Athens—Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be. First, those wonderful Greek smiles are gone, replaced by wintry ones at best. People are worried, as well they should be. At the Divani Caravel hotel, once owned by yours truly, the staff greets me like a conquering hero. I was a benevolent owner who used to party and spread the wealth. Now things are more professional, and the hotel is profitable because of expert management. The staff is the best in Athens by far.
The migrant crisis is secondary, from what I hear. Pension reform and the country’s creditors are on a collision course, with daily strikes impeding any growth to an economy that’s hit rock bottom. It will get worse, as it is an intractable gridlock. How can an economy grow and pay its debts when austerity is squeezing it python-like? For “python,” read Angela Merkel-like. This woman (bitch), who has stated that “the right to political asylum has no limits on the number of asylum seekers,” should obviously be shot without a blindfold, the trouble being no one shoots women any longer except for ISIS and their ilk. Slovakia and Hungary have been wise to tell economic migrants and the EU to shove it, but poor Greece is on the front line, as is Italy. No one expects Turkey not to undermine Greece, just as no one can count on Libya to spare Italy.
I flew into Athens for two concerts by Israel’s national orchestra conducted by the great Zubin Mehta. Sponsored by my oldest friend, Aleko Goulandris, I had the opportunity to study the maestro from up close, dining and lunching with him, with a private rendition from The Barber of Seville by the great soprano Christina Poulitsi, a young woman who will go very far in the opera world. The maestro had studied with Dimitri Mitropoulos when he was a youngster—we are exactly the same age—and told me how the Greek would point at a score and ask him to pick any page and Dimitri would know it by heart. Zubin also conducts without score, and his Ravel suite from the ballet Daphnis et Chloé brought down the house. He also gave us Mozart, Tchaikovsky, von Weber, Rossini, and Saint-Saëns. His wife, Nancy Kovack, was a very beautiful Hollywood actress back in the early ’60s, and she and I pulled the maestro’s leg about our dates—innocent ones, alas, at El Morocco. Ah, those were the days.
