Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  I always have dinner in LA with my lovely friend Fiona, wife of composer and Police drummer Stewart Copeland, and with Liz Dalling and her ex-husband, now boyfriend again, Michael Dalling. Lizzie works too hard, with her very successful management agency Special Artists, handling stars like Pierce Brosnan. She took me to lunch with Pierce at his Malibu house. It’s funny living in Malibu; you run into many famous Hollywood stars, just out doing their shopping. I used to see Pierce at the supermarket. Another time, I was in Blockbuster and they had a big display of Saving Private Ryan videos, which had just been released, and Tom Hanks was wandering through the store. I used to go to the Malibu Gym – where my trainer was Angie Best, former wife of footballer George Best – and Mike Myers was often in there. He would like to practise his English accent on me, as he was playing an Englishman in an upcoming film. The film turned out to be Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. I often saw famous stars in restaurants in Malibu: Clint, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and Demi Moore. Doctors’ waiting rooms in Beverly Hills are also good places for star spotting. I’ve sat waiting with Lauren Bacall, Julie Andrews and Little Richard. I suppose it’s a universal law, ’cause even they have sod all to say in those bloody places.

  Freud

  I had a previous connection with the Freud family. I produced many of the Pedigree Chum commercials starring Matthew’s father Clement Freud, and a bloodhound called Henry. There was not just one Henry; the part was played by a number of different identical dogs, due to the difficulty of getting one dog to sit still all day in front of the camera. I remember going to the apartment of the dog trainers in North London. They lived in a small basement apartment with six huge bloodhounds, and the stench of dogs in the flat was something horrendous. Clement Freud was an anti-smoking pioneer. Years before the reports of passive smoking were released, and before the subsequent ban on smoking in offices, bars and restaurants, he insisted no one smoked in the film studios – an inconsiderate demand at the time as far as the crews were concerned. I also met Clement’s daughter Emma Freud, now married to Richard Curtis. I met them at Paul Weiland’s Italianate country house in Bradford-on-Avon. Paul and his wife Caroline have star-studded house parties in the country every weekend, and Rowan Atkinson regularly flies in in his own helicopter.

  Senna

  Ayrton Senna was a Brazilian racing car diver. He was a hero to millions and a three-times Formula 1 world champion. He was different from everyone else, and everyone knew it. I guess in life, sometimes people are just good, and everyone knew it about Senna. But only the good die young; I just never would have dreamt he was going to be one of them. Senna fought relentlessly to improve the safety of Formula 1, and during his fight he had to watch the tragic death of fellow driver Roland Ratzenberger – it happened just one day before his own.

  Allan van Rijn directed many commercials for Marlboro cigarettes, featuring the Marlboro McLaren Formula 1 team and its driver Ayrton Senna. Over a period of years, Allan filmed him at Silverstone in England, at Jerez in Spain, and in the studio. One shoot took place live at the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, and although I wasn’t producing the spot, I went as a fan of motor racing. The complexity of the technology alone is staggering, and once you get your head around the skill necessary to drive one of these cars, then you are beginning to understand. Formula 1 racing is to me the most thrilling but terrifying experience, and it’s because I know and understand what it is I am watching. The more you know about it, the more you understand its dangers; the more you understand its dangers, the more thrilling it becomes. Every square inch of design is at the cutting edge of our human ingenuity; the machinery leads the way in mechanics; the science behind rubber on concrete; the different aerodynamic forces, ‘wings’, ground effect, pressure, double-wishbone suspension, disc brakes, springs and dampers; the oiling, the revs and the speed; the fact that the whole car, including engine, fluids and driver, only weighs 640kg, the minimum weight set by the regulations – then you begin to understand. But then you get into the race and the circuits, the politics, the money and the big big big big business, and the event becomes more than just a spectacle. It becomes something to marvel at. Anyone who steps into the cockpit has my attention, but anyone who can drive the things – they have my respect.

  Our access was incredible; I had passes to all the pits and track areas. You should have seen me; I was out-of-control excited. I was able to sit in the press stand with the photographers to watch the start, but I couldn’t sit still – the whole thing was electric. During the race, I could wander around on the grass verge bordering the track, with the cars screaming past me feet away. I had access to all the pits, even Ferrari, and I met the man: the one and only Ayrton Senna. We bought him a remote controlled helicopter. It was his hobby, and he loved our gift. I was with Allan when we learnt of his death, and he was in tears. Ayrton, like for many people, was Allan’s hero. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I’m not sure why. The world was shocked when he left us. I guess it hit home how quickly it can get taken from you. It was just as he once said of it: “because in a split second, it’s gone.”

  Muhammad Ali

  BFCS had a commercial to shoot with Ali, for Birds Eye hamburgers of all things. Michael Seresin was the director and I produced. Ali’s voice was beginning to fail, so we had to get him into our office in North Wharf Road to see if the commercial was feasible, as he needed to talk to the camera. We decided it was doable and we celebrated with a nice photo of Ali with Michael Seresin and yours truly outside our studio. He later signed it, “To John, best wishes from Muhammad Ali”, and it is a great and proud possession of mine. We shipped an English film crew to Los Angeles, where we were to shoot in his house. Ali lived in a gated community of mansions in Hancock Park. It had been a very upmarket area in the 1930s Hollywood heyday, but was now bordering rough areas of Hollywood. Still, I could understand why anyone would want to live there: the houses are wonderful. We filmed in the house for three days and Ali’s family were all there; he had a beautiful wife called Veronica and two young daughters, Hana and Laila. Laila herself would later become a female boxing champion. As the producer, I spent a lot of time with Ali and I enjoyed every minute. One thing that I’ll never forget: he told me he couldn’t forgive himself for accidentally taking a double dose of his thyroid medication on the day of his last big fight with Larry Holmes. It had made him tired and short of breath, and he lost the fight.

  Ali was fun to be with during the shoot. In between filming set-ups, he would do magic tricks and boy did he love an audience – more, I think, than any of the actors I had worked with.

  A couple of years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

  Trevor Eve

  When they returned my driving licence, I got another Mercedes; this time a 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet – a little gift to myself, because I really needed a car! It was a very desirable and rare convertible. For the car geeks reading, there were only thirty-six imported into the UK in right-hand drive form.

  It was 1983 and I was living in Notting Hill. One day, I pulled up outside the Prince of Wales pub on the Portland Road to find a matching car outside. “Buggery buggery shit,” I recall was my first reaction, considering its rarity, but then I thought it was meant to be. As I said about my introduction to Nigel Carroll, people with similar cars often talk to one another. I went into the pub, stood in the middle of it and cried out to anyone who would listen: “Whose is that Mercedes 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet?” Someone replied, “It’s my bloody Mercedes 280 SE 3.5 Cabriolet”, and that was my first meeting, and the start of a great friendship, with English actors Trevor Eve and his wife Sharon Maughan, who lived just over the road from the pub.

  People always thought Trevor and I looked similar… and we have been mistaken for brothers on more than one occasion. I saw plenty of the Eves for the next few years, and again in LA in the nineties, when they would travel back and forth from London. Trevor even moved in with me at my Notting Hill penthouse on one occa
sion, when he had been a naughty boy and Sharon kicked him out of their family home. They had had their first child, Alice, in ’82 before I met them. Alice is now a Hollywood star and has just finished the Star Trek movie. Jack followed and he’s now an actor, producer and director, and I am very proud to be godfather to their third child, Gorgeous George. He has just left Bedales School and is going to be a rock star – there is no question about it. He already has fan clubs at girls’ schools as far away as Cheltenham Ladies’ College. I asked him recently if there was room in his band as a piano accordionist, but apparently there was not.

  Michael Gambon

  For a couple of years, I had a very illustrious neighbour at Ridge – the great British actor Michael Gambon. He is now infamous for having Gambon Corner named after him on the worldwide television phenomenon Top Gear. He was renting a cottage in the hamlet and he came with his girlfriend over to my house for lunch by the pool, and said I had created paradise. He is a very funny man and told me he had once tried to be gay, but had to give it up because it made his eyes water.

  Chapter 36

  Curing Tourette’s

  In 1998, I was home in Wiltshire for the summer. I read an article in the Sunday Times colour magazine about a family who all had compulsive tics. They had all started twitching at around seven years old. I remember thinking, That’s me! It turned out they had something called Tourette’s syndrome. I had heard of that, but I thought it only applied to people who shouted profanities in the street.

  A short while later, I was back in LA. I had a heart scan and the doctor who was checking my computer imaging had a very bad head tic. I told him I had the same thing and mentioned the magazine article. I asked him if he knew it was called Tourette’s syndrome. He said he knew, and that the world’s leading authority was nearby. I went to see this so-called ‘leading authority’, Dr Comings, at the City of Hope Hospital at Duarte, a few miles away. First he tried me on various medicines and patches, none of which had any effect beyond making me feel drowsy. Eventually he tried me on a tiny pill called Orap, and this miracle drug has changed my life. I immediately stopped twitching – although even just writing or talking about it, I feel I could get back into it. Thanks to Orap, I don’t. I am like an evangelist for the thing these days. If I see someone twitching in the street, I stop him and tell him about it.

  I have emailed two Tourette’s associations to tell them about Orap, but didn’t get a reply from either of them. Weird.

  Part 3

  Chapter 37

  Italy, the Return

  Faced with the certainty of internment, my family packed up and moved to Rome. It was there where my mother took supplies from the Allies, the Americans, and because of it, I survived. Maybe I wouldn’t have been born if Giuseppe had lived. Life: what a strange and incredible thing, and I don’t try to make sense of it. There are still things I don’t know, even after writing this book, like why my mother really did leave my father, but I think it’s okay not to have all the answers. I just try to enjoy it and I encourage you to do the same, ’cause it’ll go pretty fast. I returned to Italy to live, and live I do.

  *

  My life is completely different now, and I like it that way. I live a quiet life in beautiful, peaceful places. I don’t like cities and traffic anymore, so consequently I don’t often see all of the trendy people and celebrities in London and LA; instead my friends are normal people, like me. I’m in a different phase of my life, and I think when you are retired and in your seventies, good friends and good wine are the keys to a happy time.

  I spend the summers in Tuscany, on the Umbrian border, in an 1840s farmhouse. I bought it for £20,000 for my sister Luisa in 1984, and I never thought for one second that I would one day live in it myself – but something happened and, like I’ve mentioned, a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. The house was a favour that came back around to repay me. Luisa had been destitute. She was living in a squat in the Umbrian hills, with someone I presumed was a junkie. He wore shorts, which showed open sores all over his legs. I don’t think Luisa took heroin; wine and pot were her things. “Why are you living with this guy?” I asked. The story is often the same: “I had nowhere else to go.” That upset me tremendously and I had been fortunate with money, so I told her I’d buy her a house if she didn’t live with him. She agreed and I sent her a million lire every month, for twenty years. It sounds impressive, but that was only £500 a month – almost enough for her to live off, excluding her drinks bill. I would visit Luisa regularly because I was always filming in Italy and she would take me to both bars in the village of San Leo Bastia, where she always had a huge tab of another £500 in each. I would, of course, pay them off. Luisa was very socialistic in ideology; she thought rich people’s money belonged to the poor, or more precisely, that my money was hers. Her favourite expression was, “Don’t worry, my brother is rich. He will pay.” And that’s two of the reasons they now like me in the village. They know that I looked after my family and that’s important to the Italians, but they also know that I honoured her debts, and they respect me for that too.

  Things were getting worse and Luisa was living with a woman, Stefania, who was supposed to be looking after her, driving her around, doing her errands. Instead, Stefania would go to the bank with Luisa each month and snatch the money from my sister’s hand. I had to get Luisa away from her, so I bought her a small house in the village, hoping she could live alone. Unfortunately, it was over the road from one of the bars, and she would get hopelessly drunk and lie comatose in the middle of the road. She was soiling herself and leaving pans on the stove in the house. I was in LA so I suggested putting her in a home, but things like that don’t really exist in Italy. In Italy, old people live with the family. Andrew and Marianne Newell, friends of Luisa, tried to help and put her in a home of sorts, but it was more like a loony bin and she was molested. When that news came in, it seemed to open old wounds and I reached out to my other sisters for help, because it was so difficult for me to do anything from LA. Christina went to live with her in the little house in the village. The thief Stefania refused to leave, and I had to sue her to get her out. By this time, Luisa kept having strokes and could no longer talk. Eventually she got too bad and came to Cornwall, where she was looked after by Christina and the social services. She died about five years ago. By then I was retired, so moved to Italy.

  *

  My house is actually in Tuscany, but more often than not I call it Umbria. I am the second house in Tuscany, one mile from the border with Umbria. I rarely go into Tuscany. If I do, it’s for the thirty-minute winding drive over the mountain to Cortona, which is a lovely town. I think of Luisa when I’m there, too much sometimes, but I guess that’s normal. Could I have done more to help? It’s hard to know, I suppose. Questions like this come to you in old age. It’s normal they tell me, and not to dwell on it too much. It – the past – is something I think a lot of these days, here in Italy.

  Instead, I head for the local village, San Leo Bastia, which is five minutes away in Umbria. As Cecilia from my local bar says, I sleep in Tuscany, but I live in Umbria. I spend more time in Città di Castello and Umbertide, two mediaeval towns in Umbria, than I do in Tuscany. Since the great American success of Frances Mayes’ book, and subsequent film Under the Tuscan Sun, Cortona has become crowded with American tourists. I don’t blame them coming here; it is a beautiful city, but it’s now a bit too touristy for my tastes – now that I’m officially retired.

  One of the reasons I like Italy so much is the circle of friends that I have found. The life I have is like a commercial for an Italian pasta sauce. We have lunches on long tables of eight to fifteen, sometimes twenty-five in the summer. We meet three times a week, eat two courses and all the wine you can drink for €20 a head – €10 if it’s pizza.

  I am not embarrassed that many of my friends here are expats, even if it is a bit of a cliché, but we live a different lifestyle to the locals; we�
�re Brits, after all. The Italians work mostly in agriculture or in logging, and their lives don’t fit with ours. I suppose it’s always the case when communities try to integrate in foreign countries; they usually always try really hard, but regroup in the end. Umbria is covered in trees and is known as the Green Heart of Italy, not only for its colour but its oxygen too. The villagers either cut down the trees or transport them to the lumber merchants, or chop them into firewood. They live in big family houses with four generations living under the same roof. The old people often make it past 100, so who says wine and pasta aren’t good for the heart? Their lifestyle is quite commendable to me – it is slower, more focused on the important things. I like that, and in the modern hectic world of mobile phones, computers, and high stress, we can learn from them.

  I hesitate to say one friend is my best, as I love them all. But I am closest to Jim and Jill Powrie. They live in Umbria, but have their holiday home in Croatia, in an unspoilt fishing village called Supetar on the island of Brac, just off Split. I spent a month there last summer. It, too, is like going back in time, like San Tropez must have been before Brigitte Bardot discovered it: a harbour full of traditional fishing boats, and no luxury motor yachts.

  David Monico and Neil Brown are in a civil partnership, having been together for forty years. David was an actor and Neil worked at the BBC. We have lunch on Saturdays, at Fez in Città di Castello. Sometimes it’s just the three of us, or with Ian McDonald, but in the summer it tends to get a bit more crowded. I’m not homophobic, but I do feel a bit outnumbered sometimes! Robbie Duff-Scott is a wonderful painter and gets up at 5am to a rising sun to begin his art. It certainly is a quieter life, but occasionally there is a drama. Robbie’s mother Barbara also lives in Umbertide, with her partner Lenny. Lenny recently got arrested at his home and was taken to the post office, which had been evacuated of its entire staff and cordoned off by police holding submachine guns. Inside, there were forensic experts in white protective suits, tentatively poking at a package addressed to Lenny. It had burst open and a suspicious yellow powder was all over the post office. Lenny confirmed the package was his, and that it contained Bird’s custard powder!