Michael Jackson’s umbrella dance in a Philadelphia hotel room.
On Sunday night, Michael picked up a yellow legal pad and sketched David’s face in remarkable detail—the bump in his nose, the lines around his eyes, his unkempt beard and mussed-up hair—then signed the portrait with a decorative flourish as rain lacerated the city outside (which Michael also noted, along with the location, date, and exact time: nine p.m.). David, when Michael gifted it to him, was amazed at the likeness; he carefully tucked it away to frame and hang on his wall, where it would remain for many decades.
Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, did not approve of his son’s unusual guest. During the recording session, David had noticed that Mr. Jackson acted “a bit cold” toward him, refusing to shake his hand. This made David feel “uneasy,” a discomfort that was only exacerbated by another standoffish encounter in the hotel lobby. But perhaps Joe Jackson also felt uneasy around David, who was, after all: white, thirty-seven years old, exhibiting all the telltale mannerisms of a gay man, and wielding a camera around two of his sons. In truth, David harbored no particular libidinous interest in Marlon. And he felt even less desire for Michael, whom he liked “immensely” as a friend, because Michael was uplifting company, but who struck him as a young eccentric suffering from a serious case of loneliness.
David did wonder if Michael was gay. “Still uncertain,” he confided in his diary. He yearned to ask outright, or at the very least to tell Michael about himself, so they could talk about “the gay thing” openly and honestly. Maybe there was some stuff that Michael would want to get off his chest, David reasoned. Maybe what he needed was a sympathetic ear, somebody to listen to whatever might be confusing him on the threshold of maturity. Michael seemed closed up like a vise. Without exerting any pressure, David just made himself available, a reassuring, avuncular presence who was ready to talk. Later, Michael would recall about this period: “I was searching, both consciously and unconsciously. I was feeling some stress and anxiety about what I wanted to do with my life now that I was an adult. I was analyzing my options and preparing to make decisions that could have a lot of repercussions.”
Back home in New York, David waited a few days, then decided to call Michael at the hotel to thank him for the weekend, which had bolstered his spirits. Joe Jackson answered and was “cold as ice.”
David was appalled. He dashed off a letter to Michael and Marlon “laying it all on the line” about their father’s unnecessary behavior. Michael soon phoned up to apologize. As David recalls, he said: “This is why I have no friends.”
A few months later, in September, Michael would call David again with another invitation, this time to Brooklyn. Michael had been hired by Sidney Lumet to play Scarecrow in The Wiz, an opportunity he would later describe as “the most wonderful thing in the world.” Jackson loved The Wizard of Oz, had always wanted to act in a movie, and now “got to be somebody else” and “escape” through a character who could sing and dance—his two biggest passions. They were running rehearsals just across the East River, at the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn Heights.
When David arrived, Michael was practicing his steps in the hotel’s Colorama Ballroom with the sprawling cast. (Jackson would prove so superior to everybody else at mastering the complex choreography that Diana Ross, who was playing Dorothy, pulled him aside one day and suggested in no uncertain terms that he was making her look bad.) David watched from the sidelines, recognizing several of the other performers from gay nightclubs around town. Then he joined Michael for lunch. While they were eating, Diana Ross walked up and asked Michael who his friend was. By way of introducing himself, David mentioned that his brother had once made suits for her on Savile Row.
“Oh,” Ross replied. “I don’t wear those anymore.”
That evening also turned out to be Michael’s nineteenth birthday party (though his actual birthday was a few days earlier). He was throwing it on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, at a new restaurant called Windows on the World. The way Michael talked it up in advance, David imagined a lavish celebration with hundreds of guests. However, when he actually arrived, he found the party was a tiny affair: just Michael; two publicists from Epic, Steve Manning and Susan Blond; and himself, playing the role of Michael’s close friend. David put on a brave face but found it quietly tragic.
After that, there were further late-night phone chats, another party at which David got terribly drunk and besieged the performer. (“Don’t remember too much about it,” he wrote the next morning through a throbbing hangover. “May have been embarrassing.”) But Michael’s life soon began to pick up velocity and drag his attention elsewhere. Though Michael remained warm and generous, extending invitations to events and performances, David fell increasingly out of touch.
The last time David would see Michael Jackson in person was November 1979, at Studio 54. Off the Wall, Michael’s funk-pop masterpiece, had just been released; people everywhere were dancing to “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” Catching sight of Michael from across the room, David muscled and pushed, trying to reach his erstwhile friend. To no avail. “Couldn’t get near Michael for the crowds,” he wrote. They’d had their vivid period of convergence, and then it was over.
* * *
Studio 54 lifted its velvet rope for the very first time on April 26, 1977. Perhaps the most legendary nightclub ever, it was the unlikely creation of two middle-class Jewish friends from Brooklyn: Ian Schrager, a straight, conservative-looking lawyer searching for a good business prospect, and Steve Rubell, a gay restaurateur whose chain of steak joints had been struggling to turn a profit. One evening—or so the story goes—Schrager had gone with Rubell to Le Jardin, on West Forty-Third Street. Technically, Le Jardin was a gay club, but Schrager noticed that straight people were also standing in the line, attracted by a kind of “sexual electricity” that did not seem to exist anywhere except these dedicated gay spaces. “It was like a Sodom and Gomorrah,” Schrager later recalled. “There was frenzy on the dance floor, the music was reverberating around the room, they had lighting effects, and it was like—boy!—overwhelming.” Afterward, Schrager told Rubell that he smelled an opportunity. The pair formed a partnership to open something of their own.
They soon took over an eleven-room mansion next to a municipal golf course in Douglaston, Queens. Though hardly the most ideal location in New York (or even in Queens), they spent $27,000 renovating the house and christened it the Enchanted Garden. Then they courted Carmen D’Alessio, a Peruvian nightlife promoter, to host theme parties that would attract a “fusion” crowd of gays and straights, like the one at Le Jardin. D’Alessio scoffed: “I said there was no way that I could get involved because I wouldn’t take my crowd all the way to Queens, plus I didn’t know any press out there.” Eventually, she relented; one of her more elaborate evenings, dubbed the “Island of Paradise,” featured hula girls, a seventy-pound roasted pig, and “a fire dancer working himself into a charcoal-broiled frenzy.” It ended up in Newsweek.
Schrager would later claim that the Enchanted Garden became another victim of David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, who was then stalking New York with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver: “It was hard to get people to come into a nightclub when someone was out there killing you.” (In all fairness to the Son of Sam, the Douglaston community was also less than enthused about the noise, and the City Parks Department soon issued an eviction notice.) But the Garden had been successful enough during its short run to embolden Schrager and Rubell to attempt a second, far more ambitious club in Manhattan—in the old CBS studio on West Fifty-Fourth Street that had once been used to produce The $64,000 Question.
Schrager, who was the creative in the “marriage” between himself and Rubell, oversaw a six-week construction job. Carmen D’Alessio, however, would later claim that she did all the work, while Schrager and Rubell did “nothing much” at all: “They raised the money, but other than that it had definitely
the taste of a woman who had been involved in fashion.” Either way, to overhaul the TV studio, a superstar team was brought in to conjure some magic: a minimalist interior designer, some restaurant architects, a florist, and two theatrical lighting experts who were responsible for Chicago on Broadway. The studio’s existing lighting rig was retained, which allowed Schrager to transform the environment of the club continuously, unpredictably, like a dynamic stage set. Schrager also wanted “serious sweaty dancing” to music you could feel in your bones, so he employed Richard Long, an audio maestro who was behind most of New York’s best gay discos. Long installed enormous bass speakers around the floor, which would reverberate through your feet, and tweeter arrays along the ceiling to rain down the high notes. Schrager later said that “the idea was to constantly assault the senses.”
David first visited Studio 54 at the end of July. Though it was then just three months old, the club had already established many of the hallmarks for which it would become legendary. Rubell, for instance, had begun standing outside on the street, sometimes on a stool, handpicking people from the thirsty crowd to create what he called a “tossed salad” of gays, celebrities, wise guys, street kids, gorgeous models, and Eurotrash. Rubell did not want “deadwood” floating around his club, or people from the outer boroughs and New Jersey—the reviled bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Once, two women turned up dressed as twin Lady Godivas accompanied by a live horse; Rubell rejected the women, but said yes to the horse. And not for the first time, either: Bianca Jagger had already sat astride a white one at her birthday party, creating one of the most indelible images of the decade.
“I made the foolish decision to get on it for a few minutes,” Bianca later told the Financial Times, annoyed by all the attention.
Inside, a giant Man-in-the-Moon loomed high above the dance floor, sniffing cocaine from a mechanized spoon. Confetti guns spewed glitter over the heads of revelers while busboys in tiny gym shorts shimmied their toned asses through a mezzanine bar. David, who went with Elton, and then with Elton and Rod Stewart, with whom he got “totally wrecked and stayed until four,” thought it was all “so amazing.” He would go dozens more times over the next few years—taking THC at a Halloween bash; celebrating Rubell’s birthday with Shetland ponies and a marching band—before the club finally lost its luster in 1980, the year Rubell and Schrager were sentenced for tax evasion. “You never knew who you’d see there,” David says—Liza Minnelli, Brooke Shields, Donald Trump. “There was a beaded curtain that would go up and down. I remember laying on the dance floor looking up at it just before I passed out.”
* * *
One evening stands out as particularly notable in the annals of 1977: an album and book launch at Studio 54.
The launch invitation
The book, David thinks, had originally been Elton’s idea. The earliest diary reference to it comes the same night Freddie Mercury told him off about his battered face: “Bernie was lovely and wants to do book with me.” Running into David at the Queen after-party, Bernie Taupin had agreed to write the text; David would supply the photographs. After signing a contract with the Viking Press and Penguin Books, he would also finally receive some royalties for his work.
David had grand plans when it came to the book’s presentation. Using the darkroom at King’s studio, he made contact sheets and meticulous prints from his favorite negatives. He then took everything to Ruth Ansel, the former co–art director (with Bea Feitler) of Harper’s Bazaar who had recently moved on to The New York Times Magazine. (David had met her through working with King.) Brilliant and provocative, Ansel had designed Richard Avedon’s book on an avant-garde theater troupe, Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company and the Making of a Play. She was also responsible for an exquisite edition of Peter Beard’s The End of the Game, about the fraught history of African wildlife. David wanted something just as ambitious for his photographs of rock stars: glossy black-and-white spreads arranged like an art catalogue; animated action shots contrasted with intimate close-ups. After he flipped through his portfolio in Ansel’s apartment, Ansel agreed to take on the project.
However, when David shared his plan with the production team at Viking, they demurred. “They said they wanted to use their in-house person,” he recalls. David felt powerless to take on a behemoth publishing company, so Ansel was out before she was ever officially signed. This “in-house person” then reconceived the design as a madcap montage that was almost like a scrapbook or graphic novel. Bold, italicized type crawled across pages decorated with palm trees and place names. David’s photographs were crammed together—four, five, eight to a page. In some instances, they were violently altered using Wite-Out and a pair of scissors, so that Elton’s disembodied head appeared to peek through the book credits. The intention was whimsical, but the result was amateurish. David hated it. He also hated the printing, which he thought used the wrong grade of paper stock. For some copies, the plates used in the offset printing process were not aligned properly, so final images were blurry. He grumbled about the cumulative degradation of his work, seeing it as a missed opportunity to make something truly beautiful. Yet for all its flaws, Elton John: It’s a Little Bit Funny was a high-profile release that publicly validated David as a photographer. He liked what it represented in the abstract, if not on the actual page. It helped, too, that Elton decided to dedicate the book to him.
This book is dedicated to David Nutter and to everybody else who picked me up off the floor!
On October 11, David arrived at Studio 54 for a five p.m. cocktail reception with the media. The buzz in the club was loud and positive, though Elton, who’d just been inducted into the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame, appeared for barely an hour before throwing a tantrum. “It seems he still isn’t used to either superstardom or his recent re-haired dome,” a journalist complained, “because when photographers engulfed Elton on his entrance, he retreated to a backstage room for the duration of the event.” Not that David noticed; he later wrote that the spectacle was “amazing”: “Elton walked out after five minutes and Bernie and I were left. Did an interview and had some pics taken. Book very well received.”
After the buffet, David raced home to meet a special guest who was accompanying him to the proper party. A few weeks earlier, he’d received a letter with some unexpected but delightful news: Tommy’s situation had shifted in London, his prospects were now looking good again, and he was scheduled to arrive in New York in early October for a few days of work. Serendipitously, this meant he would also be able “to go to the Ball!” David took a disco nap and then woke to receive his brother, who turned up carrying a brand-new black bespoke suit. David was thrilled—“My suit sensational”—and put it on immediately.
A limousine arrived to collect them, along with a few more of David’s friends. Around eleven p.m., it pulled up outside Studio 54. The street crowd parted like the Red Sea, and David marched his own personal entourage past the velvet rope.
Inside, the throng of partygoers was “murder,” David thought, jostling elbows as he shot for the bar—but also “wonderful.” The Commodores were there, along with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Dame Edna, Ellen Burstyn. “They all came,” David would later write, delirious at the turnout. Michael Jackson was in town for a Wiz party and stopped by to say hello. Several members of Monty Python slinked around the room in drag. Elton reappeared in a velvet suit and newsboy cap (covering those tender hair plugs), and he mingled with his admirers until somebody grabbed him, hoisted him up by the waist, and swung him around and around in nauseous circles.
It is one thing to identify the most terrifying episode of a person’s life; it is quite another to pinpoint the moment when a person is at their peak, happiest to be alive. For David, perhaps this comes close: October 11, 1977, publication day, sometime toward midnight, on the dance floor at Studio 54.
David and Tommy with Elton: It’s a Little Bit Funny.<
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Tommy posing outside Kilgour, French & Stanbury on Dover Street.
Of his miraculous, Lazarus-like comeback in 1977, Tommy would once explain: “I applied to the largest textiles conglomerate in Britain, Lincroft Kilgour, and asked if I could sort of stand in their shop in Dover Street: Kilgour, French & Stanbury. And they said, ‘Yes, Tommy.’ And so I stood there. And Elton walked in, and Tim [Rice] and Andrew [Lloyd Webber] walked in, and it all happened.” This was a mostly accurate account, albeit a little burnished around the edges for dramatic effect.
Barry Grigg, father of David Grigg, whom Tommy had stayed with before moving to Chelsea, worked as a director at Lincroft Kilgour. After watching months of Tommy’s failed scheming, Barry arranged for him to be hired in-house at Kilgour, French & Stanbury (which operated under the umbrella of Lincroft Kilgour). “Kilgour needed a fresh face, so they brought him in,” David Grigg recalls. This extraordinary last-minute reprieve saved Tommy from imminent bankruptcy, assuaging his skittish lenders. It also restored him to the heart of the tailoring trade in Mayfair. Beginning in February, Tommy “stood” in the showroom at No. 33a Dover Street…and he would continue to stand there for much of the next five years, a stretch of his working life that can be treated as discrete and self-contained, like, say, Picasso’s Blue Period.
Kilgour, French & Stanbury was one of the most respected bespoke tailors in the Savile Row area (“and therefore the world”), rivaled at that moment only by Huntsman, Henry Poole, and Hawes & Curtis. Founded in 1880 as T&F French, it catered to an exclusive clientele of aristocrats and social luminaries. In 1923, the original firm had merged with A. H. Kilgour—another tailor of considerable repute—to create the partnership of Kilgour & French. A few years after that, Kilgour & French had opened its doors to a pair of Hungarian brothers named Frederick and Louis Stanbury. Frederick Stanbury was “an engaging personality who reveled in the creation of clothes,” but Louis was considered something of a “wild one” on Savile Row—meticulous, strict, and prone to displays of theatrical excess. One story has him wrestling with a coat in front of a customer, then stamping on it repeatedly like an angry child to illustrate his disgust at poor workmanship. “I want a man to look a he-man,” he once told a writer. “I like square shoulders, big chests and narrow waists.” (He also declared that “a man’s success with people depends on his tailor”—an overstatement that illustrated how seriously he took his role.) The Stanbury brothers introduced an attractive cut that soon became the house’s signature style; for their effort, the firm was renamed Kilgour, French & Stanbury. Then, in 1970, it expanded yet again, this time to incorporate Bernard Weatherill, a tailor famed for equestrian and sporting wear. Indeed, by the time Tommy finally entered the picture in 1977, the business was like Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from multiple bodies and lumbering along with little sense of unified purpose. Its public image, however, remained all Hollywood grace: Fred Astaire in Top Hat, dancing in a Kilgour, French & Stanbury tailcoat with a white carnation threaded through his lapel.
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 22
