by Paul Howard
He introduced himself as The Divine Dali and he kissed Amanda’s hand. ‘I was very skinny. He said to me, “You have the most beautiful skeleton I have ever seen.” I got the impression that he was making fun of us all. I found him terribly obnoxious, but Tara, Brian and Donald thought he was hilarious.’
Dali was wearing a bronze-coloured velvet suit with a gold lamé waistcoat, and his moustache was waxed and twisted upwards in its familiar fashion. Brian and Donald couldn’t stop laughing, especially at the comical way he rolled his ‘r’s. ‘It is nice to meet a Rrrolling Stone,’ he said. ‘But which Rrrolling Stone are you?’
‘Brian Jones,’ was the reply.
Then he turned to Tara. ‘And you are a lord, yes?’
‘No,’ Tara said, ‘my father is a lord.’
Dali seemed disappointed. He invited them to join him. ‘We’ve never had an Amanda at court,’ he said. ‘We have had a Saint Sebastian, a Red Guard, a Unicorn and a Cardinal.’
Dali rarely used people’s names. He found them too prosaic, according to Amanda. Instead, he ascribed people with generic labels. All blondes were ‘Ginesteae’ after a plant with a yellow flower that grows mostly in the Mediterranean. Thin people were ‘Saint Sebastian’, pale people were ‘Christ’ and people of good breeding – like Tara – were ‘Fillet of Sole’.
He gestured to a woman sitting at his table. She was middle-aged, blonde and dripping in jewellery. ‘Sit down beside Louis XIV,’ Dali told Amanda. ‘I beg you. She speaks excellent English. Did you know that Louis XIV spoke English in New York with Greta Garbo?’
Tara, Brian and Donald could barely contain their laughter. The conversation continued in this bizarre manner for about an hour before Dali announced that he was going home to bed. His wife, Gala, didn’t like him to stay out late. He invited them all to lunch the following day, at the upmarket Restaurant Lasserre on the avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt. ‘One o’clock,’ he told them. ‘On the dot.’
Then he left, with a flower behind his ear, while a member of his court, whom he introduced as The Virgin, walked behind him carrying another flower in her cupped hands.
‘He’s crazy, man,’ Brian said. ‘He’s completely crazy.’
Tara and Amanda slept that night at Oonagh’s flat. The following morning, Tara was keen to go to Lasserre. He thought it might be fun. Amanda dressed up in a violet silk mini-dress and knee-high boots. They arrived late. Tara always had trouble being on time for anything. Brian and Donald never showed up at all.
Dali was already sitting at a long table by the window with John and Dennis Myers, identical twins from England who regularly modelled for him and who would later appear in Performance. There was also the woman he called Louis XIV and another whom he introduced as the Avocatesse.
Dali, who was wearing the same clothes as the night before, told them he’d taken the liberty of ordering ortolans for everyone.
Tara began to have second thoughts about the lunch, since the artist was clearly smitten by his girlfriend. He didn’t speak to Tara once during the lunch, according to Amanda, and referred to him only as ‘your friend’.
His conversation was as surreal as anything he ever committed to canvas. He announced to the table that he was impotent. He said his favourite drug was mineral water. He asked Amanda if she was Chinese. He talked at length about her skull. Then he asked her, apropos of nothing, if she was a lesbian. ‘All girls have a bit of lesbian in them,’ he told her, ‘just as all boys have a little bit of the homosexual. I bet your friend here likes boys, like all well-bred, young Englishmen.’
Tara laughed nervously, but he couldn’t wait for the lunch to be over. He realized now that he had a problem. Dali wanted Amanda for a courtier and Amanda – who was interested in the world of art and artists – was clearly flattered by his attention.
•
Nicki knew of her husband’s regular visits to Paris and suspected the affair was still going on. At the start of October, she returned home from Marbella. ‘I stopped off in Paris on the way home,’ she remembered, ‘and I met up with Amanda – because we were good friends ourselves, remember. I had to go to the boulevard Suchet flat for something, so I said, “Come with me.”
‘And, of course, Amanda had to go through the whole rigmarole of pretending she’d never been there before, that she didn’t even know where Oonagh lived. The building had four floors and you needed a special, three-digit code to operate the lift up to Oonagh’s flat. I went to press the buttons, but Amanda got there before me. One, two, three. And then I knew. I took a flight straight back to London.’
She confronted Tara and he admitted everything. According to Nicki, he promised to end it the next time he was in Paris, although this would have been an unusual commitment, given that he had already made up his mind to leave Nicki and file for divorce. ‘The way that it was explained to me,’ recalled Garech, ‘was that even though he really liked Nicki – he had nothing against her whatsoever – he just couldn’t bear another minute of being married to her.’
On Monday, 10 October, Nicki walked into the mews to find Tara not at home. ‘I realized that his music system was gone,’ she remembered. ‘Then I went upstairs and his clothes were gone as well. Everything else was still there, except his music and clothes and him. And that was the day we split, or rather that was the day they moved him out.’
There was a further sting in the tail for her. Oonagh had been looking after Dorian and Julian at Luggala while her daughter-in-law was in Marbella and her son was gadding about London. It’s clear that Oonagh was as dismayed by Tara’s performance as a father as she was by Nicki’s as a mother. By the time the children’s holiday in Ireland was over, she had made up her mind that she wasn’t giving them back.
On Tuesday 11 October, Tara called around to the mews to tell Nicki that he was staying at the Ritz. ‘We were supposed to be going to Ireland to pick up the children,’ she remembered. ‘Oonagh had them at Luggala while I was in Marbella, closing up the rental house. I said to Tara, “What’s going on? Remember, the flight is at 2.30 p.m.”
‘He said, “I’m sorry, my mother has taken the children off somewhere and she’s going to try to get custody of them in Ireland.” I was shocked that she’d organized this coup against me. Tara was upset, too. They’d manipulated and got him. As long as Tara’s mother controlled the purse strings, she knew that she could control everything.
‘I said to him, “Tara, we need to go and get the children back right now. They’re our children – not hers,” and that’s when he said the strangest thing to me. He said, “What’s the point? I’m not going to live very long anyway.” Then he said he had to go and see the trustees to sort some things out.’
Nicki flew to Ireland alone, but when she arrived at Luggala, there was no one home. ‘I was told by a member of the staff that they had gone away,’ she said. ‘They were all staying at the Shelbourne Hotel, as it happened. Oonagh thought it was great fun: “Let’s all play a game with Nicki.”’
She returned to London and tried to contact Tara at the Ritz. He wasn’t there. ‘Divorce was just an accepted thing in their family,’ she said. ‘Tara had seen his mother go through it. She had Gay and Tessa – that’s one lot. Then she married again and had Garech and Tara. I think Tara thought that was how it went. You get married, you have some kids, you get divorced, then you have another lot with someone else.’
Nicki decided she needed a lawyer and she turned to the best in the business. On Wednesday 12 October, she took a taxi to Pall Mall to see David Jacobs, Britain’s leading showbusiness solicitor, whose clients included Brian Epstein, Judy Garland and Liberace. He also represented Donovan, who had recently become the first name to be busted for drugs as part of an Establishment backlash against the pop groups of the time. Nicki claimed that her mother-in-law had ‘snatched’ her children. Jacobs took her straight to the High Court and sought an order for the return of her children. Her counsel, Harold Law, told the court: ‘One does not fear any physic
al danger. It is just the refusal by the grandmother to allow the mother to see the children. She has, in fact, spirited them away.’
However, the judge, Mr Justice Pennycuick, refused to make the order without first hearing her husband’s side of the dispute. He adjourned the case until the following Tuesday, when evidence from Tara could be presented to the court. But Tara was reportedly missing. That night, Dublin’s Evening Press led with the headline: ‘Guinness Heir Sought by Police.’
The story said: ‘Police throughout Britain were alerted to look for a 21-year-old Irishman, heir to a million pounds, and his two young children . . . The police said they wanted to question Guinness heir, the Honourable Tara Browne, about the whereabouts of his two children, Dorian (3) and Julian (1½).’
In a staged photograph, Nicki appeared in the following morning’s Daily Express, looking at pictures of her children while ‘waiting for the phone to ring’. She claimed the breakdown of her marriage had come as a bolt out of the blue. ‘I just want to know where my babies are and what it’s all about,’ she said. ‘We haven’t rowed.’
Several journalists knocked on Tara’s father’s door in nearby Eaton Place to ask Dom if he knew of his son’s whereabouts. He told them he hadn’t seen him since Wednesday and he didn’t know where he was staying. Oonagh, meanwhile, had made an application to the High Court in Dublin for care and control of Dorian and Julian.
Tara finally surfaced that weekend, snapped by a photographer as he flew into Dublin. ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he said, before leaving in a taxi to meet with his solicitor. On Tuesday, 18 October, he was back in London for the hearing in front of Mr Justice Pennycuick. It took place in camera. Tara’s counsel sought a ten-day adjournment, pending the outcome of the Dublin proceedings. The adjournment was granted.
Nicki attempted to enlist the support of Oonagh’s first husband, Philip Kindersley. ‘I phoned him up,’ she said. ‘He told me he couldn’t think of a worse person to be in charge of two young children than Oonagh. I said, “Well, she’s got my two.” He said he wished he could help, but he couldn’t.’
The following weekend, in between court appearances and meetings with solicitors, Tara flew to Paris to see Amanda. But any plans he might have had for a romantic weekend were quickly dashed when Dali phoned to invite her for dinner at Ledoyen, one of the finest restaurants in the city, on the Champs-Elysées. Amanda told Tara that he should come along, too. Tara debated whether or not he should go. He didn’t like Dali. He was jealous of the influence he had over Amanda but he also wanted to be there should something develop.
He also had an ulterior motive for being in Paris that weekend. He told Amanda that he was planning to divorce Nicki and he asked her to sign a statement saying that Nicki was, in her view, a neglectful mother. Amanda agreed, although she claimed later that she regretted it.
Tara decided to go to the dinner after all. Dali escorted Amanda into the restaurant on his arm with Tara following behind. They were joined at the table by Leanor Fini, the Argentine surrealist painter, who was wearing a floor-length ballgown with a magician’s cape over it and carrying a wand.
It was the beginning of what would be a miserable evening for Tara. Dali announced that he only really liked mournful music and insisted that the pianist play Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles, while a paparazzo took endless photographs of them, and Fini, who was bisexual, stared lustfully across the table at Amanda, occasionally whispering approving comments about her to Dali out of the corner of her mouth.
Before the evening ended, Dali told Amanda that he wanted to paint her. Amanda asked Tara if he’d mind and Tara said she didn’t need his permission to do anything. He knew he was losing her. Amanda was clearly infatuated with Dali, if only in a platonic way. That weekend, they also hung out with the artist at the Hotel Lambert, then he invited them to a residence in the suburbs, where they were greeted at the door by a woman holding a bullwhip. Inside, an orgy was in full swing. According to one witness, Tara felt uncomfortable and he and Amanda disappeared into a room alone. It was a peculiar weekend, even for someone who had experienced most things and wasn’t easily shocked. Tara returned to London the following day. He and Amanda never saw each other again.
‘A week or two later,’ Amanda said, ‘he phoned me to say he was coming to Paris tomorrow. I went to meet him at the airport but he didn’t show up. I phoned him and he said we had to stop seeing each other because Nicki knew about us and this was going to make things very difficult in court. And that was the end. I never saw my beautiful Tara again.’
Oonagh’s application for care and control of her grandchildren came before the High Court in Dublin. With the agreement of both parties, the case was heard in private. Nicki flew to Ireland. Unable to afford a hotel, she stayed with Rock Brynner in his rented mews off Pembroke Square. ‘We were followed everywhere,’ he later recalled, ‘by private investigators, obviously trying to prove that Nicki was being unfaithful, which she certainly wasn’t, by the way. She loved Tara, despite everything that was going on. She was penniless and I was just trying to be a friend. She was completely on her own. And she’d gone up against the Guinnesses in Ireland. Good luck with that!’
Nicki argued that the children should be with her. Oonagh made the case that her daughter-in-law was an unfit mother. The judge ruled in Oonagh’s favour. She was granted custody of Dorian and Julian. Nicki returned to London without her children but still believing that she could win custody as part of the divorce settlement. In the weeks that followed, as the date of their divorce hearing approached, the relationship between Tara and Nicki dissolved into bitterness and recrimination.
On 11 November, Tara drew up a will, cutting his wife out of everything. Nicki, meanwhile, was threatening to use her husband’s affair with Amanda against him. Suddenly, her claim that she put Tara and Amanda together in the first place sounded all too plausible to her mother-in-law. ‘Oonagh thought I did it so that I could prove adultery,’ Nicki said, ‘and take half of Tara’s fortune. In response to that, they tried to get people to say that I’d slept with John Crittle. They even asked him if he would say it. John said, “What do you think I am? She’s my friend’s wife.”’
But Tara suspected there was substance to the story.
•
Nicki had another issue to deal with as the date of the divorce hearing approached. She had no money. There were bills due and there was no food in the house. She went to see Oonagh’s older sister, Maureen, one of the Guinness trustees, with whom Oonagh had always had a difficult relationship. Not surprisingly, Nicki got a sympathetic hearing from the woman who was once described by Cecil Beaton as ‘the biggest bitch in London’.
‘I had no money at all,’ Nicki said. ‘I didn’t know how I was going to eat. So I went to see Maureen and she took out a pen and a piece of paper to figure out what I should be given to live on now that Tara and I were about to be formally separated. I think she was being nice to me just to get at Oonagh. It was, “Three pounds for manicures, twelve pounds for the hairdresser, eight pounds for clothes.” I said, “Maureen, this is very generous – overly generous – but there’s also a thing called eating and paying the telephone bill.” It never occurred to them that people would need money for such things because they had no idea where food came from or who paid the bills. They just thought, “What do women want? Well, they want nice hair and nice nails and, oh, nice clothes.” So I said this thing about food and this friend of Maureen’s, who happened to be sitting there, listening to all of this, said, “I think fifteen pounds a week is perfectly fine for a girl of your station.” Can you believe that? I’ve never heard the likes of it outside of a Victorian play!’
14: A DAY IN THE LIFE
Tara’s life was in chaos. His marriage was unspooling in a very messy and public way. His children were in Ireland. He’d lost Amanda. And he found himself going into business with a man whom he suspected was sleeping with his wife. Lonely, he had moved out of the Ritz at the end of Oct
ober and moved in with his friends Gerard Campbell and Theodora Brinckman, on the Fulham Road. ‘He was in a state of absolute turmoil,’ Gerard remembered.
The separation of one of Swinging London’s most popular couples presaged the end of the city’s golden age. By the second half of the year, there were signs that England’s time as the happy capital of the world was coming to an end – if you cared to see them. Three news stories from 1966 offended the happy narrative of young, fun-loving Britons changing the world with their cheery positivity. In April, two young lovers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the so-called Moors Murderers, were convicted of the torture and killing of three children in Greater Manchester. In August, three policemen were shot dead in Shepherds Bush, West London, in what became known as the Massacre of Braybrook Street. And in October, 116 children and 28 adults were killed when a mountain of slurry slid down on the South Wales village of Aberfan.
Economically, the country was in deep trouble. In July, the government had attempted to tackle soaring inflation by declaring a freeze on wages. An era of austerity had begun, even if the people didn’t quite realize it. The New York Times commented upon the fin de siècle feel to the city in the summer of 1966. ‘The atmosphere in London can almost be eerie in its quality of relentless frivolity,’ it reported. ‘There can rarely have been a greater contrast between a country’s objective situation and the mood of its people.’
The West End went on swinging, as if in denial. But the serendipitous orgy of mutual good feeling that made London the most exciting city in the world had gone. Spontaneity was replaced by calculation. Suddenly, it was all too self-aware and self-regarding. Tara was intuitive enough to understand that the happy times were coming to an end – and not just for him and Nicki. ‘I remember being on the King’s Road with him in the fall of 1966,’ Rock Brynner remembered. ‘We were both very silent. There’s a good chance we were stoned. And he said to me, “This is not what we meant.” By that, I think he was saying that the spontaneity had gone out of it. The whole thing had become contrived and commercialized.’