Johnny Cigarini Read online

  Johnny Cigarini: Confessions of a King's Road Cowboy

  Memoirs of a terrible name-dropper

  John Cigarini

  Copyright © 2014 John Cigarini

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,

  or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents

  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

  any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the

  publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with

  the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries

  concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador®

  9 Priory Business Park

  Kibworth Beauchamp

  Leicestershire LE8 0RX, UK

  Tel: (+44) 116 279 2299

  Fax: (+44) 116 279 2277

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  ISBN 978 1784628 062

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

  For me, my friends and you.

  *

  The King’s Road in Chelsea

  was the epicentre of the swinging sixties

  and the seventies London scene…

  *

  With special thanks to Luke Shipman for his valuable contribution.

  Contents

  Cover

  People to Remember…

  Introduction

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 2

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part 3

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  People to Remember…

  This autobiography features the incredibly large number of one hundred and twenty people who are no longer with us:

  Ruby Cigarini

  Armando Cigarini

  Luisa Cigarini

  Mabel Davies

  Jack Davies

  Revd Kenneth Senior

  Dr Nora Senior

  Lord Beaumont

  Bob Brooks

  Jim Baker

  Len Fulford

  Allan van Rijn

  Larry Williams

  Ann Pugsley

  Ronnie Holbrook

  Robert Mitchum

  Vittorio De Sica

  Jean Harlow

  Sir Bobby Robson

  Tony Curtis

  Herbert Lom

  Richard Warwick

  Ayrton Senna

  Elvis Presley

  Marlon Brando

  Ossie Clark

  Keith Lichtenstein

  Steve O’Rourke

  Alphi O’Leary

  Cyril Stein

  Carl Perkins

  John Belushi

  James Hunt

  David Jacobs

  Steve Marriott

  Tony Howard

  John Bindon

  George Harrison

  Princess Margaret

  Keith Moon

  Maureen Tigrett

  Peter Cook

  Jeanne Crain

  Christopher Reeve

  Michael Hutchence

  Paula Yates

  Dennis Wilson

  Stevie Ray Vaughan

  Terence Donovan

  Marc Bolan

  Malcolm McLaren

  Johnny Chapulis

  Joseph Cotten

  Bill Graham

  Lesley Sunderland

  Tony Scott

  Andy Warhol

  Buddy Holly

  Yogi Bhajan

  Junior Walker

  Jeremy Keegan

  Gerlinde Kostiff

  Zelda Barron

  Luciana Martinez

  Michael Powell

  Richard Harris

  Storm Thorgerson

  Freddy Heineken

  Sir David Frost

  Kirby Brown

  Richard Bembenek

  John Wayne

  Peter Sellers

  Muriel Belcher

  Ian Board

  Francis Bacon

  Frank Zappa

  Terry Kath

  Jimi Hendrix

  Victor Borge

  Maria Schneider

  Tommy Roberts

  Freddie Hornik

  Victor Mature

  Toni Litri

  Paula Boyd

  Peter Grant

  Michael Kamen

  Clement Freud

  Fred Dibnah

  Jack Dellal

  James Brown

  Duck Dunn

  Colonel Tom Parker

  Krissie Wood

  John Lee Hooker

  Dodi Fayed

  Princess Diana

  Lee Van Cleef

  Conor Clapton

  Doug Green

  Baron George-Brown

  Alvaro Maccioni

  Rodney King

  Allan McKeown

  John Slater

  Miss Cynderella

  David Abbott

  Mark Shand

  David Iveson

  Bob Hoskins

  Oscar Lerman

  Johnny Darke

  Dick Clark

  David Watkin

  Dave Crowley

  Gordon Miller

  Carol White

  George Raft

  Sai Baba

  Enjoy every day! And stay away from Johnny Cigarini.

  Introduction

  It should really be called ‘Autobiography of a Nobody’. But who is nobody? Who is somebody?

  *

  “This above all; to thine own self be true.”

  – William Shakespeare

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  The War

  He had a beautiful young English wife, three gorgeous daughters and a studio on the Harrington Road. Life must have been sweet for my father in London in the 1930s. It was surely the dream life for any photographer.

  That dream came to an end when Italy declared war on Great Britain. It was 1940.

  *

  Armando Cigarini was born in 1896 to an Italian family in French Tunisia. It had been recently established during the French colonial empire, which was still the second-largest colonial power on the map. When he became an adult, Armando made his way to Paris where he was an apprentice to Marcel, the well-known French photographer, and he saw the First World War – fortunately only as a war photojournalist for a French newspaper, as his heart condition
prevented him from being drafted in as any kind of soldier. He was present during the famous retreat from Caporetto in 1917, taking photographs on the Austro-Italian front – as documented by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Near the town of Kobarid, Austro-Hungarian forces, reinforced by German units, broke the Italian frontline and overwhelmed the Italian army. It was the war of poison gas, the terrifying stormtroopers, the trenches. Those who read the Hemingway masterpiece would often summarise it with a word: bleak. The backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers and the displacement of populations would have been nothing but bleak. It is what my father would have surely seen, like the lines of men, marching in the rain. A Farewell to Arms is quite a story of love and pain, of loyalty and abandonment – ironically the exact themes that would encapsulate his own life. But not yet. First he would need to meet her, my beautiful mother.

  After the Great War, Armando moved to Berlin where he opened a photographic studio. They must have been fun days during the Golden Twenties in Berlin; a sophisticated culture of architecture, cabaret, literature, painting, film and fashion. Considered decadent by rightists, it was surely fabulous for my father, but he didn’t stay long and moved swiftly to London to become a court photographer for the Royal Court, a title of great distinction in those days. He photographed young Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, and I have a photograph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, inscribed ‘Portrait by Cigarini’. He was also a society photographer for Tatler and Bystander out of Fleet Street and for The Sketch, the newspaper weekly that cornered high society and the aristocracy. Armando’s photographs were hand-coloured, which I believe he did himself and I find that to be quite fabulous. On the internet, I found one he had taken of film actress Eve Gray, and another of Miss Peggy O’Neil, now in the National Portrait Gallery archives.

  By the early ’30s, Armando had met and married my mother, Ruby Davies, who was a wonderful and beautiful young model. Likely they met on a photo shoot in his studio on Harrington Road. They had three daughters: Maria born in 1933, Luisa in ’36 and Christina in ’38, and they lived in Marylebone, Central London.

  It was 10 June 1940 when Benito Mussolini stepped onto the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia and declared war on France and Britain, bellowing in his uniform to a quarter of a million in the Piazza. “Soldiers, sailors, and aviators… black shirts of the revolution and of the legions… men and women of Italy… of the Empire… and of the kingdom of Albania… pay heed. An hour appointed by destiny has struck in the heavens of our fatherland. The declaration of war has already been delivered…” and the crowd chanted two words back to their Mussolini: “war” and “war”.

  The reaction from the Allies was swift. In London, all Italians who had lived on British soil less than twenty years and were aged between sixteen and seventy were interned. For the Italians of London, life had changed in a heartbeat. Panic had hit the city streets and what was once a place of opportunity, wonder and excitement had turned overnight into a place where people feared for their lives.

  Faced with the certainty of internment, the family packed and moved to Rome. It may have suited my father, who avoided internment, but life was not easy for my mother and the English girls in German-occupied Rome. To begin with, none of them could speak Italian. Only my father could, as he was already well travelled and fluent in Italian, French, Arabic, German and English. Like in all wars, hardship was evident everywhere. The German forces took most of the available food, with bread being rationed to just 100g per person per day. Utilities were cut off, and the family had no electricity, gas or water. Subsequently, my mother had multiple miscarriages during the war due to the hard conditions, until eventually they had their first son, Giuseppe – but he died after just forty days. They had twin daughters, Lilliana and Silvana, but they also died – after just four days. My mother was exhausted, she had no milk in her body, and there was none to buy.

  The bombing of Rome took place on several occasions in the early 1940s, most notably in June 1943 when more than 500 Allied planes dropped bombs, causing thousands of civilian deaths, and even the Vatican City was under attack by both British and German forces, despite it maintaining neutrality.

  Rome was hit by 60,000 tons of bombs over seventy-eight days before her capture. Yet, quite amazingly, against a backdrop of all of this, in late 1943 my mother fell pregnant… with me. She woke up on 6 June 1944 to a great sound: American tanks on the main street, near home. She left the house, heavily pregnant, and walked up to the American soldiers. Holding me in her tummy, she spoke to them in English, which would have been unusual for the American GIs to hear.

  “Which way did the Germans go?” the US Fifth Army asked her as she stood in her long coat. They befriended her and gave her a supply of milk, chocolates and bread. It seemed that day was to mark a turning point in the war in Europe, with Rome being the first of the axis power capitals to fall to the Allies. American troops took control of Rome and the Germans had been ordered to withdraw. Rome was liberated and the people emptied themselves onto the streets in celebration, welcoming the Allies with cheers and applause, hurling bundles of flowers at passing army vehicles. Two days later I was born. It was 8 June 1944. What I’ve come to realise is that those very provisions the Americans gave my mother enabled me to live. I owe my life to those soldiers on that day. My luck had just begun and I was given the middle name Victor to denote the victory.

  *

  Being multi-lingual and a good businessman, my father began to supply the Allied Forces with general provisions, namely vegetables, eggs and poultry, which he sourced in the Roman countryside. He became quite rich in the process, but sadly lost most of the money buying a warehouse full of old master paintings, which turned out to be fakes. Quite the businessman, he got involved in an enterprise, which I remember well from my childhood in Rome. He invented a chocolate-banana machine. You put the chocolate and the banana in one end, and the chocolate-covered banana came out the other. The machines were big, about the size of a supermarket freezer. I remember those bananas being quite delicious, but the business didn’t take off. I have since only come across chocolate-covered bananas once, in Hawaii.

  Likely through his American Army connections, my father was offered the job of running Coca-Cola in Italy but, much to the exasperation of my mother, he turned the offer down. He said he had never worked for anyone else in his life, and he didn’t want to start. Whether for that reason or because the war was over, my mother decided she would return to England, which she did in 1949. But before we left, we had a visitor: my maternal grandmother, Mabel, likely giving my mother guiding words from a generation that had seen war before. My mother decided to only take my eldest sister Maria and me, Little Johnny, back to England. By this time, my father was already ill with the heart disease that would eventually kill him. Luisa and Christina, then aged thirteen and eleven, were put in a convent in Rome. The family was beginning to split apart.

  Although I was only five, I remember the journey to England. We went for a final pizza before the trip. I went back to the flat sixty years later and after all those years I was still able to walk straight back to our apartment building from the tram. The pizzeria was still there too! I remember my mother wearing her long black coat. I remember us stopping off in Paris. I remember seeing one of my father’s brothers there. I remember his family at the station. It was a long time ago; I am now seventy. But I remember.

  My sister Christina, who stayed behind in Rome, has since told me that my father did not know we were leaving and that he had his first heart attack when he found out. All this because of the war.

  When we got to England, my mother left my sister and I with two of her sisters, while she got her life organised. She was looking for a job and somewhere to live and started calling herself Johnson, presumably so my father could not trace her. I still don’t know why my mother left him – I guess I’ll never know; perhaps I’m not meant to – but it must have been terribly hard for her in Rome during those times. I’m sur
e she must have missed England dearly. Maria was nearly sixteen, and was left with Aunty Mabs in Broadstairs, Kent. Mabs was a hairdresser and her husband, Les, worked for the Post Office. I was left in Coventry with Aunty Alice. Her husband Ted worked as a toolmaker at the Standard Motor Company. They had three small children of their own.

  That was it, I never saw my mother again. Four months later in London, she was dead. She had started vomiting blood due to a serious liver disease and went into a coma. She died, aged thirty-nine, of haematemesis. The last time I saw my father was when he came over for my mother’s funeral in 1950, when I was just five. He gave me a red twelve-inch tin-plate model car with a battery and working headlights. I still have it and it is my most treasured possession, still with the original battery. Armando went back to Rome and died of heart failure in February 1954, aged fifty-seven. My father was dead, my mother was dead, three siblings had died before their first birthday, I had two sisters back in Italy and one I had been separated from in England. I was alone, kind of. Maybe it was the early years that were to shape the rest of me. It would certainly explain a few things.