I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

by Paul Howard

  To placate her ex-husband, Oonagh asked Deacon to prepare Tara for the Common Entrance exam, a vital step towards gaining admittance to Britain’s most academically selective schools. As his tutor, Deacon played an enormous part in Tara’s intellectual development, advising him what books to read and passing on his appreciation of classical music and opera, both of which Tara came to love.

  ‘He was one of the most important adult figures in Tara’s life,’ according to Nicki. ‘After his mother and father, I would say he was the most important.’

  Quiet and brooding, Deacon was introduced to Oonagh by a member of her drawing-room circle, the writer and critic Cyril Connolly, who considered him an English Marcel Proust. Deacon had just finished writing The Rack, a semi-autobiographical novel based on his time in a sanatorium in Switzerland suffering from tuberculosis. It would be published in 1958 under the pseudonym A. E. Ellis and immediately proclaimed a modern classic.

  At Oxford, Deacon had been a close friend of Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, who once described him as ‘an expensive limited edition of a curious object’. Among his fellow undergraduates, he was famous for having a housekeeper, a sizeable and unexplained income, and a mysterious, tortured private life. Tynan’s wife, Kathleen, described Deacon as ‘deeply pessimistic and a recluse’ in her biography of her husband, The Life of Kenneth Tynan. ‘Lindsay’s enthusiasm,’ she wrote, ‘did not extend to himself, nor to life in principle.’

  Nonetheless, he was regarded as one of the most brilliant young intellectuals of the post-Second World War Oxford generation. ‘He was going to be the great man,’ wrote another university friend, the writer Kingsley Amis, ‘greater than all of us.’

  But in his early twenties, when Amis and Tynan were carving out their literary reputations, Deacon developed tuberculosis, the lung disease for which there was no known cure at the time. He was sent to a specialist hospital in the Swiss Alps, where he endured endless experimental treatments, including the removal of a lung. So appalling was the agony he suffered that, one day, he determined upon suicide. In his memoir, In Love and Anger, Andrew Sinclair recalled his friend’s darkly comic recollection of the episode: ‘He was a great raconteur of death gone wrong. He told me a story of leaving his Swiss sanatorium to buy a revolver and kill himself. It was hard to buy the weapon. He had to pledge the gunsmith not to kill anyone but himself. He went back to his hotel suite . . . He put the revolver in his mouth, was too weak to press the trigger, hated the taste of the gun barrel and ordered coffee and croissants instead. With his breakfast came the hotel manager, who insisted he left the suite immediately because a dignitary wanted it. To him, suicide was a form of slapstick.’

  Deacon kept the gun as a morbid souvenir of the episode. Garech remembered seeing it in a drawer in the Mayfair flat where Deacon was known to spend months on end hibernating from the world. The shelves of his living room were lined with leather-bound volumes of books by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lautréamont, Wilde, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, some of which he would recommend to Tara in the course of tutoring him, though mostly without success.

  Deacon was thought to be in love with Oonagh, though she was old enough to be his mother. His feelings were unrequited and they would never be lovers. Instead, he became her closest confidant and financial adviser, as well as a teacher to her son, as they stravaiged around Europe. In the summer of 1957, Deacon accompanied Oonagh and Tara on a trip to Venice, where, each July, Oonagh took a floor in the Palazzo Papadopoli or the Palazzo Polignac. They made for an uneasy-looking threesome in Oonagh’s photographs from that summer. In one, they’re sitting together in a gondola. Tara and Oonagh, in identical, horizontally striped T-shirts, are smiling, while Deacon, in a plain white shirt, looks morose, bearing out Andrew Sinclair’s memory of him as a man whose weary pessimism was perfectly suited to ‘the temper of the times under the mushroom cloud’.

  While Deacon struggled to get Tara to take his schoolwork seriously, he did manage to open the boy’s ears to classical music. He introduced him to Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Wagner, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler and Bach. Deacon talked him through some of the great operas, especially Nabucco, Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, The Marriage of Figaro, La Bohème and La Traviata. Typically, Tara became utterly consumed by it, especially after he got to shake Igor Stravinsky’s hand in a restaurant in Venice that summer. Soon, he could listen to a piece of classical music and explain in a very sophisticated way what it was about it that he loved. He bought several hundred LPs that summer – symphonies, concertos, operas and ballets – which were packed into crates and shipped back to Ireland.

  Lucy Hill spent two weeks of that summer in Venice with them. It was while she was there that Tara complimented her on her hair and Lucy quickly realized that her friend had outgrown her. When she returned to England, she started boarding school and they rarely saw each other after that.

  As is the way with childhood, Tara quickly moved on to new friends. As Lucy Hill departed his life, Lucy Lambton entered it. This Lucy was the eldest daughter of the Conservative MP Viscount Antony Lambton, and his wife, Bindy, both of whom Oonagh knew from the social round in London. ‘I met Tara for the first time in Venice,’ she recalled, ‘where I lived between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. My mother thought it would be nice for me to have a friend, so it was arranged that we should meet each other. My recall of him is total. And it’s a montage. Him in his suits, with the water of Venice behind him. The Grand Canal. The glistening water. He was in his alternative, everyday suits, which at that time were turquoise velvet with red lapels and red velvet with turquoise lapels. In my mind, I can still feel the texture of the velvet.

  ‘Tara was twelve. I was fourteen, almost fifteen. But he was so worldly. He was brought up entirely among adults – and very sophisticated adults. What interests me, looking back, is that a girl of my age wouldn’t have known the meaning of the word sophistication, or had the thought that someone might be sophisticated. Yet, I was just aware that Tara was different to other boys of his age. There was a magic about him.’

  Twelve-year-old boys, in her experience, were selfish, yet Tara had a generosity about him that seemed wildly out of character for a young boy. ‘He seemed to have no end of money,’ she said, ‘but he would give without any thought whatsoever as to the cost. I remember I wanted a pen and he bought it for me – this incredibly expensive fountain pen, which cost, I think, a hundred and fifty pounds, which was an absolute fortune in 1957. It didn’t mean anything to him to have money and to give it away like that.’

  Another visitor to Venice that summer was Tara’s cousin, Caroline Blackwood, who had tired of Lucian Freud’s serial unfaithfulness and left him for good in 1956. For comfort, she turned to Oonagh, rather than her own mother, who Caroline knew would feel vindicated by the failure of her marriage. On the rebound, Caroline had a brief affair with Deacon, which began in London in the spring of 1957 and continued in Venice. But she was already thinking about escaping to America to make a new start and she confided in Oonagh her plan to go to New York to try her hand at acting. Oonagh was delighted to see her emerging from what had been a dark period in her life. But Caroline’s decision to move to America would set in train a course of events that would have grave consequences for Oonagh’s life and cast a shadow over Tara’s life too.

  •

  In September 1957, shortly after their return from Venice, Oonagh threw a party at Grosvenor Place in London to see her favourite niece off. Caroline spent the autumn and winter of 1957 studying under legendary acting teacher Stella Adler, a proponent of the Stanislavski method, which encouraged actors to explore their own feelings and past experiences to fully realize the character they were portraying. It should have been rich ground for Caroline, but Adler considered her too shy and too stuck-up to be a successful actress. Caroline eventually abandoned her acting ambitions to become a journalist and Booker-nominated author.

  In January 1958, to celebrate her upcomi
ng forty-eighth birthday, Oonagh visited Caroline in New York, taking her usual suite at the five-star Drake Hotel on Park Avenue and 56th Street. She placed Tara with Caroline’s cousin, Lady Veronica Woolfe, and her husband, Peter, in London. Deacon visited him each day to tutor him for the Common Entrance exam, which Dom insisted that he sit that summer.

  Caroline was thrilled to have Oonagh in New York. Whether dining at Delmonico’s, or shopping in Bergdorf Goodman for shoes for Oonagh’s child-sized feet, the pair resembled two sisters rather than a middle-aged woman and her young niece.

  It was during a visit to a dressmaker whom Caroline had discovered on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that Oonagh met the man who would become not only her lover, but, with a haste that shocked even her louchest bohemian friends, her third husband.

  He was a short, stocky, thirty-something-year-old Spanish-American, with the dark smouldering looks of a matinee idol. The Daily Express thought he looked like the actor Mel Ferrer; the Daily Mail thought Mike Todd. He called himself Miguel Ferreras, though his name, like much of his back story, was a fiction.

  According to his own account of his life, he was born in Cuba in 1928, and brought to Spain at the age of three months by his mother and father, both of whom later died. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, he was then raised by his mother’s brother, who was Franco’s military attaché in Berlin. It meant that as a child he travelled extensively through Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the years of the Second World War. Two years after the war – again, according to the account he constructed for himself – he applied for a student visa to study fashion design in New York. There, he was apprenticed to Charles James, the brilliant, temperamental, English-born atelier. He eventually set up his own shop on Manhattan’s East 56th Street, where he was working on the day that Oonagh walked through the door and into his life.

  Miguel had originally propositioned Caroline while he was fitting her for a dress, telling her quite openly that he was looking for a rich wife to bankroll his ambitions to become an international couturier. Caroline offered to introduce him to her rich aunt, who had told her in Venice that she intended to marry the very next man who proposed to her.

  ‘Years later,’ according to Garech, ‘I asked Caroline, “What were you thinking?” And she said, “I never thought she’d marry him.” Because Caroline knew him and she thought he was a joke figure. If my mother really did say she was going to marry the very next man who asked her, all she meant was that she wasn’t going to be all that choosy.

  ‘If Caroline had known that my mother was going to suddenly marry this clown, she would never have taken her there. She was very vulnerable at that point of her life. She was lonely and, yes, I would say rather afraid of getting old.’

  Oonagh was physically attracted to him. In 1997, two years before his death, Miguel told Harpers & Queen, with a lack of chivalry that was his apparent trademark, that Oonagh married him for sex, which they engaged in the third time they met each other. ‘Oonagh told me her first two husbands did not give her any pleasure,’ he told the magazine’s reporter, Nicholas Farrell. ‘She wanted to have the youth which she never had.’

  Yet Oonagh truly believed she was in love, according to Garech. ‘I think she was trying to wish this image of him as a dashing, Spanish bullfighter figure into reality,’ he said. ‘But he wasn’t anything like that. He was just a fool. And I never heard him praise anyone or anything unless it was to his own advantage.’

  Whatever the source of the attraction, within weeks of their first meeting, Oonagh agreed to become his wife. Laughing at the crazy impulsiveness of it all, Miguel told the Sunday Express: ‘I fell in love at once. Oonagh was a little doubtful for the first three hours.’

  They tied the knot only six weeks after they met. It was just enough time for Miguel to obtain a divorce from his existing wife, Margaret Clarke, with whom he had two daughters, but who, he told reporters, had grown ‘rather bored with me’. The marriage was dissolved in Alabama. Two days later, on 25 February 1958, Oonagh and Miguel were married. The ceremony was conducted by a Presbyterian minister in her suite at the Drake Hotel, one block away from the salon where Caroline introduced them as a joke the previous month.

  The bride wore black, the New York Herald Tribune reported, while the suite was decorated with blue flowers – ‘the groom’s favourite colour,’ said one syndicated story, its author clearly tickled by this detail. Caroline acted as Oonagh’s bridesmaid, while Joaquin Ferreras – whom Miguel claimed was his brother – performed the role of best man. The newlyweds spent a week at the Drake Hotel, then departed for Cuba, which Miguel claimed was the country of his birth.

  While she was honeymooning with her young lover, Oonagh became a grandmother for the second time, when Gay’s wife, Magsie, gave birth to Catheryn, a sister for eighteen-month-old Robin. Oonagh, who adored babies, couldn’t wait to return home to meet the latest addition to her son’s family. She was also excited about introducing Tara and Garech to her new husband, a man about whom she knew almost nothing. She wouldn’t even know his real name until six years later, when, in an effort to show that the marriage was invalid, her legal team began exhuming the secrets of his past.

  According to documents uncovered by White & Case, Oonagh’s international lawyers, the man she married was in fact born José Maria Ozores Laredo; not in Havana, as he claimed, but in Madrid; and not in 1928, as he always insisted, but in 1922. This made him six years older than his stated age of thirty, and, significantly, an adult rather than a child during the years of the Second World War.

  His childhood was one of poverty and abandonment. He entered the world in the Calle del Mesón de Paredes Maternity Hospital in Madrid and was placed by his mother in a foundling house, or orphanage. In 1934, at the age of twelve, he went to live with his mother’s brother in Ribadeo, in the north-west of Spain. Poor and uneducated, he spent his teenage years living between there and Madrid, working odd jobs and supplementing his earnings through looting and petty crime during the years of the Spanish Civil War.

  On 22 July 1941, at the age of nineteen, he was convicted of theft in the Spanish capital. He was spared jail, but a few weeks later, perhaps realizing that he might not always be so lucky, he took the route of redemption offered to many wayward youths by joining the army. He volunteered for the Blue Division, a unit of Spanish soldiers that served alongside the Nazis on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Enlistees were required to swear an oath of personal allegiance to Adolf Hitler, before spending five weeks at a training camp in Grafenwöhr, Bavaria, where they were incorporated into the Wehrmacht. His unit was part of the general German force advancing on foot towards Moscow from Poland, although he enjoyed a far from distinguished military career.

  Before he and his Blue Division comrades reached the Russian capital, they were re-routed north to help out in the Siege of Leningrad, the battle that would see some of the fiercest fighting and heaviest casualties of the war. In November 1941, just weeks after it began, he was arrested outside Leningrad while attempting to desert. He was imprisoned for a month, then sent back to Spain. However, in 1943, with the casualties mounting on the Eastern Front, he was allowed to re-enlist and he returned to Russia. Again, he didn’t last long in battle. In December 1943, according to official records, he was part of a convoy that returned home wounded – possibly suffering the effects of frostbite, which was a common hazard.

  He was discharged from the army and lived for a short time in Vigo, on Spain’s Atlantic coast, before returning to Madrid and his former life of petty crime. On 24 January 1944, he was arrested by police at the North Station in the Spanish capital for stealing a suitcase. Four weeks later, on 27 February, he was arrested again, this time on suspicion of stealing clothes to the value of 1,200 pesetas.

  Three weeks later, perhaps to escape trial, or possibly out of a genuine commitment to the cause of the Third Reich, which was then losing the war, he volunteered to join Hitler’s beloved Waffen SS. In March 1944,
he was awarded the rank of second lieutenant. As the Germans were squeezed from all sides in the final stages of the war in Europe, he saw action in Romania, Russia, Hungary, Germany and Yugoslavia. He was eventually captured by the Allies in Italy in the final months of the war and spent what remained of it detained in a camp just outside Naples.

  In December 1945, seven months after the German surrender, he was repatriated to Spain. But shortly afterwards, with the several warrants out for his arrest, he decided to get out of the country. It seems that this was the moment when José Maria Ozores Laredo became Miguel Ferreras.

  Miguel denied all of this in his interview with Harpers & Queen in 1997. But the story of his rebirth through the theft of another man’s identity was later confirmed to Oonagh’s lawyers by Joaquin Ferreras, Miguel’s ‘brother’, and the best man at their wedding in the Drake Hotel. Joaquin, who was born in Havana, and who soldiered alongside his friend on the Russian Front, did in fact have a brother named Miguel Ferreras. He happened to have the man’s Cuban birth certificate amongst his own papers when Miguel made up his mind to get out of Spain. In a sworn affidavit obtained by Oonagh’s lawyers, Joaquin said: ‘When I told Ozores that I was going to return to Cuba, he asked if he could pose as my brother, Miguel Ferreras, and obtain with me, from the Cuban consul, a visa to Cuba. I agreed as, at the time, I was friendly with him and conditions in Spain were very bad.’

  In March 1946, Joaquin, and the man now posing as his younger brother, crossed the border illegally into Portugal and were arrested by the Portuguese police. The pair claimed to be Cuban nationals and demanded to see the Cuban consul in Lisbon. He approved their application to be repatriated back to the country of their birth and they left for Havana, where they lived for a time with relatives of Joaquin. Miguel found work as a gardener.