Death of a Socialite - Is Percy Thrillington really Tara Browne? 

From April Ashley’s Odessy….”Next morning I awoke early and took out the basket to gather some provisions. As I veered into the King's Road it was as if I were seeing it for the first time... Tara and Nicky Browne chatting to Michael Fish in the middle of the road and handing out sweets to strangers. Anthony Haden-Guest was writing about them, Michael Rainey was selling clothes to them at his shop where, if you knew him, he'd go down into the basement, pull out a brick and roll a marijuana cigarette (later he married Jane Ormsby-Gore and left World's End in a gypsy caravan to look for the Holy Grail in the West Country).”

I recently discovered a new blog concerning the former wife of Tara Browne which I believe makes interesting reading. If it is true or a spoof I don’t know, maybe the author has been reading some of the posts here – again I don’t know. However, certain issues are alluded too and accusations implied that would back up some of the assertions I, and others, have made.

Here is one such claim, Nicki and Tara were cult figures in the swinging sixty's of psychedelic era London and I do mean CULT!! Ignoring the poor grasp of English the assertion here is clear. Here is another. So, he was with another women when his Lotus hit another car maybe he hit a pot hole too and crashed and he was killed but not his new girl friend who was in the car too. Some say Paul McCartney was the occupant of the other car, maybe a conspiracy of some kind..

Reading on. Drugs with Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones was a boyfriend, all of that. He sat in on the making of the Beatles record 'Revolver'. First I have heard of him sitting in on Revolver and does the author really mean that Brian Jones was a boyfriend? Certainly they liked to swap girlfriends, Suki Potier jumped very quickly from the front seat of Tara’s smashed Lotus and into Brian’s bed, but did they share a bed? 

Who knows, however, and although I was aware of both of these photographs, it has just come to my attention that they were snapped by Michael Cooper with their partners for the November 1966 Vogue magazine, just a month before Tara’s death.

Tara and Nicky Browne and Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg

Anyway, let us continue…Tara was involved with Britains first transsexual scandal April Ashley and the other transsexual Amanda Lear who was with Dali. Anita Pallenberg, John Paul Getty the second and Talita .. the effete elite, you name it. Anyway, it is an interesting thread of magic, and spawned the story about Paul McCartney and a body double..

All of which brings us to another interesting conspiracy theory, and here I shall quote from another website….Amanda Lear is one of Europe’s leading gay icons. She has regularly performed at Gay Pride festivals held in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands and Greece. The life of Amanda Lear is confusing and there is a lack of photographic evidence from her youth. Her Wikipedia page indicates that Amanda was born in either 1939 or 1946. Amanda Lear was part of the Swinging London lifestyle of the 1960s. She was friends with The Beatles, Twiggy, The Rolling Stones, Bowie and a large collection of rock stars. Lear became a “stalwart of London’s demimonde” and an exotic name on the nightclub circuit. She was romantically linked with Bowie, Brian Jones and Tara Browne. Amanda Lear is the basis for a large collection of gay rumours surrounding famous people, including Lennon, McCartney, Bowie, Jones, Tara Browne and Salvador Dali.

Her connection with Brian Jones resulted in the ironic Rolling Stones track “Miss Amanda Jones,” included on the 1967 album, Between the Buttons. In 1979, Lear married French bisexual aristocrat Alain-Philippe Malagnac d’Argens de Villèle who, in fact, was the former lover turned adopted son of diplomat and controversial gay novelist Roger Peyrefitte. The life of Amanda Lear is interesting. She has been connected to a large group of gay men. Lear dated both Tara Browne and Brian Jones. The conspiracy theory revolves around the suggestion that Amanda Lear may be a famous man in disguise, possibly someone involved with the December 18, 1966, car accident. If you see Lear in her older photographs, she looks like a man. In many of her images, Amanda is hiding her neck, giving the visual impression of a fake head imposed on body.

Is this the motivation behind McCartney’s daubing Tara’s Plastic Skirt?

And so to round off and to get to the question posed in the title of this piece, here is Paul’s take on the origins of Percy Thrillington…We took personal ads in Private Eye and the Evening Standard saying, "Percy Thrillington seeks the love of his life." People eventually began to ask, "Who is this Percy Thrillington who keeps taking out small ads?" And then on holiday in Ireland with Linda we decided to find an actual Percy. We found a lad working in a farmer's field. We went up to him and asked, "Would you mind doing a photo shoot?" And so for a modelling fee we persuaded him to put on a dinner jacket and Linda took some pictures. And this Irish farmhand became Percy Thrillington. Now compare and contrast with this final quote from the Break the Silence blog… She was an Irish farmers daughter that secretly married him in 1963 in Paris..

Here is todays tweet from Percy…Percy Thrillington is deeply irritated by the curtailment of his apres-ski enjoyment & is currently returning overland by private ambulance, could this be a prelude to this?