I Read the News Today, Oh Boy Read online

  PAUL HOWARD

  I READ THE NEWS TODAY,

  OH BOY

  The short and gilded life of Tara Browne,

  the man who inspired The Beatles’ greatest song

  PICADOR

  For my wife, Mary McCarthy

  Contents

  Prologue

  1: Guinness for Strength

  2: War Baby

  3: Oonaghland

  4: The Trouble with Miguel

  5: La Vie est Belle

  6: All That Jazz

  7: Venus in Blue Jeans

  8: One Plus One Makes Three

  9: Speed

  10: Full Swing

  11: London Takes a Trip

  12: A Day for a Daydream

  13: Here Today

  14: A Day in the Life

  Epilogue: And Though the News was Rather Sad

  Select Bibliography

  Sources and Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  It was a never-to-be-forgotten night. And true to the Sixties cliché, hardly anyone who was there can remember anything about it. Or at least they recall it in little broken shards of memory. It was one of those parties that would define a moment in time. There was drink and there were drugs. There were wispishly thin girls in miniskirts with geometrically cut hair, and groovy young men in impeccably tailored suits who spoke in short, staccato sentences: ‘Yeah, cool, man!’

  Mick Jagger and Chrissie Shrimpton were there. So were Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg. And a black man in native African robes who kept performing a peculiar toast: ‘Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, – I drink again, I die,’ before pouring a finger of whiskey onto a drawing-room carpet that cost more than an average family car.

  And there was half a Magritte. Mick Jagger couldn’t stop laughing when he saw it. Years later, others thought they might have imagined it. Was it something they smoked? But no. It was there, on the wall. The legend had it that an elderly housemaid noticed what she thought was dust on the modern masterpiece but was in fact a cluster of stars. She gave the canvas a rub with a chamois and, hey presto – a humble domestic’s ironic twist on the work of an artist who set out to challenge people’s preconditioned observations of reality. There was something about it that was so of the moment, so wacky and satirical, so surreally surreal. And, of course, very, very funny, especially if you’d dropped enough acid or smoked enough grass, which many of the guests most assuredly had.

  On Saturday, 23 April 1966, there was a party at Luggala, the Guinness family’s exquisite Gothic house, set in the heart of a 5,000-acre estate, which plunged dizzyingly down a steep valley in the Wicklow Mountains. The occasion was the twenty-first birthday of Tara Browne, the Dublin-born brewery heir, music lover, style icon, racing car driver and sometime Vogue model, who was one of the most famous faces in what Time magazine had very recently called ‘Swinging London’.

  For one weekend, the world capital of cool was transplanted to a remote corner of the Irish countryside. The party guests were driven to the house on a narrow road that stared down precipitously on the deathly dark Lough Tay and its beach of fine white sand. One or two may have remarked, as visitors often do, on its resemblance to the porter that made the family’s name and fortune. The journey took them several hundred feet down into the valley, then along the edge of the water, past a low meadow spotted with rabbits and sika deer, before the snow-white walls of Luggala Lodge – his mother Oonagh’s fairytale home – revealed themselves through an embrasure in the trees.

  A large marquee had been fixed to the side of the house by David Mlinaric, the London society decorator, to accommodate a dance floor. A buffet, prepared by two French chefs, was laid out along the length of the dining room, amid the period furniture and ancestral portraits. And from the arms of ancient trees, planted two centuries earlier by the house’s original owners, hung coloured lights that flashed in time to the music of The Lovin’ Spoonful, Tara’s favourite band. Oonagh, a brewery heiress with film-star looks, paid $10,000 to fly them to Ireland from New York – her gift to her son, her miracle baby, to celebrate his coming of age.

  Rich, handsome and effortlessly cool, Tara seemed to be at the centre of everything that was hip and happening during those handful of years in the 1960s when Britain gave up mourning its lost empire and became once again the cultural focus of the world. He was the living, breathing quintessence of Swinging London, a dandy with the air of a young prince. The hippest of hip cats, he always seemed to be right on the heartbeat of the moment in everything he did, whether introducing Paul McCartney to the mind-expanding possibilities of LSD in his Mayfair flat, turning heads in his psychedelically coloured AC Cobra, or gadding about London’s West End with a Beatle or a Rolling Stone or perhaps Peter Sellers or Roman Polanski by his side.

  In the context of the decade, he wasn’t as vital a figure as Mick Jagger, or Mary Quant, or Michael Caine, or David Bailey, or Robert Fraser, or Terence Stamp, or John Lennon, or Vidal Sassoon. He didn’t write a song, or star in a movie, or take a photograph, or design an item of clothing, or invent a haircut, or discover a guitar riff that defined the era in which he lived. In fact, he didn’t produce anything more enduring than the memory of him as a young man who seemed unusually in harmony with the spirit of the times, a social butterfly who fluttered prettily across Sixties London and then was suddenly gone.

  Fifty years on, he is familiar to many as John Lennon’s lucky man who made the grade, only to blow his mind out in a car. But while ‘A Day in the Life’ immortalized the life of Tara Browne, it also succeeded in reducing it, for he was more than just another slumming aristocrat who lived too fast and died too young.

  Swinging London, much like any popular social movement, was built on a serendipitous coming together of unique individuals. Some were unique for what they did. Others, like Tara, were unique for simply being themselves. Part of what gave the city its extraordinary creative energy in the 1960s was a new spirit of class unconsciousness that was embraced by Tara and many of his young blueblood friends. Just over a decade and a half after the Second World War, the hidebound social divisions that had been a feature of British life for centuries suddenly seemed not to matter. A new generation of confident young men and women gave the class system a vigorous shake, and for a few years, until the sediment settled again, no one cared if you were Penny from Kensington or Penniless from Hull.

  The Guinnesses were aristocrats, but not snobs. At least not all of them. Tara had grown up in the space where royalty and bohemia intersected. He was an impossibly worldly sixteen-year-old at the dawn of the 1960s, when the old aristocracy of princes, princesses, lords and ladies were beginning to mix with a new aristocracy of pop musicians, clothes designers, movie directors, artists, photographers, ad men and hairdressers. The right honourables were rubbing shoulders with ‘right-on-orables’ and quite often it was Tara making the introductions.

  One of the other great social shifts that allowed London to swing with such abandon was a general and widespread loosening of morals among Britain’s youth. The country became more permissive. A generation that had grown up with National Service and post-war rationing suddenly started breaking out. The Guinnesses had never really been in. Tara’s mother had been one of the Bright Young People, an earlier youth scene whose antics between the wars were a cultural precursor of what was to come three decades later. In many ways, the Sixties merely democratized the way that England’s upper classes had always lived. Tara was raised not to give a hoot what anyone thought of him – and wasn’t that after all the leitmotif of London during its renaissance years, when hair became longer and hemlines shorter and youn
g people no longer had to be who their parents wanted them to be?

  Tara grew up liberated from the concerns of ordinary children. At the age of eleven, he walked out of his posh Dublin boarding school and told his parents that he was finished with formal education. Instead, he received a different kind of schooling, as he chaperoned his peripatetic mother between homes in Dublin, London, New York, Venice, Paris and the south of France, crossing trajectories along the way with Salvador Dali, John Huston, Brendan Behan, Igor Stravinsky, Humphrey Bogart, Norman Mailer, Lucian Freud and a host of others.

  As a teenager, he was sophisticated to a degree that disarmed people. Socially, he was fearless. In fact, he thrilled to danger of any kind, whether it was experimenting with the newest hallucinogenic drugs, shooting the breeze with the East End villains who popped into his motor repair shop in London, or tearing up the King’s Road in a low-slung sports car, a record player built into its dash, maybe a bit of Oscar Brown Junior, up high, the needle skipping across the vinyl as he weaved through the traffic flow.

  It was how many of his friends would still remember him fifty years after his final birthday party: in a hurry. Nicki Browne – the postman’s daughter he married at eighteen while she was pregnant with the first of their two sons – said her husband never expected to live for long, which explained his apparent eagerness to cram so many experiences into whatever time he had.

  He had an uncanny, barometric ability to always be at the centre of the current excitement. When he was in his mid-teens, he lived in Paris, a Billy Budd figure in a velvet suit escorting his wealthy Irish mother and his gigolo stepfather with the shady Nazi past. At sixteen, he was a habitué of all of the city’s best-known jazz dives, where he would sit, Gauloise burning between his knuckles, watching the legendary musicians perform. ‘He appeared in our lives almost fully formed, as if from an egg,’ recalled his friend Martin Wilkinson, who met Tara shortly after he arrived back in London, just as the city was beginning to swing.

  As the city blossomed through the early years of the decade, so Tara blossomed as an unnaturally with-it young man about town. Sixties London wasn’t one single scene. It was a collection of different ones. Yet, somehow, he seemed to be at the centre of most of them, a first-hand witness to many of the events and trends that shaped and coloured the decade.

  The guest list for his twenty-first birthday party reflected the mix of people who made up his social circle and captured Swinging London in perfect microcosm. Hereditary peers and baronets shared David Mlinaric’s dance floor with pretty, stick-thin models and members of the avowedly anti-Establishment Stones.

  Sir Alfred Beit was there. And Jane, Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, the impossibly hip children of Lord Harlech, the British Ambassador to the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. David Dimbleby and Derek Hart of the BBC chatted with the Irish sculptor Eddie Delaney about Nelson’s Pillar, the monument on Dublin’s main thoroughfare that had recently been blown up by the IRA. Yul Brynner’s son, Rock, was there and John Betjeman’s daughter, Candida, as well as John Paul Getty, the son of reputedly the richest man on the planet, and his socialite girlfriend, Talitha Pol, all members of Tara’s far-reaching social circle. All human life was there. A great big social stew of pop stars, aristos, debbie girls, artists, chancers, billionaires, models, scenesters and titled hangers-on. ‘If you asked me to sum up the Sixties in a single moment,’ said Joe Butler of The Lovin’ Spoonful, ‘then I would just describe the weekend of Tara Browne’s twenty-first birthday party.’

  While the band played a set that included ‘Daydream’ – a number two that spring in both the UK and US charts – Tara’s guests partied through the night until the sun showed its face over the top of the valley and breakfast time was announced by the placing of a large tureen of vodka and tomato juice, the Luggala morning tipple, in the middle of the dining-room table.

  His mother’s photographs from the night capture the decade at its sunny, hopeful height. Tara and Nicki, their marriage straining at the seams, sit behind a set of bongos, sharing a laugh on what would be one of their last truly happy times together. Brian Jones, tripping on acid, tackles a slice of birthday cake with a dessert fork, while Anita Pallenberg stares into the camera, her head resting adoringly on his shoulder. With their identical pudding bowl haircuts, they resemble twins more than doomed lovers. Oonagh, in a pink ballgown, shares a laugh with Patrick Cummins, the Luggala butler who could have stepped from the pages of a P. G. Wodehouse novel, while a young Mick Jagger shares a large pink armchair with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend on the night when, she later remembered, their relationship began to go off the rails.

  Tara – wearing one of his signature black velvet suits, a blue shirt with a purple collar and blue brocade tie – looks the epitome of Swinging London cool: young and stylish, with an undeniable air of never-had-it-so-good contentedness. With a cigarette in one hand and a knowing smile tugging at his lips, it’s not difficult to see why he is remembered as part of the popular iconography of the times.

  For many of those who knew him, his death in a car crash later that year was the demarcation line between the Sixties when they were good and the Sixties when they turned bad. ‘While he was alive,’ said his friend the poet Hugo Williams, ‘it was the miniskirt and the Twist and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. And after he died, it was more about long hair and drugs and psychedelia and Altamont and horrible things like that.’

  So when his friends remember that time, they think about Tara on the night of his birthday party. They remember John Sebastian singing ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ and Brian Jones and Mick Jagger enjoying a night together before the diabolical internal dynamics of the Stones drove a fatal wedge between them. They remember the cloying grass they smoked and the acid trip they went on up in the Wicklow Mountains the day after the party. They remember half a Magritte and laughing so hard at it that it hurt. They remember Tara in the happy, optimistic prime of his life, a young aristocratic gadabout who was John Lennon’s muse on a record that would become the musical high watermark of the decade. A happy, fun-loving, Sixties peacock. A lucky man who made the grade.

  1: GUINNESS FOR STRENGTH

  Two miles south of Claremorris, close to where the N17 motorway cuts a swathe through County Mayo, there is an old abandoned mansion that stands as a lonely remnant of Ireland’s aristocratic past. Behind its boarded-up windows and flaking yellow outer walls are the echoes of a more colourful era and a largely forgotten way of life. Walking through the vast emptiness of the house today, it’s not difficult to summon up a time when its rooms and passageways pulsed with life: the master of the house, in dinner jacket or plus-fours, moving from room to room with the easy propriety of the landed gentleman, while housemaids and footmen scuttle about the place, conducting the business of the house. It was here, amid the old-world splendour of Castle Mac Garrett, that Tara Browne – icon of Swinging London – spent his early childhood.

  Life in the house moved to the rhythm of the seasons, much like the world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy into which he was born. At various times of the year, there was pheasant and snipe shooting, hunting, trout fishing and point-to-point racing. Assorted European royals and members of the English gentry with absurdly rococo titles visited regularly to enjoy the sport. It was the era, too, of the great country house party and Castle Mac Garrett, with its seventeen bedrooms, was built for entertaining on a lavish scale.

  Even now, in its current dilapidated state, it’s easy to imagine the house as it was in the years of Tara’s childhood: the walls of the main entrance hall and impressive staircase wainscoted with family coats of arms set in plaster and portrait paintings of his mutton-chopped, ermine-swathed forebears.

  Everywhere, there are reverberations of what life here must have been like. Each door gives way to a big empty room that once served a function in the daily life of the house. There is a pantry and a large kitchen, where a team of chefs laboured to keep the household fed. There is a long drawing
room and a short drawing room, both with elaborate, neoclassical stucco ceilings, where guests, in evening dress, enjoyed cocktails before a gong signalled the start of dinner. There is a large formal dining room, whose walls were once painted robin’s egg blue, and a library with a beamed ceiling and mahogany shelves once lined with leatherbound books. There is a walk-in vault where the family silver was stored and a laundry room where the morning newspapers – the Daily Telegraph and the Irish Times – were ironed by a member of staff before they were presented with breakfast.

  There are servant quarters and a butler’s room. There is a smoking room and, off the main ballroom, a boudoir, where the lady of the house could take a moment out from entertaining to powder her nose and perhaps exchange tittle-tattle about the guests. In the voluminous albums of photographs collected by his mother, there is one of Tara, aged four, sitting on the little tricycle that he liked to ride very fast around the house’s courtyard. With his awkward smile and mane of straw-coloured hair, he looks like any ordinary little boy, and not the well-born son of two aristocratic dynasties.

  •

  Tara was the youngest son of Dominick Geoffrey Edward Browne, the fourth Lord Oranmore and Browne – or Dom, as he was more familiarly known – and Oonagh Guinness, a granddaughter of the first Earl of Iveagh and a glamorous society beauty. Their marriage produced two boys, whose births bookended the years of the Second World War. Garech, the elder, was born in 1939, just weeks before Britain declared war on Germany, while Tara arrived six years later, just as the Allies were advancing on Berlin.

  Dom was, by most accounts, a lovably rakish figure who had a keen eye for women and excused his frequent romantic wanderings with a simple line in reasoning: ‘What do you expect? I’m an Edwardian!’

  ‘Our father,’ recalled Judith Haslam, a daughter from his first marriage, ‘was what they called NSIT. It stood for Not Safe In Taxis. It meant that, if the occasion arose, he might behave like something less than a gentleman. When he was with my mother, she used to jump out of the window of the car to get away from him. He was very good-looking in his youth. Women fell in love with him. He was very, very charming. Too charming really. No one ever said no to him. He had this way of getting around people.’