Jackie After O (2 page)

But the aesthetic matched Onassis's swaggering personality. With his smooth olive skin, habitual Cuban cigar, dousing of cologne, and hair thick with Brilliantine, he could be magnetic. He had a capacity to listen, observe, and collect beautiful women. But his charms did not appear to work on Jackie that night. He noticed that she was pleasant but aloof during the tour, making mindless small talk with him “in her little voice.”

“I must ask you to leave by 7:30,” Onassis told the group. “Sir Winston dines sharp at 8:15.”
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After the group left, Costa Gratsos, a close friend of Onassis, guessed what was on his boss's mind.

“Don't fuck up her life just to get even with Bobby,” Gratsos said.
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Jackie's next fateful meeting with Onassis came during the presidency after her infant son Patrick, born prematurely, died when he was just two days old in August 1963. The Kennedys were devastated, and Jackie, on Cape Cod, summoned the strength to call her younger sister, Lee Radziwill, to tell her the horrible news. Although Lee was married for the second time to Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill, a Polish prince, and they were living in London with their two young children, Anthony and Tina, Lee had developed a relationship with Onassis in the intervening years and was with him in Greece when the First Lady phoned her.

Invite her over for a rest, Onassis suggested to Lee.

Jackie left for her two-week trip to Greece in October, and, still weak from her wrenching cesarean, needed oxygen on the flight over. The president, facing a tough reelection campaign, stayed behind with his mother, Rose, by his side to greet foreign dignitaries at the White House.
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The media seized on the question of why Jackie would sail with a man who had been indicted and fined by the US government. Indeed, his FBI file was as thick as two telephone books, full of memos about potential un-American activities during World War II and, later, Cuba.
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They also wanted to know why Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., then undersecretary of commerce who was serving as a kind of old-fashioned chaperone on the trip, would stay on a yacht owned by a man whose nautical empire the US government partly regulated.
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And it was no ordinary boat.

Floating in the Mediterranean, the
Christina's
passengers—indulged with fresh figs and strawberries, caviar, ten extra servants, two hairdressers, and a band—were initially unaware that Jackie's recuperative cruise had turned into a scandal in America. They passed the days floating between Istanbul, Marrakesh, and islands in the Aegean, with Onassis impressing Jackie with his knowledge about art and history, bringing alive the ruins in Crete and those at the Oracle at Delphi, where, when she stumbled in a hole, he was there to help her up. Between the sightseeing and Onassis's history lessons in highly remote locations, she, in turn, confided in him about her life lived in public with an imperfect spouse. He listened intently, tried to be supportive. He also encouraged her to stick by her husband's side and campaign with him that fall. She took his advice.
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A month later, on November 23, 1963, Dallas was her first official reelection campaign trip. And, sadly, it was also her last, as bullets shattered the president's windpipe and skull, sending a chunk of his brain in an arc through the air, spilling his blood into the lap of Jackie's pink Chanel skirt in an open-top limousine.

Onassis was one of the few outsiders to visit Jackie at the White House on the day of Kennedy's funeral.
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And they slowly became closer. He brought gifts to her kids and visited them on Cape Cod, where they playfully buried him in the sand. He could still charm an aging Churchill as well as a string of remarkable women, from his first wife, Tina—the daughter of an even richer Greek tanker tycoon—to his longtime mistress, the opera soprano Maria Callas, and, eventually, Jacqueline Kennedy. He was a buccaneer of a businessman, able to pull off such complex deals that his tanker
Tina Onassis
“was built in Germany, mortgaged in the United States, insured in London, financially controlled from Monaco and manned by Greeks. It flew the flag of Liberia.”
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Onassis fit a pattern for Jackie, who had relied on a series of men with means and strong personalities throughout her life. First, there was her father, “Black Jack,” the stockbroker who lost more money than he made, who drank and cheated but still indulged his daughters Jackie and Lee after their mother divorced him; her stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, whose inherited Standard Oil wealth enabled the family to live among high society, even though they eventually ran low on cash; JFK, whose family money was built on stocks, the movie business, real estate, and a touch of bootlegging; and then Bobby Kennedy, whose fighting spirit and near-constant presence—to the annoyance of his wife, Ethel—protected Jackie in her darkest days.

For several years after the assassination, Jackie struggled to bring equilibrium back to her life, moving to New York, making her children feel secure, establishing new routines, and settling back into Manhattan society. It was not until after Robert Kennedy's murder in June 1968 that a devastated and terrified Jackie thought she and her children were also homicide targets and, shaken to her core, was prepared to turn her back on America. Not surprisingly, Onassis was there to rescue her in her grief with his boat—and give her shelter on his own private island, Skorpios.

Skorpios, in the Ionian Sea between the west coast of Greece and the heel of Italy, was aptly named for being shaped like a scorpion, with land like a curled tail at one end and two pincers at the other. It was a place of unsurpassed freedom and luxury, a place Onassis, one of the richest men in the world, had bought for about $100,000 a dozen years earlier in 1963.
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He then spent another $10 million to domesticate its rugged beauty, to raise farm animals, and to plant vineyards, fig trees, olive groves, and flowers. It was a place where the scent of eucalyptus and jasmine mixed with briny air, where bathing suits seemed superfluous, and waiters in white gloves served beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon.

It was there, on October 20, 1968, that Jacqueline Kennedy stunned so many by marrying Onassis. With a prenuptial agreement in place that had been negotiated by her former brother-in-law US senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy and her financial adviser, André Meyer, the contract made it clear that the $200,000 in yearly support from the Kennedys and the $10,000 annual widow's pension from the US government would cease as a result of the wedding. Onassis agreed to give her spending money and $3 million up front, as well as annual interest on million-dollar trusts for John and Caroline. Although tabloids later widely reported that the prenuptial agreement had 170 clauses covering every detail of how their life together should be—including their frequency of sex—the author of that claim later admitted to inventing those details.
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Clearly, money was not an issue—in the beginning. But it did become one of several obstacles in their marriage. Onassis was the opposite of her first husband in appearance, age, and approach to many aspects of life. He was mercurial, could be crude, and was old-fashioned about many things, especially his treatment of women. He flaunted his affair with Maria Callas, before and after he married Jackie, and was even photographed in May 1970 with her at Maxim's in Paris.
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Indeed, Onassis was an incongruous mate for America's queen: twenty-nine years older than Jackie, he was more than two inches shorter at just five foot five, and heavier and rougher than the horsy-artsy-intellectual crowd with which she was embedded. He was a divorcee and a world-class womanizer. She was the good Catholic who had learned to turn the other cheek in her first marriage. He loved bouzouki music and smashed pottery in Greek tavernas, one night running up a bill as high as $1,000 for all the dishware he threw.
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She loved the theater. He didn't. He was a night person, typically waking when she was eating lunch. Onassis often wore a dark suit and tie, even in the summer. Jackie, by contrast, was always impeccably dressed according to season and occasion, and a regular at Valentino—who had made the ivory skirt and lace sweater
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she wore for their Greek wedding.

October 20, 1968. Jackie, wearing Valentino, and Aristotle Onassis, at their wedding on his private island, Skorpios.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

Whatever reasons she may have had for marrying Onassis—love, money, security—even her admirers were perplexed by her choice.

When her friend Truman Capote asked her why, she said, “I can't very well marry a dentist from New Jersey!”
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Other friends told her she was going to fall off her pedestal if she married Onassis.

“That's better than freezing there,” she scoffed.
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Caroline and John “would have been happy to stay around the penny candy store in Hyannis” rather than go to Greece, but it wasn't up to them.
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Onassis had lived a large life. Born in Turkey to an overbearing father and a mother who died when he was twelve, his formative years were tumultuous and oppressive. Although his father remarried, producing two more of his three sisters, the family was forced into exile in Athens during the political upheaval caused by Atatürk, the revolutionary who transformed Turkey from a caliphate to a republic. But Onassis did not stay in Athens for long, leaving for Argentina to seek his fortune with as little as $60 in his pocket.

In Buenos Aires, he bunked in a cheap boardinghouse above a dance hall (which instilled his lifelong love of tango) and worked as a telephone operator, where he polished his international language and business skills through eavesdropping on calls. Eventually, he bought tobacco from Greek sailors, and peddled it on a cart. By 1930, as smoking became ever more popular, Onassis had built the tobacco business into a million-dollar company, motivating him to expand his enterprises. He bought an abandoned wooden ship, frozen in ice in Nova Scotia, sight unseen for $35,000 during the Great Depression. The ship would be his first of many.
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At his peak, the man nicknamed the “Golden Greek” was controlling some one hundred companies in a dozen countries, including hotels, banks, piers, real estate, and an enormous fleet of seafaring vessels, separate from his yacht, which cost $500,000 a year to run.
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Onassis, never one to sit still for long, had moved from Monaco to Skorpios as his home base, where he had a helipad, airstrip, marina, and the
Christina
, on which he preferred to sleep and spend his time.
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For a handful of summers and school vacations, the 350-acre cypress-covered island was a safe retreat for Jackie, her children, sister, and New York–society friends. There, they could lounge on the yacht or at his stucco, hill-perched villa, which had been white until he painted it pink for his wife, as if trying to erase memories of another exotic white house she had lived in. Jackie relished her time on the island, meticulously decorating the villa with Greek antiques, books, and flokati rugs to soften the terra-cotta floors. When she was not shopping in Athens or reading on the beach, she had a six-horse barn to visit and miles of riding paths that were hers alone.

But paradise was a fiction, a place where Onassis had dynamited rock to build roads, ravaged trees from other islands, laid imported grass from South Africa, and sprayed chemicals to kill snakes and insects.
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This island was indeed a place that stung on many levels, its natural beauty in jarring juxtaposition to the physical, emotional, and financial devastation unfolding there.

Onassis lost his only son, Alexander, in what the father believed to be a suspicious plane crash in January 1973. Within a year, Onassis was offering a $500,000 reward for anyone with information about whether the Piaggio plane Alex was flying in was tampered with—or suffered from improper maintenance, or pilot's error—but the cause was never determined.
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His body was laid to rest next to the chapel where his father's wedding to Jackie had taken place. Onassis would visit the grave often, and his son's death plunged the old man into an isolating depression that made him mean, paranoid, and an even more difficult husband.

After five years of marriage, during which he basked in Jackie's light, Onassis was also shadowed by the legacy of JFK, whose tenth assassination anniversary—and its many official events—was coming up that year. Add to that the discord that two sets of stepchildren can create, arguments over money—specifically Jackie's spending on clothes and shoes—Callas, and the differences that resulted from their respective cultures, ages, geographies, and interests, and the relationship was, not surprisingly, wearing thin. And after Alex's death, Onassis's inner turmoil made him angry, withdrawn, and preoccupied.