Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  For Hindus, going to the source of India’s holy rivers – the Ganges and the Yamuna – is a sacred journey. One day, when darkness fell, we hadn’t reached the lodge where we were going to sleep that night and I had to climb onto a mule. I had never ridden an animal before and I didn’t know that you should put your weight on the stirrups. It was terrifying. The damn thing was clambering over the rocky path, getting too close and almost throwing me down it. I was swaying and hanging on for dear life in the dark, with a drop of 2000 feet and nothing but the sweating and the panting of the mule to keep me company. I remember calling to my companions, “I’m not even a Hindu!” My goodness, was I relieved when I got there. The next day, we arrived at the river’s source, and all the men, including yours truly, stepped fully clothed into the hot thermal pool.

  Before the pilgrimage, I spent a month on the ashram where Robyn Beeche lives in Vrindavan, near Mathura. Vrindavan is the centre for Krishna followers and this doesn’t just mean members of the Hare Krishna movement – who are usually Westerners – but Indian Krishna devotees. I was there for Diwali, the festival of lights, where lamps and candles are lit to signify good over evil. In Vrindavan, the town became full of sadhus during Diwali – the Indian monks who could be seen walking around playing their musical instruments. The real sadhus have chosen to live on the edges of society, have renounced all material possessions and are often painted in white powder, wear long beards and have dreadlocked hair. They are an extraordinary sight, like everything in India.

  It is, of course, difficult to talk of India without mentioning cows. They are as common in India as dogs or cats in England, and they are members of society – sacred and holy. But I wasn’t convinced they were being looked after as well as they perhaps could. On one occasion, I happened to watch one eat its way through an entire plastic bag in a skip full to the brim with garbage and shit. Considering how a cow has four stomachs, that really did prove how biodegradable plastic bags aren’t! In Vrindavan, the temple floors were patterned with elaborate displays, all made of cow dung, and I had heard that in certain parts of the country, they even drink their ‘holy’ urine. Cows in India are everywhere and all of the time, like in the middle of motorways or at your hotel reception – quite different to England and the occasional squirrel or robin. I thought the cows were quite scary at first, but then I saw the monkeys – the monkeys of Varanasi.

  Varanasi is the oldest city in India, and the spiritual capital. Mark Twain once wrote that Varanasi was “older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looked twice as old as all of them put together”, and he said that over a hundred years ago. Varanasi crawls with tourists who have travelled the world to come and watch. I was one of them and this place was certainly old India, and there was a real atmosphere of death.

  In Hinduism, death at Varanasi brings salvation. As it is located on the riverbank or ‘ghat’, many people go there to die or make provisions – sometimes years prior – to be in Varanasi for the moment of death. Some come too early, and they will remain there until they die. When they die, they are cremated on the banks of the holy river (or Ganga) and along the river there are funeral pyres. Babies, though, are not cremated; they are tied to stones and dropped in the river. This is because they need not be burnt, as they are ‘already holy’, like the sadhus, who are already dead, and have no connection with this world (they’re not even listed as citizens when alive). The unburnt corpses often release themselves from the binding and bob to the surface. When I took a boat trip, I saw a bloated infant corpse floating down the river. There are also many dead cows in the Ganges; they too are sacred, having saved Indian society.

  It was all becoming quite claustrophobic and I walked downhill towards the river through the mist to find some peace, but there was no escaping it. I passed some French brothers down a side road eating street food, practising their Hindi and their head bobs, when suddenly – a great crash – a woman had collapsed down some steps and into some baskets and a crowd of men quickly came to her rescue. As I mentioned, people have made provisions to arrive here for their deaths and it’s the ultimate wish of a Hindu to die and be cremated on a riverbank. She must have just died. The holier the river, the better for the soul, but put more accurately, it’s not dying, it’s ‘leaving bodies’. Hindus believe in reincarnation because stuff or matter has never been made or destroyed, just transferred from one thing to another. Most Hindus will be burnt where they part with their physical selves and are released from the never-ending cycle of transformation, samsara, and suffering through reincarnation. A rumbling had begun and suddenly the people in the street began to part. I looked uphill and saw a line of men carrying a body that lay dead on bamboo. They carried it toward the river while chanting ancient mantras. I got swept into the traffic and ended up back at the burning ghat, Manikarnika Ghat, which is the main attraction (so to speak) where the dead come to be weighed – so the men in charge know exactly how much wood to spare for the burning. The bodies are then burnt and sunk.

  I left Manikarnika and walked up river. Kids played their beloved cricket on the bank and one boy tried to force a pack of dogs to eat a cow. A group of tourists played kites with some children and a sadhu sat on a step around a group of ten smoking charas – a common practice among the holy or babas to destroy all sexual desire and help contemplate ‘the mysteries of the cosmic’. He had a tin pot for spare rupees and I gave him some, but not enough. It was never enough in this country; too many people are incredibly poor. India is highly overcrowded. It has over a billion people and unless you leave the cities, you will rarely see a tree. They have all been cut down for firewood, so in much of India, the people dry and then burn cow dung for heating and cooking.

  In India, the traditions and customs run to infinity. Hindu religion is unimaginably diverse, with more lineages and philosophical schools than any other, and over 320 million gods. I was still walking along the riverbank and I decided that I wanted to come back again one day. The sun’s rays leaked through clouds and I could see a mother standing with her daughter beside the river with lips chanting light mantras. An elderly man was in the lotus position praying before wetting his head in the holy water, and there were Buddhists and Muslims too. A group of tourists clambered into a boat to record it all on camera and in journals. They will return to the West reporting to their loved ones what they have seen or what they think they have seen. Astonished, astounded, we are fascinated.

  Beautiful India, I have seen merely the surface of you.

  *

  I went to Nepal and stayed at my friend Mary Heale’s Lakshmi Lodge, on the trail toward Machapuchare mountain – a fish tail, as it is known, angling its spike into the ocean blue sky of upper Nepal. It is in the Annapurna Himalaya of north central Nepal, revered by the local population as sacred to the god Shiva, and hence is off limits to climbing. Her village Birethanti is a Gurkha village, where there were many distinguished-looking elderly military gentlemen with very smart houses. There are no roads to the village. You have to walk for about half an hour from the nearest road, crossing a small bridge – normal for the guides who begin hiking at age four, carrying the luggage as porters for the tourists on one dollar a day. I went for a hike in the magical foothills, with a guide from Mary’s lodge, where we stumbled across a sloth bear that was sleeping on the path in front. It woke up with a start and a loud roar, but fortunately ran off and hid behind a tree. They can be dangerous, but this one seemed more frightened of us – or maybe it was me? The air here was clean, the sounds of the birds as sharp as a knife blade, and the food – dal bhat – was fresh and ripe mountain food; the same Sherpa diet my guide’s ancestors ate.

  I stayed a few days at Tiger Tops. I didn’t see any tigers, but lots of elephants and rhinoceroses. It was where my guide told me: “Two things tourist people never getting bored of, Mr Johnny… elephants and rhinoceroses.” I certainly agreed with that.

  Kathmandu is a great city, and as the main city in Nepal, it
is a cross-section of cultures and nationalities – including the Tibetan people, who are so very peaceful and light when they speak, Indians, Chinese and visitors from Israel, Germany, Argentina and England. It is a place people come to from all the world’s far corners. Something has called to them all, and here, it was something you could feel – in the Himalayas. There truly is nothing quite like this powerful mountain world, one I saw on a dawn flight over Mount Everest.

  I love India, but after three months I was nearly screaming to leave. With the vast population and intense cultural change, it is quite unadoptable and unadaptable! If another young boy had asked me where I was from, and what my name was, and if I would like to visit his brother’s store, I swear I would have throttled the bugger. My hat goes off to any Westerner who has managed to settle there, or for that matter worked out how to use the squat loo and hose. On that note, “Happiness is having a hard shit”, I remember one traveller telling me when she had just finished her second stint of Delhi belly. That pretty much summed it up for me in the end – it was exhausting, it was exhilarating. It was time to get out!

  *

  Laos was the perfect antidote: peaceful and calm and untouched for centuries, apart from a hideous amount of illegal American bombing during the Vietnam War. Flying across the country is a depressing experience. Seen from the sky, the ground is pockmarked with craters, where the Americans tried to destroy the Viet Cong supply routes. It is estimated that Laos received one B52 bombload every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day, for ten years between 1964 and 1973. I read it was the equivalent of thirty tons of bombs for every man, woman and child in Laos. US bombers dropped more ordnance on Laos during this period than was dropped in the entire Second World War. Appalling behaviour. It is now very peaceful, and the people are so gentle and friendly that my heart went out to them for the suffering and pain the older people must have endured during the bombing. I went to the capital, Vientiane, a nice town with French influences in its architecture, and also in the café life. My favourite town was Luang Praband, a sleepy little town on the banks of the Mekong River.

  Vietnam was beautiful and it rained the whole time I was there. Experiencing Asia in the rain is something everyone should do, because when it rains, it pours, and when it pours, it can do it for days, and another world emerges. It is a very different world to ours. Not better or worse, just different – the sounds, the smells, the thoughts people have. I got depressed in Hue, which was the scene of the Tet Offensive of ’68. Hue was actually in South Vietnam, just south of the border with the North, but it had been infiltrated by the Viet Cong and was therefore bombed by the Americans in the Battle of Hue. The whole city was practically razed to the ground. I went to visit the Forbidden City and it had truly been lost; there was only a perimeter wall remaining. After being in India with all the wonderful temples, it was very sad to see this. Very sad indeed.

  I went to Cambodia and visited the fabulous Angkor Wat temples, seat of the Khmer Empire, dating from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. I was practically the only tourist there due to the civil war and Cambodia was still on the Foreign Office list of places not to visit, but I ignored their advice. The Angkor Wat temple complex is the largest religious monument in the world and dates from the twelfth century, and it takes at least three or four days to look around it. I particularly liked the Prasat Bayon, about thirty tall towers with large faces carved on the four sides of each one. The main Angkor Wat temple itself is staggering. The apsaras and other bas-relief carvings are still in mint condition. My favourite temple was Ta Prohm, which has been left almost untouched since the temples were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thick roots of fig, banyan and kapok trees grow in and around the temples. It was like a real version of an Indiana Jones movie. That day, my guide and I were the only people there. I felt like the French explorer who discovered them. I needed a guide because these temples were dangerous. If one strayed away from the paths, there was danger of landmines.

  I went to Thailand and stayed with Jamie Morgan in Bangkok. He was one of Siobhan Barron’s Malibu gang. At that time, he was living full time in Bangkok in a cheaper hotel. So I stayed there with him, but it was something of a junkie hangout. One night, a young American lad, presumably tripping on acid, rushed down the third-floor corridor, shedding his clothes in a trail on the floor, and tried to dive into the pool from the upstairs window. The pool was a long way away and he went straight down. He hit a porch, which broke his fall, and that saved his life. It’s a story we’ve all heard too many times. I think acid helps you realise how free you are, but because of the amount of suppressed freedom there is in the modern mind, people who trip can experience a massive unbalancing, so they often think they are so free they can fly.

  Jamie and I also went to Phuket for Christmas. Jamie is a fashion photographer, and friends with supermodel Helena Christensen, who was staying in the Amanpuri with her boyfriend Michael Hutchence – the lead singer from the great Australian band INXS. Jamie and I were staying in the Pansea next door, but we spent every day at Michael’s villa at the Amanpuri. We all stayed together the whole week, and went into Patong town to see the sleazy bars and lady-boy pick-up joints. Michael was a really nice guy and Helena was just gorgeous. She was always wearing open-fronted Versace silk dresses, which left nothing to the imagination. Naomi Campbell was also there and hanging out with us. She was staying in the Amanpuri with her boyfriend Nellee Hooper, a great record producer of Massive Attack, Björk and Madonna. It was all a bit different to slumming it through India and Laos, but it was still part of my travels. Celebrities are still people, after all.

  When we got back to LA, I arranged for Michael Hutchence to have his birthday dinner in the Foundation Room at the House of Blues. There were other members of INXS present. Johnny Depp was also there with his then girlfriend Kate Moss. I chatted to them. They both seemed nice, unassuming people.

  Michael died a few years later, of strangulation. By then, he was going out with Paula Yates – former wife of Bob Geldof and mother of his children. Paula had one child from Michael and she sadly became a junkie after his death, and would later die from an overdose. The coroner ruled Michael’s death was suicide, but I believe he was stoned, and he was fooling around with autoeroticism. I think a lot of people knew that was the case, but for some reason, it was more convenient for the media to demonise Michael this way and just say he was mentally unstable. In reality, he was a great man, a creative soul and a gent. Ironic, then, how he described the English press: “So nosy… and the English seem to love that eavesdropping.”

  I knew Paula from the Roebuck pub on the King’s Road from ’76, when she was a young girl. I met her again when the film Four Weddings and a Funeral had a launch party in the House of Blues Foundation Room. The public relations king Matthew Freud was with Paula. His connection to the House of Blues was Isaac Tigrett. I believe the Hard Rock Café had been Matthew’s first ever client when he set up his PR consultancy. I had known Matthew for years, because he’d sometimes visit Stocks House late at night when he was a young man. There had just recently been a big spread on Paula and Michael Hutchence in the News of the World because they had just started dating, and had been caught by the paparazzi at a country motel. There were photographs of Michael fighting with the paparazzi. I was talking to Matthew and Paula, and I said to them, “You know, you could never buy the first five pages of the News of the World, that’s fantastic publicity”. Paula pointed to Matthew and said, “Yes, and Matthew wrote all of it.” He is a brilliant PR man, and the whole incident was a publicity stunt. He is now married to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter. And that was Matthew Freud.

  *

  These days, I still have big travel plans. There are still so many countries I’d like to visit, cultures I would like to learn about, quiet towns I want to walk through. Some people say the grass is always greener, but that thing inside me that has kept me quite restless has kept me adventurous – I thank God that I have that.
It’s helped me travel and yearn for even more adventures. John Steinbeck said that: “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” I guess I feel that way about my life sometimes: the great journey of life. I think it was the thing he was talking about. Sometimes I got lost on the road, sometimes I was lost in my head, but I kept going, somewhere, and I always ended up in the right place eventually. I guess that’s the key – to just keep going. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

  Chapter 35

  Terrible Name-Dropping

  Twiggy

  In LA, I always see my old friend Mary Lindes. I first met her when I was doing a shoot with Twiggy, her closest friend. Mary accompanied Twigs to the shoot. A short while later, I went to a party at her flat in Chelsea, where she lived with her husband Hal Lindes. Hal was a guitarist in Dire Straits. Mary had been previously married to superstar Peter Frampton. I know Twiggy through her marriage to my friend, actor Leigh Lawson. Both of them are super duper and they’d often visit me at Ridge Farmhouse. I went to Twiggy’s fiftieth in the private room at San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge. I remember talking with Jeremy Irons and Bob Hoskins. Actually, Bob chatted to me. I was sitting next to his wife and he seemed to think I wasn’t talking to her enough, so he asked me to change places with a lady. Same old complaint!