James Vallance White agrees with Edward’s recall—“I was actually getting rather worried,” he says—but again, Peter dissents: “As far as I remember, everything was in good shape. Why would I give Tommy a failing situation? It wasn’t my style. I would never have done that. I gave him my part and persuaded the others to do the same, because now he would have something to live off. And also, I suppose, now that I’m thinking about it: maybe I had a little guilt about walking out and leaving him behind. At least I was leaving him with a business.”
* * *
Judging by his actions, Tommy weathered the radical change in his life with stoic acceptance. As Peter prepared to make his transatlantic migration, Tommy moved into a new one-bedroom flat back on Conduit Street. He then decorated it with the reckless abandon of somebody who has never lived alone before, who is excited by the prospect of living alone. He added road lamps, a geisha doll, more Clarice Cliff ceramics, and Art Deco furniture. He co-opted a mannequin’s leg for use as a flowerpot. He covered the walls with bright, lacquered collages, and upholstered the couch cushions in leftover suiting cloth. He hired an Irish cleaning lady, Bridie Mullen, who thought his taste in décor was “unusual,” but “trendy.” By his own admission, Tommy was “desperately untidy” at home, but Bridie would pick up his clothes without complaint, and she’d make sure he had enough clean socks and wineglasses (the two essentials). She liked him and his friends, who refused to treat her like a servant, even after one of their messy all-night parties. With Bridie watching his back, Tommy continued to function like a somewhat responsible adult. He showed up for work on Savile Row. He became momentarily obsessed with lightweight Bermuda shorts, until he was accused of a patent violation, at which point he dropped them.
Life went on.
And then, one evening in February, a few weeks after Peter had departed for the airport, Tommy went to the Tate Gallery. A new Andy Warhol exhibition was being advertised around London with a poster of Marilyn Monroe’s garishly painted face. For a limited six-week run, the galleries would be filled with Campbell’s soup cans, race riots, car crashes, cow wallpaper—a “world of death and flowers” that constituted a serious solo show for the acclaimed American pop artist. Serious enough, at any rate, to warrant a major celebration for patrons and supporters. Tommy arrived around nine thirty p.m. with a group of his friends, including Stewart Grimshaw, the owner of Provans.
He did not have a ticket to the party. Everyone else had a ticket, but not Tommy. The group had strategized in advance, though, and come up with a plan of attack. They would hand the Tate staff what looked like an approximately accurate number of tickets, and then, en masse, as an amorphous scrum, shuffle inside with Tommy as a stowaway.
No chance. The Tate staff sorted the tickets and separated Tommy out from his friends.
Faced with the prospect of humiliation, Tommy did not react well. He turned and, without a moment’s hesitation, fled back toward the road. Stewart watched in horror as Tommy dodged traffic across busy Millbank. He reached the embankment on the other side, heaved himself up, onto the wall—and then threw himself into the Thames.
“We all gasped,” recalls Stewart.
His friends ran after him. Stewart expected to see Tommy being swept away in the notoriously strong current. Yet he arrived at the embankment and peered over the edge to find Tommy just down below, poking out of the mud in his tweed suit.
Was this another tantrum—an “almost Shakespearian overreaction” (as his brother recalls it) to being rejected from a society event? Was Tommy drunk? Or did the rash act suggest a more unsettled emotional state?
Like the episode on Hydra several years before, Tommy wriggled his way out of proper explanations. He would refuse to discuss it, except, perhaps, in dark jokes about suicide thwarted by a low tide.
A rope was fetched. Some calls were made. One to Christopher Tarling, who was told that Tommy was being taken to the hospital with something broken—a rib, or maybe an arm. Another went to Peter, who (he recalls) received a frantic message from Edward at the shop: “He jumped into the Thames!” Peter had lived with Tommy for so long through similar episodes of operatic drama—an arrest in Hyde Park for “importuning”; a half-assed drug overdose after Tommy caught him fooling around with another designer—that people assumed Tommy was still his responsibility. Well, not anymore.
“What can I do?” Peter replied. “I’m in New York.”
* * *
Rewind to March 1969: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s wedding in Gibraltar. Sitting on the executive jet, laughing as they drifted high above the rolling topography of Europe, David managed to strike up a rapport with the couple. Encouraged by Peter, this rapport had then catapulted him through several months as a semiofficial photographer. David trailed the band—Lennon, in particular—like the press corps of a US president. In other words, Tommy was not the only Nutter to be directly affected by the dissolution of the Beatles.
Just four weeks after the Gibraltar wedding, David was standing on the roof at Apple Corps witnessing John change his name before a Commissioner of Oaths to John Winston Ono Lennon. Later that day, David accompanied the couple to the studios on Abbey Road, where he watched them work on a track for their upcoming Wedding Album, an avant-garde recording of them calling out each other’s name over audio of their heartbeats. John and Yoko lay on the floor to apply a hospital microphone so sensitive it picked up the entire moist symphony of their internal organs; as John lifted his shirt, David snapped a picture. Back in the darkroom, David then made his own experimental composition using an enlarger, splicing the image with a second frame showing clouds over a London skyline.
John and Yoko in the clouds over Primrose Hill.
Another day, David returned to the Apple Corps roof to shoot John for the cover of a proposed Penguin book release—a sequel to In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, full of poetry and nonsense. The book was fast abandoned, though David kept the picture anyway: John’s face, almost serenely blank, deliberately elongated “to make him look more like Jesus.” (David had appreciated Lennon’s irreverent comment more than the American evangelicals.) The photo proved a nice complement to an X-ray that John soon procured of his own head. He asked David to make a positive print; David complied, but also duplicated the X-ray, and then superimposed John’s eyes and wire-frame spectacles from the previous cover shot. In effect, without quite planning it, David created a startling twin portrait of Lennon at a moment of profound transformation, a moment when he was asserting his identity as an artist separate from the Beatles.
David’s twin portrait of John Lennon, 1969.
David would put these two pictures in a drawer, showing almost nobody—not even John and Yoko—for several decades. In his view, they were nothing particularly extraordinary, just something made to pass the time. Like Tommy with his suits, the impulse to create just flowed naturally, the unfiltered expression of some basic instinct. Though his images were unquestionably art, David had no aspirations to be considered an artist. He was just reimagining the world through a Nutter lens, daydreaming in his darkroom.
Over the next few months, David would complete several other assignments either for or around the Beatles. He photographed Pattie Boyd, George Harrison’s wife, at the Glyndebourne opera house in East Sussex. He snapped Mary Hopkin, the Welsh folk singer, not long after the release of her first studio album, which was produced by Paul McCartney. When John Lennon crashed his car in the Scottish Highlands, David was part of the entourage that collected his family from the airport. And then, on September 20, while hanging out in the Apple offices, David was grabbed by Peter, pulled into a room, and directed to document something that would prove momentous.
In truth, this “happy scene” was not particularly happy, and its most pressing subject was not the renegotiation of a record contract, but the beginning of the end. Lennon announced to the room, “The grou
p is over, I’m leaving.” Paul McCartney’s smile masked his shell shock. “We paled visibly and our jaws slackened a bit,” he later recalled.
At this point it would still be more than another full year before Paul filed his lawsuit in the High Court (a year during which he, too, would announce his departure from the band, though a little more publicly than John had). But David knew that he’d reached his own stop on the Beatles Express. “Bad timing,” he says. “Everything fell apart.”
* * *
In 1970, David’s business was prosperous enough that he could turn his attention elsewhere. He landed a regular gig photographing musical acts for the BBC. He worked for Rod McKuen, the bestselling poet and songwriter, during McKuen’s album collaboration with Rock Hudson (and consoled McKuen when Hudson ignored his romantic advances). David also worked as a printer for Harper’s Bazaar, which would take him to Paris on incredibly tight deadlines. The magazine would phone, and David would rush across the Channel to a hotel with a makeshift darkroom. Then a fashion house—Yves Saint Laurent, say—would release its season collection to a media queue: first to newsprint, because it was more immediate publicity; and afterward to the magazines in a variable rank, so Harper’s might be given a collection after Queen, or before Vogue. Staff would sit up all night waiting for the clothes to arrive, photograph them quickly but meticulously, then ship them off to the next group awaiting its turn. Meanwhile, David would develop negatives and produce contact sheets, even if it happened to be three o’clock in the morning. This was thrilling work: he found himself collaborating with extraordinary photographers like Hiro, Frank Horvat, and a young Bill King. It was also terrifying work, as his partner Carlo Manzi recalls: “Can you imagine fucking up the film?”
But after the Beatles job fizzled, the thing that brought David the most genuine satisfaction was Oz—a “monument to psychedelia,” as Richard Neville, the Australian editor, once described the glossy underground magazine with gorgeous graphic design.
First published in Sydney in 1963, Oz had launched in Britain four years later and rapidly became infamous for its uncensored engagement with anything taboo (gay issues) or transgressive (the fierce feminism of Germaine Greer). It was not unusual to find a poem about revolution by D. H. Lawrence; an article on “the biggest tool in show-biz” (ten inches, belonging to Roddy McDowall); a faux advertisement for a “yum-yum rubber fun substitute”; a classified ad promising “Gay Young Men with Style & Pose & Lack of Clothes”; and a real court transcript with “CONSPIRACY” watermarked across the page—all in a single issue. Indeed, nothing was too extreme for inclusion in Oz. Not a “bare-chested long-hair” sticking a needle into his arm, not a couple simulating sex as a baby watched on from beside their dirty mattress. When the mainstream media complained about the content, Oz simply incorporated the angry headlines into future issues. People, for example, once published a notice to parents: “Your kid may pick up a magazine in a discotheque or a record shop. It will look way out, switched on and hippie.” Oz took the warning and turned it into a special lift-out souvenir poster. The magazine seemed immune to criticism, swallowing everything into itself, like the Blob, only growing bigger and more threatening.
David adored all this flagrant insolence. While hardly a hippie himself, he appreciated anything that agitated for a more open-minded conversation by treating alternative lifestyles as legitimate sources of joy. In this regard, Oz was “so important,” David thought. It seemed to embody the radical potential of the entire previous decade. Reading it made him feel like there were other people out there who understood what was possible.
When David met the magazine’s art director, Jim Anderson, out in a gay bar, he confessed his admiration for the cause. Anderson liked what he heard, so David soon found himself working with the Oz art department as a photographer-at-large.
Anderson and the other editors gave David free rein to create the images he wanted. For one shoot, an Anderson/Nutter co-production, a woman held up an ax and a severed penis (represented by a strap-on dildo) while wearing a sash that proclaimed “Pussy Power.” For another, a naked woman straddled the shoulders of a man who had somehow misplaced his trousers. The man was Carlo, David’s business partner. “We were set up to do the cover in our studio,” Carlo recalls, “and the editor said, ‘The male model has pulled out, so you’re going to do it.’
“I said, ‘What do I care? You can sit a naked girl on my shoulders.’ ”
White arrows were then scrawled all over David’s final print, diagnosing Carlo with watery eyes (glue sniffing), hand tremors (amphetamines), disorientation (barbiturates), and “diminution of genital area” (cocaine).
Oz, No. 34
On April 22, 1970, David arrived at Jim Anderson’s house to photograph an inside spread for Oz, No. 28: “The Schoolkids Issue.” Recently, the magazine had published a small advertisement: “Some of us at Oz are feeling old and boring. So we invite any of our readers who are under 18 to come and edit the April issue…” Now, in an overgrown backyard budding with hollyhocks, a dozen or so teenagers gathered around Richard Neville as he sat in a garden chair waving a stick like a headmaster. The teenagers were all guest editors, and this, Neville later explained, was a parodic class portrait: “On my left knelt Berti, a fifteen-year-old from Aldershot who was sweet and pretty, and dreamed of living in a commune. Beside her was Vivian Berger, sixteen, the wildest of the bunch, a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed to have smoked pot at nine and tripped at eleven.” As some Russians played volleyball over the fence, David stood behind his tripod, snapping pictures of the unruly mob. None of the teenagers, smiling and horsing around, had any idea how poorly their work was about to be received. Neither did David.
The gang behind Oz, No. 28: “The Schoolkids Issue.”
“The Schoolkids Issue” came out in May, covered in naked women. Among other things, it featured masturbation, spanking, tips for survival during the apocalypse, “Jail Bait of the Month,” and (most egregiously in the eyes of authorities) a comic strip of Rupert Bear penetrating a virgin.
In early June, police raided the Oz offices under the Obscene Publications Act.
In October, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson, and Felix Dennis found themselves standing in the Marylebone Magistrates’ Court for a preliminary hearing on charges of obscenity. As The Times later explained: “The five charges against the three men and the company, Oz Publications Ink Ltd, were conspiring with certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing obscene, lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, cartoons, drawings and illustrations with intent to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and other young persons and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted desires.”
Refusing to take the charges seriously, the editors turned up dressed as little schoolboys, complete with satchels and caps, and sent Oz subscribers gilt-edged invitations to attend the first in a series of “obscene court room dramas—fancy dress optional—RSVP Scotland Yard.”
The trial of Oz properly kicked off the following summer. Just before it did, David invited the three editors to his studio in Primrose Hill to express his contempt for so-called justice through a subversive photo-shoot.
David showed his solidarity with the Oz editors using his camera.
The trial ran for six weeks. Its circuslike atmosphere—“a touch of reefer madness in the dock,” as Neville would later write—made it an immediate sensation. At one point, Judge Michael Argyle told the jury not to worry unduly if they didn’t understand everything: “Neither do I. We shall get a grip on it as we go along.” Another time, George Melly, the pop critic and jazz musician, was put on the stand and asked to define “cunnilingus.” Melly offered: “Gobbling, going down, sucking off. Or as we used to call it in the Navy, ‘yodeling in the canyon.’ ” Melly was also quizzed about why he thought the magazine was even being prosecuted. “It couldn’t be abo
ut the alleged pornography—there’s too much of that about elsewhere,” Melly replied. “So it’s really a trial about an attitude to life.”
This liberal attitude to life, fertilized by a decade of remarkable progress in terms of sexual and personal freedoms, was actually on trial in more places than just the Old Bailey. Earlier that year, two Christian missionaries, returned to Britain after a long residency in India, had founded a nationwide “Festival of Light” to counteract what they saw as an appalling degeneracy in moral standards. Their targets were pornography, abortion, and homosexuality: basically anything Oz magazine treated as either intriguing or important. Holding a series of rallies in places like Hyde Park, the festival organizers denounced sex and violence in the media while simultaneously promoting a return to biblical teachings—that is, a straight, conservative (and bourgeois) existence with traditional gender roles.
Many people on the left pushed back against this kind of regressive moralizing. In what amounted to an overnight culture war, the Festival of Light was attacked by members of the Gay Liberation Front, who organized under the code name “Operation Rupert” (after the lascivious bear). The GLF swarmed at least one festival rally in drag and released white mice through the righteous crowds. At another rally, a Reverend Father Fuck (of the Church of Aphrodite, in Tooting) set up a sacrificial altar and served out slices of a cannabis cake baked in the shape of a giant phallus; he then joined hands with his friends and danced “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” among the outraged Christians. Meanwhile, at the Oz trial, stink bombs were thrown outside the courthouse, and an effigy of Judge Argyle was set ablaze while the crowd chanted, “Roast pig, roast pig, roast pig…”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 13
