Tara Browne's widow
The following piece has been taken from the Sunday Telegraph
obituary:
 |
| Tara and Nicky Browne |
Nicky Browne, who has died aged 70, was the widow of the Hon
Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune and archetypal golden child of the
1960s, whose death at 21 at the wheel of his car inspired the Beatles song A
Day In The Life.
A gamine farmer’s daughter of Irish descent, she became an
emblem of Swinging London, flitting amid a glamorous elite exemplified by her
wealthy young husband, one of a cabal of fashionable aristocrats to court the
The Rolling Stones and The Beatles.
Having married Tara Browne in London in August 1963, she
quickly bore him two sons. But a week before Christmas 1966 he was with killed
when he drove his turquoise Lotus Elan through a red light at high speed and
collided with a parked van in Redcliffe Gardens, Earl’s Court.
As the Beatles sang:
He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure
If he was from the House of Lords.
Nicky Browne was not with him on the night he died, and
indeed by then was separated from her husband; Browne’s companion in the
passenger seat was an 18-year-old fashion model, Suki Potier, with whom he had
reportedly taken up. She escaped with minor bruises.
As a result of the Brownes’ estrangement, Nicky Browne had
launched a very public and painful legal battle for custody of her two young
children, her adversaries being not only her husband but also his mother, Lady
Oranmore and Browne, the former Oonagh Guinness, the formidable matriarch of
the powerful brewing family. The case became something of a cause célèbre, and
when a judge ruled that the boys should live with their grandmother, Nicky
Browne suffered an emotional collapse.
In the years that followed, she was further distraught that
her young sons were shuttled from one school to another (some 20 in all, she
recalled), and that she was allowed to see them only in the holidays. Close
friends observed that both mother and sons suffered as a result.
Although Oonagh Guinness made her daughter-in-law a small
financial allowance, the settlement was dwarfed by the Guinness family fortune.
Tara Browne had stood to inherit £1 million on his 25th birthday, and even at
the age of 21 his estate exceeded £56,000, a sum which would have made him a
millionaire today.
Nowhere was the gilded Guinness lifestyle more in evidence
than at Luggala, the Gothic family seat in the Wicklow Mountains. There, in the
spring before Tara died, Nicky Browne had been at her husband’s side at his
lavish and — so it was said — acid-laced 21st birthday party. Two private jets
flew the 200 or so guests to Ireland, including John Paul Getty, Mick Jagger,
Brian Jones, his then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, and Paul McCartney.
At the inquest into his death, Browne was described as a man
of “independent means”, but his widow was not a beneficiary in his will. When
John Lennon chanced to read a newspaper account of the coroner’s proceedings,
he immortalised Browne as “a lucky man who made the grade” in A Day In The
Life, the closing track of the Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band (1967).
She was born Noreen Anne MacSherry in the autumn of 1941
near Yeovil, Somerset. The eldest of three children, Noreen ran away to London
as a teenager in search of a more exciting life. After being sacked from her
first job, at the Bank of England, when she got in a muddle over exchange
rates, she worked as an artist’s assistant, making canvases and keeping the
studio clean.
In late 1962, when she was 19, mutual friends introduced her
to Tara Browne at Battersea funfair. It was a coup de foudre. He was one of the
most eligible bachelors in London, and they married at Islington register
office the following summer. Later Nicky Browne told reporters that her
mother-in-law took against her from the first, suggesting that Tara had married
beneath his station.
Furthermore, Oonagh Guinness believed that the free-spirited
farmer’s daughter had deliberately stopped taking the newly-available Pill in
order to get pregnant and ensnare her son, who at 17 was himself a ward of
court following the break-up of Oonagh’s second marriage.
Charming, witty and attractive — a “hippie-babe par
excellence”, according to one admirer — Nicky soon established herself as an
exotic butterfly on the London scene. For a country girl, she had an
unexpectedly worldly air, socially at ease at a time when old class barriers
were breaking down. Her husband, on the other hand, was almost impossibly
precocious, having hobnobbed in Paris with the likes of Cocteau, Dali and
Beckett before moving to London.
But while Tara Browne’s money and aristocratic background
earned him a raffish reputation , Nicky — always unmaterialistic — lavished as
much attention on her two young sons as on the rock stars of the day whom she
helped entertain at their mews house in Eaton Row, Belgravia. “Musicians were
interested in having a place to hang out where there were no fans bothering
them,” she told the author Paul Howard, Tara Browne’s biographer. “We had a
good sound system, so our flat became a place where they could come around and
smoke dope. It became another club. One place would finish and everyone would
say: 'Where can we go now? Tara’s.”
Paul McCartney told interviewers that he took LSD for the
first time with Tara Browne, and Marianne Faithfull has asserted that Browne
“was on acid” the night he died — though the coroner found no traces of drink
or drugs in his bloodstream. Nicky herself seemed to be no more than a casual
smoker of pot.
Tara included Nicky in some of his business deals, dabbling
in some of the fashionable boutiques then appearing in Carnaby Street and the
King’s Road. He was one of the financial backers for Sibylla’s, advertised as
London’s first classic discotheque, the most technologically advanced in
Britain, which opened in June 1966. At the launch party, the glittering guest
list that included all four Beatles, three of the Stones, David Bailey, Michael
Caine and Mary Quant, was headed by “the Hon Tara Browne and Nicky”.
But the venture turned out to be jinxed. The club’s
co-owner, Kevin MacDonald, threw himself off a roof just weeks before Tara
Browne’s own death.
Nicky blamed pressure from her mother-in-law for the
eventual breakdown of her marriage; matters deteriorated still further when
Oonagh Guinness began her custody battle for the children. When Nicky lost the
case a few weeks after Tara’s death, she moved to southern Spain, deciding it
would be cheaper to settle there than to remain, comparatively impoverished, in
London.
Before he died, Tara Browne and Nicky had bought a 400-year
old whitewashed house in Marbella, and had been among the first to spot its potential
as a fashionable resort. In Spain Nicky planned to convert the house into an
exclusive, expensive boutique, but decided instead to pursue a brief career as
an actress. In 1970 she appeared in a revival of the musical Hair in Tel-Aviv,
directed by Oliver Tobias, with whom she claimed she had a relationship.
Latterly she lived in a farmhouse in the small mountain
village of Benahavis, near Marbella. Her partner of 26 years, Robbie Oliver,
died last year. Her two sons survive her.
Nicky Browne, born 1941, died June 11 2012
