Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  Later, Mamita provided her own description of Ari’s violent temper:

  He needed some victim on whom he could release his nervous tension. It would not have suited his complicated character to discuss what was at issue between us, and we never did. He was always trying to put me in the wrong, because he always needed to keep his victims within his power … he had to have them “in the palm of his hand.”

  Ari was drinking heavily now, and the beatings continued, sometimes leaving Mamita so badly battered—“like a boxer who has just lost a fight,” she said—that she had to be treated by a doctor. But Mamita and Mamico had developed a relationship of mutual dependence, and she could not leave him. When Ari proposed marriage, he promised to buy Mamita her own yacht and a private Greek island. He gave her an antique Egyptian necklace to wear at the wedding. First, however, Mamita required an operation to enable her to have children. When the operation failed, she made a botched attempt at suicide.

  After the end of the war, Ari phased Ingeborg Dedichen out of his life like a rusty ship. He married Athina Livanos, the younger daughter of Stavros Livanos, one of the wealthiest of the Greek shipowners. Ari was forty years old, and Tina—a petite, blonde tomboy with a passion for horses—was seventeen. Ari was marrying up.

  Almost a year later, Stavros Niarchos, who had also been attracted to Tina, divorced his wife, and married Tina’s sister Eugenie. The stage was set for the monumental rivalry that would obsess Niarchos and Onassis for the next thirty years.

  Tina was attractive and well educated, but like Ingeborg Dedichen, she soon became the victim of her husband’s uncontrollable anger. When he was displeased with Tina, Ari disciplined her with the tip of his hot cigar.

  “Every Greek, and there are no exceptions, beats his wife,” he said. “It is good for them. It keeps them in line.”

  Jackie enjoyed listening to Ari’s stories of his women. But of all his paramours, it was Maria Callas who interested her the most. Ari had carried on a love affair with Maria for more than a decade, and like everyone else, Jackie was curious to know what he thought about the legendary soprano.

  In private, Maria was a shy, insecure, and humorless woman. But she was transformed into a commanding presence whenever she walked out onto an opera stage. She was a big woman, with huge black eyes and lustrous black hair, and she held audiences spellbound with her soaring, unconventional voice. Her fiery interpretations of Norma, I Puritani, and Tosca were talked about for years, until they took on almost mythic proportions. Gradually, Maria began to confuse herself with her press clippings, and she turned into a stereotype of the spoiled diva.

  “Callas was difficult to live with,” said Stelio Papadimitriou, Ari’s private attorney, who came to function as his second-in-command. “When they visited his office in Monte Carlo, Onassis would order the elevator to stop so that Callas could have quiet. The staff had to climb the four floors on foot. But Callas did not like the sound of their footfalls. So they in the upper floors had to take off their shoes.”

  Ari and Maria shared a common language—Greek—which they used for screaming and cursing at each other. And they shared a common background—they had both come up the hard way.

  “I have always had a great admiration for Madame Callas,” Ari said. “More than her artistic talent, even more than her success as a great singer, what always impressed me was the story of her early struggles as a poor girl in her teens when she sailed through unusually rough and merciless waters.”

  Ari and Maria traveled to Istanbul on the Christina, and they paid a call on the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church there, who blessed them as “the world’s greatest singer and the greatest seaman of the modern world, the new Ulysses.” After that, Maria began acting like a different woman. Her singing career, which she had treated until now like a religious calling, suddenly seemed unimportant, and she retired from the stage. She allowed herself to be swept into the vortex of Ari’s life—drinking until dawn at Régine’s, attending other people’s opening nights, shopping for new clothes, going to the races, gambling at Monte Carlo.

  “[But] Onassis, a master of the art of pleasing women, was no less a master of the art of crushing them,” wrote Maria’s biographer, Arianna Stassinopoulos. “And there was something in Maria’s way of treating him like a sultan or a god that brought out the despot in him. Underneath the easy sophistication of the cafe society habitué (and not that far below the surface), Onassis had retained all the primitive male impulses of the old-fashioned Greek….

  “[A] 11 the suppressed violence in him came out in the way he treated her, especially in front of his children,” Stassinopoulos continued. “He would walk ahead with them, leaving her behind, and he belittled her constantly: ‘What are you? Nothing. You must have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.’ ”

  One of Maria’s friends, Maggie van Zuylen, tried to comfort her.

  “Of course he loves you,” she said. “That’s why he yells and abuses you and puts you down. If he didn’t love you he would just ignore you and be totally indifferent to you.”

  Ari’s violence and infidelities were not Maria’s only problems. She also had to contend with Ari’s formidable sister Artemis.

  A fragile-looking woman who did not weigh a hundred pounds, Artemis Garofolidis was a tiny dynamo. She was married to a wealthy doctor of orthopedics who spent more time pursuing his favorite hobby, hunting, than he did attending to patients in his office. His long absences were explained by the fact that he and his wife had suffered the loss of their only child, a daughter named Popin, who died of a rare disease at the age of eighteen. Artemis was left to focus her inexhaustible supply of energy on her brother Aristo. She doted on him and made no secret of her contempt for “that opera singer.”

  “They are both big bosses,” she said of Ari and Maria. “Neither one knows how to give in. I do not want my brother to marry Maria. She is not right for him. Her personality is too strong for him. She is not elegant enough for him.”

  The Onassis-Callas affair fascinated the European press. Wherever Ari went, reporters wanted to know: Did he love Callas?

  “Of course, how could I help but be flattered if a woman with the class of Maria Callas fell in love with someone like me?” he told reporters in Venice. “Who wouldn’t?”

  All this was too much for Ari’s wife Tina, who flew off with their children to New York to seek a divorce.

  “She has kidnapped the children and is demanding $20 million ransom,” Ari complained.

  Ari’s Greek sense of honor demanded restitution. While he tried to work out the best possible terms of divorce, Costa Gratsos, his friend since the Argentinean days, took matters into his own hands. Gratsos telephoned reporters on several of New York’s tabloid newspapers, and fed them outrageous—and false—accusations against Tina, Ari’s soon-to-be ex-wife.

  Gratsos told the reporters that Tina Livanos Onassis was a heartless woman and a compulsive materialist who was spending Ari blind. Gratsos would use the same smear tactics against Jackie many years later.

  Like most ne’er-do-well sons, Gratsos had an inflated sense of his own importance, and he loved the company of glamorous stars like Maria Callas. When Ari and Maria visited New York, Gratsos made his apartment available, providing them with the privacy they required. He tried to convince Ari that, while Tina might have been unwilling to put up with his long absences and chronic infidelities, Maria loved him enough to tolerate anything.

  But Gratsos miscalculated Maria’s tolerance for repeated public humiliations. When Maria heard that Jackie Kennedy had been invited for a recuperative cruise on the Christina after Patrick Bouvier’s death, she refused to go along.

  “The watching game was turning deadly serious, and the pain, killing,” wrote Arianna Stassinopoulos. “[Maria] knew that Jackie had been given the Ithaca suite, the suite reserved for special guests, the suite that was Churchill’s, the suite she herself had stayed in. She knew, because she had lived it so many times, t
he routine on the Christina, the times for lunch and dinner, the ritual cocktails on the deck at sunset; she knew the maids who would look after Jackie, the waiters who would wait on Jackie, the chef who would cook for Jackie…. In her private hell, Maria lived their cruise with them. It was at this time that she began to find it impossible to sleep without pills.”

  When Ari flew to Washington to be by Jackie’s side after John Kennedy’s assassination, Maria was apoplectic.

  “Aristotle is obsessed by famous women,” she said. “He was obsessed with me because I was famous. Jackie is even more famous.”

  However, neither Maria nor anyone else could have predicted what the end of her affair with Ari would be like. It dragged on for years, and it resembled the last scene of an opera in which the heroine dies a thousand deaths.

  “TYPICAL JACKIE”

  In the summer of 1967, Jackie accepted an invitation from Ari to visit Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea.

  “That was the year I went to Skorpios with Gianni Agnelli [the Fiat automobile heir],” said a man who was a friend of the Onassis family. “It was August. We came suddenly …; we were cruising down to Greece in Gianni’s boat, pulled up at the island, dropped anchor, and sent a message that we were there.

  “Down came Onassis with his car, and just as he arrived, we saw Jackie waterskiing; she never even stopped to say hello. Later, when she was finished, we all had lunch. In those days, she was extremely friendly, extremely nice to me, and she spoke to Gianni in that whispery voice: ‘Oh, Gianni.’ Typical Jackie.

  “Onassis drove us around in his car; he was just building Skorpios then, and I remember that once he backed up and we nearly went off a cliff. He was sweating, and he wore a lot of cologne. I remember it well: it was August 1967. Jackie, not married, spent the summer on Skorpios, the colonels were in power in Greece, my wife was trying to leave me, and I got back together with her, and we had a good time—it was a magical summer.

  “Christina [Onassis] was insignificant in the scheme of things; in the presence of her father, she was often silent. In those days, in a Greek household, a talkative child was not tolerated, and she was—what?—sixteen then.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent certain that there was another Kennedy on Skorpios that summer as well, either Bobby or Teddy, although I would assume it was Teddy; Bobby was always pulling Onassis’s leg, trying to get money out of him. Onassis didn’t like the Kennedys, but he was a businessman; he got along with them fine. He would have gone to bed with the devil if it meant getting close to power.”

  NINE

  FALLEN IDOL

  Spring–Fall 1968

  “THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS”

  Aristotle Onassis was in Paris in the spring of 1968 when he heard the good news: Robert Kennedy, the man who stood in the way of his marrying Jackie, had taken the plunge back into national politics. Bobby had decided to challenge President Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, the leading anti-Vietnam War candidate, for his party’s presidential nomination.

  “Now the kid’s got other fish to fry,” said Ari.

  America was convulsed by its greatest crisis since the Civil War. The Viet Cong had just launched their Tet offensive, invading the United States Embassy in Saigon, and the streets and campuses of America were exploding in demonstrations.

  Other traumas followed in quick succession: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, setting off massive rioting by blacks in more than one hundred cities. Students took over the president’s office at Columbia University, leaving their own feces as a calling card on his desk. The Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, set up Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., a fifteen-acre campsite between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And on the nightly news, LBJ announced that he was not a candidate for reelection.

  While Bobby huddled with his advisers at Hickory Hill, Ari made his move in Paris. At a cocktail reception in the swank George V Hotel, he launched into a flowery monologue about his lifelong search for the ideal woman. Someone asked him for his opinion of Jacqueline Kennedy.

  Ari’s face lit up. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

  “She is a totally misunderstood woman,” he said. “Perhaps she even misunderstands herself. She’s being held up as a model of propriety, constancy, and so many of those boring American female virtues. She’s now utterly devoid of mystery. She needs a small scandal to bring her alive. A peccadillo, an indiscretion. Something should happen to her to win our fresh compassion. The world loves to pity fallen grandeur.”

  The words struck his listeners as indiscreet. But, as usual, Ari knew what he was doing. He believed that Jackie wanted to marry him as much as he wanted to marry her, but that she was still in bondage to Bobby. Bobby was the sole remaining obstacle to the conclusion of the biggest deal of Ari’s life—marrying Jackie.

  “He needed to make deals,” wrote Peter Evans, another Onassis biographer. “Deals had always been essential to him, in some psychic way he needed them; a deal meant an opponent, an opponent meant confrontation, and confrontation was the source of his strength. He could not live without adversaries, no more than a tree can live without soil.”

  Bobby was the enemy, but he was an enemy Ari did not understand. Why wasn’t Bobby upset when Jackie flew off to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and strolled through the moonlit Mayan ruins with Roswell Gilpatric? Why didn’t it faze Bobby when Jackie invited Lord Harlech for an intimate weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port?

  Ari had not slept with Jackie yet, and being Greek, he could not be sure of her until he did. He was seized by feelings of resentment and jealousy. Were Jackie and Lord Harlech lovers? How about Ros Gilpatric? Was there more to that friendship than met the eye? Who else was Jackie seeing on the sly? What about those rumors of John Warnecke?

  “He was fascinated by scandal,” said Joan Thring, who was Rudolf Nureyev’s personal assistant and was up on all the latest gossip. “I knew that whatever I said was important to him. Winning Jackie meant everything to him. It was the only time I ever sensed vulnerability in the man.”

  It galled Ari that nobody took him seriously as Jackie’s suitor. People could not conceive that the dewy queen of Camelot would want to make love to the toadlike Onassis. Her kisses would never turn him into a prince. The same gossip columnists who wrote about Ros Gilpatric and Lord Harlech hardly noticed when Ari slipped into Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a quiet tête-à-tête, or when he dined with her and Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn at Mikonos, one of his favorite Greek restaurants in New York.

  At one of those dinners, Nureyev leaned over to Jackie, and said in his heavily accented English:

  “Every fact in world must have been printed about you now. To be this public is not good for soul.”

  “Oh, they’re still on the fanciful embellishments,” Jackie said. “The essence is still untouched.”

  Ari intended to change all that. He was feeling quite smug as he left the cocktail reception at the George V Hotel and climbed into the backseat of his limousine next to one of his henchmen, Johnny Meyer, the former Howard Hughes associate, who helped Nigel Neilson with publicity.

  Ari knew that his comments about Jackie’s needing a juicy scandal would be picked up by the wire services, and played back to America, and run in all the newspapers there. As his car headed down the Champs-Ely sees toward his home at 88 Avenue Foch, he turned to Johnny Meyer and said:

  “That should set the cat among the pigeons at Hickory Hill.”

  LITTLE GREEN APPLES

  Ari kept many henchmen like Johnny Meyer on his payroll, but at the critical moments of his life, he turned to his sister Artemis. She was the only person he really trusted. Unlike Merope and Kalliroi, Artemis shared the same mother and father with Aristotle. They had the same genes, the same blood. And in the end, it is always blood that counts to a Greek.

  In May, he telephoned Artemis from the Caribbean and asked her to come
to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where the Christina would be docked.

  “A VIP is coming aboard,” he told her.

  “Who can be so important that I have to drop everything and get on an airplane?” Artemis wanted to know.

  Ari knew that his sister would do whatever he asked of her, and he refused to tell her the identity of his mystery guest.

  “I thought the Christina was going to St. Thomas to pick up Callas,” Artemis recalled. “I was afraid Aristo was going to listen to Costa Gratsos, and ask Callas to marry him. Gratsos and my brother were forever talking about women, and for some reason, Gratsos had taken a strong dislike to Jackie from the start. Maybe Gratsos was jealous that Aristo liked Jackie more than he liked him. Whatever the reason, Gratsos was pushing Callas over Jackie.”

  Like most Greeks, Gratsos saw romantic love as a destructive force. Art’s love of Jackie was dangerous, and Gratsos did his best to turn Art against her.

  “To Onassis’s face, Gratsos described her with a phrase in Greek that is not polite—it is obscene—but which meant that she was poisonous,” said one of Art’s friends. “And he prophesied that [Jackie] would bring bad luck.”

  When Artemis arrived in St. Thomas, she found her brother in a state of acute anxiety. She had never seen him like this before. He was sweating even more profusely than usual. He had ordered the oil painting of Tina Onassis, his former wife and the mother of his children, to be removed from its place of honor over the fireplace in the yacht’s salon. In its place he had hung a large, hand-tinted photograph of his beloved mother, Penelope, who had died when he was six. He had asked all but one of his passengers on the Christina to leave the ship at the previous port of call, St. John. Only Joan Thring remained on board.