I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  ‘“She took one look at it . . .’” Author interview with Glen Kidston, by telephone, 2015.

  ‘“The first night he got it . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“He came around to our house in Montpelier Square . . .”’ Author interview with Jacquetta Lampson, London, 2011.

  ‘“At one point, he grew quite melancholy . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“She was the runaway daughter of an Irish-born postman . . .”’ Nicki was always referred to by the press as the daughter of a farmer from County Down. Her father, Seán (whose name was usually pronounced ‘Shane’) MacSherry, did own land in Ireland and later retired to live on a farm in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan. But in the 1960s, he worked for the Post Office in London. The confusion may have been a deliberate effort by Nicki to cover up her working-class roots. Describing her father as simply a famer would have given no indication as to her family’s financial circumstances. Tara’s father was also a farmer.

  ‘“She had a kind of slightly androgynous quality . . .”’ Author interview with Christopher Gibbs, London, 2010.

  ‘. . . and she’d given her up for adoption.’ She confided this information in at least two friends, who did not wish to be named.

  ‘“The bank thought that was a very good idea . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘“This flatmate of mine said Michael was calling around . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“He wanted to show me the boat . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“Tara was very sweet . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“He knew she wouldn’t approve . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“From that point on,” she said, “we were inseparable . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“He outgrew us really . . .”’ Author interview with Hugo Williams, London, 2011.

  ‘“He used to say to me, ‘I know they’re hustlers . . .’”’ Author interview with Michael Boyle, London, 2011.

  ‘“He was with Nicki at the time and I think things were already difficult . . .”’ Author interview with Rabea Redpath, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“He got his motto from that record . . .”’ Author interview with Hugo Williams, London, 2011.

  ‘“His father had told him there was no way he was taking the car . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2009.

  ‘“We heard a siren . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I think Tara and Nicki were the first couple I ever understood to be incredibly sexually in love . . .”’Author interview with Melissa North, London, 2011.

  ‘ . . . the Daily Express carried a photograph of Tara on the dance floor . . .’ Daily Express, 6 August 1962.

  ‘“In the morning, towards eleven . . .”’ Cold Cream – My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2009), p. 196.

  ‘“I was still in love with Tara . . .”’ Author interview with Melissa North, London, 2011.

  ‘All she owned of any real value, she remembered . . .’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“She seemed so much older than us . . .”’ Author interview with Melissa North, London, 2011.

  ‘“Oh, I was a gold digger . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“We were never happier than we were at that time . . .”’ Ibid.

  8: ONE PLUS ONE MAKES THREE

  ‘ . . . with no one prepared to brave the drifts . . .’ From contemporary newspaper reports.

  ‘“Tara could hardly write . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“He said I’m not going unless I can bring my girlfriend with me . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“The clubs in Wardour Street tended to be full of gangsters,” she recalled . . .’ Ibid.

  ‘“There was a time that winter when I was very pale . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“We discussed a termination . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“Except he said, ‘We’ve got a problem here . . .’ ” ’ Ibid.

  ‘. . . the first of which, ‘How Do You Do It?’, had been passed over by The Beatles.’ The Beatles did record the song, which was written by Mitch Murray, but chose not to release it as a single, preferring ‘Love Me Do’ instead. Their version appears on the 1995 Beatles retrospective album, Anthology. Their lack of enthusiasm for the song is quite apparent in the recording.

  ‘Melody Maker pronounced in June 1963 . . .’ Melody Maker, 8 June 1963.

  ‘And, of course, those ever-northward-inclining hemlines.’ The question of who ‘invented’ the miniskirt remains the subject of much debate. In 1958, Mary Quant raised the length of her skirts to above the knee for the first time. But as author Paul Gorman points out, she was actually continuing a trend started by Cristóbal Balenciaga seven years earlier, when he invented the first free-form dress, meaning hemlines could be raised without affecting the line. Author interview with Paul Gorman, London, 2011.

  ‘“I remember being hit over the head with umbrellas . . .”’ Author interview with Victoria Ormsby-Gore, Dublin, 2009.

  ‘“He used to drive through Piccadilly . . .”’ Author interview with Melissa North, London, 2011.

  ‘“Tara appeared in my life fully formed . . .”’ Author interview with Martin Wilkinson, Newport, 2011.

  ‘“I wanted to be a racing driver from very early on . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“Unlike our parents and our grandparents . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘Michael Beeby had started going out with . . . Lady Henrietta Guinness.’ Lady Henrietta Guinness was the daughter of Major Arthur Onslow Guinness, Viscount Elveden, who was killed in a rocket strike in Holland in the final year of the war (The Guinnesses, by Joe Joyce (Poolbeg, 2009), p. 296), and Lady Elizabeth Cecilia Hare. Her grandfather was Rupert Guinness, the second Earl of Iveagh.

  ‘“Mike was the most dangerous driver I met . . .”’ Author interview with Glen Kidston, by telephone, 2015.

  ‘“We decided that we were going to go to see it . . .”’ Author interview with Tchaik Chassay, London, 2011.

  ‘“We had breakfast in the SKR with the car ticking over outside . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘Now, her solicitor husband was suing him . . .’ From contemporary newspaper reports.

  ‘“What she wanted me to do . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“He told her he loved me . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“All she wanted was to legitimize the child . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I didn’t give a damn if I was married or not . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“ . . . he told us we couldn’t do it there because we weren’t resident nearby . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘. . . Henrietta committed suicide by jumping off an aqueduct in the town of Spoleto.’ On 6 January 1969, she had been granted the rank of an earl’s daughter. After rejecting her society life, she married Luigi Marinori on 3 February 1978 and went by the name Henrietta Marinori until her death three months later at the age of thirty-five. Source: The Peerage.

  ‘“They didn’t know she was married . . .”’ Family friend who didn’t wish to be named.

  ‘“We had a lovely day . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“We didn’t need one . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“It was such a long labour . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘. . . So we called him Dorian Clifford Browne.’ Ibid.

  ‘Garech said they couldn’t understand why Irish people . . .’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2011.

  ‘“They were standing in the drawing room . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2011.

  9: SPEED

  ‘. . . they held the top five positions in the US chart.’ In the week of 4 April 1964, The Beatles held the top five positions in the US Billboard Chart with ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ (1), ‘Twist and Shout’ (2), ‘She Loves You’ (3), ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ (4) and ‘Please Please Me’ (5). At the same time, they had seven further singles
in the top 100: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ (31); ‘From Me To You’ (41); ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ (46); ‘All My Loving’ (58); ‘You Can’t Do That’ (65); ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ (68); and ‘Thank You Girl’ (79).

  ‘. . . and George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the band’s two singletons, in a bachelor pad in William Mews, near Knightsbridge.’ The Beatles’ London by Piet Schreuders, Mark Lewisohn and Adam Smith (Interlink Books, 2008).

  ‘“I barely saw them . . .”’ Author interview with Mary Fanning, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘. . . And life, or at least the social aspect of it, began to revolve around a nightclub called the Ad Lib.’ A very interesting account of the life and times of the Ab Lib is featured in Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy (Fourth Estate, 2002), pp. 159–62. According to author Levy, George Harrison was the first Beatle to discover the Ad Lib in early 1964. It was likely while the band was in London filming A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 satirical comedy about the new phenomenon of screaming fandom.

  ‘“I wouldn’t say it was a mutual, made-in-heaven arrangement . . .”’ Author interview with Michael Rainey, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“He didn’t court attention . . .”’ Author interview with Martin Wilkinson, Newport, 2011.

  ‘“He was absolutely central to it . . .”’ Author interview with Jane Ormsby-Gore, London, 2010.

  ‘“Paul McCartney liked being around people he thought he could learn something from . . .”’ Author interview with Nicholas Gormanson, London, 2011.

  ‘‘. . . a member of an aspiring comedy musical hall act called The Scaffold.’ In 1968, The Scaffold scored a UK number one with ‘Lily the Pink’. They had two other top ten hits: ‘Thank U Very Much’, which reached number four in 1967, and ‘Liverpool Lou’, written by Dominic Behan, a brother of Brendan, which reached number seven in 1974.

  ‘“I first knew him as just a guy on the scene . . .”’ Author interview with Mike McCartney, Liverpool, 2008.

  ‘Before the 1960s . . .’ Ibid.

  ‘“Quad 303 amplification . . .”’ Author interview with Glen Kidston, by telephone, 2015.

  ‘Over dinner, he told Mike some of his Brendan stories.’ Author interview with Mike McCartney, Liverpool, 2008. Interestingly, one of the stories Tara told him involved being groped by Brendan, not as a child, but as an adult. ‘Tara said he’d be driving Brendan home from Luggala,’ Mike recalled, ‘and Brendan would make a grab for him, drunk out of his mind, thinking he was a woman with the blond hair.’

  ‘“He ordered a brandy . . .”’ Ibid. The brandy was probably Hine cognac, according to Garech.

  ‘“People used to say, ‘Be careful driving over the bridge to Annamoe . . . ’ ” ’ Author interview Monsignor Tom Stack, Wicklow, 2011.

  ‘“He drove it . . .”’ Author interview with Nicholas Gormanston, London, 2010.

  ‘“We were going to Bray . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2009.

  ‘“Oonagh was worried about the way he drove . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“Tara took it out for a test drive . . .”’ Author interview with Glen Kidston, by telephone, 2015.

  ‘“Clark was a humble fellow . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I drove it one night . . .”’ Author interview with Hugo Williams, London, 2011.

  ‘“They arrived in pieces in a series of crates . . .”’ Author interview with Nicholas Gormanston, London, 2010.

  ‘ . . . started to take an interest in the story of Sir Algernon Lee Guinness and his younger brother, Kenelm . . .’ An account of the lives of the two racing Guinness brothers is featured on the website historicracing.com.

  ‘Algy told the subsequent inquest . . .’ Contemporary newspaper reports of the inquest.

  ‘“I think he was going to do Formula Three first . . .”’ Author interview with Martin Wilkinson, Newport, 2011.

  ‘“I remember one time we were going to Ireland . . .”’ Author interview with Glen Kidston, by telephone, 2015.

  ‘“I was aware that two grand-uncles of his . . .”’ Author interview with Larry Mooney, Dublin, 2009.

  ‘“The handicaps were worked out very scientifically . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘“I took it out for him . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘ . . . Autosport magazine reported . . .’ Autosport, 20 June 1964.

  ‘ . . . while the Irish Times reported that he had driven “faultlessly” . . .’ Irish Times, 1 June 1964.

  ‘“I was in quite a slow car . . .”’ Author interview with Rosemary Smith, Dublin, 2009.

  ‘“It was pretty clear to everyone that he had a gift . . .”’ Author interview with Larry Mooney, Dublin, 2009.

  ‘“It was a fabulous place . . .”’ Author interview with Rosemary Smith, Dublin, 2009.

  ‘“Every week or so . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“A sixteen-year-old girl from a tiny village . . .”’ Author interview with Mary Fanning, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘Nicki was far less prepared for a lifetime of stay-at-home fidelity than Tara . . .’ In interviews with the author, Nicki often responded to questions about marital infidelity with the line, ‘It was the Sixties!’

  ‘“He once made me beans on toast . . .”’ Email from Douglas Binder to the author, 2010.

  ‘“She had lost her baby to me . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“ . . . a reaction to her loss of control over Tara . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“There was another fellow who came to dinner . . .”’ Author interview with Michael Rainey, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“She also went to Denmark . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“In a few months,” she told the Irish Independent . . .’ Irish Independent, 14 August 1964.

  ‘. . . Rafael Trujillo, who was assassinated after robbing the tiny Caribbean country blind for years.’ Trujillo: The Last Caesar by General Arturo Espaillat (Henry Regnery, 1963) is a fascinating account of Trujillo’s time as leader of the Dominican Republic by a former intelligence officer.

  ‘. . . then decamped to Flor’s more impressive suite on a higher floor.’ Miguel acknowledged an overlap in the two relationships in his September 1997 interview with Nicholas Farrell of Harpers & Queen.

  ‘“He told Oonagh, ‘I have to go back to France to get my collection together’ . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘. . . whom Miguel claimed was his brother, signed an affidavit, admitting the subterfuge.’ Document seen by the author.

  ‘A solicitor even found the real Miguel’s mother, selling newspapers in Madrid.’ The solicitor confirmed the story to the author but did not wish to be named.

  ‘“Under English, Irish and French law . . .”’ Author interview with Garech Browne, Wicklow, 2010.

  ‘“He remembered what I had told him years earlier . . .”’ Author interview with Hugo Williams, London, 2011.

  ‘ . . . Garech agreed that the figure of £6 million . . .’ This is the figure most often quoted as the cost of Oonagh Guinness’ marriage to Miguel Ferreras. Garech estimated that the business cost her £5 million and his extravagant lifestyle a further £1 million.

  ‘“I know he wasn’t God’s gift to humanity . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘While his wife reverted to her former name of Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne . . .’ According to Garech Browne, Oonagh had no intention of emulating her sister, who called herself Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava during her two subsequent marriages. So Oonagh consulted Dom, who agreed to her reverting to her old title having seen the evidence suggesting her marriage to Miguel was invalid.

  ‘Within weeks, the New York World-Telegram reported that he was planning to marry Flor . . .’ From contemporary American newspaper reports.

/>   ‘ . . . Miguel told the New York Daily Mirror that he would continue “dressing the very rich” . . .’ Ibid.

  ‘“The thing that people often forget about the Sixties . . .”’ Author interview with Marianne Faithfull, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘Marianne Faithfull once characterized him as someone who would “attend dinners given by any silly thing with a title and a castle”.’ As quoted in Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy (Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 202.

  ‘“A lot of these aristocratic kids had a lot going on in their heads . . .”’ Author interview with Marianne Faithfull, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“They were very alike . . .”’ Author interview Jane Ormsby-Gore, London, 2010.

  ‘“I don’t know if you believe in astrology . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘“Tara was such a mellow kind of person . . .”’ Author interview with Anita Pallenberg, London, 2015.

  ‘. . . Even by Tara’s standards, Brian had lived what could be described as a full and interesting life.’ From several biographies of Brian Jones, especially Brian Jones: The Making of a Rolling Stone by Paul Trynka (Viking, 2014); Brian Jones: The Untold Life and Mysterious Death of a Rock Legend by Laura Jackson (Smith Gryphon, 1992); and Who Killed Christopher Robin?: The Murder of a Rolling Stone by Terry Rawlings (Helter Skelter Publishing, 1994).

  ‘“Brian was the grown-up one . . .”’ Author interview with Anita Pallenberg, London, 2015.

  ‘By then, Mick and Keith were starting to find their stroke as songwriters . . .’ They also came up with ‘My Only Girl’, another ballad that Gene Pitney released in America under the title ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. It was a top ten single in the UK, but it failed to break into the top 40 in the US.

  ‘“Tara wasn’t trying to get on any trip . . .”’ Author interview with Michael Rainey, by telephone, 2011.

  ‘“He was obsessed with engines . . .”’ Author interview with Nicki Browne, by telephone, 2010.

  ‘“She thought she’d get me married to Tara to legitimize Dorian . . .”’ Ibid.

  ‘Tara chatted to a reporter from the Daily Express about their forthcoming arrival . . .’ Daily Express, 19 October 1964.