Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  Dick Pountain and Marion Hills summer here. Dick worked at Oz magazine, with Felix Dennis, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson – the editors. They were put on trial for obscenity after publishing an edition created by schoolchildren. They were found guilty and given long jail sentences, but were acquitted on appeal. There was popular support for them, led by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

  Tim and Anna Maltby pick olives and bottle the oil, and host wonderful lunches; Rob and Amanda House have a fabulous home and also love entertaining; and Ken Stott and his artist girlfriend Nina Gehl live here too, when he isn’t filming The Hobbit or appearing on the West End stage. Ian McDonald is a summer visitor. He is known as the Chairman, by virtue of being the Chairman of the Umbria Lunch Club. He had his moment in the spotlight during the Falklands War, when he was the Ministry of Defence spokesman on television.

  One swell couple are John Fraser and his long-time companion Rod Pienaar. John was a fine actor and had many starring roles, playing the king alongside Charlton Heston in El Cid, Lord Alfred Douglas in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, and Colin in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. However, his big passion was for Shakespeare, and John ran a touring company, which toured Africa amongst many other places. He is still a fine looking man in his eighties and a good author, too.

  David and Jenny Nichols are overrun with seven dogs and cats, and sometimes a goose. Jenny is another great cook and is hostess for residential cooking holidays. David is a film producer; his last two big productions have been The Tourist and To Rome with Love. I also have to thank him for telling me I should write my autobiography. A month later and it’s almost finished, David!

  The only people I know in Cortona deserve a mention, not only because they are nice people, but mostly to keep in the spirit of the subtitle of the book. My friend Lisabette Brinkman is the daughter of Jeanne Crain, the former Hollywood star. I met Lisabette through a Baja connection. During the peak of her fame in the late 1940s, when only Betty Grable bettered Jeanne Crain’s fan mail, she was nicknamed ‘Hollywood’s Number One Party Girl’, and would attend over 200 parties a year. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her starring role in the 1949 film Pinky.

  There are many other friends, as expat crowds all seem to know each other, and there is no one I don’t like. We all have a great time and I am grateful to them all for enriching my wonderful Italian world. In addition to all my expat mates here, there are all the lovely Italians from my local village, San Leo Bastia. They are the best people in the world: friendly, kind and generous, in spite of the fact I find it difficult to understand what they are saying. Many of them, like my builder Luciano and Camilla Muffi, and the Bucci and Pierini families, invite me to dinner or Sunday lunch, where huge tables are laid for sometimes three or four generations of family, and with tons of food. One amazing thing about the villagers is how much they loved my sister Luisa, despite what happened.

  In June 2014 the village Pro Loco organised my 70th birthday celebrations. I had visitors from all over the world, including my neighbours from Baja, Roberta Booth, Percy and Estela Hendler, and Dennis and Gun Bush, and also friends from LA and England, who all came to Italy for a week of festivities. Each day we took a bus to the beautiful medieval towns of Umbertide, Città di Castello, and Cortona, and had sumptuous lunches with twenty friends. On the night of my party, the Festa di Johnny, there was an open invitation to all the villagers and all my expat friends. Eighteen unpaid volunteers cooked a four-course sit-down dinner for five hundred people. Three or four times during the dinner, the local youngsters, whom I have nicknamed the Vitelloni (young bulls) after the great Fellini film of that name, chanted “Jo-NNY! Jo-NNY! Jo-NNY! Jo-NNY! ” The tidal wave came over every few minutes. I felt like I had scored the winning goal in a World Cup Final. We then had two bands; Pamela and Martina, two beautiful young accordionists that the older folk enjoyed dancing to, and the GTOs, a great local band led by Bryan Ferry look-a-like Stefano Bucci, which got the youngsters bouncing up and down. In between, we had an English DJ Kenny Hague. The Pro Loco presented me with a plaque making me an Honorary Citizen of San Leo Bastia, and when I made a short speech in Italian telling them I felt great love from them I burst into tears. It was without any doubt the best night of my life, and I went to bed at 3am. However, I was so over-excited I could not sleep for hours. The next day Sunday 8th June, (my actual birthday) I felt dizzy and faint, and badly out of breath when walking up the stairs. A local friend who is a cardiologist took my blood pressure and it was sky-high. She recommended I went to the accident and emergency room, so my Italian nephews from Rome took me to Città di Castello hospital. After electro-cardiograms, x-rays, and blood tests all day, I was released to go home at 8pm, feeling much better. I guess the excitement of the night before had all been too much for a seventy-year old. I had had such a great party it didn’t really bother me to spend my 70th birthday in the hospital. I was just sorry to miss a nice birthday lunch with my family and friends, but they had it without me.

  The Pierini are a typical San Leo family. Nine siblings all in their sixties and seventies: five women and four men. One of them, Giobbe, is the village plumber with his son Diego, Rosato cuts down the trees, his handsome son Francesco cuts them into logs, and another brother Menco drives the lumber truck. I am particularly friendly with Menco and his three sons Emanuele, Enrico and the younger one Lorenzo, who is at Rome University. The family had a terrible tragedy. Their mother Alba suddenly collapsed and died; she was in her early fifties. She was the classically strong Italian woman who ran the household of four men. It was touching watching the men make do without her, but they coped fine. They often invite me to Sunday lunch and they cook up a terrific meal, but it’s still sad not having Alba, the wife and mother, there. It made me think of my mother who died young – but like I’ve mentioned, it can’t all be happy times, can it?

  I am also very fortunate to have a wonderful family in Italy. They are the husband and sons of my sister Maria. As I spent so much time with them when I was a teenager, we are all very close. I love my brother-in-law Peter, or Pietro, Rebecchini. In many ways he was like a father substitute for me in those early years, when I hitched to Rome as an orphan. He is now eighty-eight and still married to Maria, although they haven’t lived together for over forty years. He still sends her half his pension every month and that is the Italian way. They have three lovely sons, now in their fifties, and I remember them all being born. Jimmy, Marco and Luca are the three brothers, all covering the whole gamut of hair colouring. They are all very lucky to have the Cigarini hair genes; the Rebecchinis on their father’s side were all as bald as an egg by the age of twenty.

  When I first met my brother-in-law Peter, he must have only been in his mid-twenties, but he looked very old with a bald pate and hair around the fringe. He doesn’t look a lot different now, and he’s eighty-eight. He tells me that God only gave hair to the people who don’t have good-looking heads. All my nephews’ wives and children are just a delight. I love them all very much and I am very lucky to have such a great Italian family, thanks to my sister Maria. She still lives in England, in Bournemouth, but I think she would like to move to Italy to be nearer her sons. She should, as she is now eighty. Maria… come.

  My other sister, Christina, seems content living alone in Cornwall. Her ex-husband Gordon died a few years ago, but they had already separated. She has a very active social life, partially through the church, and has many friends.

  In November of 2012, I treated Maria and Christina to a cruise to commemorate Maria’s eightieth, Christina’s seventy-fifth and my seventieth. We went to China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. The destinations were wonderful, but I won’t pretend it was always easy between us all. There are deep-rooted issues between the sisters, stretching back to their childhoods. I doubt it’s different in any other family, it’s just that our history is a bit more complicated than most. It was the first time we had spent so much time together for sixty-three
years, since Maria and I left Rome in 1949. In spite of that, I hope they enjoyed themselves – I certainly did. We toasted the beloved missing sister, Luisa. It was sad, but life is sometimes.

  *

  In 2012, I bought myself a Bentley Continental. I decided to buy one when I read Keith Richards’ autobiography Life. That was the car he had in the 1960s, and I love them. The scene when Anita Pallenberg gave him a blow job in the back of it may have influenced me. Bentley was one of the few makes of cars I had never owned. I was offered an R-Type Continental by Peter Frankel, my dentist, in the early eighties, for £40,000. He used it as an everyday car in Knightsbridge. I have always regretted not buying it, as they are worth twenty times that now. I bought the modern-day version of the Continental, having decided I would like to spend my seventies swanning around Umbria in a Bentley (like a flash git), but my ownership had an ignominious beginning. I bought the second-hand car in England and was waiting for the Portsmouth-Le Havre ferry, to drive it to Italy. I bought a fire extinguisher and reflective jackets, as required in France, at the ferry terminal shop, and put the bag in the front passenger footwell. A short while later, I opened the glove compartment and the lid lightly touched the bag. With a pop, the extinguisher went off, filling the car with white powder. I had to quickly throw the bag out of the car. It was all very embarrassing, as there were other cars waiting for the ferry. I could even hear them laughing and calling to me, “Flash bastard!” They weren’t wrong and it got me thinking that because Anita Pallenberg gave Keith Richards a blow job, a fire extinguisher had gone off in my Bentley. Work that one out… ’cause I can’t.

  Chapter 38

  Baja, Master of Two Worlds

  “… and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal

  ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly

  relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes,

  that is to say, an anonymity.”

  – Joseph Campbell

  It can be brutally cold in Umbria, and it is now twenty years since I spent a winter in Europe… so I seek the sun! I’m sure if I had been born in ‘the olden days’, I would have been one of those people who worshipped it religiously. I absolutely adore the sunshine. I spend the winters on the East Cape of Los Cabos in Baja (pronounced Baha) California, Mexico. My great friend since 1970, Roberta Booth, discovered it. She told me there were these gringos spreading up an unspoiled coastline, “Where the desert meets the ocean.” It sounded idyllic. I went down there, and it was. I am only allowed three months’ residency in America, so Mexico happened, where the water is warm enough to swim in, eighty degrees every day, and I am allowed in for six months. The property values are also much cheaper. So, I bought a beachfront house, and I am now in my twelfth winter there. I am there now as I am writing this, listening to the ocean, thinking of London. I don’t miss it these days, and here is why.

  The house is art deco in style or ‘Streamline Moderne’, according to Alex Matijas, the Argentinian architect who built it for himself. As you walk in, all you see is the ocean through four huge windows and sliding doors, a curved staircase, walls and ceilings. You can’t see the beach or any land when entering, as it is on a point, and from the front deck the sea horizon is so wide it is curved. Here, you really feel that the planet is round. The house has a lighthouse tower, like a minaret – the Casa Divina. Alex told me that after he built the house, he had a visit from the narcotics police. They thought the lighthouse was for signalling to drug smugglers.

  On one side of the house, I just have the beach, sand dunes and cactus trees. The nearest house is a quarter of a mile away, but cannot be seen. On the other side, I have a neighbour, Renate. Her house is also set back from mine, so I don’t see it. They have dogs, and I always know when I have a visitor. They have a caretaker, Fano, and his Mexican family watching over their home, and they look over mine too. I think people realise I have no family here, no wife or children, so they help me in all the little ways – like people have always done, ever since I was five.

  *

  The East Cape is a wilderness with miles and miles of empty beaches that run as far as the eye can see. Behind, there are desert forests that run for over a thousand miles to America. There are huge cardon cactus, terrote (elephant trees), pitaya and palo blanco trees. In front, we have the real Baja celebs, the whales. The grey and humpback ones come to Baja to give birth. They live here in the sea for just two or three months from January through to April, until the calfs are strong enough for the journey back north. The mothers are forty feet long, and the calfs sixteen feet at birth. From my house, I can see them breaching (leaping out of the water), or slapping their tails and flippers, causing huge splashes like something from an Attenborough documentary. The mothers seem to be teaching the calfs how to do it. I hear them slapping their tails at night and sometimes I hear them groaning, or is it singing? The annual migration of the grey whales is the longest of any mammal on earth – over 7000 miles from Baja California to the Bering Sea. The whales only feed themselves when they get to the Bering. They gorge on krill all summer and then sustain themselves all winter on their blubber, including milking the calfs. We hear that the great ships create too much noise pollution for the whales and it hurts them. It interferes with their navigation and makes it harder for them to speak to one another. Sometimes, they get lost on their journey. Don’t we all?

  One great trip we can take is to Bahia Magdalena, or Mag Bay as we call it. It is where the whales mate and give birth. It is a 50km-long bay, protected from the Pacific Ocean by the barrier islands of Isla Magdalena and Isla Margarita. It is more like a lagoon than a bay. On approach, the small plane circles the bay and the pilot points out the male grey whales guarding the narrow entrances, keeping out the killer whales – who will kill the baby grey ones merely in order to eat their tongues. Two open panga boats, each containing fifteen people, go out to the whales in the bay. They are accustomed to humans and will allow people to touch them, but only in the bay – they would never allow it on the open sea. In the bay, even the calfs can be petted. Being so close to these huge mammals is a wonderful experience. It really is humbling to know there are such great beasts living with us here on earth. It helps one remember that we share the planet with everyone, even sea monsters. Their size is impressive, and their blowing of air from close up is a giant and terrific sound. When I was there, I saw one breach from the water, right near a panga. The whales stay in the bay for a few weeks with their calfs before going around the Cape in front of my house, where they are plentiful in January, February and March. They start to leave for the migration by April. When that happens, I wave them goodbye.

  The other highlight from my house is the full moon rising out of the water. For three or four evenings each month, it comes up golden and reflects in the sea. I call it a moon river. The dawn needs to be mentioned also, as my bed faces toward the sun rising through a thirty-foot curving window. If I am awake in time, then I see a red sky every day. I often open my eyes at 6am and say, “That’s nice” and then go back to sleep. Because there is no air or light pollution in Baja, the stars are very clear and run down to the horizon. I can lie in bed at night and see the stars all the way down to the sea. Living in a city doesn’t allow us to experience the stars, or the sunrise, or moon rivers, but here I get it all and I wish I wasn’t the only one. Sometimes it even makes me sad that all the world cannot see it, as it was meant to be.

  For me, some of the best things in Baja are the birds. On Saturdays, not only do I get a choice of all the Premier League games on Mexican Sky, but while I am watching them I often see four whales through the large windows either side of my telly, while the pelicans dive into the deep blue, the magnificent frigatebirds soaring on high thermals, and the large turkey vultures flying past my window. Sometimes I see dolphins. Sometimes.

  My favourite bird of the sky is the osprey, which comes to visit me each morning at the same time, as regula
r as clockwork. It is especially exciting for me as an Englishman, because they were extinct in Britain and only reintroduced to Rutland Water in 1996. It hovers in front of my house, and sometimes I get the thrill of seeing it dive and catch a fish in its claws. My house is raised from the beach on a dune, so it hovers almost at my level. The osprey loves to sit on my lighthouse tower, chirping out to sea. I have a fine pair of Zeiss binoculars for whale watching, which I use for the osprey too. I hear they are known as the sea hawk or fish eagle, and they can grow a wingspan of six feet. I like to watch it because it seems wise, and it is also alone. Sometimes I watch it for a long time, wondering what it will do next. I often wonder what I will do next, but I cannot know, so I just keep watching the birds. That’s fine for me, for now.

  More common large birds are the turkey vultures, which the gringos call buzzards – an American name. However, in the Old World, the name buzzard is reserved for a buteo, which is called a hawk in America. The turkey vultures will always give way to the Caracara birds at a meal. These are magnificent falcons, usually in pairs. They have red heads with a white stripe around the neck, and another white stripe on the wings. The male has a crown on his head. They are only a once-a-week sighting, usually sitting on a large cardon cactus. They are not fast flying aerial hunters, but are usually scavengers.