House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  Tommy arrived at Trident and was installed in the armchair, told to prepare himself. The song was cued for a second play. As he then listened for the full seven minutes and eleven seconds, Paul and John watched him closely, trying to gauge his reaction.

  After it was finished, Tommy remained impassive, unreadable. There was a long pause.

  He told them he didn’t like it.

  The Beatles were “crestfallen,” Peter recalls, until they were informed this was Tommy’s idea of a droll joke. Indeed, Tommy would eventually admit that “Hey Jude” was “the most incredible song…because we’d never heard anything like that before.” What impressed him was not so much its groundbreaking form, though, as how uncalculated it seemed. In Tommy’s view, the Beatles hadn’t set out to break the mold; they’d just wanted to express themselves. And expressing themselves—honestly expressing themselves—meant making the song in a way that happened, by the by, to be groundbreaking. “It just came from within them,” he later said admiringly. “That’s what they wanted to do and they did it properly.”

  * * *

  What finally inspired Peter to offer the financial backing for Tommy to launch his own business? Tommy never understood it—or at least pretended not to understand it for the sake of modesty. “I don’t know, I can’t say why they did it,” he would murmur when asked for an explanation about his first financiers. “They trusted me, they thought I might be successful. I suppose they liked me.”

  Sometimes Tommy would come home in the evening to the Conduit Street flat in a glum mood, complaining that he had all these ideas, but there was nothing he could do with them, because the only suits made by Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward were “conventional.” Peter had already noted his wonderful eye for line and color. He saw that Tommy had a remarkable ability to throw together disparate things, patterns, materials in a way that seemed both exactly right and irresistible.

  Peter’s investment was no doubt helped along by the fact that he’d been surrounded, since his Liverpool days, by people who’d shown their natural creativity to be the source of immense power. Or that he was now the administrative director of a corporation that was devoted, in no insignificant way, to funding unlikely projects based on intuition and perceived artistic merit, rather than strict financial requirements—“to not being nasty businessmen,” as Peter recalls the ethos motivating Apple Corps. In other words, it was a normal course of events at No. 3 Savile Row that somebody like Tommy Nutter might be given an opportunity to explore their latent potential—be given a little lift.

  “It wasn’t that I was so brilliant,” Peter says. “I just had a feeling that this kid knew what he was doing.” And that feeling, as Brian Epstein had once famously illustrated, could take you to some interesting places if you just went with it.

  * * *

  Edward Sexton has a vivid memory of sitting at a table opposite Peter in Madame Prunier’s fish restaurant, on St. James’s Street. A formidable establishment—oysters from Brittany, caviar from the Garonne—Edward had been invited to Prunier St. James’s for, perhaps, a kind of interview: Peter appraising the man Tommy had chosen to be his head cutter. Or perhaps Peter was simply being friendly. Either way, Edward set out to make an impression.

  When the waiter came around to collect their menus, Edward ordered for the both of them: Dover sole and a nice bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé.

  When the waiter came around with the fish, Edward instructed him to leave it on the table, unserved. Then he set about serving it himself. He separated the head from the body with a pair of spoons, flaked off the feather bones from the delicate flesh, and lifted out the skeleton whole to set off to the side.

  When he was finished, Peter, having watched in amazement, asked, “Where did you learn that?”

  In Edward’s memory, this question rang as a moment of triumph—proof he had shown himself as sharp and capable, unintimidated by highfalutin pomp.

  Peter, however, has no recollection of any dinner with Edward at Madame Prunier’s on St. James’s Street. “I don’t know why I would have been taking him to dinner,” he says—the first of several such moments where his and Edward’s narratives diverge around Tommy Nutter, like water around a rock in a turbulent stream. “But it could possibly be,” he concedes. “I probably just thought he must have been a waiter at one time.”

  III.

  After Peter Brown, the person who would become the second financier of Tommy’s new enterprise appeared sometime in the middle of 1968. James Vallance White, a tall, thin thirty-year-old with an aristocratic mien, was a junior clerk in the House of Lords. He’d just undergone surgery at a private clinic in Harley Street, and the doctor, noting his restlessness, had recommended he take restorative strolls around Mayfair. Inevitably, these walks led James south toward Piccadilly, through the Burlington Arcade, where he noticed Donaldson, Williams & G. Ward. James needed a new coat, so he decided to step inside and order one.

  Tommy greeted him politely, then immediately began asking the usual questions. But James, feeling a little starved of human interaction as he whiled away hours recuperating in the clinic, wanted to chitchat. He asked Tommy if he liked his job.

  Tommy hesitated. He looked around. James noticed he was quite nervous about the other, more senior members of staff overhearing this conversation. Carefully, Tommy admitted that no, not really, he didn’t like his job; and actually he was thinking about leaving to open something of his own.

  This was a brazen confession, James thought. Tommy had revealed his seditious plans to a perfect stranger, right there in the showroom. What James didn’t know, however, was just how much further Tommy had already gone in subverting his workplace.

  Recently, Michael Hall had been away on vacation at the same moment Mr. Donaldson happened to be visiting Australia, which effectively left the firm without an overseer. A young man had entered the shop. Tommy had made his overture…but the boy didn’t want what Donaldson’s was peddling. On a usual day, this would have ended with polite apologies: this was what they sold, sir, and there was nothing else on offer. But this was not a usual day. Tommy called Edward down to the showroom. Together, they contemplated the situation. The boy wanted something distinctive. They wanted to make something distinctive. And so they took the hacking jacket style Edward had been working on after hours, tweaked it according to Tommy’s fancy, and drafted the earliest iteration of an entirely new look—which the young man commissioned. Then they used the firm’s resources to assemble the suit, fit the suit, alter the suit, admire the suit, and ship the suit out before either of the bosses had returned from their travels.

  James didn’t know any of this when he encountered the confident salesman. But he was intrigued nonetheless. He placed his order and went away to wait, mulling their conversation in the meantime.

  As James saw it, the city around him was going through a period of peculiar upheaval, when all sorts of things seemed to be happening outside the status quo. Time magazine had written about it in 1966: “In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life.” Yet James, now seven years out from his studies at Oxford, remained mostly unstimulated by his government position. He was bored with routine. So why not get involved with something outré and have a little fun? Perhaps, he reasoned to himself, it would provide “another aspect to life.”

  When James returned to the Burlington Arcade for a fitting, he told Tommy that his idea sounded rather attractive. Not long after, Tommy called James and asked him to meet Peter—who then laid out the whole proposal.

  “Tommy didn’t have any money,” James recalls, “but what he did have was a modern slant on tailoring. Instead of being stuffy and traditional, he wanted to make a shop that was going to be a sort of sitting room, where people would drink coffee, look at magazines, talk to their friends, and then go into one of the rooms to be fitted for clothes. The image was going
to be very different. I do seem to remember, too, that the Beatles, who were by then becoming quite seriously famous—the idea they were under the influence of Peter was not uninfluential in our thinking that the thing might take off and be successful.”

  James and Peter discussed money: how much it might cost to stock a business, hire some staff, and secure the lease on a desirable showroom. Coincidentally, a small space had just become available on Savile Row at the base of a new multistory garage. That multistory garage. If Tommy acted quickly, he could open on the very spot where G. Ward had once stood before being razed by the local council.

  James was convinced; he added his name to the project. And in the months following, he sent several notes about it to Tommy at the Burlington Arcade. Noticing the return address, Mr. Donaldson began to grow curious: Why was a salesman receiving mail from the House of Lords? Edward came to suspect the old man was trying to steam open the envelopes before giving up, and begrudgingly handing them over.

  * * *

  The final financial backer—or backers, being a couple—were also the most famous: the singer Cilla Black and her angelic-looking boyfriend, Bobby Willis.

  Peter had known Cilla since Liverpool, when he’d routinely thrown her out of the Lewis’s department store where he worked; Cilla would listen to records over and over as she tried to learn how to sing them for the local clubs. A tiny, sylphlike redhead with a pronounced overbite, Cilla had been an unlikely candidate for pop superstardom—but that was Brian Epstein’s genius. “I watched her move,” Brian once said, “and I watched her stand and I half-closed my eyes and imagined her on a vast stage with the right lighting. I was convinced she could become a wonderful artist.” She had a vocal style that ranged from throaty whisper to explosive vibrato, and there was something disarming about her working-class lack of airs and graces. She was relatable; people liked her. Brian had signed her in 1963—his sole female artist—and by the time of his death, four years later, she’d had two number-one hits on the UK charts, sold millions of records, and cemented her reputation as a national darling. A weekly BBC variety show, arranged by Brian in one of his last acts, was already preparing to go into production.

  Brian had respected Cilla more than perhaps any other woman outside of his own family circle. However, he’d also scrupulously excluded her from anything gay, which meant freezing her out of much of his personal life. By Cilla’s own admission, she was something of an ingénue in the early days: “When an acquaintance had come up to me in the Blue Angel Club in Liverpool and said: ‘You do know he’s queer?,’ I just thought he meant that Brian was an oddball.” Brian was intent on keeping her in the dark. Peter, on the other hand, thought the enforced separation of business and personal when it came to Cilla Black was all quite ridiculous; when Brian died, he threw the policy out.

  Following the overdose, Peter and Cilla drew together in a shared medium of anguish. This meant that Cilla also inevitably drew closer to Tommy, who was virtually inseparable from Peter, and who soon became inseparable from Cilla, too, because she came to adore him.

  In January 1968, Cilla began filming her eponymous variety show at the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. Peter and Tommy would go and watch the taping live, then meet her and Bobby Willis for dinner somewhere around town. Eventually, the foursome were holidaying together in Portugal. Cilla would monopolize Tommy’s attention, until Peter was moved to snap, “Tommy, come on…”

  “Oh, are you jealous?” asked Cilla, mock-serious.

  For his part, Tommy thought Cilla was “a big star.” And he took great pleasure in expanding her mind, in filling in the gaps about queer life that Brian had so fastidiously maintained. One evening in Kensington, for example, Tommy, Cilla, Peter, and a small cadre of friends pulled up in a Rolls-Royce outside the Sombrero, an upmarket club that catered to a predominantly gay clientele. Peter skipped the line—Peter did not do lines—and strolled directly inside. Cilla, though, hung back. “She wasn’t sure at first,” recalls a friend who was part of the group. “But then Tommy said, ‘Yes, you’re coming’…and sort of dragged her down there. Of course, she loved it. All the queens were going mad. Cilla Black!”

  * * *

  Years hence, Tommy would credit Cilla with a leading role in getting his fledgling business off the ground, though in reality she came on late, out of love for her friend, to offer a minor financial stake and some priceless publicity for Tommy’s new venture.

  On December 22, 1968, the Sunday Express ran a cartoon of the pop star with a measuring tape draped around her neck. Ms. Black, the journalist noted, was taking the “rather surprising step” of setting up business as a gentlemen’s tailor. She was hardly the first musician to associate herself with fashion enterprises, but perhaps she was the first to aim right for the heart of such a traditional niche: Savile Row.

  “It’s going to be terribly posh,” Cilla told the paper’s readers. “It will be a very snob tailors. There will be none of the common gimmicks of Carnaby Street, and no gaudy décor.” The clothes would be exquisite, “made on straightforward classical lines,” and the demographic would be “lords, ambassadors, and royalty.” This was her first venture into the rag trade, Cilla acknowledged: “In the past I have always been advised against it. My former manager Brian Epstein didn’t believe in my advertising women’s clothes.” But, she continued, “this is something entirely different.” How so? “The tailoring will be in the hands of Mr. Thomas Nutter,” Cilla announced, finally debuting his name in the press. “I think he is the best tailor in London.”

  interlude

  CILLA AND BOBBY GET MARRIED

  Cilla Black and Bobby Willis fought, as the saying goes, like an old married couple. Or at least Peter thought they did. He’d watched them during a dinner at San Lorenzo, on Beauchamp Place, going back and forth across the table, arguing about nothing. It had given him an idea: If they were going to bicker like an old married couple, then they probably should just get married and be done with it.

  This came as news to Cilla and Bobby, who were going about their day at home when Peter rang the intercom and said that he was on his way to the Marylebone Registry Office: Did Bobby want to come along?

  “I guess it’s on,” Cilla told him.

  A few days later, on January 25, 1969, a horde of journalists besieged Priscilla White (they recognized her real name listed in the public notices) outside the registry office. She wore an £8 burgundy dress, hastily shortened the night before, and clutched a bouquet of anemones. Bobby wore a blue suit with a red rose in the buttonhole. Peter (who gave Cilla away) and Tommy (who was Bobby’s best man) wore early iterations of the new suit style Tommy was designing with Edward.

  David Nutter was recruited as the official wedding photographer. He followed the small party from the registry office to the Ritz, where they had lunch; and then on to Cilla’s flat on Portland Place, where there was cake and Champagne, and where Cilla pretended to stab her new husband with the serving knife.

  First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes…has sprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth.

  THOMAS CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus

  Tommy poses in the showroom of Nutters of Savile Row for the Evening Standard.

  “Thomas Nutter is opening what he calls a ‘thoroughly square’ tailoring shop…in Savile Row next week. Well, that will make a change,” snarked a writer in the Daily Mirror. “I mean there can’t be more than a dozen there now. Mr. Nutter, who is twenty-six, is weary of ‘all those Car
naby Street gimmicks’ and thinks that clothes, like hair, are settling down to something more sober…What then of rumors that Ringo Starr has ordered a pair of scarlet PVC trousers from Nutters, which is being backed by such notables as Cilla Black?”

  Tommy replied, curtly, “They’ll be very square scarlet PVC trousers.”

  * * *

  Nutters of Savile Row was located at No. 35a, on the western side of the street. The glass frontage was framed by a waxed pine portico with four Corinthian columns, all topped by acanthus leaves, and an ornate wooden door, salvaged from a house in Isleworth, that began to stick almost from the moment it was installed. Fixed to the door were two heraldic crests—each one sporting an original H snapped to the more appropriate N—that resembled Napoleon’s monogram on the gates at Fontainebleau.

  Pushing inside, the showroom was not particularly spacious: just 540 square feet. To best exploit the tight fit, Tommy brought in his friend Michael Long, who brought in a Jaeger shop-fitting expert. Together they conspired to evoke Tommy’s desired aesthetic—“elegant with a touch of the sombre”—through a combination of old and new furnishings: chocolate-colored carpet, a Greek frieze, chic Wassily chairs, and dark lacquered slat shelving for bolts of British cloth. One entire wall was given over to a twelve-foot mirror, conjuring an illusion of greater depth. Spotlights, suspended from the ceiling behind carved wooden pelmets, illuminated a single rack of finished samples, where each garment was draped from a NUTTERS-branded hanger. Rounding out the décor were two changing rooms with pull-curtains and a small desk with a bottle stashed in the top drawer; Tommy liked to sip sherry from a teacup. He also liked to use an atomizer to scent the showroom with patchouli. “People seem to think that our shop is going to be all flashing lights and music and we’ll all be freaking out all over the place,” he once remarked. “It is not like that at all.”