1

ESCAPE ARTISTS

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.¹ 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 elder, David was on the shorter side, fair-skinned, with sharply defined features and a blond widow’s peak. He was emotionally volatile, often careering 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’.^{2, 3} 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 olive-skinned 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 rumour, invariably began with a single crucial figure: their mother.

Dorothy Lucy Banister was born on 14 July 1916, in Kilburn, a modestly prosperous if overcrowded area of north-west London then known for industry and manufacturing.⁴ Dorothy’s mother, Lily Tribe, worked in Kilburn as a milliner. Her father, Albert Banister, worked as a labourer 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.’

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’.⁵

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 behaviour 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 to David in the same letter where he entertained his brother’s theory about the witches.⁶

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.

Dolly was not afraid to wear make-up. She adored high heels and floaty cotton dresses, and for several years she kept her hair cut short with a sharp fringe – 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 emphasise her colouring, making herself even darker – and more Mediterranean-looking – Dolly began to spend long hours worshipping 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, non-negotiable 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 mindset that the woman had to do everything.’

Sometime after the wedding, Christopher left de Havilland and assumed the management of a cafe owned by his sister’s husband, John ‘Jack’ Cross, who had his hands full running another establishment on the Holloway Road. John’s Cafe, as it continued to be called, appealed to a blue-collar clientele – plumbers, binmen and lorry drivers. Thus appointed regent ruler of a tiny empire of eggs and chips, Christopher moved his new wife to a modest flat built directly above the cafe 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.

In the years before Neville Chamberlain’s radio declaration that the United Kingdom was, once again, at war with Germany, government ministries began making speculative calculations about how many civilians might die during a theoretical aerial attack on British cities. If Hitler launched an all-out raid, the Home Office estimated that the demand for coffins might become so great – 20 million square feet of timber each month – that mass graves and the incineration of bodies might become necessary.⁷ Worst-case predictions foresaw the spread of typhoid fever, unchecked civil disorder, and so much material damage that the assessments were quietly withheld, perhaps to avoid inciting public panic.⁸ By late 1937, gas masks were being assembled at a rate of 150,000 units per week.⁹ Then, with Nazi movements looking increasingly ominous, planning began for precautionary evacuations that were intended to reduce the projected casualty toll. This scheme would scoop up schoolchildren, elderly and blind people, infirm and invalids, expectant mothers, and mothers with children under five years of age. Because it would lead them out of urban centres into the countryside, the evacuation plan was code-named Operation Pied Piper – a curious choice given the fabled Pied Piper of Hamelin lures children away to their doom.

On 1 September 1939, people mobilised as the operation began to play out. The first day of evacuations focused solely on schoolchildren, many of whom had name-and-address tags pinned to their coats that made them resemble luggage on the railway platforms.¹⁰ Overhead, as the trains shuddered off to safety, giant barrage balloons bobbed in the sky.¹¹ On 2 September and 3 September (the day Britain officially went to war), mothers with young children became a priority, and they crammed the carriages with their luggage and government-issued General Civilian Respirators.¹² David Christopher Nutter, born on 10 May 1939, was less than four months old at the time. Family lore has Dolly joining the voluntary exodus of 1.47 million people, boarding a train bound for Scotland that was so overcrowded David had to be handed aboard through an open carriage window.¹³

But if Dolly did escape to Scotland, she also quickly returned. Perhaps, like the 80 per cent of evacuated mothers who’d come home by Christmas, she was deceived by a protracted calm on the Western Front that soon became known, somewhat ironically, as the Phoney War.¹⁴

After the Phoney War, the Luftwaffe began the very real Blitz. As London began to burn in 1940, Christopher turned John’s Cafe over to his elderly parents and enlisted in the army for DOW – ‘duration of war’.¹⁵ He travelled to Bulford Camp on the Salisbury Plain to fill his first posting as Private Nutter in the Royal Army Service Corps. Dolly, back in London, faced falling bombs no matter where she stayed; both Edgware and Kilburn would be hit repeatedly by the Germans. So she rejoined the government’s evacuation scheme and fled with her son into the country again; this time they washed up in Fairbourne, a tiny village on the coast of Cardigan Bay, in North Wales.

Fairbourne is an unusual place. Houses are small and exposed, like dice tipped from a tumbler onto a tabletop of green felt. Dense forest is girdled by drystone walls of Welsh slate. Behind the village, hills begin a punishing climb towards the heights of Cadair Idris. Along the shore, beyond a miniature train that has chugged back and forth for more than a century, gulls populate a shingle beach, and a slither of sand plays hide-and-seek with the tide. The beach feeds into the mouth of the River Mawddach in a wide, changeable estuary that divides Fairbourne from the larger settlement of Barmouth, just to the north. Tennyson wrote part of ‘In Memoriam’ in Barmouth (‘Sweet after showers, ambrosial air …’), and, seen in a certain magic-hour light, the entire area looks something like a prelapsarian Eden.¹⁶

At least, that’s how David describes it, having spent his formative years there. ‘We lived in a boarding house, in a room right at the top,’ he recalls. ‘When I was old enough, I’d go and ring the church bells on Sundays, because I was friends with the vicar’s daughter. And the stationmaster used to let me into the signal box to pull the huge levers that shunted the rails between Fairbourne and Barmouth. I loved the smell of steam trains.’

What it meant to the urbane, twenty-four-year-old Dolly is more opaque. Although she was far from solitary in her new home – marked as a ‘Safe Area’ by the military, Fairbourne had been flooded with evacuees – there would not have been much to occupy the time, and even less in the way of employment. It is not hard to imagine Dolly walking down the shingle beach as she wondered how she’d ended up in a place like this, and what with another child on the way.

Thomas Albert Nutter: when he was conceived, Christopher was stationed just several hours north-east of Fairbourne, repairing army equipment in the workshops at Overton-on-Dee. When Tommy was born, Christopher was right there in the Barmouth maternity hospital, signing his second son’s birth certificate on 17 April 1943.

The bedlam of wartime Wales, though, with its bell-jar isolation and suspension of familiar social rules, had been bizarre enough to roil some ambiguity around Tommy’s origin. Besides evacuees, Fairbourne and Barmouth saw many unfamiliar faces during the war: ‘a polyglot assembly’, as a local historian has described it, of Brits, Norwegians, Lithuanians and ‘at least one Russian lady’.¹⁷ American GIs passed through the area, while Crete Camp in Barmouth was used by the Royal Marines. Polish Commandos billeted with residents, ran mysterious night manoeuvres, and finished punishing training exercises by marching down the road singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’.¹⁸ In the town’s pavilion, they threw rowdy public dances and flirted with the local girls, who flirted back.

When he was a teenager, David whispered an idea into Tommy’s ear that would prove intractable: What if their mother had paramours out there in the wild west of Wales?

What if Christopher Nutter was not his biological father?

This was pure hokum, one teenager goading another with a fantasy that diagnosed the differences between them as symptoms of illegitimacy. Still, Tommy seemed to run with it. ‘He liked the idea that his real father was an American GI,’ David says. Tommy told the story to cousins, friends and even Dolly herself – who, far from being scandalised by the insinuation of her wartime promiscuity, apparently found it compelling enough to share with several more people. ‘She told me the story,’ recalls one family acquaintance, ‘but it was only a joke. Although, I don’t know. It might not have been a joke?’

Just one month after Tommy voiced his first scream in Barmouth, Christopher left the home forces and headed for North Africa, where he would draw on his experience as an aircraft seating upholsterer to provide maintenance support for the 1st Airborne Division. Africa was ‘filthy, with flies everywhere’, he later complained, though he also refused a vaccination against typhus while he was there. Towards the end of the war, after the invasion of Normandy, he headed to Norway as a member of the British Liberation Army. Scandinavia, by contrast, was to him ‘beautiful, wonderful’ – particularly the ski jumps.

Christopher Nutter, with his perpetual grimace, was not a bad person. His main shortcoming was a lack of imagination: he knew what he knew and had only minimal interest in knowing anything more. With a few exceptions – science; the ‘Dome of Discovery’ at the Festival of Britain, which seemed to intrigue him – horizons were there to be fortified, not expanded. Like many men of his generation, Christopher grabbed hold of easy prejudices and built a barrier of abrasive pessimism around himself. Black people were lesser people; the new South Asian migrants to Britain were a cause for alarm; and America (New York particularly) was ‘a hellhole’, even though he’d never been there and would never go. Why anyone might voluntarily seek out somewhere other than one’s own comfortable abode was beyond his understanding.

Christopher was discharged from service on 15 February 1946. He immediately reinstalled his expanded family in the Edgware flat and Dolly back behind the tea urn. This was the natural order of things, as he saw it: an obedient wife, pints at the pub, the occasional game of football. ‘Chris just went to work, made some money,’ a relative recalls. ‘He didn’t expect anything else out of life.’

What he expected of his sons was just as banal. When he went off to war he was following an example set by his own father, also Christopher, who’d fought in the Great War and Second Boer War before that.¹⁹ In other words, Christopher Jr had taken the torch of traditional British masculinity and relayed it through to the 1950s with minimal disruption. And now his own sons were expected to start carrying. ‘He used to take me to the Edgware Football Club and Lord’s Cricket Ground,’ David recalls. ‘I think he was trying to encourage that sort of thing. He always wanted me to get into boxing, too, so he bought me boxing gloves. But I didn’t like it.’

David lasted four days in the British Boy Scouts; Tommy never pretended to try. Instead of communal sports, they both preferred big Hollywood spectacles, viewed for free because their parents had agreed to display Odeon advertisements in the cafe. They also liked to spend time with their mother, whom they’d call Dolly, sunbathing together on the back stairs by the apple trees and accompanying her to live performances (Ethel Merman, Marlene Dietrich) at the Golders Green Hippodrome. Dolly, the brothers soon decided, was ‘almost like a slave’ to her husband. Though she never spoke to them openly about being dissatisfied, they sensed Christopher got under her skin with his endless grousing – that he was, in effect, holding her back from reaching her full potential.

As payback for the tyrannical atmosphere Christopher created at home, Tommy and David liked to play pranks on their father. One involved positioning an object atop a slightly open door: when their father pushed into the room carrying several plates of food, the object fell on his head, causing him to drop everything. Christopher was incensed; their arguments could be explosive. But the brothers were unperturbed and vowed to do it all over again. ‘We used to call him names because he got on our nerves,’ David says. ‘And he was racist. All the things that we weren’t.’

Though Christopher struggled to make any headway in toughening up his sons, there was always the hope the school system could do the job for him. By the time the boys came of age, the Education Act of 1944 had divided secondary schools into three distinct types and implemented an exam known as the eleven-plus to sort students among them. Doing well in the eleven-plus would grant a child access to one of the country’s coveted grammar schools, which opened a pathway to university and white-collar comfort. Doing poorly, on the other hand, diverted a child to a technical school, or one of the secondary moderns, which were looked upon by some with a dread bordering on horror. Capturing a widely shared opinion, the journalist Peter Laurie once wrote, ‘To have been consigned to the limbo of the secondary modern is to have failed disastrously, and very early in life.’²⁰ Keith Richards summed up the secondary modern as ‘the school for kids that don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semi-skilled labour’.²¹ Simon Doonan, the writer and window-dresser, is even more blunt: ‘If, like me, you failed your eleven-plus, you were left with this horrible sinking feeling that society had essentially written you off already.’

David failed the eleven-plus.

Three years later, Tommy also failed – ‘desperately’ – joining the other 75 to 80 per cent of students who did the same.^{22, 23}

Prospects for escaping the working class now looked dim for both of them. David was given a reprieve, however, when Christopher and Dolly decided to send him to a private preparatory school instead. This was followed by Clark’s College, a secretarial school, where the Dickensian-named Mr Savage would hold communal canings like public executions.

Following in David’s wake, Tommy received no such boost. ‘My parents put me on to a council school, which was very rough,’ he later recalled.²⁴ ‘Rough’ to Tommy was, in fact, a horticultural school, Camrose Secondary Modern, where students were taught how to grow vegetables and could elect to join the pig club.

In 1956, Tommy got another chance to safeguard his future, this one called the thirteen-plus. Doing well this time round would allow him to transfer to a building school, an engineering school, or even an art school, once vividly described by George Melly as a refuge for ‘the bright but the unacademic, the talented, the non-conformist, the lazy, the inventive and the indecisive’ – essentially, a character sketch of T. A. Nutter.²⁵ Over the 1950s and 60s, art schools would develop into bastions of fashion and modernist jazz, Sartre and duffel coats, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. All of the imaginative people seemed to be art students, and Tommy was desperate to join the party; indeed, when he passed the thirteen-plus – ‘to everybody’s amazement’ – art school was his first and only choice.²⁶

However, as Tommy later acknowledged, ‘Art in those days was looked upon as a bit odd, a little bit funny, the Beatniks, all that sort of thing.’²⁷ Christopher believed his sons were already funny enough. ‘My parents, bless them, just wouldn’t allow me to go to art school,’ Tommy recalled.²⁸ ‘They didn’t know what “art” was.’

At Christopher’s behest, Tommy was shunted instead into Willesden Technical College. There, he was condemned to a three-year building trade course that covered the rudiments of plumbing and bricklaying – or, as Tommy preferred to put it, ‘all those butch things I couldn’t bear’.²⁹

In part to inoculate themselves against the unbearable expectations of their father, Tommy and David combined their powers of invention. They treated the walls of their shared bedroom with shocks of coloured paint. They built a faux fireplace from scavenged bricks and sculptures out of tin film containers threaded with wire. They sliced out pages from Marie Claire, Paris Match, and made a giant photo mural that juxtaposed Brigitte Bardot with African tribal dancers. They collected the entire back catalogue of Leonard Bernstein, which they blared on a portable radiogram.

David also took up amateur photography.

While stationed in Norway, Christopher had developed a taste for taking pictures, a taste he’d then passed on to his firstborn son (one of the few things they had in common). Christopher was content to just take snaps on summer holidays, but David was more inclined to pursue such hobbies to their creative extremes. In Edgware, he converted a cupboard into a makeshift darkroom, filling the tiny space with sloshing liquids, strips of film, and a cheap enlarger he could use to make experimental exposures. Over time, with the help of Tommy, who performed the role of artist’s muse, his work became increasingly sophisticated – and glamorous.

‘Glamour’, today, is most often used as a synonym for beauty or celebrity, but it also has another meaning. As the writer Virginia Postrel has argued, glamour has to do with illusion – an illusion that masks certain details of reality and arouses longing for something better: ‘It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.’³⁰ Glamour is part performance, part seduction. For Tommy and David, it also became a guiding life principle.

Perhaps the starkest exposition of glamour is the modern American musical, where messy lives are streamlined through the grace of staging, and where inarticulable emotions are effortlessly expressed through a medium of song and dance. Unsurprisingly, young Tommy and David were musical ‘groupies’ (as David describes it), catching the train down to the West End for standing-room tickets in the big theatres. It began with Guys and Dolls in the mid-1950s. My Fair Lady opened in 1958. Candide in 1959. Bye Bye Birdie would premiere in 1961. But their abiding favourite was – and remained, for much of their lives – West Side Story, which felt transgressive and true, somehow, though they struggled to put their finger on exactly what spoke to them.

Tommy and David framed a picture of Chita Rivera in their bedroom. When they received word that George Chakiris was playing tennis near their house, they stalked him like paparazzi. Between the two of them, they saw West Side Story at least a dozen times, over and over, Tommy even skipping classes to make the matinees at Her Majesty’s Theatre.³¹

Tommy finally escaped Willesden Technical College in the summer of 1959 with a Pass standard in English language and geometrical drawing – which qualified him for almost nothing. His teachers and parents despaired of his ever landing ‘a decent job’.³²

Now sixteen years old, Tommy had just missed conscription under the National Service Act, which was finally ending. Just the previous December, David had stood before a medical board in Acton and been rejected for his asthma. (‘And I don’t think my eyesight was that good either,’ David recalls with relief. ‘It would have finished me off, you know, because I don’t like being told what to do by anyone.’)

Tommy got piecemeal employment at a variety of places, including a plumbing firm that forced him to transport ceramic toilet bowls on the Tube. ‘It really wasn’t me,’ he later said.³³ And then Christopher interceded once more on his son’s behalf. ‘My parents, thinking of a nice, safe job for their little boy, suggested I take the Civil Service exams,’ Tommy recalled.³⁴ A government position would mean a respectable, dependable career for life. He took the exams in October 1959.

Four months later, a letter from the Ministry of Works arrived at the cafe advising ‘T. A. Nutter, Esq.’ that he was now a clerical assistant. ‘Your starting pay will be £4 17s.³⁵ 0d. per week, rising to £5 10s. 6d. per week on your birthday in April, 1960,’ the letter informed him. ‘Up to the age of 18 you will be entitled to a meal voucher valued ⅛d. and purchasable for 10d. You will also be allowed time off (a day each week) to attend school, if you wish, until you are 18.’

What this actually meant was that Tommy had essentially become an office chai wallah. Fetching tea left him ‘practically insane with boredom’, and he spent most of his time staring at the scratched surface of his wooden desk.^{36, 37} During Tommy’s tenure, the Ministry of Works was finalising designs for the Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), a centrepiece of the country’s modern telecommunications network that would dramatically alter the London skyline with its bulbous figure.³⁸ If Tommy took any notice of what was happening around him, though, he never gave any indication. Instead, his attention seemed focused elsewhere – on himself, on what he was wearing. ‘I shall never forget my first suit,’ he later recalled, and he would recall it so often and with such wistfulness that the suit came to seem almost talismanic, a glorified relic for which he’d paid £8.³⁹ Bought from Burtons, it featured a short, square jacket in brown worsted, narrow lapels, three covered buttons, and tapered trousers with slits up the ankles: what was called ‘the Italian Look’.

Tommy loathed the Ministry of Works. Administrative bureaucracy was, he decided, tedious and ‘dismal’.⁴⁰ He endured it for nine months, got his pay raise. And then, on 8 November 1960, he bought a copy of the Evening Standard, turned to Situations Vacant, and alighted on an advertisement.

Tommy would later claim that he’d always had a natural flair for dressing well. At the technical college he’d woken up to the idea of personal style, had kept his little white shirt carefully well ironed (‘or at least my mother did’), and his hair parted, creamed and combed into a peak.⁴² The advertisement now spoke to him, and it seemed to say, ‘Come on, if you don’t do it now you’ll never do it.’⁴³

The following day, Tommy wrote an application letter using his most painstaking penmanship.

Tommy posted the letter without telling his parents. When they found out, ‘their feeling was one of amazement’, Tommy recalled.⁴⁵ ‘They had always wanted me to find a steady, secure job. Tailoring did not fit into that category.’ Christopher, for his part, was ‘not exactly pleased about the idea’.

But Tommy didn’t much care about his father’s opinion, and he was through with blindly following convention for the sake of security. He’d tried things their way, Dolly and Christopher’s; now it was his turn. ‘I knew from a little boy what I wanted to do,’ he once told a journalist, glamorising the facts only a little.⁴⁶ ‘And I went against everything to do it.’

Chelsea Bridge and the Battersea Power Station

2

THE GOLDEN AGE

A regular workday, 1960: Tommy is dodging men in black bowlers, traffic conductors, scooters and women whose skirts seem to be getting shorter these days; past tobacconists and newsagents, florists, hair salons, cosmetics shops, immigrant-run restaurants selling foods that he’s never heard of, let alone eaten; past dank, unpaved alleyways, seedy cellar spaces and low-slung windows coated in grime; and past narrow espresso bars with those newfangled Gaggia machines, where the kids are ‘packed tight’, just as Colin MacInnes wrote, ‘whispering, like bees inside the hive waiting for a glorious queen bee to appear’.¹ This labyrinth – Soho – unfurls all the way to Charing Cross Road, a gauntlet populated by boys much like Tommy rushing cans of celluloid from one production house to the next, by drunkards and prostitutes, by people cruising down around Piccadilly for anonymous sex.

As an ‘errand boy-trotter’, or deliveryman, Tommy has a bag on his back filled with toiles and valuable cloth.² He comes to a door and pushes inside, then climbs a staircase to a cramped workroom, where men sit cross-legged, squinting, beneath lighting that will probably destroy their eyesight before the end. These men, called outworkers, look up from their boards at the new arrival, who promptly distributes his cargo: cloth to be assembled into coats go to the coat makers (a popular saying: ‘Gentlemen wear coats, potatoes wear jackets’); and trouser pieces go to the trouser makers. Everyone has his specific role, an area of expertise. Some have callused ridges on their fingers from years of repetitive exertion.

Tommy collects any garments the outworkers have completed and folds them gingerly into his bag. Then, mission accomplished, he dashes down the stairs and retraces his path back through the squalidness to Regent Street.

A canyon carved from grey-white Portland stone, Regent Street divides this part of London into two distinct realms: louche Soho in the east; genteel Mayfair in the west. A river of black cabs and red buses rushes in between. Tommy bridges the canyon at the traffic lights, adjusts his pace, and begins a respectable stroll towards the famous stretch of Savile Row.

Say, today, that you have some serious money in your pocket, £3,000 to £6,000, and an overwhelming desire to buy a suit so finely made it will immediately diminish everything else in your wardrobe to the level of rags. On Savile Row, do you go to the tailor’s your father has gone to (and grandfather before him, for his military uniforms), Dege & Skinner? Or is your primary interest a signature house style: the slim-looking single-button coats at Huntsman, perhaps, as skilfully balanced as a samurai sword? If old Hollywood is an influence, you might follow Rudolph Valentino into Anderson & Sheppard, just round the corner on Old Burlington Street. Of course, Henry Poole & Co. is always a safe bet too, having been favoured by everyone from tsars and shahs to Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French during the Second World War while looking immaculate.

Whichever firm you choose to patronise, the process of bespoke is largely the same. During a first consultation, a salesman, attentive but not obsequious, will begin by peppering you lightly with questions. What suits do you already own? And what is the intended event for this one: a wedding, a law office, a film premiere? What’s the weather like where you plan to wear it, because that will influence the cloth selection (worsted wool, linen, mohair, tweed, flannel …). And then, of course, there is the matter of design: pinstripes, windowpane, Glenurquhart check? Single- or double-breasted? If you happen to be the indecisive type, this step alone might take several hours, which is exactly why alcohol is often on standby.

Eventually a cutter will be summoned to the front, a star employee, confident and persuasive, who is supremely educated in all aspects of the craft. The cutter usually has at least seven to eight years of experience; in the past, tailors have been known to claim, with proud exaggeration, that training a cutter ‘takes longer than to train a brain surgeon’.³

The cutter’s first charge is sizing you up. Accompanied by one or more assistants, sometimes called strikers, he (or she, if the firm is particularly progressive) will wrap and poke a tape measure in up to two dozen different ways, charting the topography of your body with unnerving precision. He will also observe your figuration – the way you hold yourself, the way you move. Physical measurements are recorded as a list of numbers; figuration, however, might become a series of covert abbreviations, meaningless to all but those in the know.

DR: Sloping down on the right shoulder

RB: Rounded back

FS: Flat seat; no backside

The cutter will ask his own questions. With tact and subtlety, for example, he may enquire whether you ‘dress left’ or ‘dress right’ – which way your manhood tends to fall in your underpants.fn1 Unsurprisingly, this intimate collaboration between client and cutter has assumed a special status in tailoring lore, a status that a Playboy fashion director once summed up like this: ‘They used to say that the relationship of a man to his tailor was like a woman and her gynaecologist – all private.’⁴

The cutter combines technical skill with subjective interpretation; mathematics with art. This becomes particularly true once you’ve played your part and vacated the premises. Standing at a workbench before a wide expanse of clean manila paper, the cutter looks over your details and, using a piece of chalk, sets about translating them into an original pattern. He may do this using a draughting square and French curves, jotting down equations based on long-held principles of scale, proportion and balance.

‘A corpulent man may, and, if of true type, does, hold himself erect to counterbalance the weight of his abdomen.’

Or he may just wing it. If complex geometry is second nature, his preferred cutting system will be ‘rock of eye’, or the rule of thumb, meaning he’ll sketch out your coat freehand, using almost nothing but a refined instinct for graceful lines. All details of the suit – angle of the gorge, sweep of the lapel – will then be inflected by those idiosyncrasies of hand that make some cutters good and others astounding.

Once finished, your pattern will be safeguarded in the firm’s storeroom for decades. In the future, whenever you visit for a new suit, alteration lines will be added to reflect the passage of time, until the pattern becomes, in effect, a palimpsest of your life. Many years ago, Poole employed a man who acted as an in-house librarian, his primary job to maintain thousands of numbered patterns on shelving in a vast basement. His secondary job was to read The Times obituaries every morning: if a client’s name happened to appear, he would locate their pattern and ‘get rid of it’, effectively closing the record.⁵

Eventually your pattern is transferred to approximately three and a half yards of cloth. Extra lines are added for pockets and vents. Then the cutter (perhaps running shears through his hair to ever-so-lightly oil the blades) strikes out each of the requisite panels, or has an able assistant do it for him. There is no room for sloppiness here. ‘Cutting bespoke suits is almost the hardest thing in the world if you’re really into it,’ explains Rupert Lycett Green, who ran a tailoring firm near Savile Row from 1962 until the early 1980s. ‘You’re trying to create things of beauty. If you’re Michelangelo, you can take a bit of stone and keep at it until it’s perfect. But if you do that with a suit – well, then the man goes on holiday and comes back eight pounds heavier, or takes up marathon running and comes back eight pounds lighter. You’ve got to alter it. There’s tremendous pressure.’

The first fitting is a subdued affair. You return to the showroom and pull on a ragged-looking ‘skeleton baste’, tacked together with white cotton thread. The cutter dances around, slashing you with more chalk marks to refine your silhouette. This is generally done away from a mirror: people who gaze at themselves tend to stiffen their posture in an unconscious act of self-magnification.

Following the fitting, the baste suit is unstitched, ripped flat, recut if necessary, and then built, on average, for eighty hours. Give or take a dozen.

If you’re of the rare breed able to appraise your own body honestly, then by the second or third fitting you will begin to understand what makes these suits so exceptional. The materials and feel, of course, as well as the way it makes you feel, like you’re wearing a carapace. But there is also something more: what could be called the sartorial airbrushing.

A master tailor ‘must be able not only to cut for the handsome and well-shaped, but bestow a good shape where nature has not granted it; he must make the clothes sit easy in spite of a stiff gait or awkward air …’ So decreed the Dictionary of English Trades in 1804, and the principle remains true more than two hundred years later.⁶ Take, for instance, a man with a slight frame, sloping shoulders and an abnormally large head: a Savile Row suit can pad up his shoulders by multiple inches, and be draped to emphasise his chest and hips, thereby making his head seem more flatteringly proportioned. Just look at Archibald Leach: this is precisely what the consummate experts at Kilgour, French & Stanbury did to help turn him into Cary Grant.⁷

On Savile Row, this magic trick is executed with a particular attitude that only enhances the effect. Hardy Amies, the couturier and fashion designer, once wrote, ‘A man should look as if he had bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care and then forgotten all about them.’⁸ The Italians call this idea sprezzaturano corrections are even taking place