[Bernie’s sexuality and who was murdered at
his home in Gypsy Hill in 1985, while Bernie,
then 17, and his mother were both in the
house. In Soho Society, the book Bernie pub-
lished in 2008, he chronicled his father’s death
with a detached, macabre humour. On hearing
gunshots, ‘when I went to investigate, I discov-
ered that thanks to the bullet through his head,
my dad’s brains were splattered across the four
walls of his bedroom. Never one to miss an op-
portunity, I sashayed over to his wardrobe and
navigated my way across the sea of footwear to
his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes I’d
secretly always had my eye on. Thank God they
were in the wardrobe. You see something good
always comes out of tragedy.’
Not always. Bernie’s tragedy, as I discovered,
was that after he left the Groucho, with no reg-
ular job, he had begun to succumb to the ad-
dictions that had dogged him through his life
and that presented him with money troubles.
Put bluntly, he got on the wrong side of the
wrong type of people – specifically, it was whis-
pered, Albanian gangsters and their constant
demands for repayment. The traffic-blocking
turnout at his funeral procession attested to the
many people who counted Bernie as a friend.
Yet very few of those friends were aware of the
pressure he was under.Bernie’s body was found on 31
August 2017 at his modest rented
flat in Kentish Town, north Lon-
don, by a long-standing friend. The cause of
death, according to Dr William Dolman, the
coroner at St Pancras Coroner’s Court, was ‘sus-
pension’ – a legalistic euphemism for hanging.
He recorded an open verdict. It was a tawdry
end to a life writ large – and loud.
Inevitably, rumours flew: some members
blamed the Groucho. Had the management
been fair to Bernie after his many years of out-
standing service? Was he pushed out? If so, why?
Although members gossiped, no hard facts ap-
peared. When Bernie died, I asked a couple of
the club’s waitresses if they knew what had
happened. My inquiry drew uneasy, slightly
nervous looks; they did not want to talk about
it. Nor did many of Bernie’s friends. One media
celebrity wrote to me, saying that he had ‘loved
Bernie’ but conspicuously had nothing more to
add. Odd that. In fact, I am not sure Bernie had
many real friends: he was a ‘friend’ to the stars,
but how many were genuinely friends to
him? Ultimately, he was an outsider, merely a
gatekeeper to a gilded, glamorous world.
The irony of a new Bernie Katz restaurant at
the Groucho has not been lost on some mem-
bers. They suggest that the club’s management
is trying to atone belatedly for the treatment oftheir legendary employee. Not one member of
Bernie’s large family attended the party to
launch the restaurant.
‘We asked them,’ says Groucho Manager Jeff
Connon, ‘but they didn’t want to come. That
was their choice. I think for the Groucho it is
important that we reconnect with the club’s
past – and Bernie was part of that.’
He certainly was. Stephen Fry, a founder
member of the Groucho, was perhaps closer
to Bernie than most – and yet, he said: ‘I can’t
claim I knew him intimately. There probably
was something sad about Bernie. It can’t have
been easy to watch so many people coming in
and out, so many of whom seemed to have
perfectly prosperous and easy lives, while he
was always working late, late, late, always at
the mercy of whatever structural or managerial
changes might come to make his life harder.
It may seem glamorous to be a popular and
well-known figure of the kind he was, but in
fact there was a lot of work, very little money
and too many temptations into addiction and
late nights for either physical or mental health.’
Was he depressive? ‘I think yes,’ said Fry,
‘When alone – a condition he rarely sought –
he had demons that flew about his head.’
By the time Bernie finished his last shift in
the spring of 2017, the Groucho had changed
hands several times. Founded in 1985 by
Quaker chocolate heir Tony Mackintosh, wine
merchant John Armit and architect Tchaik
Chassay, among others, it was conceived pri-
marily as a members’ club for literary types. Yet
it had always had a showbiz pedigree; among
the many original investors were Paul Simon
and Julie Christie. In 2001 it was taken over by
Joel Cadbury and Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-
law Matthew Freud; Freud fell out with Cadbury
and withdrew from ownership a year later. In
2006 the club had passed into the hands of
Graphite Capital, a private equity firm. They
subsequently sold it in 2015 to another equity
firm, Alcuin Capital Partners, whose portfolio
also included the UK Krispy Kreme doughnut
franchise and Caffé Nero – neither of which are
particularly rock ’n’ roll.
In 2016 some long-standing members wrote
an open letter moaning about the corporate
feel of the club, the profusion of laptops and
what they called ‘open’ drug use on the prem-
ises. But cocaine had long been a feature of an
evening at the Groucho, as various members
have testified in print. The writer Toby Young
was thrown out of the club by the membership
committee in 2001 after he wrote about Keith
Allen and Damien Hirst using cocaine on the
premises, at the time under the ownership of
Matthew Freud and Joel Cadbury. There is of
course no suggestion that they condoned drug
use. (In his memoir, Stephen Fry points outTatler October 2019 tatler.comKATZ PEOPLE
From top, Kate Moss leaving the Groucho in 2009. When
Bernie died, she said, ‘Soho will never be the same again’;
his confidants, Jude Law and Viscount Macmillan, at the
club, 2013; the hearse’s floral tribute, bearing the moniker
given to Bernie by his friend Stephen Fry, 2017PHOTOGRAPHS: BACKGRID; GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK10-19WELL-MarkEdmonds.indd 116 09/08/2019 13:18
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