Tatler October 2019 tatler.comLouche, loved and always there for his A-list friends, Bernie Katzwas the King of the Groucho Club – until, just months before hismysterious death, he was unceremoniously dethroned. Mark Edmondsuntangles a web of debauchery, dazzling nights and omertàIT IS SEPTEMBER 2017, AND THE LATE
summer sun is shining on the tightly packed
grid of dishevelled streets that marks out Soho.
It’s an enclave that has witnessed many memo-
rable tableaux over the years, but the funeral of
Bernie Katz, the former front-of-house at the
Groucho Club in Dean Street, ranks among the
most remarkable. The cortège, led by a splendid
horse-drawn Victorian hearse carrying a floral
tribute bearing the words ‘The Prince of Soho’,
is accompanied by several hundred mourners.
Among the crowd are Sienna Miller, Sadie
Frost, Alfie Allen and Noel Fielding, all of
whom had known the small man now lying in
the casket, silent and alone.
Even by Soho’s lavishly extrovert standards,
Bernie Katz’s funeral is an extraordinary occa-
sion, meriting a three-minute segment on the
BBC London news. Anyone who mattered in
the louche, bold-face world of clubland knew
Bernie. He was the guy who could get anything
done, both the Prince of Soho and the King of
the Groucho; he was a confidant of Kate Moss
and Jude Law, a fixer without equal and a trust-
ed keeper of secrets. His discretion and loyalty
had allowed him to become the beneficiary of
many of the Young British Artists who’d
frequented the club at the height of their fame;
he’d been given dozens of paintings and his
private art collection must have been worth well
in excess of six figures. He had recently been
named one of the most influential men in
Britain by GQ and his passing was deemed
significant enough to grant him the lead obituary
in The Times, before the Duke of Richmond.
There were other obituaries and abundant
heart-rending online tributes. But no one went
into any detail about how, towards the end,
Bernie’s life had unravelled quickly, quietly and
catastrophically. No one speculated about
where the money from those YBA paintings
had gone. No one had probed into Bernie’sdemons. No one had spoken of the vicious
Albanian gangsters pursuing him. And no one
had characterised his life as the sad morality
tale it had become.
But then Bernie kept things quiet; he had
seen the rich and famous in varying degrees of
excess, and one of the reasons he enjoyed such
‘respect’ was that he was discreet, utterly
discreet. As the television presenter Richard
Bacon put it, on the back cover of Bernie’s first
and only book: ‘Bernie is known as the little
man who can in Soho. Can what? Anything.’
That ‘anything’ hides a multitude of sins.
Bacon, for example, was famously fired from
Blue Peter in 1998 for taking cocaine – he was
forced to return his Blue Peter badge. Bernie
may well have had his own problems. Only
now, on the second anniversary of his death –
and as the Groucho renames its downstairs
restaurant Bernie’s, hanging a beautiful portrait
of him by the artist Nina Fowler on the wall –
have the dark secrets surrounding his demise
begun to emerge.
Little more than five months after Bernie had
left the Groucho, he was dead. The club put
out a terse announcement, but no reason was
given: some suggested a heart attack. By the
time he had stepped down, he had clocked up
more than 27 years of service, starting as a bar-
man in 1990, at a time when the Groucho had
reached its fashionable, cocaine-fuelled zenith:
the upstairs snooker room was widely known as
the ‘Peruvian Procurement Department’.
The club had effectively become Cool
Britannia’s front room, colonised en masse by
the new wave of Young British Artists that
included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sam
Taylor-Wood and Sarah Lucas. One memora-
ble night, Hirst put his £20,000 1995 Turner
Prize money behind the downstairs bar. The
next morning, with the party still going, he
topped it up with another £20,000 from hisown ‘savings’. The YBA era was probably the
Groucho’s heyday; Bill Clinton played saxo-
phone at the club one evening and regulars
included television stars and Britpop luminaries
like Oasis and Blur, as well as older school musos
such as Bono and Eric Clapton. Bernie was in
with all of them.
The Bernie stories, like the man himself,
were vivid, outrageous and lurid. In the Nine-
ties, he and Daryl Hannah once undertook a
night-time tour of Soho membership clubs
across the rooftops of the West End, literally
dropping in unannounced on flabbergasted
members. He claimed Jessica Lange taught
him to drink tequila and smoke cigars. He was
entranced by Hollywood celebrity, but his con-
cern for the welfare of rank and file Groucho
members also knew no bounds. And he could
wildly overstep the mark: he was once inter-
rupted in the club’s snooker room while trying
to administer a restorative dose of fellatio to
one sleeping (and non-consenting) rock star.
As Bernie became more and more estab-
lished at the Groucho, his hissy fits, warm-
hearted kindness and outrageous campery
would invariably pep up all but the most be-
draggled and wasted of clubgoers. Until it was
time to go home. It was then that Bernie found
himself showing members the door. ‘Nothing
good ever comes from staying out later than
4am,’ he’d trill, in his fruity nasal twang, a
camp interpretation of a south London drawl.
Then he’d strut across the reception in his
trademark leopard-skin jacket and clackety-
clack Cuban heels before throwing some
drink- or drug-ravaged showbiz multimillion-
aire out on their ear. He once proved his chutz-
pah by kicking out Madonna for being rude.
That chutzpah came perhaps from his own
colourful background. His father Brian ‘Little
Legs’ Clifford was a ruthless south London
gangster, who never came to terms with ]Who killed the PPHOTOGRAPH: JULIAN SIMMONDS10-19WELL-MarkEdmonds.indd 114 08/08/2019 11:23
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