Forthcoming book to reveal all about Tara Browne
The following is taken from a review of a forthcoming book about Tara Browne
I received a call from the Irish writer Paul Howard, who, as
Ross O’Carro-Kelly (‘Rock’) has written a number of popular satires about Ross
and the Celtic Tiger, a series now necessarily discontinued. Howard is
presently embarked on a new project — a biography of Tara Browne, who famously
‘blew his mind out in a car’ in the Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, the one
that begins ‘I read the news today oh boy/ About a lucky man who made the
grade’. (He was similarly elegised in ‘Death of a Socialite’ by The Pretty
Things.) I knew Tara well during the Paris phase of his brief trajectory and my
first reaction to news of this biography was that it would be quite a short
book, Tara having died in a car crash in Redcliffe Gardens in 1966, aged 22.
John Lennon affects detachment in the lyric, ‘He didn’t
notice that the lights had changed’, but he knew Tara and it is clear from the
song’s elegiac mood that his death stood for something in the life of the band,
that it marked the end of the party. The last line ‘Now they know how many
holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall’ expresses the mood of disillusion, or
so I like to think, because that was the way I felt about Tara’s death myself.
Before it, the innocent phase of the 1960s, the Twist, the mini-skirt, ‘I wanna
hold your hand’. After it, long hair, old clothes, psychedelia, Altamont, the
rock-and-roll deaths. Before it, for me at least, the carefree present tense.
After it, fatherhood, work, the future.
Howard had assembled a few last witnesses of Tara’s life in
the tearoom of the genteel Montcalm Hotel near Marble Arch. I was so keen not
to miss anything that I arrived an hour early and fell asleep in the lobby, a
shameful condition to be found in for one about to boast of his wild youth. I
woke with a start and there was Godfrey Carey QC, Tara’s tutor during the Paris
phase of his life, hired to try and get him into Eton. We were joined by Paul
Howard, who placed a dictaphone on the table. I laid beside it a faded green
Chinese brocade tie of Tara’s which I had hoped would sum up his colourful
personality but which only looked small and sad.
At 15, in 1960, Tara was barely literate, having walked out
of dozens of schools. He smoked and drank but he hadn’t got on to joined-up
handwriting yet. He was living at home with his mother Oonagh Guinness and her
third husband, a louche Cuban ‘shoe-designer’ presently named Miguel Ferreras,
who was gaily going through her fortune. Tara was two years younger than me but
years ahead in sophistication and fun, dealing jokes, insults and ridiculous
boasts from an inexhaustible deck like a child delightedly playing snap. In his
green suits, mauve shirts with amethyst cuff-links, his waves of blonde hair,
brocade ties and buckled shoes, smoking menthol cigarettes (always Salem) and
drinking Bloody Marys, he was Little Lord Fauntleroy, Beau Brummell, Peter Pan,
Terence Stamp in Billy Budd, David Hemming in Blow-Up. His drawly Irish blarney
was the perfect antidote to our public school reserve and what would come to be
called ‘postwar austerity’.
All the white-gloved pre-debs doing time at Paris finishing
schools found their way to Oonagh’s apartment, where they encountered their
first taste of Sixties hedonism, without Daddy being around to say no to drinks
and cigarettes and staying up past their bedtime.
There was the
chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental to conduct us to the clubs and
swimming-pools. There was fresh milk in the fridge picked up daily by the Irish
butler from the American embassy canteen, the only place in Paris where you
could find it in those days. If there was any embarrassment about money Tara
would pretend to find a ‘dix milles’ note in the street. He had one of the first
car record-players, which you could walk along with (‘Rubber Ball’ by Bobby
Vee, ‘Cut Across Shorty’ by Eddie Cochran) and after the clubs we took it to
the Aerogare des Invalides and danced for the cleaners and pilots, keeping the
photo booth busy. Our childlike faces peer out of the little black-and-white
squares in ecstasy at our newfound freedom in the adult world.
Godfrey Carey described arriving at the flat in the morning
to find bodies everywhere. An hour later Tara would peer out of a blanket, saying
his Irish ‘Sorrry, sorrry’. I seem to remember his lessons taking place in the
back of the Lincoln on the way to somewhere like Eden Rock, where Jean-Paul
Belmondo waved to him. These were the days of Godard’s A Bout de Souffle,
yellow-T-shirted American girls crying ‘New York Herald Tribune’ in the Champs
Elysees, Edith Piaf’s ‘Milord’ playing in Le Drugstore. I’ll never forget Tara
facing my father over the drinks tray in Majorca. Would he like some orange or
a Coke? ‘An orange juice,’ said Tara in the tones of Lady Bracknell. ‘I’d
rather have a Bloody Mary, sir. But do you mind if I fix it myself?’ The photos
have him building enthusiastic sandcastles on the beach next morning.
Animated anew by Tara’s memory, I was gabbling excitedly by
now. When Godfrey could get a word in he told us of the desperate last bid for
study time — a stay in the Drake Hotel in New York of all places. On the first
morning he awoke early to find that Tara had been watching TV all night. After
three days of ‘jet-leg’, Tara told his mother he did not think he should miss
Lucy Lambton’s coming-out ball. He flew to London and Godfrey never saw him
again. Miguel later accused Godfrey of having an affair with Oonagh, who was
55. I said the last time I heard Tara’s voice was when he asked me to testify
in his mother’s divorce case that Miguel had made a pass at me. (I declined.)
Howard revealed that Miguel had fought for General Franco in the war, joined
the SS and was taken prisoner in Italy. He was still alive in Canada where Howard
intended to doorstep him. Perhaps it would not be such a short book after all.
Tara could hardly have failed to be a success in Swinging
London. While I was wandering around the globe in ’63 and ‘64, he embarked on
the second and last phase of his meteoric progress. He got married, met the
Stones and the Beatles, opened a shop in the King’s Road and bought the fatal
turquoise Lotus Elan in which he entered the Irish Grand Prix. He let me drive
it once in some busy London street: ‘Come on, Hugo, put your foot down.’ I had
just got my first job and our ways were dividing. His money and youth made him
a natural prey to certain charismatic Chelsea types who turned him into what he
amiably termed a ‘hustlee’. He reputedly gave Paul McCartney his first acid trip.
The pair went to Liverpool together, got stoned and cruised the city on mopeds
until Paul went over the handlebars and broke a tooth and they had to call on
Paul’s Aunt Bett for assistance. There is still a body of people — and a book
called The Walrus is Paul — who believe that Paul is dead and is now actually
Tara Browne with plastic surgery.
Everyone has got some golden boy or girl in their life whose
death or sudden departure distils the period into the long party it should have
been but probably never was. When my first girlfriend was trying to think of
something really nice to tell me she came up with ‘Your eyes are nearly as nice
as Tara’s’. I remember being tremendously pleased about this and could hardly
wait to tell him. I discussed titles for the book with Paul Howard and there
seemed to be no choice: A Lucky Man Who Made the Grade.
_724383214525_BookletInner-2-HQ.jpg)
