Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  The third of the girls was a redhead, Janet Ferguson, who happened to be Frank Zappa’s nanny. One of her friends, Gail, had married Frank, and the Zappas were living in London in a rented house on Ladbroke Grove with their first daughter Moon Unit. They had also just had their son, Dweezil. I went to Frank and Gail’s house a few times. Frank was always playing avant-garde music from Eastern Europe, which I also found a bit weird, amongst other things at his place.

  Donna Curry was just fab. She came from Chicago and was best friends with the band Chicago. They had just had hits with ‘25 or 6 to 4’ and ‘I’m a Man’ and it was one of Donna’s friends, Pam, who had married Terry Kath, the lead guitarist of the band. He was really quite a genius; a singer and multi-instrumentalist who played lead, rhythm and bass, banjo, accordion and the drums. He died in 1978, playing Russian roulette with a pistol.

  Other famous groupies and musicians regularly came to my flat. Cynthia Plaster Caster was a frequent visitor. She had an infamous collection of plaster casts of rock stars’ erect penises. She had her own special technique for getting them ‘up’. I think it probably involved smudging her lipstick. I asked her if she wanted to do a cast of mine, but she apparently only had enough plaster for one more, and was saving that for David Bowie. I thought that was quite unreasonable myself.

  *

  I recall a time in 1973 when I was listening to Isaac Hayes in my flat when this scruffy American girl came by. She said she was a musician. In those days, who wasn’t? This was well before the punk style was fashionable and I remember thinking, Honey, you’ve got no chance, looking like that. It was Chrissie Hynde, who had just moved to London from Akron, Ohio. She turned out to be a brilliant songwriter and later hit the big time with her band the Pretenders. Oh well, what did I know?

  Chicago came to London on their way to the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The girls and I took them to the Speakeasy, the musicians’ big hangout. Until I discovered Tramp, which was a more upmarket nightclub, I was at the Speak every night. I saw Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in the Malibu Starbucks sometime in the 1990s, and Ozzy came up to me and said, “Don’t I know you from the Speakeasy?”

  Chicago hired a bus to get to the Isle of Wight and I was playing tag along. We all piled in and stopped off at Stonehenge en route. With the band was the fiancé of keyboard player Bobby Lamm, and what a beauty she was too. She married Bobby and became Karen Lamm, but later I met her in LA with Dennis Wilson, drummer of The Beach Boys. She had become Karen Lamm-Wilson. Amazingly, she still found time in between them to give me a few flings. I think back to my young days, the time in Margate with the girl who came to my room, in Africa with the exotic maid; times had definitely changed.

  At the Isle of Wight Festival, I had two backstage passes from Chicago. I ran into a friend, Daniel Topolski, who used to cruise his Mini-Moke, an open jeep made from the Mini car, around the King’s Road. He worked for the BBC and had two media area passes, so between us we had all backstage areas covered. Daniel was the son of well-known artist and illustrator Feliks Topolski, and he lived in a large family house overlooking Regent’s Park. Daniel was a rower and he would later become well known for coaching the Oxford crew to about ten consecutive victories against Cambridge.

  Chicago played on the Friday night and left, but I was staying on for the main act, Hendrix. I had taken a small tent, and Dan and I slept in that. Due to traffic problems, the show on Saturday ran very late and The Who didn’t play until around 3am. They had military searchlights on the stage illuminating the crowd – all 600,000 of us – and by three in the morning, it really was quite a scene. By the time Sly and the Family Stone came on, it was daylight – Sunday morning. The organisers only sold one-day tickets, so when the show ended for the day, even if it was the next morning, everyone was thrown out while people were queuing to get back in for the next. Vendors were selling paper sacks as sleeping bags; the whole thing was just madness. Dan and I, of course, took it upon ourselves to go down the waiting line of people: “Wouldn’t you rather sleep in a nice warm tent?” We eventually got a couple of willing girls, and it was hysterically funny having four people in a single tent, with arms and legs sticking out of the sides – very sexy, too, very seventies. Jimi Hendrix came on, opening with ‘Foxy Lady’, and it was simply incredible. A month later, he was dead.

  The Isle of Wight is an island and for many quite an incredible obstacle course to get to. The fact that 600,000 came that year to a place of only 100,000 inhabitants was what made it the great event it has gone down in history to be, and the one that topped Woodstock, in my opinion, thanks to the music of The Doors, The Who, Hendrix, Free, Miles Davis, Supertramp, Procol Harum and the wonderful Joni Mitchell. Something happened on that island and everyone who was there knows what I’m talking about. I was proud to have gone and to have been a part of that great event and to have seen the great Hendrix. They said it was to be the last Isle of Wight Festival, but in thirty-two years that would all change.

  Chapter 10

  Outrageous Sexual Behaviour

  There is one interesting sexual anecdote from my time at Hobson Bates and given this is my chance to tell the world of it, I shall. One of the directors lived in a modern house in the woods in the Home Counties, where he would have orgies every Sunday. I went for the first time to see with my own eyes that which I had heard of, but only in whispers – like the beds being covered with naked people.

  It was the sixties and though this kind of thing happens today, it had not happened before, so when I was there it held something. There was a certain atmosphere where no one knew of the consequences; there was a quality to that, a certain unique kind of a… je ne sais quoi. I would go to the parties and I tried it, but to be honest I wasn’t really into the group sex thing, or maybe it just didn’t come naturally to me. I wanted one-on-one more. There were two parties: a normal one downstairs, where families would sit and drink tea and their children would play and run around (you’d have to see it to believe it), while upstairs, all of the sex action would proceed and certainly not with any caution. There was one gorgeous woman whose face and body I will remember forever, because she was absolutely, totally and utterly mesmerising. A goddess is a word I wouldn’t use lightly, but for her I will and I do and I am. She was a goddess. She used to attend the downstairs party each week with her husband. I don’t know why, but she wasn’t interested in the orgies either. I was really attracted to her and the orgies just seemed to ‘lend themselves’ to a certain dynamic between the people downstairs – because we all knew what was going on upstairs.

  Each week, despite neither of us being interested in the upstairs orgy and despite her being all prim and well-behaved downstairs with her hubby, I would ask her to come upstairs… with me… privately, so to speak. She was reluctant, but I could see she was tempted. Perhaps the orgasmic vibrations of the upstairs had begun to travel down and tempt her even. The dark side was alluring and I could see it in her eyes, her breath, the way she hung her legs. Her mind was on the smut of the upstairs, the thing that London has had with it since antiquity – mischief and naughtiness – and now it was here for us to use and abuse. Now was the time, for her, for me, but there was a problem: her husband.

  After a couple of weeks, she asked him if she could go with me, and perhaps she had been softly easing him in to his decision, as she told me he had given her the okay. I practically came in my pants right there. To me, it was as if God had answered my naughty prayer, or maybe I was just lucky one more time. Her husband had two rules: that she must not get pregnant – well, that seemed fair enough – and we were to use one of the bedrooms where no one else could see. Fine by me too, no arguments there at all.

  I put the bedside lamp on the floor and put a sweater over it to soften the lighting. I remember that bit because I burnt a hole in my sweater – but I wasn’t too bothered, as she had already begun to give me oral pleasure. It was delightful and I recall how fabulous and erotic she looked while she did it. I don’t want to
sound obnoxious, but it was as if she had been fantasising about it for some time; the sounds she was making, staring at me with her deep purple eyes and gripping my thighs with her nails, tasting and loving my penis.

  Sadly, the fantasy play-out was not to last. Only a few minutes had passed and there was a loud banging on the door. It was her husband, screaming into the room. She leapt off the bed and went out to him. Later, I found out from her that he had gone for a walk into the garden, depressed because she was with me. Unfortunately (for all), while strolling around the garden, he had looked up and seen the shadow of her giving me a blow job on the ceiling of the bedroom. He was furious, because she would not do that to him. She obviously considered it too dirty for her husband, but okay for me. Quite a sweet sentiment, really. Actually I felt sad for him that I had made him depressed, but I probably did him a favour. I bet he got it after that. I hope so anyway; she was to-die-for. I stopped going to the orgies.

  *

  After I left Hobson Bates, Carol Adler gave me some jobs for Ultrabrite. We were shooting on the Ivory Coast and all staying at a beach club, where a pretty French girl was staying alone. I had enough experience by this stage and knew what my strengths were and how to use them. Let’s just say I was a producer from London and Bob Brooks was my director (not a lie in it). She stayed the night with me, exhausted me in fact – I must say, I wasn’t expecting to learn anything new from the pretty French girl, but every day’s a school day, right? I couldn’t keep up with her sexual demands and began joking about it the next day with Peter Biziou, the lighting cameraman, who also fancied her. Peter won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Mississippi Burning, for which he gave the best Oscar speech I’d ever heard: One word, “Thanks.”

  “If the pretty French girl is too much for you to handle, could I have a crack?” he asked me in-between takes.

  “You can have her tonight,” I assured him, “but I want her back tomorrow.” However, the handsome devil never returned the goods. In fact, he took her to London and stayed with her for months. Outrageous, the pair of us, but that’s how it was in those days – or that’s how we were in those days. It was outrageous sexual behaviour. Was this sexual behaviour more commonplace in the sixties and seventies, or were we just young?

  I was going out with Suze Randall at the time and she looked a picture with her short blonde hair, swinging about London in her Alfa Romeo 2600 Spider – a very desirable convertible indeed. She had found out that my friend Daniel Topolski was in hospital with hepatitis, having heard of him from the Wet Dream Film Festival. I suggested that she go give him a present. We went in to the hospital to his private room and I introduced them: “Daniel, this is Suze; Suze, this is Daniel.” I drew the curtains, and went to stand guard. She gave him a blow job – a true present, and surely better than grapes or chocolates. Later, Suze went to America and became the world’s leading female erotic photographer and the first female staff photographer for both Playboy and Hustler.

  The first Wet Dream Film Festival was held in Amsterdam in 1970. Underground pornographic films were considered art in those days. There was not the proliferation that came with videos, adult TV channels and the internet. The first four rows at the cinema were reserved for people who wanted to masturbate, the next four for people who wanted to screw, and so on. Topolski had told me about a ‘happening’ during the sixties, even before I came to London. It was at the very respectable ICA, near Buckingham Palace. The event was held in a pitch-black room where no one could see anything and everyone inside the dark room was groping everybody else, as they so desired. If nothing else, surely that was the sixties. Doing things without worrying about the consequences, doing things without caring too much about who with, doing the things we always wanted but were never given a stage to play them out on – but there was a darkness to it, what with the underground abortions and so on. It was A Hard Day’s Night but it was Alfie too – not all joy, especially for some of the girls.

  Sometimes I was bordering on being exhibitionistic. I had one girlfriend who loved nothing more than screwing on Park Lane, with all the traffic rushing past us. She also wanted to do it on the window ledge of a room at the nearby Hilton, and I had to book a room high up so she could show off to all of London. There was a heat wave one summer. It was so hot, in fact that I had taken to wearing a kaftan. I wore it when we went to Primrose Hill, one of my favourite parks in London, boasting a view of the entire city. There, we made love on the grass. We were aware of prying eyes behind every tree. I think it may have even been a gay cruising spot. What we were doing may not have been their cup of tea, but I think we gave them a good show nonetheless.

  I was behaving pretty outrageously in those days, but I had my own style with it. It wasn’t too smutty and I always tried to remain a gent – ‘tried’ being the operative word. On a number of occasions, I would take advantage of my third floor balcony that overlooked the King’s Road and chat a girl up at the bus stop on the street below. I’d use a corny line, which I’m sure none of them believed, that the buses were on strike and they could “come and wait it out in my flat” – and they would often come up for a tea or a coffee. Dear, oh dear! Many did and many were super cool, but none of them were like Tara…

  Tara was from Toronto and we met one night at the Speakeasy. She visited London a few times in the following years and she would always see me. I was her first man, but not the first person she’d slept with. She came from a lesbian home as her mother lived with three other lesbians in her home in Canada. In fact, Tara told me once she had first been seduced by one of her mother’s lesbian friends, so she was more experienced than most. Tara was unique in that she had the most seductive chat-up technique I ever saw, and by then I had seen quite a few. She had come to realise that many heterosexual women were curious about a lesbian ‘experience’ and this was in the seventies, even before being bisexual became a fashionable thing. Tara would always seduce girls for us – it was easy for her, looking like Isabelle Adjani – and it was her who was about to give me one of my most erotic experiences. She brought one girl back to my flat, someone she had picked up that night, and within moments I was lying on my back and the girl (who was very petite) was on her back on top of me, with my cock inside her. Meanwhile, Tara was kneeling on the bed, holding the girl’s legs wide open and licking between her legs, and licking me as I went into the young babe. It’s a shame things like this don’t really happen to me anymore!

  Over the years, I have found that many girls like fantasising about being with a woman during a sex session with a man. It seems to really turn them on for some reason. Once I visited Tara in Toronto and I was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel. It had a lively bar scene, one that singles would rely on to hook up. One evening, Tara seduced a woman who was there with her husband (but who was not with her at that specific moment) and she managed, somehow, to get her to come upstairs to my room for a threesome. Without the husband knowing, she had left the bar. It was the woman’s first lesbian experience, and she loved it. Tara also stayed one night with me in the hotel. My room was on the fifteenth floor, and it was the only tall building in the area. In the morning, while she was giving me oral sex, a man on a harness suddenly appeared, cleaning the outside of the window. Being on the fifteenth, I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains, and he saw everything. After a few swishes of his wiper and with one flick of his control switch, he disappeared to the floor below. We giggled like a couple of school kids and it was the last time I saw her – Tara, the fantastic lesbian. I still think of her from time to time, like many of the beauts, like the wife who gave me erotic oral sex at the orgy. I make sure I think of them all regularly. I think it keeps me young and what a terrible waste it would be to forget. Don’t you think?

  It was in the mid-1970s and I went to the South of France, this time producing for director Ross Cramer. We used to shoot the ‘Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ commercials – a very famous campaign devised by Terry Lovelock
at CDP, in which Victor Borge (the famous Danish-American pianist, comedian and raconteur with the laconic voice) did the voice-overs for the whole campaign for many years. In this film, for the only time, he was to appear in person, as the world’s richest man (shot of Victor lying on a sunbed by the pool, idly tossing peanuts into the water). He has a beautiful house (shot of a fabulous mansion), beautiful women (shot of half a dozen models), valuable cars (shot of Rolls Royces), private planes and so on, but he is bored and dispirited. So the butler serves him the cold Heineken and it fails to refresh him, proving that it is better to be poor and refreshed, than rich and unrefreshed.

  Looking for the location in France, we stayed at the Hotel du Cap, one of the leading hotels in the world. We eventually settled on a magnificent house called the Château de la Garoupe, at the point of the Cap d’Antibes. It had belonged to a British family since 1907 when Sir Charles McLaren bought four acres of the Cap. (According to The Riviera Times, it was sold to a nominee company of a London-based Russian oligarch for €22 million.) The chateau is on its own little peninsula on the Cap. You can stand in the main drawing room and look down the steps to the sea, turn 180 degrees and still be looking at the sea. Freddy Heineken, the owner of our client, lived next door. He was a friendly man (I would be too, with a net worth of 9.5 billion guilders) and was one of the richest people in the Netherlands. He came to the shoot with his daughter Charlotte, who is one of the richest women in the world now that Freddy has died. We had a helicopter for aerial footage of the house and the pilot took me up for a spin. It was fascinating seeing all the wonderful homes on the Cap d’Antibes. After that and the shoot, I was feeling good, feeling strong, feeling like a man… feeling like I was ready for more outrageous… sexual… behaviour, so I took one of the models, a great Australian girl called Jill Goodall, to a hotel in Juan-les-Pins for a dirty weekend.