by Paul Howard
On 14 March 1949, the real Miguel Ferreras died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Ourense in Galicia, northern Spain. According to Civil Registry records, his body was never claimed, but his death represented the removal of a potential complication for the man who had stolen his identity.
By then, the new Miguel was living in New York, having used his falsified documents to obtain a student visa to study fashion design. His apprenticeship under Charles James is one of few details in his own account of his life that holds up to scrutiny. James clearly formed an impression of Miguel, although it didn’t match Miguel’s impression of himself as the heir apparent to Christian Dior. In 1961, in an interview with the New York Times, James would dismiss his former protégé’s ambitions as a couturier, describing him as having ‘great mechanical competence, great bluster, which, as Barnum & Bailey showed us, is so necessary, and what would pass for taste in the provinces’.
Miguel obtained citizenship of the United States through his first marriage. He opened his own salon on the Upper East Side, but it haemorrhaged money. As his former mentor suggested, however, he was more than capable of talking himself up. He bragged, for instance, that he had designed a maternity dress for Elizabeth Taylor. A story in Life magazine, which featured his work alongside that of two other Cuban designers, mentioned that he had studied architecture and had previously worked for a Paris couturier. With Miguel – as Oonagh and her children would come to discover – it wasn’t always easy to separate the fact from the fiction.
Miguel had a modest output of about sixty designs per year, according to the same article, with each piece selling for between $325 and $1,200. In September 1957, it was reported that an outfit he designed for singer Lena Horne for the Broadway opening of the musical Jamaica left her unable to move, let alone dance, and had to be remade entirely. The publicity had the potential to be catastrophic for Miguel’s business at a time when he was struggling to pay the rent in one of New York’s most expensive neighbourhoods. There couldn’t have been a more opportune time for him to meet a rich woman like Oonagh.
Miguel seemed to have little doubt about the future trajectory of his life now that he was married into the Guinness family. And he had few qualms about discussing it publicly. After the wedding, he told the New York press that he and his wife would live between London and Paris, where he would be setting up his own couture house.
Back home, the marriage caused shock and consternation among Oonagh’s social set. When her friends eventually met him, their worst prejudices were confirmed. To them, he was uncouth, boorish and very evidently on the make. ‘An absolute swine who was quite clearly out to milk her,’ was Kenneth Rose’s memory of him. ‘He was a real bad hat – loathsome, absolutely awful, to anyone who had any experience of the world. I’d been in the army, which I regarded as the best grounds for experience of all, and he stuck out to me straight away as a self-seeking shit.’
Deacon considered him unworthy of Oonagh and nicknamed him ‘as-a-such’ because of his habit of finishing sentences with that idiomatic flourish. After meeting him for the first time, Oonagh’s first husband, Philip, told Gay that his mother ought to keep her new man ‘chained to the bedpost’.
After a long Caribbean honeymoon, Oonagh returned to Luggala with Miguel in May 1958 to a traditional Irish welcome. To celebrate their mother’s homecoming, Garech and Tara arranged a hooley in her honour in a cottage in the grounds of the house. All of the invited guests, many of them house staff, estate workers and local villagers, dressed up in nineteenth-century Irish dress for the occasion. In knee-high britches and tam-o-shanters, red petticoats and Munster and Kerry cloaks, the men and women danced until dawn to fiddle and pipe music. A banquet of pigs’ trotters, baked potatoes, boiled nettles, fried kippers, roast goose and apple cake was laid out. It was devoured without the aid of cutlery and washed down with mugs of porter and whiskey.
It was a memorable night and was covered by a number of newspapers. ‘The lad who appeared to eat most,’ the Daily Mail reported, ‘and to dance most, was thirteen-year-old Tara Browne, wearing a heavy white homespun suit with a red jumper, clay pipe and clogs.’
While they were happy to have their mother home, Tara and Garech hated her new husband on sight and would never come to accept him as their stepfather. ‘Our mother had lovers from time to time,’ Garech said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that. The only one we took an instant dislike to was this creep and we hoped she would drop him very quickly.’
Quite what Miguel made of his first glimpse of his adoptive country is uncertain. A photograph from the party, taken by Tara, shows him looking almost comically ill at ease in an Aran sweater and flat cap, while, beside him, Oonagh appears brimming with happiness in her black hooded Munster cloak.
The press were keen to get the measure of the new master of the house. And the story of Miguel’s life seemed to improve with every telling. Now, according to the newspapers, he was ‘one of America’s leading dress designers’, had a salon on Fifth Avenue, New York’s most prestigious shopping street, and specialized in designing dresses ‘for many of America’s star actresses’. But if Miguel was full of bluster, he was also full of plans. He said he wanted to bring Irish materials to the international market and planned to do a show in New York that autumn featuring his own designs in Irish cloth. ‘I think Donegal tweed, in particular, should be better known around the world,’ he said.
He was effusive in his praise for his new Irish home. ‘This is a heavenly place,’ he said. ‘We are in a completely different world from my offices in Fifth Avenue, New York. There is certainly peace and quietness here. The tempo of life is so restful.’
With Miguel around, it wouldn’t remain that way for long.
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Dom’s domestic arrangements were about to change, too. By now, he was struggling with the job of making the Castle Mac Garrett estate pay for itself. Ireland was in the midst of an economic depression. In the unemployment- and emigration-hit west of the country, there was no longer a market for his produce – at least not one sufficient to maintain a large house and its staff.
By the mid to late 1950s, Castle Mac Garrett was a quieter place. The gaps between the shooting parties grew. And Sally was deeply unhappy. In 1958, she gave an interview to the Daily Mail in which she spoke candidly about the loneliness of living in an empty castle in the wilds of County Mayo.
‘We live mostly to ourselves,’ she said. ‘We never go to any parties. We do very little entertaining . . . I’ve longed just to have a television here so that I could at least see some of my old friends of film and the stage on screen. It would help to cover up some of the loneliness. But even that is impossible. My husband tried with a set, but it was hopeless. We cannot get any reception here.’
Dom and Sally began talking about selling up and moving to London. ‘She was no more a country girl than I was a Norwegian,’ according to Dom’s daughter, Judith. ‘She learned to garden and she became a very good gardener. But it was an alien life for this very glamorous London actress to find herself suddenly living in the bogs of Ireland. They were miles from anyone. There was one phone in the house and it was in a poky room at the back of the house. If my father wanted to use it, it was brought to his study and plugged into the wall. But if Sally wanted to talk to someone – which she didn’t seem to very often – she had to sit in this tiny, dark room. It was unimaginably lonely for her. And of course she suffered a breakdown. But it would have been enough to give anyone a breakdown if you weren’t used to it.’
According to Dom’s eldest son, Dominick, Sally attempted suicide on at least one occasion by jumping out of a window. ‘My father sent her to London,’ he said, ‘to have electro-shock treatment, which they didn’t know a lot about. But it was a horrible treatment that took away part of your memory. She was never the same after that.’
Tara and Garech still visited regularly and had become more and more immersed in the local music scene. Other boys of their age were having t
heir young minds blown by Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and the other early exponents of rock and roll coming at them through long-wave radio. But Tara and Garech’s biggest musical heroes were Irish: people like Leo Rowsome, who played the uileann pipes, a bellows-blown bagpipe that evolved from ancient Irish war pipes; and Margaret Barry, the so-called Singing Gypsy, whose unique vocal style and zither banjo-playing made her a star of London’s Irish community and influenced a generation of ballad singers, including Luke Kelly.
In the mid to late 1950s, Ireland’s native music, much like its language, was considered an anachronism. ‘Even the town of Claremorris, close to where we lived in Mayo, thought traditional music was terribly old-fashioned,’ Garech remembered. ‘It wasn’t that it was dead. It was very much alive. It was just that it was unfashionable. People were shocked that anyone wanted to listen to these old musicians.’
Not least the privileged sons of a peer of the realm. But Garech and Tara had developed an educated ear for native Irish music. Each summer, they had ventured further and further afield in search of good traditional musicians and singers. Tousle-haired Garech, who had taken to dressing in traditional Irish dress, and his cherub-faced little brother, had become regular fixtures at various fleadhanna cheoil, or traditional music festivals.
‘They were an unusual sight,’ according to Brid Ni Dhonnchadha, who remembers them from that time. ‘I first met them at a fleadhanna ceoil in Longford. They both had this long blond hair, which was a very strange thing to see on a boy at that time. And then the way they spoke was different. There was nobody like them on the scene at the time. But they loved the music.’
In 1956, at a music session in Tulla, County Clare, Garech and Tara had met Paddy Moloney, the future founder and driving force behind what would eventually become the internationally famous Chieftains. The son of an army sergeant, Paddy worked for a builders’ providers by day and played the tin whistle, button accordion and uileann pipes in the evenings and at weekends. He also played the washboard in various groups during the skiffle craze, which also inspired the young Beatles. At the age of seventeen, Garech had returned to Ireland after studying French at the Alliance Française in Paris and moved into a rented mews in Quinn’s Lane in Dublin. Paddy took to dropping in and the pair became firm friends, acquiring the nickname Ballcock and Browne, a pun on Paddy’s day job and the name of the first aviators to cross the Atlantic. Like their near-namesakes, Ballcock and Browne would become pioneers in their own right, spearheading the revival of traditional Irish music in a country in which it had ceased to exist as a form of popular entertainment.
Tara accompanied Garech and Paddy as they travelled to traditional music festivals all over Ireland and his adolescence was coloured by the characters they met during those long, music-filled summer nights – sean nos singers, storytellers and itinerant pipers.
In the summer of 1958, while Miguel was getting his feet under the table at Luggala, Tara and Garech spent six weeks travelling around Ireland with a state-of-the-art, two-reel Grundig tape machine, recording traditional music, folk songs and stories. They filled hundreds of hours of tape, not just at festivals, but in isolated rural cottages, where they found extraordinary musicians and storytellers who had never been heard by a wide audience.
‘Tara helped me with the buttons,’ Garech remembered, ‘because I discovered that I couldn’t listen and work the reels at the same time. It was a wonderful summer. We travelled around and we slept in bed and breakfasts, or above pubs, or on somebody’s floor. We stayed with the great concertina player Mrs Crotty, who ran a pub with her husband in Kilrush, County Clare, which stayed open until five o’clock in the morning. We stayed with Lord Kilbracken in Killishandra, County Cavan, and were driven around by Dr Galligan, who was the chairman of Comhaltas Ceoltóiri Éireann [an organization dedicated to the promotion of traditional music, song and dance in Ireland] and who also happened to be the local GP.’
The recordings they made were the stem cells of Claddagh Records, a label founded by Garech the following year, with his friend, a psychiatrist called Dr Ivor Browne. Fourteen-year-old Tara was a shareholder of the company. Claddagh would go on to play a major role in the revival of traditional Irish music, both at home and internationally, beginning in 1959 with Leo Rowsome’s King of the Pipers. Like all of Claddagh’s subsequent albums, it would have a contemporary sleeve design, subverting the age-old wisdom that Irish records had to have shamrocks and rainbows on their covers to be commercially successful. In the decade to come, the label would give traditional Irish music an air of Sixties cool.
The arrival of Claddagh was, in its own modest way, part of a watershed year for music. While Garech was pressing his first LP, a Detroit factory worker called Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family’s loan fund to set up the record label that would eventually come to be known as Motown. At around the same time, a young Memphis record store owner named Jim Stewart was making the first recordings for what would soon become Stax Records. And in Liverpool, three teenagers called John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were finding their feet in a rock and roll cover band billing itself as Johnny and the Moondogs.
•
The marriage between Oonagh and Miguel was in trouble right from the beginning. The ‘heavenly place’ that Miguel spoke of in reference to Luggala was in fact his idea of hell. He missed the fast pace of life in Manhattan and he was insecure around Oonagh’s intellectual friends, most of whom considered him embarrassingly gauche. He compensated for his lack of social confidence by being rude to everyone who visited the house. He failed to understand, too, why his marriage to a woman with the title of Lady did not accord him a title. ‘He thought he should have been Lord Somebody,’ according to Garech. ‘He used to say, “Why I not? I marry a Lady. I should be a Lord – as a such.”’
It must have been plain to Miguel, too, that Oonagh’s children despised him. In the weeks before Garech and Tara set off around Ireland with the Grundig tape machine, he had been making awkward efforts to exert some form of parental control over them. Even at thirteen, Tara was too independent of mind and too wise to the ways of the world to accept this boorish stranger as some kind of authority figure. Like Garech, he simply disregarded him. Miguel’s response was to raise the decibel level of his voice. ‘I don’t recall us ever once calling him our stepfather,’ said Garech. ‘We called Sally our stepmother. But Miguel? Never. We really thought of him as an intruder.’
It’s not difficult to imagine why Miguel, an abandoned child who endured a desperately deprived upbringing, was so jealous of Oonagh’s children and the privileged life they enjoyed. But in attempting to show Tara some tough parental love, Miguel overplayed his hand. Before the summer of 1958 was finished, with the marriage less than six months old, he was gone. Oonagh was tired of the shouting matches and the general disharmony he brought to the house. She went to Dublin one morning for an appointment at the hairdresser’s and didn’t come home. Miguel took the hint and moved out, returning to New York. Oonagh instructed her solicitors to initiate divorce proceedings. In an interview with the Sunday Express, she was very forthcoming about her reasons.
‘The marriage failed,’ she said, ‘because of my husband’s attitude towards my children and my friends. My children are very intelligent and sensitive, and, when Miguel shouted orders and criticisms at them, it made everyone unhappy. It made me absolutely miserable. I began to feel, too, that I couldn’t have any of my friends in the house – he was so rude to them. When we were at Luggala, my place in Ireland, he was always running down the Irish, offending both my friends and my servants.’
The issue for Miguel, it was clear, was his failure to supplant Oonagh’s children, especially her youngest, as the centre of her world. In an interview with the Daily Sketch, he revealed his resentment at how Tara travelled everywhere in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and was given obscene amounts of pocket money by his mother. ‘He w
as spending $2,000 each month,’ Miguel told the newspaper. ‘I thought it was ridiculous that a schoolboy should be spending so recklessly. I told my wife about this. But I am afraid we didn’t agree on the matter . . . I certainly wouldn’t bring up a boy like that.’
Assuming the figure was correct, it was an astonishing allowance for a boy of thirteen, the equivalent of £720 per month, at a time when the average industrial wage for a man was £546 per year. Tara – dubbed by one newspaper as ‘society’s reputed freest teenage spender’ – splurged his pocket money on everything, from toy soldiers to opera and classical albums, which would arrive from America by the crate-load. His interests were varied and ephemeral. He bought camera equipment, budgerigars, books, train sets, comics and modern record players. He enjoyed anything that was new and novel. He had a red bow tie that lit up when he pressed a button on a battery pack concealed in his pocket. Brendan Behan loved it so much, he wrote about it in the Irish Press. And he was becoming obsessed with cars. He had one of the very first Scalextric sets, not long after it was introduced at the Harrogate Toy Fair in 1957.
Like his mother, Tara was of the view that money was for spending. The real concern for Miguel wasn’t how much money Oonagh was lavishing on Tara, but rather how little she was spending on him. In time, she would discover, to her considerable cost, just how profligate Miguel could be with money. But for the moment, much to the relief of Tara and Garech, he was gone from their lives.
Knowing the depth of his mother’s loneliness, and hoping to forestall a possible reconciliation, Gay tried to set her up with Kenneth Rose, his former history tutor at Eton, who was then working as a columnist with the Daily Telegraph. In late August, in an effort to put Miguel out of her mind, Oonagh had decided to take Tara on a fortnight-long Italian cruise. Gay offered to join them and persuaded his old teacher to come along in the hope that, adrift together under a Mediterranean sky, something might develop between them. ‘I remember feeling that there was something indecent about being the lover of your friend’s mother,’ Kenneth recalled. ‘Oonagh was a whole generation older than I was. But she was very attractive.’