In the story we look chronologically and alternate between what was happening to David and his brother Tommy Nutter.
David Nutter was born in Edgware in May 1939 and Tommy four years later in April 1943 while his parents were living in North Wales. Their great grandfather had been a builder in Kilburn and their mother Dorothy (Dolly) Bannister was born there. In 1937 she married Christopher Nutter who worked as a seating upholster in the de Havilland aircraft factory at the Stag Lane aerodrome in Edgware. After their marriage he and Dolly ran ‘John’s Café’ at 7 Handel Parade Whitchurch Lane in Edgware for his brother-in-law John Cross. When Christopher was discharged from the Army in February 1946, the family returned to Edgware where they lived over the café. By 1961 the family had moved to 24 Eresby Road, one of the houses built in Kilburn by Dolly’s grandfather, Edward Tribe. The entire road, which ran from Kilburn High Road to Kingsgate Road, was demolished as part of the building of the Kingsgate Estate in the 1970s.
Both boys failed their 11-plus exam. David was sent to a private prep-school and then to Clark’s (commercial) College at 77 Shoot-Up Hill Cricklewood (now demolished). Tommy went to Willesden Technical College where he took a building trade course which he disliked. After this, his tyrannical father made him sit the Civil Service exam and Tommy started work as a clerical assistant at the Ministry of Works in April 1960 at a salary of £4 17s 0d per week. He wasn’t happy there so in November he answered an advert for a job at the tailors Donaldson, Williams and Ward in the Burlington Arcade. Much to his father’s annoyance he was hired and started, ‘by picking up pins and delivering the bolts of cloth to the outworkers’. He worked hard and soon moved to the cutting room as ‘a trimmer’ who organised all the suit trimmings – such as the interlinings, buttons, and threads. He learned everything he could from his fellow workers and completed a six-month course at the Tailor & Cutter Academy in Gerrard Street.
Tommy and David loved going to the Gaumont State just across the Kilburn High Road from their home, where they saw visiting musicians like Louis Armstrong and Bill Haley. Tommy really liked American jazz from Sarah Vaughan to the MJQ. David suffered from bipolar disorder which was undiagnosed and not understood in the Nutter household. Sometimes he was so depressed he couldn’t leave the flat and the concerts and records proved life-sustaining. When he was 21-years old he started to go to clubs like the Flamingo, and the Marquee.
David stumbled through several jobs and eventually got a job as a darkroom technician in the Palace Gate Kensington studio of Bob Horner, a respected photograph printer who had contracts with fashion magazines like Vogue. To earn extra income, David worked as a photographer for journalist Mike McGrath who employed young people on assignments for the teenage magazines. In 1963 David introduced brother Tommy to McGrath who used the tall, good looking young man as a part-time model. McGrath also worked as the PR agent for the fashion designer John Stephen and they wanted to promote a new young fashion. That year David took a series of photos of Tommy wearing John Stephen’s clothes which soon appeared as large blowups in his Carnaby Street boutique windows. Although this did not directly lead to any new opportunities, it confirmed that the brothers had more to offer than their current jobs.
Both Tommy and David were gay, something they had to hide from their strict right-wing father. They frequented the clubs of Soho, such as the Rockingham Club at 9 Archer Street, finally finding their freedom when they left home in 1964.
In 1966 cutter Edward Sexton joined the same firm of tailors as Tommy. Both were 23-year old working-class young men and they quickly became friends, although they led very different lives, as Edward was married with a newborn baby.
David met his partner Carlo Manzi at the Rockingham. At the time Carlo was working in his brother Eugene’s record shop at 7 New College Parade in the Finchley Road. They agreed to set up a business together and Carlo signed a lease on an empty railway men’s club opposite Primrose Hill Station. They built a darkroom and photographic studio and called the company ‘NUTTER’. David had a long list of actors looking for headshots, and soon the company gained a reputation for high quality work.
After they split up, Carlo started a vintage costume hire company ‘Own Up’ at 33 Liddell Road in West Hampstead in the 1980s. It had 30,000 items of clothing in the large hanger-like warehouse which were used in film and TV shoots. Today, Carlo Manzi Ltd is in North Acton Road.
In the summer of 1967 Tommy met Peter Brown at a dinner party in Brian Epstein’s house, 24 Chapel Street Belgravia. Peter was Epstein’s friend and personal assistant having worked with him in Liverpool. Peter ran their management agency at 5-6 Argyll Street Soho overseeing the Beatles’ affairs. There was red telephone on his desk which the Beatles could call – just like the Bat Phone in the Batman films. Peter travelled everywhere with Brian during the world tours.
On 27 August 1967 Brian died of an accidental overdose of barbiturate sleeping pills in the Chapel Street house. Peter who was at Brian’s country house, Kingsley Hill in East Sussex, was devastated. He had the difficult job of telling the Beatles who were at a retreat in Bangor North Wales with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and they were stunned.
The next day Tommy phoned Peter at Chapel Street who said he was feeling awful, and Tommy went over to comfort him. At the time Peter was dating the comedian and DJ Kenny Everett but it was Kenny’s first relationship with a man, and he was very insecure and needy. Because of Brian’s death Peter could not cope and he told Kenny it was over. Kenny was deeply wounded, and he hid his sexuality until 1985.
In early 1968 Tommy left his room in Elvaston Place South Kensington and moved with Peter to a flat in Conduit Street, convenient for both their workplaces. Neither Peter nor Tommy were monogamous. While Tommy enjoyed his relationship with Peter, he would still go cruising at the Coleherne Arms pub in Earls Court or on Hampstead Heath.
In June 1968 Apple Corps Ltd, of which Peter was the administrative director, opened their office at 3 Savile Row. In early August Paul McCartney invited Peter and Tommy to Trident Studios in St Anne’s Court Soho to hear ‘Hey Jude’ which they had recorded on 31 July. Tommy listened to the seven-minute track and told the Beatles he didn’t like it. They were crestfallen, until Peter explained Tommy was joking, he thought it was incredible.
Tommy and Edward Sexton decided to set up their own tailoring business. The financial backing was provided by Peter Brown, together with James Valance White, a young clerk at the House of Lords, and Cilla Black with her boyfriend and later husband, Bobby Willis. Cilla was a friend of Peter’s from their Liverpool days and Brian Epstein had signed her in 1963, his only female singer. Peter and Tommy had gone on holiday to Portugal with Cilla and Bobby and taken her to gay clubs. When Cilla and Bobby married in January 1969, Peter gave Cilla away and Tommy was Bobby’s best man. The wedding photos were taken by David Nutter.
When ‘Nutters’ opened at 35a Savile Row on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1969, it was the first new tailors to start there in over a century. It quickly became a success as the place to go for the new look in high quality suits.
John Lennon wanted to marry Yoko Ono without any fuss from the London paparazzi. Peter found out that they could get married at the British embassy in Gibraltar, and he took David to photograph them on 20 March 1969. In a bizarre twist, David’s negatives of the 118 photos from the shoot went missing in 1975, when he loaned them to Andrew Fawcett for his book on John Lennon. Worth an estimated £100,000, they were only tracked down in 2016 when they were being offered secretly for sale.
Nutter’s distinctive look began to be noticed, and even an established designer like Hardy Amies after a visit to the shop said, ‘Tommy Nutter is the most exciting tailor on Savile Row in decades.’ His designs reached world-wide fame when the Beatles album ‘Abbey Road’ was released on 26 September 1969. Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan had taken the famous cover photograph in Abbey Road on 8 August by standing on a step ladder, and all of the Beatles, apart from George Harrison in denim, are wearing Nutter suits. They had not decided this advance or been told what to wear, it was simply the clothes they were wearing that day.
In addition to the Beatles and Cilla, Tommy and Edward made suits for Mick and Bianca Jagger, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Peter Sellars, Twiggy and even Nancy Regan. Within a year of opening Tommy was at the centre of fashionable group of people with a cross-section of wealthy clients which included, rock musicians, film stars, lawyers, doctors, and bankers.
By 1969 Peter and Tommy were no longer lovers, but remained close friends, and they moved into a two-bedroom flat in Hays Mews Mayfair. In 1971 Peter left Apple Corps after Allen Klein had become the Beatles business manager and he found he could not work with him. Peter went New York to work as the US president of the Robert Stigwood Organisation and Tommy moved to a small flat in 27 Conduit Street.
David was busy and printed photographs for fashion magazines like Vogue and Harpers, but he also worked as a photographer for the controversial ‘Oz’ when it was published in London in 1967. He created many of the front cover photos. When the ‘Schoolkids’ issue was published in May 1970, the three editors, Richard Neville, Felix Dennis, and Jim Anderson, were charged with obscenity and faced trial in June 1971. They were defended by two barristers who happened to have local connections: John Mortimer QC (who lived near Finchley Road) and Geoffrey Robertson (later a West Hampstead resident). The Oz Three were initially sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment. However, their convictions were overturned on appeal.
David had supported the Oz editors throughout but in December 1971 he moved to New York, where he ran the darkroom of the fashion photographer Bill King. David continued his friendship with John and Yoko in New York and went to parties where he met Andy Warhol, Roman Polanski, David Bowie and Elton John with whom he worked as a photographer during his US gigs. In December 1975 David was invited to St James in Barbados where Elton went to recuperate for six weeks after a strenuous year. He and Elton became good friends and talked about their periods of depression. Elton asked David to photograph his transatlantic tour which began on 29 April 1976 and ended at Madison Square Garden on 17 August.
On 4 February 1977 David had gone dancing at Crisco Disco in the Meatpacking District of New York. Suddenly, everything went black and he woke up in his apartment on the Upper West Side. He had taken one of the Quaaludes he had brought back from San Francisco as a favour for Bill King and it had triggered a blackout. David had a vague memory of a man standing over him and punching him violently, saying he was going to die. The man stole what he could and left. Incapacitated, David managed to use his tongue to dial his neighbour who climbed into the apartment from the fire escape. The next day David went to the party after Queen had played their first ever performance at ‘The Garden’. In the Oh-Ho-So restaurant he met his friend Freddie Mercury and told him what had happened. Freddie was furious when he saw the bruises and said to David, ‘Don’t ever do that again!’
In May 1976 Tommy and Edward ended their partnership of the Nutter business, but it is not clear about what happened as they gave different versions of the event. Tommy was a great designer but a poor businessman while Edward was a brilliant cutter who ran the business. They had a violent argument and Tommy left.
When Tommy walked out of Nutter’s he lost everything and refused to speak with Edward. He lived in friend’s flats including that of David Grigg and dreamed up various plans to get back in business, but these never materialised. He quickly ran out of money and was forced to sell his Brighton property after asking David for help, but he had not earned that much for his work for Elton.
In April 1977 David received a phone call from 18-year Michael Jackson, whom he had met through Elton. He went to a recording studio in Philadelphia where Michael was working with his brothers on ‘Goin’ Places’, their last album. David took some pictures of Michael and his brother Marlon but was aware that their father Joe Jackson was not happy and was rather cold. A few months later Michael asked David to join him in Brooklyn where he was playing the Scarecrow in ‘The Wiz’ a stage version of the Wizard of Oz with Diana Ross as Dorothy. (A film version was made in 1978). David wondered about Michael’s sexuality, but they remained just friends. Later, David took the photos for Elton’s October 1977 book, ‘Elton John: It’s a Little Bit Funny’, which he dedicated to David.
In February 1977 Tommy found his feet with the respected tailors, Kilgour, French and Stanbury, at their shop in Dover Street. They were a traditional tailors: Fred Astaire in the 1935 film Top Hat had danced in a KFS tailcoat. Barry Grigg the father of Tommy’s friend David Grigg, was a director of the company and got him the job. It saved Tommy from bankruptcy and restored him to the heart of the tailoring trade in Mayfair. At the beginning of 1978, the company formed Tommy Nutter Promotions, and Tommy travelled around America with KFS cutters to collect orders from clients.
In England, a deal was made with the Austin Reed company to stock the Tommy Nutter collection in their chain of Cue Shops. Tommy was thrilled with creating the Savile Row cut for the ready-to-wear market. It was launched in March 1979 and received with extremely positive publicity. But Tommy wrote to David that he was unhappy with the ‘Are You being Served?’ ethos of KFS which he wanted to change. The directors agreed to set up a shop within a shop, and the ‘Tommy Nutter for Kilgours’ boutique opened in Dover Street in February 1981. The style was fun and very camp.
But the KFS group was suffering loses which Tommy’s efforts could not overcome. After a tremendous trip to Japan where he was treated as a superstar, he came back to London in June 1982 to find he was unemployed. KFS no longer wanted to fund Tommy and he was fed up with them. Luckily, Alan Lewis a Manchester entrepreneur, shook Tommy’s hand just two weeks after he returned and set up a new company where he had 25% of the shares and Tommy had 75%. Lewis had a vast showroom at 18-19 Savile Row which was currently vacant. Tommy was delighted to be back in Savile Row as he told the press and announced the shop would be opened on 4 October by Cilla Black.
In New York on 8 December 1980, Mark Chapman shot and killed John Lennon outside the Dakota Apartments where he and Yoko lived. David was called by Elton and other friends; deeply upset by John’s death, he was haunted by nightmares.
David finally broke free from the difficult and demanding Bill King. During a photo shoot with the singer Patti LaBelle, King whispered a racist remark about Patti and her friends to David. This was too much and brought back memories of his father’s ignorant rantings. He walked out of King’s studio for the last time. He had some work from Elton who asked David to do shots for his albums and publicity.
By 1982 David was working for the photographer Art Kane whose interests were much closer to David’s. Kane had famously photographed ‘Harlem 1958’, a group of 57 giants of jazz including, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan and Thelonious Monk, gathered round the steps of a brownstone. Kane later worked with rock stars such as Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and The Who. Kane did not have his own darkroom, so David was put in charge of the studio.
In 1984 Elton surprised people when he announced that on Valentine’s day, he was going to marry Renate Blauel, a German-born sound engineer he had met at Air Studios in Lyndhurst Road Hampstead. Tommy agreed to design Elton’s wedding suit and David was asked by Elton to take the photographs at a church in Sydney Australia. The marriage lasted four years until they divorced in 1988. In June 2020 Renate sued Elton after he published his autobiography the previous year, having mutually agreed neither would speak publicly about their marriage. She told the press she hoped it could be resolved amicably.
The first cases of AIDS were reported in the US in June 1981 and it spread rapidly. David was concerned whether he had the disease because close friends had already died. He had been very ill but was relieved when it was diagnosed as viral hepatitis not AIDS.
In England Terrence Higgins, a gay man, had collapsed on the dance floor at Heaven in April 1982 and died a few months later from AIDS related pneumocystis pneumonia. In May 1983 Mel Rosen, an American AIDS activist, told a London conference, ‘I hope you get very scared today because there is a locomotive coming down the track and it is leaving the United States.’ Tommy was in a crowd of 900 people from the fashion industry who gathered on a common in Fulham in April 1989 to pledge money and launch 1,116 balloons for the people who had died of AIDS.
Business was going well for Tommy. About half his income came from bespoke suits and the other half from ready-made. Bill Wyman wore a bespoke Nutter suit when he married the young model Mandy Smith in June 1989, and other clients included Tom Jones and Christie Brinkley. Tommy also made the outfit which Jack Nicholson wore in the film Batman (1989) designed by Bob Ringwood. Tommy’s ready-to-wear suits, made in Italy from English fabrics, could be bought in Fortnum & Mason and Selfridges.
In July 1990 David flew to London to see his mother Dolly, who was now living in Flat 14 Chalford 177 Finchley Road (near today’s Waitrose), following her husband’s death in 1983. After using alcohol for many years, David was sober since attending AA in 1986. He had given up photography and was now working as an assistant for Mick Jagger in New York. He looked after Mick’s house on the Upper West Side, where he fed Calico the cat and dealt with the building contractors and the fans. He even helped Jerry Hall with her English accent for a theatre part. David took Dolly on a nostalgic trip to Barmouth in North Wales where they had lived during the War, and where Tommy had been born.
The first black spot appeared on Tommy’s leg in 1988 and his friend Carol Drinkwater, who had read an article about Kaposi’s sarcoma, said he should see a doctor. He saw a specialist called Brian Gazzard who said the tests showed Tommy was HIV-positive and the current treatments were limited – AZT perhaps, which could prolong life somewhat, but had side effects. Tommy was always hopeful that a new drug would be found. But his health deteriorated, and he had pneumonia in March 1991. After he was released from hospital having lost a lot of weight, he told Alan Lewis he was HIV-positive and Lewis said he would pay for the best doctors.
Tommy decided to retire in January 1992 and stayed in his tiny Conduit Street flat. He was reluctant to see visitors apart from his friends Robert Leach and Tim Gallagher. The AZT treatment resulted in anemia and he needed blood transfusions. He became very weak and sometimes collapsed in the street where people thought he was drunk and walked past him.
In June he was admitted to hospital. David had flown to London to see an Elton concert at Wembley. When David saw Tommy, he was suffering hallucinations and David thought he looked like a victim from Bergen-Belsen. Dolly did not leave her son’s bedside, and she ate and slept at the private Cromwell Hospital. She kept people away, although Cilla, Bobby and Peter Brown visited him on 3 August. Near the end, as his assistant at Nutter’s Wendy Kavanagh held his hand, he said jokingly, ‘Oh, I’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t I?’ She replied, ‘Don’t be silly, we’ve all been naughty.’
Dolly was there when Tommy died of bronchopneumonia on the 17 August 1992, he was 49. His funeral was held at the Golders Green Crematorium with a later memorial service at St George’s Church not far from Savile Row. Dolly died three years later aged 79.
David continues to live in New York where he had lost many friends to AIDS. He visited author Lance Richardson every week for a year to talk about his memories and he lent him photos and 26 years of diaries as Lance wrote ‘The House of Nutter’ (2018). This blog story relied heavily on this fascinating double biography of David and Tommy Nutter.
Wow, never knew any of this!
ReplyDeleteSuch a great article to find.. stared search having just acquired Oz magazine no 31 Nov Dec issue with photo credit to “Nutier” want to identify who black model is and rest of group..any ideas?! Thanks terence pepper
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