Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  *

  I went to Cebu in the Philippines and booked into the only hotel I could find, the St. Tropez. As I was at the tiny Cebu airport waiting to collect my luggage from the Manila flight, I sat on a bench next to an American. His name was Nick and he asked me where I was staying, so I told him. He was staying on a boat, and informed me he and his crew would be at the St. Tropez the next day. I didn’t realise until I got there, but the St. Tropez was not only a hotel – it was a pole-dancing club and brothel. Nick came with his crew. I thought they looked a very rough, unsavoury bunch, but Nick was well educated and a WASP, he was rich and quite personable. Coincidentally, his family happened to own a film studio outside New York that my company used, so we were new best friends. He invited me to go for a sail with them the next day. I was expecting a forty-foot or fifty-foot sailing yacht, but instead a 115-foot, three-mast schooner appeared – the biggest in the ocean. It had film-editing equipment onboard and was used as a facility craft for underwater films, and had just returned from doing film work in the Truk Lagoon, where there was a sunken fleet of Japanese warships. The Americans sank twelve warships, thirty-two merchant ships, and 249 aircraft in 1944, in revenge for Pearl Harbour. Truk had been the main Japanese base in the South Pacific.

  On the first trip on Nick’s boat, we just went out for the day, but they were planning a longer voyage to look for diving locations and they invited me along. We met up at the St. Tropez before the trip and we all stocked up on girls for the journey. We each picked a girl we liked and they all came aboard wearing their dancing gear.

  The trip was fantastic, one of the best experiences of my life. The crew taught me how to scuba dive and the coral in those islands is some of the best in the world. Even the snorkelling was fantastic, because there was an usually shallow shelf of coral and then a sudden drop-off into the darkness. It would make your stomach turn as you swam over the cliff, seeing that giant drop into the sea. We would sail at night and I did my share of night watching. Then, we would dive all day. Each day we would arrive at a tiny island, which was sometimes uninhabited, but I would swear, if there were people, they hadn’t seen white men before. After a few days, we dropped all the girls off at an island where they could catch a ferry back to Cebu. I thought it was rather cruel, but also very funny, watching them get off our boat in their short tight dresses and stiletto heels on a remote island.

  Nick visited me in London a couple of months later. I took him to dinner and to Tramp. He told me they had found a shrunken treasure ship containing Delft pottery, dating from the seventeenth century. He was in dispute with the Philippine government over the ownership of it. A couple of years later, I read, I think in Time magazine, that Nick was one of America’s most wanted fugitives. He was a drug smuggler. That explained why his crew looked so tough and rough. The film work was probably a front, so now you know why I have only used his first name. Granny had warned me to be careful of “out of town folk”. I guess the saying was right after all: Grandma knows best, Granny knows best, do as your grandmother would say, or something like that. I went back to Thailand on my own for more girls.

  Chapter 25

  Commercials

  A very popular commercial is the Yellow Pages’ ‘J. R. Hartley’, directed by Bob Brooks and produced by yours truly. In it, a nice old man goes around bookshops looking for a book called Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. He fails to find it, gives up and goes home. His daughter suggests he tries the Yellow Pages. He does and phones a listed company, finds the book and we discover that he is, in fact, J. R. Hartley. We filmed the home scenes in a house in Hampstead. It was a hot summer’s day, and the house was pokey with no room for anyone other than the actor, Bob and the essential crew. The producer’s job was done, so I sat in my car for most of the day. I didn’t know that a journalist called Valerie Grove happened to own the house. A short while later an article appeared in the London Evening Standard, entitled something like, ‘The day the film crew came to my house’. In the article, she wrote, “and then in came ‘Mr Big’, the producer John Cigarini. He came into my kitchen and put his feet on the table…” (I certainly did not), “… picked up the phone and started dictating, ‘1969 Mercedes convertible for sale…’” (I probably did that), “… then he went outside and fell asleep in his Mercedes…” (I definitely did that). It was all rather embarrassing. The day the article came out, someone had put ‘Mr Big’ on my office door nameplate. It was all very funny. Some enterprising person published a book called Fly Fishing, under the nom de plume of J. R. Hartley. It was a compendium of short stories on fishing. I don’t believe it had anything to do with David Abbott, the legendary copywriter from Abbott Mead Vickers, the advertising agency responsible for the Yellow Pages campaign, and apparently it did rather well in sales, from a character that had been made up.

  A few years later, I ran into the journalist Valerie at Morton’s bar. After we had both had quite a few drinks, I really believed I could have seduced her under the table. In my drunken state I thought she liked the idea of ‘Mr Big’. I didn’t do anything but I should have, so I’d like to take this opportunity to tell all the men of the world: when you get to my age, regrets start to creep in, so be bold while you’re young, seduce women under the table and hit on the African maid when she’s flirting with you. The worst than can happen is a slap in the face, which is worse than living with the truth – that you could have nailed the goddess on her kitchen floor. God, I wish I had banged her.

  Another commercial Brooks and I did was for the VW Golf. It featured Burt Kwouk telling the camera that Japanese cars were the number one best-selling cars in Europe, but the VW Golf was the number one best-selling car in Japan. As he is talking, a car drops into the shot alongside him, he gets in it and drives it away. All in one shot. These days, computer graphics would be used, but in the eighties, things were shot for real.

  We had to do tests to see how far you could drop a car and still drive it away. We destroyed quite a lot of cars finding out that the optimum height was exactly six feet seven and a half inches. This was a problem, because it is very difficult to shoot with something only six feet from the ground and not have the camera see it. It meant we had to use a long 200mm lens, and no studio was long enough for that. In the end, we got the longest studio we could find, opened the end door and built a tent outside. We had to build a white cove the whole length of the studio, because of the foreshortening effect of the long lens.

  Burt Kwouk is a lovely man. He had also been in the Pink Panther films. He was Cato, Peter Sellers’ manservant, who would kung-fu attack him when he got home each evening. He was incredibly plucky in this commercial. The claw holding the car would not always release it evenly, and sometimes the car would land on one side and bounce towards Burt. He was unconcerned, even when the car grazed against his leg. The spot won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival.

  I produced another commercial for VW with Michael Seresin as the director. It involved a race between a VW and a falling chimney. Again, it had to be done for real and, for obvious reasons, with only one take. The car had to pull up in front of the camera for the product beauty shot, in the same take as the chimney bricks bouncing behind it. We had the car strengthened with a safety cage, but no amount of reinforcing would have been enough if the chimney had fallen on the car. First, we had to find the chimney. I spoke to Fred Dibnah, the famous steeplejack. He had become a TV celeb, not only for dropping chimneys, but also for his lovely Yorkshire accent and personality. He told me of a chimney he was about to drop in Accrington, Lancashire. The factory around the chimney had already been razed to the ground. In small industrial towns in the north of England, the houses for the factory workers had usually been built close around the factory. This presented a problem in the post-industrial age when you wanted to get rid of the chimney. Fred Dibnah could drop it straight down between two rows of houses, without touching them. I talked to him and persuaded him to hold off dropping the Accrington chimney. We first
had to build a tarmac runway for the car.

  This spot also won a Gold Lion at Cannes.

  Chapter 26

  Breathalysed

  Like most drinkers of my generation, I didn’t take much notice when they introduced the breathalyser; so, like most drinkers of my generation, I got caught.

  The British cabinet minister George Brown was a well-known lush and I was listening to him on the car radio. It was a Wednesday and I was driving around at the time, aimlessly and in no direction. He said he always carried milk of magnesia with him in the car, as he claimed it oxidised the breath and eliminated the effects of the alcohol. From that day on, I kept a packet on me.

  I was out on a bender with Dan Mindel on a Saturday in 1982. I had known Danny as a youngster working in the Hard Rock, when we hired him as a runner in our studio at BFCS. He worked his way up through the camera grades and is now a top Hollywood cinematographer, this year working on the new Star Wars movie. We started the piss-up with a lunch at Il Bersiglieri, opposite my old flat on the King’s Road, and the bar crawl moved in zig-zags and circles until we finished it at Tramp in the early hours of the next day. We were driving home in separate cars; Danny was leading the way. He pulled over in St. James Street to ask for directions (no iPhones in ’82). I pulled over behind him and a police car pulled in behind me. “Fuck.” I saw the officer approaching in my rearview. I remember the song playing on my radio; it was ‘Pretty Vacant’ by the Sex Pistols. It’s funny how everyone seems to have the anarchist in them, if only a small amount. We can go through our entire lives kissing arse and sucking up to the man, but I do believe that somewhere deep inside all of us, we have that trapped angry animal that wants to scream and break stuff. I guess that’s all Lydon was doing at the time.

  The officer was closer now. A smile came, I turned down the volume and quickly jammed the milk of magnesia in my mouth. The problem was, I hadn’t done a test run and the effect took me by surprise. The magnesia instantly depleted my mouth of any saliva and I began to froth. Naturally, I was worried he would see the foam in my mouth, so when the policeman spoke I tried to reply to him with my lips closed. What came out was, “mmmm… mmmm… mmmm” and “mmmm”. The Sex Pistols were still seeping through the stereo speakers. I was breathalysed and taken to the police station.

  I was driving a Mercedes 6.3, which happened to be the fastest saloon car in the world, and the copper who drove it to the station told me it was the best car he had ever driven. Apparently, though, that wasn’t enough to get me off the hook. I was left alone in the room and waiting for the doctor to arrive. I read the arresting officer’s notes: “The suspect seemed to have extreme difficulty in speaking, so he was breathalysed.”

  When the doc came to take a blood sample, it was 3am and he found me running on the spot. He bent over with laughter. “That won’t do any good, only glucose can help you now!”

  A decade later, I was at Danny’s wedding in New York. Us boys went out for the stag to a club called Pure Platinum. This time we decided to get less wamoed. Pure Platinum was the first in a new wave of upmarket lap-dancing clubs owned by Peter Stringfellow. Some of Danny’s friends were male models – and I’m talking Calvin Klein models – so, of course, the girls in the lap-dancing club were all over them. One stunner was particularly friendly and came over to us whenever she wasn’t dancing. I got talking to her – and, me being me, I couldn’t resist asking how much money they make. It was about a thousand dollars a night in tips. Some clients put a hundred in the garter. They were open every night of the year. That’s $365,000 a year, in cash, just in tips, and this girl was a student. Not a bad way to see yourself through college.

  Oh, by the way, I was banned from driving for a year. Thanks a lot, George!

  Chapter 27

  Saatchi

  Charles Saatchi is the biggest collector of contemporary art in the world. He has tremendous purchasing power in the art market and therefore huge influence. He can make an unknown artist famous merely by buying up an entire first show. My mate Sid Roberson introduced me to him in the eighties. Sid had been working at Benton & Bowles advertising agency where he met Charles, and where Charles met his future wife Doris Lockhart; Charles and Doris both worked as copywriters at the agency. When I first met Charles, he was well known for being a recluse, but he liked to play tennis and Sid was his partner, and that was how it all began.

  I was in Italy, and Charles and Doris invited me to stay with them at a rented house in Ansedonia, near Porto Ercole, with Sid and Susie. Shortly after, Charles and Doris split and Charles met an American woman called Kay Hartenstein, who had a flat in Eaton Square. Sid and Susie were very fond of Doris and stayed friends with her. They just didn’t take to Kay, and I think it showed, so the feeling was mutual. The long shot was that Sid and Susie Roberson’s friendship with Charles didn’t make the transition from Doris to Kay, but that didn’t stop the lads playing tennis, and quite right too. I think Kay liked me, and I her, and Charles and I were now at the beginning of a long friendship.

  Kay was a socialite, and had an A-list group of friends like Mick Jagger and Jean Pigozzi, the super-wealthy heir to the French Simca car family. Up until that time, Charles only seemed to have one or two friends, like Alan Yentob of the BBC. The Saatchi and Yentob Iraqi Jewish families had known each other since they had both come to England, when Charles was a baby. With Kay, Charles became much more sociable, mostly with her friends, and over the next four years we saw a lot of each other and he was about to be a big influence on me and on my views on the world. We would go out to dinner, sometimes just the three of us, a few times a week. For a few years, I think I was his closest mate. They would also have glamorous dinners at their home, with people like Mick Jagger, and I was reunited there with my old friend Malcolm McLaren. We wined, dined and we went to the theatre. Alan Yentob could get any tickets, but Charles would never last past the interval and everyone would have to leave – even Yentob.

  On one occasion, I was with Charles in New York and we were walking the galleries. We were with the great Steve Martin, who is also a big art collector, and we went to Sotheby’s. Charles was bidding for a Rauschenberg!

  Charles and Kay Saatchi were incredibly generous with their holidays. They would rent big stinkpot yachts every year and motor around either the Caribbean or the Med. On one occasion, they had a 175ft motor yacht called the Havre de Grace. There were ten crew and eight guests. I was on my own, but not for long: I got lucky with a beautiful young blonde crew girl who took me to her cabin. Eric Idle and his wife Tania were there, too. He serenaded us on guitar with ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’.

  The Havre de Grace was chased around Sardinia by the paparazzi. The other Charles – the prince – and Princess Diana were on a yacht in the same sea area, and as we were the largest boat in any harbour, they thought we were them. From a distance, Kay even looked like Diana. My nephew Luca and his friend Stefano jumped aboard in Sardinia – two handsome Roman hunks swallow-diving off the top of the ship. The Saatchis didn’t always hire a motor yacht; it was often fantastic Italian villas, near Florence – the kind of palaces where the Italian State maintains the gardens. We had a few holidays like that and although it was all high-end, I was missing my alone time, roughing it in Africa or living in a remote village in Bali with locals. Charles would always have his Rolls Royce convertible and we would cruise around Tuscany in it. On these holidays, I was usually paired off with the charming Charlotte Barnes – an interior designer in Chelsea. She was attractive, very funny, and so, of course, nothing ever happened! I was still taking cocaine with Henrietta, and I was going through my asexual phase with anyone else (I could make exceptions for pretty young girls on the ship’s crew, though). Disgraced yet?

  Charles and Kay had their wedding at a palace lined with gardens, statues, fountains and topiary. We had been warned ahead of time to prepare for a talent contest, so I had rented a gold Elvis outfit. I was first up, but only knew one Elvis number, ‘Heart
break Hotel’. I would probably have won the contest, except David Puttnam, master of ceremonies, insisted I did another song because the first one was that good. Mostly, he was being a typical friend: he had caught me practising with the band in the afternoon and considered that cheating. By then, I had taken my Elvis wig off and I did a lame version of ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’. The band didn’t know it and it ruined everything. I completely bombed.

  Most Christmases, the Saatchis and I went to Phuket, Thailand. They stayed at the Amanpuri, but it was impossible to get a room over Christmas – and kind of out of my league anyway – so I stayed next door on the same beach. There was a regular crowd during Christmas and it was like a big reunion each year when we all arrived to meet friends like Richard and Joan Branson, David and Patsy Puttnam, Loyd Grossman, and Johan and Amanda Eliasch, and one year Björn Borg. He still played senior tennis with a wooden racquet. According to him, the modern racquets had ruined the professional game.

  It was at Phuket that Charles, Richard Branson and I first went go-karting. Charles became smitten with the sport and went back to London and set up a team of professionals. He raced seriously, and I think became some sort of champion. Trouble was, he was racing against sixteen-year-olds who weighed half what he did. One cruise we went on, he only ate spinach the whole cruise trying to lose weight – for the go-kart racing.

  As the years clicked away and I was back in London, I would go to see Charles and Kay at their own home, although sometimes they came to mine. When he first came to my flat, the first thing he did was take one look at my huge paintings, which had cost me a small fortune, and commented, “You want to get rid of all this stuff before you can’t give it away.” The fact that the paintings subsequently dropped in value so much gave me burnt fingers about buying art, from which I have never really recovered. I was my father’s son after all, but I still have them – now in Italy – because I like them. On the other hand, when I told Charles I had got my Andrew Logan ‘Cosmic Chandelier’ because I couldn’t afford an Alexander Calder mobile, he said, “But that’s much better than a Calder.” Win some, lose some, I guess.