by Paul Howard
‘I’m going by myself,’ she said before she left, ‘just to pick up my life again and sort things out. I shall make a new home for myself there . . . I want to install a fountain and plant thousands and thousands of flowers.’
Despite the judge’s stated wish that she should play a role in Dorian and Julian’s lives, it didn’t work out as anyone would have wished. It was neither a tidy nor a happy arrangement and would lead to years of hurt and estrangement between Nicki and her two sons.
While John Lennon was immortalizing Tara in song, Anita Pallenberg paid her own private tribute to him in the movie A Degree of Murder. ‘I couldn’t grieve for Tara properly because straight after he died I had to go to Germany to make this film,’ she said. ‘But I had this amethyst ring that Tara had lent to me. In the film, I threw it across the room – when you watch the film, you can see it flying through the air – and that was my little ode to Tara.’
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in June 1967 and immediately hailed by many as the greatest music album of the twentieth century – as it still is by many critics, almost fifty years after it was first recorded. If there was a cultural gravitational point that the 1960s had been pulling towards, then this was it, a record that managed to capture the unique energy of the times. Almost everything about it was revolutionary, from its original concept, to its songwriting, to its cover art, to its use of studio trickery to achieve sounds never heard before on vinyl.
Its pièce de résistance was ‘A Day in the Life’, with John singing in a disembodied, almost spectral voice and taking licence with the details of Tara’s death to provide the album with its haunting coda.
The cover photograph, taken by Tara’s friend and twenty-first-birthday-party chronicler Michael Cooper, remains the most enduring image of the psychedelic era. The diorama of cut-out figures from history included, at John’s suggestion, George Bernard Shaw, author of Pygmalion.
The album became the soundtrack for the season of hope and upheaval that was 1967’s Summer of Love, when it suddenly seemed conceivable that young people really could change the world with their happy thoughts. It also represented the last hurrah for the era of Swinging London. You could almost make the case that the dying piano chord at the end of ‘A Day in the Life’ – a sound created by all four Beatles, plus George Martin and roadie Mal Evans, simultaneously hitting three pianos – was the moment when the essential energy of the Sixties shifted from England to the west coast of America.
The later, counterculture Sixties were about hippies in Haight-Ashbury and Vietnam War protests and civil-rights marches that turned bloody and Hells Angels turning murderous at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Freeway and drugs – the ‘bad’ kind. It was the Sixties that Tara never lived to see, which is why his death, coming when it did, became for many of his friends a historical marker.
‘For me, the day that Tara died was the end of the Sixties,’ said Hugo Williams, who had his eyes opened to the world by this confident little man-child in Paris in the late 1950s. ‘His death was the point from which things started to go bad. While he was alive, it was the miniskirt and the Twist and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. And after he died, it was more about long hair and drugs and psychedelia and Altamont and horrible things like that. His was a rock and roll death really. Because he stood for something in our lives. And suddenly the party was over and we all had to grow up and get married and get on with our lives. It really did stunt my youth, the way he died. I think a lot of people have a death that stands out for them in that same way.’
•
There was a perceptible change in mood in Britain in the early weeks of 1967. London was still swinging but the momentum had started to slow. The old Establishment – as represented by elements in the police and press – decided that everyone had had more than enough fun and began to assert their might.
These working-class singers and musicians, most of them still in their twenties, were buying up the stately homes that the old aristocracy could no longer afford to live in, were openly flaunting the drug laws and holding themselves out to be role models for the nation’s youth. They had to be stopped. And top of the Establishment’s hit-list were The Rolling Stones.
‘We were all so young,’ Anita Pallenberg remembered. ‘That’s why they were so envious. We were all young kids, especially Brian, who was driving around in a big Rolls Royce and he could barely see over the steering wheel. Can you imagine an old geezer seeing a young kid with long hair driving a Rolls? They said, “What the fuck? Why should they have that?” That’s why we had to be stopped.’
Brian was devastated by Tara’s death and his behaviour became increasingly reckless. In January 1967 he spoke openly about his use of illegal drugs to an undercover reporter from the News of the World, which had decided to wage war on The Rolling Stones on behalf of the moral majority. The reporter thought he’d just heard a confession from Mick Jagger, rather than Brian Jones.
When the newspaper ran the story, Mick immediately sued, thus bringing the weight of the police, with whom the newspaper worked hand in glove, crashing down on all of their heads. On Friday, 10 February, Mick, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull and Donovan were among the crowd gathered in the studio on Abbey Road to see The Beatles and a group of classical musicians work on the orchestral crescendo in ‘A Day in the Life’. That weekend, Keith was entertaining guests at Redlands, his fifteenth-century home in West Wittering, West Sussex, when the bobbies arrived at the door. There, they discovered various members of the London scene sitting around, including Mick, Keith, Christopher Gibbs, Michael Cooper, Robert Fraser and Marianne, wrapped in a rug, but otherwise in a state of undress. George Harrison and Patti Boyd had just left.
They turned the place over looking for drugs but would have been disappointed with their haul. On Mick, they found four amphetamine pills that he claimed had been prescribed in Italy for travel sickness. On Robert, they found a small amount of heroin and eight capsules of methylamphetamine hydrochloride. They were both charged with possession of drugs, while the remnants of a single joint found in an ashtray meant they could charge Keith with allowing his premises to be used for the smoking of marijuana.
Anyone familiar with the hedonistic lifestyle of the Stones and their aristocratic hangers-on couldn’t believe that was all the police could lay their hands on. It sounded like they were having a quiet night in.
Robert pleaded guilty to drug possession and received a six-month prison sentence with hard labour. While he was in prison, his gallery was put into receivership. It eventually closed in the summer of 1969. Mick was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, amended to a conditional discharge on appeal. Keith was sentenced to a year in prison, later overturned. William Rees-Mogg, the traditionally conservative editor of The Times, wrote a leader article criticizing the harshness of the sentences and the Victorian brutality brought to bear on those involved.
Soon, pinning drug charges on pop stars became the almost exclusive preserve of Norman Pilcher, the crooked drug-squad detective who was accused by many – including John Lennon and George Harrison – of bringing his own drugs to a raid in case of disappointment.
It was almost certainly Pilcher who ordered the raid on Dandie Fashions in the summer of 1967. The shop had opened, as planned, in Christmas week and was doing good business. Jimi Hendrix, The Bee Gees and Procol Harum had all bought clothes in there, while Andy Warhol had strayed in from the street once and had a look around. But John Crittle had managed to make an enemy of the local police. ‘He used to really get up their noses,’ remembered Alan Holsten. ‘He used to park on the pavement outside the police station. When they’d tell him to move, he’d tell them to fuck off. So they decided to stitch him up.’
Amanda Lear happened to be in the shop, trying on a dress, when the police arrived. John later told the press that there were ten police officers involved in the raid. They arrested a number of people, including Amanda and John, and seized various pills and
substances for analysis.
‘They busted him for drugs,’ Alan said. ‘I was a witness at the trial and I didn’t exactly help matters. I was nervous. They asked me what I did for a living and I told them I worked in a shit shop. I meant to say shirt shop. But of course shit was slang for drugs.’
John received a relatively light sentence of three weeks, while the charges against Amanda were dropped when the police confirmed that her pills were prescribed for a medical condition. But news of the raid had been splashed across the newspapers. The Guinness trustees didn’t care much for the publicity and withdrew their money. They eventually sold the business to Apple Tailoring, one of the philanthropic companies established by The Beatles. And that was the end of Dandie Fashions.
It was open season on Britain’s young musical stars. Brian Jones was busted separately from Mick and Keith. While they were waiting for their cases to come to trial, The Rolling Stones exiled themselves. In the summer of 1967, Brian, Anita, Keith and Christopher Gibbs went on holiday to Tangiers in Morocco. It was there one night, while Brian was hospitalized with pneumonia, that Keith, who had developed feelings for Anita, made his move. And Anita slipped from the life of one Stone and into the life of another.
‘He was devastated by Tara’s death,’ according to Amanda Lear, who became close to him around that time. ‘He also felt completely rejected by the group. He was very difficult to control because of all the drugs he was taking. He kept telling me he was going to go solo, make an album. He felt lost and rejected. He had no friends, just hangers-on. Tara, I think, was the last true friend he had.’
After his break-up with Anita, he became romantically involved with Suki Potier, the girl who survived the crash that killed his friend, but all they ever had in common was Tara and a certain doomed quality that they both shared. ‘Suki was completely broken up by what happened to Tara,’ said Jose Fonseca from English Boy. ‘She told me once that she went to see a psychic, who told her that she would witness the deaths of three important men in her life,’ a line that would prove spookily prophetic. She spent a great deal of time with Brian as he pirouetted towards his own sad demise. Then, in 1981, she was killed alongside her husband, Hong Kong-born casino heir Bob Ho, in a car crash in Portugal.
In 1969, Brian bought Crotchford Farm, the house where Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne once lived. But his heavy drug intake, mounting legal problems and ostracism from the band he still considered his own meant he couldn’t find peace. It was all leading up to what happened on 3 July 1969, when, shortly after he was finally sacked by The Rolling Stones, he was discovered motionless at the bottom of his swimming pool. The coroner’s report called it death by misadventure, noting that his liver and heart were unusually enlarged due to drug and alcohol abuse.
‘Brian definitely went downhill after Tara died,’ said Marianne Faithfull. ‘I’m not saying that was the reason it happened. I know there were other things going on. But a lot of people like Brian, who loved Tara, mourned him in very dangerous ways. And that was understandable. Because a bit of the idealism of the 1960s died with him.’
•
In 1969, three years after his death, Tara’s name was disinterred from history in the most bizarre circumstances. A silly-season conspiracy theory, which started among students on a university campus in Iowa, claimed that Paul McCartney was dead. Fans – or ‘freaks’ as Lennon would describe them in a later song – began to study the covers of all of the band’s albums from Sergeant Pepper onwards for clues to support the theory that he had died in a road accident years earlier and it had been covered up. One claim, which was no less ridiculous than all the rest, was that Paul was killed when he crashed his moped on Boxing Day 1965 and he was replaced by a lookalike – Tara Browne.
‘They said Tara had had cosmetic surgery to make him look like Paul,’ Nicki remembered. ‘I always thought that Tara would have been very amused by that story.’
John Lennon wasn’t the only artist to immortalize Tara in music. The Pretty Things, who had been regular callers to the house in Eaton Row, wrote a song about him called ‘Death of a Socialite’.
The Irish composer Seán Ó Riada composed In Memoriam Tara Browne, inspired by ‘sekundenzeiger,’ a poem by Hans Arp, to be accompanied on the piano. But it was as John Lennon’s lucky man who made the grade that his memory would be preserved.
In the new spirit of puritanism, the BBC announced that it was banning the song ‘A Day in the Life’ because it ‘could be considered to have drug-taking implications’. But it only added to the song’s peculiar allure.
Fifty years after it was written, the track that closes arguably the best and most influential album of all time still exerts a fascination like no other Beatles song. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine listed what its writers considered to be the 100 Greatest Songs by the band in order of preference. ‘A Day in the Life’ was number one. In 2010, the lyrics that John Lennon scribbled down after reading about Nicki and Oonagh’s custody case sold for £800,000 when they went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York.
Meanwhile, people whose lives Tara touched, however briefly, remembered him in their own ways. In 1976, Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards had a baby, who died tragically after just ten months from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. For the short time that he lived, his name was Tara Richards. In 1968, John Paul Getty Jr and his wife, Talitha, had a son, whom they named Tara Gabriel Gramophone Galaxy Getty. And back in Ireland, Larry Mooney, who talked Tara through the twists and turns of the course before his first and only car race, remembered him fondly enough to name his son after him, too.
In the decades after his death, all the principals in the story got on with their lives as best they could. Amanda Lear was a muse to Salvador Dali for sixteen years, living with him on and off. In the early 1970s, she became David Bowie’s lover and, at a time when sexual ambiguity became highly fashionable, appeared on the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure album in a leather bodice, holding a black panther on a leash. In the 1980s she reinvented herself as a Disco Queen. Suki Potier survived one car crash only to die in another fifteen years later, while several of Tara’s other friends also died young, including Julian Ormsby-Gore and Michael Cooper, both by suicide. John Lennon was murdered in New York in 1980.
Nicki spent the rest of her life in Spain. Soon after her husband’s death, she became involved with a twenty-two-year-old Spanish racing driver named Rodrigo Dominguez. More than a few people remarked upon his resemblance to Tara. Later, she had a romance with the actor Oliver Tobias and starred alongside him in a production of the hippie musical Hair in Tel Aviv.
She and Amanda became friends again. What happened between Amanda and Tara suddenly seemed unimportant. ‘Looking back,’ Nicki said of the affair, ‘I’m just glad he got in as many interesting and funny and colourful experiences in his short life as he did.’
Nicki and Oonagh never mended their differences and Nicki never forgave her mother-in-law for – as she saw it – ‘taking my children away from me’. Oonagh spent most of her latter years in Guernsey – a financial exile after Miguel Ferreras drove her close to ruin. She died in 1995, at the age of eighty-five. After a funeral service in London, her ashes were scattered on Lough Tay in the presence of her children, Garech, Gay and Desmond.
Miguel surfaced briefly in 1997, in an interview piece in Harpers & Queen, in which he denied that he was ever José Maria Ozores Laredo, the Nazi soldier. There was no happy-ever-after for Miguel and Flor Trujillo. They married but divorced after seven years. He was living with his fourth wife, Felice, on New York’s Upper East Side, not far from the Drake Hotel where he and Oonagh were married forty years earlier. He died in 1999.
In 2001, six years after Oonagh’s death, Nicki telephoned Garech out of the blue. She asked if she and Anita Pallenberg could come to Luggala to visit Tara’s grave. Garech said of course they could. In the final years of her life, she became a regular visitor to the house and a friend to her brother-in-law. She said
that every time she returned to Ireland, a little bit of Tara was returned to her.
In 2012, she died from cancer at her home in Spain. Her body was cremated and, in accordance with her final wishes, her ashes were scattered on the water of Lough Tay by her sons, Dorian and Julian, just yards from where their father was laid to rest.
Fifty years after his death, the man immortalized in the opening lines of ‘A Day in the Life’ continues to represent, for many of those who knew him, everything that was happy and confident and fun about the 1960s.
‘He wanted to be Peter Pan,’ Nicki said in the final weeks of her life. ‘Forever young. But he knew his time wasn’t going to be long. He often said it. He epitomized the spirit of the Sixties, which was: try everything once; make the world a little bit better for other people if you can; try not to hurt anyone if you can avoid it; wear pretty clothes; and, most importantly, live your life.’
He did all of these things. Lucky man.
Select Bibliography
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Ashley, April, and Fallowell, Duncan. April Ashley’s Odyssey (Arrow Books, 1982)
Barnes, Suzanne. When Our Plane Hit the Mountain (New Island Books, 2005)
Beatles, The. The Beatles: Anthology (Cassell, 2000)
Bence-Jones, Mark. Burke’s Guide to Country Houses, Volume 1 – Ireland (Burke’s Peerage/Pergamon, 1978)
Bockris, Victor. Keith Richards: The Biography (Da Capo Press, 2003)
Breward, Christopher; Gilbert, David; and Lister, Jenny. Swinging Sixties (V & A Publications, 2006)
Brynner, Rock. Yul: The Man Who Would Be King (Simon and Schuster, 1989)