When Tommy was not playing the role of reluctant host, he stayed in Brighton alone throughout much of the summer. “I love it,” he later said. “I’ve always loved the sea.” A Friday-afternoon train down from London, and then one back on Monday morning—or Tuesday, perhaps, if the weather was particularly sublime (or Wednesday, if it was transcendental). For those few days between arrival and departure, nothing could bother him there, not expectations or cash-flow concerns or a threatened rent increase by the Westminster City Council that was suddenly putting extra pressure on his already fragile business. Brighton was his “refuge,” he told one of his colleagues. In fact, Brighton had been a refuge for queer people to go and be themselves since before the 1920s. Tommy just embraced the tradition and made it his own.
It was not until summer began to graduate to fall—late August, early September—that something sufficiently extraordinary happened to shake him out of his Brighton daydream and draw his attention back to Savile Row. It involved the 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu—the man who, through the Montagu Case, had inadvertently helped earn people like Tommy the legal freedom to live as they wished and love whom they chose. Tommy and David had been children when the scandal unfolded in 1954, though their entire adult lives had been inflected by the fallout.
Lord Montagu was getting married (for the second time), and now came into Nutters hunting for a wedding suit. His fiancée, the free-spirited Fiona Margaret Herbert, who could not have cared less about the trial even after he gave her a book about it, also came in looking for something original to wear. The two of them had decided to have a Great Gatsby theme for their reception. However, Ms. Herbert objected to women’s clothes from the Jazz Age—“all those dropped waists.” She told Lord Montagu, “I’m going to come as Jay Gatsby.” Indeed, they would both be coming to the party as Jay Gatsby. Tommy Nutter seemed like the obvious man for the job.
The future Lady Montagu of Beaulieu was born in Zimbabwe (formerly Southern Rhodesia), “so I’d never had a smart suit,” she recalls. The fittings at Nutters stretched on for ages, though she found the process thrilling and was happy to go with the flow. Lord Montagu, on the other hand, was determined to squeeze out a deal with the tailor. He announced, “You make us lovely suits and you can come to the party.” (“He was so bad!” recalls Lady Montagu.) “Lord M,” as his friends called him, was famous for the parties he threw at his gothic country house, and this one promised to be, like F. Scott Fitzgerald had written, a night where “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Tommy agreed to the proposal.
On October 19, taking Carol Drinkwater along as his date, he caught a train southwest from Waterloo. Also in the carriage was Stirling Moss, the Formula One racing driver. When the train finally arrived at Brockenhurst, in Hampshire, Lord Montagu was waiting in a Jaguar. As Carol recalls, “I think Stirling Moss thought, ‘Ah! He’s come to pick me up.’ But no. It was for me and Tommy.” Lord Montagu had a habit of flouting social hierarchies in a way that endeared him to some and left others fuming with resentment.
Montagu drove Tommy and Carol past open fields and scattered oak trees onto the Beaulieu Estate, which had been in the family since 1538 and contained, among other points of interest, the crumbling ruins of a Cistercian abbey. He dropped them off at his sister’s home, where they were both given rooms. They were picked up again, dressed and ready, several hours after dinner, and ferried in yet another vintage car on toward the grand old pile of Palace House.
The Great Gatsby Ball—“On the Occasion of Edward and Fiona’s Marriage (And the Anniversary of Edward’s Birth)”—kicked off at 10:30 p.m. Jay Gatsby and Jay Gatsby stood at the entrance of the house, welcoming their guests. All hundreds of them. Lady Montagu was in a daze. “I’d just married this man,” she recalls, “and between three parties and various other things going on at Beaulieu, I’d met 1,600 people, because that’s how he was.” Their matching Nutters suits were impeccable and much admired: three pieces, white worsted, white satin braiding, paired with ties and silk taffeta shirts by Mr. Fish.
The Lord and Lady Montagu…
…as Jay Gatsby and Jay Gatsby.
As Tommy and Carol swanned into the party, they carried oversized black matchbooks about the length of a good cigar. On the front of the matchbooks was a drawing of Palace House surrounded by stars and fireworks. Inside, opposite several dozen tear-off matches, was a schedule of the night’s festivities.
Dancing in the Lower Drawing Room to
the Orchestra of Christopher Allen.
Further dancing and musical enjoyment
in the Upper Drawing Room, with
phonograph recordings.
A competition (voluntary) for the
dancing of the ‘Charleston’—in the
Lower Drawing Room at midnight.
Late supper will be served in the
Upstairs Dining Room at 12.30 a.m.
Newsreel and movies of the ‘Twenties’
will be shown in the Upstairs Library.
A pianist will play for your enjoyment
throughout the evening.
An assessment of sartorial elegance
(costume judging) will take place at
1.15 a.m. (Entry optional)
Breakfast will be served in the
early hours.
Well before breakfast, some guests would burn themselves out and fall asleep in odd corners of the estate. At least one man would be disqualified from the Charleston competition for attempting a version on all fours. The Montagus would dance for hours, challenging everyone else to keep up with their indefatigable tempo. Carol would dance with Earl Mountbatten (who would one day be assassinated by the IRA) and the bombshell actress Diana Dors, who came dressed as a flapper. “The three of us!” remembers Carol. “Who would believe me? It doesn’t sound normal, does it?”
But there was also a moment when eyes turned sharply to Tommy. The orchestra was swinging, alcohol was flowing, and he decided it was his turn to waltz through the spotlight. Taking the hand of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, an angularly handsome thirty-six-year-old with foppish hair and heavy horn-rimmed glasses, Tommy began to spin intimate circles around the dance floor, in full view of everyone.
A gossip columnist watched gleefully from the sidelines. “A lasting memory for all of us,” he reported a few days later in the Daily Mail. “But I could not fathom who was leading. It was never like that, surely, in the Roaring Twenties?”
Tony King and David in Elton John’s suite at the Sherry-Netherland.
It was on Wooster Street, in run-down SoHo, that David finally signed the lease on a loft of his own. Large and drafty, with a concrete floor and rough fittings that made it barely habitable as a residential address, it cost around $200 a month. David split the bill with an artist—or a man “who thought he was an artist”—who liked to drop acid and then stay up late spray-painting his masterpieces in the common space while David became increasingly irate in his bedroom, trying and failing to sleep.
It quickly became clear that David and the artist were not particularly well suited as roommates. In his diary, David would variously diagnose the artist as “evil,” “very nasty,” and “a maniac”; he ultimately fled after a troubled eight months of co-residence. Before it got to that point, though, when there was still only the occasional screaming confrontation, rather than hotheaded altercations on a near-daily basis, he decided to take advantage of the cavernous loft by throwing a single Mancuso-style dance party.
The guests of honor would be Tommy and Edward, who were back in New York (together this time) to follow up with clients and forage the social scene for new ones.
It was early November, and David set about preparing for his party with all the diligence of Mrs. Dalloway. He wrote and distributed doze
ns of invitations himself, each one falsely announcing the arrival of a new baby. (“I thought they would spark some interest,” David recalls.) He borrowed an excellent sound system and handpicked disco records from a friend’s collection. He assembled a large, freshly scrubbed aquarium in the middle of the apartment, then filled it to the brim with lethal rum punch. Just before the guests began to arrive, he added a dose of dry ice so fog bubbled up and spilled over the sides, cascading down the glass to the loft floor. “Very excited about party,” he wrote in his diary.
Tommy and Edward turned up first, accompanied by Gary Lajeski, Peter’s boyfriend. The rest of the city (or so it seemed) followed afterward in a heady rush. Bill King and the artist Richard Bernstein, who made the covers for Interview. The playwright Tom Eyen and the cast of Women Behind Bars, which was in early workshops. A crowd from La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which David had begun photographing through his friend Bernard Roth. Then Nona Hendryx, of the rock trio Labelle; Jackie Rogers, the Chanel model turned designer; John Vaccaro, director of the anarchic Playhouse of the Ridiculous; and “the whole world—everyone,” David later wrote, bemused that he had somehow managed to assemble such a stunningly diverse crowd of people in his own apartment. “The whole thing escalated into the party of the year.” And Tommy and Edward “seemed overwhelmed by it all,” which pleased him immensely.
Another guest at the party was Tony King, the young Englishman who, in 1969, had worn the first Nutters suit as Hardy Amies bent over his lapels with a tape measure. Back then, in London, Tony had caused a minor shift in Tommy’s fortunes; now, here in New York, he would trigger a more substantial change in David’s life.
David and Tony had two significant things in common. First, they both had a peculiar ability to ingratiate themselves with temperamental rock stars. (Tony, after a stint at Apple Corps, had worked for John Lennon and then migrated to Elton John’s recently founded Rocket Record Company.) Second, they were both enamored with nightlife, and could go longer—and harder—than almost anybody else around them. Tony had already crossed paths with David out in the clubs; the loft party only deepened his impression of David’s good spirit.
A few days later, Tony called David up and invited him out for dinner. Over Italian food on Hudson Street, Tony mentioned, casually, that he was “moving in” tomorrow with Elton John at the Sherry-Netherland. (With its sweeping views of Central Park and ample closet space, the classic hotel was one of Elton’s favorites when he visited New York.) This throwaway comment was not a boast, or not entirely, and it would not have impressed David much if it had been. Rather, Tony had a notion in his head, and he was testing to see if David might be a willing accomplice. “Elton was going through a rather depressed period at the time,” Tony recalls. “And I said to him, ‘Oh, I’ve got this friend who you’re going to love because he’s really funny. I’ll introduce you—it’s Tommy Nutter’s brother.’ ” Perhaps David could come cheer Elton up a little.
The next day, David traveled uptown to visit Tony at the Sherry-Netherland. Also in the hotel suite was Mike Hewitson, Elton’s loyal valet, whom everyone called “Brenda”; and Elton John himself, perhaps the biggest glam rock star in the world at that moment. David greeted him with exactly the same amount of fawning adoration that he offered every cultural luminary he happened to encounter—which is to say none at all. Elton was impressed. “Hit it off like a house on fire,” David later wrote.
That evening, Elton’s bodyguard, “a huge black Mr. Universe” (in David’s description), escorted the group to an “awful party full of muscle queens and Mozart records.” Still energized by his own recent success as the perfect hostess, David began to satirize everyone in sight, which sent Elton into hysterics. Afterward, they all climbed into Elton’s sleek limousine and wound their way through Manhattan to Buttermilk Bottom—“but Elton saw a policeman and we hotfooted it back to Le Jardin.” The next day, David discovered that Elton’s skittishness was actually good intuition: Buttermilk Bottom was raided not long after they fled. But David was too distracted to reflect on the implications of this fact, the barely averted international scandal of Elton John arrested in a gay bar, because Tony King had just called…
“Elton really liked me,” David wrote.
On November 27, less than two weeks after his loft party, David returned to the Sherry-Netherland to collect a pair of tickets left in his name: one for him, and one for his new (fleeting) boyfriend, Maurice. Thursday was Thanksgiving; Elton was scheduled to perform at Madison Square Garden before an audience of some 20,000 people. David and Maurice were granted VIP access.
“The crowd screamed—deafening,” David later noted. “Never seen the likes of.” Elton was “unbelievable,” peacocking across the stage, and at one point John Lennon walked out (having just thrown up into a bucket because he was so nervous) and performed a duet on three songs. Lennon told the frenzied crowd, “We thought we’d do a number by an old, estranged fiancé of mine called Paul”—and then launched into a stunning rendition of “I Saw Her Standing There.” The applause seemed to reverberate into eternity.
The after-party, held at the Pierre, was “all very gala in the ballroom,” David thought. With Maurice by his side, he worked the room as though it were his own, floating past guests like Uri Geller, who was sitting on a couch bending spoons for Elton’s sound man. Nona Hendryx invited David over for dinner that Sunday; John Lennon invited him over for dinner “sometime.” David was “outrageous again,” he wrote, a nimble court jester hovering near Elton, who (like David himself) was wearing a Nutters bespoke suit (Elton’s with a “#1” pin fixed to the lapel, in case anyone forgot the hierarchy).
David later wrote that he had “never felt so good” as he did that Thanksgiving. It had been an entire month of unusually heartening validation, of people showering him with compliments, laughing at his jokes, inviting him out to parties and dinners and musical premieres, of affirming that he was funny, appreciated, loved. An impression emerges through his diary that David had encountered something precious for a moment, something that had long eluded him, and that he was desperate to maintain now he had finally felt it: a strong sense of belonging.
Photobombing, far left: David Nutter
Notably, Tommy was present to witness this rare starburst of unadulterated joy. Though Edward had flown home a few days earlier, Tommy had lingered to wrap up some other business, cruise around the baths a bit longer, and attend Elton’s concert. At the after-party, Tommy now watched his brother be the social butterfly, and David watched Tommy watching him from across the room. As a final note on the evening, David wrote to himself, proudly, that “Tommy was astounded at how bold I was.”
* * *
Before heading back to London in early December, Tommy invited his brother on a last-minute reconnaissance mission to Madison Avenue. They were joined by Gary Lajeski—were, in fact, going to the Lajeski Gallery, where Gary exhibited art on the first three floors of a converted townhouse that had once been occupied by Valentino. There was much to discuss, a great deal of work to do before Tommy would be ready for an opening reception here on January 22.
It was a difficult time to be a fashionable dandy. The Evening News was warning British readers that the “Peacock Revolution” was about to turn into “a remnant sale.” At Blades, near Savile Row, Rupert Lycett Green was predicting that all the talk of fiscal austerity meant “moderation will return to men’s fashion.” Indeed, even Michael Fish, that stubborn grand dame of British aesthetes, who represented the culmination of 1960s extravagance, was now shutting up shop on Clifford Street. “Fashion doesn’t exist anymore,” Fish declared in his dramatic final bow. “Only clothes.”
Yet it was at this very moment that Tommy decided to publicly exhibit a range of his experimental designs in an art gallery. It is almost as though he were openly defying the grave prognoses, projecting an image of rude health while everyone around him was giving up
hope. Whether this was optimism or denial—or both, two sides of the same coin—is a matter of interpretation. For Tommy, as always, it involved no small amount of magical thinking.
Tommy returned to London to finalize fifteen pieces, which he then carted back to New York in mid-January. His intention was for the suits—various checks and tweeds, mixed together in unusual combinations; wide lapels or three-tone shawl collars; trousers so capacious they swallowed up the wearer’s shoes—to be displayed on mannequins in small groups. But Tommy also wanted to show what they looked like when worn by actual people, so he handed a few off to David in advance. Braving the chill, David gathered some friends for an impromptu shoot in Central Park and other striking locales around the city. Afterward, he developed the film at Bill King’s studio, decided the prints “looked great,” and handed them back to Tommy for installation on the walls of the gallery.
Traditionally, to be a tailor means to follow, to offer suggestions and guidance to clients but ultimately defer to their judgment, because they are positioned as the final authority. To be a fashion designer, on the other hand, is to take the lead, to direct style according to a cultivated eye that can tell what is best for clients better than they can tell for themselves. In fashion, the designer is the final authority; the client either buys the clothes or not, but never directs the design process in any meaningful sense. From the moment Nutters opened in 1969, Tommy existed somewhat ambiguously between these two poles; over time, though, he gravitated increasingly toward the latter. As his reputation grew, the standards of tailoring—measuring clients to create bespoke suits in the styles they wanted—interested him less than producing what he wanted, building “Nutters” into a name known for specific styles that belonged to him as the creative director. His comparing Nutters to a couture house, “like Dior,” as he did in Interview, was not a throwaway comment; it was a statement of intent. To now have an exhibition in an art gallery, in New York, on Madison Avenue, was to stake a claim even more forthrightly as something different from the usual Savile Row craftsman.
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 17
