley illustrations, saucy, French postcards of girls with long eyelashes in silk stockings, and a sign that borrowed from Oscar Wilde: ‘One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.’

  ‘There was a lot of yahoo, yobbo kind of catcalls,’ remembered Nigel Waymouth, one of the shop’s owners, ‘but I knew from the reaction, as we were putting up the sign, that they were also slightly confused, or bemused, but certainly fascinated – and that was the whole idea.’

  Waymouth was a former grammar school boy and economics and history graduate who worked for a year and a half as a freelance journalist, ‘writing in-depth features about tramps, homeless people, junkies, schizophrenics, people living in Glasgow doss houses, my George Orwell years – Down and Out in Paris and London kind of thing.’

  He set up the shop along with his girlfriend, Sheila Cohen, a collector of vintage clothes, and John Pearse, a mod, who came out of the Soho coffee bar milieu and had served an apprenticeship as a Savile Row tailor. Granny’s, as it became known, was one of two London boutiques that opened at the end of 1965 that would have an enormous influence on the way young people dressed, and would persuade Tara himself to go into the rag trade.

  Granny’s actually started off as a jumble sale. The first clothes they sold were items from Sheila’s own wardrobe, which she’d resolved to declutter. ‘They were piling up everywhere in the flat where we lived, just off Baker Street,’ Nigel remembered. ‘And it was getting slightly out of hand, so we thought we’d open an outlet to sell them.’

  Sheila’s clothes were mostly vintage items from the 1920s and 1930s, which John went at with scissors and a needle and thread to give them a modern twist. ‘We were really making it up as we went along. This wasn’t the world of Stella McCartney. This was street design.’

  World’s End couldn’t have been more off the beaten track. It was far from the West End and from the heart of the King’s Road, the latter the base of operations for Mary Quant, whose companies were now grossing millions of pounds annually. But, as John Stephen showed on Carnaby Street, if you piqued people’s interest, they would find you.

  The name of the shop captured the whole point of the enterprise, which was taking clothes that their grandparents might have worn and giving them a more modern look. But it was also a cheeky wink to the still relatively small constituency of people, like Tara, who were in the know as to the effects of psychoactive drugs. Granny’s was the first indicator that Carnaby Street’s day as the arbiter of what was hip was coming to an end. By the end of 1965 it was choked with tourists and weekend mods. The real groovers, their heads suddenly filled with surrealistic shapes and fantastical colours – phosphine and paisley patterns, spirals and concentric circles, blindingly bright purples, reds and yellows – would soon be migrating west in search of something to wear that matched the new visual aesthetic.

  Mod snazziness and the beatnik look were on the way out, replaced by a new fixation with Victorian frills, Edwardian velvet and satin, and ethnic materials and designs, all infused with a pop-art sensibility. Very quickly, Granny’s became an essential destination.

  When Sheila’s wardrobe was empty, they started acquiring clothes, including men’s clothes, from other sources: colourful floral shirts; white flared trousers made of Venetian cloth; flapper dresses; jackets in trademark William Morris prints; tight velvet trousers; Chicago gangster suits; fezzes and turbans; Victorian bustles; satin blouses with frills – for women and men. That was what was truly revolutionary about the new look that began to emerge, post-Carnaby Street – the homogenization of fashion. Jackets, trousers and, yes, even blouses were no longer for women or men.

  ‘Then we started designing our own
stuff. Sourcing vintage stuff – you can’t keep doing it. Beautiful, haute-couture clothes were becoming more and more rare. We had to start making our own. Sheila was keen to do dresses and things for girls and John had a lot of ideas for men. I did most of the drawing. I remember we got this outrageous floral material and we asked this woman named Mrs Trot in New Cross to turn it into shirts. They flew off the shelves at five guineas each – outrageous, half a week’s wages, you know. It was extraordinary.’

  They changed the front of the shop regularly, sometimes to attract passing trade, but occasionally just to amuse themselves. One day, a giant smiling sun shone out from the boards that covered the front window. Another day, it was a pop-art image of Jean Harlow. Another, the front half of John’s broken-down 48 Dodge which they’d sawn in two and fixed to the outer wall to make it look like it was crashing out of the shop.

  One day, early in 1966, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wandered in. They left with a couple of signature Granny’s shirts, slim-fitting, loudly coloured and ornately patterned with long rounded collars, which made the Carnaby Street look seem positively old-fashioned almost overnight.

  Tara loved the sheer oddness of Granny’s and became a regular visitor. He considered opening a shop just like it. ‘Tara had an extraordinary visual sense,’ said Martin Wilkinson. ‘He went to huge lengths to get an old Hungarian guy to make special shirts with frills for him. He’d visit tailors with instructions. The impulse behind all of these new shops that were suddenly opening up was a return to eighteenth-century dandyism. It was more than just a dress code. It was, “I’ve just had a very large joint and I’m going to take tremendous enjoyment from the fact that I’m wearing a blue silk shirt with frills on it and it’s really pissing off the guy in the bank.”’