* According to Stephen Howarth, a historian who has examined ledger notes from across the decades and centuries at Henry Poole & Co., more than 95 percent of men “dress left.” One notable exception was “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who was first measured at Poole in 1892, and always did things his own way.
“I’d rebel when I wasn’t actually at work,” Tommy once said. “I’d be wearing things that were quite different.”
One day, seemingly out of the blue, Christopher Nutter threw down the hand towel at John’s Café and closed up shop. Dolly’s father had recently died, and Lily, her mother, was living all alone in her spacious Kilburn terrace. The Nutters and their two sons now moved into the bottom two floors, while Lily kept the one above. Christopher returned to work as a seating upholsterer; Dolly found work serving meals at a community hospital. Each evening on Eresby Road, the couple would come home and convene in front of the television, and Lily would shuffle downstairs to join them for the “lovely murders,” as she liked to call her favorite crime dramas.
Tommy and David went out. Often, they didn’t have to go very far: a short stroll up the street to the Gaumont State, a theater that loomed 120 feet over the neighborhood like a miniature Empire State Building. In the ornate foyer, filled with huge mirrors and glass chandeliers, they would buy two tickets for the cheapest of cheap seats. Ascending the grand stairways in the auditorium, which seated 4,004 people, they would continue to the top back. Then they would peer down across a rapt audience and the orchestra pit at an illuminated stage. Louis Armstrong would appear, clutching his trumpet. Or Bill Haley and the Comets in matching dinner jackets. Once, Ella Fitzgerald came out to perform, and after she was finished, during her standing ovation, Tommy yelled that she was “awful!” for no reason other than to aggravate the people around them.
In truth, Tommy loved Ella Fitzgerald. He loved most American music, from Sarah Vaughan to the Modern Jazz Quartet. For his older brother, though, these concerts and the vinyl LPs represented something almost life-sustaining. To David, good music offered a thrill, an escape, and, most important, a medium for coping with the despondency that had pummeled him mercilessly from a young age.
Depression wasn’t something most people talked about in the 1950s. In the Nutter household, there was no understanding of how to navigate its mysterious shoals. Tommy was rarely afflicted with lingering sadness, and as far as Christopher or Dolly knew, bipolar disorder didn’t exist, and therefore didn’t need to be treated in their eldest child. Back in Edgware, before the move, David would sometimes be too stricken with ill-defined anxiety to even leave the flat. When that happened, he would put on a record and find solace in the rhythm, curling up in a chair by the window. From there, he often watched the same scene recurring on the street below: Long John Baldry, a friend and neighbor, lumbering—he was six-foot-seven—to the Tube station with his duffel coat and guitar case, heading off to jam somewhere in a darkened room.
Soon enough, David began to seek out the clubs himself. In 1960, he was twenty-one years old—mature enough to explore all the salacious nooks of Soho, including the Flamingo, known for its all-nighters, and the Marquee Jazz Club, just to the north on Oxford Street, which was damp and salty, tucked away in a basement ballroom beneath a cinema. David would arrive early and stay late.
Some nights, Dudley Moore would come out to play piano, or Johnny Dankworth would blow on a saxophone with his wife, Cleo Laine, who’d rightfully earned a reputation for her virtuosic vocal scatting. “Long John Baldry would sing in a group with Charlie Watts,” David says, “and I remember Mick”—as in Jagger—“coming in to play with them.” The band was Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated; “Mick” contributed vocals and harmonica over a string of Thursday evenings, after he’d finished up a day of study at the London School of Economics.
On July 12, 1962, Long John Baldry played at the Marquee the same night as the debut public performance of a new band: the Rolling Stones. David failed to make it down to the club that night, though he heard about the set, and the band’s sound of joyful, defiant screaming soon became impossible to miss.
* * *
By the time Tommy moved with G. Ward into the Burlington Arcade, David had already flitted through several forgettable jobs and arrived in the employ of Robert Horner, a photograph printer who had contracts developing the portraiture and fashion spreads for magazines such as Queen. Horner was Scottish, well respected in the industry, and, in David’s recollection, impossible to work with. “He and his wife used to get drunk and go out and come back and start fighting,” David says. “Then he would throw the photographs in her face.”
David found this kind of behavior unusual, though he tried to keep to himself in the studio. As Horner’s darkroom technician, he was being exposed to some of the best photographers in the world: Irving Penn, Guy Bourdin, David Bailey, and (his favorite) Frank Horvat. He also had incredible facilities at his disposal, which he was not inclined to disregard; though Horner was a cheapskate, he was also inattentive, so David could freely print his own stuff on the side without getting caught.
To earn extra income, he accepted a slate of freelance jobs around town. Some of the more interesting assignments came via a man named Mike McGrath, a journalist (in the loosest sense of the term) who churned out entertainment and fashion columns advising kids on the hottest trends and where to find them: “The up-to-the-minute mod wear for the mods—by a mod who knows!”
McGrath had a system: He would offer work to young photographers who wanted to take pictures of celebrities but lacked the know-how to make it happen. Seeing himself as a kind of benevolent fixer, he would tell them he had “no problem” with access because his features were coming out in She and Woman’s Own every month, “as well as all the teenage market magazines, such as fashion articles for Rave.” McGrath would then head off to conduct his interviews and take a photographer along to illustrate the articles. In this way, David found himself snapping an entire lineup of young wannabes all clamoring for the big-time. Some, like Cliff Richard, would actually make it; most would not. Not Paul & Paula, an American pop duo who’d sell more than a million records before vanishing into obscurity seemingly overnight. Nor Neil Christian, a pointy-chinned fop who’d become a one-hit wonder for an uninspired track titled “That’s Nice.”
Neil Christian and Tommy modeling the latest fashions, photographed by David.
Sometime around 1963, Tommy felt suddenly compelled to try his own luck with McGrath, who seemed, through his articles, to be capable of bestowing fame as he pleased. David was baffled, but he took his brother to pay the journalist a visit.
Without a hint of irony, Tommy told McGrath: “I think I’ve got a voice.”
“Tommy did not have a voice,” David says. He could barely hold a tune.
McGrath saw something else he could use, though, and engaged Tommy on the spot.
By then McGrath had another position, which today would be considered an egregious conflict of interest. While writing for the fashion magazines, he was also working with a fashion producer, John Stephen, who was already being touted as “Apostle of the Mods.”
Stephen was a shy, eccentric Glaswegian who chewed his fingernails and liked to take his white German shepherd to lunch at the Ivy. A brilliant entrepreneur, Stephen had noticed the tsunami of youth created by a postwar baby boom, and he understood what the youth wanted, what made their hearts flutter. In 1957, when he was just twenty-three years old, he’d opened a small Soho boutique on Carnaby Street, painting the storefront canary yellow to make it pop from the gray, and set to selling a range of affordable fast fashions aimed specifically at young people: pony-skin coats, striped lilac oxford shirts, low-riding hipster trousers in flame red or orange cotton that would advertise the wearer’s backside like a neon sign. This gamble proved so exactly in tune with the shifting zeitgeist that Stephen soon owned nearly a dozen stores—Mod Male,
Domino Male, Male W1—and a sleek £6,000 Rolls-Royce, though he didn’t know how to drive.
Pinpointing the source of his success, Stephen, who was gay, once told a newspaper: “Man is asserting his masculinity by choosing for himself and feeling free enough not to go for the old stereotyped clothes.” On Carnaby Street, a man was a man for dressing how he pleased, even if the older generation condemned his choices as sexually ambiguous. “There was no fashion for men,” Stephen declared, “and then we came along.”
Mike McGrath spied the “new and exciting world” Stephen was creating in Soho and wrote about it approvingly in one of his columns. Stephen had been “very pleased” with the press—so much so that he then hired McGrath to handle all his publicity.
Part of McGrath’s job in the John Stephen Organisation was to exploit his access to beautiful people. Stephen wanted Carnaby Street to be associated with the best and brightest—to, in effect, borrow the starlight of bands like the Kinks. And so McGrath would conduct his interviews for the magazines, then have some of his subjects wear Stephen’s clothes in the accompanying photographs (taken by those young protégés). McGrath later claimed that his biggest success was getting Billy Walker, the “red hot boxer of the Sixties” and “epitome of masculinity,” to wear skin-tight trousers more commonly associated with fey homosexuals. The provocative shots of Walker were blown up and placed in Stephen’s boutique windows. “Afterwards,” McGrath boasted, “the clothes almost ran out of the shops.”
Tommy was about as far from a famous pugilist as he was from a pop singer destined for the hit parade. But he had something else going for him.
“The coolest man you’ve ever seen,” recalls Carol Drinkwater.
By the age of twenty, Tommy resembled a matinee idol. He was six-foot-two, with a twenty-eight-inch waist: as ideally proportioned as a wooden artist’s model. He wielded his long limbs slowly, deliberately, like a praying mantis. His complexion could be spotty, but a carefully cultivated tan helped disguise any redness, and he had curious, attention-drawing eyes that could shift from guileless to suggestive in less than a blink. Tommy struck one friend who met him around then as “the coolest man you’ve ever seen,” somebody whom “nothing would ever bother.” This apparent equanimity was part of a little-boy quality that would linger his entire life, making him appear open, innocent, even a touch naïve. Yet also corruptible. Which was an ideal combination for a fashionable clotheshorse.
One day that summer, with the blessing of Stephen and McGrath, the Nutters raided Carnaby Street. They caught the Tube back to Kilburn with bags full of clothes. David loaded film into a Mamiya camera. Tommy coordinated outfits and pouffed his hair. For vivid backdrops, they scouted local playgrounds, a cobblestone lane. Inspiration for the shoot was West Side Story (“our religion,” David recalls), rough urban streetscapes contrasting with Jerome Robbins’s fluid ballet movements. Or Tommy’s version of them, anyway.
West Side Story, Carnaby Street edition
David snapped several dozen frames of his brother, all of them radiating earnestness. The next morning, he developed contact sheets on the sly in Horner’s darkroom. These were passed along to McGrath, who passed them along to Stephen, who approved of the work. And soon enough blow-ups appeared in several of Stephen’s boutique windows, each one surrounded by pieces of the outfit Tommy was modeling.
Tommy’s audacity (or lunacy) in approaching McGrath had paid an unexpected dividend. Never mind that a talent scout would never walk down Carnaby Street and say to himself, upon glimpsing these tableaus, “There’s my next leading man.” These model shots would come and go just as lightning-fast as the fashions they were ostensibly promoting. But that was hardly the point. The important thing was the precedent being set, the fact that, for the first time in his life, David was seeing his work published in a professional context beyond some niche magazines. And for the first time in his life, Tommy was being presented to the public as someone with style, somebody aspirational, worth emulating through the purchase of unconventional clothes.
* * *
Every Sunday, with the dutiful regularity of church sermons, Tommy and David would meet up in a pub near Leicester Square and begin drinking.
Michael Long would inevitably be there, a well-dressed chap from Luton who worked on the window displays at Jaeger. And Carol Drinkwater, an Essex “dolly bird” Tommy had met one night while dancing to Blue Beat records at La Douce. As the sun began to set, the rest of the crowd—pretty, young, up to a dozen in total—would become increasingly rowdy, egged on by Tommy, who was silly and impossible after a few too many rounds.
When it was dark, the carousers would empty their glasses, grab their coats, and decamp to an unassuming lane in Soho called Archer Street. At No. 9, they would knock on a discreet door, which opened onto a steep staircase, then a reception desk, where one was required to flash a membership card for further access.
A Rockingham Club membership card
Stuart Hopps, a choreographer and friend of the Nutters, knew there was something odd about the Rockingham Club the first time he went there. “I was very naïve,” he recalls, “but it didn’t take me too long to work out it was a gentlemen’s club.” That is, a queer gentlemen’s club, which it had been since Toby Roe bought the place in 1947 and named it after a porcelain vase.
Roe filled the Rockingham with flocked Regency wallpaper, leather armchairs, and a large white piano. He implemented a strict dress code and oversaw the membership list himself. During the 1950s, well-heeled homosexuals would frequent the club wearing their own take on the neo-Edwardian look (before the Teddy Boys ruined everything). This posh formality, the stiff collars and cravats, led some people to roll their eyes and dismiss Roe’s establishment as “piss-elegant and full of queens” who think they’re in “the Athenaeum” (a grand members club on Pall Mall). The pomp and performance, however, was partly a defense mechanism: The more respectable something appeared, the less attention it would draw from the outside world. “Top drawer queers” like Francis Bacon used to mingle at the Rockingham, a fact that led Quentin Crisp to anoint it the “closet of closets.”
By the time Tommy and David talked their way onto Roe’s list, Sunday night at the Rockingham had become Ladies’ Night—yet another strategic decision by the wary management. “You would have gay politicians there who didn’t want it known that they were gay, as well as other professional men and quite a few designers,” recalls Kim Grossman, a frequent visitor. “They wanted girls to dance with them because, of course, it was illegal for them to dance with each other.”
Despite its provenance, the Rockingham attracted many ladies on Sunday—and at least one entire family. Jack and Violet Aron were a Jewish couple who set an extraordinarily liberal example for their teenage children. Louise, their daughter, recalls, “My mother would cook a big Sunday lunch for a bunch of guests, and afterwards one of our gay friends would do my hair and makeup. We’d all prepare ourselves and then go down to the Rockingham together. I guess I was fourteen or fifteen years old when it started. My family was very camp.”
Jack Aron played penny whistle with the West Indian band. Violet Aron played unofficial club hostess, greeting everybody with a high-pitched “Darling!” Meanwhile, petite Louise, flouncing around in feather boas as though she’d just broken into a costume store and pilfered all the stock, danced with the gay men, including Tommy.
Louise fell hard for the enigmatic boy in his fine Savile Row suit. He began visiting her house for dinners, while she, in turn, began helping him pick up trade in the Rockingham.
“He’s rather nice,” Tommy would say, loitering shyly with a drink in his hand. Louise would nod, accepting her mission, then drift off across the dance floor, up to the chosen one, and announce, with all the flinty bravery of a young girl who has literally nothing to lose in this scenario (though perhaps she wished things were otherwise, because he w
as very good-looking): “My friend really likes you.”
But even with the willing complicity of a young girl, behavior like this put Tommy at considerable personal risk. During his childhood, the British Medical Association had regarded homosexuality as a serious condition. Men were subjected to brutal aversion therapies—electroshock treatment; doses of Antabuse, which induces headaches and vomiting when mixed with alcohol—in what amounted to Pavlovian experiments to make them associate gay sex with horrendous pain. In 1953, as Tommy, ten years old, marched in a street parade dressed as Charlie Chaplin to celebrate the queen’s coronation, Alan Turing was undergoing chemical castration after being put on trial for homosexual acts. The judge had understood what would happen (gynecomastia: the growth of breast tissue) but ordered the estrogen anyway. In 1954, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.
As Tommy was failing his Eleven-Plus, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the British Home Secretary and a former prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, was calling for a “new drive against male vice”—a drive, incidentally, that was strongly sanctioned by the Americans, who were carrying out their own government purges across the Atlantic. In the first year after Maxwell Fyfe’s appointment, 670 men were prosecuted for sodomy, 1,686 for gross indecency, and 3,087 for indecent assault or “attempted sodomy.” The smallest suspicion could result in aggressive police harassment as authorities questioned friends and rifled through private correspondence in search of a smoking gun. The specious rationale behind this witch hunt was captured, in part, by an editorial published in The Sunday Times on November 1, 1953: “In public terms, a society with a high or growing proportion of unnaturalness is a weakened and perhaps a decadent society.” One so-called decadent society was the Weimar Republic, many readers would have recalled—and look how that turned out.
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 5