Johnny Cigarini (8 page)

There is one interesting sexual anecdote from my time at Hobson Bates and given this is my chance to tell the world of it, I shall. One of the directors lived in a modern house in the woods in the Home Counties, where he would have orgies every Sunday. I went for the first time to see with my own eyes that which I had heard of, but only in whispers – like the beds being covered with naked people.

It was the sixties and though this kind of thing happens today, it had not happened before, so when I was there it held something. There was a certain atmosphere where no one knew of the consequences; there was a quality to that, a certain unique kind of a…
je ne sais quoi
. I would go to the parties and I tried it, but to be honest I wasn't really into the group sex thing, or maybe it just didn't come naturally to me. I wanted one-on-one more. There were two parties: a normal one downstairs, where families would sit and drink tea and their children would play and run around (you'd have to see it to believe it), while upstairs, all of the sex action would proceed and certainly not with any caution. There was one gorgeous woman whose face and body I will remember forever, because she was absolutely, totally and utterly mesmerising. A goddess is a word I wouldn't use lightly, but for her I will and I do and I am. She was a goddess. She used to attend the downstairs party each week with her husband. I don't know why, but she wasn't interested in the orgies either. I was really attracted to her and the orgies just seemed to ‘lend themselves' to a certain dynamic between the people downstairs – because we all knew what was going on upstairs.

Each week, despite neither of us being interested in the upstairs orgy and despite her being all prim and well-behaved downstairs with her hubby, I would ask her to come upstairs… with me… privately, so to speak. She was reluctant, but I could see she was tempted. Perhaps the orgasmic vibrations of the upstairs had begun to travel down and tempt her even. The dark side was alluring and I could see it in her eyes, her breath, the way she hung her legs. Her mind was on the smut of the upstairs, the thing that London has had with it since antiquity – mischief and naughtiness – and now it was here for us to use and abuse. Now was the time, for her, for me, but there was a problem: her husband.

After a couple of weeks, she asked him if she could go with me, and perhaps she had been softly easing him in to his decision, as she told me he had given her the okay. I practically came in my pants right there. To me, it was as if God had answered my naughty prayer, or maybe I was just lucky one more time. Her husband had two rules: that she must not get pregnant – well, that seemed fair enough – and we were to use one of the bedrooms where no one else could see. Fine by me too, no arguments there at all.

I put the bedside lamp on the floor and put a sweater over it to soften the lighting. I remember that bit because I burnt a hole in my sweater – but I wasn't too bothered, as she had already begun to give me oral pleasure. It was delightful and I recall how fabulous and erotic she looked while she did it. I don't want to sound obnoxious, but it was as if she had been fantasising about it for some time; the sounds she was making, staring at me with her deep purple eyes and gripping my thighs with her nails, tasting and loving my penis.

Sadly, the fantasy play-out was not to last. Only a few minutes had passed and there was a loud banging on the door. It was her husband, screaming into the room. She leapt off the bed and went out to him. Later, I found out from her that he had gone for a walk into the garden, depressed because she was with me. Unfortunately (for all), while strolling around the garden, he had looked up and seen the shadow of her giving me a blow job on the ceiling of the bedroom. He was furious, because she would not do that to him. She obviously considered it too dirty for her husband, but okay for me. Quite a sweet sentiment, really. Actually I felt sad for him that I had made him depressed, but I probably did him a favour. I bet he got it after that. I hope so anyway; she was to-die-for. I stopped going to the orgies.

*

After I left Hobson Bates, Carol Adler gave me some jobs for Ultrabrite. We were shooting on the Ivory Coast and all staying at a beach club, where a pretty French girl was staying alone. I had enough experience by this stage and knew what my strengths were and how to use them. Let's just say I was a producer from London and Bob Brooks was my director (not a lie in it). She stayed the night with me, exhausted me in fact – I must say, I wasn't expecting to learn anything new from the pretty French girl, but every day's a school day, right? I couldn't keep up with her sexual demands and began joking about it the next day with Peter Biziou, the lighting cameraman, who also fancied her. Peter won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for
Mississippi Burning
, for which he gave the best Oscar speech I'd ever heard: One word, “Thanks.”

“If the pretty French girl is too much for you to handle, could I have a crack?” he asked me in-between takes.

“You can have her tonight,” I assured him, “but I want her back tomorrow.” However, the handsome devil never returned the goods. In fact, he took her to London and stayed with her for months. Outrageous, the pair of us, but that's how it was in those days – or that's how we were in those days. It was outrageous sexual behaviour. Was this sexual behaviour more commonplace in the sixties and seventies, or were we just young?

I was going out with Suze Randall at the time and she looked a picture with her short blonde hair, swinging about London in her Alfa Romeo 2600 Spider – a very desirable convertible indeed. She had found out that my friend Daniel Topolski was in hospital with hepatitis, having heard of him from the Wet Dream Film Festival. I suggested that she go give him a present. We went in to the hospital to his private room and I introduced them: “Daniel, this is Suze; Suze, this is Daniel.” I drew the curtains, and went to stand guard. She gave him a blow job – a true present, and surely better than grapes or chocolates. Later, Suze went to America and became the world's leading female erotic photographer and the first female staff photographer for both
Playboy
and
Hustler
.

The first Wet Dream Film Festival was held in Amsterdam in 1970. Underground pornographic films were considered art in those days. There was not the proliferation that came with videos, adult TV channels and the internet. The first four rows at the cinema were reserved for people who wanted to masturbate, the next four for people who wanted to screw, and so on. Topolski had told me about a ‘happening' during the sixties, even before I came to London. It was at the very respectable ICA, near Buckingham Palace. The event was held in a pitch-black room where no one could see anything and everyone inside the dark room was groping everybody else, as they so desired. If nothing else, surely that was the sixties. Doing things without worrying about the consequences, doing things without caring too much about who with, doing the things we always wanted but were never given a stage to play them out on – but there was a darkness to it, what with the underground abortions and so on. It was
A Hard Day's Night
but it was
Alfie
too – not all joy, especially for some of the girls.

Sometimes I was bordering on being exhibitionistic. I had one girlfriend who loved nothing more than screwing on Park Lane, with all the traffic rushing past us. She also wanted to do it on the window ledge of a room at the nearby Hilton, and I had to book a room high up so she could show off to all of London. There was a heat wave one summer. It was so hot, in fact that I had taken to wearing a kaftan. I wore it when we went to Primrose Hill, one of my favourite parks in London, boasting a view of the entire city. There, we made love on the grass. We were aware of prying eyes behind every tree. I think it may have even been a gay cruising spot. What we were doing may not have been their cup of tea, but I think we gave them a good show nonetheless.

I was behaving pretty outrageously in those days, but I had my own style with it. It wasn't too smutty and I always tried to remain a gent – ‘tried' being the operative word. On a number of occasions, I would take advantage of my third floor balcony that overlooked the King's Road and chat a girl up at the bus stop on the street below. I'd use a corny line, which I'm sure none of them believed, that the buses were on strike and they could “come and wait it out in my flat” – and they would often come up for a tea or a coffee. Dear, oh dear! Many did and many were super cool, but none of them were like Tara…

Tara was from Toronto and we met one night at the Speakeasy. She visited London a few times in the following years and she would always see me. I was her first man, but not the first person she'd slept with. She came from a lesbian home as her mother lived with three other lesbians in her home in Canada. In fact, Tara told me once she had first been seduced by one of her mother's lesbian friends, so she was more experienced than most. Tara was unique in that she had the most seductive chat-up technique I ever saw, and by then I had seen quite a few. She had come to realise that many heterosexual women were curious about a lesbian ‘experience' and this was in the seventies, even before being bisexual became a fashionable thing. Tara would always seduce girls for us – it was easy for her, looking like Isabelle Adjani – and it was her who was about to give me one of my most erotic experiences. She brought one girl back to my flat, someone she had picked up that night, and within moments I was lying on my back and the girl (who was very petite) was on her back on top of me, with my cock inside her. Meanwhile, Tara was kneeling on the bed, holding the girl's legs wide open and licking between her legs, and licking me as I went into the young babe. It's a shame things like this don't really happen to me anymore!

Over the years, I have found that many girls like fantasising about being with a woman during a sex session with a man. It seems to really turn them on for some reason. Once I visited Tara in Toronto and I was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel. It had a lively bar scene, one that singles would rely on to hook up. One evening, Tara seduced a woman who was there with her husband (but who was not with her at that specific moment) and she managed, somehow, to get her to come upstairs to my room for a threesome. Without the husband knowing, she had left the bar. It was the woman's first lesbian experience, and she loved it. Tara also stayed one night with me in the hotel. My room was on the fifteenth floor, and it was the only tall building in the area. In the morning, while she was giving me oral sex, a man on a harness suddenly appeared, cleaning the outside of the window. Being on the fifteenth, I hadn't bothered to draw the curtains, and he saw everything. After a few swishes of his wiper and with one flick of his control switch, he disappeared to the floor below. We giggled like a couple of school kids and it was the last time I saw her – Tara, the fantastic lesbian. I still think of her from time to time, like many of the beauts, like the wife who gave me erotic oral sex at the orgy. I make sure I think of them all regularly. I think it keeps me young and what a terrible waste it would be to forget. Don't you think?

It was in the mid-1970s and I went to the South of France, this time producing for director Ross Cramer. We used to shoot the ‘Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach' commercials – a very famous campaign devised by Terry Lovelock at CDP, in which Victor Borge (the famous Danish-American pianist, comedian and raconteur with the laconic voice) did the voice-overs for the whole campaign for many years. In this film, for the only time, he was to appear in person, as the world's richest man (shot of Victor lying on a sunbed by the pool, idly tossing peanuts into the water). He has a beautiful house (shot of a fabulous mansion), beautiful women (shot of half a dozen models), valuable cars (shot of Rolls Royces), private planes and so on, but he is bored and dispirited. So the butler serves him the cold Heineken and it fails to refresh him, proving that it is better to be poor and refreshed, than rich and unrefreshed.

Looking for the location in France, we stayed at the Hotel du Cap, one of the leading hotels in the world. We eventually settled on a magnificent house called the Château de la Garoupe, at the point of the Cap d'Antibes. It had belonged to a British family since 1907 when Sir Charles McLaren bought four acres of the Cap. (According to
The Riviera Times
, it was sold to a nominee company of a London-based Russian oligarch for €22 million.) The chateau is on its own little peninsula on the Cap. You can stand in the main drawing room and look down the steps to the sea, turn 180 degrees and still be looking at the sea. Freddy Heineken, the owner of our client, lived next door. He was a friendly man (I would be too, with a net worth of 9.5 billion guilders) and was one of the richest people in the Netherlands. He came to the shoot with his daughter Charlotte, who is one of the richest women in the world now that Freddy has died. We had a helicopter for aerial footage of the house and the pilot took me up for a spin. It was fascinating seeing all the wonderful homes on the Cap d'Antibes. After that and the shoot, I was feeling good, feeling strong, feeling like a man… feeling like I was ready for more outrageous… sexual… behaviour, so I took one of the models, a great Australian girl called Jill Goodall, to a hotel in Juan-les-Pins for a dirty weekend.

The second Ultrabrite film was set in the Caribbean. As the producer, I decided to take the whole crew on a week's Club Med holiday. It was the most cost-effective method and I chose Martinique where there was a beautiful Club Med beach resort. Location scouts were unheard of in those days, so it was the producer's job to go ahead and find the locations. I booked myself an extra week's holiday at the Club and although I had never been to the Caribbean, I was not getting too excited about it. In fact, I was not feeling very well. I needed to go to my doctor in London about a septic finger, and I explained to him that I was listless, had no
joie de vivre
, and wasn't even looking forward to the trip to Martinique. I had gone from feeling so good after the helicopter, the shoot and the dirty weekend, to feeling so low. What was happening to me? He suggested I return from the Caribbean and go see a psychiatrist.