House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  His swings between mania and depression, still undiagnosed, made him prone to going too hard, to drinking immoderately. David was already a high-risk candidate for addiction. With the added desire of an escape from work, pleasure now merged inexorably into compulsion, and the gay underworld became a kind of fix. In fact, David got so caught in an obsessive loop—bars, alcohol, men; bars, alcohol, men—that eighteen months after arriving in Manhattan he had yet to open a savings account.

  Throughout all this, Tommy, despite being nearly 3,500 miles away, remained an important point of navigation. In 1973, David began keeping a day journal; he also recorded his lucid dreams, which often featured his younger brother in a starring role. In one example, David returns to their childhood home in Edgware “totally shattered” after Tommy has drowned in an accident and then been mysteriously resurrected. “Nobody seemed as depressed as I was when he drowned,” David wrote. “It was as if half my life had been taken away.” Everything may have been edging toward chaos in New York—David caught in a savage waltz with Bill King, unable to lasso his emotions—but at least he still had Tommy.

  * * *

  Tommy arrived for a month-long visit at the beginning of June, his first trip to New York since he’d stayed with Hardy Amies on West Fifty-Eighth Street. Peter had secured a stunning apartment on Central Park West, so Tommy went there and took up residence in his ex-boyfriend’s guest room. He was joined by Jimmy Clark (of the British Gas van), which meant it was something of a reunion: Peter had previously employed Jimmy as the doorman at Apple Corps. Rounding out the household was a young American named Gary Lajeski, Peter’s new boyfriend. Tommy took a shine to Gary immediately, and the two of them began to “make trouble,” Peter recalls, by ganging up together to terrorize their host.

  Tommy was deeply tanned from Puerto Rico and ready to make the most of his extended stay in the metropolis. Peter set the tone by proceeding to throw a series of buzzing parties. “Lots of people there,” David noted in his diary after the first of these. “Tommy was in his glory…superstar types à la Warhol…”

  On so-called quieter nights, Tommy would slip away to catch a musical on Broadway (he still adored Sondheim), or meet David and Jimmy for drinks somewhere like Le Jardin, a brand-new “discotheque pour monsieur” that was packed with beautiful people “in their whitest T-shirts and tightest jeans.” One afternoon, Jimmy noticed an advertisement in the Village Voice for John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, a critic’s quote printed across the top dismissing it as vile trash. Jimmy and the Nutters rushed to the cinema and howled with laughter (“Oh, Babs!”).

  Things took on a more civilized tenor for the film premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar. Dinner, first, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and his wife at Peter’s apartment (Peter was working with Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice through the Robert Stigwood Organisation); then a screening of the film itself; then a star-studded celebratory bash at the top of a skyscraper with views across Manhattan.

  Occasionally, Tommy paused all the frolicking about to do some work, reminding himself that this wasn’t entirely a holiday. “I’m here promoting my name, getting a bit more famous,” he told a journalist. The news peg, if one could call it that, was the first major new style to come out of Nutters in nearly four years. Tommy and Edward had watched old movie stars for inspiration (Fred Astaire, Rudolph Valentino), and now Tommy was describing the final product as “a mix of everything. Joan Crawford shoulders. Oxford bags from the Twenties. It doesn’t really resemble any suit from the past but it’s bits and pieces from different periods. And, then, a bit of me.”

  “And, then, a bit of me,” Tommy said.

  Sometime in the middle of June, Tommy pulled on an arresting waistcoat (vertical black-and-white stripes on the right side; horizontal black-and-white stripes on the left side) and paid a visit to Andy Warhol’s Factory, which was now located at 860 Broadway. After passing surveillance cameras and through a bulletproof door—Warhol had become paranoid since being shot—Tommy sat down on an Art Deco needlepoint sofa. Seated opposite him was Bob Colacello, the twenty-six-year-old editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. Given the stature of the magazine, its trendy, in-crowd readership, this was a big opportunity for Nutters, so Tommy planned to select his words carefully for maximum charm.

  Tommy had recently been named to the Best Dressed List for the third time in a row, Colacello noted.

  “I suppose they’ll shove me into the Hall of Fame next year,” Tommy said with a sly smile.

  What did he predict for the future of fashion?

  “The only thing that may die off is the tie,” Tommy said, declining to predict anything much at all. “There seems to be a revival of glamour with designers like Zandra Rhodes, [Bill Gibb], and Ossie Clark. They all make such marvelous clothes for women. And I’m the only one who makes men’s suits that complement these clothes…”

  Indeed, Tommy was happier making predictions about his own future. He wanted to design for theater and movies, he said. He saw Nutters as a “couture house,” and he was preparing to turn his focus to other things: toiletries, cosmetics, a ready-to-wear line, “like Dior.” He’d already been approached for licensing deals in America by “masses of people,” he boasted, “but they’re not really good enough. I want it to be done well.”

  Eventually, Tommy dropped the posturing for a moment. He was feeling comfortable with Colacello, who now watched him slump back on the sofa and mop his brow of summer sweat. “You know, it would be so nice to get into some jeans and walk around,” Tommy said. “Ever since I’ve been here I’ve had to make myself look like Tommy Nutter. People expect one to turn up looking like a chic Bozo the Clown. Next week I’m going to do everything wrong and have fun.”

  Which is exactly what he did. By the end of his stay, Tommy had sampled all the clubs that David liked to frequent, though he was not content to stop there. While his older brother avoided the bathhouses (except once, to photograph Patti LaBelle performing at the Continental Baths), Tommy spent hours cruising them in a state of dishabille, even renting a cubicle to stay overnight. He also tried “the trucks”—freight trucks left empty and unlocked near the West Village after dark that were popular among gay men as a place for anonymous hookups. In a sign of the times, these kinds of hedonistic hot spots were proliferating across the city. David was aware of them, even valued them as a symbol of freedom, but he had personal limits when it came to sex: “I remember Bill King taking me to a place called the Toilet. He showed me all these bathtubs. I just didn’t get it. Not very romantic.”

  Tommy did not have limits. He had a good time.

  * * *

  Return for a moment to that needlepoint sofa in the Factory: “Ever since I’ve been here I’ve had to make myself look like Tommy Nutter…”

  myself look like

  To a remarkable extent, “Tommy Nutter” had become like a good Savile Row suit: less a true and faithful representation of the person than an idealized projection of who that person wished to be, with all flaws and shortcomings artfully concealed. Just as sloping shoulders can vanish beneath the nimble fingers of a master tailor, so Thomas Albert, working to make himself look like “Tommy Nutter,” had tucked his shyness and working-class background beneath the shell of a confident, sophisticated, elegant rogue.

  This shell was so flawlessly executed that people would sometimes stop and stare as he walked down the street. Back in London, Simon Doonan was a shop assistant working on Burlington Gardens, just around the corner from Savile Row. “Tommy would go out for a cup of tea, he’d go out for his cheese sandwich or whatever he had at lunchtime,” Doonan recalls. “And he usually had this younger, very good-looking boy with him. I don’t know if he was Tommy’s boyfriend, but he was definitely an acolyte. The two of them strolled down the street looking like an old illustration of Art Deco glamour, with these wide lapels and very wide trousers with pleats at the front.” Doonan would “literally
wait” for Tommy to pass by his window so he could marvel at the spectacle: “He was so gorgeous. So glamorous.”

  Yet Tommy sometimes needed a break from this heightened performance. At Nutters, he’d come to prefer hiding in his small office, making sketches or gossiping with the accounting lady, to working the showroom; now he’d only emerge if somebody specifically requested to see him and was famous or rich enough to warrant the attention. In the evenings, he often stayed home with a bottle of wine, watching soap operas on the television or jotting down notes for a short story. On weekends, he liked to swap the bespoke waistcoats for sweaters purchased at the Chelsea Antiques Fair.

  At the same time, Tommy remained fiercely committed to the continuity of “Tommy Nutter,” and if anything imperiled the quality of this image, either directly or through association, he was not above lashing out.

  The “acolyte” Doonan noticed walking down the street was David Grigg, a young aspiring actor who’d begun working for Tommy as an assistant and occasional surrogate (“Have a pretty minette stepping into my shoes for a while”). One night, Grigg went with a raucous group of his peers to La Popote, a restaurant on Walton Street, where he ran into Tommy. “He was quite offhand with me,” Grigg recalls. “I said, ‘Why are you being so offhand with me? We’re good friends!’ And he pretended he didn’t want to speak to me.”

  On Monday morning, Grigg went into Savile Row to open the showroom. Unusually, he found Tommy waiting for him there. “And he just—pow! Punched me right in the nose.”

  Stunned, David asked, “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “You mixing with those dreadful people,” Tommy said.

  Tommy with David Grigg, the “pretty minette.”

  * * *

  By the close of 1973, Nutters remained a darling of the London glitterati, worn most recently by Ian McKellen in the pages of Vogue and by Cilla Black during her eight-week stage spectacular at the Palladium.

  But the reality of business was a little more fragile than Tommy liked to admit. Despite his professed faith that there was still a demand for style “in a world being overtaken by blue denim,” the world was, indeed, being overtaken by blue denim. There was no getting around the decline in sartorial standards across Britain. European imports had swamped the high streets, while an American influence had tipped the scales definitively toward leisurewear. Ready-to-wear clothes had also improved in quality while remaining appealingly affordable; you could now buy an off-the-rack suit that was passably wearable in a law office. None of this was new, exactly. Savile Row firms had been amalgamating for years as they struggled to weather the unpredictable climate of fast, disposable fashions. But Nutters had seemed impervious to the storm, finding success by engaging fashion and applying the workmanship (and cost) of high-end tailoring—it had seemed, in other words, to embrace the change. Of course, this worked only so long as people had the money to pay their bills and the confidence to rack up new ones. “I know people can’t believe it but I’m not making much money on a £200 suit,” Tommy once said. Nutters needed to sell a great many every month to turn a healthy profit.

  Throughout 1973, inflation and debt continued to climb in Britain. This affected what people were choosing to wear, as the Financial Post observed: “Perhaps, if clothing is an indicator of national spirit (and why not?), today’s relative quietness throughout the whole gamut of men’s clothing has something to do with the uncertainties over Britain’s future in the Common Market.” The country’s future became even more uncertain in October, when an oil embargo in the Middle East sent prices skyrocketing on goods and services across the board. In November, the National Union of Mineworkers, resisting the government’s anti-inflation policies, began agitating for more industrial action, turning a difficult situation into something almost catastrophic. By December, there was, once more, a state of emergency. To conserve coal stock, television stations ceased nightly transmission at 10:30 p.m., people were encouraged to share hot baths, and Tommy readied the gas lamps again.

  Beginning January 1, 1974, all nonessential businesses were restricted by government order to three consecutive days of electrical use per week. (The rest of the time, they would have to make do like people did before the Industrial Revolution.) This Three-Day Week, as Edward Heath’s order came to be called, put tremendous pressure on small companies, which suddenly found themselves running at three-fifths the usual capacity. The misery remained until March 7—after a full miner’s strike, a snap election, and the humiliating loss of power by Heath’s Conservative government.

  It is impossible to say exactly when Nutters began to feel the pinch. As Edward tells it, a day arrived when the business came to rely on an overdraft: a line of credit to keep things moving smoothly. The bank agreed to extend the overdraft but demanded collateral. Tommy owned nothing with any real equity, so Edward and Joan agreed to step in and list their own house. (It is possible that several other staff members also contributed collateral.) According to Edward, there was simply no other choice: “The bank insisted on it.”

  What is certain is that the Three-Day Week coincided with significant change at No. 35a. If Edward had once been content to toil away in the backroom, engineering Tommy’s ideas into spectacular suits, he now decided it was time to take on a more prominent role. Nutters was stumbling in the downturn; people were spending less money as the economy convulsed into recession. His house was listed on the dotted line. By securing the bank credit, Edward also raised the stakes of his own involvement in Nutters of Savile Row.

  He suggested to Tommy that they needed to become more rigorous as a business. Tommy, it seems, did not disagree with this assessment. In late January, Edward sat down to write his own letter to David in New York that laid out the shift in strategy: “I felt it only right to compose a few lines and thank you in advance for your very kind offer to show me some of the sights during my stay in N.Y. As you know, this is a new venture for N.S.R. and we anticipate this trip being very successful (with the help of MRS. B), and possibly the first of many.”

  Tommy had approached his trip to America as a chance to build his public profile (“getting a bit more famous”). Edward, by contrast, would be going over to make some actual sales.

  He arrived in New York on February 22, checking into the Biltmore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal. A nice suite, fabric swatches fanned across a table: this was a time-honored practice for Savile Row tailors seeking customers beyond the British Isles. Yet Edward was mostly making it up as he went along. He had a few names and telephone numbers scribbled on a piece of paper; that was about it. “I didn’t even realize New York was divided into four boroughs,” he recalls.

  Five.

  “Five boroughs! I had no idea.”

  Undeterred, Edward reached out to the Americans who already patronized the shop in London: people like Bill Blass, William Haines, “real aristocratic queens, the crème de la crème.” These men, in turn, connected Edward with more prospective clients, who then came to the Biltmore for consultations. Nutters had always maintained a significant number of Americans on the books; now the figure climbed even higher. Just as Tommy and Edward had hoped, the trip would prove productive enough to suggest a viable way forward for the company. Edward would take his pile of orders back to London and return later in the year with suitcases filled with clothes for fittings. The finished suits would then be mailed out direct.

  Although Edward came to New York with a serious mission, he was not entirely immune to the city’s seductive diversions. David soon arrived to welcome his brother’s colleague, and they stayed up until five in the morning drinking gin, dishing gossip, and making plans to go out while Edward was in town. A few days into his stay, they even staged a photo shoot on the Biltmore roof, Edward trying out the role of glamour model for the first time in his life.

  Edward probably didn’t notice at the time, but David was in the middle of an extended manic
episode when all this was happening. During the photo shoot, he tripped and injured his knee. “Took speed and just kept going,” David wrote a few days later, after a night out with Edward at the notorious Club 82, an East Village haunt known for its drag revue. “I was so ‘up.’ ”

  * * *

  Edward on the roof of the New York Biltmore Hotel.

  Just before the start of financial turbulence at Nutters, Tommy had secured a mortgage on a small flat four streets east of Brighton Pier. “It overlooks the sea and has a minute roof garden at the back,” he wrote David in a letter, thrilled with his purchase of a weekend escape. The roof garden was lined with terracotta tiles, which made it a sun-trap, perfect for tanning. Tommy threw down some cushions and a rug to create a Moroccan daybed, and he would lie out with a piece of tinfoil propped under his chin for hours at a stretch.

  Like his own Royal Pavilion, Tommy filled the interior of the flat with an exotic mélange of pink mirrors, porcelain masks, and more of his beloved Clarice Cliff china—“Mind you, it is all rather expensive,” he wrote. The only downside to the whole setup was that “everyone wants to come and stay.” Tommy was besieged by his friends, including Carol Drinkwater. “We used to get in the back of Jimmy’s British Gas van and drive down to Tommy’s flat every weekend,” she recalls. “I know this sounds daft, but I had a green bikini. I’ve got a photograph of me and Jimmy on Tommy’s bed: he’s wearing the top, and I’m wearing the bottom. He was quite a big guy, Jimmy, with my tiny bikini top on. Brighton was outrageous like that.”