I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  The official opening of the shop was less than two weeks away, but Tara was preoccupied with the divorce case. Tara and Nicki were in court almost every day to witness their lawyers argue over the custody of the children and over what settlement, if any, Nicki would receive. Alan Holsten was clearing out the lock-up garage on Gloucester Avenue one day when he found a handwritten poem in Tara’s desk drawer. He presumed Tara had written it in response to his break-up with Nicki, although Martin Wilkinson thought it was more likely a song he was writing with Brian Jones. Either way, it may have offered a hint as to his emotional state at the time:

  When my heart first began to

  Crumble

  I never knew that the

  Reason for this

  Was I.

  As I watched our Real Love tumble

  I wasn’t ready for

  Feelings that

  Did

  Die.

  Now I come to you ever humble

  And beg of you to

  Give love one

  More

  Try.

  But reconciliation with Nicki was never on the cards, even though she later claimed they remained on good terms and in regular telephone contact, contrary to the instructions of their lawyers, throughout the court case. Tara was ready to move on, from Nicki and from Amanda. At the start of the December, he became romantically involved with one of Mark Palmer’s friends, Suki Potier, a pretty, nineteen-year-old model.

  Mark Palmer met her in a club on Cromwell Street when she was about seventeen. She came from a comfortable, middle-class background, he remembered, with parents who disapproved of her friends and her lifestyle. She was petite and blonde, with a painstakingly put-together look that would soon be rendered old-fashioned by the time the Summer of Love rolled around and hippie chicks like Marianne Faithfull took centre stage. She was pleasant company, according to Tara’s friends, but she didn’t challenge him intellectually.

  ‘Nicki, by contrast, was bubbly and alive,’ said Michael Rainey. ‘She had a presence. I liked Suki a lot, but she was a bimbo really – she had a bimbo look and mind. She was basically a groupie.’

  Jose Fonseca, who handled her bookings for Mark Palmer’s modelling agency, English Boy, remembered her being nice if slightly scattered. ‘She seemed to sort of drift through life,’ she said. ‘She didn’t have much focus. She did the odd bit of modelling here and there and earned enough to live. But in those days, you could do two or three jobs and get by on the money for two or three months.’

  Tara and Suki went out a handful of times, but nothing about the dynamic between them suggested the affair would be anything other than short and fleeting.

  ‘She was a rebound thing for Tara,’ said Martin Wilkinson. ‘She was incredibly sweet, very feminine, very funny, laughed a lot. Not particularly bright. Reacted in a very light way to things, but she also had a sort of doomed quality about her. Her reaction to mishaps was always, “Oh my God, I knew that was going to happen.” I would have said she was worried by life, in a way that Tara wasn’t, which is why I don’t think it was ever going to develop into anything serious.’

  On Wednesday, 14 December, his driving licence was reinstated. He wasted no time in getting back behind the wheel. ‘He rang me the following day,’ said Nicki. ‘It was a Thursday. We weren’t meant to be speaking to each other because we were in the middle of this court case, but we were still speaking behind everyone’s back. He rang me and he said, “Guess what! I’ve just got my licence back!” and I said, “Oh, good!” And the last words I ever spoke to him were, “Drive carefully.”’

  Tara was due to fly to Ireland that Saturday afternoon to see the children, but for some reason he changed his mind. He had a big week ahead of him. On Monday, he was due back in court. On Wednesday, Dandie Fashions was opening its doors for the first time, after which he was planning to fly to Ireland to spend Christmas.

  When Nicki spoke to him that week, she said he seemed ‘addled’.

  ‘I think he just saw everything going down the spout,’ she said. ‘His mind was distracted. He had people pulling at him from this side and that side – trustees, solicitors, Oonagh, me. You have all that going on in your mind, then you get into a car and you drive at ninety miles per hour, there’s one thing that’s likely to happen.’

  On Saturday he slept until lunchtime, then he popped around to the garage, where he spent the afternoon servicing a light blue Lotus Elan that belonged to Glen Kidston’s girlfriend, Serena. His painted Cobra was in New York and, he was tickled to hear, turning heads in Times Square. David Vaughan had taken it to America on a Cunard liner and was planning to drive it from coast to coast to drum up publicity for Binder, Edwards and Vaughan. And he was up to his old tricks, telling the New York Times that he was hoping to cover a skyscraper with a giant mural.

  With no car of his own, Tara borrowed Serena’s Lotus for the weekend. He finished work in the late afternoon, then he popped round to Courtfield Road and watched Jukebox Jury with Brian. He had a date that night with Suki and he was looking forward to it. He picked her up shortly before 9 p.m. and they had dinner in a restaurant on Abingdon Road. They left the restaurant just before midnight and drove off. London was festooned with Christmas lights. They headed west in Serena’s Lotus Elan, driving just for the hell of it, with no particular place to go.

  ‘It’s very dangerous if you haven’t driven anything for six months to suddenly get back into a high performance car like a Lotus Elan,’ said Martin Wilkinson. ‘The car had a very good power-to-weight ratio. It was great, as long as you remained in control of it. But if it went away from you, because it was so light, then you really had no chance.’

  Just after midnight, they were driving through Redcliffe Gardens, approaching the junction with Redcliffe Square in South Kensington, when Tara, for reasons that were never clear, lost control of the car. Neither alcohol nor drugs were a factor, as Tara had consumed less than one pint of beer, though speed may well have been a cause. Suki claimed that he wasn’t going particularly fast, although that would have been wildly out of character for him. Several witnesses claimed he flew past them, accelerating and braking fast, while the car made a loud noise. Seconds later, there was a bang and the sound of the engine stopped.

  According to Suki’s version of events, a white car – either a Volvo or an E-type Jag – emerged unexpectedly from a side street, forcing Tara to swerve and collide with a black van that was parked nearby, before landing on the pavement a few feet away. Despite nationwide appeals, the driver of the second car was never found.

  Whatever the reason for Tara’s uncharacteristic loss of control, his final act in life was to pull the steering wheel to ensure that he, and not Suki, took the full impact of the collision with the van. ‘A gentleman,’ said Anita Pallenberg. ‘To the very end.’

  The car disintegrated around them. Tara suffered a fractured skull and lacerations to his brain. Suki survived with bruises and shock. She held Tara, dying in her arms, while she waited forty-five minutes for an ambulance to arrive. He was removed from the car and taken to St Stephen’s Hospital in Fulham. Two hours later, he was pronounced dead.

  Suki phoned Theodora, who then phoned Nicki. They both rushed to the hospital. ‘Theodora got there before me,’ Nicki remembered. ‘When she saw me, she said, “Oh, Nicki, they’ve combed his hair the wrong way.”’

  Gay Kindersley was asleep in his farmhouse in East Garston, near Newbury, when the police rang to say that his half-brother had been killed in a car accident. They asked if he would formally identify the body. He was in such a state of shock that he didn’t trust himself behind the wheel of his car. In the middle of the night, he woke his friend, the horse-trainer Billy Payne, and asked him to take him to London.

  ‘It was the most awful thing I’ve ever had to do,’ Gay remembered. ‘I went down to this morgue and I walked through and the policeman – a very nice man – said, “Would you like a cigarette, sir?” I hadn’t smoked for about twenty y
ears. I said, “Yes, I would.” And then they pulled out the drawer and there was Tara lying there, the poor chap.’

  At 3 a.m., Garech, who was sleeping soundly in Woodtown Manor, his Dublin home, received a call from his mother’s solicitor, James Cawley, who told him that his brother was dead. ‘You expect to see your parents die,’ Garech said. ‘That’s part of life. But you don’t expect your younger brother to die – not before his time. It seemed so stupid, so pointless.’

  Still numb, he drove to Luggala in the middle of the night to break the news to his mother. Oonagh was up, feeding Desmond and Manuela. ‘I said to her, “I have something urgent I have to tell you,” and she said, “Sit down and wait until I’ve finished feeding the babies.” It was hell. I had to sit there while she fiddled with bottles, with this thing in my head.’

  Oonagh broke down when she heard the news. Afterwards, Garech returned to Woodtown Manor. At 7 a.m. he phoned his father and broke the news to him. Dom, who had lost his own parents in a car accident forty years earlier, had lost his youngest son in similar circumstances. ‘He just couldn’t take it in,’ Garech remembered.

  He was far from alone. The following morning the news broke with the dawn. ‘It was like a death knell sounding over London,’ remembered Marianne Faithfull. ‘I think it was a definite turning point for a lot of us. It was the end of the Sixties for many people. To have someone who was so full of life and so full of joy suddenly taken from you, it made you very pessimistic and cynical about the world, which is what we’d all been trying so hard not to be.’

  Later that morning, Suki’s father, Gilbert, paid tribute to Tara’s actions in saving his daughter’s life. ‘It was a very gallant act,’ he said. ‘It’s tragic that it should have cost him his life.’

  At Courtfield Road, Brian Jones was doorstepped by a reporter, who broke the news of his friend’s death to him. He wept uncontrollably. ‘I am numbed,’ he said. ‘It’s ghastly. He was so full of life.’

  That night, guitar in hand, he showed up at the mews house in Eaton Row, where he’d spent so many happy nights, playing with Tara’s Scalextric cars, smoking dope and listening to The Beach Boys. Nicki invited him in. He sat down and, without uttering a single word, she said, he played soothing guitar to her for two hours until she fell asleep.

  Three days later, in the middle of Christmas week, Tara was laid to rest in the grounds of Luggala, on the shore of Lough Tay, under a simple granite slab that carried his name, the Browne family’s coat of arms and the two dates – 1945 and 1966 – that bore out the tragedy of a life cut short.

  Eight months after celebrating his twenty-first birthday, on a night that would remain for many of them the high watermark of the Swinging Sixties, his friends returned to his home at the bottom of a valley in the Wicklow Mountains to say goodbye to him. It rained so heavily that a hydraulic pump had to be employed to prevent the grave from filling up with water. Between forty and fifty of Tara’s young friends, decked out in the fashions of the day, stood around in the rain, openly weeping, as if they instinctively understood that his death represented something more than just the end of a life.

  ‘We felt immortal,’ said Anita Pallenberg. ‘We thought we were indestructible. But then Tara died – the first of us to go. Something changed that day. For everyone. The Sixties weren’t the Sixties anymore.’

  EPILOGUE: AND THOUGH THE NEWS WAS RATHER SAD

  On the morning of Monday, 19 December 1966, the day after Tara’s death and still three days before he was buried, his mother and widow had a date to keep at the High Court in London. The divorce case had been finalized in the most tragically unforeseen way, but the question of who would raise Dorian and Julian was even more important now that their father was gone. Nicki and Oonagh appeared in front of Mr Justice Cross, who said he would make an order on the issue of the custody of the children in the New Year.

  Everyone had an utterly miserable Christmas.

  On 16 January 1967, Justice Cross upheld the decision of the Dublin court, ruling that Dorian and Julian should stay with Oonagh, although he said that every effort should be made to ensure that their mother played an increasing role in their lives.

  Nicki left the court in a daze, then went back to Eaton Row and cried for four hours. ‘I had no chance,’ she said, ‘taking on the Guinness family with all their money.’

  The following day, John Lennon was sitting at his upright piano at the EMI recording studios on Abbey Road in London. He was blocked. The Beatles had been in the studio since the last week in November, laying down songs for a concept album in which they would play the part of a fictional band. Hiding behind musical alter egos would allow them to experiment creatively with different song forms and sounds. At least that was how Paul sold it to the others, since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was his creative vision.

  By the second week in January, the sessions had yielded three songs, whose conceptual link was that they were all nostalgic compositions inspired by their Liverpool childhoods: John’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and Paul’s ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’. Only the last of these would make it onto the final album.

  John, like George and Ringo, wasn’t enjoying himself. He was, in his own words, ‘very out of it then’, taking enormous amounts of acid in an effort to counter the boredom of his suburban life with a wife and child. By contrast, Paul was happily gadding about London, living the life of a bachelor while his girlfriend, Jane Asher, was away in America. Creatively, he was on a roll. This was his record – his idea, his personality, his drive. Sergeant Pepper marked the moment when Paul became the dominant creative force in the band. Tighter with producer George Martin than any of the others, he began to assert more and more control in the studio over how their music was recorded.

  Every day, he was presenting the others with new ideas for the album, whereas John was worried that he’d already shot his bolt with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. He knew that unless he started coming up with material, every song on the record would be written by Paul.

  But then he hated working this way, writing songs to order, instead of allowing inspiration to arrive. He did what he’d always done when he was bereft of ideas. He picked up a newspaper, looking to find something in the morning’s headlines that might serve as inspiration. He propped a copy of the Daily Mail on the music stand in front of him and turned over the front page. There, in the middle of page three, was an article headlined: ‘Guinness Heir Babies Stay with Grandmother’.

  John had heard about Tara’s death. He and Paul had just been discussing whether or not Tara would have inherited his father’s seat in the House of Lords had he lived. Paul said no, that his father had a son from his first marriage, who was in line to become the next Lord Oranmore and Browne.

  John touched the piano keys and out came the opening line of a song about a lucky man who made the grade, but died in a traffic accident. In John’s fictionalized account of the accident, Tara was tripping on acid and failed to notice that a traffic light had turned red. He muses on how the dissemination of news trivializes things that happen, as a crowd of people gather at the scene, recognize his face and wonder if he was a member of the House of Lords.

  John wrote two more verses, inspired by a report in the same morning’s Daily Express about potholes in Blackburn and his recent experiences filming How I Won the War.

  John played the song to Paul, who loved it, then offered him a middle section that he originally wrote for another song, about smoking pot on the upper deck of a bus and slipping off into a dope-fuelled reverie. Together, they happened upon the line about turning someone on to drugs. Paul – who was first ‘turned on’ by Tara – looked at John and the same thought passed between them. They couldn’t say that in a song, could they?

  •

  While The Beatles were locked away in the studio, Tara’s friends gathered for a memorial service in his honour in St Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Kensington, one mile from the scene of the
accident. Despite the January cold and rain, almost all of the girls there were in miniskirts, the Daily Sketch reported, while most of the men were decked out in bell-bottomed trousers and multi-coloured Regency jackets.

  Gerard Campbell, who had put Tara up in the final weeks of his life, was shocked to discover that his friend had left him £1,000 in his will. ‘I went out and bought a new suit,’ he said. ‘Loud – the kind of thing he would have appreciated.’

  Father Dennis, the Franciscan friar who conducted the service, said of Tara: ‘He touched life fully.’

  After the service, Nicki ran from the church in tears and was driven away, it was reported, with her face buried in the fur of her pet white poodle.

  It was said that Oonagh was never the same after Tara’s death. She already knew the tragedy of losing a child before its time but the loss of her youngest son broke her. ‘She moved out of Luggala,’ said Greta Fanning, who worked as a nanny to the children, ‘and into Luttrelstown Castle [her sister Aileen’s home]. Then we all went to Paris. Being at Luggala just reminded her of what she’d lost.’

  Similarly, for his brother, Garech, Tara’s death would be a scar on his life. Though their interests were very different, Tara idolized his older brother and they were just reaching the point in their lives where the six-year age gap no longer felt like a generation separating them.

  ‘As the older brother,’ Garech said, ‘I was very protective of him. But in a strange way, later on, he was very protective of me, too. I remember him taking me around the bits of London that I didn’t know. So that’s what was most upsetting to me. I had one brother who I thought I could always talk to, who would be my relative and pal for life.’

  Nicki couldn’t bear to be in London anymore. Too many old ghosts. Just days after the order awarding custody of her children to her mother-in-law, she moved to Marbella, making a permanent home for herself in Orange Tree Square, in the whitewashed cottage where she had hoped that she and Tara would one day live.