Well, maybe just a little.
The front window displays were a master class in exhibitionism. While everybody else on Savile Row hid behind frosted glass and modest bronze nameplates, Nutters opted for clear sheet glass, prominent stenciled lettering—NUTTERS—and a rotating lineup of eye-catching installations beamed straight from the brain of Michael Long: a painted mural of Egyptian ruins; a Punch and Judy puppet show; “a riot of Royal Purple and Fuchsia-coloured ostrich feathers.” Huntsman may have had Royal Warrants, and Poole may have had bits and pieces left over from the Great Exhibition of 1851, but Nutters, for a time, had red ribbons dangling Champagne bottles that clinked deliciously every time the door was wrenched open.
Tommy liked “the idea of an ‘old look,’ ” he once claimed, the traditional muted understatement of Savile Row. But he also defended his outrageous windows as an opportunity to “show what we do, so that people will not be frightened to come in.” Compared to its intimidating neighbors, Nutters was intended to be “a lot more relaxed,” the kind of place where a stranger should feel emboldened to walk in uninvited and ask for “something different.”
In this respect, it turned out to be successful before the official launch date had even arrived. One evening, Tommy and Cilla were sprawled across the carpet laughing and drinking wine, yet another raucous celebration in the two weeks since her surprise wedding. It had recently come to their attention that Tommy was about to be the first new tailor to open on Savile Row in more than a century—and, perhaps, the youngest ever.
Suddenly, a group of Americans knocked on the door. Attracted by the warm glow, they’d peered through the window, spied the party, and decided they wanted to join. The door was thrown open. Space was made on the floor. Another bottle of bubbles was uncorked. Everyone was welcome at Nutters.
* * *
Everyone, that is, except Louise Aron, the boisterous girl from the Rockingham.
Jack Aron, Louise’s father, had recently died, an awful, cataclysmic change for her family, and she was looking for something to cheer her up. She told Tommy she could barely wait for his launch, that it would be a grand party, glitzy, boozy, to which she was planning to wear something camp—“big feather boas and all that stuff,” just like the old days. But one morning Louise was in the HMV on Oxford Street, where she worked, when some friends came in and told her she’d missed it. The launch had already happened. Without her. Despite their comforting words—“You don’t have to worry, though, because everyone was asking where you were”—Louise was devastated by the news. She started to cry. No invitation when she needed one most. “It was an awful thing to have done to me,” she recalls. “I’d been friends with him for years.”
Louise immediately blamed Peter (“He didn’t like me, that’s what it was all about”), but she could never quite work up the courage to confront Tommy directly to confirm her suspicions. And so they drifted apart. It broke the love between them, and they didn’t speak “for a long, long time after that.”
Ironically, the official launch party for Nutters of Savile Row had occurred on Friday, February 14, 1969—Valentine’s Day. Peter delegated party logistics to a public relations woman he’d worked with through the Beatles. The star-studded guest list, though, was largely his doing. Peter had dressed the Apple Corps doorman in a Nutters frock coat, which meant that anybody who visited the building received a personal preview. Tommy was a regular visitor to Peter’s office, too—the fans who gathered outside, called Apple Scruffs, got to know him so well they’d wish him good night as he’d stroll past—and Peter had introduced his boyfriend to the staff and impresarios. Nutters of Savile Row had garnered some serious advance buzz, in other words, and the glitterati were encouraged to come out and toast Tommy as one of their own.
The final guest list is lost, though Paul McCartney is said to have shown up, along with Twiggy, “It Girl” of the moment, and her manager/boyfriend Justin de Villeneuve. Several of Tommy’s friends did make the cut, as did (according to Cilla) “a bunch of East End gangsters.” And the financial backers, of course: Peter, Cilla, Bobby Willis, and James Vallance White, huddling together as a flashbulb popped in the candlelit showroom.
Tommy had arranged the purple candles to foster a more intimate atmosphere. “God,” Cilla told him, “I’ve never seen such big candles.” He gave her a few to take home, and it wasn’t until the next day, taking a closer look, that she noticed they were penis-shaped. “I burned them then and there,” Cilla later said. “Destroyed the evidence.”
From Tailor & Cutter
Also at the launch was Tony King, a music promotions manager who drew a great deal of attention for what he was wearing. Tony had met Tommy “at parties, of course,” and been entranced by his “languid nonchalance”—Tommy had a tendency to move slowly, and speak slowly, almost as though he were slightly sedated. “And he was all angles,” Tony recalls, “like Fred Astaire. He had all the right angles for the clothes he was wearing.” In fact, everything about him was “elegant, not only physically but also emotionally.” Tony was fascinated. At one party, he’d walked right up to Tommy and said, wanting to emulate his look, “I’d love to get a suit made by you at your tailors.” Tommy had smiled shyly and asked Tony if he’d prefer to be a model; he was currently looking for somebody tall and lithe to test out a new experimental silhouette. Tony said yes and accompanied Tommy to meet Edward, who struck him as “a mischievous man but a brilliant cutter.” The result of that meeting was the first commercial Nutters suit to be produced at No. 35a, a suit Tony was now proudly showing off at the opening launch, like a walking advertisement.
On Savile Row in 1969, the standard suit was narrow and staid, designed to deflect attention away from the male form beneath the layers. Suits at Nutters promised a different approach. Edward was an expert at building hacking jackets: long, full-bodied coats originally intended for horseback riding, with wide skirts that could spread out across a saddle. The Nutters silhouette took this template and exaggerated it, adding “masses of shape and flare” to the skirt, as Tommy once explained, and a tight waist and chest that would emphasize the wearer’s body. To this close-fitting creation (“long and leafy,” says Edward) they then went totally overboard on the width of lapels, adding double-breasted lapels to a single-breasted coat that were so enormous they grazed the sleeve heads. The coat pockets were straight and flapped, with the outside ticket pocket cut “deep, deep.” The waistcoat also sported seriously capacious pockets. The trousers, by contrast, were such a snug fit that pockets were impossible, though these were suits for people who liked to move, so there was flexibility there too. The full effect, when you stepped back and took it in as a whole, was pleasing to the eye; it displayed a “gallant Nutter character” that Punch would once memorably pin down as “an eccentric mix of Lord Emsworth, the Great Gatsby, and Bozo the Clown.”
Tony King
Nothing else even remotely like this existed at the time. Tommy, deliberately echoing the language once used to describe Christian Dior’s revolutionary women’s collection of 1947, would boast that his design represented an entirely “ ‘New Look’ for menswear.”
But what was most remarkable about the Nutters suit was not the design so much as what the design represented. Edward gets to the heart of the matter when he says, “We weren’t two clever guys who wanted to go out and create history; we just wanted to express ourselves through our work.” To express themselves through their work meant, inevitably, to express their collective influences. Teddy Boy street fashion. The kind of neo-Edwardian dandyism seen in Rockingham homosexuals. A youthful fantasy of grace and glamour, pop music and movie stars. Even the “louche-but-sharp flamboyance” of West Side Story. The first Nutters look represented a culmination of everything modern about Tommy and his cutter, everything mod, smashing, subversive, Continental, American, queer, and camp—combined with a keen fidelity to old-school Savile Row craftsm
anship.
Tony King’s suit was just the beginning. “I thought I would play things down a little by making the first suit in Alsport tweed,” Tommy admitted. The more dramatic iterations would come later, when clients were more accustomed to his subversive sensibility. It was like slowly spiking the punch to raise everyone’s tolerance for the hard stuff.
Yet even Tony’s “soft” suit caused something of a scene after the launch party.
A few days later, Tony turned up for cocktails at the house of Hardy Amies, dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II. In 1961, Amies had made fashion history by staging the first ready-to-wear catwalk show for men; he’d also published his ABC of Men’s Fashion, a bible of good masculine taste (underwear, for example, “should be as brief as wit and as clean as fun”). Not long after, Stanley Kubrick had commissioned him to imagine the costumes for 2001: A Space Odyssey—to imagine what clothes might look like thirty-plus years hence, when men circled the Earth in centrifugal spaceships. In other words, Hardy Amies was one of the country’s foremost authorities on style. When Tony arrived at his house, though, Amies was on the staircase wearing a dressing gown. He was running late.
“Oh, hello,” Amies said, looking Tony up and down before ushering him through to the drawing room. “Do go in, do go in…”
When Amies finally emerged, fully dressed, he strolled up to Tony and introduced himself properly. Then he asked, “Where did you get that suit?”
Tony said, “Tommy Nutter, opposite you”—Amies ran Hardy Amies Limited from No. 14 Savile Row.
“The new boy?”
Amies barked across the room for an associate to join him. Then, surrounded by fascinated guests—“in the middle of the bloody cocktail party,” Tony recalls—Amies pulled out a tape measure, unraveled it, and began to measure the Nutters lapel, which he deemed “extraordinary.”
* * *
Accuracy can become collateral damage in the polishing of a good anecdote. “Imagine this,” began a journalist as recently as 2011: “You’re 26, from Barmouth, and a bit of a whiz with a needle and thread. You turn up at work for a day’s tailoring, nervous in the knowledge that John Lennon and Yoko Ono are due in soon for a fitting. However, upon turning the corner to your atelier on London’s prestigious Savile Row you see they’re already there, standing in the window and both absolutely stark naked.”
Really?
Tommy seemed to suggest as much. John and Yoko visited Nutters and stripped naked to browse through the clothes, he once said: “The customers were complaining, but what could I do? This was John Lennon.”
Edward remembers things a little differently. “It was on a Saturday,” he says, “and John was prancing around in his underpants. He was in and out from behind the curtain; we had a big tartan one. And Lady Harlech came in to pick up a check coat. Of course, next thing you know, the curtain comes back and there is John Lennon in his pants.”
Not naked, then?
“Probably got exaggerated slightly,” Edward admits. “But everyone is dead and buried now, and I wouldn’t want to contradict Tommy if he said there was nudity.”
* * *
John and Yoko wanted to get married. Not like Cilla or Paul McCartney, though; not with the circus of attention that inevitably resulted from posting the legally required banns notice forty-eight hours in advance. John and Yoko didn’t want any publicity. In fact, John didn’t even want to tell the other Beatles: “They are as big-mouthed as anyone,” he said. He and Yoko had tried to tie the knot on a cross-channel car ferry but were foiled by visa issues and an uncooperative captain. They had also considered traveling to a country like Germany, which turned out to require a three-week residence first before marriage. Eventually, they just got sick of all the roadblocks, flew to Paris, checked into the Plaza Athénée, and asked Peter Brown to sort it out for them.
Peter’s response to the couple, hatched with Apple lawyers, is immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”:
You can make it O.K.,
You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.
As a British Overseas Territory, Gibraltar recognized John’s citizenship, but imposed none of the conditions of home and no residency requirements. Peter chartered an executive jet to collect the couple in Paris and promised to meet them at the Rock with a discreet photographer.
He phoned David. “I knew he was talented,” Peter recalls—David had, after all, just shot Cilla’s wedding at his request—“and I knew he was honest. I said to him, ‘David, I want you to go to Gibraltar tomorrow. Don’t ask me why. Just get there, and take your camera.’ ”
David was promptly collected at his Primrose Hill studio and driven to the airport. He had no idea what was happening, although when he did find out, en route, he was not particularly moved, almost never getting star-struck: “I was like, ‘OK, let’s do it.’ ”
On March 20, John and Yoko arrived in Gibraltar around 8:40 a.m. after a three-hour flight. Yoko—described by The Times as “an actress, painter and maker of a film on human bottoms”—wore a white floppy hat, a white knitted mini-dress, white tennis shoes, and the kind of giant black sunglasses people wear to hide from the world while simultaneously drawing attention to themselves. John wore Nutters: a cream corduroy suit he’d been fitted for in Savile Row. He also carried a coat that was made, according to one newspaper report, from human hair. (“John said it was monkey fur,” recalls Peter. “Black and rather stylish.”)
John liked Gibraltar, the symbolism of the Rock, strong and enduring, which reminded him of his relationship with Yoko. But there was little time for sightseeing. Joined by Peter and David, the couple drove to the British Consulate to swear affidavits before a magistrate that there were no impediments to their getting married; then they bought a special license. The registrar, a man named Cecil Wheeler, had spent a restless night worrying that word of the ceremony would leak, leading fans and media to storm the building. But it was a quiet affair, over in minutes. Acting as witness, Peter stood to the side of the desk, though both “Peter Brown” and “David Nutten” [sic] would be listed on the marriage certificate. David snapped away, barely pausing for a moment to contemplate the surreal tableau of a superstar musician wearing his brother’s new design; his brother’s boyfriend; and a small, inscrutable Japanese woman, in what would quickly become known as one of the most infamous weddings of the decade.
David’s photographs were later used to illustrate John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Wedding Album (1969).
Back on the runway, press photographers had somehow received word and materialized at the side of the jet. Perhaps as a taunt, John waved the marriage certificate above his head; then he climbed aboard, having spent all of sixty-five minutes on the ground. David exposed a few more rolls of film during the flight. “John was being funny and we were all laughing,” he recalls. “Even Yoko.”
Peter Brown turns the camera back on David.
Once the jet touched down in Paris, John and Yoko jumped into a car and sped off back to the Athénée, where they would hide out for a few days before heading on to Amsterdam to stage their first “Bed-In for Peace.” (Having successfully executed a low-key wedding, they would now try their hand at a spectacle.)
Meanwhile, David was accosted in the terminal as he prepared to fly home to London. The crowds pressed in, David recalls, “and this woman from some tabloid came up to me and said, ‘I’ve been instructed to take your film.’
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, you cow. Don’t try anything.’ ”
Sitting on the plane, downing Champagne as they crossed the English Channel, David realized he hadn’t brought any money for taxi or train fare. He had to ask the pilot for a ride into London.
Back at NUTTER in Primrose Hill, he began going through negatives. Outside the darkroom, Carlo, his business partner, attempted to man the telephone. As Carlo recalls, “We had Camera Pr
ess calling every ten minutes”—Peter had made a deal with the agency—“and the guy was asking, ‘When can we get this film from you?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s in the processing bath and you can’t have it until it’s dried.’ He said, ‘We need it! You don’t understand. Every paper in the world wants this stuff.’ I said, ‘Well, you just have to wait. We’ve got to do the contact sheets.’ He said, ‘We’re not fucking waiting for contacts!’ And the guy who owned Camera Press got a cab over and virtually beat down our door: ‘Where’s the film?’ I said, ‘It’s in the drying cabinet.’ He went to the drying cabinet and just started unclipping it. It was really dramatic. I was quite taken aback.”
* * *
One day on Savile Row, Hardy Amies stepped out of his studio and rushed into the street, pursued by a writer who was furiously scribbling in a notebook, as if taking dictation. Amies was talking nonstop—“Marvelous tailor,” he muttered—as he waved away a procession of speeding cars that threatened to knock them both to the ground. “Absolutely marvelous.” Finally, he reached No. 35a and completed his thought, which the writer obediently recorded: “Tommy Nutter is the most exciting tailor on Savile Row in decades.”
The morning after admiring Tony King’s lapels, Amies had swanned into Nutters and spent several thousand pounds. Later, he would explain what appealed to him about Tommy like this: “Savile Row is a street of bespoke tailors. They execute the orders of their customers. They help with advice but do not attempt to originate. Tommy Nutter did.”
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