He blew his mind out in a car

There was a touch of Raymond Radiguet, the young literary sensation of 1920s Paris, about Tara Browne. In life poetically beautiful, poetry-imbued, tender and trusting, deliciously precocious and eerily presumptive, androgenous in looks but not desires, Tara died —‘without knowing it’, as Cocteau said of Radiguet — tragically, but given his penchant for very fast cars, unsurprisingly young. And, like Radiguet, having touched the lives of those who knew him with a kind of iridescence that remained with them more than half a century later. This lengthy biography, which, given its subject’s foreshortened life is necessarily somewhat repetitive, has gathered their still-vivid recollections, and if it reads more as a protracted tabloid double-spread, that’s the fault, and expectation, of our times rather than the author’s, or Tara’s.

His childhood milieu included the Irish writers and English aristocrats, mondain Parisians and questionable New Yorkers who peopled his divorced parents’ circle. His philandering father, Lord Oranmore and Browne, newly married to the film-star Sally Grey, had given up the fortune-depleting task of farming a vast estate in Galway for the safety of Eaton Square. Tara’s mother Oonagh, most elegant of three Guinness sisters, had recently become the wife of a gay, soi-disant Cuban depleter-of-fortunes named Miguel Ferreras. Oonagh adored children; more looked unlikely from this union, and as her youngest, merely five at the time, Tara was destined to become the apple of her strange grey eyes, her companion, her confidante.

In many ways, Oonagh is the central character in this story. Almost all members of the Guinness brewing dynasty, whether born a Guinness or married to one, have been extraordinarily self-obsessed, but it seems not to have been true of Oonagh. Wilful, sometimes steely, she nevertheless had a self-effacing, even shy, personality, preferring to let others gambol in the limelight, allowing her fortune to make those around her happier.