House of Nutter

by Lance Richardson

  Still, Tommy had few qualms about cutting somebody off once he grew a little weary, which only led to more letters.

  I don’t know what I can say to you, the important things I can’t write, but you can be sure that’s true, when I say I am very sorry bad feeling without you.

  With my best wishes

  and carefull greetings

  According to Christopher Tarling, Tommy was “one of life’s flitters. He never really put down roots. He was always the leaver in the relationship, never the left.” He was “always on to the next one, on to the next one,” Christopher says, echoing the thoughts of another boyfriend, Christopher Brown, who would date Tommy several decades later only to reach an identical conclusion: “There’s another nice-looking boy, there’s another nice-looking boy…”

  Once, Brown would ask Tommy to define his masculine ideal. What kind of men did he prefer?

  Tommy considered the question for a moment. “A California surf boy,” he replied.

  Tommy’s ideal man was blond and sun-kissed, sculpted in the waves of Huntington Beach. Somebody carefree, hedonistic, and foreign, beamed in from a more beautiful universe. This Tab Hunter figure was a cinematic fantasy, but perhaps its impossibility was exactly what made it desirable. If you can never really have something, after all, you never have to risk being disillusioned.

  Peter Brown at his desk in Apple Corps, 1968.

  I.

  One morning in January 1966, an assertive new cutter turned up in the Burlington Arcade to work at Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward. Mr. Donaldson (nobody called him by his first name) had decided to retire in the next few months (or years; it remained vague), and he wanted to groom his replacement for an easy transition. In other words: “He wanted to look at his stocks and shares in the newspaper,” says Edward Sexton, who jumped at the opportunity to become a junior partner in a well-respected firm.

  A few years earlier, when G. Ward amalgamated with Donaldson & Williams, the companies had pooled their resources but kept the client lists separate. They remained two different teams, in effect, contributing to a single bottom line. Edward now began working for Mr. Donaldson upstairs; Tommy, meanwhile, worked as a salesman for Michael Hall, who owned G. Ward, down in the shop.

  The two young men soon became friendly. Edward was twenty-three years old—just five months older than Tommy. He, too, was working class, from the Elephant and Castle, where he’d lived with his family in a tenement. Though he spoke with a thick Cockney accent—an accent that had recently been mocked, much to his resentment, as “a rasp”—he also carried himself with grace, ramrod-straight, as meticulously dressed as Brummell himself.

  Like Tommy downstairs, Edward’s attitude toward clothes was born of the trends he’d weathered as a teenager. During adolescence, for example, he’d struggled with a “restless edginess,” a feeling of not being comfortable in his own skin. And one way he’d compensated for this was by stealing away into the school bathroom, peeling off his gray flannel trousers, laying them carefully across his lap, and then using an amateur backstitch to narrow each leg until they roughly resembled the drainpipes he’d seen on the Teddy Boys. Determined and resourceful, Edward, from a young age, had understood that clothes could be a second skin, manipulated as a way of fitting in—or standing out.

  When he was fifteen, Edward had gone to work as a commis waiter at the Waldorf in Covent Garden. Until then, he recalls, “I don’t suppose I’d ever really crossed the bridge to come up to the West End.” At the Waldorf, his parochialism was shattered as he found himself fondling the spectacle of wealth: caviar, smoked salmon, steak au poivre. Serving patrons dressed for the nearby opera came as a shock; it constituted, Edward says, “my first realization that there were a lot of people doing different, nicer things than either I or my parents were doing.”

  It was his desire to ascend the class ladder that first introduced him to bespoke tailoring. At a high street tailor, Edward commissioned a mod suit uncannily like the one Tommy had worn at the Ministry of Works: Italian-style, boxy jacket, with very short side vents. The suit made him feel like a somebody, and Edward was just as taken with the process, ordering what he wanted, looking at the fit, getting a feel for different styles. This fascination became a habit, freely indulged until he amassed a wardrobe of “really nice clothes.”

  When he entered the tailoring trade immediately after the Waldorf, Edward marked Savile Row as his ultimate goal. “I figured if you’re going to be a good jockey,” he recalls, “you better have the best stables.”

  Unlike Tommy, who, lacking models, had never really known what he wanted to do—“In those days it wasn’t all that easy to become a designer,” he would later say—Edward was content to follow the traditional route to becoming a good cutter. That meant years as an apprentice coat maker crafting riding wear for Harry Hall. It meant night classes at the Barrett Street Technical College, and then work as an under-cutter at Kilgour, French & Stanbury. Moving across Savile Row to Welsh & Jefferies, Edward had learned how to make military uniforms with razor-sharp silhouettes. He’d come to appreciate the value of a Sam Browne belt: a leather strap that goes over the right shoulder, around the waist, and then is cinched tight, with all excess fabric tucked away using darts and seams until you’re left with a snug, close fit—“a sculpture.” He’d hoarded techniques and experience, and also practiced “all the hours that God gives you.” For Edward, tailoring became life—his whole life. “You can’t do it between nine and five and then go home and start living another,” he says.

  By the time Edward finally arrived at the Burlington Arcade, he’d built a private clientele of contractors and car dealers, people who were not afraid of trying something a little less orthodox. This side business allowed him to deploy his abilities in idiosyncratic ways: wrapping a tape measure around a client’s waist, say, and cinching it tightly to find the ideal shape. Edward had come to believe that the only way to grow as a tailor was to make your own suits, your own style. And your own mistakes. This was an experimental creed that resonated with his new friend down in the showroom.

  Tommy quickly noted Edward’s extraordinary technical skill. But he was just as intrigued by Edward’s moonlighting, which showed the cutter flouting established rules to create clothes that were, at least by Savile Row standards, aesthetically daring. Edward struck Tommy as the kind of person who might consider new ideas with curiosity rather than skepticism. The idea, for example, that “the fabric you wore, the way it was cut, the lifestyle you lived: it all went together.”

  When it came to their own lifestyles, the two men were wildly mismatched. By 1966, Edward was married with a newborn baby, responsible for providing a stable home. He could barely drink more than a few beers without “throwing up all over the place.”

  Tommy, on the other hand, was a promiscuous gay man who was chronically incapable of maintaining a relationship or a healthy bank account, and who believed that a few glasses of wine would just “loosen you up.”

  But ambition has a way of steamrolling the most acute personal differences, and at this moment Tommy was willing to seize any opportunity that happened to come into his purview. As Edward’s wife, Joan, recalls, “Tommy said Edward was just who he was waiting for.”

  Edward and Joan Sexton

  * * *

  Tommy was exasperated with his job. The “little suits” of Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward, as he would derisively dismiss them, left him feeling cold and uninspired. Recently, he’d tried to inject a little flair into the workroom by offering up some of his original sketches, but it had not gone over well with the traditionalist tailors: “It was all very well this sparky and, they’d admit, presentable lad was being given his chance to potter about the design department, didn’t want to be stuffy and all that, but really and oh dear, what he was suggesting was not only tasteless but technically impractical,” a wry journalist would later r
eport. “People did not come here to be measured up for tents, dear.”

  An attempt by Tommy to go elsewhere had also ended in humiliation. In the Cork Street premises of Henry Poole & Co., Tommy had petitioned Samuel Cundey for a salesman job. Cundey had taken one glance at Tommy’s hair, now growing out in dark, fashionable fronds, and sent him away, horrified.

  Many evenings after the gates of the Burlington Arcade were shut to pedestrians, Tommy and Edward would migrate together to a nearby pub. Before long, Edward would have to head for his workshop on Brewer Street, where private clients were invariably demanding his attention; but, for a short spell at least, the young men would talk over pints about their discontent: the “boring establishment” of Savile Row and the larger London scene in which they found themselves bit players.

  By 1967, Tommy knew the city’s fashion quarters intimately. He had already conquered Carnaby Street, which by now had settled down into tacky consumerism—mini-kilts, Union Jack soup ladles.

  Over in Chelsea, bustling like an elaborate costume party on Saturday afternoons, he’d staked out the boutiques along the King’s Road by taking Edward’s young wife to buy “a frock,” as he called it, and then commanding her to “do a twirl” as she stepped out from the changing rooms. He’d admired what he saw there, the spontaneous, avant-garde creativity that allowed an in-house designer to transform the store on a whim (as John Pearse once did at Granny Takes a Trip: “I saw East of Eden with James Dean, and I remember walking into the shop and saying, ‘It’s going to be a moon-jet jacket! It’s going to have a half belt on the back! We’re going to clear out all this Victorian dandy shit!’ ”), though Tommy also thought he could do it better.

  Closer to work, just around the corner on Burlington Gardens, Tommy had investigated the tailoring firm where Christopher Tarling worked: Blades, named after the fictional gentlemen’s club in Ian Fleming’s Moonraker. There was no question that the owner of Blades, Rupert Lycett Green, had done something impressive when he co-founded the firm back in 1962, developing a suit cut that sat somewhere on a spectrum between old and new, Savile Row and Carnaby Street. But Blades also seemed unsatisfying when Tommy and Edward got right down to the details. “They were quite good with colors,” Edward recalls, “but there was still an aristocratic schoolboy feel about their clothes.”

  Indeed, the only place that seemed to push all of Tommy’s buttons was a single boutique on Clifford Street. Called Mr. Fish, it was run by Michael Fish, a talkative, fearless, bitchy aesthete who would once tell a journalist, “If I don’t get whistled at and jeered when I pass a New York building site, I feel underdressed.”

  The “peculiar” Michael Fish, photographed by David Nutter.

  Mr. Fish sold gorgeous, ridiculous things, each item sporting a label that claimed it as “Peculiar to Mr. Fish.” There were silk kipper ties the shape of actual kippers. Puff-sleeved shirts straight from a swashbuckling cinematic fantasy. Chocolate-brown velvet dungarees, long leather coachman’s coats, and white flowing kaftans “for a man to wear about the house.” Later, there was also a gender-bending white moiré man-dress that Mick Jagger would wear at a Hyde Park concert, flouncing around before a crowd of thousands. And the luscious silk dress David Bowie reclined in on the cover of The Man Who Sold the World. Vanessa Redgrave and Picasso shopped at Mr. Fish; for good reason, Michael Fish himself would soon be dubbed “a phenomenon of our age,” and the “high priest” of “peacocks”—cashed-up dandies who had begun treating clothes as a personal art form.

  What Tommy found intriguing about Michael Fish was that he’d managed to make a splash “without losing the quality and design.” Fish had got his start at Turnbull & Asser, which meant he understood craftsmanship, how to make something well. But he was not afraid to apply that understanding in an offbeat way, to create clothes that fitted his outlandish sensibility. Tommy later said, “I felt I could do the same thing with Savile Row tailoring.” In fact, Tommy asked Michael Fish for a job: Fish declined, encouraging Tommy to open something up using his own name instead.

  In many ways, there had never been a better time to embark on a risky venture. The writer Clement Freud, observing the frenzy of fashion stores suddenly appearing around London, remarked, “One feels almost a fool if one doesn’t own a boutique.” And Tommy knew what it took. He’d done, in a roundabout way, the market research. He had an enthusiastic ally scheming with him in the alehouse. As for the rest of the details, the actual step-by-step requirements of launching a serious business—he’d just watched his own brother stumble through those, haphazardly, the previous year.

  * * *

  David had met his business partner, Carlo Manzi, through the Rockingham Club. More precisely, he met Carlo’s girlfriend, Kim Grossman, via Sundays at the Rockingham, and Kim had introduced him to Carlo, a handsome young man of Neapolitan descent with a penchant for Tonik suits and gold jewelry.

  Carlo was working in his brothers’ record store, Manzi Records, on Finchley Road at the time. He was hoping to start something of his own, though, using money from his parents, who’d made a small fortune selling coin-operated slot machines. David, for his part, was looking to break away from Robert Horner, whose erratic behavior was by now abominable. After Kim orchestrated a meeting between them at a local fast-food restaurant, Carlo had decided that photography seemed like a compelling proposition. “David had developed a fantastic reputation as a world-class black-and-white printer,” he recalls. “Here was a man at the top of his game, but he needed help, he didn’t have any particular business nous.” In Carlo’s view, that was exactly what he had. “And I wanted to be involved in something artistic, so it seemed like a good opportunity for both of us.”

  Things had started modestly, with the two men processing test film in Carlo’s parents’ garage. (One day, a spider skittered across the floor, and they’d shrieked in unison and run for their lives—and Carlo’s mother.) But then Carlo had signed the lease on an empty railwaymen’s club overlooking Primrose Hill Station, an impressive headquarters for any new outfit. They’d transformed the bar area into a dedicated darkroom, and left the large empty ballroom as a studio that could later be rented out independently for extra revenue. They named the business NUTTER. Singular, to sound more commanding, in bold orange capitals across a light-pink letterhead.

  NUTTER LABORATORIES & STUDIOS

  Then they began making phone calls. David had an extensive contact list: actors and actresses looking for headshots, creative types he’d met out and about with Tommy, and the magazine and fashion people he’d worked with through Horner’s. “I guess they all jumped ship,” David recalls. “Or maybe I stole them.”

  Thus established, virtually overnight, NUTTER fast earned a reputation as one of the best photography production facilities in London. It was both supremely proficient on a technical level (lighting, developing) and endearingly eccentric, which was something that Carlo and David only encouraged further by, for example, sending out Christmas cards to industry contacts showing themselves in the Nativity.

  “Amazed I haven’t been struck by lightning,” David says.

  David and Carlo as Mary and Joseph.

  * * *

  Tommy had many of the same qualities that David had relied on to make NUTTER a reality: raw talent, passion, a flair for self-branding, and a generous dose of bravado—or, at least, enough dreamy-eyed vision to overcome any apprehension one might reasonably feel about taking on such a precarious project.

  But he lacked money, a financial backer. And where would he find one of those? At least David had a track record of sterling photograph printing work when Carlo had come sniffing. What tangible evidence did Tommy have to show for himself? Who in their right mind might pledge support to “a comely youth from Edgware,” as one writer would condescendingly peg him, “without influence or capital,” and with “no qualification of any kind, beyond the sweetness of his sm
ile”?

  II.

  Peter Brown first spied Tommy Nutter in 1967, at a dinner party thrown by Brian Epstein in his Georgian townhouse on Chapel Street. Before anything else, though, this fact invites another important question: How did Tommy come to be socializing with the manager of the Beatles? What was he doing in Brian Epstein’s Belgravia house in the first place?

  There are two stories.

  In the one told by Tommy to journalists over the years, he “got into the whole scene mainly by going to the Ad Lib Club.” The Ad Lib was frequented by Julie Christie, Rod Stewart, the Who—and Tommy glided right up to the VIP section. “It was where everybody went,” he later said. “Brian Epstein would throw parties and everybody would be there.” It must have been hard to keep up with all the big spenders, but, Tommy said, “I survived, like you do when you are young…It was all slightly calculated but I enjoyed it as well.” In Tommy’s narrative, he was an agile social climber, working the Ad Lib dance floor until it “paid dividends.”

  However, in the memory of Peter Brown, somebody simply brought Tommy to dinner as his date. “That’s really how Brian and I met him.”

  It was a warm evening, summer, June or July. An intimate sit-down for a handful of people. Peter thought Tommy was remarkably cute, though Tommy, perhaps dazed by his surroundings and the famous host, gave no indication of even noticing Peter.