Death of a Femme Fatale

When Terry Keane died, my niece Marie-Louise was crestfallen with a sense of loss. Marie-Louise had worked with Terry as her researcher and sometimes co-writer, and had come to love her. Terry, she said, was as a great and exotic wild bird who brought a unique sense of colour into life.

Terry was someone who elicited extreme opinions. Those who knew and loved her saw Terry as a beacon of laughter, generosity and allure. Her critics saw a different Terry. A close advisor to Charlie Haughey told me “don’t mention that woman’s name to me: she is poison.”

Even some of Terry’s own friends pointed to flaws. “Terry is the most selfish woman in the world,” one of her oldest friends exclaimed to me. “A typical only child!” With apologies to only children – there is a belief that some never quite learn that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

Well, we are all a mixture of attributes, and, as Carlyle said on the death of Louis XVI – a thousand people will tell a thousand different stories about this passing. Yet I think both critics and adherents of Terry would agree about one thing: she was a genuine, a real, a true femme fatale.

The authentic femme fatale is not necessarily a woman of outstanding beauty, or even very evident sex-appeal. “Pulling” guys is not what the true femme fatale does: almost any female under fifty can “pull” if she puts her mind to it. 

But the true femme fatale is something else: men are profoundly smitten by her spell. They will risk their life, their career, their family for her enchantment – as Charles J. Haughey did. And that was a phenomenal talent of Terry’s. Men were smitten by her to a point of obsession.

I once walked into the apartment of a very senior Irish civil servant: this man was making policy for this country in the realm of foreign affairs. There was only one picture on his walls: a tastefully naked photograph of Terry Keane, taken from the curvature of her beautiful back. Before this picture, this mandarin worshipped. That is what a femme fatale is: she exercises a power of witchcraft.

And if Terry was Ireland’s Madame de Pompadour, she also had the accompanying gifts of the greatest of court mistresses. She was cultivated. She knew about art and antiques and old silver and porcelain. She had a refined and educated taste in the decorative arts.

And she had something else, for which men will sometimes shoot themselves: she was funny. She was a brilliant raconteur, her stories told and embellished in that seductively contralto voice. She could tell you a story to your face in which you were the butt of the anecdote, and still you would laugh: you would not only be amused but flattered.

She was not just La Pompadour: she was also Scherazade.

But there can be a sad side to a great conversationalist: you may outshine to the psychological detriment of others. After a particularly hilarious lunch with Terry and some friends in Chelsea in the late 1990s, I remarked to her son Tim as we drove away: “Your mother is full of personality.”

“Yes,” Tim said in a small voice. “I sometimes think that she has so much personality there was none left over for me.”  Tim was a gifted but fragile individual, and he died alone after a domestic accident in 2004. Terry suffered dreadfully over that.

She was an intensely family-minded person. She adored her children and grandchildren and was devastated when a new-born baby grand-daughter died. Terry voted the pro-life ticket in the 1983 referendum on abortion: she had, after all, valiantly placed her first child for adoption rather avail of an abortion (and how happy she was, later, to be reconciled with that much-loved daughter). Terry also voted against introducing divorce in the referenda: to the day she died she was still married to her husband, Judge Ronan Keane.

I know it sounds strange: but a mistress may be supportive of the family structure.

But Terry was ill-advised to allow herself to be pressurised into selling her story about her relationship with Charlie Haughey. There is an old French tradition which holds that whatever matrimonial sins you commit, you do not publicly embarrass the spouse or the children. Terry came to regret that decision, and yet, bewilderingly, she repeated the exercise, even after the apology. The femme fatale is high-maintenance, and her fine taste in lifestyle requires revenue. And that, I think, clouded the judgement.