In the middle of September, David received a phone call from Tony King that made him race to the Pierre: Elton John was back in town. It was like the moon vaulted suddenly into the sky over Manhattan; the tide of David’s mood swelled immediately.
What followed was “one of the [most] hysterical days of all time,” David later wrote. A horse and buggy through Central Park to a restaurant on Lexington. A drama in Chelsea Cobbler that made the whole group walk out in a collective strop. At Maxwell’s Plum, Elton threw chocolate cake in his own face, and everyone inhaled helium balloons. Then there was a party for Andy Warhol at Halston’s house (David decided that Warhol “seemed nice”) and a concert at the Uris Theatre for Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald, which David thought was “magical,” with “wonderful vibes.”
Society photographer Robin Platzer catches Elton’s entourage (including David) leaving Halston’s house.
A few days later, Elton told David that he had something for him: a Pioneer Stereo System. And this was only the start; the singer could be breathtakingly generous with people he liked.
At that time, David happened to be searching for work. Not to replace his printing job with Bill King, whom he seemed tied to like a marriage, but something on the side that would utilize his own talents as a photographer. An approach had been made to Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, on his behalf; David had also taken his portfolio to Howard Bloom, head of public relations at ABC Records (though he was less than enthused about the musicians Bloom represented).
A few days after the stereo arrived, David received another gift from Elton in the form of an invitation. It came via Linda Stein, the band manager, and then through Tony King directly: Would David like to come to Los Angeles to watch Elton perform at Dodger Stadium, the first rock concert to be held there since the Beatles played in 1966?
This was not a job offer as such; there was already an official photographer, Terry O’Neill, who had worked with Elton for years. David would just be part of the entourage, though they wanted him to stay on for a couple of weeks. Money was not discussed—everything was done informally around Elton, who just paid your rent, picked up tabs, gave you gifts or sums of cash from time to time—but David didn’t care about those kinds of details anyway. He wanted to get away. Needed to get away from New York. “Can’t believe it,” he wrote in his diary after accepting the offer.
Having announced to Bill King that he would be gone for a while, David then flew to the West Coast. It was October 24. Tony collected him at the airport and drove them to the Holiday Inn in Westwood, which John Reid had rented out for friends and family flown in from London on a private Pan Am jet. David, however, would be staying elsewhere, in Tony’s luxurious apartment. And Elton John was staying in Beverly Hills at a mansion that had once been owned by Greta Garbo.
At Dodger Stadium, over the following two days, Elton played for 110,000 people. David watched both concerts from the press box. He also watched Terry O’Neill snapping photographs of Elton, capturing “what it must have looked like from Elton’s perspective,” as O’Neill later wrote, “looking out at Dodger Stadium in front of tens of thousands of fans, screaming fans, people who were singing along with him, songs he and Bernie Taupin wrote…”
David had brought his own camera to Los Angeles, and he used it liberally to shoot the action backstage. These images of Elton John—and Billie Jean King and Cary Grant, among others—would turn out to be the first of thousands he would take over the next decade, a kind of dress rehearsal for a position he had no idea was even on the table.
Elton John at Dodger Stadium with Billie Jean King and Cary Grant.
After the second concert, on October 26, John Reid threw a big dinner to celebrate Elton’s record-breaking achievement. Everyone was drunk and emotional, and David cozied close to Elton, who had already burst into tears during the performance. Suddenly, Elton turned and invited him to Paris. David, without a moment’s hesitation, said yes. “Will join him there,” he wrote in his diary. “Love him.”
* * *
Tommy and Edward arrived in Los Angeles on November 7, which meant an overlap with David of three days. Plenty of time, it turned out, for Tommy to infuriate his brother by failing to call for the first twenty-four hours; and then, when they did finally connect, by asking him if he was “getting enough out of Elton”—a question that thoroughly appalled David.
The official purpose of Tommy and Edward’s trip was to follow up on Edward’s previous visit in April, fitting orders and taking new ones from an elegant suite in the Beverly Wilshire. However, it soon transpired that Tommy had an ulterior motive too. “It seems so old-fashioned today to look like a hippie and act bizarre,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “What I’m doing is bringing younger men back to suits, glamor, tailoring—things that haven’t been in for years.” In other words, he was scheming to open his first American boutique. “I am going to create a store that is similar in design to a fine tailor’s shop in London. And I’m doing my first ready-to-wear line for Los Angeles.” He had been reading about Chanel, he added, and hoped “to create the first really expensive men’s cologne.” He felt that Hollywood was going to be “very lucky” for him.
Tommy had an accomplice for these plans in the form of Peter Brown, who was also in Los Angeles. Recently, Peter had left the Robert Stigwood Organisation (“I was bored with the music business”), raised some capital on Wall Street, and migrated over to California to develop movies. As far as Peter knew, Nutters was still going strong in London, so he’d arranged some meetings for Tommy on Rodeo Drive, where a space had recently become available to rent.
Edward went along to listen, though he was flummoxed by this whole scenario. “I was a realist,” he recalls. “I was thinking, ‘This is all a pipe dream! We can’t even pay our bills where we are, let alone open a shop on Rodeo Drive.’ ”
Hadn’t Tommy just moved into a tiny bedsit above the Savile Row store in order to save some money? Edward couldn’t understand his reasoning here. But then, Edward understood increasingly less about his partner these days. Edward did not (does not) see himself in terms of an artist. “I think there’s a lot of art in what we do,” he says, but he prefers the label “craftsman.” He had come to Los Angeles to collect the business they needed to sustain a strong, vibrant craftsman’s firm on Savile Row, one that could provide them with comfortable incomes while also allowing them to express their taste and ideas through excellent work. From Edward’s perspective, that is what Nutters had started out as in 1969, and it was what he’d signed up for as head cutter: “No one wanted to be a designer. No one wanted to be a legend. It was just two young fellas working hard, believing in what they did.” Only now Tommy was pulling things in a different direction, an “exasperating” one that seemed foreign to Edward, not to mention financially parlous.
In truth, Tommy didn’t like Los Angeles very much. Peter spent a few days driving him around the spaghetti-like freeways, past gated mansions, lonely canyons, endless suburban sprawl, the blue Pacific shimmering perpetually away in the distance. One afternoon, they returned to Peter’s new house in West Hollywood, just off Melrose Avenue. Tommy decided he had seen enough. “So,” he demanded, “where is the glamour?” As though Peter were deliberately withholding it.
“Tommy, I don’t think there is any,” Peter replied.
This was not an acceptable answer.
Here is what Tommy told the Los Angeles Times about his first impressions of the city (impressions that were based in reality, but then embellished by his rococo imagination): “I expected to see people dancing down the street doing the conga around palm trees. Fred Astaire has been a big influence on me. But I suppose I’m luckier than most tourists. The first person I saw when I got off the plane was Paul Newman. And the very first time I went to a Hollywood party Mae West walked up to me and said, ‘Come up and do a suit for me sometime.’�
�”
David’s diary, 1976
To recuperate in the sunshine after a hectic year of nonstop touring and recording, Elton John rented a mansion in St. James, a wealthy enclave on the west side of Barbados. For the “Christmas season”—that is, from early December until the middle of January—he would retreat from the spotlight and concentrate on his health, both physical and mental. Elton was joined in this convalescence by a rotating lineup of band members, promotions staff, Bernie Taupin, Kiki Dee, and David, who was stunned to be included on the list. From Los Angeles, he’d flown home to New York for all of seven days, then rejoined Elton in Toronto (“E. J. took the plunge and came to Manatee with us…The kids in the disco couldn’t believe their eyes”). Now he found himself in a lavish palace with its own retinue of waitstaff, adjacent to a Caribbean beach that was filled with roving Barbadians. “Beauties all around,” David wrote in his diary. “Am going mad.”
Each morning, the first person to wake up had to throw open the windows, initiate prep for a communal breakfast of Bloody Marys, put a record on the stereo, and play their theme song at maximum volume: that was the rule. For Elton, it was “Babyface,” by Wing and a Prayer Fife and Drum Corps. For Tony King, it was “Jump for Joy,” by Biddu Orchestra. For Mike Hewitson, Elton’s valet, it was “All By Myself,” by Eric Carmen. And for David, it was “That Old Black Magic,” sung by Frank Sinatra—though it was never David who woke up first.
For six weeks, life passed in a hot blur of sunbathing, swimming, jet-skiing, charades, alcohol binges, hangovers, photography sessions, and at least one mock voodoo ritual. David sat on a towel and wrote cards to Tommy and Dolly back home in London. He went shopping with Elton in the boutiques of Holetown—Elton shopped, David watched—and took a ride in a “native-type bus” to catch Jaws at the cinema. Elton and Bernie Taupin drafted some new tracks at the house piano, including “Snow Queen,” which would end up as the B-side for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”; David was awarded a song credit after suggesting some dirty lyrics (sanitized before release). At night, the whole group would migrate over to Oliver Messel’s house for cocktails—the stage designer was more pleasant than David expected—or hit the local disco so hard that David, next morning, would not be entirely sure how he’d even gotten home. His propensity to party until the sun came up soon earned him a nickname, as did his preference for darker men.
Dawn Black.
(This particularly entertained Elton, who was already well known as “Sharon,” and Tony King, who was “Joy” and largely responsible for the monikers.)
Within a matter of days, David watched as his skin began to spontaneously clear from the saltwater and fresh air. In fact, everyone was “looking much healthier,” he noticed, including Elton, who had also never seemed so calm or reasonable. Sure, there were still those legendary tantrums—at one point, Elton lost it and announced that Christmas was “canceled”—but the outbursts in Barbados were balanced out by self-reflective humility, genuine regret.
One day, Elton left David a letter in which he apologized for his unreasonable behavior, saying that he was ashamed at how his actions were affecting others. He told David that he was doing his best to improve, to be a better person, and that David’s ongoing support was hugely appreciated.
When David found the letter waiting for him in the house, he read it and nearly burst into tears. (He would hold it in safekeeping for decades afterward.) His relationship with Elton existed in a peculiar liminal state between friend and employee, but it had become vital to his own enduring happiness. The two men shared emotional temperaments, an appreciation of surrealism. More important, though, they reassured each other. David made Elton feel better about himself (“I get depressed easily,” he would soon tell Rolling Stone. “Very bad moods. I don’t think anyone knows the real me. I don’t even think I do”); and Elton, for his part, made David feel valued. Some nights they would sit together on the sand in St. James, rating crashing waves from 1 to 10 while David did some knitting. For months afterward, David would smell the seawater in his woollies and vividly recall their intimate conversations.
In early January, people began to fly back to America or England, back to their lives and adult responsibilities. David stole glances toward his own return date with a sense of impending doom. “Only about a week to go,” he wrote in his diary. “Feel awful about leaving dear Barbados.” But then everyone did, apparently: “Elton had a good cry after stripping twice.” As the hourglass emptied further, David struggled to control his saturnine moods, until they finally overcame him: “These last few days are really sad—got depression in morning.”
As David recalls, “I was thinking that I have to go back to my dismal life after this. Nothing’s getting any better. I haven’t got any money. I’m either up, with no sense of anything, or down, and not wanting to even leave my apartment. This is all so unreal, this life, these millionaires…”
Barbados was manifest escapism, a superior “unreal” life that he was desperate to prolong. And, in fact, he would prolong it—for several more months. David touched down in New York on January 15; a little more than four weeks later, he lifted off again for Los Angeles, to do some work for Elton with Tony King. Then, after a blink, he was back in Barbados, toiling with Bernie Taupin and Alan Aldridge over the unproduced film script of Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy. Then, another blink, he was up in Toronto, where Elton was laying down Blue Moves, for which David would take photographs for the inside album cover.
During this adrenaline rush, intoxicating and propulsive, David made a hurried note in his diary that stands out as jarring and, given all that happened afterward, particularly important.
February 2:…Peter Brown has been calling every day to see about Tommy’s business, etc.—boring.
Ten weeks later, he then recorded a piece of news that could no longer be shrugged off as “boring”:
April 20: Spoke to Peter Brown. Apparently Edward has taken over the Nutter business from under Tommy’s nose.
* * *
What really happened at Nutters of Savile Row in the spring of 1976? Was Tommy the victim of an internal coup, Edward and his assistants seizing control above their stations? Or was it more complicated than that, the case of an inattentive owner and his unhappy workers who tried to rescue the ship before it capsized?
In January or February, Tommy had flown to Johannesburg to visit his friend Jimmy Clark, who had recently relocated there from London. He’d also met up with a journalist and mentioned his Beverly Hills plan, suggesting, for the record, “that he might open a Nutters branch here”—in South Africa. That fantasy, recalls Jimmy Clark, “was undoubtedly the catalyst which caused the total breakup between Edward and himself. Edward was absolutely furious that Tommy came down, because in reality the prospect of any business from such a visit was virtually zero.”
A definitive explanation of what occurred after that Johannesburg visit has eluded curious onlookers for decades. And in the absence of any surviving financial documentation, an objective narrative of “the total breakup” remains all but impossible. But what does survive is perhaps more fitting for a story about unreliable storytellers anyway: opinion, rumor, hearsay, conjecture, and heated, contradictory accounts from the people involved. A chorus of inharmonious voices, in other words, which may nevertheless offer some echo of the true story.
* * *
EDWARD SEXTON This is a whole life story. I’ve been very much part of this person’s life, and the creation of all this clothing. I’ve got a big investment of my life here, haven’t I? So I want this to be very open and honest.
CHRISTOPHER TARLING I hope you get the truth from Edward. Didn’t they go to America, and then Tommy went AWOL or something? You know, being the front man on a business like that, you have to deal with a lot of shit. Not every customer is easy. And Tommy was still being the front man. He’d gotten there, not making much money
, I don’t think, by working his arse off. Then something must have happened that made him think, “Fuck, what’s all this about?”
EDWARD SEXTON We made chic, elegant clothing. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. Tommy was fantastic at it, nobody could touch him, socializing and bringing in the right type of clients. There’s never been another Tommy and there never will be, and as a team we were dynamic. I had some great times with Tommy, believe you me. I’ve got nothing but love and affection for him as a person and a creative figure.
But as a businessman, he was fucking useless. I’m telling you from the inside that there was a lot of extravagance going on. Tommy was very, very extravagant. He just didn’t want to perform his daily duties, like keeping control of the accounts. There were many, many things—quite a few years when he used to just drive me nuts. You’re making the most beautiful suits, and then he’d be out with his trick: the next thing you see, the trick is wearing the suits I’d made for him. And I remember that Tommy came on selling trips with me to America, but what did he do there? Fucked off to Central Park West, where Peter was at. He didn’t stay in the hotel with me; he stayed with Peter Brown. And he’d go off early instead of staying and working with the clients. He didn’t have his finger on the pulse.
DAVID GRIGG You wouldn’t have known things weren’t going well. They were making so many suits. It’s really bizarre. They had such an incredible clientele, all the tailors were working, they were charging decent prices. I don’t understand what went wrong, unless Tommy was spending a fortune. But I don’t think he was. It wasn’t like he was buying large houses. He rented his flat. He didn’t have a car. He struggled to buy that flat down in Brighton.
House of Nutter_The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row Page 19