High life
Paradise isle
Taki
The sea off Mykonos is probably, in fact definitely, the clearest and cleanest in the Mediterranean, and the beaches — to use a Miami Beach Jewish-American hippy expression — are to die; as most of the tourists who are regulars in Mykonos will. From Aids. I would say that 99 per cent of the foreign tourists who come to Mykonos are homosexuals, and judging by what my far from expert eye saw there last week, all 99 per cent of them have a death wish. They used to say, see Naples and die (or was it Paris?) but now it's definitely Myko- nos. I only hope that mosquitoes don't carry the disease, because if they do, I've now got it, and if I die nobody will believe that the greatest modern Greek would consider being in the closet as big an insult as, say, being a lawyer, or even a judge.
The first time I set foot there was in 1961. My father still owned his two-masted schooner, Aries, and had piled 25 of us on board. (Incidentally, a reader has correctly pointed out that I must know very little about boats if I describe one as a two- masted ketch, and someone from Australia has written that I must know very little about Debrett if I refer to it as Debrett's, and both gentlemen are right I suppose, but my only excuse is that when I write English I translate in my head from Greek, into German, into French, and finally into Anglais, a process which allows a few mistakes to slip through even as brilliant a mind as mine.) My friend Zographos and I had been relegated to the deckhouse, so once we dropped anchor we decided to go ashore and look for a hotel. Which we found literally 50 yards from the tiny port. The trouble was, the lady who owned the place did not believe our story, that we had just arrived there by private means, even when we asked her to go down to the port and see for herself. She took us for stowaways, or spies from Turkey, because back in those good old days people arrived in Mykonos with the boat that landed there once a week from Piraeus, and c'est tout.
When Zographos lost his temper with her she yelled for help, and Mykonians instantly began coming to her rescue. Needless to say, the place was paradise. And the mainland Greeks who had houses there were not the show-off types who bought private islands in order to seem distinguished. They still are not. The Greek tourist in Mykonos is among the most civilised that that uncivilised country produces, and the Athenians who own houses there are among the nicest and least pretentious.
Throughout the Sixties I returned to Mykonos every summer, and once I be- came the proud owner of Bushido, I literally moved my base there. Then a terrible thing happened. Jackie Kennedy came shopping there, and where once the place had only one boutique that sold trousers to both men and women, over- night every house turned its ground floor into a shop. Worse, Pierro Aversa, a friend of mine from Italy, decided to start a bar for his many friends. He called it Pierro's and it was a hit from day one. The trouble was that Pierro's friends were all gay, and word gets around among gays. Sooner than one can say Jack Robinson every gay this side of San Francisco had descended on Mykonos (with a stop at Porto Heli first).
Even after Pierro had been deported from Greece on a trumped-up charge, thousands of gays continued to pour into the island that is guarded by two sacred islands on each side, Delos and Tinos. The houses that were not turned into boutiques became discos, yet miraculously Mykonos remained outwardly unspoiled, and the quality of island life did not suffer. In fact, I preferred it, because along with the gays came some pretty wild girls from the north, namely German models looking for hot- blooded islanders.
For the past ten years I've taken the Greek karate team there for rest and relaxation before the European cham- pionships which are always held in Octo- ber, and this year was no exception. As I hadn't been there for three years for reasons known only to me, I took along an expert, Leonidas Goulandris, a young man whose parents I live with the year round. Alas, he performed his duties admirably. The earliest we went to bed was six in the morning, and two of us came down with alcoholic poisoning from a Mykonian ouzo of which one shot would kill off all the Karamazov brothers, and not surprisingly I failed to make the national team for the first time ever. Still, it was worth it. In fact I had the best time I've had in a very long time, notwithstanding the fact that the first person I encountered upon landing in Athens, and having gone to see Zographos Vouliagmeni, was Andreas Papandreou himself, and in a bathing suit to boot, a sight that made thousands of naked gays in Mykonos a welcome one indeed.
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