House of Nutter Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Lance Richardson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  TOMMY NUTTER is a registered trademark used here with the kind permission of its proprietor, J&J Crombie Limited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Richardson, Lance, 1984–, author.

  Title: House of Nutter: the rebel tailor of Savile Row / Lance Richardson.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Archetype [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017045881| ISBN 9780451496461 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451496478 (trade pbk) | ISBN 9780525529439 (audiobook download) | ISBN 9780451496485 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Nutter, Tommy, 1943–1992. | Fashion designers—Great Britain—Biography.

  Classification: LCC TT505.N88 R53 2018 | DDC 746.9/2092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017045881

  ISBN 9780451496461

  Ebook ISBN 9780451496485

  Cover design by Rachel Willey

  Cover photograph by David Nutter

  Image credits appear on this page.

  v5.2_r1

  a

  for

  Rebecca Cubitt

  because it was your idea

  &

  Dawn Black

  because it is your life

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  PART I: 1939–1968

  1. ESCAPE ARTISTS

  2. THE GOLDEN AGE

  3. YOUNG METEORS

  4. THE NEW ARISTOCRATS

  Interlude: Cilla and Bobby Get Married

  PART II: 1969–1976

  5. DISCOTHEQUE IN A GRAVEYARD

  6. A COMPLETE LOOK

  7. BLOW-UP

  8. PICCADILLY TOM

  9. LIBERTINES

  10. MUSCLE QUEENS AND MOZART RECORDS

  11. THAT WONDERFUL SUMMER

  Interlude: Louder Than Concorde

  PART III: 1977–1992

  12. THE VELVET ROPE

  13. ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

  14. LOST BOYS

  15. HUMDRUM LIFE

  EPILOGUE: DAWN BLACK

  Notes

  Image Credits

  Selected Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Tommy Nutter at home on Conduit Street, 1975.

  You may not recognize the name of Tommy Nutter, but you almost certainly know his clothes. Picture Elton John in the 1980s, playing piano on a vast arena stage while wearing a heavily padded suit that is half black, half white, like a yin and yang symbol. Or imagine Bianca Jagger sometime in the 1970s, languorous and grumpy in a pistachio-colored men’s suit as she fiddles with her Malacca cane. Or—a sure bet—recall the album cover of Abbey Road: four Beatles marching across the street in northwest London, with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Paul McCartney dressed in immaculate bespoke.

  Tommy Nutter was just twenty-six years old when, in 1969, he opened Nutters of Savile Row. He had no formal education as a fashion designer, and no advanced training as a tailor—nothing, really, except what he once described as an “in-built feeling for clothes.” And yet almost immediately he found himself outfitting everyone from rock stars to members of parliament, Twiggy to Diana Ross. Within a few years, the Evening Standard pronounced Tommy “as established and as important as any British tailor or designer.” He accrued an avid following in America that stretched from New York to Los Angeles. People raved about his Savile Row suits, describing them as nothing short of art. In the words of one former client, wearing one made you feel like “an honored custodian of something spectacular.” Today, his trailblazing legacy can be sensed in the work of contemporary tailor-designers like Richard James, Ozwald Boateng, and Timothy Everest. Tommy Hilfiger recently credited his “irreverent approach” as an enduring inspiration. Even Tom Ford, arguably the most important figure working in menswear today, has acknowledged his influence.

  I first heard about Tommy Nutter several years ago, when a friend told me the story of a young man who once, after being denied entry into a party at the Tate, threw himself into the River Thames. It sounded so outlandish, so extreme and operatic, that my curiosity was piqued. What intrigued me once I did further research, however, was not so much his burnished image as the “Tailor to the Stars”—an iconoclast who shook the foundations of a hallowed industry—but the tension between his vaunted reputation and the realities of his private life.

  Here was a man whose suits are now safeguarded in the Victoria & Albert Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, though he could barely manage a backstitch. Here was a man who comported himself with grace and hobnobbed with Princess Margaret at galas in Venice and Munich, yet had grown up above a humble café that catered to truck drivers. A man who’d managed to pull himself out of the working class using nothing more than the strength of his own imagination, an imagination so boundless, it seemed, that it could overcome all reason and even prove ruinous.

  Tommy Nutter was obsessed with his public image. He was also gay, coming of age in the oppressive censoriousness of the 1950s. Indeed, his life vividly personalized forty years of critical gay history. From the underground queer clubs of Soho to the unbridled freedom of New York bathhouses to the terrifying nightmare of AIDS—Tommy was there, both witness and participant. As a gay man myself, it occurred to me that Tommy’s focus on outward appearances might have been a way for him to take control and overcome the more challenging aspects of his lived experience. After all, one way gay men mitigate the perennial pressure to conform to societal norms of masculinity is by striving for perfection (in body, in clothes, in career), overcompensating until that which sets us apart—our taste, say—becomes so impressive it assumes its own power.

  Tommy ultimately died from AIDS-related pneumonia in August 1992. The lives of many artists, performers, and designers were lost prematurely to the plague and have since been unfairly marginalized in the collective memory. This, finally, was the strongest motivation for me writing this book: I saw an opportunity to rescue one person’s story from the drift of oblivion.

  * * *

  Of course, when you go rummaging around in the past there is a good chance you’ll stumble across something you never dreamed of finding. It happened to me early in the research phase, when I arranged to meet Tommy Nutter’s brother in a café on New York’s Upper West Side. Seventy-seven years old, David Nutter turned up wearing a crumpled Rolling Stones T-shirt and clutching a tote bag stuffed with the kind of original photographs usually exhibited in a gallery. He had taken them all himself, he said; they were just sitting in his apartment in stacks of cardboard boxes. Over coffee, he made a range of passing references that seemed inscrutable in the moment—to an obscenity trial, to the birth of disco, to Starship 1, to Michael Jackson, to Mick Jagger. It would take me many months to untangle everything, and years before I understood exactly how kaleidoscopic the Nutter saga really was. But I quickly intuited that I was writing a book about two people here, two gay brothers, two halves of a larger, stranger whole.

  To discuss a man’s wardrobe is really to discuss a man’s life. For the kind of clothes he has in it reveals his way of life; and their condition
and degree of fashionableness will show his character.

  HARDY AMIES, ABC of Men’s Fashion

  Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.

  FRANK O’HARA, “In Memory of My Feelings”

  HOUSE OF NUTTER

  Fashion, indeed, is born only in social struggle, and it is typical of new and struggling societies and times of violent social change which give birth to new social orders that styles change with equal violence.

  PEARL BINDER, The Peacock’s Tail

  Tommy and David Nutter, 1946

  In the mid-1970s, rapidly approaching middle age, David Nutter began to shake the family tree to see who might fall out. He wanted to understand his pedigree, to know how far the name had roamed, so he poked through genealogical records, immigration logs, birth and death certificates. He found it everywhere: a whole diaspora of Nutters. Then he considered etymology, trying to trace the name back to its source. Was “Nutter” Norman-French, or was it Danish—notar, a kind of professional notary? The Danish path led David to history books, which led him to Cnut the Great, also known as King Canute, a Viking warrior who once ruled over a vast Anglo-Scandinavian empire. David liked the sound of that; he noted it down. But as he rifled further through library archives, the figure who really piqued his interest turned up a little closer to home: Lancashire, England, in the early 1600s. David had always had a great deal of fondness for the era of King James (“all his boyfriends running the country, sending him letters”), and now he alighted on a wealthy widow from Roughlee—one Alice Nutter, who had been tried and hanged during the trials of the Pendle witches.

  Witches in the Nutter bloodline?

  Thrilled by the possibility, David dashed off a letter to his brother. Tommy soon replied: “Somebody told me the other day that I have strange eyes. Do you think I could be one? Please tell all. It would make a great story for the papers.”

  In many ways, David and Tommy Nutter were a case study in familial disparity. As the eldest, David was on the shorter side, fair-skinned, with sharply defined features and a blond widow’s peak. He was emotionally volatile, often careening one way into depression or the other into euphoria. Tommy, by contrast, was statuesque and dark; he would one day be described as resembling “a Botticelli youth,” and the “living, breathing embodiment of Peter Pan.” Four years younger than David, he mostly floated along, a little aloof, unflappable, out to have a good time.

  What the brothers did share in common, though, was a way of looking at the world—what could be called a Nutter sensibility. Both tended to fixate on peripheral, decorative details, often at the expense of more fundamental concerns (like remaining solvent). Both disdained pretension, and would come to treat royalty and rock stars with a generous dose of irreverence. Both spoke a private language rich in double meanings, loaded code, Polari, and camp. And both liked to pose questions about themselves (who were they? where did they come from? what did they deserve out of life?) and then embroider their theories so extravagantly that truth, in their hands, could take on the texture of a personal mythology.

  Nothing sparked Tommy’s and David’s imaginations more than their relationship with one another. Why was Tommy tan but David pale? Why was Tommy introverted while David had such an easy rapport with strangers? Why was Tommy even-keeled (most of the time), and David susceptible to wild, unpredictable mood swings that could strike him down like a sickness?

  How were they brothers?

  The elaborate explanations they dreamed up, or wove together, from thin threads of fact and rumor, invariably began with a single crucial figure: their mother.

  * * *

  Dorothy Lucy Banister was born on July 14, 1916, in Kilburn, a modestly prosperous if overcrowded area of northwest London then known for industry and manufacturing. Dorothy’s mother, Lily Tribe, worked in Kilburn as a milliner. Her father, Albert Banister, worked as a laborer for the railway at Camden Town. Unless, that is, her father was Bruno Brunieri, in which case he worked as an attaché for the Italian government down in the West End. “We can’t prove anything,” says David, describing his mother’s paternity as “an enigma.”

  Lily and Albert lived in a plain but comfortable brick terrace house on Eresby Road, which connected the Kilburn High Road with Kingsgate Road. Lily’s father—Dorothy’s grandfather—had built the entire row sometime in the 1880s, after his mother begged him to stop sailing off to China and the Far East as a cabin boy on clipper ships. The house he gave Lily was the last in the row, bordered on the left by a cobblestone lane; on the right by the next terrace, where Lily’s brother lived with his own burgeoning family; and out front by a sad-looking privet hedge that afforded scant privacy for a bulging bay window. Lily and Albert occupied the first two floors. To earn extra income, they leased out the third to international lodgers, like Bruno Brunieri.

  By all accounts, Lily Banister was an unusual woman, manicured but mercurial. Some called her “Creampot Lil” for her habit of putting so much cream on her scones that they all but disappeared beneath the avalanche. In Kilburn, she was divisive for her aggressive animal-rights activism; she would berate the milkman for mistreating his horses and cut up stale loaves with a pair of scissors to feed the birds. “I remember pulling away from the front gate in a black cab and seeing a flock of pigeons hovering by the side of the house,” says one relative. “The window was open, and Lily was tossing out handful after handful of bread. She was almost the double, visually speaking, of a Miss Marple character.”

  Lily Banister feeding the Kilburn wildlife near her house.

  Later, when Tommy and David finally arrived on the scene, they came to see “Nanny Banister” as a figure of exquisite camp, like a Victorian Bette Davis. Once, during a sightseeing trip to Clacton, Lily was overcome with light-headedness and declared that she was probably about to die. Turning to Dorothy, she whispered, in front of her grandsons, “I’m going, Doll.” Decades hence, Tommy would flummox a newspaper journalist by saying the same thing as he went off to retrieve a white sailor suit for a fitting: “I’m goin’, doll.” Lily Banister, the journalist discovered, had “made such an impact upon the young Nutter that even to this day he rarely leaves anywhere for anywhere else without employing the phrase.”

  Lily was ridiculous, but she was also sanctimonious, imposing her version of propriety with ruthless determination. One story has her doctoring photo albums to erase all traces of a daughter’s ex-husband, as though he and the divorce had simply never occurred. Could a woman capable of that kind of behavior really conduct a short-lived affair with her Italian lodger, then return to Albert and pass a love child off as his own?

  “It’s all quite likely,” Tommy wrote David in the same letter where he entertained his brother’s theory about the witches.

  Dorothy, her daughter, did look vaguely Mediterranean. When she was a child, her family mocked her olive complexion; like Tommy with David, she struck a remarkable contrast if placed next to her older sister, Gladys, who was as white as salt and unapologetically bourgeois. Dorothy was a carefree bon vivant; she liked to go dancing with her friends at the Cricklewood Palais. For short, people called her Dolly, which suited her better anyway, capturing something of her abiding youthfulness and playful style.

  Dorothy Lucy Banister

  Dolly was not afraid to wear makeup. She adored high heels and floaty cotton dresses, and for several years she kept her hair cut short with sharp bangs—something like Louise Brooks, the famous American flapper. By the time she was a young woman, capable of making some of her own decisions, she’d become sufficiently self-aware to sense that her complexion, though setting her apart from her family, was also an asset, the distinction that made her beautiful enough to (for example) model in a newspaper advertisement for a secretarial school. And so, to emphasize her coloring, making herself even darker—and more Mediterranean-looking—Dolly began to spend long hours w
orshipping the sun, relentlessly, recklessly.

  Like Lily, Dolly was governed by a powerful moral compass, though perhaps hers pointed more accurately in the direction of empathy. She liked to say, “I take people as I find them,” almost as a kind of personal mantra. But no matter how open-minded or inclined to independence she may have been, a woman of the working class had limited options in 1930s London: marriage and children were a given, particularly under the coolly expectant eye of Lily Banister. How Dolly first encountered Christopher Nutter, a seating upholsterer for the de Havilland Aircraft Company; how he penetrated her social milieu of close friends and dance halls, of tea gowns and chaperones; what she made of his stiff reticence, so different from her own easy volubility; how their courtship unfolded and how he ultimately proposed—all these details are lost to history.

  David describes his parents’ marriage as “a leftover from the Victorian era.” There were no public displays of affection, no hugging or indulgent expressions of warmth. The power structure was traditional, nonnegotiable from the first: Christopher would lead, Dolly would follow—plus, of course, raise any children that might appear in the future. “He was of that old mind-set that the woman had to do everything.”

  Sometime after the wedding, Christopher left de Havilland and assumed the management of a café owned by his sister’s husband, John “Jack” Cross, who had his hands full running another establishment on the Holloway Road. John’s Café, as it continued to be called, appealed to a blue-collar clientele—plumbers, garbage men, and truck drivers. Thus appointed regent ruler of a tiny empire of eggs and chips, Christopher relocated his new wife to a modest apartment built directly above the café in the semi-rural suburb of Edgware. Dolly soon resigned from a secretarial job in the city; work now became cups of tea served from a hefty Stotts of Oldham urn.