Johnny Cigarini (7 page)

1969 was the year we went to the moon, when Lennon and Yoko did their ‘bed-in',
Easy Rider
blew cinema audiences' minds wide open, US troops began withdrawal from Vietnam and The Beatles were photographed on Abbey Road. It was December 1969 and I was at a Christmas party put on by Chappell's, the music publishers. I was standing at a bar talking to a stranger and was telling him my new career plans.

“You should come work for us,” he said to me. ‘Us' was a new commercials film production company called Brooks Baker Fulford and he was Jim Baker, the producer partner and managing director. The other two names were top stills photographers Bob Brooks and Len Fulford, who had both just started directing commercials. Brooks Baker Fulford was the first of a new wave of production companies that were owned by the directors and not the producers. Colour television had only just happened in 1969 and they were the pioneers in shooting commercials where beauty and lighting were vital, followed shortly afterwards by another visual pioneer, Ridley Scott. We made ‘cheers' at the bar and I downed my drink in one. It's funny looking back at where and how the moments came – you know, the big moments, the ones that change it all, like a certain phone call, a ride on the bus, a walk through a park, a drink at a bar at a Christmas party. Jim invited me to meet the directors.

Brooks had a studio in Irongate Wharf, Paddington, and Fulford on Maddox Street, off Bond Street. The production office where Jim and another producer Martin McKeand worked was on Princes Street, off Regent Street in the West End. I was to replace a young man who had just left BBF to become a director at another company, Jenny & Co. His name was Adrian Lyne. It took him two years to be offered his first commercial directing job, but he stuck at it and had the last laugh. He became one of the world's top commercials directors and a magnificent feature film director of blockbusters
Fatal Attraction
,
Flashdance
and
Indecent Proposal
.

Jim Baker invited me to the production office on Princes Street where I met Bob Brooks, Len Fulford and Martin McKeand. They liked me. They offered me the job.

*

Carol Adler, the gal I bought my King's Road flat from, had introduced me to a beauty called Jenny Sieff. Jenny was from the Marks and Spencer family and I met her charming parents. I remember her father telling me “Marks and Spencer doesn't believe in advertising.” I smiled about that, years later, when the struggling brand was revived by an ad campaign featuring my mate Twiggy.

Jenny and I went out for such a short time, and such a long time ago, that she will probably be outraged to be featured in my autobiography, but she will be nonetheless. Those months were significant and I shall tell you why. First of all, on a personal level, she was the only girl I have ever lived with, before or since, although only for a few weeks (she complained I didn't talk to her, something I was to hear time and time again). Secondly, and more importantly, she was instrumental to my accepting the Brooks Baker Fulford job. She was a friend of Jenny Armstrong of Jenny & Co. Jenny Sieff and I went to Jenny Armstrong's house in Chelsea for Sunday lunch, and there she invited me to her office to discuss the BBF job offer with Adrian Lyne.

I'll never forget meeting Adrian. He was the first man I had ever seen wearing a wolf-skin overcoat and it just looked fab. Little did I know then that Adrian would go on to be a true superstar director, but looking back, he definitely had a zing. Amazing, looking back… where we all came from, what we're doing now… the journeys, the stories, the lessons learnt. Talking to Adrian persuaded me to accept the job offer at Brooks Baker Fulford. My feelings told me to go for it, so I did and it was the smartest move I ever made. I joined the company in April 1970.

The job marked a big change, leaving behind the sixties for good and beginning a new career. My salary was instantly increased to £1750 per annum. I put away the suit in a bottom drawer and went out and bought a grey leather jacket and some blue jeans – my new work clothes. It certainly was the right decision.

Two months later, we were in Venice at the International Advertising Film Festival. Bob Brooks, Jim Baker and Len Fulford were all sailing enthusiasts, and they had rented a twenty-three-metre racing ketch called Stormvogel for a sailing holiday up the Dalmatian coast, and to provide accommodation while at the Venice Festival. Jim took me for a walk along the quayside and it was there he told me he was leaving the company due to his differences with Bob Brooks. Brooks, a small East Coast American, was famous for having a great temper and would even shout at his clients, sometimes hurling the product at the wall. In 1970, when shooting the famous Cadbury's Smash Martians commercial (voted best commercial of the century in 1999), he even lost his rag with one of the puppets and was ready to throttle the damn thing. I could certainly understand where Jim was coming from. Martin McKeand bought Jim Baker out and became managing director, and within two months of joining the company, I was already the second-in-line producer. The company changed its name to Brooks Fulford and it was decided henceforth to only call itself according to the directors it represented. So in '73 when Ross Cramer joined, it changed name again to Brooks Fulford Cramer. (Ross had been Charles Saatchi's partner in a creative consultancy called Cramer Saatchi, so when Ross left to become a director, and Charles' brother Maurice joined the consultancy, it became Saatchi and Saatchi, and grew to become the biggest advertising agency in the world – Margaret Thatcher's fave!).

Martin McKeand was a nice man to work for. Those were heady days in the advertising business. Selling the directors was an important part of the producer's job and it would usually happen over a lunch. On down days, when we were not filming, we would regularly go for boozy ones with ad agency producers or creative teams to the Trat (Mario and Franco's Trattoria La Terrazza), L'Escargot or other joints in Soho. The clients would invariably offer scripts for a new campaign over the coffee… or the Sambuca.

Martin was a member of the notorious Colony Room Club. This was a members-only afternoon drinking club that managed to serve drinks when all the pubs had to legally shut for the afternoon. It was run by an infamous lesbian called Muriel Belcher, assisted by her equally gay barman Ian Board. It was a typically tiny Soho dive on Dean Street and very popular with artists. Its interior was painted in a vile green or ‘Colony Room green', and its staircase stunk so badly, that members even gave going up them a name: “going up the dirty stairs”. It was certainly a place for eccentrics, misfits and outsiders, managing to attract both lowlifes and artists. Years later, for the young artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, it was a magnet.

One of the founding members and regulars was the great and famous painter Francis Bacon. I think he was there every time I went in, and we became friends very quickly as we had something in common: the only school he had ever attended was Dean Close School, the place where I had moved to be with Revd Ken Senior and family. We were there in different years though, so we wouldn't have known each other. We'd reminisce about those starched detachable Van Heusen collars in style 11 and how hands were not to be put in trouser pockets for going into town. It was interesting to think back about it all, in the context of having now lived through the sixties.

After a boozy lunch with advertising agency creatives, and then drinking at Muriel's in the afternoon, Martin and I got pretty hammered, but it didn't matter; the producer's work was done for the day if he had scripts for a new campaign in his pocket. Ian Board always called me Big Cock and for years I assumed it had just been his way of coming on to me, but Martin reminded me recently that apparently, in one moment of drunkenness, I had a cock contest with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room Club. For the record, I only have a slim recollection of this, and I guess it's just a pity the winner didn't get a painting. There were all kinds of goings-on in that club. It was, to say the least, bohemian, and later where Kate Moss once worked as a barmaid, Dylan Thomas threw up on the carpet and even Princess Margaret paid a visit.

*

One role of the producer is to find work. This means showing the directors' showreels to the advertising agency producers and creative teams, and trying to get them to give you a job. In America, they have sales reps who work on commission to do that, but that was only just starting to creep into London when I left the business in the mid-1990s. Once the production company has been asked to bid on a job, the producer has to do the budget, which means working out how much the job will cost and how much to charge the client. In my day, this was done very differently – with a calculator and something called a pen and a piece of paper. The production company covers its overheads and makes its profit by what's called a mark-up, on the basic costs of the job. Of course, if it's a fantastic, potentially award-winning idea, then the agencies get production companies to do commercials at cost. Productions are bid competitively, particularly in the US, but in the earlier days in London, they were often just single bids for the director the agency had chosen to shoot the commercial. Before the job is awarded, the agency requires meetings between the director, the producer, the agency producer and the creative team to discuss execution of the script. If it's bid competitively, very often a job is won or lost on the director's interpretation. Once the job has been awarded and signed off by the agency's client (e.g. Coca-Cola), the producer's job is to set up the shoot. This means scheduling it according to the director's availability, organising the casting, finding the locations or briefing the set designer if it's to be shot in a studio, booking the studio, booking the crew, ordering the wardrobe department, and so on – so that on the day of the shoot, everything is ready for the director and film crew to shoot and to run as smooth as silk. Sometimes this can mean protecting the director from the clients, but usually the director will have good communication with the agency creative teams and producers.

Shooting one commercial can usually take between one and three days, depending on the complexity of the production, but if it's part of a campaign of commercials involving a series of films, it takes much longer. It's the producer's job to coordinate everything. Producers and directors usually work as a team and I'm not being falsely modest if I say the director is much more influential and important than the producer. The director is the star, and that's who everyone wants and wants to be. The agency also has a producer, whose job is to liaise with the production company producer. The agency has video playback to see what is being shot and approves it as they go along. BFCS pioneered the use of video playback and was possibly even the first company to use it through Joe Dunton, who developed the system. If anything goes wrong during a shoot, and things often would, the production company producer has to sort it. After the shoot is over, the producer has to coordinate the post-production with the editor, the director and the clients. In the US, this is usually done directly by the agency, and the director has very little say in the editing beyond seeing the final cut. Directors in England, though, would not stand for that.

*

By the late 1980s, I wasn't producing any more. In my capacities as managing director of BFCS Ltd. (the English company) and president of BFCS Inc. (the American one), I was in control of the two companies with the brilliant help of Linda Maxwell, Gary Feil and Patricia Judice, the executive producers in New York and LA. Running a production company is a bit like being the manager of a rock band. You don't get your name on the door, but you have to deal with a bunch of talented stars who earn an obscene amount of money, and with many big egos. There are financial rewards, though; a top commercials director can earn a couple of million dollars a year. Finding and keeping good directors is the hardest role for a company owner, and making them happy and remaining in your company is the name of the game. I have tried hard not to think about any of this for eighteen years; it's big business, big stress, big egos and big parties. It was a heap of fun, though; I'd just never have thought it was all going to move so fast. Had I known, I guess I'd have tried to enjoy the ride even more. Like the great Billy Wilder once said, “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.” But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the King's Road.

The King's Road in Chelsea was the epicentre of the swinging sixties and seventies London scene. Today, although unique places still exist, the global chains have moved in too, and its edge has been lost, its independence. But back then… then it was different, and different to anywhere else in London. It began as a private royal road only for Charles II, but by the mid-nineteenth century, us common folk were allowed down with horse and cart. Some houses date back even to the eighteenth century and the King's Road was where Thomas Arne is said to have composed ‘Rule Britannia', nonetheless. The biggest bragging points, however, come from the fact that it's where 007 lived, or at least in a square just off it…

Outside of work my life was mainly rock ‘n' roll and not in a clichéd way, in a genuine way. Moving into my new flat on the King's Road, I had stumbled into a hornet's nest of groupies living next door to me in Argyll Mansions. One of them was Dany, a beautiful Swiss-French girl who was friends with a big gang of famous musicians. Next door on the other side was John Morshead, a guitarist in a band called Juicy Lucy. His girlfriend Diane (as gorgeous as they come) worked at
Private Eye
. Dany had a boyfriend, later husband, called Ronnie Holbrook, but for the first few months I was there, I didn't get to meet him – he was “laying low” in Marbella. He had imported marijuana in the panels of his car, a Lancia Flavia Coupé. When he returned to London I bought the car off him, and he always claimed there was still a packet of grass lost in it somewhere. Dany worked in a super-fashionable hairdressing salon in Beauchamp Place, called Sweeney Todd's, where she made the sandwiches. It was where all the rock stars went to get their hair cut, and Dany, being the sexy minx that she was, was friends with all of them. Back in the mansions, with John to my right and Dany to my left, two magnets for famous celebrities, I found myself watching them (the celebs) float in and out of our homes. This included The Faces, Rod Stewart's band – in particular the guitarist Ronnie Wood and keyboard player Ian McLagan, who were regulars. Ronnie Wood's wife Krissie also used to drop by. Rod Stewart was always up and down the King's Road. It was impossible to miss him, driving his bright red Lamborghini Miura. It was my job to help Rod search in the pubs for Mona Solomons – “the sexiest girl on the King's Road” – who was just one of his army of admirers. Denny Laine, who sang the beautiful vocal on the Moody Blues' first hit ‘Go Now', was also Dany's boyfriend while Ronnie was still in Marbella. In fact, Dany moved in with him for eight months, which made Ronnie pretty mad – but he also had a serious girlfriend of his own over in Spain, so what could he say? It was the seventies. Soon after, Denny Laine would become a founder member of Paul McCartney's Wings.

One day, Mick Jagger was in Sweeney's when Dany slipped him a note: “How about giving one to the sandwich girl?” A few hours later, I was trying to watch the footie in her place (I didn't have a telly and it was the 1970 World Cup), but it was really difficult, what with Mick and Dany hot at it behind me. Quite recently, I suggested to David Gilmour of Pink Floyd that I had met him in 1973 at the Hollywood Bowl, but he corrected me: “Actually Cigar, I met you before that, when I was visiting the French girl… next door.” Let's just say Dany was a fun girl while Ronnie was away!

Dany had lots of girls staying with her too, mostly ones connected to musicians. I suppose you could describe them as super-groupies, but they were not the kind of groupie to hang out by the stage door. They were a bit, how to say, special. Keith Richards describes them well in his autobiography
Life
, as “friends who looked after us when the band came to town”. Dany had three of these girls staying with her, or should I say, staying with us, due to the very ‘flexible' sleeping arrangements between our two flats. One of the girls, Donna Curry, moved into my flat permanently, but it became quite the squeeze when Miss Cynderella arrived. She was a member of the first ever groupie band, Frank Zappa's creation, the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously). Miss Mercy and Miss Lucy were also floating around, like perfect little butterflies. Miss Cynderella eventually married John Cale, the Welsh musical genius from the Velvet Underground. John would come to London and play solo shows at the Hammersmith Odeon. His act would feature live chickens and I thought his music was extremely bizarre. It was only years later that I realised his loud, abrasive and confrontational performances had been the forerunner of the new wave of a music called punk. His marriage to my fling was quite rocky and Cale wrote a song about her, ‘Guts', which opens with the epic line, “The bugger in the short sleeves fucked my wife”. He was referring to Kevin Ayers and not yours truly (just for the record). They divorced in 1975.

The third of the girls was a redhead, Janet Ferguson, who happened to be Frank Zappa's nanny. One of her friends, Gail, had married Frank, and the Zappas were living in London in a rented house on Ladbroke Grove with their first daughter Moon Unit. They had also just had their son, Dweezil. I went to Frank and Gail's house a few times. Frank was always playing avant-garde music from Eastern Europe, which I also found a bit weird, amongst other things at his place.

Donna Curry was just fab. She came from Chicago and was best friends with the band Chicago. They had just had hits with ‘25 or 6 to 4' and ‘I'm a Man' and it was one of Donna's friends, Pam, who had married Terry Kath, the lead guitarist of the band. He was really quite a genius; a singer and multi-instrumentalist who played lead, rhythm and bass, banjo, accordion and the drums. He died in 1978, playing Russian roulette with a pistol.

Other famous groupies and musicians regularly came to my flat. Cynthia Plaster Caster was a frequent visitor. She had an infamous collection of plaster casts of rock stars' erect penises. She had her own special technique for getting them ‘up'. I think it probably involved smudging her lipstick. I asked her if she wanted to do a cast of mine, but she apparently only had enough plaster for one more, and was saving that for David Bowie. I thought that was quite unreasonable myself.

*

I recall a time in 1973 when I was listening to Isaac Hayes in my flat when this scruffy American girl came by. She said she was a musician. In those days, who wasn't? This was well before the punk style was fashionable and I remember thinking,
Honey, you've got no chance, looking like that
. It was Chrissie Hynde, who had just moved to London from Akron, Ohio. She turned out to be a brilliant songwriter and later hit the big time with her band the Pretenders. Oh well, what did I know?

Chicago came to London on their way to the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The girls and I took them to the Speakeasy, the musicians' big hangout. Until I discovered Tramp, which was a more upmarket nightclub, I was at the Speak every night. I saw Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne in the Malibu Starbucks sometime in the 1990s, and Ozzy came up to me and said, “Don't I know you from the Speakeasy?”

Chicago hired a bus to get to the Isle of Wight and I was playing tag along. We all piled in and stopped off at Stonehenge en route. With the band was the fiancé of keyboard player Bobby Lamm, and what a beauty she was too. She married Bobby and became Karen Lamm, but later I met her in LA with Dennis Wilson, drummer of The Beach Boys. She had become Karen Lamm-Wilson. Amazingly, she still found time in between them to give me a few flings. I think back to my young days, the time in Margate with the girl who came to my room, in Africa with the exotic maid; times had definitely changed.

At the Isle of Wight Festival, I had two backstage passes from Chicago. I ran into a friend, Daniel Topolski, who used to cruise his Mini-Moke, an open jeep made from the Mini car, around the King's Road. He worked for the BBC and had two media area passes, so between us we had all backstage areas covered. Daniel was the son of well-known artist and illustrator Feliks Topolski, and he lived in a large family house overlooking Regent's Park. Daniel was a rower and he would later become well known for coaching the Oxford crew to about ten consecutive victories against Cambridge.

Chicago played on the Friday night and left, but I was staying on for the main act, Hendrix. I had taken a small tent, and Dan and I slept in that. Due to traffic problems, the show on Saturday ran very late and The Who didn't play until around 3am. They had military searchlights on the stage illuminating the crowd – all 600,000 of us – and by three in the morning, it really was quite a scene. By the time Sly and the Family Stone came on, it was daylight – Sunday morning. The organisers only sold one-day tickets, so when the show ended for the day, even if it was the next morning, everyone was thrown out while people were queuing to get back in for the next. Vendors were selling paper sacks as sleeping bags; the whole thing was just madness. Dan and I, of course, took it upon ourselves to go down the waiting line of people: “Wouldn't you rather sleep in a nice warm tent?” We eventually got a couple of willing girls, and it was hysterically funny having four people in a single tent, with arms and legs sticking out of the sides – very sexy, too, very seventies. Jimi Hendrix came on, opening with ‘Foxy Lady', and it was simply incredible. A month later, he was dead.

The Isle of Wight is an island and for many quite an incredible obstacle course to get to. The fact that 600,000 came that year to a place of only 100,000 inhabitants was what made it the great event it has gone down in history to be, and the one that topped Woodstock, in my opinion, thanks to the music of The Doors, The Who, Hendrix, Free, Miles Davis, Supertramp, Procol Harum and the wonderful Joni Mitchell. Something happened on that island and everyone who was there knows what I'm talking about. I was proud to have gone and to have been a part of that great event and to have seen the great Hendrix. They said it was to be the last Isle of Wight Festival, but in thirty-two years that would all change.