I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

The affair went on for most of the summer. It was the talk of the town. Tara ceased to care who knew about it. He was infatuated with Amanda. It was inevitable that word of her husband’s affair would reach Nicki in Marbella. Her pride wounded, perhaps it suited her to pretend that she had put the two of them together as a birthday wheeze and it had unexpectedly developed into something more serious and lasting.

  Amanda was full of guilt. The man for whom she’d fallen was married and had two children. For the second time, she decided she had to remove herself from the situation, which meant getting out of London altogether. In August, she took a modelling job in Paris in the hope that the relationship might cool off. But not even distance could separate them.

  With Amanda off the London scene, Tara looked for things to distract him. Again, he began to consider becoming a racing car driver. He wrote again to Gore Taylor, his postman friend back in Ireland, offering him the job they’d discussed before. Gore wrote back, agreeing to become his full-time mechanic and racing manager, starting in January 1967.

  Then Tara decided to follow Michael Rainey and Nigel Waymouth into the rag trade. What he really wanted was a boutique on the King’s Road right at the heart of where the action was, a place where young men and women could go to buy the latest clothes they’d seen on Ready Steady Go! or Top of the Pops or just hang out like they did at Hung On You and Granny Takes a Trip.

  Through Christopher Gibbs, Tara had met John Crittle, a gregarious twenty-three-year-old Australian who had arrived in London from Sydney in 1964. ‘John was the archetypal Australian rogue,’ according to Alan Holsten, a friend and colleague for several years. ‘He was fantastic. Wicked smile. I think his father was a policeman in Sydney and he had a brother [Peter] who played rugby for Australia and another brother who was in the army. But John was definitely the black sheep of the family. He’d been a bit of a bad boy, so they shipped him out and he came to live in London.’

  Michael Rainey, one of the first men in London to employ him, remembered him as a man of ingratiating charm. ‘The kind of charm that people like Jimi Hendrix, who was around London at that time, were amused by. He once asked John Lennon if he could borrow his car. John, at that time, was driving that Rolls Royce painted rather like Tara’s car. He said, “Okay, take the keys.” The next thing, Crittle was driving down the King’s Road smashed out of his brains. The police stopped him. They said, “Where’d you get this from?” and he said, “What, this? Oh, my friend John Lennon lent it to me.” Of course he got arrested.’

  Early in 1966 he had used his charm to blag himself a job at Hung On You. ‘He walked in off the street one day. He had a pretty girlfriend with him. He said he’d moved to England and was looking for work. I said, “Well, as it happens, I need this changing room wallpapered. If you can do that for me, then maybe we’ll see what else you can do.” Anyway, he did a fantastic job – wallpapered it and put a curtain up. I said, “Okay, hang around for a week and we’ll see how good you are with customers.” It turned out he was very good at selling.’

  But John had ambitions far beyond serving as Michael Rainey’s mere lackey. ‘He got into his head that he could do it for himself. And he could, because he’d seen me doing it. He knew how I wanted my jackets – velvet on the collars, velvet on the sleeves. And he thought, “I could do that.”’

  What John wanted was to colonize the King’s Road in the same way that John Stephen had taken over Carnaby Street. He spent six months at Hung On You, learning every aspect of how the business worked, in the shop and out on the road. When Michael asked him to collect fabric from a supplier and deliver it to one of the tailors he used, John was only too happy to oblige. He was taking note of everything, while building up his own relationships.

  Michael Rainey’s most important supplier was Foster Tailoring, on Brewer Street in Soho, who made the jackets and suits that were Hung On You’s biggest sellers. For Pop and Cliff Foster, the father and son team that ran the business, there simply weren’t enough hours in the day – by the summer of 1966 they had regular orders from at least two dozen shops and new ones were approaching them every day. John decided he wanted a piece of the business. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any capital. That was where Tara came in.

  ‘John’s girlfriend at the time managed to earn a wage modelling,’ Michael said. ‘That’s how he became ensconced in the Chelsea set. They were suddenly meeting a lot of influential people. Christopher Gibbs took him under his wing a bit. So that was how he met Tara, whose involvement at that point was in motor cars.’

  In the beginning, John hoped to use Tara to get to Paul McCartney or one of the other Beatles. But when he found out that Tara had access to Guinness money, he knew he’d found his new business partner. ‘Tara wanted to be a backer of enterprises,’ said Martin Wilkinson. ‘There was very much a mood for that type of thing at the time. The Beatles did the same thing with Apple. Also, he knew something about clothes. His mother used to take him to all the fashion shows in Paris from the time he was a child – Balenciaga, Chanel, all those. So it was an area he was interested in.’

  John persuaded Tara to buy a chunk of Pop Foster’s business. Then he gave his notice to Michael Rainey. In August 1966, Foster Tailoring became Foster and Tara, with premises on Brewer Street and now also a lock-up garage on Gloucester Avenue, not far from Brian and Anita’s house. Alan Holsten, a teenager who worked in Woollands in Knightsbridge and who knew John from trendy clubs like Blaises and The Speakeasy, became their first employee.

  ‘We worked out of this tiny little mews garage,’ Alan remembered. ‘It was deadly quiet and completely empty. We started from nothing, just building stock up. John would go up to Berwick Street Market in Soho to buy fabric and take it across London to the tailors to get a few jackets or suits knocked together, which we then supplied to the shops.’

  The real plan, though, was to open a shop of their own, modelled on Hung On You, where they would sell exclusive Foster and Tara designs. ‘The interesting thing for me about Tara,’ said Paul Gorman, an expert on the fashion of the era, ‘is that he seems to have been one of those people who knew clothes really well. You know, you think about these wonderful gadabouts and they looked great. But when you investigate it, they actually did have an aesthetic. They had a critique with which they framed everything. And it was no surprise that he opened this tailoring business with this quite established father-and-son firm. So he could say, “No, the trousers must be tapered like that.” See, we often think of the Sixties as a series of accidents. But these people meant it that way.’

  Tara had found the perfect unit for a clothes shop at 161 King’s Road, a ground-floor space that was just below the Chelsea Methodist Church. It was available at a reasonable rent from its owners. He came up with a suitably foppish name for the place – Dandie Fashions.

  While he was trying to get the business off the ground, he was also having fun with the Cobra, even though he was still forbidden from driving it. Lord Snowdon happened to see it and had an idea: to take the car to Westminster, along with a painted Buick owned by Binder, Edwards and Vaughan, to photograph them in front of the Houses of Parliament, juxtaposing old order and new.

  They arranged to do it on 29 September. Dudley and the others brought along five members of an up-and-coming Birmingham band with whom they were friendly called The Move. They were led by a singer named Roy Wood, had a residency in the Marquee and knew the value of a good publicity stunt. Banned from driving, Tara sat in the back of the Buick, looking like a sixth member of the band, against the backdrop of the House of Lords, where his father had a seat.

  After that, they took them up to Primrose Hill, on the northern side of Regent’s Park, where Lord Snowdon wanted to capture them – the funky cars, the hot new band and the Honourable mod, Tara Browne – with the skyline of the swinging city behind them. And that’s when they had a brush with authority that made the day so memorable for everyone.

  ‘Snowdon,’ the Daily Express reported the following da
y, ‘was halfway up a ladder in one of the royal parks in London yesterday when a formidable blue-clad figure moved in front of his wide-angled lens. “You’re not allowed to do this,” said the park-keeper, Margaret Blackman, well versed in the regulations of Primrose Hill Park.

  ‘Lord Snowdon lowered his camera and replied, in level terms, “As a member of the public, I can take pictures wherever I want. All you can do is to tell the cars to move.” Snowdon walked down the path accompanied by WPK Blackman. He climbed into his Aston Martin parked outside.

  ‘A spokesman for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which controls the royal parks, said: “The woman park-keeper was mainly concerned with the cars being there, although strictly speaking special permission should have been obtained for the ladder.”’

  Dudley remembered laughing until it hurt. ‘It was like something out of an Ealing Comedy,’ he said. ‘A while after, we each got a letter from the Ministry of Works or something, saying that, on such and such a date, you contravened these regulations to do with the royal parks. However, on this occasion, we’re prepared to overlook it – obviously because they weren’t going to bring the Queen’s brother-in-law to court for having a stepladder in a royal park.’

  Robert Fraser had spotted the Cobra being driven up the King’s Road one afternoon, with Glen at the wheel and Tara in the passenger seat. People were running out onto the street to gawp at it as it made its way towards Sloane Square. It was so perfectly of the moment, Robert thought. He asked Tara if he could exhibit it in his gallery. Tara figured that if he couldn’t enjoy the car fully then others should be allowed to.

  On Saturday, 3 September 1966, the car was driven to the Fraser Gallery on Duke Street. The front window of the gallery had to be removed to get the car inside. Robert, a man who rarely missed a trick, especially where money was concerned, persuaded Tara’s three artist friends to cover the cost of removing and refitting the window. After all, he was offering them a month-long showcase of their work in the city’s hippest gallery. There was newspaper and TV interest. Even Pathé News wanted to film the moment for posterity.

  ‘He said the window was part of the deal,’ Dudley remembered, ‘so we said we’d cover the cost of taking it out and putting it back in. But Dave got it into his head that we shouldn’t have to pay full price for this. “I’ll sort this out,” he said, then he drove up to Notting Hill, went into some pub up there, which was full of people pissed out of their heads on a weekend afternoon. Dave went in and he said, “Does anyone want to earn a fiver?” So he got all these guys down who hadn’t taken out a window before. It was a massive window. But they did a fair job, because they got it out – and they were pissed, remember.’

  Once the window was removed, they placed long planks of wood down to form two ramps, one inside and one outside the gallery. Then, with Tara steering, but the engine switched off, they pushed it up one ramp, then down the other and into the exhibition space. Then Dave’s half-slaughtered hirelings turned to the job of putting the window back.

  ‘So Doug and I are standing there,’ Dudley remembered, ‘watching this, fretting. But they managed to get the window in place. Suddenly, there’s only inches left to go and we’re saying, “He’s done it! The bugger’s gone and done it!” Then one of the blokes gave it a nudge with his shoulder for some reason and that was it – thirty feet of window, smashed. Of course, Dave, who exploited and conned his way out of everything, got Tara to pay for the damaged window.’

  On Monday, Tara’s fantastically coloured sports car became the newest attraction at the Robert Fraser Gallery. Tara made a brief speech at the unveiling that night, waxing poetic and invoking the spirit of the Bright Young People era in his description of the car.

  ‘It is the world that the Thirties promised and never fulfilled,’ he said. ‘All trace of smoke, oil and grease are gone, the depressing wastes of industry long since vanished. There remains a Perspex city, uninhabited, silent, built without human labour and coloured by the rays of the sun.’

  The French TV station ORTF became interested in the car and its owner. They sent a documentary crew to London to make a short film about a day in the life of a member of the Swinging London set. The seven-minute, black-and-white film was entitled Une Journée Avec L’Honorable Tara Browne and featured Tara in some of his favourite spots, set to a backing track of ‘Love You To’ and ‘Good Day Sunshine’ from Revolver.

  He was filmed sharing a joke with a coquettish-looking Marianne Faithfull at the Fraser Gallery, trying on a coat and a trilby in Lord John on Carnaby Street, then chatting to the singer Spencer Davis, who had become a regular visitor to Eaton Row. They captured him strolling up the King’s Road; kicking back in the mews house, flicking through a pile of albums that included Rubber Soul and Blonde on Blonde; then dancing in Blaises, a popular basement nightclub in Queen’s Gate. In perfectly accented French, he talked about his friendship with Brian Jones and The Rolling Stones, his garage and his love of clothes, his children and his teenage years in Paris. Significantly, there was no mention of his wife.

  They filmed him getting into the multicoloured AC Cobra, despite his driving ban, then taking off with the top down and the wind in his hair. The car was then filmed passing a number of London landmarks, including Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the House of Lords and Piccadilly Circus, although they cheated with these shots. ‘That was actually me at the wheel,’ said Glen Kidston. ‘I had to do all the driving, because Tara didn’t have his licence.’

  In truth, Tara’s London – that part of the capital that was setting the agenda for the rest of Britain and, indeed, the rest of the planet – was a tight and incestuous world that comprised no more than a few hundred people. And, as with their spiritual antecedents, the Bright Young People, the media were keen to put names and faces on this new generation of fast, young, pleasure-seekers, whose influence was being felt all over the world, especially in America.

  In September 1966, the New York-based men’s fashion magazine Gentleman’s Quarterly published a photograph of Tara and four of his friends, standing on the banks of the Thames, cool and unsmiling, in their finest Carnaby Street clobber. The image looked like it could have been taken from a record cover, except the five friends happened to be members of the British nobility who had never produced as much as a note of music between them.

  The fact that Britain’s young aristocrats were swanning around dressed like pop stars caused ripples on the other side of the pond. ‘My colleagues in America report that this picture has been received there with incredulity,’ ran an article in the Daily Mail, published under the pseudonymous by-line of Charles Greville. ‘I am not surprised. It is headed, “Dandies on the Thames”, and looks like a large pop group. In fact, it shows five aristocrats in their normal gear.

  ‘They are Christopher Gibbs, 27, antique dealer and nephew of Sir Humphrey Gibbs, Governor of Rhodesia; Sir Mark Palmer, 24, son of Mrs Henriette Abel Smith, an extra Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen; The Hon. Tara Browne, 20, car enthusiast, father of two, and son of Lord Oranmore and Browne; Nicholas Gormanston, 26, artist and premier Viscount of Ireland; and The Hon. Julian Ormsby-Gore, 25, son of Lord Harlech, former Ambassador to Washington.

  ‘The American magazine Gentleman’s Quarterly . . . says in a sentence that should weaken sterling a little more: “That the peacock mod of young England today is not confined to the sons of working-class blokes what shop on Carnaby Street should be apparent from the dandified flourish of these aristocratic gentlemen – all of the establishment, past and contemporary.”’

  The photograph was taken by Willy Rizzo of Paris Match, who ran into Tara and his friends one night and asked if he could take their picture. ‘It isn’t my fault these young aristocrats look like that,’ Rizzo told the Mail when he was asked if he got them to dress up for the shot. ‘I just took the pictures. If you don’t wish your aristocrats to look like that, you should tell them what to wear.’

  It was all fun, but all
too fleeting. The car, the documentary, the clothes shop, the garage, the exhibition, the photograph in the American fashion magazine, the putative return to motor racing – they all took his mind off Nicki temporarily. But by the early autumn of 1966, Tara realized that he had to do something about the mess that had become of his marriage.

  •

  The separation from Amanda didn’t take. He went to Paris to visit her regularly, sometimes every weekend, between August and the beginning of October.

  They spent long, romantic evenings talking about the future. They slept together in the new apartment that Tara’s mother had bought on boulevard Suchet when she split from Miguel.

  Her relationship with Tara had Oonagh’s full consent, according to Amanda. On those weekends when she too happened to be there, she even brought them breakfast in bed.

  ‘The way she behaved with me was amazing,’ she said. ‘I was sleeping with Tara in her flat in Paris while she was also there. This was while he was still married to Nicki. She would come into the room in the morning to bring us breakfast. She would say, in her very nice voice, “Hello, Amanda, how are you today?”’

  But somewhere in between Tara’s regular visits to Paris, he began to feel a distance open up between them, owing to her friendship with the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali.

  According to Amanda, Tara was actually present the night she first met him. Tara showed up in Paris one weekend in September, with Brian Jones and Donald Cammell, the Scottish filmmaker who had insinuated himself into the Stones circle and would go on to write and direct a famous bedroom scene between Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger in his movie, Performance. ‘I was doing a show for Paco Rabane,’ Amanda remembered. ‘It was in the afternoon, so I was fully made-up, with eyelashes and everything else, which was nice because I wanted to be pretty for Tara.’

  They had a romantic dinner together, then went to meet Brian and Donald in Chez Castel, a nightclub on the city’s Left Bank. Dali was at a nearby table with a group of people whom he treated in the manner of courtiers. ‘Tara and Brian were dressed in these lace and velvet suits. They were very dandy and they really stood out. Dali discovered that one of them was a Rolling Stone and he said, “I must meet him!”’