by Edward Klein
“A friend told me, ‘Cheer up, Aristo, there’s always next year,’ “ Ari told Jackie. “And I said, ‘Idiot! Do you think I am going to hang around this piddling town? For me, the whole world is small…. You will marvel one day at what I shall do.’ ”
That day came sooner than expected, for in 1922, when Aristo was sixteen years old, the Turkish army fell upon Smyrna and slaughtered the Greek population in a bloodthirsty campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Onassis tobacco warehouse went up in flames. Aristo’s father was arrested. His grandmother Gethsemane perished in the holocaust. The traumatic experience sealed for all time the bond he had with his full-blooded sister Artemis.
When a Turkish officer showed up at the Onassis home to requisition the residence, Aristo convinced him that he could be of service.
“You usually find that if you make things comfortable for people, they like you,” Ari explained.
In the midst of the fighting and turmoil, he escaped on a boat, wearing the disguise of a sailor, and carrying a large portion of the family fortune. But later he could not resist embroidering even this dramatic incident. He told Jackie that he had seen his uncle Homer being hanged by the Turks—which was false—and that he had to swim under a withering fusillade of gunfire to reach the boat that carried him to Athens, and to freedom.
“In those days,” he said, “overseas Greeks were not particularly welcomed in Greece, where we were known as Turkospori—Turk’s sperm.’ ”
He used the family money that he had smuggled out of Turkey to secure his father’s release from prison. But when the old man arrived in Athens, he showed little gratitude. He demanded that his son give him an accounting of every penny he had spent.
“People forget quickly,” Ari said. “Only a few weeks earlier they may have been on the verge of death. Then comes safety and the grumbles and complaints begin—over all sorts of trivialities.”
Ari’s closest friend was Constantine (“Costa”) Gratsos, a tall, handsome man who invariably sported a pipe in his mouth and a pretty young woman on his arm. The ne’er-do-well son of a rich Greek shipowner, Gratsos was an alcoholic who squandered his patrimony, and ended up working for Onassis as a paid companion.
Gratsos believed that Aristo was motivated to succeed by his difficult relationship with his father. It seemed to Gratsos that Onassis developed a passion for money and power as a way of winning the approval of his father and, later, of the entire world.
No one, not even Aristo, could say what his motives were, but there was no doubt that he felt humiliated by his father’s rebuke. He packed a battered suitcase, put together a few hundred dollars, and emigrated to Argentina. He traveled steerage class on the twelve-thousand-ton Tomaso di Savoya, but he bribed a boatswain to let him sleep in the aft of the ship in a cage that held the ship’s stern lines.
In Buenos Aires, the eighteen-year-old Ari added a couple of years to the birth date entered on the documents he carried in his pocket. No longer would he need parental permission to seek work. He had dark hair, dark eyebrows, and an abundance of optimism and self-confidence, and he was an immediate hit with the girls.
“I liked the girls a lot, as do all boys of that age, and I must admit that I did have the gift of attracting them more than any of the rest of my friends,” he said. “I spoke Spanish with ease and I suppose they must have found my conversation full of charm.
“You know,” he continued, “the first five thousand dollars is always the hardest to make. But I was soon on my way to making my first fortune by importing oriental tobacco leaf from my father in Greece and selling it to local cigarette manufacturers. But money was never an end in itself. I never confused accumulation with enjoyment. Money gave me a sense of power, and I used it for my own pleasure, even when I was a young man.”
Buenos Aires was a bustling port city, handling the country’s massive exports of beef and grain, and Ari decided to take the money he had made in the tobacco business—about $600,000—and invest it in shipping. It was the midst of the Great Depression, and dry-cargo freighters could be bought for less than their scrap value. Ari gambled that shipping would recover, and would make him what he had always wanted to become—the champion of champions.
THE SPLENDOR OF GREECE
Jackie was mesmerized by Ari’s life story. The other passengers on board the Christina could not help but notice that a certain chemistry was developing between her and the Greek shipowner. Every morning at breakfast, there were feverish conversations among Princess Irene Galitzine; Arkadi Guerney, Jackie’s old friend from her student days in Paris; and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who had been sent along by Jack Kennedy to watch over his wife.
“Maria Callas wasn’t [on board] for the first time in four years,” Roosevelt recalled. “Jackie’s sister brought Stas Radziwill along, but Stas left during the trip. We began to look like a boat full of jet-setters, and President Kennedy didn’t want that image.”
Between times with Ari, Jackie sat in the sun reading Greek history. One of her favorite books was The Splendor of Greece, by Robert Payne, who wrote:
This naked rock is bathed in a naked light—a light unlike any other light on the surface of the earth. It is a light that can be drunk and tasted, full of ripeness; light that filters through flesh and marble; light that is almost palpable. It fumes and glares, and seems to have a life of its own. It is in perpetual movement, flashing off the sea onto the rocks, flashing from one mountain to another and back again, spilling over the valleys.
The ancient Greeks, Jackie read, were the first to develop the arts, and to live a full and free life of personal freedom—just the kind of life that Jackie yearned for. Homer’s hero in the Odyssey reminded Jackie of Ari; they were both great fighters, wily schemers, ready speakers, and men of stout heart. Little by little, the salt air, the warm Ionian sun, the opulence of life aboard the Christina, the myths of the ancient Greeks, the stories of Ari’s youth—all this began to work on Jackie. Myth, legend, saga, and story became jumbled in her mind.
“[Jackie and Onassis] got along famously, speaking voraciously in English, Spanish and French,” Frank Brady wrote. “[Onassis] all at once offered to be her friend, provider, companion, father confessor and possible lover…. She was amused and fascinated at his seemingly unending supply of anecdotes, and she was impressed that even on the cruise he was able to constantly conduct and control business throughout the world. Cables and telephone calls arrived from heads of state and the presidents of the world’s largest corporations, and Onassis, sometimes even between dinner courses, dictated replies and returned calls that had multimillion-dollar implications. Whereas Jack Kennedy ruled a country, Onassis seemed to rule the world.”
On the last night of the cruise, Ari presented Jackie with a magnificent diamond-and-ruby necklace.
“Ari has showered Jackie with so many presents, I can’t stand it,” Lee joked in a letter to President Kennedy. “All I’ve got is three dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t even wear to her own birthday party.”
THE PRIZE
Onassis was in Hamburg, Germany, overseeing the construction of a new tanker, the Olympic Chivalry, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. He immediately contacted Lee, who was still under the impression that he was going to ask her to marry him. Lee insisted that Ari accompany her to Washington.
There, he presented himself at the gate of the White House and demanded to be admitted. Angier Biddle Duke, the chief of protocol, who was in charge of all foreign dignitaries, balked at letting Onassis in. Duke checked with the Kennedy family, and to his amazement, he was instructed to admit the Greek shipowner.
“My job was to keep the foreign guests penned up in Blair House, and a Greek getting through my fingers bothered me,” Duke recalled. “Later, of course, I came to realize that Jackie was making all the decisions about the funeral, and this Greek wouldn’t have gotten near the Family Quarters without her say-so.”
A kind of Irish wake was taking plac
e in the White House as Onassis made his entrance. Ted Kennedy was doing imitations. Robert McNamara was wearing one of Ethel Kennedy’s wigs. After dinner, Bobby Kennedy came down from the third floor, where Jackie was resting, and started to badger Onassis about his yacht and all his wealth. The puritanical Attorney General did not like the sybaritic Greek.
“I have never made the mistake of thinking it is a sin to make money,” Onassis said. “I’ve dealt with a lot of people, and they haven’t always been scouts. It’s impossible for an entrepreneur, a man like me, not to tread on somebody’s toes. All profit is an injustice to somebody. I’ve made a lot of enemies … but what the hell! No excuses. I’m as rich as I know how to be, and rich I know about.”
Bobby drew up a bogus document stipulating that the Greek shipowner would give away half of his wealth to the poor of Latin America. Playing along, Onassis signed the document in Greek.
His good humor and patience were rewarded when the phone rang with a call from Jackie. She asked that Onassis come upstairs for a private chat. He was the only visitor outside of family and a few heads of state to be accorded such a special honor by the widow of the slain President.
When Onassis entered the Yellow Oval Room of the Family Quarters, he found Jackie sitting on a sofa. He took a place beside her, and immediately started speaking. He did not ask her any questions—not how she felt, nor if she was all right, nor if there was anything he could do for her. He knew how to talk to a woman. He loved words, had a huge storehouse of facts at his disposal, and possessed a keen intelligence. He consoled Jackie with his facts, and wooed her with his native charm.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been dead for less than two days.
After the assassination, and Jackie’s move to New York, huge bunches of red roses began arriving at her apartment every morning with cards in Greek signed “Aristotle Onassis.” In the evening, identical bunches of roses were delivered with the same good wishes. Ari behaved like a man who had nothing better to do than pay court to Jackie.
“Ari began courting Jackie with all his resources, wooing her with his vast wealth, his vast power, and his earthy charm,” recalled Aileen Mehle, who wrote a society gossip column under the name Suzy. “Vulnerable, despairing, and at a total loss after Jack’s death, she was overwhelmed by the attention. Here was someone, she thought, who loved her truly, coming to her rescue. He, amazed at his luck at winning the world’s most famous and sought-after woman, could not stop crowing over his prize.”
Little by little, he gained Jackie’s confidence and assumed a many-sided role—father confessor, financial adviser, and potential lover. He made no secret of his desire to replace Bobby Kennedy as Jackie’s chief male protector, but he felt that an invisible barrier stood in his way.
One fall day in 1967, they were sitting in the library of Jackie’s apartment, and Ari turned to her and said:
“Jackie, you have no right to isolate yourself like this.”
Just then, Marta, Jackie’s housekeeper, came in with a tray of tea and madeleines, Jackie’s favorite sweet. Ari waited until Marta had left, then continued:
“It is not good for you, and not good for the children. You have done all the mourning that anyone can humanly expect of you. The dead are dead. You are the living.”
For a long time, Ari attributed Jackie’s standoffish behavior to Bobby Kennedy’s influence. Bobby simply did not like him. Ari had heard about Jackie’s relationships with other men: Roswell Gilpatric, the former undersecretary of defense; David Ormsby-Gore, who was now Lord Harlech; and John Warnecke. But Ari told himself that these men were just friends, and meant nothing to Jackie.
He was right—at least when it came to Lord Harlech and Ros Gilpatric.
“There was a lot of nasty stuff going around town about Jackie and Ros Gilpatric,” one of Jackie’s closest friends told the author. “Ros’s wife, Pam, was an old friend of mine, as was Jackie, so I knew the truth. That story was absolute rubbish. Jackie never had an affair with Ros, who had lots of affairs with other women, but never one with her.”
Ari considered himself Jackie’s most serious suitor. And yet, Ari had a sixth sense about things, and he must have noticed the change that came over Jackie at about this time of her life. Although Ari did not know it, Jackie had recently stopped sleeping with Jack Warnecke, and she seemed more receptive to Ari’s overtures. In turn, he stepped up his campaign to win her over. Shrewdly, he began paying more attention to Caroline and John.
Ari had two children of his own, Alexander and Christina, but he had never bothered to be a real father to them. As they were growing up, they had no home life. Ari hardly ever saw them, and rarely mentioned them to Jackie. He made her feel as if she and her children were the only ones he cared about.
LITTLE DADDY
As Jackie and Ari drank their tea and ate the made-leines, they talked about her problems with the press. Reporters and cameramen were camped outside her Fifth Avenue apartment. Each time Jackie made an exit under the long green canopy, the slavering media beast was there waiting to devour her. So were women with their hair in rollers, tourists with Instamatics, and strollers with their dogs. Her public ordeal brought back tormenting memories of the day they shot Jack.
In the shadows cast by the library fire, Ari reminded Jackie of her father in his latter years. If Jack Warnecke had represented one side of Black Jack Bouvier’s character, Ari represented the other. He was a bad boy who held out the promise of raw adventure. He danced and romanced like a real-life Zorba the Greek. He knew how to break through Jackie’s introverted personality, and make her feel like a bit of a she-devil.
Ari and Black Jack were both men of the world, men who enjoyed the drama of the mating game. Like Black Jack, Ari had an endless supply of anecdotes about his sexual escapades, and Jackie enjoyed listening to them.
There was, for instance, the story of his brief affair with Eva Perón, the wife of the president of Argentina. This had taken place a very long time before, in 1947, to be exact, when Eva was touring Europe, and staying at a villa on the Italian Riviera. After she and Ari made love, Eva cooked him an omelette, and he wrote out a check for $10,000 as a donation to one of her favorite charities.
“It was the most expensive omelette I have ever had,” he told Jackie.
Then there was Ingeborg Dedichen, the beautiful blonde daughter of one of Norway’s leading shipowners. Ari called her by the Italian nickname Mamita, “Little Mother,” and she called him Mamico, “Little Daddy.”
Ari described for Jackie in the most graphic detail his love life with Mamita—how he licked her between each of her toes, embraced every part of her body, covered her with kisses, then devoted himself again to her feet, which he adored. He had a thing about feet, he admitted, and he found Mamita’s feet as soft as a baby’s bottom.
Despite such candor, he chose to omit some of the less flattering details of his relationship with Mamita. For one thing, he did not tell Jackie that he enjoyed putting on Mamita’s clothes now and then and parading around their apartment dressed like a woman. For another, it was not only her feet that fascinated Ari. He was also into bottoms, the anus, and anal humor.
He once told Mamita that he had piles, and would have to see a doctor the first thing the following morning. He then asked her to examine his anus, and when she did so, he let out a loud fart in her face. He found the joke very amusing.
Mamita was older than Ari, and when they met, she was far more sophisticated than he. They lived together for more than ten years, and she taught the refugee from Smyrna about good manners, and how to order food from a French menu. But her real value lay in her connections to the elite members of the oil-tanker business in Britain, Sweden, and Norway.
“In the mid-1930s, tankers were still a comparatively small business,” noted The Times of London. “Oil accounted for only 15 percent of the world’s total energy requirements: coal was king…. Onassis was not the first Greek into tankers…. One or two other small operators were ac
tive during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 onward, supplying both sides impartially. What Onassis perceived most clearly was that tankers could be much bigger than anyone then considered feasible. He envisaged heroic economies of scale in operating costs. Having done so, he had the courage to push his vision through.”
Ari and Mamita spent the war years in New York, which was headquarters for most of the prominent Greek shipowning families. It was about this time that the lovers reached a tacit understanding: they were free to come and go as they pleased. Ari slept with other women, and Mamita liked hearing about these sexual liaisons. They became, as Mamita put it, “accomplices rather than lovers.”
“We sat in L.A. screwing the girls, a very pleasant occupation,” Ari’s good friend Costa Gratsos recalled of those war years. “There were starlets, semistars, and stars, an endless supply.”
“He was very sweet,” said Veronica Lake, one of Ari’s girlfriends, who spent some Hollywood nights with him at Romanoff’s. “But, oh, God, those black eyes! They look like they are going straight through the back of your head.”
Meanwhile, Mamita had become friends with the second wife of Stavros Niarchos, who, like Ari, was a parvenu in the Greek shipowning community.
“It was after dinner with the Niarchoses that Ari, for the first time in their relationship, beat Ingse,” an article in The Times of London reported years later. “There had been an argument on the Chris-Craft over her insistence on wearing a pair of green and yellow plaid pants that he found unbecoming. He was uncharacteristically silent throughout dinner, and on the way back. When they were home again, his pent-up rage turned to uncontrolled violence, and he kicked and hit Ingse until he was finally exhausted and went to bed.”
