David recruited some friends for an impromptu photo shoot around New York.
The opening reception augured good things. It was part of a trio of shows premiering simultaneously for a two-week run at the Lajeski Gallery: on the ground floor was “Paintings,” by Gisela Beker; on the third floor was “Frescos,” by Franco Ciarlo; and sandwiched in-between was Tommy, with his “Clothing Concepts.” A large, sympathetic crowd drifted past the displays and photographs, praising Tommy, who wore a brown suit with beige rolled lapels.
Nevertheless, back in London, Prudence Glynn, a fashion columnist for The Times, could not help but raise a skeptical eyebrow at the whole affair unfolding across the Atlantic. “Were Tommy not such a sensible person I should have reservations about his being involved with displays of clothes ‘as an art form,’ ” she wrote, “because it seems to me that one of the problems of being a fashionable fashion designer, in an era when fashion is a pop cult, is that you can lose the perspective on your talent. When all is said and done, fashion is one of les arts mineurs.” However, Glynn continued, “Tommy Nutter is not about to believe he is Rembrandt; indeed, as Sir George Clark wrote of Wren, so far as is known he never gives himself airs as an imaginative artist and is a fundamentally practical man, whose buildings (in the case of Mr Nutter, creations) excel ‘like Vauban’s fortresses, in their adaptations to their sites.’ ”
For Prudence Glynn, the idea that a Savile Row tailor might also be “an imaginative artist”—or even aspire to be considered as such—was just too much novelty to swallow. In 1975, she was not alone in this critical assessment.
* * *
David’s newfound optimism warmed him through the grim New York winter. He maintained the momentum by staying busy, working hard at King’s studio during the day and then partying even harder after the sun went down. Elton John may have left the city after his concert at Madison Square Garden (saying goodbye, David presented him with a funny poem in a card), but there were plenty of other distractions to take the performer’s place.
One evening, Tony King took David out for drinks with John Lennon and May Pang. At this point, John and Yoko had been separated for more than a year; Lennon was deep in what he would later describe as his “Lost Weekend” phase, consuming copious amounts of drugs. May Pang, once the couple’s personal assistant and production coordinator, was now John’s steady girlfriend—approved of and encouraged by Yoko herself. (“I needed a break,” Yoko later told a journalist. “We were so close John didn’t even want me to go to the bathroom by myself.”) Sipping Champagne, David and May hit it off immediately, even if he found the whole arrangement between her and the couple mystifying. “Marvelous time chatting,” he wrote in his diary. “Cozy.”
Six days later, David went with Tony to visit Yoko at her giant apartment in the Dakota, on Central Park West. They were supposed to be fetching her for a party at Peter Brown’s house, just a few doors up, but they ended up staying for hours to gossip instead. David found Yoko surprisingly “wonderful” on this occasion—an opinion that was only reinforced the following evening, when he found himself sitting between her and Peter at dinner. David cracked jokes, making wry observations. Peter told him he was in “top form,” and Yoko, attempting to offer her own brand of compliment, told him he should be committed to a psychiatric ward.
In early February, David was out and about with May Pang again, accompanying her to a party where they spoke with “Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Divine, etc.” Despite their eleven-year age difference, David felt that he was destined to be “good friends” with the woman.
Three days later, however, John made things considerably more complicated by abandoning May to reunite with Yoko. The swap back, after some eighteen months of separation, was probably inevitable. But it wedged David in an awkward position. Pang called up her new “good friend” to vent confusion about what had just happened. Where did it leave her? David then spoke with John and Yoko, though he resisted becoming an intermediary. In his diary, he took everything he was told by the three parties concerned and distilled it down into two neutral words: “Strange dramas.”
On February 19, Yoko asked David to come to the Dakota for a private conversation. When he arrived, unsure of what he was getting himself into, Yoko was still sleeping, so he had to wait around in the lobby for a while. Eventually, he was welcomed inside. David thought Yoko, who had not bothered to change for her guest, “looked funny in her nightdress walking through that huge place.”
The two of them sat down to talk—not, David discovered, about May and John, but about a job, the details of which were (and remain) a little vague.
Yoko had acquired a female mannequin with long, wavy black hair. There was to be a catalogue of sorts, or maybe one of her idiosyncratic art pieces. She wanted David to photograph the mannequin doing…things, she said. Just regular people things around the Dakota. And as far as David can remember, that was about the extent of direction.
David returned to the Dakota in early March with a camera and several rolls of black-and-white Ilford film. He had selected a low ISO so he could do longer exposures to maximize image quality. It was a bright day, sunlight streaming through the picture windows that framed Central Park across the street. David investigated the apartment, to which he’d been granted unimpeded access. He then examined Yoko’s plastic woman: life-size, thin, with a pretty, expressionless face. David noticed that the limbs were remarkably supple.
Over the next few hours, he experimented with a series of surreal compositions. In one sequence, David photographed the mannequin outside from below, so that she seemed to be descending from the overexposed sky, a naked angel bathed in heavenly light. For another few shots, he extended her arms out and upward in a gesture of either rapture or supplication, then placed a telephone in her lap and the receiver in her hand, as though she had just received a particularly transformative phone call. Other poses were more comical: the mannequin playing dress-up with a hat and feather boa; the mannequin crouched above a toilet bowl preparing to vomit, her hair tucked considerately over her right shoulder.
But perhaps the most mesmerizing shot involves Lennon’s famous white piano. Were it not for the giveaway joints at her waist, shoulders, and wrists, the mannequin could almost pass for a real woman (Yoko Ono, perhaps?) picking out notes from the open composition.
Yoko’s mannequin playing John’s grand piano.
In David’s memory, he was alone in the apartment when he took his shots, arranging the plastic woman to rummage through a file cabinet or recline meditatively on the couple’s enormous bed. In some ways, the photos represent a continuation of the ones he’d taken back during the Apple Corps days, the next in a series of uncanny portraits inspired by his interactions with John and Yoko.
For days and then weeks afterward, David waited for Yoko to call him with her thoughts. Did she like the photographs? Were they what she was after for her catalogue, or art project, or whatever it was?
Yoko never rang. The mannequin shots seemed to slip from her mind as she declared an intention to re-stage her Gibraltar wedding “psychically” for the upcoming sixth anniversary. David was not one to push for an answer. Nor was he one to chase payment for a job well done—a problematic trait he shared with his brother. Instead, David placed the negatives, prints, and contact sheets in a manila envelope, just in case Yoko ever did happen to recall their unique collaboration and come calling.
He would leave the envelope in a safe place, untouched, for the next forty-one years.
* * *
Back in England, Tommy was stirring up a fuss in Bath, where an exhibition at the Museum of Costume was charting the evolution of wedding attire since 1822. The show was arranged to culminate with two “contemporary” examples, handpicked by a magazine editor named Anna Harvey. Harvey had selected Gina Fratini to contribute the bridal gown: cream shadow-printed silk organza with satin
ribbon streamers and a matching half bonnet (“rather reminiscent of Little Bo Peep,” observed one local journalist). But people were more immediately struck by her selection for the groom, an outfit that caused “a few subdued gasps followed by an initial silence” when it was unveiled by the lord mayor. The slim-fitting frock coat was made from eau-de-nil gabardine, with a long, flared skirt and cream lapels, finished by a pearl pin stabbed through a silk polka-dot cravat. Explaining her bold choice, Harvey described Tommy Nutter as “today’s best young designer of men’s clothes. He is not gimmicky, but imaginative and prepared to be adventurous.” Nobody in Bath could argue with that. The Chronicle nicknamed his entry the “Teddy Boy bridegroom” and declared it had stolen the whole show.
Tommy took David Grigg as his escort to the launch, which was held in the Assembly Rooms, a series of beautiful Georgian chambers that once hosted the kinds of society balls that Jane Austen liked to satirize.
At lunch, Tommy sat next to the lord mayor’s wife, who, he later wrote to his brother, “played with my knee.” He also participated in two interviews for local television news, then retired for the afternoon to a nearby hotel, where he and “Miss Grigg” drank tea until the spots aired and Tommy could evaluate his on-camera performance. “I was great!” he wrote David, in a freewheeling, excitable letter that showed him as nonstop since his successful exhibition at the Lajeski Gallery.
Easter, for example, had been spent in Brighton: Tommy had hosted his friends Michael Long and Michael’s Japanese boyfriend, Hatchi, who was somewhat temperamental (“Ms Nakatsu stormed out”). And Elton John had recently paid him a visit on Savile Row, which Tommy knew David would want to hear about: “P’haps I told you?” Tommy took Elton to dinner at Morton’s and “got so pissed I fell off my chair onto the floor.” But these things happened, as David could well understand, and the point was that spirits were flying high. Indeed, the shop was busy—“quite a few lady clients this season”—and everything seemed, in Tommy’s telling, to be going on more or less exactly as one might hope.
And so, when it came time for the next business trip to America, Tommy decided to sit this one out. It was the third trip since the trauma of the Three-Day Week, and by now the process of measuring clients in a New York hotel room was basically routine. Edward would take care of it with his assistant cutter, Joseph Morgan, who would also accompany him on a Los Angeles leg (they were expanding their reach). Then Joan Sexton would join them back in New York for “a little holidayette,” as Tommy called it. Indeed, Tommy’s main contribution to the effort was to ask David to “look after them and take them to all the wrong places” when they passed through Manhattan. In the meantime, Tommy, like a creative director who has delegated responsibilities to his underlings, would stay behind and ponder some new design concepts.
Ringo Starr wearing Nutters, photographed by Bob Gothard.
He pondered through much of the summer. Often, he retreated to Brighton, and when the weather cleared up he browned like a roast chicken and became, in his own words, “quite chubby, really.” Yet the thought of design was never far from his mind. After an extraordinary few months of exhibitions and press attention, what would Tommy Nutter do next? The question gnawed away at him. In another letter to David, he outlined his anxiety with characteristic humor: “Trying hard to think of a new look, but the problem is you end up with the old look which is really the new look.” He continued, in a rambling, stream-of-consciousness style, “The saddest thing of all is an in-between look. Like the woman who plays safe all the time with handbag and shoes to match. It’s all so easy for her. I think it is terribly sad when a woman gives in like this and instead of setting the trend, follows it. But I suppose this is what it’s all about. If there was no one to follow it, what’s the use of creating the new look?”
Not everyone at Nutters agreed with this assessment. After returning from America, Edward found himself becoming increasingly annoyed by Tommy’s choice of focus—or lack thereof. “He’d vanish for days, gone down to Brighton,” Edward recalls. “Then it became half a week.” And when Tommy did reappear on Savile Row, he would glide through to his office at the rear of the shop, close the door, and resume work on his sketches. Eventually, Edward says, it got to a stage “where he just didn’t see people”—a situation also noted by David Grigg and the assistant cutters.
In a sign of how much control Edward had assumed in the business since staking his house as collateral for the bank, he took steps in late July, or early August, to rein in Tommy’s scattershot behavior. One day, when Tommy was away, “we took out this little room where he used to go and hide,” Edward says—meaning he ripped open the space that Tommy was using as his studio. When Tommy returned, he was stunned by the renovation. “He said, ‘Well, where’s my office?’
“I said, ‘In the showroom.’ ”
From Edward’s perspective, Tommy’s role in the business was supposed to be front-of-house salesman, just as it would be at a more traditional tailoring firm. In which case, he was currently shirking his duties.
After his initial shock, Tommy’s response to Edward’s remodeling was remarkably muted. If he was angry about the loss of his private work space, the anger quickly dissipated into resigned acceptance of the new store setup. By mid-August, Tommy was writing to David that “we have gone open plan in the shop here and I am on stage more. Having to flog the suits myself. Still, it’s better.”
Why was it “better”? Because money was tight, Tommy could hardly deny it; and because David Grigg, the proxy who had worked the showroom on his behalf for the past two years, was suddenly no longer there. “I was told they were making cutbacks, and I think they saw me as an unnecessary expense,” Grigg remembers. Here, too, Tommy was remarkably blasé in his account of the staff reduction. “Young David with the voice is going but we are still all good friends,” he wrote to his brother. (Grigg spoke with a plummy accent that Tommy found highly amusing.)
Tommy’s choice of language in the letter was subtle but deliberate. Grigg was not fired for financial reasons; he was simply “going.” Nutters had not been physically rearranged because of a disagreement between himself and his head cutter; it had just “gone open plan,” as though the change had happened naturally, almost by itself. Even to David, the person who’d known him longer than anyone, Tommy preferred to project an image of the steady ship, cloaking any bad news in a tone of reassuring nonchalance. Then, as usual, he simply changed the subject completely.
No special friends around at the mo but lots of tricks. Rod’s is the new bar on King’s Rd and it is like Flamingos. Can you believe it in London? Shirts off. Lots of dinge and a few stars…Any trips lately? How’s Fire Island? Is it all going on?
* * *
It was, indeed, all going on in New York, though not quite in the way Tommy intended. But such is bipolar disorder: soaring periods of “never felt so good” can be followed by a rapid freefall to “rock bottom,” as David was describing his life by August.
What triggered this dramatic swing?
Where to begin?
In May, David had relocated to the Upper West Side after relations with the artist in his SoHo loft had eroded past a point of no return. Then horrendous eczema had broken out across his body, seemingly impervious to treatment. John Lennon had floated the idea of David taking some photos—a new album cover—but it fizzled out, yet another disappointment from the Dakota. And Bill King was being even more obnoxious than usual, with the cocaine situation at his studio spiraling out of hand.
The cocaine situation: As David recalls, the whole thing began back in November 1974, when King had asked him to collect a package from “this nice little man” at the Chelsea Hotel. This nice little man was Billy Maynard, a rock photographer of drag bands like the Cockettes who also happened to be a drug dealer, though David failed to make that connection until Maynard was beaten to death a short time later in Room 803. Reading
about the murder in a newspaper, David experienced a moment of horrifying clarity. “And then, of course, when I was ‘in,’ ” he recalls—meaning complicit with King’s cocaine habit, as though that followed naturally—“we used to have to test the coke when it came into the studio to see what it was cut with.”
Recently, David and the staff had been testing the cocaine a lot. Photo shoots needed the stuff like an engine needs oil, and all income seemed to be outgoing to dealers to keep the supply flowing steadily. David recalls being threatened, more than once, by dealers who were paid late for their services. He also remembers King encouraging an atmosphere of paranoia by, for example, installing bulletproof glass in the studio windows.
* * *
David began having trouble sleeping that summer—sleeping too much, not sleeping at all, feeling alternately wired and strung-out, restless and catatonic. He went to the hospital for a prescription of Valium, but the doctors refused to give it to him. He complained to Tommy about how he was feeling (and complained to his diary, meanwhile, that Tommy had “got so far in life,” while he had barely got anywhere). Tommy replied, “Sorry to hear about all your predicaments. But I am sure they will sort themselves out. They always do.”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 18
