I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  They met on the first day of November at the Empire Theatre in London’s Leicester Square. Sally was one of several celebrities prevailed upon to sell programmes at a charity preview screening of the romantic fantasy movie A Matter of Life and Death, starring David Niven. Dom first espied her, across a smoke-filled theatre lobby, crowded with members of the royal court and movie stars in dinner jackets and ballgowns. He was immediately smitten and soon he would be openly declaring his love to his ‘darling girleen’.

  Sally Gray was born Constance Stevens in working-class Holloway, north London, on Valentine’s Day, 1916, the daughter of a ballet dancer who was abandoned by her husband and who struggled to bring up five children on her own. Drawn to performing from an early age, Connie, as Sally was then known, began her career on the stage at the age of ten, and later, as a teenager, blacked up her face to star in a minstrel show at the Gate Theatre in London. In 1933, at the age of seventeen, she got her first major break when she appeared in Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, alongside Fred Astaire, who gave her private dancing lessons during breaks in performances. Soon, she broke out of the chorus to get her name on the bill.

  But it was under her assumed name of Sally Gray that she became one of the biggest names in British cinema during the mid to late 1930s. She was mentored by her married lover, Stanley Lupino, an actor, producer and writer, and a star of British cinema’s golden age. It was her leading role in the 1941 movie Dangerous Moonlight that established her as a true star of wartime cinema. In it, she played the part of Carole Peters, an American war correspondent in love with a Polish airman and piano virtuoso, who is suffering from shellshock. Released at the height of the Blitz, British cinema audiences adored it.

  In 1941, not long after the aerial bombardment of London ended, Sally and Stanley returned to the stage in Lady Behave, the city’s first major musical since the outbreak of the war. But a month later, the show was forced to close because, by then, Stanley was seriously ill with cancer. He died in 1942, at the age of just forty-eight.

  That same year, at the height of her fame, Sally suffered a nervous breakdown. It was thought to have been triggered by Stanley’s death, although Charles Doble, a movie archivist familiar with her career and life, believed it was her romantic involvement with another married man, the director John Paddy Carstairs, which brought about her mental collapse. For three years Sally became a virtual recluse, but she was in the midst of a triumphant return to acting, playing mostly bad-girl roles in noir dramas, when Dom, smiling raffishly, asked her for a programme in the crowded foyer of the Empire Theatre.

  Like her previous lovers, ‘Dom Dom’, as she came to call him, was considerably older than her; fifteen years older, in fact. Also like her previous lovers, he was tantalizingly off-limits, with a wife and two young children, including eighteen-month-old Tara.

  ‘Sally told me years later,’ said Dominick, ‘that the moment she met my father, she said, “He’s my man.” It didn’t bother her that he had a wife and children in Ireland. It didn’t bother my father either. What a naughty man.’

  Oonagh had many friends in London and it was only a matter of time before news of their affair reached her ears, which it did in 1949. One day, while they were at Luggala, she very calmly invited Dom to join her in a small boat kept on Lough Tay.

  ‘They rowed out into the middle of the lake,’ according to Garech, ‘and that’s where she confronted him. My father admitted everything. She told him that she would give him a week to finish it. He said that he needed two weeks. She said no and that was that.’

  It’s doubtful whether the deadline was the real issue. Oonagh could likely see what Garech can see now when he looks at old photographs of his father and Sally together: ‘They were just so in love. You can tell from the way they looked at each other. So, so in love.’

  Oonagh told her husband that their marriage was over. Shortly afterwards, Dom broke the news to eleven-year-old Garech and four-year-old Tara at Castle Mac Garrett, the same news he’d had to impart to the children of his first marriage.

  ‘I remember being taken from school by my father,’ Garech recalled, ‘and he asked me with whom I wanted to live. He thought he was being reasonable. He was offering me a choice. But, for me, it was horrifying. Being eleven years of age, I took it that I was being asked whom did I love the most? So I said, “My mother,” on the basis that I thought she would be more upset to have to say goodbye to me.’

  At nineteen, Oonagh had moved from her family home into her first marriage, then, at twenty-six, straight into her second. Now, a few weeks short of her fortieth birthday, she found herself, for the first time in her life, on her own. But there was at least the sense that she was leaving an unhappy decade behind as she walked out of Castle Mac Garrett for the final time and, with Garech and Tara, retreated to the sanctuary of her Wicklow house.

  3: OONAGHLAND

  In February 1950, shortly after her divorce from Dom, Oonagh celebrated her fortieth birthday. It was a watershed moment in her life. With her two youngest children, four-year-old Tara and eleven-year-old Garech, she left behind her a decade filled with sorrow. Now, in her middle years, she had the opportunity to carve out a new identity for herself, not as Mrs Philip Kindersley, nor as Lady Oranmore and Browne, but as Oonagh Guinness, the chatelaine of Luggala and a hostess of great renown.

  For the first time in her life, she could summon around her the kind of people whose company she enjoyed. Over the course of the six years that followed, Tara and Garech’s childhood home became famous for its parties, as Oonagh entertained an ever-widening circle of interesting friends that included writers, poets, musicians and artists, as well as diplomats and the titled remnants of Ireland’s old aristocracy.

  It was literally at their feet, in the loquacious atmosphere of his mother’s drawing room, that young Tara learned about the world. He rarely saw the inside of a classroom, his entire school career accounting for little more than two years of his childhood. But the lessons he learned from his mother’s offbeat coterie of writers, intellectuals and aristocratic black sheep helped form his personality from an early age.

  Even as a child, he was precocious to a degree that would leave strangers open-mouthed in shock. The late Kenneth Rose, a journalist, historian and occasional house guest, recalled his first sight of Tara in 1953. ‘I remember Oonagh giving a very big dinner party one night,’ he said. ‘It was about nine o’clock in the evening and this little boy joined the dinner party. I’ll never forget this. He climbed up onto the table, in these blue satin pyjamas, and he walked barefoot down the centre of the table, greeting everyone, saying, “Hello, I’m Tara.” He must have been eight. And no one commented on it, of course. It was nothing unusual.’

  It was mild compared to some of the goings-on at Luggala. Tara’s childhood home had a reputation as a kind of bohemian salon, where the normal rules of Irish society did not apply. Ireland of the 1950s was a colourless, economically poor, neo-Catholic country, founded on the romantic vision of the archly conservative Eamon de Valera, the country’s most dominant political figure since independence. Unemployment, poverty and emigration were a fact of life for a large percentage of the population, while the Church set the social and cultural agenda, helping to enforce, amongst other things, the most prescriptive literary censorship laws outside the Communist world.

  Against this backdrop, the Guinness family remained unapologetically a law unto themselves. Luggala’s location, deep in the bowels of the Wicklow Mountains, far from the censorious eyes of Catholic Ireland, encouraged guests to act in a more carefree manner than they might have elsewhere. They arrived for dinner and sometimes stayed for days. When asked to account for the time missing from their lives, they explained that they’d been ‘Luggala-ed’.

  In his 1956 memoir, Living Like a Lord, John Godley, third Baron Kilbracken, described the house as an escape from the humdrum piety of de Valera’s island state. ‘Whenever I pass between
those gateposts,’ he wrote, ‘and plunge down into the valley beyond, I feel as though I have left Ireland and entered a strange, unreal, independent principality: Oonaghland.’

  Oonagh’s were not the kind of dinner parties where the women left the table for the men to discuss politics over brandies and cigars until the early hours. They were intellectually inclusive occasions, made all the more interesting by Oonagh’s love of mixing people from disparate backgrounds.

  As Claud Cockburn, the journalist and Communist, and a frequent visitor to the house once asked, where else could you find the Duke of Brissac and Brendan Behan having a row with the Director of the Bank of England about the Grand National, only to be soothed by a man singing a poem in Gaelic?

  From a very early age, Tara and Garech became accustomed to watching intellectual sparks fly. The well-born were thrown together with the artistically gifted, and little pleased Oonagh more than if her thoughtfully calibrated mix of people yielded some drama or other.

  ‘She had a wicked sense of where to place people,’ according to the Irish poet John Montague, ‘either in the rooms in which they slept or at the dinner table. Ex-husbands would find themselves sitting next to ex-wives whom they detested – or sleeping in rooms next to each other. She had what I would call an Anglo-Irish wickedness. It was the kind of thing that Oscar Wilde would have taken pleasure in. I always got the sense, looking at Tara as a child, that he was bemused by it, trying to make sense of this circus.’

  Dinner was served by the butler, Patrick Cummins, at a long table in the dining room. Afterwards, guests would repair to the drawing room, the soul of the house, to talk and drink and sometimes behave outrageously. Brendan Behan, who was skilled in all three areas, once wrote that Luggala was a house where you could say anything you liked, ‘provided you were witty and didn’t take too long about it’.

  The morning after a party, a tureen of vodka and tomato juice was placed on the dining room table as a cure for those who had to leave – and, for those who were planning to stay, as a pleasant segue into another day’s drinking.

  Oonagh’s coming-out as a hostess in her own right was the twenty-first birthday party she threw for Gay in August 1951. Six years after the war ended, Britain and Ireland were still living with the privations of food rationing and the menu for the party was considered newsworthy of itself, featuring fresh lobster, cold chicken and ham, and fruit salad with lashings of fresh cream. Two hundred party guests danced the Raspa and the Can-Can to music performed live by the birthday boy’s favourite band, which in the era of the Irish showband, was Tommy Kinsman and his Orchestra.

  It was a party that set a high bar for the decade to come and helped burnish the Guinness set’s reputation for dissolute behaviour. The Spanish Ambassador and the United States Chargé d’Affaires were among the guests who watched a well-known writer drive his car at high speed into the packed marquee after another guest made a pass at his wife. It was, it was generally agreed, an excellent party, with squealing echoes of the pre-war days of the Bright Young People.

  ‘When I think about Oonagh now,’ said Martin Wilkinson, one of Tara’s teenage friends, ‘I think she was always trying to get back the life she had to put on hold during the Second World War. She was still quite young when the war broke out and I think there was a sense that her fun had been stolen from her by this dreadful war and all these tragedies that happened to her.’

  At forty, she was a single woman for the first time since her days as a teenage debutante back in the 1920s. It was often said that she became more beautiful with age and she had many suitors. ‘Lots of people were in love with her,’ according to Tara’s cousin, Desmond Guinness. ‘Men couldn’t resist her. She was so extraordinary.’

  In 1951, just over a year after her divorce from Dom became final, she began an affair with a younger man, an RAF war hero with saturnine good looks. His name was Robert Kee and he would go on to become one of the most distinguished historians, broadcasters and documentary-makers of his generation. At thirty-two, he was ten years younger than Oonagh and, like her, recently divorced. In his twenties, he had written two highly acclaimed autobiographical novels, A Crowd is Not Company and The Impossible Shore, based on his experiences in the Second World War. Now, he was working for Picture Post, a photojournalistic magazine modelled on America’s Life.

  Fiercely intelligent and almost equally intense, Robert was more intellectually suited to Oonagh than either of her two husbands had been. By the end of 1951, they were deeply in love. In the days before a telephone was installed at Luggala, Robert would express his feelings for her in telegrams, sometimes several a day. These were usually delivered by Willie Gilbert, the local postman, who was required to cycle the three-mile distance to the house from Roundwood, the nearest village. Once the telegram was handed over, he would walk his bicycle back up the steep road to the top of the valley. When he returned to the post office, there was often another telegram waiting to be delivered. ‘Sometimes,’ recalled Garech, ‘the telegram would simply say, “Goodnight, Darling”.’

  •

  Oonaghland was a wild and exciting world for an adult. But for children, it could be a remote and lonely place. Tara enjoyed all the normal adventures of boyhood, exploring Luggala’s dense and deer-filled woods in search of the best trees to climb, or venturing to the top of the Fancy, the enormous rock promontory that stares down on the house. He learned how to row a boat on Lough Tay and became acquainted with its peculiar currents and the safest spots in which to swim.

  But unlike Oonagh’s other children, he didn’t have the company of siblings who were close in age. There were six years between Tara and Garech, who, in any case, was away at boarding school from the time Tara was eight.

  Growing up, the son of Irish ‘royalty’, at the bottom of a valley in a deserted pocket of Wicklow, wasn’t conducive to forming the ephemeral, fun-filled friendships that are a feature of more ordinary childhoods. It tightened his bond with his mother, but might also have accounted for the air of melancholia that often surrounded him as a child.

  ‘I would say he was quite lonely,’ said Rabea Redpath, his closest childhood friend. ‘When I met him, he told me that Patrick the Butler was his best friend in the world.’

  Even the circumstances of Tara’s friendship with Rabea were unusual. She lived in London, he lived in Wicklow, separated by a veritable ocean of distance to a boy of six and a girl of seven. She was the daughter of Heywood Hill, the famous Curzon Street bookseller, and his wife, Lady Anne Hill. They met – or rather they were thrown together – in Oonagh’s favourite Mayfair hotel in the summer of 1951.

  ‘My mother knew Oonagh through the social round,’ said Rabea, who was Lucy Hill until her marriage and conversion to Islam as an adult. ‘One day, Oonagh rang. She was staying in Claridge’s – she had a suite there – and she asked would Lucy like to come to Claridge’s to play with Tara. My mother said yes. I was furious. I really didn’t want to go. I cried and stamped my feet. But my mother made me go.’

  In the end, she was pleased she did. Together, they enjoyed a day of raucous, no-holds-barred fun. ‘We ran up and down the corridors of Claridge’s banging on people’s doors, roaring with laughter. And Oonagh didn’t stop us at all. That was the point. She couldn’t have cared less. And Tara and I got on wildly well from that point on.’

  So much so that Oonagh resolved not to allow the geographic inconvenience of living in two different countries to keep the young friends apart. ‘I used to get flown off at weekends to Luggala, aged seven, to play with Tara, air fare paid for,’ Rabea remembered. ‘I completely fell into it and enjoyed it all. We used to spend a lot of time outside. Out in the boat on the lake, climbing trees. And pillow fights, I remember. The usual stuff of childhood.’

  Tara and Oonagh were devoted to each other, but it wasn’t a mother-son relationship that was typical of the times. In an era when the popular wisdom held that children were better seen than heard, Tara was allowed to do pretty much as
he pleased. His playground stretched from horizon to horizon and there were no adult-imposed parameters on his life. It would be difficult for any boy so raised to maintain a sense of scale.

  ‘There was, in the background, this sadness in him,’ Rabea said, ‘even as a child, because his life was completely unconventional. I was used to eccentric people. My parents had very eccentric friends. As a child looking at Oonagh, what I remember is lots of make-up. I mean, she looked like a film star. But she was rather a distant figure to me. I don’t remember her as a mother figure at all.’

  Oonagh’s indulgence of her youngest son shaped his character from an early age. His tastes were eclectic and they would remain so throughout his short life. His enthusiasms, then and later, tended to be intense but short-lived. ‘He’d have bouts where he liked one particular thing, then he’d move on,’ Rabea remembered. ‘Once, for a while, it was Battersea Funfair. When he was in London, he’d go every night to Battersea. He’d get five pounds from his mother, which in those days was an absolute fortune.’

  In one of her family albums, Oonagh kept a photograph of the three of them, taken in a photo booth at the fair during the summer of 1953. Eight-year-old Tara, in a little suit and tie, is sitting on his mother’s knee, blowing her a kiss, while little Lucy looks slightly removed from the fun, staring not at the camera, but off to the side, appearing slightly lost or worried.

  It may have been exhaustion. Whenever she was around Tara, they never seemed to go to sleep.

  ‘At home, I’d been made to go to bed at seven o’clock every night,’ she said. ‘When I went to Ireland, I could stay up all night. It was almost complete freedom. I had my own room and a maid would come in the morning, light the little fire and give me my breakfast. And I’d be exhausted, having been up until four in the morning. I remember enjoying every moment, but at the same time feeling this exhaustion and not wanting it. You know, wanting to have some limits. I think maybe sometimes Tara felt the same.’