Lewis liked the tailor. “So I said, ‘All right, I’ll finance you.’ ”
The handshake happened extremely fast. Just fourteen days after Tommy returned from Japan, Alan Lewis formed Fabricwood Limited and issued four shares: one (25 percent) to Thomas Albert Nutter; and three (75 percent) to a company named Alcrafield Limited, which Lewis had controlled since its incorporation in 1968. (Later, Lincroft Kilgour would also sell Lewis its Tommy Nutter Promotions, handing over several boxes of documents and ephemera.)
On paper, it sounded like an irresistible prospect. Through Fabricwood Limited, Tommy would have ready access to all of Lewis’s other holdings—including, once the deal was finally approved by the Monopolies Commission, the world’s second largest wool-textile group and a producer of luxury materials, Illingworth Morris.
But far more important, Lewis had something that Tommy desperately wanted, something Lincroft Kilgour had never been able to offer: a place on Savile Row. Recently, the businessman had acquired a vast showroom at No. 18–19. It was currently vacant.
Tommy made a public announcement in August that he was leaving the team at Kilgour, French & Stanbury. He maintained that this had been the plan for “quite a while,” that he’d merely been “waiting for a suitable site” before he gave his notice and ventured out on his own. “I’m getting some of the bright lights back into the street,” Tommy declared in September, hinting at “a megastore.” He would open on October 4, having been away from Savile Row for more than six years.
“18-19 Savile Row, London W1: Opening October 1982”
I.
It had not been until 1979, after what seemed like an eternity of Dantean torment, that David finally managed to break free from Bill King. The moment had come during a photo shoot with Patti LaBelle, though King’s behavior had been building toward some terrible crescendo for months. Not long before, for example, a fire had broken out in the studio’s elevator shaft; King had evacuated himself first, leaving the rest of the staff to potentially suffocate from smoke inhalation. That had been bad—but this, with LaBelle, was something else entirely.
David was assisting, as he often did when the big-name performers came in to be photographed. King snapped a few pictures of the singer. Everything was untroubled, going fine. But then King turned and, as though David were his co-conspirator, whispered “a racist remark about Patti and her friends.”
David was horrified. If there was one thing he could never abide, not since his father’s ignorant ranting back in Edgware, it was racism. Years of pent-up resentment suddenly came exploding out in a vitriolic rush. “When I walked out of the studio for the very last time,” David recalls, “Bill gave me a bottle of Champagne, and I told him to shove it up his ass.”
* * *
Now, in 1982, David was working for the American photographer Art Kane, who in many ways was a much better fit than Bill King had ever been. A portraitist and bold visionary (and, arguably, one of the more underappreciated artists of the twentieth century), Kane’s interests paralleled David’s almost exactly. There was the experimentalism, for instance. Kane had pioneered the creative use of wide-angle lenses, distorting his subjects for poetic effect. He’d squeezed emulsion from the pods of unexposed Polaroid film to create ghostly abstractions. He’d perfected what he called the “sandwich” image: multiple transparencies stacked together using tweezers and tape, so a black man’s face appeared overlaid by metal grates, say, or Venice seemed to be sinking into the lagoon. (This was a different technique from the one David once used to put John and Yoko into the clouds, though the effect was comparable.)
At the same time, Kane had produced photo essays on poverty, Native Americans, the great American racial divide. He’d worked for all the major fashion magazines and done exquisite studies of rock stars: Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, the Who. One of his most enduring pictures, Harlem 1958, showed fifty-seven giants of jazz, everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Thelonious Monk, gathered around the stoop of a single brownstone. Andy Warhol once compared Kane to “the sun,” saying: “Art beams his eye straight at his subject, and what he sees, he pictures—and it’s usually a dramatic interpretation of personality.” David agreed with this assessment; he thought Kane was blindingly brilliant as a photographer, if a little more uneven as a boss.
Kane suffered from debilitating bouts of depression. In fact, the reason Kane had hired David in the first place was because he found him amusing; he insisted on calling him “David Funner.”
Kane did not have his own darkroom and therefore had no need for a darkroom technician. So David was put “in charge” of his studio at Broadway and Twenty-Eighth Street, a light-filled penthouse with glorious views over Manhattan. Once again, though, the job description did not really capture the job reality. David spent a great deal of time wrangling the studio bills (there never seemed to be enough money to go around), but he could also be called upon at any moment to fulfill some other function. On one occasion, the French fashion brand Cacharel commissioned Kane to illustrate a womenswear ad campaign—and then objected when Kane submitted photographs of burning giraffes, possibly inspired by Dalí. “Art wouldn’t go and see them,” David recalls. “I had to go. The owner told me, ‘We can’t have this kind of thing.’ ”
On another occasion, Kane needed models for a Vogue Italia fashion shoot, so David was ordered to dress up as a Catholic priest. In the final photograph, David poses alongside a “Hasidic rabbi” (one of his friends doing a favor) and Christie Brinkley.
David also typed scripts, because Kane was determined to break into show business. An original screenplay, The Camoufleur, was about Kane’s wartime experiences in the 603rd Camouflage Engineers, a unit responsible for creating a “ghost army” of fake, inflatable tanks, cannons, trucks, and jeeps to bamboozle the Nazis after the invasion at Normandy. Another script, titled Paper Dolls, was a stage musical with book and lyrics by Kane, and music by the composer Michael Kamen. Also loosely autobiographical, Paper Dolls told the story of a photographer who gets swept up in New York fashion and disco. David, having added small edits based on his own life experiences as he typed, remembers it fondly: “It probably could have been great.” (Neither script was ever produced.)
Meanwhile, David still chipped away at his own artistic projects on the side, though he’d never quite managed to leverage the moment presented by the Viking/Penguin book back in 1977. Perhaps he lacked the relentless ambition required to succeed as a creative in New York. David was too passive; rather than going out to seize opportunities, he tended to wait for them to come to him. Which, admittedly, they did—just not as often as he would have liked. Over the years, Elton had continued to rely on David’s services for album covers and publicity shots. And every now and then, another request might filter through that led to paid work, or, at the very least, a strange encounter.
One that would haunt him for years happened not long after John Lennon’s assassination. On the evening of December 8, 1980, Lennon had been walking into the Dakota when a man named Mark David Chapman stepped out and opened fire with a Charter Arms pistol. After news broke that John had died from his wounds—had been murdered—May Pang phoned David in hysterics, and Elton called him at three a.m., deeply unnerved. David was immediately beset by nightmares. “Went to Dakota after work,” he’d written the next day. “Eerie…Like a movie.”
The following April, David had been summoned back to the Dakota by a grieving Yoko Ono. Swearing him to secrecy, Yoko, knowing she could trust David, asked him if he was interested in working on the cover of her next album. As David recalls, she then pulled out a pair of glasses. John’s glasses, coated with his dried blood. She placed the glasses near a window overlooking Central Park. “She said, ‘What do you think I should use, a wide-angle lens? What kind of lens will you use?’ ” David swallowed his shock to offer a considered professional opinion.
According to his diary, David was still waiting
for a follow-up call a week later: “No word from Yoko—I’m sure it’s off.” He’d never chased her about the job, once again allowing an extraordinary opportunity to slide away. But that June, David had been reminded of their discussion when he saw Yoko’s Season of Glass in the record stores: a photo of Lennon’s bloodstained glasses, perched on the windowsill alongside a glass of water. Yoko had picked his brain for technical details, David says, and then taken care of the final picture herself.
* * *
One day in September 1982, David was working in Kane’s studio when he came across a discarded copy of Time. The cover showed a charging bull tangled up in reams of ticker tape, an illustrated commentary on the finance industry. This was hardly David’s area of interest, but he opened the issue anyway. He thumbed past “Wall Street’s Super Streak,” and “Hope and Worry for Reaganomics,” and past multiple cigarette advertisements, right up to the Medicine page, where he hit an article that stopped him cold.
It began suddenly, in the autumn of 1979. Young homosexual men with a history of promiscuity started showing up at the medical clinics of New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco with a bizarre array of ailments.
Written by Claudia Wallis, the report was titled “The Deadly Spread of AIDS,” an acronym (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) that had only recently been coined by the Centers for Disease Control. According to the CDC, which was now monitoring the situation, AIDS had been responsible for the death of at least 232 people in the past sixteen months—considerably more, Wallis noted, than certain other epidemics that had caused widespread alarm, including the 1976 outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease in Philadelphia. Wallis quoted Dr. James Curran, head of a CDC task force on AIDS, describing it as “a very, very dramatic illness” with a seemingly exponential spread.
In the beginning, when AIDS seemed to be specific to gay men, “our efforts were concentrated on trying to dissect out life-style differences,” Curran continued. Researchers had started their search by examining the colorful particulars of gay sexual practices, including the use of amyl nitrite poppers as a muscle relaxant. But now there were signs of AIDS elsewhere, beyond the gay community: in Haitians, hemophiliacs, and heterosexual drug addicts. And so, Wallis wrote, scientists had come to suspect something new was responsible—sexually transmitted, perhaps also transmitted by blood—though nobody seemed to understand exactly how it worked. Attempts to identify a common infectious agent from various patients had so far been fruitless. “It is not known whether there is a transmissible agent,” Curran said.
Wallis listed the early symptoms of AIDS, which were not much different from those of a nasty cold. She noted that AIDS seemed to have a curious effect on the immune system: patients showed unusually low counts of helper (CD4+) T cells, leaving them open to all sorts of infections healthy bodies would usually fight off. She reported that apprehension had swept the gay neighborhoods of New York and San Francisco, that some gay men were no longer going out to clubs, effectively isolating themselves. After a grim discussion of current treatments for Kaposi’s sarcoma (surgery, chemo), Wallis then tried to conclude her article with an upbeat kicker: “immunologists, virologists and cancer experts agree that AIDS represents a remarkable experiment of nature.” Perhaps the syndrome, in the words of Pablo Rubinstein, an immunobiologist, could even “teach us more about cancer and old, familiar diseases than we are able to fathom at this time.”
David put the magazine down. This was the very first time he’d heard of “the AIDS,” as he would describe it in his diary. He saw nothing upbeat about the implications.
* * *
A few weeks later, David woke up feeling unusually dreadful. He was freezing, and then he was hot, back and forth, hot and cold, in strange, alternating flashes. He wondered if this meant the flu again, which he seemed to contract with alarming regularity these days.
He climbed out of bed and pulled on his clothes. He headed downtown to work. Before long, he left the studio and returned uptown to bed, tucking an electric blanket under his chin.
The next morning, David found that he was too ill to even leave his apartment. “Told Art it could be psychosomatic re: money issues, etc,” he wrote in his diary. He huddled under the blanket and willed his body to improve. He felt “weak as hell,” both physically and mentally. Even his dreams had stopped coming, which was “very strange,” because David usually dreamed so lucidly that he could recount them like other people discussed their waking life.
On October 9, he started to vomit. “Can’t keep a thing down,” he wrote. He was wracked with “awful pains.” He fretted—“Getting worried”—and then vomited some more, for two days in a row. He blew off a friend’s birthday party, a catch-up with Elton John. “Have to see doctor,” he wrote to himself.
At the medical center, Dr. Schachtel took samples of his blood. After asking David to pee in a cup, Schachtel was alarmed by what he saw there. “He didn’t like color of pee (very dark). Said ‘liver’.”
Now David was seriously rattled.
But because there was nothing he could do until the test results came back, he staggered home on the shoulder of his roommate, Kevin Bostick, who was tending to him like a dutiful nurse.
Kevin Bostick and David on Fire Island, June 1978.
David had first met Kevin back in 1978, when a mutual friend introduced them. There’d been a fling, though it hadn’t lasted long before fizzling out. Kevin had a drug dependency—Tuinal and Seconal, sourced from the dealers who lurked along Fourteenth Street. David had found him impossible when he was high. (“Had row on the pier about drugs and money,” he’d once written in his diary. “I threw money at K and it fell to the floor.”) Yet even after their involvement ended, the two men had maintained a strong connection. David liked Kevin, who was sweet and well intentioned; and Kevin was attached to David, perhaps because David showed such a keen interest in his welfare. Soon David had started letting Kevin crash at his apartment when he needed somewhere to stay. Over time, Kevin crashed with increasing frequency, until he was living there full-time. This was an unplanned development, though not an unwelcome one. While Kevin could be challenging with his multi-day benders, he was loyal. Indeed, you could say that Kevin had gradually, without either of them quite realizing it, become a kind of partner. David and Kevin did not have sex, but they provided each other with all the other things partners were supposedly good for: comfort, companionship, emotional support. And “greens,” which Kevin now brought David on grocery runs in a bid to get his friend’s strength back up.
On October 12, David staggered back into Art Kane’s studio. He thought he “must be mad” to work, but there was “so much shit to clear up,” and Kane would only let it accumulate until David took care of business. He got as much done as possible before calling a cab and returning home to resume brooding.
It was not until October 25, nearly two weeks later, that a definitive diagnosis finally arrived. Schachtel called to say that David had been slammed with “a massive dose.”
Viral hepatitis, usually cleared with time.
This was excellent news, a huge relief. Yet beyond some light self-admonishment (“I have to be careful”), David didn’t register much of a response in his diary. Perhaps he was distracted by the other developing news: “Norman had called. He has to go into hospital to have lump removed on his neck. Sounds bad to me. Harry too is in hospital with fevers etc…”
Years later, David would say that he had “a premonition” after reading the article by Claudia Wallis. That he’d sensed what was coming, immediately adjusted his sexual behavior, and tried to warn his friends in New York, his brother in London. Although, by then it was already too late: the virus could incubate undetected for years. It was now just starting to wake up.
II.
At almost exactly the same moment that David began to feel ill, Tommy put the finishing touches on the most important event of his
working life since the launch of Nutters in 1969. But perhaps a full description of the “Grand Opening & Fashion Show,” as his elaborate invitations called it, is best left to Annie Frankel, who attended the party, then went home and typed out (in green ink) a biting commentary of the whole episode for Tommy’s private amusement.
Hello there Nutter fans everywhere,
It’s Monday 4th October 1982, 8:30pm and my goodness the rain is pouring down ruining the makeup and hairdos before we even get started. It hasn’t deterred the fashionable from coming to Mr. Tommy Nutter’s new and sumptious salon—ablaze with lights in the highest of tecs [sic].
And here is Mr. Nutter himself approaching us with hysterical laughter (can’t help but wonder why he always laughs like that whenever he sees us: could it be Petie’s bow tie and my frock???). “DARLINGS,” he screams, grabs hold of us and without a moment’s hesitation throws us into little gold seats…“At least I’ve got you firmly put in your places,” he grunts contentedly and disappears. This gives us the chance to look at all the other little gold seats and what is written on them. We are on the catwalk itself—my, my, what an honour—and directly opposite see the words “Miss Cilla Black” planted on a chair.
And here she is: a little black-and-white Crêpe De Chine number, beautiful with a slit up the middle revealing one of the best pair of legs ever displayed.
…I note that the chair next to hers is marked “His Grace The Bishop of Southwark,” and ask my next-door-neighbour, who is called “Guest of Mr. Stewart Grimshaw,” whether we also should grovel or prostrate ourselves or curtsy when his Grace arrives? No need to worry, however, because into the good bishop’s chair drops Liz Brewer looking chirpy in red/gold/silver/green/blue/yellow/mauve/pink frock, with shoes to match. “What a good disguise,” says my neighbour, “the bishop looks like Liz Brewer.”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 25
