I gave a small party for the Pink Floyd band members in my penthouse. Charles had been to his gallery for a private viewing with Mick Jagger and Jean Pigozzi, so he brought them along. Jerry Hall was heavily pregnant; in fact, I thought she was going to drop the baby in my flat. I didn’t take any pictures of the rock superstars; I didn’t think it would be cool. I wish I had now for this book.
On another occasion, Charles came to my penthouse for dinner. “You’ll never guess what I bought today… a rotting cow’s head covered in flies!” he told me. It was his first Damien Hirst. I went to the private opening of his Hirst exhibition – the one with the shark and the sheep – at the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road in ’92. It was impressive, but no one could have imagined that Damien would become so huge and one of the richest men in Britain. Charles had the sheep in his house, next to Carl Andre’s bricks and a large Picasso, but Charles had also once said to me, “You know all this British art I am buying, it won’t be worth anything one day.”
When the Saatchis discovered that Charles was going to curate the 1997 Royal Academy Sensation show, about three years beforehand, Kay told me, “This is really going to put Charles on the map.” I couldn’t understand that, because to me he was already famous as the biggest collector of contemporary art in the world. The effect the show had on the Britart scene took me by surprise. I wished that I had started collecting when I was hanging out with him, but he was always very secretive about his movements. He would never let on what he was buying or from where or why, and the truth was, I didn’t understand conceptual art. I still struggle to know or feel the difference between a so-called masterpiece and a piece of crap. Actually… I don’t think many collectors do! To me, they are all investing. In other words, trying to make a profit; or trying to appear to be knowledgeable, cool, sophisticated; or, in some cases, setting the standard for what is knowledgeable, cool, sophisticated – just by buying the stuff. Anyway, by the time of the Sensation show in ’97, I was living in Los Angeles and wasn’t seeing much of Charles and Kay, who later split. It was the beginning of the end of my time with Charles Saatchi.
I met Damien Hirst a few times in the nineties, when I used to stay at the Groucho Club, on my visits to London from LA. It was my London base and Damien was there every night. I told him about Charles and the cow’s head. Damien was best friends with Keith Allen, who I had spent time with at the World Cup in Italy a few years before. Although I saw Damien in the Groucho, I didn’t know he was doing the dot and spin paintings, otherwise I would have bought one of each – I like them… I think! It’s irrelevant anyway; I can’t afford them now he has gone stratospheric. Buggery buggery shit.
It’s a phenomenal thing that’s happened to Damien’s spot paintings. When he had his retrospective at Tate Modern in 2012, Larry Gagosian, his dealer, filled all eleven of his galleries worldwide with over 300 spots, mostly borrowed back from the owners. There are apparently over 1400 spot paintings in existence, but there must be a big market for them, with one of them fetching a record price of £1.8 million. Just how many Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern sheikhs, and hedge fund multi-millionaires can there be out there? Damien, of course, doesn’t paint them himself, assistants do. He himself has said he “couldn’t be fucking arsed” and with a net worth estimated at around £350 million, who can blame him? There’s a funny story that one of his assistants who painted the spot paintings was leaving the factory and asked for a painting. Damien told her to paint one and take it. She said she didn’t want one of hers, she wanted one of his. The only difference, of course, is the signature and the value. It all seems like a bit of a speculative bubble to me. I’ve seen it before, with classic cars, with property, and we all know what happened with tulips. I suppose real art will always survive the main test: time. I hope Damien’s does, but only time will tell – and anyway, by then, we’ll all be dead. It seems to me in my total ignorance, that the more shit there is, the more it becomes a magnet for the super elite. A woman walks into an art shop. The shop owner tells her “I’ve got something vile for you, darling.” “Oh that’s wonderful!” the woman replies. “No, you don’t understand, it’s really genuinely shit.” “Wrap it up straightaway,” she tells the shop owner.
I went on four motor cruising holidays with the Saatchis. I behaved badly on the last one and didn’t help Charles with his baggage at the airport! Charles can be difficult to be with sometimes and he was in a ferocious mood that day – the type of mood where everyone wants to steer clear. I was also in a bad mood. I was suffering with my Henrietta and cocaine withdrawals, and I was anxious to get back to London. It was the last holiday I went on with them. We parted like a pair of spoilt angry brats. Like Sid and Susie with Kay, I never did make the transition to a new wife and I didn’t see Charles when he was married to Nigella. Nowadays, they invite my friends Trevor and Sharon Eve on their holidays and their children are all friends, but without a kid and because of our tantrum, I have been ousted. Now it’s the Eves’ turn to enjoy Charles’s generosity. I certainly had plenty of it and I am very grateful to him. We had a lot of good times together. I have great memories and I miss him. A dinner was arranged quite recently with myself, the Eves and the Saatchis, but at the last minute, Sharon Eve got a call from Nigella. I thought enough time had passed, but I was wrong about that. Nigella told Sharon that “Charles doesn’t want to go backwards.”
I walk now along the Thames and watch the water turn, thinking of the past, the memories, the friends who have come and gone. Some are like the rain that now falls, disappearing into the river. Someone said that if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you haven’t learned anything. That man’s name was Muhammad Ali, and I was about to meet the great man.
*
In the end, I don’t know what did happen between Charles and Nigella. There was much I didn’t know about Charles – even when we were friends. Although I’ve never met Nigella, I was very sad when I heard of their break-up. That’s all I want to say about that.
Chapter 28
Pink Floyd
I saw a lot of Pink Floyd in the eighties; it was mostly to do with cars. I had maintained my friendship with Steve O’Rourke, the manager, since the Dark Side of the Moon Hollywood Bowl concert in ’73, and by the late eighties I was either earning too much money or all the cocaine was affecting my judgment, but I kept buying cars. As I told film director Alan Parker, when he asked me why I kept buying them, it was an obsessive need. It might have had something to do with my Tourette’s, but I would obsess about a particular car, say an Aston Martin or an E-Type Jag – until I bought it, then I would immediately lose interest in that car and obsess about another. Gandhi said of greed that “There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed”, but I don’t think he understood where I was coming from: I needed cars. Or had I missed something? If my obsessions were coming from my Tourette’s and my Tourette’s had been a product of my trauma as a child, then it is likely my obsession with cars is a result of the war. I’m buying Ferraris because of Adolf Hitler!
I finished up buying eighteen classic cars. I had four Ferraris, one Aston Martin, two E-Type Jags, an XK 120, three Alfas, a Maserati, two Corvettes, a Ford Mustang Shelby replica and… I can’t even remember the others. Eighteen, all at the same time! Greed probably came into it. My friends were trying to warn me about it, but I didn’t want to listen. Erich Fromm said that greed is “a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction”, but he was already dead and clearly didn’t understand the rising market in classic cars. The trouble is, it was a bubble, and it caught me. “It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen” – Democritus!
Hanging around with the Floyd didn’t help either; they were all car fanatics. Drummer Nick Mason had fifty-five cars and every one was worth all my cars put together. He even had a Ferrari 250 GTO, registration 250 GTO – the most valuable model in the world. One ha
d recently sold for fifteen mil. I suppose we were all guilty of greed, although the irony was that I wasn’t the one preaching the prophecies of love and consciousness that bands coming out of the psychedelic era seemed to.
I met with Nick when he and his wife Nettie were on the Mille Miglia historic rally in Italy, and we had dinner together on the overnight stopover in Rome. On another occasion, they were horrified when I drunkenly climbed into the bridal taxi taking them from their wedding reception in Holland Park, asking, “Can you give me a lift to Ladbroke Grove?” How embarrassing! I went with Steve O’Rourke and his wife Angie to the twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans, where his Emka Aston Martin came in seventh – the highest finish of a British car for years. He had a big trophy in his house, given to the highest British finisher at Le Mans, and it carried all the names of the famous pre-war Bentleys and post-war Jaguar C-Types and D-Types that had won the race. At Le Mans, Alain de Cadenet, a friend from London, told me a wing had come off his car at 200 mph down the Mulsanne Straight. Incredible! Pink Floyd and I went to many private track days at circuits such as Goodwood, and races at Brands Hatch. We went to the Goodwood Festival of Speed and I’d often watch Steve racing his Knobbly Lister-Jaguar.
Nick Mason and David Gilmour got the first two limited edition Ferrari F40s from the factory at Maranello, while they were touring Italy with the Floyd. Nick took me to Donington in his, where a magazine photographed it. He knew I was on the list of a thousand people to receive one. I got on the list thanks to my nephew Jimmy; his wife Laura’s father was head of the Automobile Club of Italy. I had to wait five years before it arrived, and mine was the last one into the UK. By the time I got it, I was just about to leave to live in California, where it was not legal – so, can you believe it… I sold it! But before I did, I needed to take it for a spin, so I took it down to Wiltshire one Saturday. I was having fun on the A303, coming up behind motorists on the two-lane highway and putting my foot down when they pulled over, showing off the acceleration basically, and wadda-ya-know, I got busted for speeding.
It took the police ten miles to catch me (I was unaware they were chasing me) and when they pulled me over, I began to plead. I told them I was leaving the country, hoping they would let me off, but they weren’t too sympathetic – and they took me down the station straightaway. Hysterically, the copper who needed to drive the thing couldn’t do up the tricky seatbelt and was looking at the gear stick like it was some state of the art high-tech coffee machine. I told him “That’s just the beginning, officer; you’ve really got to know how to drive these things well… otherwise you can cause accidents.” I offered to drive it myself and follow them. His head turned to mine and I could see it in his eyes: he had no choice. “You aren’t going to take off again, are you?” he asked.
I later appeared in court, with a solicitor. I was desperate not to be banned for my last month in England, when I had so much running around to do. Normally anything over 100 and you’re a banned man. I had been clocked at 106, but this was fortunate; I was actually going up to 130. I had a plan. My solicitor didn’t know what to do, so I had him step aside and spoke directly to the court: “My friends, the F40 has twin turbos!” I could see how silly they all felt not realising this crucial point. “This means they kick in when the car reaches 3500 revs…” (The three heads lifted, as if all in unison. I think my hook had caught them in one throw; I just needed to reel in.) “… which is around the legal limit of seventy miles an hour. Once the turbos come on, the acceleration from seventy to one hundred takes just one and a half seconds… so it is rather marginal whether you are doing seventy… or one hundred.” They let me off with a fine and no ban. The solicitor said I should be an actor, as it was the best performance he had ever seen in court.
David Gilmour also collected classic cars… and planes! That is, until he nearly killed himself in an old one, and his new wife banned him from flying. I was trying to keep up with the Floyd, but the trouble was they were much richer, and for me it was a nightmare storing and repairing all my cars. Life was hard you see… I had to store and repair my expensive cars! The entire thing was ridiculous and I was going to live in LA anyhow, so I sold them all in one hit to a dealer at knockdown prices.
“There was a time in my life when I thought I had everything – millions of dollars, mansions, cars, nice clothes, beautiful women, and every other materialistic thing you can imagine. Now I struggle for peace.” – Richard Pryor
*
In between the car stuff, there were some notable Pink Floyd musical memories. I went to lots of shows in London and Knebworth, where a real Spitfire flew over the crowd. I remember that show well: Steve O’Rourke threw someone who was illegally filming off the high stage. You have to be tough to work with a rock band, and Steve was. During a concert in America, I was standing with him near the sound engineers, and someone came up to him and handed him a document, accusing the band of stealing lyrics. Steve said it happened every night. I was with the band in New York. They were staying near the UN Plaza and we all took helicopters from the East 35th Street heliport to a show in the New York suburbs. It was wonderful, seeing Manhattan from a chopper. I went briefly ‘on the road’ too and we flew up to Cleveland. It was interesting seeing the musician’s life on tour, and it was exactly as you read of it in mags and saw in the films: lots of sitting around the pool during the day between shows, with pretty girls floating on past, and lots and lots of parties. Lots.
These days, I was thinking much of my father and that life he had lived in London and Berlin. I heard he had an exotic 1930s Lancia Lambda and used to hang around with the Italian Ambassador. I wonder if what he went for was what I had gone for, the places I had gone to, the circles I had become part of. He didn’t quite manage to get there from what I know of him, yet I had seemed to. Had I gone full steam for that ‘unlived life of the parent’? Or was it all a coincidence, an uncontrollable chain of events, dominos, something that the reverend had begun? It was him, after all, who had the papers publish the orphan ad, and I certainly wouldn’t have gone to Margate were it not for the war. So perhaps without it all, I wouldn’t be flying in helicopters with Pink Floyd over Manhattan – perhaps I would speak Italian and be working in the fields, growing grapes, living a more peaceful life. Perhaps that was my alternative destiny, and perhaps sometime in the future I would move over there… to feel if that alternative reality was, in fact, something that should have been. Something that was predestined.
*
Becker won Wimbledon, Born on the Fourth of July won best picture, thousands passed through the Berlin wall, Madonna released ‘Like a Prayer’ and Pink Floyd played in Venice for free. It was 1989 and the band had towed an oil rig from the North Sea all the way to Venice, and positioned it off St. Mark’s Square to be the stage. All afternoon, the square filled up with people and the lagoon with boats. I watched them from my room in the Gritti Palace Hotel. A special section was reserved in front of the stage for the gondolas. Steve O’Rourke told me later that just as it got dark and the band was due to start, the leader of the gondoliers decided it was perfect timing to threaten Steve that if he didn’t give him $10,000, all the gondoliers would blow their whistles during the concert and ruin it. I told you Steve was a tough bugger; he laughed in the bloke’s face. “First of all, the band’s sound will be so loud it will be heard fifteen miles away, and secondly, blow your whistles, and we’ll turn the rig’s fire hoses on the gondolas and their paying clients.” The concert went on as planned. I took all the wives of the band to dinner on the terrace of the Hotel Danieli overlooking the show, but got so coked up that I picked up the tab of $2000 – and they were all much richer than me! The next day, I took the band for lunch to a nice restaurant I knew on a quiet canal.
Chapter 29
Italia ’90
“Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a
ball about, but is a species of fighting. The lovers of football are large,
; boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at knocking down and trampling on
slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life – a continuous
triumph of the strong over the weak.”
– George Orwell.
We had become a nation of riot and robbery, anarchy and rampage. The late eighties saw a string of events that were to damage our sporting reputation and establish us as hooligans throughout the globe. English football hooligans were ruining Britain and we needed a team to get us out of it.
The Heysel Stadium disaster occurred on 29 May 1985. Rioting began, and it was started by the English. Escaping fans were pressed against a wall which collapsed at the stadium in Brussels, before the start of the European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool. Thirty-nine Juventus fans died. After it, Britain didn’t think it could get any worse – but everywhere England played abroad, fans rioted. Only when it went local did the nation really have enough.
Even the words ‘Hillsborough disaster’ still make men shudder. It will surely forever be, in sport and British news, one of the truly sad things. It was an FA Cup semi-final and we have all seen the footage. The crush resulted in the deaths of ninety-six people and injuries to 766. It remains the worst stadium-related disaster in British history and one of the world’s worst football events.
Johnny Cigarini Page 18