{"id":193030,"date":"2025-12-19T12:08:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T12:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/193030\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T12:08:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T12:08:13","slug":"the-multimillionaire-socialite-who-created-the-celebrity-selfie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/193030\/","title":{"rendered":"The multimillionaire socialite who created the celebrity selfie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jean Pigozzi is sitting in his apartment in the Albany in Mayfair, London, swaddled against the November cold snap in two vast fleeces. The walls are painted in Battenberg-cake colours and are bare except for a huge television screen set to the financial news, a nod to his fluctuating fortunes as a tech investor.<\/p>\n

The investor and photographer \u2014 he is said to have invented the celebrity selfie \u2014 owns the largest collection of African art in the world, but that is kept elsewhere, perhaps at his remarkable mid-century home on a stretch of prime Riviera coastline in Antibes (Roman Abramovich is a neighbour to one side; the Heineken dynasty to the other). Or maybe in his modernist mountaintop house on a private island on Panama\u2019s Pacific coast. Or most likely in shipping containers in a Swiss freeport, waiting to be moved into the new museum in Cannes that will soon bear Pigozzi\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001046159460\"<\/p>\n

With, from left, Dolly Parton, Clint Eastwood and Sarah Jessica Parker<\/p>\n

COURTESY OF JEAN PIGOZZI<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001046159441\"<\/p>\n

With, from left, David Hockney, Christopher Reeve and Andy Warhol<\/p>\n

COURTESY OF JEAN PIGOZZI<\/p>\n

We are meeting to discuss I Am Curious Johnny, a documentary directed by Julien Temple. It tells the story of Pigozzi\u2019s life through interviews with his friends, many of them well known \u2014 Mick Jagger<\/a>: \u201cYou like dressing up, don\u2019t you, Johnny?\u201d \u2014 and also via unusual interviews between Pigozzi and himself, done in split screen or using AI animations of old childhood photographs. The documentary aired at the Rome Film Festival and was released on HBO Max in the US last month. It captures, the director noted, the impact of \u201cwealth and its effects on those who possess it\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy childhood was not good. And so I am reliving it now,\u201d says Pigozzi, who is 73.<\/p>\n

When he was 11, he found out that the woman he thought was his mother was not, in fact, related to him at all. His real mother was one of his father\u2019s mistresses, whom he met only a few times in the decades that followed. Shortly afterwards, he was sent to a Jesuit boarding school of such bleakness that he woke one winter morning to find a blanket of snow on his bed. When he was 12, he returned from school to be told that his father had died suddenly from a heart attack that day.<\/p>\n

Pigozzi had been born into vast wealth as the heir to an industrial fortune made by his father, Henri. He was raised between a grand house in Paris and Villa Dorane in Cap d\u2019Antibes.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001046138878\"<\/p>\n

At his home in Antibes in 2021 with his Rhodesian ridgeback, Saatchi<\/p>\n

GREG FUNNELL<\/p>\n

When his father died, his first emotion, he says, was relief. Pigozzi Sr \u2014 who founded the French car company Simca \u2014 was \u201creally an incredible person\u201d, he says, but also a difficult one. \u201cI was terrified of my father. He was really tough on me, and what drove him crazy is that I was a bad student because I was dyslexic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith that weird upbringing, I should have gone to a shrink,\u201d he says. But he never did. \u201cAnd so I decided, in this film, that I would \u2018shrink\u2019 myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 I\u2019m just having a few friends over\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n

By most people\u2019s standards, Pigozzi is something of an enigma. In one Vanity Fair profile, Elton John described him as \u201cone of the world\u2019s greatest characters. I don\u2019t really know what he does, though, apart from always taking those pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same magazine later compiled a map of the most powerful people on the planet, from Jay-Z<\/a> to Anna Wintour<\/a>, Michael Bloomberg<\/a> to Tom Hanks, showing how each of them was connected to Pigozzi.<\/p>\n

\"amfAR<\/p>\n

With Sharon Stone in Cannes, 2021<\/p>\n

GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

His close friends include Bono<\/a>, Charles Saatchi<\/a>, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey<\/a>, Elle Macpherson<\/a> and Jagger, and his annual pool party is a fixture of the jet-set calendar. A menagerie of celebrities could often be found dancing around his famous kidney bean-shaped pool at his C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur home, filled with plastic animals.<\/p>\n

\u2018I stopped the pool parties. I knew fewer and fewer people\u2019<\/p>\n

Or at least, that\u2019s how it was. \u201cI stopped doing the pool parties,\u201d Pigozzi says. \u201cMore and more people came, and I knew fewer and fewer of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in the day, his close friends might show up to the annual party, held during the Cannes Film Festival, with perhaps a plus-one in tow. In more recent years, guests would try to bring \u201cbodyguards, hair and make-up, a PA, security\u201d, he says. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jean<\/p>\n

With Terry Gilliam at a Bafta event, 2019<\/p>\n

CAMERA PRESS<\/p>\n

Besides, he says, \u201cThe youngest person that I know in Hollywood now is Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a>, who\u2019s over 50. De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Michael Douglas, Francis Ford Coppola<\/a> \u2014 they\u2019re all in their eighties. And I don\u2019t want to have a party with decrepit old people, so I\u2019m not doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite being a figure of the Riviera high life, Pigozzi has never consumed a drop of alcohol in his life, he says, apart from on the cr\u00eapes suzettes he allows himself twice a year. He did once smoke half a joint with Rex Harrison, he admits, but only because it was Rex Harrison, and he is glad he never tried cocaine because his love of food is perilous enough: he has to \u201cstay horizontal until 11am each morning\u201d, he says, \u201cso that no chocolate croissant jumps into my mouth\u201d. The sole suit he owns is \u201cfor funerals\u201d. Despite hailing from an automotive dynasty, he drives \u201ca tiny car that looks like a yoghurt container\u201d. The only things he hates, he says, are garlic and pompous people.<\/p>\n

\u2018My life may be a bit ridiculous. But I\u2019m not changing\u2019<\/p>\n

He dresses in a kaleidoscopically colourful wardrobe and today wears the cheapest watch he could find in duty free, partially in light of the recent spate of \u201cRolex-ripping<\/a>\u201d in London but also because \u201cit tells the time just as well\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt my age, perhaps I should be wearing suits and walking slowly and going to a club and shooting on the weekend,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019m not interested in that. I can\u2019t do it. It might be a bit ridiculous, the life I have. But I\u2019m not willing to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Chanel<\/p>\n

A Soho Beach House barbecue with Lenny Kravitz<\/p>\n

GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

The documentary traces Pigozzi\u2019s early life in Paris to his studies at Harvard in the Seventies. As a young man visiting Manhattan on weekends, he would approach famous people on the street, stand next to them, extend an Inspector Gadget arm and snap a high-flash shot of the scene on his Leica \u2014 creating selfies before the term was invented.<\/p>\n

In his images, David Hockney looks young and self-conscious in a rugby shirt beneath a blond mop of hair; Hunter S Thompson appears almost hygge-cosy in a chunky woollen hat. A picture from 1983 shows Steve Jobs giving the finger to the vast, granite-bound IBM sign at his rival\u2019s head office in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

\u2018I have backed so many companies that died\u2019<\/p>\n

After leaving college, Pigozzi hung out with Basquiat and Warhol and the Studio 54 set. \u201cI bought a Basquiat at his first show, a self-portrait, for $1,250,\u201d he says, though he rues the day he refused to accept a later work from Basquiat in exchange for a new suit the artist wanted. \u201cThe suit would have cost $560,\u201d he tells me now. \u201cThat painting sold recently for $35 million [\u00a326 million].\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t his only misfire. In the Nineties, he found himself at one of the early investor pitches for an online bookshop called Amazon. \u201cThere were ten people in the room, and this little guy arrived and said, \u2018My wife and I drove from New York to Seattle with our three dogs. I started a company \u2014 we\u2019re selling books and we\u2019ll be selling some other things after that,\u2019 \u201d Pigozzi says, and laughs. \u201cI said, \u2018This guy! He doesn\u2019t know about Barnes & Noble. He\u2019s an idiot,\u2019 \u201d he laughs, of Jeff Bezos<\/a>. Other opportunities have been more fruitful. In the mid-Noughties, Pigozzi invested in a fledgling company called the Facebook, \u201cand that was very, very good\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001044277093\"<\/p>\n

Interviewing himself in the film I Am Curious Johnny, directed by Julien Temple<\/p>\n

RECORDED PICTURE COMPANY<\/p>\n

When it comes to investing, he reckons he\u2019s had far more failures than successes, though his net worth is estimated at $350 million. \u201cI have attended dozens of high-tech funerals,\u201d he jokes, and has a collection of caps at home \u2014 from dead startups and cratered schemes. He looks at them and thinks, \u201cOh, this baseball cap cost me $50,000, or this T-shirt was $100,000. I have backed so many companies that died.\u201d He lost a lot of money in the dotcom boom and again in the 2008 crisis.<\/p>\n

Now, although he is optimistic about the prospect of AI, he is wary of startups affixing the tag to absolutely anything in an attempt to capitalise on the zeitgeist \u2014 \u201can AI hairdresser, an AI lawyer\u201d. It may well be another bubble. \u201cBut I have a tiny, tiny piece of Open AI<\/a>,\u201d he admits (he will not be drawn on how much). \u201cAnd if it doesn\u2019t collapse, that\u2019s going to be my retirement money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps his legacy will be his art collection. It spans \u201cmore than 10,000 pieces\u201d of African art, though, in a typically Pigozzian twist, its owner admits he\u2019s never set foot on the continent himself. Pigozzi helped bring to western eyes artists like Seydou Keita, the Malian photographer whose stylised Fifties portraits of his nation\u2019s middle classes are strange and surprising portals themselves, along with dozens and dozens more. \u201cYou know they have Alcoholics Anonymous and they have Sex Addicts Anonymous?\u201d he says. \u201cWell, if they had Collectors Anonymous, I would be there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018My father\u2019s family were very, very poor\u2019<\/p>\n

This urge to acquire and collect may well be a hedge against one of Pigozzi\u2019s latent fears: that he will one day return to the poverty of his father\u2019s youth in Turin. He keeps a picture of his father as a child, with his six sisters and his parents. \u201cThey were very, very poor,\u201d he says. \u201cAnything not to go back, you know? I am always scared.\u201d He has a waking nightmare, he says, \u201cwhere a demon says, \u2018Sorry, there\u2019s nothing left here.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

There are other fears too. Pigozzi tells me the story of his friend Kerry Packer, the Australian tycoon, who died for several minutes when he had a heart attack in 1990 out riding his polo pony. Pigozzi later asked him what he saw. \u201cHe said, \u2018Nothing, nothing. It was black. I didn\u2019t see my life before my eyes.\u2019 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest invention ever made is to make people believe in life after death,\u201d Pigozzi says, before leavening that thought with a joke. \u201cYou know, one day I was with Woody Allen<\/a> and I said, \u2018Woody, I hear that the Muslim terrorists, when they kill somebody, they go to heaven and they have 72 young virgins.\u2019 And Woody said, \u2018You know what? I\u2019d rather have two professionals.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Old people just talk about taxes and diseases\u2019<\/p>\n

I ask him why he thinks he needs the therapy that the documentary promises. Hasn\u2019t he, by all accounts, lived a rich and jolly \u2014 if often esoteric \u2014 life? \u201cI am kind of troubled,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause theoretically I should be married. I should be a grandfather now, right? I never got married. I never had children. And so that\u2019s not completely normal.\u201d He has had many girlfriends over the years and once invited six of his exes to his 60th birthday party. \u201cThey became friends, but some of them didn\u2019t like it that much,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was an exciting experiment.\u201d And while he doesn\u2019t regret not marrying (\u201cbecause I\u2019m a terrible negotiator\u201d), he does regret never having children and thus grandchildren, in part because he is more interested in what young people have to say than his contemporaries, who \u201cjust talk about taxes and diseases and their doctors\u201d. He laughs.<\/p>\n

And yet, \u201cThe most terrifying day of the year is Father\u2019s Day. Because I think someone\u2019s going to press the thing on my door. Ding, dong! \u2018I\u2019m Charlie. I\u2019m 35 and I\u2019m your son.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Does he get lonely? Sometimes, he says. \u201cBut more and more I have a lot of projects. I started doing collages, made with things that concern me. So I put aeroplane tickets, bills from restaurants, yoghurt pots that I liked, photographs that I took\u2026 I have a big book and I think I did 50 pages,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m going gaga or not.\u201d On the contrary, he seems both thoughtful and sharp.<\/p>\n

He is wrong-footed, however, by the passage of time. \u201cI think I should sleep more, but I really hate sleeping. It\u2019s such a waste of time,\u201d he says, \u201cWhen I was 12, I would be in a chemistry lesson that lasted 55 minutes \u2014 and it was eternally long. Now that I\u2019m 73, I have a glass of water and I blow my nose and an hour is gone.\u201d He struggles to live in the present, he says, and has \u201cthis obsession with the future\u201d. When he is in a restaurant eating his spaghetti, he is thinking about the cake he\u2019ll have for dessert. But when he is eating the cake, he doesn\u2019t appreciate it because he is wondering how he will get home. \u201cIt\u2019s a terrible disease,\u201d he says. He now practises transcendental meditation twice a day to combat it. \u201cI have no idea if it\u2019s changed anything. But I think I\u2019m calmer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I go to bed each night, I am happy if I have learnt something new that day,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd if nothing happens, I\u2019m depressed because it\u2019s one less day in my life, one day that I didn\u2019t learn anything. So I really always try to be curious.\u201d<\/p>\n

I Am Curious Johnny will be released in the UK next year<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jean Pigozzi is sitting in his apartment in the Albany in Mayfair, London, swaddled against the November cold…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":193031,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-193030","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193030\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}