Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  Watching The Blues Brothers Band on the floor of the Stock Exchange was remarkable, but even that didn’t boost the stock; the Hard Rock Café stock price didn’t do very well. The problem was that Isaac was very meticulous about the cafés, and was consequently slow at opening them. Peter Morton, backed by Steven Marks, who had gone public with the French Connection clothing stores, was opening cafés like gangbusters and that was the way to do it. It seemed to be a result of Isaac’s personality; he was too punctilious and the business didn’t need that. It needed to be pushed, but that’s not to say Isaac was at fault. If anything, it was meant to be, as the following story should illustrate.

  Eventually Isaac’s share went private again, when bought by the British company Grand Metropolitan. Isaac made about a hundred million dollars, of which he spent half building a hospital for Sai Baba that parallels a giant Taj Mahal. Grand Met eventually bought out Peter Morton’s half, comprising many more cafés, for $450 million, and Morton kept the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. I had lunch with him last year in LA, and I asked him whether he still had the hotel. He said he had sold it, “very well”, to an Indian tribe. I went back to my hotel and Googled it. It turns out he had sold it “very well” for something like $750 million. Very well indeed! For an initial investment of twenty-five grand, Peter Morton came out of it with over a billion. The Seminole Indian tribe also bought out the Grand Met share, so now own all 175 Hard Rock Cafés. I thought the Indian people weren’t meant to embrace the free market? Hey ho, I guess it grabs a hold of us all eventually, even Sai Baba it would seem.

  Chapter 22

  The American Dream

  The company was in its heyday, winning more awards than we had time to receive, and it was time to expand and open in America – the land of opportunity that has always attracted me. America to me was the most liberated and free nation of the modern world and I adored the constitution, just less the power establishment intent on rewriting it. I travelled there with a feeling of adventure, in search of the American dream. On the back of our great successes in Europe, in 1982 I got on a plane and went to open an office in New York.

  In the late seventies and early eighties, we had won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Advertising Festival six times. This is the award for the best overall production company in the festival, judged not on one film or the ideas of the commercials, but on the production values. It is the final award of the festival, donated by the Ville de Cannes and presented by the mayor. I collected it personally on four occasions on behalf of the company. I had a flashback as I stood receiving one award. Shaking the hand of the mayor, I looked at the audience; I heard the sounds of their hands clapping and I seemed to stand for longer than was appropriate, but I did not feel uncomfortable. I was thinking of my life, all of it, from the deaths of my parents, leaving Italy, to Margate and Durham, Africa and my beloved London. I didn’t need to force a smile out, it came onto my face and it didn’t leave me for the rest of the ceremony. I stood with my smile and our award, and I watched the people. Were they really happy for me? Did they really care? Did I? Yes. I thought of the reverend; had he helped me or ruined me? I thought of Granny, Maria, Patti, my mother.

  *

  It is true that BFCS was the most successful production company in the world in the first half of the eighties, judged on awards. In addition to the six Palmes d’Or, altogether BFCS won over 100 Cannes and Venice Lions, and over forty US Clio Awards, including eight in one year at the 25th Anniversary Awards held at Radio City Music Hall in ’84.

  The International Advertising Film Festival in ’83 was held in Venice, and the Palme d’Or equivalent, the Coppa di Venezia, was won by another London company, Park Village Productions. The location used to alternate between Cannes and Venice, but in the seventies the organisers got fed up that the hotel workers would always go on strike in Venice during the festival. After a break of a few years, they thought they would give Venice another try in 1983. Björn Borg retired from tennis after winning Wimbledon five times, Return of the Jedi opened in theatres and customs officers in Italy confiscated all the worldwide film entries to the competition until a bribe was paid to release them. SAWA, the organisers, did not go back to Venice again.

  *

  It’s amazing how perceptive the human mind becomes after sixteen hours of anaesthetic, but as I lay in a hospital bed after my heart surgery, with nothing but yellow walls and the buzz of machines, I knew that my partners were screwing me over.

  Bob Brooks had left the company in 1980 to direct Tattoo, a feature film starring Bruce Dern and Maude Adams. He told me he never wanted to shoot another commercial. It was something true filmmakers would often say: commercials were, to the older generation of film directors, jobs and nothing more. It was the nature of the beast, the great leviathan that is the most unnatural beast of all, the king of the jungle, the matrix itself – the economic machine. Great filmmakers would often find themselves in the black hole of making ads instead of movies, as they paid better and were less risky. However, many of the new generation of filmmakers were coming from commercials. It took courage to step out and go for it in film, and I had nothing but respect when storytellers like Ridley Scott and Alan Parker did eventually embrace movie making – but sometimes it would grab hold of a man and not let him go.

  It was different for me. I wasn’t creative like Adrian Lyne, and I didn’t seem to have that inner calling to get behind a camera and tell stories to the world through films, but I would often stand aside and watch how it owned the storytellers. I had come to respect that about humanity; how, as a species, we are great storytellers and souls brave enough to let go of the security of salary and contracts and step into the unknown of the storyteller – just because we know that that is what we are on earth to do – is really quite incredible to me. I applaud it, but it wasn’t me. I was part of the machine that would help those storytellers rise; I was the man behind it all; I was the producer, the architect, the one who gives and takes all of the world’s shit. It was no problem for me.

  Bob Brooks sold his shares to Michael Seresin and began down the risky road of the feature film. Sadly, though, the experience was not good for Bob and ironically this was due to his producer, Joe Levine, who was a very difficult man. Bob was used to getting his own way making ads, and it was different with Levine. Bob decided he wanted back into BFCS. He gave film a go, but he wanted back in. Brooks was always my big supporter, but without him I had no protection while the others were wheelin’ and dealin’. Fulford and Seresin decided (when I was in hospital) that they didn’t want to give up their shares, and that they and Brooks should each have thirty percent, and I should have the remaining ten. So, they would drop from thirty-three-and-a-third percent to thirty and I should go down to just ten. I had made the mistake of inviting them to a party at my penthouse and, due to its opulence, they obviously thought I was making too much money as a producer – maybe they were right.

  A couple of years later, Brooks could see that I was miserable – mostly due to the cocaine I was taking, although he did not know about that. In fact, I was thinking of setting up another company with Richard Sloggett, who by then had won the D&AD (Design and Art Directors) Gold Award (now the Black Pencil), but Bob persuaded the others to reinstate my equal shareholding. I accepted on condition that I could bring in Sloggett as a partner, to which they agreed. So we became five partners, each with twenty percent of the company. It was a better arrangement, and that way, eighty percent of the company was owned by income-generating partners. Sloggett eventually left to set up his own company, in partnership with two other BFCS producers – Glynis Sanders and Jenny Huie.

  By the mid-eighties, I was spending a lot of time in New York and loving America. Meanwhile, the exchange rate was favourable for the Yanks to shoot in London and it almost reached parity of one dollar to the pound. This made UK productions back home very cheap for them and not only for the productions. I remember one shoot when the clients went t
o Harrods; they bought trunks and filled them with everything but the kitchen sink to ship back to New York. Bob did some multi-million dollar productions for Dr Pepper, Schweppes and Cadbury, and Michael Seresin spent a month shooting for BMW USA at the factory near Munich.

  I produced another job, with Bob Brooks directing, for an American cigarette client, for overseas use. It was shot in New Orleans and Venice – and this would be the right time in my memoirs to tell you that I have always been a bit of a man for a girl in a uniform. Before you tell me I like to be dominated and go quoting Freud or some other dead guy, I’d like to see you turn it down. Once, in Durham, I made love to a policewoman and got taken home afterwards by one of her colleagues in a police car. Sadly, the woman wasn’t wearing her uniform, but I enjoyed the post-coital ride home in the ‘naughty’ car. I suppose this is why: I had always been amused by the ‘I’m Jo. Fly Me’ and ‘I’m Cheryl. Fly Me’ posters for National Airlines, which inspired the 10cc song ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’. I always thought they had a sexual connotation, which I’m sure was deliberate, having worked in advertising for a million years.

  Encouraged by that campaign, during the flight from LA to New Orleans for the cigarette shoot, I got cute with one of the Delta stewardesses, with quite a degree of success. We were kissing and cuddling in the back row of the plane, and for a lot of the journey too. I was enjoying having my hands all over her and inside her uniform, and I got a special kick when the other flight attendants stopped by and complained that she wasn’t doing any work, but she was cool and didn’t give a damn. Bob and the film crew were on the flight and they knew what the heck I was doing. When we landed, they couldn’t wait to hear about it. It was like we were kids again and I was the lucky one. We disembarked in New Orleans and she had to continue working to Tampa, before returning for an overnight stopover back in New Orleans. She promised she would come to my hotel. I waited all evening, but she never came. It was definitely like being back in school. Man oh man, girls knew how to drive me cuckoo.

  When I first opened the US company, I was flying standby economy because we weren’t yet making any money, but, within a few years, we were all going over regularly on Concorde. I must have flown on that wonderful aircraft ten times. On one occasion, I checked in beside an American in a baseball cap. I always liked that classic American look; there was something very cool about it, and the man. It was Steven Spielberg and we had a brief chat about the previous evening’s Super Bowl. On another occasion, I sat next to Harvey Weinstein and I even had the stewardess stop the pompous Robert Maxwell from smoking a cigar, which was banned (but cigarettes were allowed). Concorde’s most frequent passenger was David Frost; for a while, he travelled on it every week. I sat next to him once and encouraged him to sign up for an air miles scheme – he had never heard of them.

  Once, Bob flew to New York for a pre-production meeting at JFK and flew back on the same aircraft. He had breakfast in London, lunch in New York, and was back home in London in time for supper with his wife Suan. We were high flyers on Concorde, going with awards and respect, talking to the biggest names in the business on planes and in taxis. It was fun, but it was sick at times. It was the eighties and it, whatever it was, was all starting to change. The politics was changing, the way films were being made were changing too, the album charts were filled with people like Van Halen and Judas Priest and the drugs were changing. Organic, naturally growing psychedelics to open the mind were ending and the faster, more quick-fix vibes that people craved were being met with a return to the West of a crystal that came from the coca plant. For thousands of years, indigenous tribes have chewed the leaf of the coca plant and, like all things in this world, it was another thing that would come and go and come back again. It was on its way back; it was cocaine and I was about to become an addict.

  *

  During the eighties, I fancied myself as a bit of a star maker in London. Some of my contemporaries will probably laugh at that and find it boastful, but other people told me it on a number of occasions. I would bring in new unknown directors like Richard Sloggett, Bryan Loftus and Allan van Rijn and get them good scripts, which helped them become top directors. It was difficult to get a new director going, but I had good friends in the advertising agencies. One of them, Alfredo Marcantonio, would always give my new directors a break because my track record was starting to speak for itself and he trusted my judgment. We were like Italian brothers. He and I were practically the only two people in the London advertising business with Italian names and he was one of the few who managed to consistently pronounce Cigarini ‘Chigarini’. I guess as an orphan, a brother was a nice idea.

  In New York, almost every agency had a partner with an Italian heritage, such as the gang at Ammirati & Puris – probably our most loyal agency after Collett Dickenson Pearce in London. Ozzie Spenningsby and Susan Shipman were great clients too – friends as well – and they gave all our directors, especially Bob Brooks and Michael Seresin, many campaigns. Their agency was the only one in New York that matched the creativity of a top English advertising agency and that was a great triumph.

  Both Bryan Loftus and Richard Sloggett won the D&AD Gold Award, which was pretty much a guarantee of a long and successful career. Bryan won his for a K Shoes spot, where a man gets a plate of spaghetti put on his head by an angry girlfriend. It was the first TV commercial to use titling across the screen during the spot, which is now a very common technique, but unheard of then. The agency was Bartle Bogle Hegarty, and their creative director John Hegarty (now Sir John) was a good friend of mine, but he would never work with Bob Brooks because Bob did what he always did: he shouted.

  Richard won his D&AD Gold Award with a campaign for Holsten Pils, featuring Griff Rhys Jones. The ad agency was Gold Greenlees Trott. Dave Trott, their creative director, was a friend of Bob Brooks, and apart from being friends, they both had lovely Asian wives, Cathy Trott and Suan Brooks. One Sunday they went to the movies to see Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and after it, Bob told Dave it would be a great idea for a campaign. Dave agreed, and entrusted the work to a young creative team, Steve Henry and Axel Chaldecott. They came up with the Pils campaign, inter-cutting an actor with old Hollywood movie footage of stars like George Raft, Cary Grant and James Cagney – the same technique Hollywood used in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

  Unfortunately for Bob, I had already worked with Henry and Chaldecott with our new director Richard Sloggett. We had done a production in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which was notable for being two feet under flood water, and also for the fact that the camera crew spent their whole week’s per diem allowance on the first evening in a lap-dancing club over the road from the hotel. They were really suckered in by the girls, who told the film crew that they would come to their rooms when they finished work. Of course, none of them did, meanwhile relieving them of their cash. Henry and Chaldecott were a new creative team, and they didn’t want to give the Pils job to an established director like Bob – they wanted their own man. Richard Sloggett and I had got on very well with them on the shoot in Florida, so they chose Richard to direct the campaign and me to produce it.

  Griff Rhys Jones wasn’t Richard’s first choice for the role; he wanted Robbie Coltrane, but was prevented by the Holsten client, who thought Robbie was too big to advertise a beer. Consequently, Bob missed out on a fistful of awards won by the Holsten Pils campaign, but he was happy the job went to one of BFCS’ new directors. Mainly on the strength of that campaign, Steve Henry and Axel Chaldecott opened their own agency, HHCL, which was voted Agency of the Decade by Campaign magazine in 2000 – and mostly because of the success of his Holsten Pils work, Richard later opened his own production company.

  From the mid-1980s, BFCS also had a fifty-one percent share in an Italian production company based in Milan, BFCS srl, in partnership with English director David Deveson and producers Fred Turchetti and Piero Cozzi. They were all jolly nice, but Brooks, Fulford and Seresin closed the Italian company in ’93 after th
ey bought me out of the UK company. It had not weathered the recession of the early 1990s well.

  Where was I? Ah, yes. Cocaine.

  Chapter 23

  Cocaine

  If the seventies were my decade for sex and romance, the eighties were the dark ages. After breaking up with with my longest ever relationship in ’82, I wanted nothing more to do with love. Love to me was dead.

  I started seeing a girl I knew from the King’s Road. We didn’t go out, actually; we stayed in, and we did cocaine. We did lots of it. Her name was Henrietta, but no one will recognise her; she didn’t meet any of my friends. I didn’t take her anywhere, not to the cinema, not to restaurants. She just came to my flat each and every weekend and we did coke. This happened for ten years and it was my big secret. I would usually see her on a Friday to give me maximum time to recover for work on the following Monday. We would stay up all night doing two or three grams and engage in all manner of deviant, stoned, sexual practices. I would go to bed at dawn totally wired, praying I would not die in my sleep. I remember my routine: I would need to fold up a cold towel on my pillow and rest my head on it, because I was sweating so much. Fortunately, I always woke up the next morning, but feeling suicidally depressed.

  Like I told you, these were the dark ages and I could hear it in the music, see it in the films and I wasn’t the only one. People of my age, having experienced the highs of the sixties and seventies, were on a comedown of sorts and coke was the answer for many of us – but it wasn’t the answer, it was making it worse. Those decades had been so high anyway that people wanted to stay high – or go higher – and they wanted it now. Cocaine gives you such a direct high that the brain decides it no longer needs natural serotonin, which normally gives a person that feeling of well-being and happiness and the ‘nothing can hurt you’ vibration. When the cocaine wears off, the brain is left without the serotonin and the depression hits. Bad depression hits. Those ten years were bad days for me. It’s a miracle in fact that I managed to keep my working life together, but I had my father’s blood in my veins – for entrepreneurs, not even the lowest of lows can stop them from putting in the work hours.