Johnny Cigarini (12 page)

Nigel Carroll is my great lifelong friend and we were introduced through our cars. Mine was a green '58 Corvette and his a regal red '56 Cadillac convertible. We met in '72 at the Chelsea Potter on the King's Road. People with cars like that always talk to each other, not in a snobby way as if people without them aren't worthy. No, it's just that cars connect people with other car people. I'd like to think I hadn't turned elitist, that was for sure. We were, however, the only ones with fancy cars – and would both be parked right next to the pub. We started hanging out as friends, and every Saturday night we went to the Potter. Soon, a friend of Nigel's, Lev, began to join us. He had a '61 red Corvette, and then came two others who also had sixties Corvette Sting Rays. It had become a Corvette club, but not for long.

Word was spreading and, little by little, different cars came. They came in abundance and the King's Road was their new camp. By the following summer, both sides of the road near the Chelsea Potter were lined with old motors – mainly American ones, from the 1940s through to the sixties. There were no parking restrictions on the road in those days and that gave rise to the now legendary Chelsea Cruise.
Custom Car
was a new mag we all read, and they took it over, promoting it for the last Saturday of every month. It wasn't too long at all before hundreds of cars began to show up. My friends and I had started something we could not control… by accident.

Within one or two summers, crowds of locals and tourists were lining the King's Road to watch the cars drive by. It became a real event for us, but eventually, beer glasses would end up in the road and traffic couldn't get through. The police got involved and the King's Road at Sloane Square became closed to any vehicle other than a bus – except me. Because I had a driving licence with a King's Road address, the police couldn't stop me entering the street, and, I will say, I took great delight in being the only vehicle that could drive past the crowds in my Corvette. In the end, the police, with the cooperation of
Custom Car
mag, transferred the whole event to Battersea Park. It turned into something huge in Battersea, and Nigel and I had started it from the pub entirely by mistake!

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Nigel was working for the property developer Peter Beale, who had a deal with Frank Dale and Stepsons, the Rolls Royce dealer in Fulham. He could buy a used car and get his money back when he returned the car a year later. In the early seventies, there was a rising market in Rolls Royces, so Peter had two Silver Clouds, the last of the great rollers – one for him and one for Nigel. In property, Peter bought the short leasehold of a huge house in Hans Place, Knightsbridge, just behind Harrods. His modus operandi was to buy a three- or four-year lease, which was too short for anyone else, fix the place up, negotiate a longer lease from the Cadogan Estates, and then sell the building on. This house in Hans Place had seven floors with huge rooms, one of which Nigel was living in. He bought a job heap of large old gilt picture frames at an auction at Bonham's. Tony Litri was a friend of his, and he could do perfect copies of old master paintings. They installed Tony in the top floor attic, which was rather similar to a Parisian artist's atelier, and gave him an electric fire. Nigel would hold a frame up to a wall in a room and say, “Tony, this feels like a Matisse” and Tony would get to work. He would age the paintings in front of the electric fire and, in no time, the whole house was filled with old masters. There was no attempt to deceive and it was only ever done for effect. Each painting had the word FAKE written across the back. Of course, for the Arab punters who came to buy the house, the paintings were included, and they never looked at the backs of them.

Apart from the house, I spent a lot of time with Nigel in the garage in Claborn Mews. It was Nigel, myself, the two Rolls Royces, a 1950s American pickup truck and the mean-looking black '69 Stingray. We simply loved our cars. Once, I went to buy a 1966 427 Corvette Sting Ray convertible. I only wanted it because it had rare knock-off wheels and I wanted to put them on my '63 Sting Ray. I swapped the wheels and sold the new car, which was a big mistake – they're now worth a fortune. As you can see, the car thing was beginning to get addictive and I'm not sure where it came from – maybe from Margate when the American boys came to take my sisters away in their classic motors. Nigel came with me to buy the Sting Ray because I needed someone to drive it back. On getting back to London, we went to Kensington High Street, where the second McDonalds had just opened. We sat eating in the car and I told him: “Happiness is a Big Mac and a new Corvette.” Smug as hell, I know, but I guess I couldn't resist.

At the time, Nigel was going out with Paula Boyd. She was the youngest sister of the infamous Boyd girls. Pattie Boyd had been married to George Harrison since the height of The Beatles fame, but she was now living with Eric Clapton and would later marry him. Her sister Jenny Boyd was married to Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac. Nigel became great friends with Eric Clapton and, before long, started working for him. He still does, in fact, do the merchandising and looking after of Eric's hot rods. To begin with, as far as I could see, Nigel was employed to be a ‘buddy' to Eric. He used to drive Eric to see his beloved West Bromwich Albion football team in the Midlands, and he would go on tour with him. However, as Nigel once told me, although they were friends, “Make no mistake, if Eric wants a pack of cigarettes at three in the morning, I'd be the one to go out and buy them.”

Through Nigel, I met Eric on many occasions. We often hung out, just the three of us. At the heart of it, we were boys; boys like Ferraris and Eric had a big collection of them, so we'd go to car meetings and Ferrari gatherings. We went to the Hard Rock Café, both in London and New York, and Isaac Tigrett had seen me with Eric. He was always trying to get me to get a guitar for the café, but there was no way I was going to ask him – or even Nigel – if I could nab one of his guitars for my mate. In the end, and with nothing to do with me, Clapton gave the Hard Rock a guitar to hang over his favourite seat. Pete Townshend of The Who heard about it and gave one of his, and then it all began spreading like wildfire – the Hard Rock became the biggest collectors of rock ‘n' roll memorabilia in the world.

My production company was a member of the Glyndebourne Opera. One time I took Eric and Pattie, and Nigel's new girlfriend Jaki, who would later become his wife. We were all dolled up in black ties and evening dresses and had a picnic on the lawns. A picnic on ‘the lawns' with Eric Clapton in black tie; had I made it? Was I in? Was I happy? I was beginning to see in so many of the people who had ‘made it' just how unhappy they could be at times. It was as if they were like normal people all along, with downs as well as ups. Unfortunately, I hadn't been given very good seats – in the front row, right underneath the stage – but Eric seemed to enjoy the opera and was nodding his head to keep time all the way through. I just wanted everyone to be happy and not sad like I had been when I was on my own, in Dean Close. Like I said, he seemed to be having a good time. That was the most important thing… I guess.

One particularly memorable trip for me was when I went on the road with Eric's band in America. They were going from New York to Philadelphia for a show in an all-silver aluminium Viscount turbo propeller aircraft. Touring bands regularly used it and inside were armchairs and sofas and coffee tables, and no aircraft seats at all. The most impressive thing for me was when we landed. I was used to flying internationally, when you have to go through security and customs. On this occasion, on either side of the aircraft as we taxied down the runway, lines of stretched limos ran alongside us. We got off the plane, climbed into the limos and, with a police motorcycle escort, sped through the traffic with sirens wailing. We then moved down the ramp and were in the stadium. Rock ‘n' roll!

Nigel and I had dinner with Roger Forrester, then Clapton's manager, behind the Four Seasons Hotel in LA. Eric's
Unplugged
album had just hit the charts at number one and his security man, a gentle giant called Alphi O'Leary, was also there. He told us an interesting story: as they were leaving the recent Chicago Blues Festival, he had climbed into a helicopter but couldn't do up the safety belts because he was too big. He got out and blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan stepped in. That night, the helicopter crashed in the fog after hitting the top one foot of an artificial ski slope. Everyone on board perished, including Stevie.

I went to Eric's Italianate home outside Ewehurst, Surrey, many times with Nigel. On one occasion, like a pair of kids, we went just to see his Ferraris, and another time for a small party for the legendary Carl Perkins. We also went a few times to Eric's Christmas show at Guildford Town Hall, and then back to his home. His granny and other members of the family were always there. I always felt an affinity with Eric because he, like me, was brought up by his granny. I always noticed that he would walk around the house holding a guitar, doing finger exercises on it. He wasn't actually playing – no sound ever came out – but I realised it's why he's so good: he practises all day. Maybe if I played the piano accordion… oh, never mind.

Nigel and Jaki got married and had their wedding reception at Knebworth House. Clapton was Nigel's best man and his band played. I think I must have been nervous, because I got trolleyed when I arrived. A psychiatrist would probably put it down to losing my best pal and playmate, but I don't know about that – maybe I just felt like getting pissed. A friend of mine told me later I downed seven pints of lager in about as many minutes. He also told me I was breakdancing, spinning on my back with my legs in the air. I was also stoned and I had started on cocaine by then. As Eric was playing, I kept drunkenly shouting out the name of one of his best-known songs, ‘Cocaine' (apparently). Later, Clapton told me he thought it was a request, not an offer, and at one point Nigel came outside and caught me taking off Jaki's bridal garter with my teeth. Oops.

Since I now live in very isolated places, I rarely see famous people like Eric Clapton and I miss seeing him. The last time I saw him I was walking down the King's Road and he was driving past in his new Ferrari. He slammed on the brakes, jumped out and gave me a big hug before inviting me to his house for a cuppa. There I met his new girlfriend, now the mother of his daughters. That was the last time I saw him. Fortunately, I still see Nigel and Jaki. She still looks as beautiful as the day Nigel married her.

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Hanging out with Clapton was great – hanging out with rock stars in general is great – but in the mid-seventies, I had a different experience altogether. Yes, it involved another rock ‘n' roll superstar, but the biggest of all time. I was staying in LA at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. I liked to go to a café called the Old World, just over the road from Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. I would sit there and have a beer and watch the cars go by. It was often quite a sight on the strip. You could really soak up LA – its size mostly and how big everything was. The cars were big, the roads were big, the people, their pets… Mostly, it was a freak show – and I loved it. One day I saw a VW Beetle that had long hair like an Afghan hound and another car with grass growing all over it.

Another day, I was sitting there on the raised terrace and just below me was a man hitchhiking, but he was no ordinary man. First of all, he was wearing a white matador's shirt with billowing sleeves. Secondly, he wasn't just hitchhiking, he was doing an Elvis impersonation and hitchhiking – I think to that old sixties dance, the Hitchhike. He was waving his left thumb, shaking his knees and singing, “Uh-uh-uh, uh-uh-uh, yeah yeah, I'm All Shook Up!” At the end of the hitchhike arc, his left fist slammed into his right arm and he shouted, “Fuck you, asshole!” to the car that had just passed him by, which I thought was pretty interesting. He did this for a while, much to my amusement. I decided to talk to him; apparently, he was once invited to sing in Vegas. Then, suddenly, just as he was doing the hitchhike dance and shaking his knees to more of ‘All Shook Up', he casually says “Hi El.” My head turned and I looked up, and there he was: the real Elvis, driving slowly down the other side of the road, and he was as cool as a cucumber. He was in his famous black Stutz Bearcat, a very rare car that I later saw at Graceland. I couldn't believe my eyes: a mad Elvis impersonator hitchhiking and the real Elvis driving past! That evening, I said to the girl I was seeing, “You'll never guess who I saw today. Elvis!” Her family owned Schwab's, the drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. She told me he went there at the same time every day to collect his meds. Not so long afterwards, he was dead.

When I went to my goddaughter Augusta Tigrett's christening in Memphis, Tennessee, we had a tour of Elvis's Graceland mansion. There were thirty-three godparents and some of them, like Dan Aykroyd, were celebs, so we had a private tour of the house. The guide was more indiscrete with us than she usually was with the general public. She told us that Elvis used to have TVs in every room, hallway and corridor, showing the same show, so that he could watch it while he was walking around the house. I thought he was into fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, but according to the guide, he only ate bacon – about half a pound a day – and he died sitting on the toilet. Anyone who has done the Atkin's Diet will know that only eating protein will make you constipated, and being constipated puts a lot of strain on the heart. That's what probably happened to Elvis – you read it here first!

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In 1991, I saw Eric at Ronnie Wood's birthday lunch in London. I asked him if he wanted to come down to Wiltshire to do some fly fishing. Eric is passionate about fishing and the Nadder, my local river, is particularly good for trout. He told me he couldn't because he was flying to New York the next day to see his four-and-a-half-year-old son Conor. A couple of days later, after Eric had got to New York, Conor tragically died falling from a fifty-third floor window. Unbelievably, the windows of this skyscraper could be raised from the floor. The maid had opened the window; Conor was running from room to room playing aeroplanes and fallen right out of the opening. Eric ran ten blocks through the streets of Manhattan from his hotel to the apartment building when Lori del Santo, Conor's mother, called him, but there was, of course, nothing he could do. He managed to channel his considerable grief into one of his most beautiful songs ever, ‘Tears in Heaven'.