Johnny Cigarini (9 page)

Going on a Club Med hol was fully inclusive of flights. It required transiting through Paris with an overnight stop and I booked into an old-fashioned Grand Hotel near the Gare du Nord. The only place I knew in Paris was the Café de Flore in St. Germain, a famous writers' hangout. I took a taxi there and a great opportunity presented itself. As I was getting out, a tasty-looking blonde Swedish girl was waiting to get in. I persuaded her to join me for a drink in the café and that quickly started us off on a full evening's crawl of the bars. She showed me St. Germain and we finished up back at my hotel for more dirtiness. There was a wedding reception in the ballroom; we crashed it, joined in the dancing and then went upstairs together.

The next day, I caught my flight to Martinique. On the plane, I threw up after eating my meal. I got to Martinique and settled into the Club Med. I rented a Mini-Moke and drove around looking for the locations and the boat we needed. In those days, I always put olive oil on my skin to suntan, as suntan lotion was unheard of. Driving around in the tropics in the open car, I got severely burnt on my face.

The Club Med had a wonderful breakfast buffet full of every fruit you could imagine, but every day I had to take my plate and sit outside the toilet, so that after eating I could rush in and be sick. I didn't know what was wrong with me. Depressed, vomiting, everything… I thought I'd got a tropical bug, but I had important work to do, so I did what all men are meant to do when they get sick: I ignored it and carried on working.

A couple of days later, I got the drips. The tasty blonde Swedish girl in Paris had given me a venereal disease. All had come clear! I didn't want to go to the doctor at the Club Med as I was too embarrassed, and I didn't want to cause panic in the Club, so I went to a doctor in town. He took one look at me. “Good God man, you're bright yellow!” With the burnt skin, I hadn't noticed that what I thought was a suntan was actually hepatitis. A day or so later, my eyes went yellow and my hepatitis blood test results were so bad that I was ordered off the island. My preparation week was nearly up, so I telephoned London and told Bob to bring another producer for the shoot. His first remark was not too sympathetic: “Did you find the boat?”

I met Bob and the film crew at the tiny airport and according to Bob, “I saw this yellow apparition approaching me, with its face hanging off.”

I left the next day, but as I was waiting for my flight, I thought I would have one final swim. I trod on a sea urchin and could barely walk to the plane. When I got back to London, I had to go back to the doctor to have him pull the needles out of my foot. An infected finger, the clap, hepatitis, severe sunburn, and a sea urchin stuck in my foot. I was off work for three months.

*

Bob Brooks directed and I produced some wonderful shoots for Benson & Hedges, thanks to Lindsey Dale, the creative director on the account at Collett Dickenson Pearce. They were usually third-world spy or espionage stories, and were sixty seconds – twice as long as a standard TV commercial. They were for the cinema, as TV advertising for cigarettes was banned by then. This was in the mid-1970s.

The first one was set in the souk in Istanbul. It featured George Cole as a hapless spy trying to pass a military secret, disguised as a cigarette, to a Peter Lorre-type character. Benson & Hedges ‘Istanbul' won every award going, including a Gold Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival, and that festival's first ever Classic Commercial Award.

The second B&H film was set in a rundown Middle Eastern port. For this shoot, the recce was the fun part. Bob, Lindsey Dale and I went to the Lebanon, Israel, Cyprus and Greece, and Hvar, Dubrovnik and Korcula in Yugoslavia, to look for a suitable port. We settled on the beautiful Venetian town of Hvar, now in Croatia and full of oligarchs' super-yachts, but in the seventies it was different – communist and quite rundown. We cleared the whole quay of boats and imported an old tramp steamer from Albania. The scene was a customs post on the quayside, manned by a customs official played by Herbert Lom (Police Commissioner Dreyfus with the twitchy eye in the
Pink Panther
films).

One evening there in Hvar, I met a pretty girl from Denmark. She looked young – I thought eighteen or nineteen – but I was still pretty young myself so I didn't mind. Like I said, she was pretty! We stayed together a few wee hours, making love and chatting about this and that in my room. I remember her well; she was the first girl I had ever met who smoked a pipe. In the small hours, I was walking her back to her hotel and ran into a very angry man. It was her teacher. It seemed she was on a school trip and hadn't told me.

The schoolgirl from Denmark, the Swedish girl, Jill, the pretty French girl, the erotic beauty at the orgy, they have all played their little roles in what has become my life – like I, I'm sure (I hope), have in theirs. Outrageous sexual behaviour would become a renowned reflection of the sixties and seventies that I lived through, but fortunately it didn't end there. A romance was about to begin.

During my convalescence from hepatitis in the King's Road, I was hanging out in a restaurant called the Casserole owned by Keith Lichtenstein, just over the road from my flat. It was the trendiest spot in town, featuring all the heroes of the swinging sixties, like David Bailey, Manolo Blahnik, Ossie Clark and Bryan Ferry. Keith was wealthy and owned an ex-artist's studio around the corner in the Vale in Chelsea, and a lovely Manor House in Sussex, which Bryan Ferry later bought from him. Keith had a fantastic collection of art deco furniture, until he tired of it and Elton helicoptered in and bought the lot.

Two of the regulars at the Casserole were Jose Fonseca and Amanda Lear. Jose owned Models One, the best model agency in town, and later married Dickie Kries, another of the old school swinging sixties mob who ran the Casserole. With huge eyes, long dark hair and inherited Portuguese genes, Jose was beautiful and herself a former model. Amanda Lear was tall and blonde, also drop-dead gorgeous, and very funny with it. She was even rumoured at one time to be transgender and she certainly had the humour of a seaman, which is what she was reputed to have been. I stayed a few days with them one Christmas at Keith's mansion. I hadn't been invited, but I was in the neighbourhood checking on a car restoration, so I dropped in to say hello and finished up staying a few days. When Christmas arrived, I had to vacate my room because they were expecting Susan Hampshire, the film actress. Amanda offered to share her room, but I was feeling a tad shy – after all, I hadn't really been invited, so I declined. I have always regretted that decision, not spending some time with Amanda and checking her out for myself. But they say everything happens for a reason and tracing back my steps, it was declining that invite that led me back home, to the Casserole and the place where I would meet her: Patti D'Arbanville, the woman I was about to fall in love with.

Patti was one of – if not
the
– great loves of my life. She was tiny, very cute, sexy as hell, but most of all she was a heap of fun. To put it simply, I adored her. She was, at that point, already a model. Andy Warhol had discovered her during a gig as a club DJ and cast her in his film
Flesh
, when she was just sixteen. It was after that she was discovered and began working as a model. When we met, she had just split up with Cat Stevens, who had written the song ‘Lady D'Arbanville' about her and she was also the inspiration for his hit ‘Wild World'. In fact, Steve (as we called him) seemed to be having difficulty letting go (and I was about to learn all about that). He would often accompany Patti and myself on our first few dates, usually to Parsons on the Fulham Road.

Patti lived in a basement flat in Draycott Place, off the King's Road. We would mainly go to hers to hang out because I had all sorts of people living at my place. She had a flatmate, Annie Hanson, who was another model and Casserole regular. Annie had a boyfriend too, who, interestingly, in spite of being very prim and proper himself, was in fact a cat burglar of country mansions – and every weekend he would come back with jewellery and other fine valuables. By this time, I had bought Ronnie Holbrook's Lancia Flavia Coupé. It had been styled by Pininfarina, and as Ronnie said, “If you squint, it looks like a Ferrari.” It had reclining seats, and Patti loved it.

As I mentioned, due to the chaos of random people moving in and out of my place, we'd mostly go to Patti's. It was the spring of 1971, and in the middle of one night, in climbed a long-haired man through the wide-open window, maybe hoping to get lucky with my girlfriend. He was out of luck that time, but he stayed the night on the sofa and in the morning we became friends. Little did I know, this was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. His name was Isaac Tigrett and he was from Tennessee. Both his parents, who were divorced, were very wealthy. His mother Frances's family had built the railway into Jackson, Tennessee, and she still had a lot of real estate in the centre of town. His father, John Burton Tigrett, was a financier who, among many things, was the backer of Jimmy Goldsmith's company, Cavenham Foods. Isaac had been sent over to the UK (I think to get him out of trouble) to work at Carr's Biscuits in Carlisle. He began exporting Rolls Royces and Bentleys to New York. He made a small fortune and teamed up with another rich-boy American, Peter Morton from Chicago, whose father was Chief Financial Officer for the Playboy organisation. Through that connection, Peter had got backing from the UK-based boss of the Playboy Clubs, Victor Lownes, to open London's first genuine US-style hamburger restaurant. It was called the Great American Disaster, and it was on the Fulham Road, near where I lived. Peter and Victor had an agreement that if they wanted to buy each other out, they would put sealed bids in an envelope. The higher bid would get it. Somewhere amongst it all, Isaac met Patti, and now he had climbed through her window and had met me. It is amazing to look back and remember where I first met my lifelong chums.

Isaac had an idea to open a rock ‘n' roll-styled restaurant, and he had found an old car showroom in Piccadilly. Morton had the restaurant expertise and contacts, so it was a perfect team. After Isaac had climbed through the window, he was still a month or two away from opening. Patti, Isaac and I all hung out a lot during that time, and finally, on 14 June 1971, the first Hard Rock Café was born, and Patti and I went to the opening party.

I love Isaac; he's got a great sense of humour and will even make the cops laugh. He used to drive around London in a black 1950s pickup truck. On one occasion, the police stopped him, leglessly drunk, for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. “Didn't you see the arrows?” the officer asked him. “Offisher, I didn't even see the Indians,” Isaac replied.

A short while after the Hard Rock opened, sons of some London gangsters tried putting the muscle on Isaac. It was probably the Kray or Richardson families. As the Hard Rock was a young people's hangout, I guess the younger generation of gangsters thought they could make a name for themselves that way, or maybe they were getting pushed by elders to muscle in and teach us youngsters a lesson. Isaac refused their demands for protection money. I was there the night the gangsters struck. It was a concert by the band Kokomo. There isn't really a stage at the Hard Rock, so the band were squeezed in on the raised platform near to the booths. It was a large band and the area was packed, and I stood there watching the jostling for quite a while before the fight started. Then all hell broke loose. It was like another scene from a Peckinpah movie and just like being back in Durham again. I saw one thug smash a full bottle of wine over a musician's head from behind and the wine spray through the air in slow motion. Then the musicians began breaking their guitars on the gangsters' backs. Chairs were being thrown… it was chaos, and I was outside by then. The gangsters had a Bentley and they opened the boot to show Isaac that they had sawn-off shotguns inside it, but he wasn't phased. I'll never forget the sight of my mate Isaac holding the leg of a broken chair, shouting at the gangsters, “Come and get some, motherfuckers!” He was very brave and never gave in to their demands.

*

By this time, Donna Curry – my lodger and friend to the band Chicago – had gone back to the US and a likeable young man I had met in the Casserole, John Stephen, took her place on my sofa. He moved in for the weekend and stayed eighteen months. He was very popular with the Holbrooks, who were, at this point in the story, ‘official' and in the flat next door. Dany had Ronnie back in town and they had got married. We all called John Stephen ‘Butch' because of the way he would crash through cinema doors. In fact, Butch, Ronnie and I had another nickname on the King's Road: because we were all very thin, with matching long blonde hair and identical outfits of tight jeans and faded denim jackets, we were The Beverly Sisters – a well-known, but corny, English female singing group from the fifties!

My new lodger Butch and another guy Bo Meftah had made some money making American football-style T-shirts, with 88 printed on them. Everybody on the King's Road was wearing them. Eventually he got a job as a barman in a King's Road bar, then as manager for Peter Langan's Odin's restaurant. He was much liked by John and Jan Gold from Tramp, so they sent him over to LA to be manager of the Tramp over there. He came back to London and was founder and chairman of Chinawhite.

Butch and I practically lived in the Hard Rock the first month, playing pinball – we just loved the place. We were living the
American Graffiti
dream. After about a month, Peter Morton said to us in his Chicago drawl, “Hey, you guys. I'm only going to say this to you once, but I really appreciate you coming here for the past month. Without you, we would have been empty.”

Patti D'Arbanville was partly instrumental in picking up the business too, although it would inevitably have happened in a matter of time. She was a friend of the Andy Warhol crowd and there was an Andy Warhol production of a show called
Pork
at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. Each night, Patti and I would take the cast of
Pork
to the Hard Rock after the show. Most of them were outrageous New York queens, and this was pre-gay lib. At that time, London had never seen anything like them. They were dancing on the tables, with the jukebox turned up high. Pretty soon after it, the place was packed, night in and night out. Carole King even wrote a song about it, ‘At the Hard Rock Café'. Queues started forming around the block. There are now 175 Hard Rock Café locations in fifty-three countries. Those days, I was more in love with Patti than ever.

*

Patti had a special friendship with a French actress called Maria Schneider, who had just made a film with Marlon Brando called
Last Tango in Paris
. As I mentioned, Patti was great fun, and she and I would fantasise for weeks about what we were going to do to Maria when she got to town. When the film arrived, Patti asked me if I wanted to go to Tramp. Maria wasn't yet in town and I was shooting a commercial early the next morning, so I declined, but I stayed the night in Patti's flat anyway. The next morning, when I was leaving at the crack of dawn for location, Patti arrived home. She'd run into Marlon at Tramp and been up all night with him doing who knows what – I didn't even want to think about it. We had a row on her doorstep. The next day, Schneider arrived with an entourage that included a good-looking gypsy. He took Patti's fancy, and that was the end of me. I went to Marbella alone, where every bar was playing Cat Stevens' songs, most notably ‘Lady D'Arbanville'. I was heartbroken.

Later, Patti had a long relationship with
Miami Vice
actor Don Johnson and they had a son. She appeared in many movies including
Rancho Deluxe
,
Wiseguy
, and another Warhol film,
L'Amour
, before making her name in the TV series
New York Undercover
.

The last time I saw Patti, she was filming in the Hollywood Centre Studios, where BFCS Inc. had its office, but it wasn't at the most appropriate of times. She was walking between the studios in hair curlers. She was delighted to see me, just a bit embarrassed to be caught mid-costume change.

I did finally meet Maria Schneider some time later, when I visited her in a flat in Flood Street. She was naked on the floor snogging my friend Kelly Ann Page, who was a Patti D'Arbanville look-alike. I left before I got in the way. I don't think Maria was into men or me, or maybe I never did fit into that bunch after all. I still think back to those days in a depressed kind of a way. I was in love with Patti and she threw me aside for some gypsy that Maria had brought into town. I'm sure it wasn't that black and white, though. I'm sure after all it was never meant to be, and deep down I am happy for the life that she's had and the man she fell in love with – but I still can't listen to that song. Anyway, there were plenty more fish out there and I was about to catch one.