Tommy said, “Oh, I’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t I?”
“Don’t be silly,” Wendy said. “We’ve all been naughty.”
He was fading in and out of consciousness. Even the bedsheet was too heavy for him now.
“It’s OK,” Wendy said. “You can go. You don’t have to hang in there. I know you’re only fighting it because Dolly is here.”
* * *
On August 16, Tommy’s heart stopped beating.
Then it started again.
Then it stopped, definitively, on August 17, 1992, at 1:20 a.m. The cause listed on the death certificate was “Bronchopneumonia.” He was forty-nine years old.
Dolly was alone at the Cromwell when it happened. Tim Gallagher had left a few hours earlier to get some sleep, though he couldn’t sleep and was sitting up at home when the phone suddenly rang. “I haven’t called anybody else,” Dolly told him. “Can you come back to the hospital?” She didn’t have to say that Tommy had died.
Tim returned to the hospital and made his way to Tommy’s room. When he got there, Dolly was standing sentinel, silent, and Tommy was a husk on the bed.
Dolly handed Tim two pennies. “Can you put these on his eyes for me?” she asked. An old custom so the dead can pay the ferryman to take them across the River Styx.
Tim put the pennies over Tommy’s eyes.
Then he ordered a cab and accompanied Dolly back to her flat on Finchley Road. “She hadn’t slept in two nights,” he recalls. “She was very upset, but then she calmed down. I think, in some ways, it was a big relief. Because the last few days—even the last weeks—were something that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. It was a relief he had finally gone.”
* * *
About a year before the end, when Tommy was still feeling good enough to talk about himself, he sat down with a journalist named Thom O’Dwyer, a friend and great admirer (“When you met Tommy, you couldn’t help but fall madly in love with him”). O’Dwyer had once covered Tommy’s exploits as an editor at Men’s Wear, and now he edited a glossy trade magazine called HeLines.
This wide-ranging interview, which O’Dwyer would title “The World According to Tommy Nutter,” covered Tommy’s modest beginnings, his first encounter with the Beatles, his thoughts about the so-called Peacock Revolution, the evolution of men’s fashion through the 1970s, the rise of designer labels, his own worst sartorial offenses (particularly around the Falklands War in 1982), and his hopes for the future, where Tommy intended to go next, “possibly into Europe and America…”
It is an extraordinary document, the closest thing Tommy ever came to producing a memoir. But two passages stand out as particularly striking.
TO’D: What really, really makes you happy, Tommy?
TN: If you want an honest answer, it’s really nothing to do with work. What makes me happiest is watching Coronation Street. The poet John Betjeman once said, ‘It’s like a half hour of sheer bliss,’ and I couldn’t agree more. You’re in a totally different world, and I just find myself absolutely glued to the television set those three times a week…I must say, material things have never really been that important to me. I have a nice handful of friends that I have accumulated over the years, and they keep me happy. Really, my happiest moments, I suppose, are trying to relax after business. Oh, and Sondheim musicals—that’s my other favorite thing in life. I look forward to any new musical he might be making. I must finally say, though, my work and the business in general brings me enormous satisfaction. I have been incredibly lucky, and I do love it. Just think, I could have ended up being a plumber’s mate for my entire life.
T’OD: So then, what makes you unhappy?
TN: It’s difficult to say. I don’t dwell on things, you see, so I try not to get myself into a position where I would feel sad or unhappy. I am obviously acutely aware of all the terrible things in life, but I always try to not let things get me down. Everybody worries, but you must keep on going. That’s the whole point, I guess. There really isn’t anything too devastating in my life. Sure, everybody has been through a lot, but you’ve just got to get on with your own humdrum life.
*“It’s common knowledge that you can’t get good ready-to-wear made in Britain,” Tommy complained, “and that’s why most of the top designers have gone to Italy where factories are streamlined for making a far superior garment. The only company you could have quality clothes made by in this country is Chester Barrie, but it’s too expensive. Even my ready-to-wear is made in Italy which is sad and a complete contradiction of being a Savile Row tailor.”
The AIDS Memorial Quilt
BLOCK NUMBER 02640
David Nutter in London, 1958.
One fall evening not too long ago, I rang the buzzer for David Nutter’s apartment on the Upper West Side. A hesitant voice crackled over the intercom, asking me to wait, so I settled down on the stoop and plumped my orange silk pocket square. What had David decided to wear? There had been hand-wringing in his emails, because what did anyone wear to a party for the Rolling Stones?
I checked the invitation on my phone, noting the address. Then there was a gust of warm air as the building’s door opened behind me. I stood up and turned to find David, smiling broadly, in a tweed jacket with contrasting patch pockets and pagoda shoulders so pointed they could have doubled as weapons. Gorgeous, bizarre; one of Tommy’s old numbers.
“Ready,” David said.
I hailed a cab on Central Park West.
The event was the New York launch of Exhibitionism, a sprawling, self-indulgent roadshow of Stones memorabilia. The press release promised “over 500 original Stones’ artifacts, with striking cinematic and interactive technologies offering the most comprehensive and immersive insight into the band’s fascinating fifty-year history.” David had been invited to the opening as a guest of Charlie Watts; I was going as a guest of David.
The cab shot down Manhattan to the West Village, where Washington Street was already a clogged artery of black Escalades. We pulled up around the corner and made the final approach on foot to the entrance of Industria, collecting holographic VIP passes that flashed alternating images of the Stones’ trademark tongue-and-lips and a woman’s crotch.
Inside, the exhibition, spread over nine galleries, was either breathtaking or soporific, depending on your feelings about the band: guitars entombed in glass cases, a faux recording studio, a re-created Edith Grove flat the boys had once shared early in their career. It was deeply, weirdly reverent; even dirty dishes were carefully placed in the sink like holy objects. David had seen much of the inventory before—including, on one wall, some Andy Warhol lithographs that Jagger had kept stashed in his basement for a decade. “I had to take them to Sotheby’s once,” David mentioned nonchalantly as we drifted past.
Eventually we reached the costume gallery, the main reason I had come in the first place. The room, filled with mannequins made up to resemble individual band members, reminded me of the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, terracotta warriors lined up in extravagant dress. There were feathers and sequins, pirate puffs, military gear, Mr. Fish, Ossie Clark, Alexander McQueen…and Tommy Nutter. A red-and-gold pinstripe coat with lapels the size of banana leaves, made for Mick Jagger in 1971. A gray three-piece pinstripe suit, made for Charlie Watts in 1975. Both outfits were unmistakably Tommy. Standing before them, David slipped into quiet contemplation.
Once we were finished with the show, we crossed the street to a cavernous warehouse for the after-party. David was fatigued; several people had already recognized him and stopped us to reminisce about the old days. But we loitered for a moment, hoping to catch Watts or his assistant, to thank them for the invitation.
Then David spotted him: Mick Jagger, shooting through the crowd in a wide arc.
I had never seen anything like it. Adults who, only a few minutes earlier, had seemed reasonable and rational, now sudden
ly staggered like animals in rut, frenzied by the pheromone-like charisma of this single man.
Having witnessed this spectacle countless times before, David was unmoved. Still, an unexpected opportunity had presented itself here. David had not seen Jagger for years—not since the performer had sold his mansion and departed New York at the end of the 1990s.
Leaving me standing where I was, David drifted across the room, calculating Jagger’s trajectory. He found the right spot and waited patiently until Jagger, moving fast, started to approach. And then there was a moment, the rock star catching the eye of this bespectacled old man, now seventy-eight years old, gaunt and gray and almost swallowed up by his strange tweed coat, when Jagger’s PR rictus gave way to a smile that was genuine.
“David!” Jagger barked, reaching out to grasp a well-padded shoulder.
David nodded. “I’m still alive.”
* * *
After Tommy’s death in August 1992, David immediately returned to London to attend the funeral at Golders Green Crematorium, and to help Dolly with the emotional process of packing up Tommy’s flat. He returned again, two months later, for a public memorial service at St. George’s Church, just up the road from Savile Row. Before a room filled with friends, admirers, tailors, clients, extended family, and at least one well-dressed pew of Tommy’s ex-lovers, Peter Brown delivered the eulogy, and Cilla Black read an abridged excerpt from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
He was a true, a perfect gentle Knight…
And certainly a man has most honour
In dying in his excellence and flower,
When he is certain of his high good name;
For then he gives to friend, and self, no shame.
At the end of the service, all stood as a full choir performed part of Handel’s Messiah. David had selected the oratorio for his brother, though listening to it brought him little solace in the moment.
When David flew home to New York, there was no time to grieve. Kevin’s kidney function had fallen below 20 percent. His morale had fallen even lower, into deep despair, and nothing David could do or say made any difference. Kevin had given up; becoming increasingly lax with his dialysis treatments, he died less than seven months after Tommy, on March 6, 1993. The newspaper notice described him as “Beloved son of Shirley Edward and Wilson Bostick. Dear friend of David Nutter.”
And then, in quick succession, due to AIDS or other unexpected causes, David lost several more friends, his doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian, his dentist, his psychiatrist, his sponsor—and his mother. Dolly had always worshipped the sun a little too ardently; she sat on a park bench working on her tan right up until the moment she was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, in 1995. She was seventy-nine years old.
In the span of just a few years, David’s immediate family was reduced to several boxes of personal effects shipped over and stacked up against a wall in his apartment. Most of his close friends became statistics in the epidemic. He did not get another roommate after Kevin was gone. He stopped going to London with any regularity. He remained sober, always, but also gave up the sobriety meetings, tired of watching others relapse, fail, disappear. He closed up into himself, becoming reclusive, hard to reach, and let a decade drift by, then a second one.
* * *
I once asked David what he was most proud of in his life. We were sitting in my apartment drinking coffee, and I was hoping he would offer some reflective statement about a photographic career that was as beautiful as it was haphazard, almost accidental.
Instead he said, “Probably surviving, because nobody else did.”
I was stunned, unsure how to respond.
To fill the silence, David continued: “People sometimes talk about ‘survivor’s syndrome.’ Well, it’s not very comfortable, you know. People think you should feel lucky, that you should be grateful that you’re still around. But it’s not that easy. You expect to have all your friends with you. I did everything they did—maybe more than they did, reading back over those diaries. Yet I didn’t get it. All of them got it. But not me. That’s a very strange feeling. It was particularly strange a few years back, when I finally did return to NA after twenty years of not going to meetings. It was like in those science-fiction movies where they put somebody to sleep for a century, and then, when they wake up again, everything’s different, and everyone familiar is gone.
“I was at a meeting on Saturday—a meeting for gay men—and the guy speaking was an ex-DJ. He mentioned this club. I’d started to think I’d imagined this club. But it existed! Afterwards, I went up to the ex-DJ and said, ‘It’s so great to hear you speak, because I sometimes doubt half the stuff that happened to me. I often wonder if there is anybody else still alive who remembers what really happened.’ ”
* * *
The AIDS crisis destroyed a generation of designers, actors, dancers, writers, and artists, from Freddie Mercury to Rock Hudson, Peter Allen, Bruce Chatwin, Denholm Elliott, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Perry Ellis, Liberace, Halston, Anthony Perkins, Rudolf Nureyev, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Derek Jarman, Alvin Ailey, Kenny Everett, Antony Hamilton, Bill King…the list goes on—and then, of course, there are countless others, too, less famous but no less worthy of consideration. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, conceived by Cleve Jones in 1985, now features more than 48,000 panels of three feet by six feet, the size of an average grave. Each one, painstakingly sewn and embroidered and spray-painted by friends and family, represents achievements, hopes, aspirations, connections, dramas, thoughts, dreams—a fully formed, three-dimensional life.
When I set out to write this book, one of my main intentions was to show the richness behind just one panel, excavating the lost history of Tommy Nutter, whose contribution to some of the most iconic styles and pop imagery of the twentieth century is woefully underappreciated, and whose influence lingers today on Savile Row, where tailoring firms are now like couture houses, releasing collections and appointing creative directors.
As a writer, it was deeply satisfying to gather anecdotes, trawl archives, read old newspapers, and then assemble all the pieces into a coherent whole. However, somewhere along the line it also became clear to me that this book was more than just an exercise in historical preservation—more, even, than just a tribute to a fascinating man.
For David, it was therapeutic.
David Nutter came to my apartment almost every week for more than a year to turn over his memories. Later, he read each successive draft of the manuscript, recalling more things about himself and his brother to add to the mix, and I watched as he went from guarded support to cautious optimism to, eventually, rapturous enthusiasm. In the end, it became as much his project as it was mine.
I would never presume to claim that working on it gave David any lasting psychological comfort. But it certainly removed some of the doubt he was feeling. Because it did happen, all of it.
David Nutter in New York, 2016.
This book is based on interviews with more than seventy people, conducted mostly in person in London and New York. David Nutter spoke to me for more than a hundred hours. He also handed over seventeen of Tommy’s scrapbooks; dozens of letters; innumerable invitations, sketches, photographs, and negatives; and every single personal journal he kept between 1973 and 1992 (minus two missing volumes from the 1980s).
I consulted several archives during my research: the British Film Institute, for three videos of Tommy; the British Library, for several rare audio recordings; the John Stephen collection in the Archive of Art & Design at the Victoria & Albert Museum (which also has more than a dozen original Nutters suits); National Museums Scotland; the Tate Archive; the London College of Fashion (for more Nutters suits, on loan from Alistair O’Neill); and the private archive at Beaulieu House, with thanks to Lady Fiona Montagu and the National Motor Museum staff. Besides David Nutter, the richest source for Tommy Nutter material is the Archives of J&J
Crombie Ltd. Almost everything of note concerning his career from 1980 onward can be found there.
For the sake of concision, I have chosen to list the main interviews I relied on for each chapter at the outset, rather than reference every single detail drawn from interviews throughout. Direct quotes that are not specifically referenced below are drawn from this original reporting. Similarly, because David Nutter’s journals are not available to the public, I have not referenced specific dates.
Sources held by David Nutter are marked “DN.”
Sources held in the Archives of J&J Crombie Ltd. are marked “JJC.”
PREFACE
Interviews with: Garry Clarke, David Nutter, Peter Sprecher.
“in-built feeling for clothes”: Tommy Nutter, quoted in Janet Buckton, “Nutter’s the Name They’re All Crazy About,” Coventry Evening Telegraph, August 26, 1980.
“as established and as important”: Geoffrey Aquilina Ross, “Who Needs Shows When You’re Your Own Shop Window?” Evening Standard, March 21, 1973.
“irreverent approach”: Tommy Hilfiger, “My London: Tommy Hilfiger,” Evening Standard, October 12, 2017.
has acknowledged his influence: Confirmation from Tom Ford came via Richard Buckley, email, January 28, 2016.
“Tailor to the Stars”: Thom O’Dwyer, “The World According to Tommy Nutter,” HeLines, 1991.
ONE: ESCAPE ARTISTS
Interviews with: John Cross, Cheryl De Courcey, Simon Doonan, Carol Drinkwater, Valerie Garland, Bertram Keeter, Val Simpson Kindell, Robert Lipscombe, David Nutter, Maureen Tough.
House of Nutter Page 30
