In 1954, the biggest news story in Britain concerned the youngest member of the House of Lords: the twenty-eight-year-old Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu. The “wretched business,” as Montagu called it, had begun the previous year, when a Boy Scout accused him of sexual assault while camping on his estate in Hampshire.
Montagu denied the accusation, but the police sniffed blood and began a chase, trailed by a pack of pressmen. Eventually Montagu was put on trial in Winchester (“the same place that Sir Walter Raleigh had once been sentenced to be beheaded,” Montagu wryly noted) and subjected to confused proceedings (“I felt bemused and helpless, like the accused in a Kafka novel”) during which a graphic testimony provided by the Boy Scout struck the jury as extremely improbable. They dismissed all charges. Montagu was reassured, but he’d underestimated the determination of the authorities to get a man they suspected was a pervert.
On the night of January 9, 1954, officers stormed Montagu’s house and pulled him from his bed. They also arrested his second cousin, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and a Daily Mail correspondent named Peter Wildeblood. This time around the allegations concerned two airmen. According to the prosecution, after a series of events involving, among other things, a bottle of Champagne and tickets to a West End production of Dial M for Murder, the five men had convened at a Beaulieu beach hut for a party that would become more notorious “than any other since the days of Nero,” as Wildeblood once sarcastically phrased it.
To incriminate their suspects, the police ransacked their homes without legal warrants and seized letters that proved Wildeblood was indeed in love with one of the airmen. (On being an “invert,” Wildeblood would later write: “I am no more proud of my condition than I would be of having a glass eye or a hare-lip. On the other hand, I am no more ashamed of it than I would be of being colour-blind or of writing with my left hand.”) Everything else about the case was, however, circumstantial. Montagu again denied the charges against him—to no avail this time. The lord was sentenced to twelve months in prison, while Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood each got eighteen months for “Serious Offences.” From start to finish, the entire affair, Montagu would write nearly fifty years later, was “a searing episode that taught me much about my fellow human beings.”
For its relentless persecution of inherently decent men, the Montagu Case, as it came to be known, proved one step too far for many people in positions of power. Sure, homosexuality was an abomination of nature; that much was widely assumed. But this double trial was like a public hanging transposed from the Middle Ages: prurient, ethically indefensible. A backlash arose against the government’s “caricature of justice,” its shameless invasion of privacy. In the words of one taxi driver, it was all a lot of “bleeding nonsense”: “If two chaps carry on like that and don’t do no harm to no one, what business is it of anybody else’s?”
The government responded to this shift in public sentiment by convening “The Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.” In 1957, the committee passed down its final report (popularly known as the Wolfenden Report, after the committee chair, Sir John Wolfenden), which recommended that “homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.” This was the first piece of progressive policy concerning queer people proposed in Britain for five centuries.
By 1963, as Louise was luring boys back across the dance floor to Tommy, the government had yet to act on the report’s advice. Clubs like the Rockingham could still be raided if police took offense at what the patrons were wearing or decided the men were dancing a little too intimately. Stuart Hopps was there for one such invasion: “We ran for our lives. The one thing my dad said to me when I came out was, ‘Please promise me you won’t get arrested. You’ll bring shame on the family.’ Little did he know I was going to the Rockingham.”
Nevertheless, there is paradoxical power in being part of an oppressed minority. David could sense it, and it would have been clear to anybody who spent time in a space like the basement on Archer Street. A straight club reproduces the accepted social order; it is mainstream society, its mores and relationships, reproduced in miniature. By contrast, a club for queer men exists outside convention, even if it might present a front of being “respectable.” Historically, the club was a space where these people could go to “let their hair down,” as the saying went—to reveal their true selves before a like-minded crowd. And in this liminal space—like a border town, not quite one thing or another but something in-between—many commonplace rules were subordinated beneath an ethos of solidarity, of possibility.
In the Rockingham, Tommy Nutter, son of a seating upholsterer, could brush shoulders with Grenadier Guards and movie stars like Charles Gray. The “classless spirit” that Mary Quant would say personified the ’60s was magnified tenfold here, and along with it the sense that self-invention was a legitimate avenue to freedom.
Indeed, many of the most important, enduring connections Tommy and David would make in their lives originated, or were strengthened by, the gay underworld. In clubs and parties, a fleeting brush on the dance floor could, like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, change everything in time.
The Rockingham gang, with Louise Aron crouched in front alongside Tommy.
* * *
Tommy and David never talked about the remarkable serendipity of them both being queer. There was no great revelation, no “coming out” or anguished heart-to-heart behind a closed bedroom door. Two gay brothers: this was no more remarkable to them than their shared love for Dusty Springfield.
The same could not be said for their parents, however. One evening at Kilburn, Tommy treated an outbreak of acne using a stash of concealer, then said goodbye to Christopher and Dolly and headed out to meet some friends. Christopher noticed the makeup, just as he’d been noticing Tommy’s matelot tops and bright hipster jeans. After Tommy left, the door closing behind him, David then overheard his father talking in the living room.
“Do you think he’s one of those?” Christopher asked Dolly.
The atmosphere in Kilburn was noxious by now. Christopher’s racist tirades and bigoted remarks were more frequent than ever, turning the house into a suffocating trap.
David began spending nights at his friends’ houses, shuttling back and forth from Eresby Road like a shift worker. Crashing on couches gave him breathing room, a break from his father; it also allowed him to continue investigating the city’s underbelly—the places where “those” people tended to hang out. David got caught up with drag queens. He developed a preference for black men, whom he liked to pick up in bars around Brixton.
A drag queen performs on London rooftops in 1963.
In 1964, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, from New York, arrived in London to give its debut British performance of Ailey’s “Revelations.” (“This three-part, hot-gospelling hymn to Negro faith is a magnificent piece of choreography, moving, deeply felt and exquisitely made,” declared The Times.) David caught a show and was floored by the whole thing, which was, he thought, “so American, so wonderful.” Along with some friends, he gained access to the backstage area, where he met a dancer named Dudley Williams. They quickly became involved. On subsequent nights, David would then stand in the wings to photograph Williams and afterward accompany him to post-show dinners, where Ailey taught him black slang, and some of the dancers discussed the American civil-rights movement. For his part, Williams seemed extremely fond of David; he knitted him a sweater while traveling on the Tube. But both knew it couldn’t last long. As David recalls, “It’s impossible to have a relationship with somebody who lives on the road.”
Tommy soon began imitating his brother’s nomadic living arrangement. His friend Michael Long shared a basement flat with a hairdresser in Kensington, and Tommy was allowed to stay whenever he wanted. But Tommy soon tired of lugging overnight bags to and from Kilburn
, so he and Michael found a new flat on Elvaston Place, a short stroll from Hyde Park, that was Victorian, spacious, and private enough that Tommy could have his boyfriend sleep over.
Christopher Tarling—a handsome, extremely tall young man from Essex—had also started work in the tailoring trade, at a shop named Blades. He met Tommy at the Arts and Battledress Club and was immediately smitten. “The word ‘charismatic’ is really over-used, but I can’t think of another for Tommy,” Christopher later told a journalist. “He had this way of making you feel like you were the center of the universe when he turned his attention on you…He was someone you just wanted to be with, have good times with. He embodied everything you wanted to be. I wanted to live forever with him.”
Once David and Tommy had flown the nest, Dolly was left alone with her husband and mother. She was probably upset, David thinks; her sons had abandoned her to purgatory, failing to turn up even for Christmas. “We just completely checked out from it all.”
But Dolly did her best to maintain the connection. Squinting at her increasingly unfamiliar sons from afar, she gleaned scraps of information from brief encounters with their friends, fleeting mentions of what they were doing in their private lives. Then she arranged these scraps, puzzle-like, trying to make out a picture she could comprehend using her limited frame of reference.
For example, Dolly noticed Louise Aron was often hanging around Tommy. Louise was pretty and warmhearted, clearly infatuated—and Tommy seemed to like her too. The two of them even shared the same birthday, a few years apart. So why didn’t the pieces fit together?
“Why won’t you marry Tommy?” Dolly asked Louise. “Is it because he’s not Jewish?”
“We just completely checked out from it all,” David recalls.
* * *
Tommy often had a female alibi on hand to dispel any suspicions. Louise, for instance, would follow Tommy and Christopher Tarling to Brighton and lie out with them on the nudist beach at Telscombe Cliffs. “Tommy went tits out, everything out,” recalls Louise. “People used to look over the top down at us.”
In early 1964, Tommy went to Paris for a weekend with his brother, Michael Long, and a girl from the Rockingham named Julie Evans. Julie posed as Tommy’s girlfriend (although, how much she realized this was a pose is debatable), and they toured the major sites: the Sacré-Cœur, Eiffel Tower, and Moulin Rouge. To cut costs, they all shared accommodation at a cheap hotel—a detail that Tommy found disconcerting enough to highlight in a letter to a friend. His friend replied, “Your weekend at gay Paree with Julie & Co. sounded marvelous, especially the bit about you and Julie being in the same bed(wait for it)room, in single beds of course! Dogs.”
Tommy’s relationship with women combined attraction and repulsion, reverence and something bordering on misogyny. To some extent, this fraught medley was born of necessity: Confronted with women who seemed intriguing, like potential allies, Tommy and his friends would have to “drop sequins to find out if they’d pick them up”—drop hints, in other words, to see if the women understood exactly what kind of men they were dealing with here. This could lead to disastrous standoffs if somebody’s intuition was off, as with the ex–child actress who realized the truth about the Nutters and their friends and began to scream, during a dinner party, “You’re all queer. You’re all queer!”
Julie Evans, Tommy, and Michael Long outside the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
Yet even when the women were clearly on their side, a great deal of caution insulated the relationships. Carol Drinkwater was perhaps Tommy’s closest lady friend. To save herself a long commute home to Essex, she often stayed overnight at Tommy’s flat—in Tommy’s bed, no less. But Carol recalls that Tommy would always build a wall of “bloody pillows” between them. “I’d say, ‘I’m not going to touch you, for God’s sake!’ ”
“Just in case,” Tommy would reply.
Despite this aversion to the female body, Tommy could also be fiercely loyal to the women he respected. Carol had met her first fiancé, Leonard Wiltshire, when she was just fifteen years old. She knew Len was homosexual, but saw herself as modern; she pretended not to worry about such things. Still, when Len disappeared during her birthday mini-break to Paris, off having a dalliance with an Australian millionaire, she decided to call it quits. Tommy and Michael were holidaying in the south of France; she phoned them up, explained the situation, and they raced up the same day to commiserate over a lunch of celery rémoulade.
Back in London, one following Sunday, Carol went with her friends to the Rockingham. As usual, everyone was very smartly dressed, Tommy in a tweed suit and Carol with her hair up and a plait extension flowing down her back. Suddenly, Len emerged from the crowd. He was incredulous, despite his sexuality, that Carol might try to leave him after years of codependency. He grabbed her hair and yanked. The plait tore away, taking a false eyelash with it. Everybody froze. But then Tommy and Michael pushed Carol into a Facel Vega and sped her across town to Elvaston Place. Louise Aron was there; she mended Carol’s look until it was flawless. Then they returned to the Rockingham, strolling in with eyes narrowed down their noses, Tommy icily unperturbed. “We went back to prove that I didn’t care,” Carol says. “That was a typical night.”
A few years later, a journalist would try to provoke Tommy by opening their interview with a personal question: What kind of women did he like?
“I don’t know, really,” Tommy replied sharply.
A pause.
“I don’t know,” Tommy said again, though this time with “obvious enjoyment” at the thought. Then he alighted on a word that seemed to satisfy him: “Glamorous,” he said. Tommy Nutter liked glamorous women.
* * *
It was in pursuit of two glamorous women that Tommy and David had first experienced the miracle of air travel.
Dolly’s best friend had two daughters, Valerie and Cheryl Garland, who were, growing up, closer to Tommy and David than their actual cousins. Like a tight posse, the two brothers and two sisters had accompanied their mothers on excursions into the country—to Oxford, say—and lazed around the flat together while their parents went out to drink. It helped that Valerie and Cheryl happened to work in show business, that they had bouffant movie-star hairdos and performed a torch-song and dance routine that was good enough to get them cast in a Palladium pantomime. In 1960, the Garland Sisters (their stage name) performed at a Butlins holiday camp on Jersey, in the Channel Islands. Swallowing their nerves about being in an airplane, Tommy and David flew across to cheer them on.
While visiting Jersey, the brothers caught a ferry over to France to see the surreal confection of Le Mont Saint-Michel. This marked, for both of them, the beginning of a passionate obsession with the Continent that would last several years. Throughout the early 1960s, Tommy and David took as many budget holidays as they could possibly afford—to Paris, to Venice, and to Italian resort towns like Rimini and Riccione on the Adriatic Sea.
In the summer of 1964, Tommy and David found themselves on the French Riviera. In Cannes, they ran into the Garland sisters on vacation with their parents. The meeting was unplanned, and unexpected. They laughed about the strange coincidence, then rumbled through neighboring towns and up into the Alps on a shared coach tour. But by then something had changed between them: an estrangement, though there was nothing hostile about it, just a palpable drift. The brothers and sisters stayed in different hotels and remained, for all intents and purposes, on very different holidays. In the evening, the Nutters would go their own separate way. “We never knew what they were doing,” recalls Valerie.
What they were doing, David admits, was frequenting a bar “where all the male prostitutes would hang out. We used to watch them and this German actor—he’s in a lot of horror movies now—picking up men. And we were drinking heavily, so I was blacking out a lot.”
At the same time, Tommy was engaged in collecting European admi
rers, a hobby he’d begun pursuing with the attentive dedication of a lepidopterist.
One of Tommy’s “glamour boys,” as David describes them.
Some of these boys wrote Tommy yearning letters after he returned home—letters he hoarded, even though their discovery could have been catastrophic.
My dear Tommy I am always thinking of you and remember the happy days we spent together and will live on these memories until the next time we meet.
In more than a dozen handwritten missives, all dated to 1964, Tommy appears as an attentive, intoxicating lover, the kind who could make three short days feel like the “best days,” as M. wrote; who was more memorable, in the words of D., than Marianne Faithfull; who proved so alluring that it was essential he provide “a light of hope” that he would soon be returning to Paris, or agree to fly to Vienna using an enclosed prepaid plane ticket: “This is the best connection I could find and leaves us at least two-and-a-half days…” Tommy was the kind of person open to clandestine reunions in Hilton hotel suites. And he enjoyed corresponding about all manner of topics: the best music (“Poison Ivy” by Billy Thorpe & the Aztecs); where to cruise for sex; even sexually transmitted infections. In one letter, written from “ward Sweet 16” in an Australian hospital, its author celebrates the disappearance of his latest ailment, laments that he’s “only had sex once since I’ve been here” (in the hospital), and then accepts an invitation from Tommy to join “the Nutter Girls Club” when he eventually returns to England: “I hope I will be given the position of ‘Madam’ of the house, what with Diamond Ruby Brown as cashier and Lotte & Pam as hostesses.”
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 6