House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  This was the strategy that Tommy now restored to Savile Row. As one onlooker noted, Nutter was “definitely not the kind of tailor who appears with his chalk and his tape measure as if he has just been chained to a design bench all day.” Instead, like young Henry Poole, Tommy made socializing part of his job description—at restaurants, bars, gallery openings, even the Annual Snow Ball. He set out to know everybody worth knowing, and he became adept at subtly convincing them they needed their own Nutters look. When they would visit him on Savile Row, he would then listen to their requests, politely deferential, before steering them in the direction he wanted, because Tommy’s guiding principle was to imagine how something would look if he were wearing it himself. Good? Then they could put it into production. Bad? Then nobody on earth could pull it off.

  Edward’s input usually began during the measurement stage. But here, too, Nutters diverged from the standard practice of other Savile Row firms. When Edward worked collaboratively with Tommy they could be like two lions toying with unsuspecting prey. They were unfailingly proper, of course; every client received impeccable service. But the duo practiced decorum during a consultation or fitting while simultaneously satirizing the pomposity of it all. “Tommy and I used to have terribly funny games we’d play with each other,” Edward recalls. A man with prominent shoulder blades might have them traced out with whimsical loops of chalk. Or Tommy might come in “looking all authoritative,” evaluate the man’s figuration, and then announce to Edward, in a tone of clinical concern, “Crook in the elbows”—a mostly meaningless phrase. “We put on a show for the person, and it would be hilarious,” Edward says. “We’d fucking die.”

  Behind the scenes, Edward would then need to become “part engineer, part scientist” to surmount the tailoring challenges set by Tommy’s imagination. In this he was aided by a staff of nearly two dozen workers, all of them under thirty, including Roy Chittleborough and Joseph Morgan, who both came aboard as his assistant cutters. Some of the workers—the Italians and Greek Cypriot boys—“wanted to feel special,” Joseph recalls, so Edward would have to “give them a kiss and a cuddle” to get what he wanted in the work. But diva antics were mostly kept to a minimum, because everyone shared a common understanding: they’d all lived within the limitations of a traditional Savile Row firm, and they all appreciated how progressive, how free, Nutters was by comparison.

  They also respected Tommy and Edward as bosses. Once, Joseph walked into the showroom for the final fitting of a white gabardine suit: “At a traditional tailors, when the suit’s finished, that’s your suit, sir, off you go…But Edward and Tom started putting more pins in it. I thought, ‘We’re remaking this thing!’ But that was the integrity of the look and design they wanted to give out to their clients.” At a traditional tailoring firm, most subordinate workers would also never have encountered the clients face-to-face; they would have hid behind closed doors like the kitchen staff at Buckingham Palace. Nutters followed a more egalitarian philosophy, encouraging clients to meet the boys and appreciate the labor involved—or, as Edward puts it, “the relationship in the garment.” A Nutters suit was more than Tommy Nutter; more even than Tommy Nutter and his brilliant head cutter. It embodied the skill and dedication of enough people to make up a soccer team.

  Tommy liked to employ handsome young men. Even if they were straight, even if there was no chance in a million years, “it always helped” to be good-looking, says Zance Yianni, who walked in off the street with next to no experience, scored a job as a trimmer, found himself promoted to striker, and then ended up running a Nutters workshop on Heddon Street.

  To say that Nutters had a queer ambiance is probably to state the obvious. Because of Tommy, there was a considerable clientele of gay men, and it was not unusual for somebody to step into the showroom and begin describing their latest conquests regardless of who might be in earshot. “I used to go in there, and Tommy would be holding court with some friends of his in a corner,” remembers James Vallance White. “One did feel the whole thing was sometimes being run as Tommy’s private club, rather than a business.” Frequent drop-ins included a local art dealer who sold voluptuous Rodin sculptures, and Manolo Blahnik, who saw a visit to Nutters as “great fun, a great hoot, because Tommy always had wonderful stories and gossip.” Blahnik had yet to find his footing as a fashion designer, so Tommy—“an amusing boy”—cut him a deal until he got ahead in life.

  Team Nutters played once, at Finsbury Park, against the Initial Towel Company, losing 11–1. “And that was the end of that,” says Joseph Morgan (bottom row, second from right).

  As for the atmosphere created by all this coming and going, Tommy made absolutely no effort to tone down the camp. If anything, he encouraged it by introducing elements of Polari into the workroom, a slang language that once allowed queer people to converse in public without being understood by their (potentially hostile) straight neighbors.

  Vada the dolly dish with the big thews

  Look at the handsome man with the big thighs

  Tommy also corrupted those covert abbreviations tailors used to note bodily defects by inventing some new ones.

  TBH To be had

  Given that most of the staff was heterosexual, this immersive education in a subculture that many of them had barely known existed could be, to put it mildly, disorienting. One day, an assistant cutter went out to conduct a fitting at a client’s house, only to walk in on the client in bed with two other men. “But hey,” says Joseph, slightly breathless at his memories, “it’s just London, and everything was full of energy.”

  And once they got used to it, everyone in Tommy’s staff seemed to accept the situation with good-natured equanimity. In this regard, perhaps they were following the example of Edward, who took to calling Tommy “Pamela,” or “Pammie,” as though it were an eminently reasonable nickname for his male colleague; he accepted the sobriquet of “Roxanne” in response. “Tommy enlarged our world,” Edward explains, speaking for himself and his wife. “We’d sit there and smoke pot—”

  “Once,” insists Joan.

  “—and experience all that sort of life we would never have learned about otherwise.”

  Zance Yianni, fresh-faced and open-minded, loved being pushed outside his comfort zone. Tommy would drag him to the clubs and throw him into the melee to see how he’d react in a frenzy of gay men. “It was so glamorous, and so wild,” Zance recalls. “It was almost as though they were just out of the closet, making the most of it, so they didn’t give a damn. They were out there having fun.”

  * * *

  Sometimes Tommy could have a little too much fun. One evening, he attended a dinner party with Peter at a friend’s house. When they arrived, walking through the door, it was immediately clear that something was wrong. One of the other guests thought Tommy looked terrible: a sickly shade of mustard yellow. Soon, during dinner, he confirmed her suspicion by announcing that he wasn’t feeling particularly well. That he was weak and achy. Could barely move, actually. The host called for a doctor and installed him in a guest bedroom. Tommy would spend more than a week there, housebound in semi-quarantine, weathering the effects of a hepatitis infection.

  During the extended period it took for him to make a full recovery, Nutters continued to operate under the stewardship of Edward, who now found himself both cutting and selling, an already substantial workload becoming even more formidable.

  According to Edward, Peter soon acknowledged his tireless efforts by rewarding him with several appreciative gifts: a bottle of Eau Sauvage, by Christian Dior, which Edward would make his personal fragrance; a small stake in the company in the form of some shares; and promotion to the level of a company director, making Edward now one of six partners. Indeed, he is described as “a director of Nutters” by Tommy in a newspaper as early as January 20, 1970.

  Nevertheless, Peter rejects the details of this account. “It’s very stra
nge that I, as the controlling shareholder, don’t remember that,” he says. In Peter’s recollection, no shares were redistributed while Tommy was convalescing. “And there’s no way that Edward was a partner while I was in control.”

  * * *

  When it came to his partnership with Tommy, Peter had not really been in control for a while, a fact that was signaled most clearly by a change in their residence. The Conduit Street flat, though beautiful and well positioned, had only a single bedroom. And somewhere along the line both of them had become “distracted,” as Peter puts it, and ceased sleeping together. They remained companions and confidants, even functional family—but they were no longer lovers. The passion had evaporated, perhaps as early as 1969. Still, except for a fleeting moment when Tommy had declared that he “couldn’t put up with it any longer,” there was never any question that the two of them would part. They liked living together; it felt right. They just had to make some minor adjustments.

  By now, a two-bedroom flat had been found in Hays Mews, a few streets farther west in Mayfair. While nowhere near as lovely as the place in Conduit Street, it afforded them privacy and intimacy in more acceptable proportions. Since the move, life had resumed its regular routine: Peter had begun throwing dinner parties for his famous friends again, while Tommy let his own friends sleep over, like old times, and decorated the den walls with his original abstract paintings.

  For all intents and purposes, Peter and Tommy remained loyally committed to each other. This was put on public display in October, when both men found themselves traveling independently to New York. Peter arrived on a business trip for Apple; Tommy, touching down in America for the very first time, arrived to represent Britain at Playboy’s Creative Menswear International Designer Collection, a tweed knickerbocker suit with full-length cape stuffed inside his luggage.

  Tommy stayed with Hardy Amies in his penthouse apartment on West Fifty-Eighth Street. Amies threw a cocktail party to introduce Tommy, like a debutante, to the city’s fashion and design set: Bill Blass, Vera Maxwell, Valerian Rybar. “It turned out just the way you’d expect it to when one Englishman gives a party for another Englishman,” a gossip columnist quipped afterward. “It was all too much for young Nutter.”

  But Peter was there to lend his support. He accompanied Tommy to the Playboy gala at the Plaza Hotel, sweeping down a grand staircase as part of an awkward-looking threesome, Amies leading the way with an imperious scowl. “Hardy never liked me because he fancied Tommy, and I was Tommy’s boyfriend,” Peter recalls. “He would always call me ‘Peter Baker,’ just to annoy me. Which I purposely tried not to be annoyed about.”

  Tommy and Peter on Jones Beach, in Nassau County, New York.

  * * *

  A month after Tommy returned to London, a photograph of him appeared in Vogue under the title “Checking Out the Men.” Dressed in a white shirt and tie, his hair perfectly coiffed, he bites down on a cigar and projects what the writer describes as “a cheery, cheeky, insouciant sort of look”—a flirtatious twinkle in his eye, smugness in his square jawline. “It makes us want to add him to our Christmas list this minute.”

  By December, Tommy was feeling very sure of his abilities and prospects. A little too sure, perhaps; the adulation had started to go to his head. “Many Savile Row tailors have recently been amalgamating or going in with each other in order to streamline the efficiency and economics of their operations,” he told Men’s Wear, confidently setting himself apart: “I’ve wanted to expand for some time now.” Old Savile Row was spluttering, in other words, while he shot out in front. The rush of success made him feel impervious, and he began to press his foot down even harder on the accelerator.

  One of these recent amalgamations had left a showroom empty on Savile Row at No. 33, just two doors down from Nutters. Tommy now convinced the partners to let him lease it for a business extension. He installed the familiar glass frontage with large stenciled letters, then lined the interior with chrome scaffolding. He appointed Christopher Tarling, his ex-boyfriend, to be the store manager, and announced to the media: “There’s no limit to what we’ll sell at the shop. It is really a personal thing, and there will be no rules concerning merchandise. If I see something I like, I’ll sell it.” Even more clearly than at No. 35a, what this new accessories boutique was peddling was Tommy’s particular taste: Liberty-print shirts with cutaway collars; kimono-style dressing gowns; hand-knitted pullovers and hand-knitted Argyle socks; oversized newsboy caps; and dandyish silk scarves with a monogrammed N, like Louis Vuitton, or something Quentin Crisp might choose to wear.

  Years before Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren, Tommy’s ambition was nothing less than to create “full wardrobes with a complete look and style for our patrons.” He hoped Nutters Shirts, following another lavish launch party, with Champagne and sprays of flowers, would be the first of many expansions under the Tommy Nutter name—an international franchise, eventually. World domination.

  The counterculture would not go down without a fight.

  According to Eleanor Lambert, an influential fashionista and the founder of New York Fashion Week, Thomas Nutter was one of the sharpest dressers in the world by 1971, when he first appeared on her International Best Dressed List alongside names like Hubert de Givenchy and Sophia Loren. “The common denominator of all the winners is durability,” explained Eugenia Sheppard in the New York Post. “They go everywhere, and their faces and fashions become familiar to all those who watch or read.” This was an auspicious vote of confidence at the start of what Vogue was titling “A Gentleman’s Year,” the year during which a decade of “good, healthy fury and change” would finally settle down and allow men to “revel in the rewards of the male evolution.” Having thoroughly established his bona fides, Tommy seemed poised to reap the benefits.

  First, though, a personal upheaval: Open boxes were scattered around the Hays Mews flat, half-filled with worldly possessions.

  Peter was leaving.

  On New Year’s Eve, Paul McCartney had initiated proceedings in the High Court to legally dissolve the Beatles. Writs had been served to John, George, Ringo, and Apple Corps, as their parent company, formalizing the animosity that had swelled and stoppered any meaningful collaboration between the band members since their Abbey Road sessions. Paul was suing his way out. At the same time—in fact, the very same day—Peter handed in his resignation, though it had been coming for a while. The arrival of Allen Klein, who became the Beatles’ manager in 1969, had transformed Peter’s role as “nurse” following Brian’s death into something more akin to an unwilling executioner. A ruthless, avaricious bully, Klein had forced Peter to purge Apple Corps through mass layoffs, emptying out the Savile Row headquarters in the name of cost cutting. Peter hated being forced into complicity, hated the atmosphere it created at Apple (“a mausoleum just waiting for a death”), and hated Klein, above all, who would have pushed him out as well if he thought the Beatles would allow it. And then, suddenly, Paul wasn’t speaking to John, Peter recalls, “and I was in a difficult situation there because I was torn: they were both expecting my loyalty. We’d all worked together over the years very intimately, like a family, so it was torturous for me.” Eventually, enough was enough. Peter handed in his notice. Then he told The Evening News, “I have had an experience which has been invaluable. I sometimes think of it as a crash course in survival.”

  The boxes in Hays Mews were destined for Manhattan. Peter was taking a job with the Robert Stigwood Organisation, as president of a newly formed US branch that would deal with music and theater productions. It was an exciting, challenging opportunity, and it promised a fresh start. On January 22, Cilla threw her friend a farewell party, which Peter thought was a huge success. Ringo came to bid adieu, though the other Beatles failed to make an appearance.

  But what about Tommy? In The Evening News, the journalist made a careful allusion for readers able to spot the pattern in s
ome judiciously arranged details: “[Peter] is, at 33, unmarried, and plans to leave his cat Clarence with his good friend, Savile Row tailor Tommy Nutter.”

  In fact, Peter planned to leave his “good friend” with something more substantial than the cat. He knew that overseeing Nutters from New York would be impractical, if not downright impossible. He could sell his stake to a new investor, but that could go wrong down the road. And Peter was feeling benevolent; he wanted to give Tommy ownership of the company. True, none of the partners had yet been reimbursed for their initial investment, but they’d done very well in bespoke clothes. Peter pointed this out when he raised his idea with the others: Why didn’t they all (Cilla, Bobby, James, and himself) surrender their shares as a combined gift? It would be a sweet gesture, and Tommy needed the asset more than they did. “That was my whole logic,” Peter recalls.

  Edward, however, offers an alternate take: “They were guaranteeing the bank loan, and they didn’t want to guarantee the bank loan anymore because the company needed money.” Handing over their shares was a way for the backers to absolve themselves of any financial responsibility at a moment when the business seemed to be inflating at a rapid rate. “Otherwise, can you imagine Peter Brown, Bobby Willis, just giving up on it? They didn’t want to finance the business anymore. And a part of it was because some rush spending had been done.”