House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row

by Lance Richardson

  On October 17, 1991, Men’s Wear published an article titled “Worth Its Weight” that had been written by Tommy. Given he mostly limited himself to quotes and press releases, this was unusual. It began with a bon mot from Oscar Wilde: “A man’s first duty is to his tailor. What his second is, nobody has yet discovered.” Then Tommy offered his own interpretation: “Although this is a far cry from today’s philosophy, where jeans, T-shirt and sneakers are de rigueur, a young man would be hard pushed to find a better investment than a hand-made suit, to give himself a lift up the ladder of success.”

  He continued, “It may sound snobbish, but once a man has worn a made-to-measure suit, he finds it very difficult to return to off-the-peg.” Besides the obvious superior quality, the reason for this had to do with its magical effect on a man’s self-confidence: “To the body it feels like a second skin while the mind is comfortable in the knowledge that it cannot be faulted,” he wrote.

  Tommy was so committed to the idea that an “immaculate suit” offers “a psychological uplift” that he then took it to a curious extreme. “Being better dressed” could boost morale, encourage spending, and revitalize the business community, “thereby ending the recession.” If everybody simply dressed better, he wrote, then everybody would be better off. Start, Tommy suggested, with the current prime minister, shabbily attired John Major: “Bring back the elegance of Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan and see the world’s confidence in Britain restored!”

  This was an idealistic argument about the glamorous power of clothes, and it is difficult not to read its plea as something personal. Indeed, Tommy finished his essay by turning reflective.

  He was “very fortunate” to find himself in a position where he could “combine high quality tailoring with design and flair.” It was this that had made his career “so fulfilling,” and he hoped that others could appreciate and safeguard the “wonderful British institution” of Savile Row that had lifted him up and given him everything in life. “It would be criminal to let it slip now,” he wrote.

  But it wouldn’t slip; Tommy’s influence was too firmly rooted by this point. Just a few months later, a young man named Richard James would open his store on the Row. “The move will mean that I will be seen as a serious tailor as well as a designer,” he told the press, “and I see this as the ideal move toward the market of the future.”

  Over several decades, Tommy had worn down the division between tailoring and fashion. Now others would arrive in his wake to take bespoke in a whole new direction.

  * * *

  The tipping point came at a dinner for the National Federation of Merchant Tailors. Distressed about his appearance, Tommy was of two minds about whether to even attend. “Everyone will be talking about me,” he told one of his friends. But then, they would be talking about him if he didn’t attend, too, so he may as well go and try to control the situation. He took Dolly as his date and smiled amiably as they circulated through the crowd.

  A few days later, word leaked out that Tommy looked “haggard” at the trade dinner. “That got into print somewhere,” recalls Christopher Tarling. Whispering tailors was one thing, but gossip published in the public sphere was quite another. “Tommy heard and was deeply, deeply affected.” He could no longer convincingly sustain an illusion of wellness anywhere.

  It was around this time that Tommy went to pay a visit to Alan Lewis. The financier already sensed that something was wrong with his chief designer: “You could see it in his business, slowly but surely.” Tommy sat down and immediately broached the topic of money. “He wanted to know about his pension,” Lewis remembers. “Because he was obviously thinking he was going to be incapacitated. And that’s when I said, ‘Look, what is it?’ And he told me. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know anything about it. But I’ve got the best doctors and we’ll send you to see them.’ ”

  Lewis assured Tommy that his pension was secure; they would continue paying out a salary “to make sure he had the income to survive.”

  And so, with that settled, Tommy decided to retire, in January 1992. Though perhaps “retire” is not exactly the word for it. David scrawled it in his diary—“Tom seems to be retiring”—but for many other people, including the ones who worked alongside him, it was more like a sudden self-banishment. One day Tommy Nutter was a vital presence on Savile Row, looming large in his eponymous shop at No. 18–19. And then he was gone.

  * * *

  Over in New York, David and Kevin bought a car—“a real bargain with all the features”—and began to go on joyrides around Manhattan. They drove to Bloomingdale’s, then down to Greenwich Village, then up to a coffee shop on Sixty-Ninth Street. “Can’t keep out of the car!” David wrote in his diary, though he left out the reason for his wild enthusiasm: having “wheels,” as he called it, was an effective distraction from everything else weighing on his mind. Being on the move was a way to change the subject, like changing cassettes in the tape deck.

  Because it wasn’t just Tommy in crisis at the moment. Now there were lumps on Kevin’s face, a patch of something fungal blooming in his lungs. The doctors had also mentioned HIV-associated nephropathy—kidney disease, in other words. All grim news that made Kevin furious and David increasingly numb.

  One day in March, needing to get away from it all, David and Kevin drove through a snowstorm across the Hudson River into New Jersey. They reached Richmond, Virginia, around two a.m. and continued on to South Carolina. They visited Augusta, Georgia, where they attended an AA meeting, and then Atlanta, where they attended an NA meeting. They drove all the way down to Jacksonville, Florida, pushing on until they reached St. Augustine, where they fed breadcrumbs to some catfish. And then, finally giving up, they turned the car around and headed home to face the doctors.

  Not long after arriving back in New York, David received another phone call from his mother. Dolly told him she’d just been to see Tommy in his flat; he was vomiting violently, she said, and she knew it was AIDS. There was no need to hide it from her any longer.

  * * *

  Tommy’s flat, at 27 Conduit Street, was so tiny and austere that people often professed surprise that he actually lived there. With a bedroom just big enough for the bed and a mahogany wardrobe, and a kitchenette where one person constituted a crowd, it was a far cry from the stylish pad he’d once shared with Peter Brown on the same street. Of course, Tommy preferred to see it a little more romantically. Since moving there in the late 1970s, he’d imagined the space as a kind of artist’s garret and himself as the reclining figure in Bernard Buffet’s Homme couché (1947), even writing on a postcard of the painting: “T. N. in Conduit Street getting inspiration.”

  Bernard Buffet, Homme couché (Lying Man), 1947

  Once it became clear that Tommy’s health was in irreversible decline, that he would soon be spending almost all his waking hours inside the flat, Robert Leach, a close friend and stylist, decided to give the place a little makeover. He replumbed the bathroom with new brass faucets. He kidnapped a couch from the Savile Row store, reupholstering it in lush trellis fabric. He bought wallpaper from Osborne & Little and paint in shades of peach and pale green—Art Deco colors, to match all the Art Deco curios that Tommy had collected over the years and arranged around himself, shrine-like.

  Following his retreat into the flat, Tommy was reluctant to receive any visitors, or at least he feigned reluctance when somebody asked. “He said he didn’t want to see anybody, but I could tell when he said it that he really did,” Robert recalls. Tommy was being treated with doses of AZT, which caused him to develop anemia; after he was given a blood transfusion, Robert turned up uninvited on the doorstep. “I’m really glad you’re here,” Tommy told him. He was shaking, perhaps from shock. Robert just sat there and held him for a while.

  Occasionally, when Tommy really needed help, he called Tim Gallagher, who had a spare set of keys. One evening, Tim came over to find To
mmy sitting in the middle of the floor, his legs having given way beneath him. “I can’t get up,” Tommy said.

  “There’s no problem, Tommy,” Tim said. “I don’t care what you ask me to do. I’ll do it for you.”

  “Can you help me get up and back into bed?”

  This was a shock: Tommy was a big man, over six-feet tall, and Tim could just pick him up with one arm, as though he weighed nothing.

  After a while, venturing outside the flat became potentially hazardous. When Tommy would try, wanting to go to Green Park to sit in a deck chair, his body sometimes revolted. “He was so weak he would fall over in the street,” recalls Catherine Everest (née Butterworth), his former assistant. “And people would not really help him because they thought he was drunk. I can remember him telling me that. He was near his flat in Conduit Street, and—he collapsed. ‘They almost stepped over me, Doll,’ he said.”

  * * *

  By June, David was beside himself, unable to think straight. He fixated on his new air conditioner, on some new carpet, on what Jagger should wear for an upcoming concert (a Morris dancer outfit, he suggested). It took John Reid to recognize what was happening and intervene. Elton’s manager suggested that David fly to London at his expense to see Elton in concert at Wembley Stadium; while he was there, he might like to check in and see his unwell brother too.

  David agreed to go on the twenty-fourth.

  On June 14, he wrote in his diary: “Message on machine from Tom saying that I shouldn’t come over. All a bit complicated.”

  On June 15: “Spoke to Tom and he said he wouldn’t mind seeing me.”

  On June 18: “Carol called at 6 and was very teary. Said Tom was really bad and was rude to everyone. She doesn’t think I should go.”

  On June 21: “Very nervous about my trip.”

  On the appointed day, June 24: “Into work in rain. Kev picked me up at 3. Home. Got ready. Drove to Newark. Flight cramped. No sleep.”

  When David finally arrived in London, he did not go to the hospital where Tommy had just been admitted. Instead, he went to a “boring” AA meeting, then collected his ticket from Reid and headed out to Wembley to watch a “lackluster” performance by Elton.

  It was not until the next day that David worked himself up to visit the Cromwell in South Kensington. He went with Michael Long, one of their oldest friends, and carried a bouquet of flowers in his hand. As he stepped into the room, Tommy was curled up on the bed, looking, David thought, exactly like a victim at Bergen-Belsen: eyes sunken, face emaciated, wasting to nothing, his breath an audible rasp.

  David was horrified. He stayed just long enough for Tommy to tell him, “They’re waiting for me onstage at Mack and Mabel.” Then David quietly left.

  David knew this would probably be the last time he saw Tommy alive, though he did not record how he felt after leaving the hospital. What he wrote was: “Michael dropped me in Piccadilly and I sat in a rehearsal of Judas Maccabaeus at St. James’s Church.”

  This was not quite as dissociative as it might seem. Judas Maccabaeus is a three-act oratorio composed by George Frideric Handel. Handel was David’s favorite composer—favorite, in no small part, because Handel had once worked as house composer at Cannons, the stately country home of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, in what would eventually become modern-day Edgware. In other words, Handel had once written music in the very place where David and Tommy grew up, which was a fact that David cherished as somehow significant, a ghostly connection between the composer, his brother, and himself. Sitting in a pew at St. James’s Church, he was now listening to an echo of their childhood.

  * * *

  When Tommy was still mobile, only approaching the late stage of his illness, Stewart Grimshaw had taken him to inspect the London Lighthouse in Notting Hill, a residential hospice for people with AIDS who wanted to die as gracefully as possible. Tommy had taken one look around at all the gay men and announced that he “couldn’t possibly” live there.

  The Cromwell, in South Kensington, was a private hospital used only infrequently by people with HIV/AIDS. It was also the kind of place where a person could go to hide from public scrutiny. Tommy was admitted on June 24; he would stay there for the next fifty-five days.

  Because it was a private facility, Tommy’s room was more like a hotel suite than a hospital ward, offering a spacious bathroom and modern furniture. By the time he actually arrived, though, Tommy was only vaguely aware of his commodious surroundings, and sometimes it would seem to him more like a nightmare place. “He would go through periods where he’d say, ‘There’s a man in my bathroom,’ ” Wendy recalls. “He was very scared of this man in his bathroom.”

  These hallucinations would confuse the people who now came to pay their final respects. For example, Tommy told Aldo Fleri that helicopters were flying out of a cupboard at the end of his bed. When Timothy Everest came to visit, Tommy invited him to climb onto the bed, lifted off in his own “helicopter,” and flew them away down the Thames. On another occasion, Tommy insisted to Robert Leach that Tina Turner’s wig was hidden somewhere in the room and that they should try to find it; when Robert got up to leave, Tommy said, “I’m not coming out tonight, but I’ll come out tomorrow.”

  In mid-July, during a moment of lucidity, Tommy requested to see Valerie Garland and Cheryl De Courcey, the glamorous “Garland Sisters” he and David had grown up with back in the 1950s.

  Dolly made the call. She told them, “Listen, he has his own lifestyle.”

  “That’s all she said,” Valerie recalls. “And then she said that he was dying of HIV and that he wanted to see us.”

  The sisters braced themselves and went to the Cromwell together. They sat around him and tried to think of things to say. “It was like talking to a skeleton,” Valerie recalls. “But he was still smiling. And that’s when he turned and said, ‘You know what I should have done? I should have grown up and married you.’ ”

  Tommy with Valerie Garland on a speedboat in the Channel Islands, 1960.

  * * *

  Dolly refused to leave the hospital. She ate and slept there and kept constant, vigilant watch over her ailing son. For David, who’d returned home to New York almost immediately following his visit, his mother became a set of eyes and ears and emotional responses, a way to monitor from afar the minutiae of his brother’s condition. “Spoke to Mum,” he wrote in his diary. “Tom may have TB. She sounded worried.”

  “Spoke to Mum and Tom still won’t eat. He’ll stay in the hospital. I fear the worst. She sounded very shattered.”

  “Spoke to Mum who sounded frustrated. Doctors won’t tell her anything.”

  “Spoke to Mum. She said that Tom was looking ‘grey’—they had made him do a will.”

  When it came to people outside the “family”—a circle that encompassed, beyond herself and David, several of Tommy’s most intimate friends—Dolly was more like an unyielding gatekeeper. She revealed nothing and, as his health became increasingly precarious, admitted fewer and fewer visitors. The actress Ann Mitchell was gently denied: “I always felt—although we all longed to see him—that it was his way of protecting his friends. He wanted our memories of him to be pristine.” And Louise Aron, the woman who’d once picked up men for Tommy in the Rockingham, found herself shut out after Dolly hung up the phone. “She thought I was press,” Louise recalls. Recently, a series of premature, ghoulish eulogies had started to appear in newspapers with headlines like: “Fashion King Nutter Fights for His Life,” and “Tailor to the Stars Dying of AIDS: Tommy Nutter Has ‘Days Left.’ ” So Dolly was understandably wary of people she thought might be journalists. “Of course,” Louise continues, “Dolly phoned me back up again and said, ‘Louise, I’m really sorry. It was so long ago!’ But even then, I couldn’t see him.”

  One person who was admitted into the suite was Cilla Black, who came on August 3 with Bobby Will
is and Peter Brown. Cilla had wanted to visit earlier, writing a card to Tommy scrawled with the lyrics to one of her songs.

  Other eyes see the stars up in the skies,

  but for me they shine within your eyes

  She was frightened, though, of how she might react when confronted with his terrible appearance. For moral support, Cilla waited until Peter flew over from New York so they could all go together: a reunion to evoke the old, happier days of dinners at San Lorenzo.

  Tommy’s mind was wandering when they walked into the room. “Look who’s here,” Peter said. “Do you know who it is?”

  Tommy opened his eyes and turned to Cilla. “It’s Barbara Windsor,” he whispered. Barbara Windsor was a petite actress most famous for starring in the Carry On franchise, a series of bawdy British comedies.

  Peter gaffawed; his patronizing query had revived Tommy’s mordant wit. But Cilla was so grief-stricken she barely heard a word.

  It was Dolly who stepped in to offer some comfort.

  * * *

  Wendy was standing in Tommy’s suite. “You could see that he wanted to go,” she recalls, “but his mother was sitting right there.” Tim Gallagher came in to say hello, and Wendy asked him to take Dolly out to the hospital café “for a cup of tea.” Once they left, Wendy walked over, sat down by the bed, and took hold of Tommy’s hand.