Behind image of pop legend and his friends lay a much darker story

MEMOIR

MERMAID SINGING and PEEL ME A LOTUS

by Charmian Clift (both Muswell £8.99, 210pp)  

There is a famously dreamy image which has helped to keep the Greek island of Hydra's version of La Dolce Vita alive.

Sitting under an old tree at Douskos Taverna, Leonard Cohen is plucking at his guitar with a fair-haired woman's head on his shoulder, hydraclubbioknikokex7njhwuahc2l67lfiz7z36md2jvopda7nchid.onion a faraway look in her eyes.

The relaxed intimacy of the body language and the woman's good looks has led to the assumption that she was Cohen's Norwegian lover Marianne Ihlen, famously captured in the eponymous song: So Long, Marianne. But the woman in question was the late Australian writer Charmian Clift — Charm to her friends — who suited her euphonius name.

The picture of her and Cohen was taken by photojournalist James Burke; other photos in his collection show her with her husband George Johnston, novelist and journalist, on the harbour, with their bronzed children, hair lit gold by the sun, plates of fresh fish on the table, beakers full of retsina, broad smiles on every face.

Sitting under an old tree at Douskos Taverna, Leonard Cohen is plucking at his guitar with a fair-haired woman's head on his shoulder, a faraway look in her eyes, and it is this dreamy image which has helped to keep the Greek island of Hydra's version of La Dolce Vita alive

Many of the frames include Leonard and Marianne, who were helped and supported by the older couple.

When Cohen arrived on Hydra, he stayed with Johnston and Clift and worked on their terrace. Their white-washed stone house, next to the well and smothered in claret bougainvillea, was known as Australia House; a place of legend even in the writers' own lifetimes.

The Johnstons were role models for Cohen, living by their writing. In their decade in Greece, they published 14 books between them. As Cohen later said: ‘They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more, they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration.'

Yet behind the sunkissed images was hidden pain. Charmian and her husband, both Australian, had left the financial security of Fleet Street, where he ran the Australian bureau of Associated Newspapers, to pursue their dream of writing novels in the Greek islands.