Johnny Cigarini: Confessions of a King's Road Cowboy
Memoirs of a terrible name-dropper
John Cigarini
Copyright © 2014 John Cigarini
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or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
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For me, my friends and you.
*
The King’s Road in Chelsea
was the epicentre of the swinging sixties
and the seventies London scene…
*
With special thanks to Luke Shipman for his valuable contribution.
Contents
Cover
People to Remember…
Introduction
Part 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Part 3
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
Appendix
People to Remember…
This autobiography features the incredibly large number of one hundred and twenty people who are no longer with us:
Ruby Cigarini
Armando Cigarini
Luisa Cigarini
Mabel Davies
Jack Davies
Revd Kenneth Senior
Dr Nora Senior
Lord Beaumont
Bob Brooks
Jim Baker
Len Fulford
Allan van Rijn
Larry Williams
Ann Pugsley
Ronnie Holbrook
Robert Mitchum
Vittorio De Sica
Jean Harlow
Sir Bobby Robson
Tony Curtis
Herbert Lom
Richard Warwick
Ayrton Senna
Elvis Presley
Marlon Brando
Ossie Clark
Keith Lichtenstein
Steve O’Rourke
Alphi O’Leary
Cyril Stein
Carl Perkins
John Belushi
James Hunt
David Jacobs
Steve Marriott
Tony Howard
John Bindon
George Harrison
Princess Margaret
Keith Moon
Maureen Tigrett
Peter Cook
Jeanne Crain
Christopher Reeve
Michael Hutchence
Paula Yates
Dennis Wilson
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Terence Donovan
Marc Bolan
Malcolm McLaren
Johnny Chapulis
Joseph Cotten
Bill Graham
Lesley Sunderland
Tony Scott
Andy Warhol
Buddy Holly
Yogi Bhajan
Junior Walker
Jeremy Keegan
Gerlinde Kostiff
Zelda Barron
Luciana Martinez
Michael Powell
Richard Harris
Storm Thorgerson
Freddy Heineken
Sir David Frost
Kirby Brown
Richard Bembenek
John Wayne
Peter Sellers
Muriel Belcher
Ian Board
Francis Bacon
Frank Zappa
Terry Kath
Jimi Hendrix
Victor Borge
Maria Schneider
Tommy Roberts
Freddie Hornik
Victor Mature
Toni Litri
Paula Boyd
Peter Grant
Michael Kamen
Clement Freud
Fred Dibnah
Jack Dellal
James Brown
Duck Dunn
Colonel Tom Parker
Krissie Wood
John Lee Hooker
Dodi Fayed
Princess Diana
Lee Van Cleef
Conor Clapton
Doug Green
Baron George-Brown
Alvaro Maccioni
Rodney King
Allan McKeown
John Slater
Miss Cynderella
David Abbott
Mark Shand
David Iveson
Bob Hoskins
Oscar Lerman
Johnny Darke
Dick Clark
David Watkin
Dave Crowley
Gordon Miller
Carol White
George Raft
Sai Baba
Enjoy every day! And stay away from Johnny Cigarini.
Introduction
It should really be called ‘Autobiography of a Nobody’. But who is nobody? Who is somebody?
*
“This above all; to thine own self be true.”
– William Shakespeare
Part 1
Chapter 1
The War
He had a beautiful young English wife, three gorgeous daughters and a studio on the Harrington Road. Life must have been sweet for my father in London in the 1930s. It was surely the dream life for any photographer.
That dream came to an end when Italy declared war on Great Britain. It was 1940.
*
Armando Cigarini was born in 1896 to an Italian family in French Tunisia. It had been recently established during the French colonial empire, which was still the second-largest colonial power on the map. When he became an adult, Armando made his way to Paris where he was an apprentice to Marcel, the well-known French photographer, and he saw the First World War – fortunately only as a war photojournalist for a French newspaper, as his heart condition
prevented him from being drafted in as any kind of soldier. He was present during the famous retreat from Caporetto in 1917, taking photographs on the Austro-Italian front – as documented by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Near the town of Kobarid, Austro-Hungarian forces, reinforced by German units, broke the Italian frontline and overwhelmed the Italian army. It was the war of poison gas, the terrifying stormtroopers, the trenches. Those who read the Hemingway masterpiece would often summarise it with a word: bleak. The backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers and the displacement of populations would have been nothing but bleak. It is what my father would have surely seen, like the lines of men, marching in the rain. A Farewell to Arms is quite a story of love and pain, of loyalty and abandonment – ironically the exact themes that would encapsulate his own life. But not yet. First he would need to meet her, my beautiful mother.
After the Great War, Armando moved to Berlin where he opened a photographic studio. They must have been fun days during the Golden Twenties in Berlin; a sophisticated culture of architecture, cabaret, literature, painting, film and fashion. Considered decadent by rightists, it was surely fabulous for my father, but he didn’t stay long and moved swiftly to London to become a court photographer for the Royal Court, a title of great distinction in those days. He photographed young Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, and I have a photograph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, inscribed ‘Portrait by Cigarini’. He was also a society photographer for Tatler and Bystander out of Fleet Street and for The Sketch, the newspaper weekly that cornered high society and the aristocracy. Armando’s photographs were hand-coloured, which I believe he did himself and I find that to be quite fabulous. On the internet, I found one he had taken of film actress Eve Gray, and another of Miss Peggy O’Neil, now in the National Portrait Gallery archives.
By the early ’30s, Armando had met and married my mother, Ruby Davies, who was a wonderful and beautiful young model. Likely they met on a photo shoot in his studio on Harrington Road. They had three daughters: Maria born in 1933, Luisa in ’36 and Christina in ’38, and they lived in Marylebone, Central London.
It was 10 June 1940 when Benito Mussolini stepped onto the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia and declared war on France and Britain, bellowing in his uniform to a quarter of a million in the Piazza. “Soldiers, sailors, and aviators… black shirts of the revolution and of the legions… men and women of Italy… of the Empire… and of the kingdom of Albania… pay heed. An hour appointed by destiny has struck in the heavens of our fatherland. The declaration of war has already been delivered…” and the crowd chanted two words back to their Mussolini: “war” and “war”.
The reaction from the Allies was swift. In London, all Italians who had lived on British soil less than twenty years and were aged between sixteen and seventy were interned. For the Italians of London, life had changed in a heartbeat. Panic had hit the city streets and what was once a place of opportunity, wonder and excitement had turned overnight into a place where people feared for their lives.
Faced with the certainty of internment, the family packed and moved to Rome. It may have suited my father, who avoided internment, but life was not easy for my mother and the English girls in German-occupied Rome. To begin with, none of them could speak Italian. Only my father could, as he was already well travelled and fluent in Italian, French, Arabic, German and English. Like in all wars, hardship was evident everywhere. The German forces took most of the available food, with bread being rationed to just 100g per person per day. Utilities were cut off, and the family had no electricity, gas or water. Subsequently, my mother had multiple miscarriages during the war due to the hard conditions, until eventually they had their first son, Giuseppe – but he died after just forty days. They had twin daughters, Lilliana and Silvana, but they also died – after just four days. My mother was exhausted, she had no milk in her body, and there was none to buy.
The bombing of Rome took place on several occasions in the early 1940s, most notably in June 1943 when more than 500 Allied planes dropped bombs, causing thousands of civilian deaths, and even the Vatican City was under attack by both British and German forces, despite it maintaining neutrality.
Rome was hit by 60,000 tons of bombs over seventy-eight days before her capture. Yet, quite amazingly, against a backdrop of all of this, in late 1943 my mother fell pregnant… with me. She woke up on 6 June 1944 to a great sound: American tanks on the main street, near home. She left the house, heavily pregnant, and walked up to the American soldiers. Holding me in her tummy, she spoke to them in English, which would have been unusual for the American GIs to hear.
“Which way did the Germans go?” the US Fifth Army asked her as she stood in her long coat. They befriended her and gave her a supply of milk, chocolates and bread. It seemed that day was to mark a turning point in the war in Europe, with Rome being the first of the axis power capitals to fall to the Allies. American troops took control of Rome and the Germans had been ordered to withdraw. Rome was liberated and the people emptied themselves onto the streets in celebration, welcoming the Allies with cheers and applause, hurling bundles of flowers at passing army vehicles. Two days later I was born. It was 8 June 1944. What I’ve come to realise is that those very provisions the Americans gave my mother enabled me to live. I owe my life to those soldiers on that day. My luck had just begun and I was given the middle name Victor to denote the victory.
*
Being multi-lingual and a good businessman, my father began to supply the Allied Forces with general provisions, namely vegetables, eggs and poultry, which he sourced in the Roman countryside. He became quite rich in the process, but sadly lost most of the money buying a warehouse full of old master paintings, which turned out to be fakes. Quite the businessman, he got involved in an enterprise, which I remember well from my childhood in Rome. He invented a chocolate-banana machine. You put the chocolate and the banana in one end, and the chocolate-covered banana came out the other. The machines were big, about the size of a supermarket freezer. I remember those bananas being quite delicious, but the business didn’t take off. I have since only come across chocolate-covered bananas once, in Hawaii.
Likely through his American Army connections, my father was offered the job of running Coca-Cola in Italy but, much to the exasperation of my mother, he turned the offer down. He said he had never worked for anyone else in his life, and he didn’t want to start. Whether for that reason or because the war was over, my mother decided she would return to England, which she did in 1949. But before we left, we had a visitor: my maternal grandmother, Mabel, likely giving my mother guiding words from a generation that had seen war before. My mother decided to only take my eldest sister Maria and me, Little Johnny, back to England. By this time, my father was already ill with the heart disease that would eventually kill him. Luisa and Christina, then aged thirteen and eleven, were put in a convent in Rome. The family was beginning to split apart.
Although I was only five, I remember the journey to England. We went for a final pizza before the trip. I went back to the flat sixty years later and after all those years I was still able to walk straight back to our apartment building from the tram. The pizzeria was still there too! I remember my mother wearing her long black coat. I remember us stopping off in Paris. I remember seeing one of my father’s brothers there. I remember his family at the station. It was a long time ago; I am now seventy. But I remember.
My sister Christina, who stayed behind in Rome, has since told me that my father did not know we were leaving and that he had his first heart attack when he found out. All this because of the war.
When we got to England, my mother left my sister and I with two of her sisters, while she got her life organised. She was looking for a job and somewhere to live and started calling herself Johnson, presumably so my father could not trace her. I still don’t know why my mother left him – I guess I’ll never know; perhaps I’m not meant to – but it must have been terribly hard for her in Rome during those times. I’m sur
e she must have missed England dearly. Maria was nearly sixteen, and was left with Aunty Mabs in Broadstairs, Kent. Mabs was a hairdresser and her husband, Les, worked for the Post Office. I was left in Coventry with Aunty Alice. Her husband Ted worked as a toolmaker at the Standard Motor Company. They had three small children of their own.
That was it, I never saw my mother again. Four months later in London, she was dead. She had started vomiting blood due to a serious liver disease and went into a coma. She died, aged thirty-nine, of haematemesis. The last time I saw my father was when he came over for my mother’s funeral in 1950, when I was just five. He gave me a red twelve-inch tin-plate model car with a battery and working headlights. I still have it and it is my most treasured possession, still with the original battery. Armando went back to Rome and died of heart failure in February 1954, aged fifty-seven. My father was dead, my mother was dead, three siblings had died before their first birthday, I had two sisters back in Italy and one I had been separated from in England. I was alone, kind of. Maybe it was the early years that were to shape the rest of me. It would certainly explain a few things.
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