House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  Afterward, Brian had a conversation with Peter in which he made some “approving comments” about their young guest. It was not that Brian Epstein had any interest in Tommy for himself; despite his stiff-collar demeanor, he preferred rough trade to “gay boys.” But he knew what Peter liked, and was, in that regard, always encouraging.

  * * *

  Peter Brown was Brian Epstein’s best friend and personal assistant. By extension, that meant Peter was also personal assistant to the Beatles. At Brian’s management agency on Argyle Street, Peter kept their passports locked in a drawer of his desk. On top of his desk was a red telephone that John, Paul, George, and Ringo could call whenever they wanted something, like the phone Commissioner Gordon would use to reach Batman. “I supervised and conducted all of their personal and business affairs,” Peter later wrote, “from getting their signatures on contracts to getting them out of jail.”

  Just thirty years old in 1967, Peter had a dark beard, sparkling eyes, and an accent that sounded more West End than Bebington. (“If you lived in this suburb of Cheshire,” Peter explains, “your parents made sure that you didn’t have a bad accent, because in those days a regional accent would stop you being successful.”) He was responsible, direct, and extraordinarily self-possessed. From the moment they’d met in Liverpool in the late 1950s, Brian had admired Peter’s poise and attitude. Peter, in turn, had looked up to Brian as someone who was “very special”—although, he later wrote, “I remember thinking that if one scratched the surface one would find a very unhappy man.”

  At least part of Brian’s unhappiness had to do with his homosexuality, which had already gotten him beaten up, blackmailed, arrested, and discharged from the army on “psychiatric grounds.” By contrast, Peter seemed fairly levelheaded about his sexual orientation after he got over the guilt, accepted the truth, and let down a girlfriend. When his parents found out, they’d confronted him with an ultimatum: “give that whole thing up” or get out of their house. Peter’s response had been to move in with a Swiss hairdresser. His parents had ignored him for six months, then tried to make amends; Peter had ignored them for a further three to make a point. This difference in temperament between himself and Brian had set the tenor for much of the friendship, which was platonic (after an initial encounter), but loving, in the way of many gay men. Peter and Brian represented a constantly adjusting equation of impulsive, self-destructive recklessness and stubborn sobriety.

  When Brian discovered the Beatles playing a lunchtime set in the Cavern Club, in 1961, Peter was already working with him at his family’s chain of music stores in Liverpool. By 1965, when Peter moved down to London to help Brian manage the band, he would do almost anything for his friend, from signing the property deed on a country estate to accompanying him on vacations to Cap d’Antibes, Mexico, and Spain, where they liked to watch the bullfights together.

  In 1966, they both went to Japan—and that is where things began to go wrong, on a tumultuous world tour Peter now blames for Brian’s rapid deterioration.

  Brian had insisted Peter come along to attend to the band’s personal problems. Consequently, Peter was there when right-wing militant students threatened to assassinate the Beatles for “perverting” Japanese culture. He was there in the Philippines when Brian rejected an invitation for the boys to perform at a party thrown by Imelda Marcos, the president’s wife—a rejection that caused, in short order, the entourage to be attacked and spat on in the Manila airport. In New Delhi, Peter was in attendance when Brian became so anxious, blaming himself for these calamities, that he refused to leave his room for four entire days. On the plane back to London, Brian then broke out in hives: “I was sitting next to him,” Peter says, “and it became so bad that we had to have the pilots radio ahead for an ambulance to meet us.” Later, in America, they encountered evangelicals burning records (Lennon had made his ill-advised remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now”), and there was fear the band might be shot while performing onstage. “Brian went through extra hell and torture over that.” It was Peter who’d found him slumped next to empty pill bottles and a suicide note, then helped get him to a hospital so his stomach could be pumped.

  Indeed, by the summer of 1967 and that sit-down dinner party where they both noticed Tommy, Peter was “virtually living” at Chapel Street with Brian, who needed constant company.

  On August 25, Peter traveled to Brian’s country house of Kingsley Hill, in East Sussex. He and Brian were supposed to spend the entire weekend there with Geoffrey Ellis, another colleague, but Brian became bored when some other expected guests failed to appear. “It was ten o’clock on Friday night when Brian announced that he was going to take a drive around the countryside,” Peter later wrote. “This hardly surprised Geoffrey and me; we were by then inured to Brian’s moods and disappearances.” What was surprising was that Brian drove all the way back to his house in Belgravia.

  The next day, Brian called Peter from Chapel Street and said he was going to drive back to Kingsley Hill…just as soon as he’d had breakfast and checked his mail and watched Juke Box Jury on the television.

  The day after that—on Sunday, August 27—Brian had still not materialized at Kingsley Hill. Peter went to lunch at a local pub. When he returned, there were frantic phone calls from Chapel Street saying that Brian was locked in his room and no longer responding to anything. A doctor was summoned. Fifteen minutes passed. And then, Peter wrote, “I said to break down the doors.”

  I remained on the line in Sussex, listening to the grunts of Antonio [Brian’s butler] and Brian Barrett as the double oak doors splintered and caved in under their combined weight…The drapes were drawn and the room was dark. In the light from the hallway they could all see him, lying on his right side, his legs curled up in a fetal position. Saturday’s mail was open on the bed next to him.

  Much has been written about the impact Brian Epstein’s death from an overdose of Carbitral and alcohol had on the Beatles professionally. For Peter, however, the shocking loss of his best friend was agonizingly personal.

  The next day, he was standing in Brian’s drawing room, looking through a window onto a street that had just been swept through by paparazzi, like a flash flood. He had already shared the news with the Beatles, who were still on their retreat in Wales with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Peter was numb, but starting to realize that he would be primary witness at the inevitable inquest. And that the enormous responsibility of running the Beatles’ office would now fall squarely on his shoulders.

  At that moment, the telephone rang. Peter walked across and picked it up.

  “How are you?” asked Tommy Nutter, who had somehow acquired Brian’s private number.

  “Awful,” Peter said. “Really awful.”

  So the young man from the summer dinner party invited himself over for company and comfort.

  * * *

  At the time of Brian’s death, Peter was dating Kenny Everett, a comedian and disc jockey famous for his broadcast work on pirate radio stations. Things had become quite serious, but Kenny had never been in a relationship with a man before. He was naïve and inexperienced, a little high-maintenance. Suddenly, with all that happened, Peter couldn’t cope with it anymore. “I wasn’t being nasty,” he recalls. “I wasn’t being difficult. I was just a mess. I thought, ‘Kenny is too needy. And Tommy is sweet and affectionate: I need that.’ ” Having reached this conclusion, Peter told Kenny it was over—an abrupt break that wounded the comedian so deeply he immediately retreated into the closet and remained there for the next seventeen years.

  * * *

  For the first few weeks they were together, Tommy acted as an emergency flotation device for Peter. The Beatles were coming off the unpredicted success of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They were also facing a complicated tax situation with the Inland Revenue. Wracked with grief, Peter found himself inundated with work. Tommy was not
particularly touchy, not much of a caretaker; but he was a distraction. He had a dry sense of humor—so dry it was almost “perverse,” Peter thought—and he was canny and sharp, not to mention sexy. His sparkling presence buoyed Peter up, so much so that Peter would come to believe Tommy saved his life, “emotionally speaking.”

  Peter’s sudden appearance caught Tommy’s own friends by surprise. There was no announcement, no explanation. David first spotted the couple strolling down Portobello Road and was left to work things out himself. Eventually, Tommy brought Peter over to the NUTTER studio for a photo shoot with silly hats. He joked with his brother that Peter’s posh speaking voice was all an affectation; Peter was really “common as muck,” Tommy said. Whatever Peter’s background, though, David soon decided he liked him enough to dub him “Peggy the Bearded Lady.”

  Carol Drinkwater, staying over at Tommy’s flat on her side of the pillow wall, also decided she liked Peter Brown—particularly his parties, where pop stars like Mary Hopkin could be found lounging around on the furniture. But some of the other women in Tommy’s life were a little more ambivalent. Kim Grossman found him overly “grand”: “The link with the Beatles and Brian Epstein—he was very pleased with where he’d gotten in life.” Meanwhile, Louise Aron, besotted with Tommy since the days she’d scavenged the Rockingham for his prey, saw Peter as a kind of invader: “Peter came on the scene and I got pushed off.”

  But perhaps the friend with the keenest insight into this burgeoning romance was Christopher Tarling, Tommy’s ex-boyfriend turned confidant. As the weeks became months, and then more than a year, Christopher found himself accompanying Tommy and Peter to extravagant dinners around London. There would be a small group—two couples, plus Christopher to make five—and plenty of expensive wine. After dinner, Tommy would nudge him, announce to the table that they were heading out, and then leave Peter with his friends to finish off the bottle.

  Some nights, the two of them went to the Coleherne Arms, a leather fetish pub in Earls Court. Christopher tended to linger by the bar, though Tommy strode through the place with unblinking confidence. “He loved glamour,” another friend recalls, “but he also felt equally comfortable in these sordid clubs with shady people.” Because a licensing law mandated that pubs like the Coleherne couldn’t sell alcohol without also selling food, these “shady people” sometimes cruised around while clutching paper plates of ham salad.

  On warmer nights, Tommy and Christopher might take a post-dinner taxi to Jack Straw’s Castle, near Hampstead Heath. Christopher would wait with the driver, paid to keep the engine idling, while Tommy dashed across the road into the park. Prowling through the trees, Tommy would momentarily shed his suit, his second skin. There would be an assignation in the grass with somebody he might never see again (and maybe not even then, if the moon was particularly hidden that night). Then Christopher would watch his friend reemerge from the dark, climb back into the cab, and direct the driver to continue home to Elvaston Place.

  * * *

  In Peter’s memory, his earliest days with Tommy, once the grief had settled down, were defined by dinners and parties, and by weekend mini-breaks out to the country to stay with John Pritchard, a conductor who had recently directed the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

  Anything else that Tommy may have been getting up to at the time—the Coleherne, the cruising—Peter lumps together as “his separate life of the American Express situation.” The “situation,” in this instance, refers to the American Express building in Central London, which reportedly featured a public restroom popular among gay men. Depending on whom you ask, Tommy once slipped on a toilet bowl in flagrante delicto and ended up with either a shoe full of water or a bruise on his thigh that lingered for months, like a cattle brand.

  Peter was not one for “cottaging”—anonymous hookups in public restrooms—which he would later describe as seeking “physical satisfaction in the saddest of ways.” But even if he’d known the full extent of what Tommy was getting up to, it probably wouldn’t have bothered him anyway. Peter did not believe in monogamy; neither of them did. Though the government had finally legalized homosexuality in 1967, it did not necessarily follow that homosexual relationships would conform to a heterosexual norm. Peter and Tommy made their own rules: “He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t tell him about anything else we were doing,” Peter recalls. They had their time together, they had their time apart, and the pieces fit together well enough. Which is not to say that there was never drama. “Tommy was not cooperative. He could be very difficult—at times impossible. He gave me a hard time, though he could probably have said the same thing about me.” (Tommy did, in fact, say the same thing in letters to his brother in the 1970s: “I have had Miss B. here which has proved to be extremely exhausting.”) But, Peter adds, “I do like people who are a challenge.”

  One episode illustrates the complicated dynamic that would eventually settle in between them. It was 1968 or 1969, perhaps even 1970: Peter and Tommy went for a few warm weeks to the Greek island of Hydra, in the Aegean Sea. There were almost no motor vehicles on Hydra; only mules and donkeys could traverse the small picturesque port town of stucco, terracotta, and marble cobblestone streets dotted with a scattering of Orthodox churches. In a converted manor house, there was also the National Merchant Marine Academy, filled with impressionable cadets.

  Peter got into a conversation with one of the white-uniformed men—handsome, charming, relatively fluent in English. Each evening, a trumpet would sound to signal the academy curfew. But if he really wanted to, a cadet could sneak out after dark. “Which he did,” Peter recalls, “to see me.”

  Peter and Tommy were staying in a beautiful house with two of their close friends, one of whom was a model named Judith Allera. A self-described “total innocent,” Judith had no idea what was going on in the rooms around her. She did, however, witness the fallout one night in a bar overlooking the ocean: “I don’t know why Tommy stood up. Sometimes he’d just go a bit—just decide he wasn’t happy. And then he ended up in the water.”

  Tommy had jumped out of a window into the ocean.

  He was “flapping about, saying he couldn’t swim,” Judith recalls. And so, “like a fool,” she threw herself in after him—and landed straight on a sea urchin.

  Peter suggests that Tommy was inebriated in the moment, moved to act in a snap fury. But over what, exactly? Peter wasn’t doing anything with the cadet that Tommy wouldn’t do himself, given the right opportunity. Was Tommy jealous? Or was he irrationally incensed at not being the center of attention—at being a supporting act instead of the main event?

  Tommy would never explain his behavior to Judith, who spent “months and months” extracting painful spines from her backside. “He’d do things like that, and then it was all…” Nothing. Like nothing had even happened.

  * * *

  In the early months of 1968, Tommy vacated his room on Elvaston Place and moved with Peter into a gracious one-bedroom flat on Conduit Street, in Mayfair. They decorated the place with Art Deco furniture and Clarice Cliff ceramics, then bought a cross-eyed cat, which Tommy called Clarence.

  A Conduit Street address meant Tommy now lived less than a five-minute walk from the Burlington Arcade, strolling down Savile Row and turning right. Peter, though, had an even shorter commute. The Beatles had just founded their multi-tentacled corporation, Apple Corps Limited, of which Peter was appointed administrative director. In June, the band spent nearly £500,000 on a five-story townhouse at No. 3 Savile Row. They installed a private mixing studio in the basement, a press office, a film department, a film library, and a lavish kitchen overseen by two Cordon Bleu chefs. Peter was awarded a stately office on the second-floor rear; to jazz it up a bit, Ringo gave him an enormous set of decorative chrome headlights.

  On a Friday in August, Peter was sitting at his desk wrapping up some work when Paul McCartney called him on the telephone. For the previous few days, the Beatl
es had been working on a new single, an experimental track that had caused tension in the group—McCartney versus Harrison over guitar riffs—and raised the concern of their record producer, George Martin, who’d suggested it might be too long for radio play. Now it was nearly completed, and Paul asked Peter to come around for a first listen.

  Peter walked through Soho to Trident Studios, where the boys had chosen to record the track. Inside, Paul and John installed him in an armchair near some high-quality speakers. The song was cued, and then Peter sat still for seven minutes and eleven seconds, from Paul’s first plaintive croon to a heaving coda of bass and tambourines, hand-clapping, and choral shrieking of nah, nah, nah, nah-nah-nah-NAH, nah-nah-nah-NAH…

  Stunned, Peter shook his head as the tape ran out. He told them he thought it was “enormously special.”

  This review must have come as a huge relief. “I was always a bit in limbo with a new single,” Paul would later recall. “Your heart’s in your mouth when you first hear it played on the radio, for instance. I knew it was a lot to expect people to swallow the whole thing.”

  Paul and John told Peter they wanted to go out and celebrate. But Peter demurred; he was scheduled to drive out to the country with Tommy for the weekend. Paul told him to call Tommy and bring him along; they had all met him by now, and there was no problem with Peter having a boyfriend.

  When Peter called him using the studio pay phone, Tommy refused, willfully noncompliant. He didn’t want to go out and celebrate in Soho. It took Paul to snatch the receiver out of Peter’s hand and beg him to “come hear this” before he finally surrendered.