Lament for a learned friend
Taki
On a sad trip to Athens for my friend Yanni Goulandris’s funeral. Throughout the years, mostly in these pages, I have always referred to him as Professor Yohannes Goulandris, mind you, mostly to annoy him. Yanni did not think much of the Germans, the reason being he was 15 when they occupied Greece, and, unlike me at five years of age, did not allow the glamorous uniforms and gallant tales of Teutonic knights to impress him. Yanni was an unusual Greek shipowner. He loved music, literature and art much more than business, and knew more about those three subjects than most professors. Hence his Speccie nickname. Yanni was no stuffed shirt. He loved wine and whisky, beautiful women, and was the first Greek to find those awful hippies of the awful Sixties quite interesting. He was among the first Greeks to have friends outside the shipping community, writers and artists mostly, although he remained close to the Greek community until the end.
He and I went to the same school in Athens, and then he attended Cambridge. He was a friend of my father, and when I came of age — when I hit the Riviera, that is — he took me under his wing. For some strange reason my children were brought up in his house. His wife Aliki, the tobacco heiress, and the mother of my children were very close, so Yanni, Aliki and Alexandra carried the can while I went gallivanting around the world looking for thrills. In other words, I owe him big time, but now it’s too late for payback. Yanni and Aliki have a charming country house with a bewitching garden north of Athens, where we would sit until dawn surrounded by jasmine and listen to Wagner, jazz and old Greek songs. He made his own retsina, which was kept in a humongous barrel in the cellar, a barrel which somehow emptied always on the last day of summer. As the end of the season drew near, Yanni would up the ante in order to ensure nothing was left scraping the barrel.
The irony, of course, was that for a German-hater he loved German music. He would go into ecstasy, with a smile on his face and his eyes closed while listening. That is when I would start praising the Wehrmacht (‘Come on, Yanni, you gotta admit the professionalism that allowed Germany to fight with astonishing effectiveness against impossible odds, and the obdurate pride that led the officer class to fight until the end ... ’), whereupon he would pull a Jekyll and Hyde. After the liberation, the commies picked him up right away as he was among the haves. Held in a football stadium, and oblivious to his plight, he began playing ping-pong with one of the prisoners and was slapped around rather hard by his captors. He never understood why. He was a very old friend of John Aspinall, of Jimmy Goldsmith, and of the other Yanni, Zographos, who was the first to leave us back in 1997.
His son Leonida had a New Orleans jazz band fly in from Paris, and, after he was lowered into the family tomb, we followed them back to the Grande Bretagne hotel where we drank to his memory. Aliki and Yanni were married for 51 years, and I don’t think they ever spent more than a day or two apart. My heart goes out to her because she not only loved him madly throughout those 51 years, but he was also the only man she ever looked at, if you know what I mean. He leaves three children, Leonida, Atalanta and AlexiaCassandra.
Losing a friend at my age is normal. But losing a friend who taught one so much makes the loss harder to take. I remember when I first started writing and if I hit a brick wall, which was a daily occurrence, all I had to do was ring Yanni. History, anything to do with music or philosophy, literature, he was my Google — decades before it was invented. The German army aside, the other things which would annoy him were my indiscreet questions about women — he had great success with the fair sex until he got married — and the fact that I always denied having borrowed ten pounds from him during my first Wimbledon. (I had borrowed five.) He insisted it was ten. For close to 50 years we would argue about a fiver, prompting some people to think we were both rather petty.
Oh, yes, and another thing. Back in 1952, in the Blue Bar in Cannes, Yanni spotted Picasso sitting at the next table. He promptly got up, introduced himself and began to give a lecture about modern art. He was for it, and knew a hell of a lot about it, but Picasso wanted to be left in peace and told Yanni so. Until the end of his life, he refused to admit it. ‘Not in the least,’ he would say. ‘The artist and I had a very good conversation, he heard me out and I heard him out ... ’ Funny, I don’t exactly remember it that way, but then again, I was young and could have been mistaken, which I wasn’t.
So, goodbye, old friend, and as we Greeks say, may the earth which covers you be soft.
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