All that changed, suddenly, on January 21, 1983, with Christopher’s death, at the age of seventy, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The death itself made no great impression on Tommy or David. Though Tommy remained with his mother throughout the first night to offer some comfort, he did not think to mention it to his close friends; he required no comfort for himself. And David greeted the news with similar equanimity. “Feel bad for mum,” he wrote in his diary, though for himself, after the initial shock, he felt merely “odd.” He would not fly back to England for his father’s cremation.
Indeed, the death is only worth noting at all for the impact it had on Dolly’s life. Her own mother, Lily (aka Nanny Bannister, aka Creampot Lil), had already passed away, and now her husband was gone as well. It was as though both the jailers had abandoned their posts.
Dolly embraced her newfound liberation. Sixty-six years old, she started what amounted to a second life. She immediately began to travel, something that Christopher had always resisted. She awakened a long-dormant creative side, filling page after page with rudimentary watercolors. (“They were kind of childish, but she loved doing it,” David remembers.) She sunbathed on park benches for hours at a stretch and visited beach towns to stroll along the sand. Most important, she set about reasserting a familiar role in the eyes of her two sons as a woman of strength and open-mindedness—a woman whose mantra had once been “I take people as I find them.” Though Dolly would always hold out hope that Tommy might find “the right woman,” he soon felt comfortable enough to take her to a gay restaurant with his gay friends for a very gay fortieth birthday party. Dolly became part of the clique.
“He loved his mother to bits,” recalls Aldo Fleri, who would get to know her well during her regular visits to the Savile Row emporium. “I think she was one of the major things in Tommy’s life.” Now that Christopher was gone, and Dolly could make her own decisions again, she would remain a significant presence until the very end.
III.
When Elton John announced that he was going to get married, on Valentine’s Day 1984, the general reaction was “complete surprise.” Many fans thought “that Elton John would never marry,” the Evening Standard reported coyly, and yet here was a woman: thirty-year-old Renate Blauel, a sound engineer whom Elton had apparently met in a recording studio, courted in Montserrat, and then asked to be his lawfully wedded wife. Renate had “heard all sorts of stories about Elton, that he’s supposed to be bisexual,” she admitted, but that didn’t worry her “at all.”
Worn by Elton John at Wembley Stadium, 1984.
Tommy agreed to provide the groom’s suit. “You’d think I was making the wedding dress,” he later recalled. “Newspapers and TV stations from all over the world kept calling and speculating about what Elton was going to wear. Frankly, I didn’t know, because I had hedged my bet a bit. I made Elton 20 outfits, two of each in case of mishap, in a wide range of primary colors, including orange and very bright yellows. With each outfit went the appropriate straw boater, shirt, tie and shoes. Elton took everything to Australia.”
Meanwhile, in New York, David received a cold call four days before the big event. Elton shared the news—“What a shock,” David wrote—and then asked his friend to fly to Sydney so he could take photos at a church in Darling Point.
Dazed, David raced to the consulate to secure a last-minute visa.
After a marathon flight with layovers in Los Angeles and Honolulu, and “lots of dishing” on the plane with other transiting guests, he arrived on February 13. “Lots of press coverage already—front page of papers,” David observed. He checked into the hotel and then went out to buy a flash gun, scoping out the harbor city as he went: “No attractive numbers.”
The next day, at Darling Point, St. Mark’s Anglican Church was decorated with hundreds of orchids and white roses. Thousands of fans waited outside, braving the drizzling rain to catch sight of Elton in his tailcoat. Technically, the wedding should have been illegal: Australian law required a thirty-day waiting period after registration to prevent “immature people [from] making immature decisions.” But government officials had waived the rule, according to a spokesman for the New South Wales attorney general, because Mr. John and Ms. Blauel were obviously “two mature people who had known each other for a long time.” (If they had declined to waive it, Elton had an alternative plan to marry on a chartered boat outside Australian territorial waters.)
In the church, David shuffled around the vestry, snapping photos as the couple took turns signing their names on the marriage certificate. The moment reminded him of John and Yoko in Gibraltar—only this time around was even more surreal. David barely knew what to say to Renate. He did not understand what Elton was doing, what he was trying to prove here. Given all that had happened over the past few years, it must have been another joke. Only Elton seemed serious, and the marriage was definitely real.
As the wedding party exited the church, an Australian onlooker yelled: “Good on you, sport, you old poof! You finally made it!”
“It just goes to show how wrong you all were,” Elton yelled back.
David climbed aboard a bus that was ferrying guests between Darling Point and a decadent, £50,000 reception at the Sebel Town House, where he got blindingly drunk on Cristal Champagne.
* * *
David, with peroxided hair, in Central Park.
A few weeks later, back in New York, David went to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Harrison, who asked him to stop taking lithium. Art Kane had shepherded him onto the drug, David recalls. “Art was the first person I knew who was manic-depressive”—meaning the first person he knew who was being treated for manic-depression—“and once, when he stopped taking his meds, he was bedridden, and I had to take his mail over to his flat. I began to identify with what I was seeing and went to see his doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian, who put me on lithium.” Having self-prescribed alcohol for years to deal with his mood swings, David now turned to the medical establishment. But lithium didn’t work, except to assault his body with unpalatable side-effects and cause him, in a moment of euphoric madness, to peroxide his hair. Dr. Harrison submitted him to a psych test, recording his answers to hundreds of questions on audiocassettes. David was also given doses of cilobamine—the second of several drugs he would try over the following few years.
Pamelor (nortriptyline)
Vivactil (protriptyline)
Marplan (isocarboxazid)
L-tryptophan supplements
Buspirone (for anxiety)
Halcion (triazolam; to aid sleep)
David was depressed about money, always in short supply. He was depressed about his achievements, the slim prospect of a career kick-start in his mid-forties. He was depressed about his drinking, which he sensed was out of control, a vicious cycle. “Must stop,” he wrote in his diary.
But what depressed him most was something else: the specter of AIDS, now prominent enough to cast a shadow over everything in his life.
The previous year, at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, Dr. Luc Montagnier and his research team had examined a sample of lymph tissue from an unwell gay man and found evidence of a retrovirus. When the team successfully replicated their original experiment, Montagnier named it lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). A short time later, at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Robert Gallo announced that he had also isolated an infectious agent, which he was calling HTLV-III. These two discoveries (the catalyst for furious recriminations of theft and grandstanding between the two doctors) were, of course, one and the same: what would come to be known as HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus.
While that was going on, the public outside the medical laboratories was becoming increasingly terrified of infection. Even more than usual, gay men were being ostracized, even turning on one another. Vitriolic debates had broken out about s
ex in the bathhouses and whether public health authorities should close them; a Gay Men’s Health Crisis hotline was flooded with daily calls from men who were unsure of how to effectively protect themselves. By the start of 1984, the CDC had compiled a list of 3,000 AIDS cases in the United States, 1,283 of which had already resulted in death. And a new study conducted in Washington, DC—a study of seemingly healthy gay men, of men who believed they were fine—suggested that some 60 to 70 percent of the community was showing signs of infection.
An impending catastrophe.
David was not following the news about LAV/HTLV-III, though he was certainly immersed in the paranoia sweeping New York, where there were now more cases of AIDS than anywhere else in the world. He worried about his own history of promiscuity. Did he have the HIV virus, still undiagnosed? Or was he destined to get it eventually? He’d already seen up close what happened to people who developed full-blown AIDS, the horrifying, humiliating, protracted end.
Norman Joseph, a black Welshman whom David liked to call Shirley (“Bassey, of course”), had been the first of his friends to succumb. It started with lumps in his neck, then a stay in St. Vincent’s Hospital for serious pneumonia. “Feel so sorry for him,” David wrote in his diary. “He thinks he’ll be out by Christmas but…that’s wishful thinking.” David and Kevin went to visit, which was “awful, because the nurses wouldn’t go near him, and we had to force them to provide ice packs to try and get Norman’s temperature down.” Norman was “scared and weak,” and the smell was nauseating. Suddenly, for seemingly no reason, the hospital transferred him to another in the Bronx: “He had to pay [the] ambulance drivers 110 dolls,” David wrote indignantly. Norman seemed to rally his strength there, and he was even released for a time; but then there was a precipitous slide, he was back in the hospital, could barely stand, became rambling and incoherent. The superintendent of Norman’s building changed the lock on his apartment, rendering him homeless. Norman’s mother announced that she would not be holding a memorial, that she didn’t want any “fuss.” Eventually, a ventilator was the only thing keeping him alive. “He didn’t see or hear us,” David wrote. And then it was switched off.
The death had hit David hard. But there was no time, no mourning period, before one of his best friends, Bernard Roth, then fell sick with bronchitis on Fire Island; coughing and mucus and shortness of breath. One day, David received word that Bernard was suddenly being admitted into a hospital burns unit. David went to investigate and was instructed by the staff to put on a paper gown. “Before I went into the room,” David recalls, “the doctor pulled me aside and said, ‘Be prepared to be shocked.’ Then he said, ‘We haven’t got a clue what we’re doing here.’ ”
Bernard had contracted an opportunistic lung infection. To treat it, the doctors dosed him with the antibiotic Bactrim. Bernard had reacted by developing a rare condition called Stevens-Johnson syndrome. “All his skin fell off,” David remembers. It blistered up and sloughed away in gruesome sheets, until Bernard looked as though he’d walked through a fire. “They had him wrapped up like an Egyptian pharaoh. His boyfriend burst into tears.”
When Bernard finally died, excruciatingly, at the end of 1984, David wrote in his diary that he “didn’t feel too bad.” This was not callousness, though, so much as David observing his own coping mechanism. He had now lost two friends. Over the following few years, there would be many more. By necessity, his emotional withdrawal would only grow stronger, more resolute and total as the weight of loss piled on top of him. Of Bernard Roth, David now wrote: “He was dead to me a week ago.”
Tommy dancing with his friend David de Lacy Spiddal.
The crowd convened in Fulham’s Eel Brook Common, opposite John Galliano’s design studio. It was a brisk, blustery Sunday morning in April 1989. Clouds threatened rain with enough conviction that some people had brought their raincoats, though others were committed to their tutus and fairy wings, to showing off rainbow patch pants, Comme des Garçons jackets, antique neck scarves, and brown suede brogues. Roger Dack, the director of Fashion Acts, which had organized the event, strolled across the grass with a megaphone rallying his troops. Later, he would describe it “the most chic walk ever.”
More than 900 marchers had turned up, pledging some £90,000. Or maybe there was “nigh on 1,000 people from Britain’s fashion industry massed together in a giant circus of noise and colour,” and pledges totaled £800,000; estimates varied. The official route threaded up the King’s Road, through Knightsbridge and Westminster, all the way over to Covent Garden, where the finish line was a Champagne reception at Tuttons restaurant. Bruce Oldfield stood at the front of the procession, itching to go; Galliano, lingering behind a battalion of strollers, brought up the rear. But first, before anyone could take a single step forward, 1,116 red balloons were released into the sky: one for every person in the country who had died from AIDS-related causes.
Early in the epidemic, AIDS had been dismissed by some members of the British public as “an American problem” that would never creep its way across the Atlantic. Of course, it had already arrived; as early as 1982, a man named Terrence Higgins had collapsed on the dance floor at Heaven and died a few months later from Pneumocystis pneumonia. “I hope you get very scared today because there is a locomotive coming down the track and it is leaving the United States,” Mel Rosen, an American AIDS activist, warned at a conference in London the following year. By late 1985, there were 241 cases of AIDS in Britain, and newspapers were reporting instances of “scared” firemen and paramedics who were refusing to perform the “kiss of life,” lest they get infected. In 1987, as conservatives talked seriously about compulsory testing of all gay men and possibly even mass quarantine, the science correspondent of The Times wrote that “leading specialists believe…between 40,000 and 100,000 people in Britain are now carriers.”
By the time the crowd had gathered in Eel Brook Common, the cumulative impact remained small compared to what was happening over in San Francisco and New York, but it was no less devastating for those personally affected. In the fashion industry alone, that meant designers, models, stylists, magazine editors, cosmeticians, photographers, boutique owners, managers, agents, public relations professionals, and dressmakers, all either dying as a result of AIDS or under ambiguous circumstances that strongly suggested AIDS. Fierce stigma had stopped many people from naming the thing that truly ailed them.
As the red balloons drifted into the sky above Fulham, Tommy took swigs from a hip flask to fortify himself for the long march to Covent Garden. He was deeply ambivalent about the realities of disease. He tended to avoid seeing ill people as much as possible, and he joked about AIDS—about looking “AIDSy”—as a way of masking his discomfort. Yet he’d been joining fund-raisers like this one since Comptons of Soho, his favorite gay pub, had held a drag cabaret and charity auction to help fund the country’s first purpose-built AIDS ward, the Broderip in Middlesex Hospital. He wanted to help. He offered donations, money, sponsorship—anything he could. Tommy understood the gravity of the crisis confronting his community. Now in his mid-forties, he also understood that it might be his own crisis, too, given the arc of his personal history.
* * *
By 1989, Tommy’s store was doing a robust trade. Wendy Samimi, a sharp, sensitive woman with an eye for numbers (and Tommy’s back), had shown up and streamlined how the business was being run. “He started doing really well,” recalls Alan Lewis. “Not millions, mind you, but a profit.”
Around half of his trade came from bespoke. From Bill Wyman, for example, who got married to the nineteen-year-old model Mandy Smith in a gray Tommy Nutter suit. And from Tom Jones, who declined to have his waist measured, insisting he was a perennial thirty-two inches. Christie Brinkley had worn a white Nutter tailcoat on the cover of Playboy. Divine, too, wore Tommy’s suits when he wasn’t in drag, though he didn’t seem to understand how bespoke tailoring worked, telling people that Tommy kept a
“Divine-sized mannequin” in his back workroom.
Just the year prior, Hollywood had come buying for Tim Burton’s Batman, which was shooting about twenty miles west of the West End at Pinewood Studios. Bob Ringwood, the film’s costume designer, conceived the Joker’s outfits (aubergine and emerald green, square shoulders, tight waistcoats, baggy trousers), and commissioned Tommy to make them actually wearable for Jack Nicholson. “I guess they came to see me because I specialize in those sort of clothes anyway,” he later said. “They are Tommy Nutter looks from over the years.” (During production, the tailors had found Ringwood’s sketches impractical to execute. “You’d cut them and it was impossible, you just couldn’t do it,” recalls Terry Haste. They’d had to improvise their way to the final fifty-three outfits, some of which sported hidden tricks or grossly elongated sleeves for optical effect.)
The other half of Tommy’s business came through his ready-to-wear lines, which were manufactured in Italy using British cloth.* Beyond his own showroom on Savile Row, the Tommy Nutter label could now be found at Fortnum & Mason, as well as Selfridges, which Tommy thought was extremely “supportive of British fashion” and thus “an ideal location to be in.” Indeed, ready-to-wear, once all but anathema on Savile Row, was now being offered by many of his most venerated neighbors. Once again Tommy had proven himself to be a trailblazer in the tailoring industry, and the National Federation of Merchant Tailors had recently acknowledged his foresight by offering him the post of guild president, a great honor that Tommy immediately declined. “I couldn’t be doing with all those golf weekends,” he later explained. “Not me at all.”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 27
