Bindon was also a friend of Steve O’Rourke, the manager of Pink Floyd. He sometimes did security work for the Floyd and Steve, Bindon and I went out on the town one night, just the three of us. We were driving around in Steve’s Mercedes 280 SE Cabriolet. It was a lovely summer night and he had the convertible top down. We went to a few pubs and then hit Tramp. After being there a while, Steve suddenly cried out in terrible panic. He rushed out of the club, but returned minutes later: “That was lucky. I left my briefcase on the back seat. I’m going to the States tomorrow… I’ve got my ticket, passport and £4000 in cash in it.” We left Tramp and hit the Speakeasy, but I noticed that as soon as we got there, Bindon was on the public phone in the lobby. A while later, Steve was told that someone had smashed open the boot of his car and the briefcase was gone. We were discussing the incident at the bar with a member of the American band playing that night, and the musician said, “I saw who did it.”
“Oh yeah? Who?” Bindon asked him, but from the tone of his questioning it was clear who it was.
“It was you”, the musician said, and Bindon knocked him out cold. It seemed he had telephoned a friend to pass the briefcase on to him, then went out and stole it and returned to the club to join Steve and I. He would do that, even to Steve O’Rourke, a friend and employer. That was the kind of man that he was.
Bindon had an aristocratic girlfriend, Vicky Hodge, the daughter of a baronet. A classic case of a posh lady liking a bit of rough. I knew her around Chelsea and through that connection, Bindon was invited to Mustique – an exclusive private island in the Caribbean Sea – on a number of occasions. There, he met the late Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister. She denied it, but I know there exists a photograph of them together. The story goes that she had heard about the size of his penis and they went for a walk down the beach so that he could show it to her. Bindon claimed that when they returned to London, the princess would frequently send a car for him to visit her in Kensington Palace.
One of Bindon’s pals was blues and jazz singer Dana Gillespie, who was – and still is – a regular in Mustique. She is also aristocratic and was friends with Vicky Hodge, so that may have been the reason Bindon and Vicky went there. Dana was going out with my friend Leslie Spitz at the time, and I often saw them in London. I also spent some time with them in LA in ’72, during the David Bowie tour for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars album. Dana was a best friend of David’s wife Angie Bowie, about whom Mick Jagger wrote the song ‘Angie’. We all hung out at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel – note, scene of the Richard Gere and Julia Roberts hit movie Pretty Woman. Bowie didn’t hang out with us; he was at the other end of the hotel, being looked after by his bodyguard. Nevertheless, Angie had access to all the trappings of a superstar existence – with a phone call she could summon a stretched limo for us when our stomachs rumbled and we needed a restaurant. I remember we always had that great Stevie Wonder track ‘Superstition’ on the limo radio. It was a fun few days for me, living the Hollywood dream.
One day, back in London, I was with Leslie and Dana, and Angie and a male friend. We were driving back into London from the country and were stuck in traffic on the Cromwell Road. Stuck in the traffic alongside us were the Russian Ambassador and his wife. At least, I presumed that’s who they were because they were in the back of a chauffeur-driven Zil limousine – a heavily armoured Russian car used only for soviet leaders and the Russian government. They were high above us and looking straight into our car. I think, from the looks on their faces, they were rather shocked – one of the girls was giving a blow job to one of the men in the back of my car.
Bindon was a good friend of Leslie Spitz and Tony Howard, and they were always at Tony’s house in Chelsea. Just to show what a sadistic bully Bindon was, one night he beat Leslie up, for no good reason, outside Tony’s house. Leslie is a tiny man, not over 5’6” tall, and he was Bindon’s friend. Other news was spreading too, and word on the street now had Bindon connected with the Kray twins and the Richardson Gang.
Johnny Bindon lived in a Belgravia mews house next door to my friends Bill and Hazel Collins. Bill, the younger brother of Joan and Jackie Collins, is another Ferraristo. Jackie always used to be in Tramp during the seventies, and her now-deceased husband, Oscar Lerman, was one of the owners of the club at that time. Later, she moved to Los Angeles. Bill would often be the DJ at Tramp, which is how I got to know him – that and the fact that his Jamaican wife Hazel is one of the most gorgeous girls in London. I had a falling out with Jackie one night. We had all been to the premiere of Saturday Night Fever and Jackie said to me later in Tramp, “Don’t you know a commercials director who could make a film of my book The Stud?” I think it was the first book she had written. I’d had a couple of drinks and I made an obnoxious remark, which I immediately regretted, something to the effect that “New directors want to do something more worthy for their first film.” It was a stupid thing to say, for apart from being very rude, I hadn’t even read the damn book. Jackie eventually got the film made and it became the biggest selling video at that time. So much for my opinion!
In 1978, John Bindon killed another villain, Johnny Darke, in an afternoon drinking club in Putney. They had a fight, and Darke, who must have been very tough to do so, was straddling Bindon on the floor, while repeatedly stabbing him in his chest. Bindon managed to get his knife out of his boot, and he thrust it up into Darke’s heart. Seriously injured, and wrapped in a blood-soaked blanket, Bindon managed to make it by train and ferry to Ireland, where he went into hiding in a monastery. He eventually offered a deal to the police, that he would return to face justice if he could plead self-defence, to which the police agreed. Bob Hoskins was a character witness for the defence and Bindon was tried and acquitted. He got away with a lot with the police and there were rumours why: either he was an informer or he had secretly taken compromising photographs with Princess Margaret, which protected him. This story is featured, although Bindon is not mentioned, in the 2008 film The Bank Job, written by my mate Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, about the 1971 Lloyds Bank robbery and the attempt by the secret service agency MI5 to get some ‘photographs’ stored in the bank safety deposit.
Johnny ‘Biffo’ Bindon died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993.
Chapter 18
BFCS
Work was non-stop. I was producing commercials for our top directors Bob Brooks and Ross Cramer. Len Fulford was also one of our stars, but I rarely worked with him. He made award-winning ads for Guinness and Courage Best Bitter. He had worked on the stills and commercials for the ‘Go to Work on an Egg’ campaign and once told John Lennon, “I am the egg man”. He liked to think that was where Lennon picked up the line. Len became known for shooting food commercials. Delia Smith worked as the home economist with him and Bob Brooks, before making her own programmes and hitting the big time. I was working with the people at the top of their game. Good quality work brought with it good quality parties and that moved everything on at lightning speed. The years had felt like they had just vanished.
By 1977, I had been there for seven years, and Martin McKeand resigned as managing director of Brooks Fulford Cramer. He had ambitions in TV production (and later produced the successful TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet) and possibly could take no more of Bob Brooks’ fiery outbursts, but I was luckier and worked closely with Bob as his producer. I liked him and he liked me, and his temper didn’t bother me. Even when we were equal partners in the company, I always knew who was boss, because Bob was a brilliant director and he was the star. I had come to realise I didn’t want to be the star, I didn’t want to be famous. I remember my time in Rome, at the Cinecittà studios, when Clint and John Wayne and Robert Mitchum and Kirk were the stars, and in my later years when it was Eric Clapton or Bob. I, though, was never in the centre and I was happy about that. I had it in me, I think, to be smarter than to want that and to know that that wasn’t really me anyway. Bob was Bob, I was Johnny Cigarini, and that was that
. Bob and I would certainly have disagreements, but generally speaking, we did accept the other for who they were. So, I stepped in and bought a third of the company. Thus, I became managing director. Golden Bollocks Cigarini… managing fucking director. I guess he was still watching me from up there. Mum, too.
My first idea was to suggest to Brooks and Fulford that we take on Michael Seresin as a fourth director, although he probably doesn’t know that. They agreed, and the company was then known as Brooks Fulford Cramer Seresin. Shortly after, we took on another director with an S initial, Richard Sloggett, and Ross Cramer left. As I was a company partner with a C initial, it was decided to call the company BFCS Ltd. and leave it at that. That was the end of the name changes and my initial was in there, kind of.
Michael Seresin is a brilliant cinematographer. He had lit many of Bob’s commercials and had been director of photography on the great Alan Parker feature films Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express before joining BFCS, and afterwards Fame, Shoot the Moon, Angel Heart and Angela’s Ashes – and as well as being a talented fucker, he was a handsome bastard. It is well known in feature film folklore that the director of photography (DP) often gets the lead girl. If I was a cynic, which of course I’m not, I would suggest those were attempts by the ladies to get photographed in the most beautiful of film lights, but I think it’s more likely that the babes are drawn to the genius behind the camera without the ego, like the bass player in the band – the man of rhythm, of intelligence, of experience in the game. Michael had that going for him, but he also had another advantage: he was devastatingly good looking and a charmer.
On Angel Heart in New Orleans, he was great friends with the beautiful Charlotte Rampling and with the hot and exotic young American Lisa Bonet. I think the directors would often get jealous that Michael was getting all the female attention. And it wasn’t just Michael Seresin. Hugh Johnson, another handsome cameraman, worked on Tony Scott’s debut feature The Hunger, and went off to live in Paris with the leading lady, the iconic Catherine Deneuve. It was times like these when I would often wonder, Why didn’t Granny give me a camera instead of the piano accordion?
Michael had been directing commercials with his friend Souter Harris before joining us. He became a star commercials director with BFCS and won many awards for films for the VW Golf, Stella Artois, Renault (the Papa and Nicole campaign) and Citroën. He had illustrious producers like Glynis Sanders, before she went off and started her own company with Richard Sloggett and another of BFCS’ producers, Jenny Huie, in the late eighties. While she was working at BFCS, Glynis married Tony Scott, Ridley Scott’s younger brother and director of Top Gun.
I knew Tony in the early days; we used to meet up at Tramp. She had a very unhappy experience during the marriage. While Tony was shooting Beverly Hills Cop 2, he had an affair with the leading lady, Brigitte Nielsen, who was married to Sylvester Stallone. It was all over the newspapers and was very humiliating for Glynis. She had met Stallone and he would ring her house. That was the end of her marriage to Tony. Last time I saw Tony Scott, he was very friendly to me and invited me over to the splendid new RSA offices in Beverly Hills. His brother, Ridley, always greets me in the same endearing way, on the occasions we meet in restaurants or in the Sunset Marquis Hotel: “Hello, Wanker!” would be considered quite normal.
Angie O’Rourke, wife of Steve, the manager of Pink Floyd, also produced for Michael Seresin. Earlier in her career, she had been Alan Parker’s PA, so she and Michael knew each other well. Another person to produce for Seresin was Michael Hayes, who had formerly been married to Jenny Armstrong of Jenny & Co, both of whom I had first met with Jenny Sieff before I first joined Brooks Baker Fulford. Hayes was later to marry Annie Pugsley, Len Fulford’s producer, who took over from me as managing director of the UK company when I moved to LA. Ronnie Holbrook also produced for Seresin – yes, that Ronnie from the King’s Road. After a stint as an antiques dealer, he started working as a freelance assistant director on commercials. Due to his considerable charisma, we offered him a staff job at BFCS as a producer.
Michael Seresin would still go off once a year to light Alan Parker’s films. He was so busy and profitable shooting commercials the rest of the time, the other partners didn’t mind him taking the time off. One time, Michael had just finished a film with Alan and was asked by Sidney Pollack to do Out of Africa. In effect, Michael wanted to go off and do two consecutive features, which was quite unheard of. He told me, “If ever there is one film I want to do in my life, it is this one.” I told him that if it was that important, he should take the job, but they couldn’t agree on the fee and the job went to David ‘Wendy’ Watkin.
I guess in life some things are meant to be, as Watkin won the Academy Award for Cinematography. Michael was also unlucky not to shoot Mississippi Burning, which also won the Oscar for Cinematography. He had been DP on all of Alan Parker’s films, but missed out on that one because he was busy directing Homeboy, a feature film of his own. Peter Biziou, a contemporary of Michael’s in London, did a great job on Mississippi Burning and won the Oscar. The point here is thus: if ever there is a cinematographer who deserves the Oscar, it is Michael Seresin. Alan Parker told me in Cannes one year that Michael and Vittorio Storaro were the two greatest cinematographers in the world, quite a statement coming from one of Britain’s finest directors.
In 1995, after I had left BFCS Ltd. in the UK, the partnership fell apart. People had been telling me for years that would happen. Seresin contentiously bought out Bob Brooks and Len Fulford, and he went into a new partnership with Derek Coutts, director of all the Nescafé Gold Blend commercials, featuring my friend Sharon Maughan – the wife of my other friend, Trevor Eve. I was out and it was continuing, but BFCS Ltd. finally closed in 2001, after thirty-five years of existence – a long, long time in the commercials production business.
Michael still works as a director of photography on movies. His time is also taken up with a very successful vineyard he has in his homeland, New Zealand. He probably won’t remember this – but it is true – he was going to call the wine by the name of the place it comes from, but I told him he was mad and that he should call it Seresin. He did.
Tony Scott died jumping off a bridge in Long Beach, California in 2012. The news was devastating.
Chapter 19
The End of Relationships
In 1982 I broke up with someone (who wishes to remain anonymous) after four years together, my longest relationship ever. She ended the relationship, saying I didn’t talk to her (again!) and she didn’t think I was capable of giving love. I was devastated, but I think I agreed with her about not being able to give love. I didn’t fight it, I didn’t plead with her or even discuss it. I just froze.
I have never been in a romantic relationship since. Thirty years have passed now and I definitely have issues with women. When I am in a relationship, I self-destruct. I am so frightened that the relationship is going to end, my fear overwhelms me and I ruin everything. As my friend Sid Roberson used to say: “Bringing about that most feared, by the means taken to avoid it.” Also, I was very self-conscious about my twitch and I couldn’t understand why any girl would want to be with someone who kept flicking his head.
Fifteen years later, when I was in LA having psychiatric counselling to help me give up work, I discussed with the therapist my inability to have relationships. It emerged that I had abandonment issues, going back to being left by my mother with her sister at age five and my mother’s subsequent death. It seemed it had hurt me harder than I realised. I still blame the war – my not being able to love was a direct result – and all that the war produced, what with my family’s split, the inertia between my parents and being sent to Margate. I don’t think that five-year-olds can really grasp the concept of death, so they see it as abandonment, and the scars run deep. Deep. That’s why I dumped so many beautiful women, to get in first before they dumped me. It was as if I was trying to take revenge on the female race, apparently! But really, it was a
defence mechanism, the irony of course being that it wasn’t and it was destructive. So destructive in fact that I cannot love, and what is more destructive than that? I decided to withdraw from romantic involvement, and to be honest, I have been happier since.
My being alone seems stranger to my friends than to me, although I don’t think any of them see me as a sad and lonely man. Maybe this chapter will explain it. I have felt alone my entire life and that’s how I am comfortable. I have never had a stable family life, so I do not feel the urge to find that stability, to have children and a family of my own. I am happy with my situation of just me – because it’s all I’ve ever had. Although I have sisters, they are always far away, just as they have always been. I am, and always will be, an orphan. Meanwhile, I don’t actually ‘suffer’ from loneliness and being single has made me much more gregarious, and that has contributed to my interesting life. It has contributed to me having more time to develop my interests and just focus on me – I suppose – ’cause nobody else did, apart from the reverend.
Chapter 20
Stocks House
Back on the King’s Road, Butch, one of the three matching thin blonde Beverly Sister men, had moved out to marry a Brazilian babe, Cristina Viera. Cristina and her sister Andrea (Rio) had taken London by storm when they arrived in the seventies. Andrea married Guy Dellal and had a daughter, Alice, who is now a big-time model and punk musician. Guy was the only son and heir to ‘Black’ Jack Dellal, a rich financier and property developer. Jack’s most famous deal was when he ‘flipped’ Bush House, the BBC building on Aldwich. He bought it for £55 million and sold it to Japanese investors for £135 million. He made a profit of £80 million without setting foot in the place. Jack also had some well-known-about-town daughters: Lorraine Dellal, who is married to Simon Kirke, drummer and owner of the band Bad Company, and Gaby, who was married to Eric Fellner, of Working Title Films.
Johnny Cigarini Page 13