And yet, despite all these successes and new accolades, Tommy was now treated by some people as redolent of another era, “a relic of the Sixties.” Did this bother him?
“No,” Tommy said, when a journalist asked him this question—“it is rather flattering to be talked about with legends, such as Mary Quant, who, like me, are still around. There were others who disappeared completely, some of them much bigger than I was. I think I survived because I seem to be on my own. There aren’t any others around here who are quite like me.”
Tommy knew that he was “on a level with the best” and that everyone important knew it as well. At the same time, he’d also come to recognize that a tension in the Tommy Nutter image had stopped him from achieving what he really desired, the global foothold that some, like Armani—and, a little closer to home, Paul Smith—had managed to secure. “I fall somewhere in between being a fashion designer and a Savile Row tailor, which, I suppose, can be confusing,” Tommy finally acknowledged. “They both fight against one another.”
Not long ago, that handicap would have frustrated him; he would have tried to overcome it through publicity and media outreach. Now, however, he seemed to shrug.
The staff could sense this mellowing, a letting-go of vaulting ambition. “I think he was quite content to just exist and have his shop on Savile Row again,” recalls Wendy. As they went about their work, Tommy told her he’d been everywhere now and met everyone, done everything there was worth doing. “He’d gone to parties in New York where Judy Garland was sat next to him.” What more could a man want?
* * *
Sometimes, strolling down Savile Row, Tommy would pass his old shop at No. 35a and catch sight of four familiar Corinthian columns framing a large wooden door salvaged from a house in Isleworth. Then he would clock his own name, stenciled on the plate-glass window—and wince, knowing there was still nothing he could do about it all these years later.
“Chittleborough and Morgan at Nutters” was now owned exclusively by his former assistant cutters, Roy Chittleborough and Joseph Morgan. Edward Sexton had left to start his own business at No. 37. Tommy had still not spoken to any of them since 1976.
He did have one important encounter that November, though, at an event called Fabric of the Nation, a fashion spectacular held at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. The purpose of the event was to show off Scottish wools and fabrics; designers ranging from Oscar de le Renta to Jean Muir contributed a wide-ranging collection of clothes, made from locally sourced materials, that were put on public display in the main hall.
To attend a lavish opening gala, Tommy traveled up with Wendy and checked in to the Caledonian, a former railway hotel near Edinburgh Castle. Unbeknownst to them, also staying there was Edward Sexton.
At one point, they all inadvertently converged in the hotel lounge. But instead of diverging immediately, as they might have done a decade ago, the erstwhile business partners sat down and began a polite conversation.
Tommy asked after Edward’s family.
“We sat together for a long, long time talking and drinking,” Edward recalls.
Tommy was “a bit regretful,” says Wendy.
As was Edward: “I could tell that we were both very sad any of this ever happened. He was saying, ‘You were my best cutter ever.’ ”
An admission of sorrow, even a lament for missed opportunities—but no reconciliation. “There would never be bygones,” says Wendy. The break was too traumatic to ever be forgotten.
* * *
A few months later, in July 1990, David flew to London for his own reckoning with the past. Lugging a gaudy purple suitcase, he took a car from Heathrow to Finchley Road, where his mother now lived. She let him in and brewed some tea in the kitchen so they could talk.
In some ways, the David who rang Dolly’s doorbell that evening was the same one she’d been worrying about ever since he decamped to New York nineteen years ago. He was still disorganized, still susceptible to strange twists of fate. But age had grayed him, thinned his hair, and brought—if not peace, then at least a degree of much-needed stability thanks to three major changes that had occurred in David’s life.
First, David was now on Prozac, a drug he found so miraculously effective he’d already converted several of his friends (including Elton John) and appeared on Geraldo, the tabloid talk show, trying to convert the depressed masses of middle America.
Second, he was sober, which was maybe even more transformative. It had started back in 1986, when Kevin, David’s roommate, had found himself addicted to crack cocaine and tried to break free using Narcotics Anonymous. Being nosy, David had gone along to observe the meetings in Harlem. He didn’t think of himself as an addict—he did not do crack—but he was impressed by what he saw at NA, the confessional storytelling and nonjudgmental reassurance. It had lodged in his mind as an abstract idea, until, one morning, he’d been pouring a glass of Olde English 800 when he started to shake violently. His head pounded; he felt nauseous. He’d struggled to get the malt liquor down. And something suddenly flipped in his thinking. Was he actually an alcoholic? He was getting drunk every day, largely as a way of dealing with all his disappearing friends. So David had gone to another meeting, on 125th Street, and told his story, which had made him feel marginally better. Soon he’d started to attend multiple meetings a week, NA and AA, all over the city—had reorganized his entire life around meetings, just as his life had once revolved around nightclubs. Eventually, he co-founded a new meeting, “Recovery by the River,” at the Riverside Church. Since then, Kevin had come and gone, struggling to keep clean without relapsing; but David had never wavered. Not one day since May 19, 1986.
The third major change was a career shift. David had fled the photography world completely. Had, in fact, become one of Mick Jagger’s New York assistants.
“David was having a very bad time, an emotional crisis,” recalls Tony King, who’d also moved from working for Elton John to working for Jagger. “So I went to Mick and said, ‘I’d like to give David Nutter a job.’ And Mick said to me, ‘Are you sure he’s going to be OK?’ Because he knew David through Elton, and knew that David was…” Going through a rough patch. Tony vouched for his friend—and David, after learning the ropes, had shown himself to be more than just “OK.” He’d thrived in the position. He looked after Jagger’s house on the Upper West Side, fed Jagger’s cat, Calico, dealt with building contractors and deranged stalker fans, befriended Karis Jagger, one of Mick’s daughters, and made sure that his houseguests had fresh milk in the fridge and clean sheets on their beds. He even helped Jerry Hall work on her British accent for a theater audition.
Taken together, all these massive adjustments meant David, sitting opposite his mother at her kitchen table, was quieter and more reflective than he had once been. “Sat up & chatted & talked of Wales,” he wrote in his diary.
A few days later, on July 14, David took Dolly to Euston Station, where they boarded a train heading north on a route they’d last taken together some forty-five years before, under the clouds of war. The purpose of the trip was nostalgia, the return to a formative location that David yearned to see one last time with his elderly mother.
They arrived in Barmouth and checked into a small hotel. David took a look at the town library, once a school he remembered well. Then they crossed the Mawddach Estuary to wander the modest streets of Fairbourne. “Lots of new houses rather spoiling the memory,” he wrote in his diary, though he was deeply moved to be there again. “Am trying to soak up as much of this as possible—it’s a lot to take in.”
That night, back in Barmouth, the town where his brother was born in 1943, David had a vivid dream. He still dreamed often, but this one was a little stranger than usual. He wrote it down the following morning.
Dream of someone like Kev or Tommy spraying black spots on a clean white wall. I was furious and he attempted to clean some of it off, knowing I was
mad.
* * *
The first black spot appeared on Tommy’s leg: small, dark, refusing to heal.
Stewart Grimshaw first noticed it when they were summering together in Saint-Tropez. Other friends noticed because Tommy drew their attention to it, making light of what the mark could possibly signify. When Carol Drinkwater read an article describing Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, the reddish-purple patches often associated with AIDS, she asked Tommy if he had anything like that. He replied, “Yeah, yeah,” indicated his leg, and shrugged away the question. But then the spot got worse, his health took a turn, and ignoring it became impossible.
Many of the gay men Tommy knew went to St. Mary’s Hospital to be screened for sexually transmitted diseases. But Tommy refused; he hated being seen in that environment. Instead, he went to see Stewart, who, Tommy knew, had been actively involved in AIDS awareness since the days it was known as the dreaded “gay cancer.” As Stewart recalls, “He came to me because he had loads of questions, and he thought I’d have all the answers.”
For example: How many people get over it?
Stewart told him that nobody “got over it.”
And how long before…?
That depends on your T cell count, Stewart said.
After Tommy exhausted his inquiry, Stewart convinced him to follow up with a brilliant clinician named Brian Gazzard. Having encountered his first case of what became identified as AIDS back in 1979, Gazzard was one of the leading medical authorities in Britain. He’d already seen hundreds of HIV-positive patients by the mid-1980s, and more recently he’d been instrumental in setting up the Kobler Centre, a dedicated HIV/AIDS research and outpatient facility funded by a combination of private donations and money from the National Health Service. (Princess Diana had opened the day-care wing during a well-publicized visit in 1988; it had been packed with patients ever since.) The Kobler saw “a never-ending procession,” Gazzard recalls, and the atmosphere was both depressing—with up to ten deaths a week—and inspiring, because “people were full of courage and determination.”
Tommy made an appointment to see Dr. Gazzard, but he didn’t want to go alone. He asked Stewart to keep him company.
The doctor sat them down in a quiet office. He told them that some people wanted to hear all the details, while others didn’t want to hear any of the details.
Tommy said, “Tell me everything.”
“But that’s not really what he wanted,” Stewart recalls.
What Tommy would have been told is something like this: That there is no easy way to break bad news. That, according to his test results, he was HIV-positive, with a very low CD4 cell count. That he already had opportunistic infections, and there was a good chance he would contract even more. That the treatments available to him were limited—AZT, perhaps, though its effectiveness at prolonging life was finite and accompanied by side effects. That most types of treatment would focus on infections rather than the virus itself, which could not be cured. That there would be ways forward, however, to remain in control of the situation. Because that was the most frightening thing for patients newly cognizant of their status: the prospect of losing control.
Stewart listened carefully and understood exactly what was going to happen to his friend.
Tommy also listened, silent until the doctor finished and asked him if there was anything further he wanted to know.
Tommy thought for a moment. Then, Stewart remembers, he said, “Yes, there is one thing I’d like to know. I’d like to know when Mack and Mabel is opening in the West End.”
Mack and Mabel was an American musical by Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman that had premiered on Broadway in 1974, but thus far failed to transfer to London except for a one-off charity performance at Drury Lane, in 1988. It told the tragic “true” (heavily fictionalized) story of Mabel Normand, a working-class girl who became a glamorous star of silent cinema before sliding into scandal and ultimately dying from pulmonary tuberculosis at the premature age of thirty-seven. Tommy had acquired a cast recording, and declared to several friends that it was his new favorite show.
The doctor stared at Tommy.
“I truly think he thought that Tommy already had dementia,” Stewart recalls.
* * *
When Tommy arrived home that evening, he telephoned Carol.
“What is it?” Carol asked. She was standing in her upstairs bedroom.
“I’ve got AIDS,” Tommy said.
Carol took a deep breath. “Tommy, you’ve got to be positive.”
“I just said that,” he snapped. “I am ‘positive.’ ”
* * *
Once Tommy knew for sure that he had HIV, his first response was to make jokes, and his second was to adopt a kind of optimistic denial. “In the first six months, he was very sure that something would be done and that he would be OK,” recalls Tim Gallagher, one of his salesmen who had also become a close friend. “I think he took it very well indeed.” Occasionally, Tommy called up Stewart to ask some more questions: What about that new drug mentioned in the newspaper? What about this experimental form of treatment? But mostly he preferred not to discuss the situation at all, carrying on as though absolutely nothing had changed. Which is not to say, however, that he wasn’t affected. His assistant, Wendy, spent enough time with Tommy to notice cracks in the carapace. Despite his demeanor of cool unconcern, she could tell that he was rattled. “Would it affect his brain? Would he get all the sarcomas? It could manifest in so many different ways—that’s where his demons were about it.”
These demons manifested most clearly whenever it came time for another doctor’s appointment, now regular and essential. Visiting the Kobler at St. Stephen’s meant Tommy could not pretend that everything was just the same; it forced him, for a few hours each month, to confront the full spectrum of AIDS, from patients like him with mild ailments right through to those in terminal stages—his probable future. The days leading up to his treatments were “awful,” Wendy recalls, “because he’d be hell at work. You could see it: ginning himself up to go. Really didn’t want to go. Probably a bit angry. A bit hard on people, which was not like him.”
* * *
(From David’s 1990 diary)
October 19:…Spoke to Tommy. Didn’t sound too great. Peter Brown called too about the same thing.
October 25: Spoke to Mum who’s going in hospital tomorrow [for a hip replacement]. Sounded fine really but Tom still confined to bed.
November 2: Elton had gone in to see Tommy and he looked awful. Doesn’t sound good at all. Called Peter Brown and he sounded worried too.
November 3: Worried about Tom. Peter Brown had tried to call him but no answer.
November 4: Still worried about Tom. Feel helpless.
November 5: Called Tom and he sounded a lot better. Apparently Mum’s up. Went so well that she’ll be out Wednesday.
November 7: Called Mum and she’s out of hospital. Operation a huge success. She said that Tom was much better…
* * *
At the end of 1990, while Tommy tried to recover from a skirmish with the flu, his staff on Savile Row worked furiously to finish a major order. The customer was Elton John, who’d also given up alcohol and shed five or six inches from his waistline, a stab at sobriety—at “changing his image,” as Tommy described it—that required the creation of an entirely new wardrobe. Despite his fragile health, Tommy threw himself into the challenge, focusing hard to deliver the goods: brocade waistcoats, country squire jackets, and a dozen suits in the kind of “quite brightish tweeds” that most of his regular customers still fled from.
In early January, Elton was spotted at Heathrow trying to check forty-one suitcases on a flight to Los Angeles. “I suppose it is a lot to take on holiday,” he admitted to the press, “but I like to be prepared for anything.”
* * *
Tommy deteriorated; th
e flu became pneumonia; by March, he was in the hospital struggling to breathe. “Sounds awful, really,” David wrote in his diary, and word quickly spread among their friends in London and New York. Peter Brown called David and was “very cagey about Tom.” Peter then asked Tony King, working with David, if David knew what the disease was—“as if I was that naïve,” David wrote. He was annoyed at being treated with kid gloves; he’d seen enough in his life and heard enough about what was happening with his brother to draw the logical conclusions.
By the time Tommy was finally well enough to be released, he’d lost an alarming amount of weight. To keep tabs on him, David started phoning the shop for meandering, seemingly pointless chats that were notable for their evasiveness, for all the things not being said. It would take until May 7, after nearly two months of these calls, before Tommy “casually talked about being positive.” Casually, David wrote in his diary, as though the simple fact had already been established between them and was barely worth acknowledging.
Dolly received even less in the way of notification. On July 15, she called David to share some news that had just been communicated to her by Wendy: Tommy was suffering from a “blood disease,” she said.
David decided not to enlighten her further.
* * *
Tommy tried to steady himself and continue as the unofficial spokesman of Savile Row. He co-judged the annual all-industry Colour & Design Competition (CREATIVITY v COMMERCE) at the Grosvenor House Hotel. He offered suggestions to The Times on dressing for the Royal Ascot: “Perhaps a brocade waistcoat. But breaking away is very difficult…” He even appeared on talk radio to rally against men in midlife crisis who resort to wearing “dreadful” ponytails and sneakers with the “nasty” tongues hanging out. The host asked Tommy what he was wearing; Tommy replied that he was wearing a brown lightweight wool three-piece Prince of Wales check double-breasted suit. “In the old days,” he said, “people used to dress for radio.”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 28
