This almost forgotten film is noteworthy for two reasons: it was Sophia Loren's English-language debut, and much of it was shot on location on the Greek island of Hydra when George Johnston and Charmian Clift lived there - click here.
Living at Marina Zea in Piraeus - see here - , just metres away from where those Russian-built 'Flying Dolphins' left for Hydra, I visited the island several times in the early 80s. Situated 70km south of Athens, the ferry would skirt what seemed little more than a bald rock in a boundless cerulean ocean when, abruptly, the town of Hydra would reveal itself like a quixotic watercolour print — its dramatic terrace of garish white houses perched enigmatically above the harbour, where pastel skiffs gently pitter-pattered against the ancient stone walls.
Beyond a few cosmetic nip-and-tucks, the island scarcely differed from the island the Johnstons sailed into in 1955. Old men still crouched over tables in the meniscus harbour playing plakoto and downing cups of black coffee, while nearby donkeys bellowed, awaiting the next shipment from the mainland.
Hydra is a beautiful place (in the warmer months!) in which to write and, if you were so inclined, it would be an equally beautiful place in which to drink yourself to death, which Johnston and Clift very nearly did. As their son Martin would later say: "The way my parents lived has perhaps been disastrous for me in the long term ... they wrote from say seven in the morning till midday, then went down to the waterfront and got pissed. And I suppose that’s a pattern of life that I’ve followed ever since."
The wind-whipped Hydra winters are harsh, however, and Johnston and Clift had little money, often living on credit from local shopkeepers. During 1963, amid the partying and the drinking, George began to write his iconic Australian novel My Brother Jack but confided to his friend Leonard Cohen, "I just don't know what to call it". "What's it about?" Leonard said. "My brother Jack," George replied. Leonard said: "There you are."
By the time "My Brother Jack" was published, their marriage was deeply strained; tuberculosis and subsequent medical treatment had rendered Johnston impotent and infidelity was a constant undercurrent of their relationship. Johnston left Hydra in 1964, a physical shadow of the strapping man who’d departed Australia in 1951.
During their years on Hydra, George Johnston and Charmian Clift presided over an extensive bohemian community of artists and writers and became Australia's greatest love story and, some 20 years later, a Greek tragedy because, within five years of returning to Australia, Clift in 1969, at age 45, committed suicide, Johnston succumbed to his illnesses just a year later, aged 58, daughter Shane suicided in 1974, Johnston’s daughter by his first marriage, Gae, died of a drug overdose in 1988, and son Martin died from alcoholism in 1990. The fate of their son Jason, who was born on Hydra in 1956, is unknown.
The filming of "The Boy on a Dolphin" and two other movies, "Girl in Black" and "Island of Love", caused great excitement on the island and got a mention in both George and Charmian's writing. The whole family were extras in these movies. See if you can recognise them.
Island of Love.
Charmian writes most Charmianly about this invasion of their little island by the people from Hollywood in her book "Peel Me a Lotus" in the chapter "September":
"Incredibly, it is happening. Like an invading army they are coming, with great weird landing-barges that nose grimly into the tiny scoop of harbour and bear down on the moorings where the wine boats were blessed a week ago.
The dense, still clots of people on the quay sigh on a long exhaling note, and slowly, inexorably, the monstrous maws open and down the ramps roll the first wheels these cobbles have ever known - jeeps, trucks, trailers, tractors, half-tracks, strange, shrouded instruments, wheeled lamps. The ordnance of the conquering army.
From the lovely marble spire of the Monastery of the Virgin the great bronze bell crashes out the first stroke of noon, invoking a shattering roar of turning motors as the jeeps and vehicles move off in procession, a triumphal procession that is not the less impressively awful for being hampered by the inadequate length of the waterfront and the clutter of market stalls and café tables."
Charmian devoted a whole chapter in her much neglected masterpiece "Peel me a Lotus" to the making of "The Boy on a Dolphin" but if you want to read more, you'll just have to buy the book yourself as I'm not about to break copyright laws for your literary edification.
One of George Johnston's friends was the LIFE magazine photographer James Burke. James came to Hydra in October 1960 and photographed the expat community. His photographs of that era are all on the Google LIFE archive and can be viewed here. To this day the locals call the modest house in a cobblestoned backstreet by a communal well the Johnstons lived in, the "Australian House".
As for me, as soon as I hear Zorba the Greek's theme music - oops! sorry, wrong version! try this one - or see the movie's opening scene, set in a Piraeus taverna just a few streets up from where I lived, I'm right back in Greece, long before "the full catastrophe" happened ☺
