by Edward Klein
“I thought that a very big deal must have been in the works,” Thring said. “In the past, no matter how many important matters were on his mind, he had been able to shut off and concentrate on the most trifling thing when he was entertaining aboard the Christina.”
The next day, Art sent a delegation composed of Artemis, Captain Costa Anastassiadis, and the chief engineer of the Christina, Stefanos Daroussos, to the St. Thomas airport to pick up his guest. None of them was told in advance whom they were meeting. Artemis said a silent little prayer as the door of the first-class section swung open.
Out stepped Jackie, looking glorious in a brown Valentino dress. Her large sunglasses were pushed up into her hair to keep it from being blown by the wind. Artemis was so thrilled that she rushed forward in the busy terminal, threw her arms around Jackie, and kissed her on both cheeks. Jackie would make a far better wife for her brother than Maria Callas.
“As soon as Jackie came on board,” Captain Anastassiadis said, “the crew started speculating that something would happen. A visit by a lone woman was not usual.”
“For Chrissake, stick close,” Ari told Joan Thring after they had weighed anchor and were out at sea. “Don’t leave her side during the day. I don’t want any sonofabitches getting any of those Peeping Tom pictures of just the two of us, making it look like we’re horsing around alone out here.”
Late one evening after dinner, Ari asked Jackie to join him for a nightcap on the deck. They stood in silence for several minutes, peering up at the vast shower of stars that spilled into the black expanse of the sea. Jackie always traveled with a portable record player and a collection of her favorite tunes, and the voice of O. C. Smith could be heard coming from the yacht’s salon. He was singing “Little Green Apples.”
And she reached out an’ takes my hand;
Squeezes it, says “How you feel-in’, Hon?”
And I look a-cross at smiling lips
That warm my heart and see my morning sun….
The air was warm and clear. For a change, Ari was not fouling it with one of his Cuban cigars. As he later confided to Costa Gratsos, he did not want to spoil the romantic moment. He recalled that he was feeling as nervous as a schoolboy about to steal his first kiss.
“Jackie,” he said, “the time has come for us to discuss plans for marriage.”
And if that’s not lov-in’ me, then all I’ve got to say:
God did-n’t make Little Green Apples
And it don’t rain in In-dian-ap-lis
In the sum-mer time.
“Oh, Telis,” Jackie said, using her pet name for Ari, short for Aristotelis, the Greek form of his name.
But that was all she said. She left the rest up to him.
“He made it clear to her,” wrote his biographer, Frank Brady, “that if they married, she would be free to go wherever and whenever she pleased—with him or without him—and that she would enjoy the position of being among the richest women in the world.”
Ari was deliberately drawing an equation between money and peace of mind. He was offering Jackie the chance to recapture the life she had with Jack Kennedy, a life with all the power and the glory.
“Jackie, like many Bouviers, especially her father and grandfather, [was] highly susceptible to beauty, luxury, and great wealth,” wrote her first cousin John H. Davis. “Who could put more beauty, luxury, and wealth into her life than Aristotle Onassis? A Greek island of her own. Apartments in all the capitals of Europe. One of the most luxurious yachts in the world. A fortune that made the money President Kennedy had left her seem modest in comparison.”
Jackie knew that any woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the notorious Golden Greek, would be accused of doing it solely for the money. Even she would not escape the sting of that criticism. Some people would call her venal; others would accuse her of surrendering her integrity.
But Jackie believed she could handle it. Let them carp. She knew the truth. And the truth was that Ari’s money was only part of the overall picture.
“She didn’t need just money,” said Jackie’s friend Vivian Crespi. “She needed to escape for sanity. I went out to a Martha Graham performance with her one night. Some strange woman came up to her and said Jackie killed her husband. It was ghastly, really a horrible way to live, putting up with this every day.”
“She told me in the late spring, before she married, that she felt she could really count on Onassis to be there for her children,” said Roswell Gilpatric. “That he was extremely protective of her, that he truly worried about her well-being. He could afford to build the buffers she then needed to ensure some degree of privacy from the public eye.”
For Jackie, feelings of attraction, affection, and sexual desire were roused when her emotional needs were fulfilled. This was probably more true of Jackie than it was of most women. After Dallas, she had an urgent need to feel safe.
“Onassis roamed the seas of the earth, a lord unto himself,” said Pamela Harriman, who knew a thing or two about why women were attracted to men. “Imagine being able to slip into that, away from the real world after so much sadness.”
But did Jackie love Ari?
The answer to that question depended in large part on whether Ari fulfilled another of Jackie’s needs. Though no one could explain it, including Jackie herself, she had a compelling need to surrender herself to a man. William Manchester had noted this when he visited her in Hyannis Port, and Jackie had automatically handed him the keys to her convertible. Men drive; women are driven. That was the logic of things to her.
No man since Jack had made as much sense to Jackie as Ari. Other people, including her own mother, might find Ari’s features coarse and gangsterish, and wonder how Jackie could possibly sleep with such a hideous man. But Jackie saw Ari through her own prism. He appeared to her as a strong and masterful man. She had been searching since Jack’s death for a man who could rescue her from her feelings of helplessness. In Ari, she had finally found the man. By affiliating herself with Ari, she would regain all her lost power.
If that was love, then Jacqueline Kennedy loved Aristotle Onassis.
“A FAMILY WEAKNESS”
Jackie could hardly wait to call Bobby on the Christina’s ship-to-shore radio the next morning and tell him about Ari’s proposal of marriage.
“You’re not serious,” Bobby said.
For a stunning moment, Jackie did not know what to say.
“I’ve agreed to marry Ari,” she said at last. Then she added: “In principle.”
“You must be joking,” Bobby said.
“We’ll discuss it when I get back,” Jackie said.
On the long flight back to New York, Jackie had time to consider the consequences of her decision. If she married Ari, a divorced man, she ran the risk of being excommunicated from the Catholic Church. She would tarnish the Kennedy image and damage Bobby’s chances for the presidential nomination. And she would be asking an awful lot of Caroline and John, who were now eleven and eight years old.
“During the few times they met, Caroline was at best sullen and reserved toward Onassis, and on some occasions overtly hostile,” wrote Frank Brady. “John was more open and friendly toward Onassis, but the question of whether he could ever consider this sixty-two-year-old man his father was one that disturbed Jackie. Each time Onassis met the children, he brought gifts and toys for them, but the role he seemed to be developing with them was less paternal than that of a rich uncle or kindly grandfather.”
Once back in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, Jackie started to hear from all the people who had heard from Bobby. It was obvious that Ethel, Joan, and Ted had compared notes, because they used the same words in their effort to argue her out of marrying Ari:
“You’ll destroy everything that Jack worked for before he was murdered.”
Her financial guru, Andre Meyer, got into the act. Meyer had done business with Ari, and he knew the man’s fundamental character.
“He’s not good enough for you, Ja
ckie,” Meyer said. “If you marry Onassis, you will topple from your position at the pinnacle of society.”
Then it was Robert McNamara on the phone. He believed that Onassis was beneath contempt. His message: “Don’t marry him!”
Truman Capote filled her in on Lee’s reaction.
“How could she do this to me!” Lee had screamed at Truman over the phone. “How COULD she! How could this HAPPEN!”
By the time Bobby arrived at Jackie’s apartment, her resolve had begun to crumble. There was something about her relationship with Ari that always seemed to bring out the guilt in Jackie. This had happened when she came back from her first extended trip on the Christina in 1963. Jack had sensed her guilt, and got her to agree to accompany him on the trip to Texas. Now, Bobby played the same guilt card.
According to what he and Jackie told their friends later, their exchange was less like a conversation than an interrogation.
“Why Onassis?” Bobby asked. “Can you give me one good reason why him out of all the men you have to choose from?”
“You know I’ve always talked about going to the Mediterranean to stay,” Jackie answered. “Ari is there. The moment is there.”
“I guess he’s a family weakness,” Bobby said, alluding to Lee’s earlier liaison with Ari. “He is a complete rogue on a grand scale.”
Jackie protested. Bobby didn’t know Ari. He was a kind and generous man. He was wonderful with her children.
“Even if that’s true,” Bobby said, “what’s the big rush?”
“Who said there was a rush?” Jackie said.
“Couldn’t you wait at least until after the election before making any public announcement about your future plans?” Bobby asked.
“Of course I can,” Jackie said. “It’s just something I have in mind.”
“Good,” said Bobby. “Then let it wait. Just let it wait.”
“All right,” Jackie said. “I’ll just let it wait.”
“And how about coming out of your retirement from public life to campaign for me?” Bobby asked.
“Sure, Bobby,” Jackie said. “I’ll go wherever you want.”
“THE LAST LINK”
Shortly after ten o’clock on the morning of June 6, 1968, Ari received word in London that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Ari picked up the phone and called Costa Gratsos in New York.
“She’s free of the Kennedys,” Ari said. “The last link just broke.”
“Ari had always taken what he wanted,” recalled Gratsos, “and for the first time in his life he had come up against a younger man who was as tough, competitive, and determined as he was. And now that man was dead.”
But Ari was a Greek, and Greeks did not believe in happy endings.
“Another assassination might just double their [the Kennedys’] right of veto over Jackie’s life,” he said.
There was no time to lose. Ari flew to Los Angeles to comfort Jackie, then flew back with her to New York to attend Robert Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
“I called out her name and put out my hand,” said Lady Bird Johnson of her encounter with Jackie at the conclusion of the mass at St. Patrick’s. “She looked at me as if from a great distance, as though I were an apparition.”
THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD HAVE STOPPED HER
The funeral train that carried Bobby’s remains from New York to Washington was packed with eleven hundred invited guests. Many of them got drunk during the eight-hour movable Irish wake. Only a select few were allowed into the hushed precincts of Jackie’s private Pullman car. They went there to give her hand a gentle pat and say a few words of condolence. But they came away profoundly disturbed by the person they met.
Jackie was not the same brave young woman who had impressed the world with her flawless performance after the death of President Kennedy. She had lost her grip on reality. She rambled on incoherently, sounding as though she thought she was still the First Lady. She seemed unsure who was going to be buried today—Bobby or Jack.
Bobby’s death had deranged her. She blamed herself for persuading Bobby to stay in public life and run for office. It was her idea that he put himself in harm’s way. It was her fault that they had killed him.
One of the guests on the train, Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press secretary, recalled a conversation he had with Jackie at the Los Angeles hospital where Bobby died. Jackie could talk of nothing but death.
“The Church is … at its best only at the time of death,” Jackie told him. “The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. But the Catholic Church understands death. I’ll tell you who else understands death are the black churches. I remember at the funeral of Martin Luther King. I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time, and they’re ready for it… in the way in which a good Catholic is…. We know death…. As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
Night had fallen by the time the funeral train arrived in Washington. The mourners, carrying twinkling candles, followed the coffin into Arlington National Cemetery.
“The cemetery itself was dark and shadowed,” wrote the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. “The pallbearers, not sure where to place the coffin, walked on uncertainly in the night.”
At the graveside, the priest picked up a handful of earth and began saying the prayers. A few minutes later, the sound of the earth striking the lid of Bobby’s coffin snapped Jackie out of her delusional state. Suddenly she was no longer confused about whose corpse was in the coffin. It was the body of the one she had truly cared for. The one she had loved. It was Bobby. His death made her more angry than sad.
“If America ever had a claim on her after Jack’s death,” wrote Willi Frischauer, a friend of Aristotle Onassis’s, “that claim was now forfeited. If she ever had any doubt or obligation to consider the impact of her action on the political prospects of the Kennedys, they were resolved by the shots that ended Bobby’s life. For her, escape was the only way out. Jackie was shedding the Kennedy shackles … her decision to marry Onassis was made at the grave of Robert F. Kennedy.”
SOME KIND OF STATEMENT
On the morning of October 15, 1968, Pierre Salinger, the master political spin doctor who had served as JFK’s press secretary, received a call in his Washington office from Steve Smith.
“I need to see you right away,” Smith told Salinger.
Smart and ruthless, Smith was the Kennedy son-in-law who had been tapped to run the family business after Joe Kennedy’s stroke. When Smith whistled, the Kennedys and their hangers-on came running. Salinger was on the next plane to New York City.
“Guess what’s happened?” Smith said as Salinger walked through his door. “Jackie’s going to marry Onassis.”
He tossed a copy of that day’s Boston Herald-Traveler on the desk in front of Salinger. There was a story on the front page reporting that John Kennedy’s widow planned to marry Aristotle Onassis.
“We have to figure out some kind of a statement for the family to put out,” Smith said.
Salinger lit up one of his famous cigars.
“Have you got any idea of what you want to say?” he asked.
“How about, ‘Oh shit!’ “ Smith said.
THE PERFECT MATCH
That very same day in Greece, Ari sent word to his children, Alexander and Christina, to meet him for dinner at the home of his sister Artemis. Her seaside villa in Glyfada was located on Vassileos Georgiou, a lovely street shaded by palm trees. The old house had large, well-proportioned rooms filled with shining new reproduction Napoleonic furniture in mahogany and gilt. An elegantly carved wooden staircase led to a set of airy bedrooms on the second floor. One of those rooms was now occupied by Jackie Kennedy.
Shortly after Alexander and Christina arrived, Artemis announced dinner, and Jackie appeared on the stairs wearing a simple sheath dress and a single stra
nd of pearls. She joined the family in the dining room, whose walls were covered with old-master-style oil paintings in ornate gold frames. Alexander and Christina, who were just emerging from their teens, avoided looking at Jackie as they took their places at the long table. Each place was set with expensive silver, along with hand-painted china that matched the serving dishes that Panagotitis the butler used to dole out Artemis’s specialty, meatballs with chili.
Ari looked across the table at Christina. There was not a hint of love or kindness in his eyes. He was perpetually upset with his daughter. He did not like her crazy moods. She was addicted to uppers and downers, and she suffered from bouts of suicidal depression. Ari did not like to watch Christina eat. It made him extremely nervous. She consumed vast amounts of chocolate and Coca-Cola, and at times ballooned to more than two hundred pounds. Sometimes Ari could not suppress his disgust, and he ranted and raved at his daughter in front of everyone in the house.
Jacqueline, age twelve (right), and Lee with their mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, attend a summer wedding in East Hampton, Long Island. Jackie may have loved her father more, but she spent her life trying to please her mother. (Morgan Collection/Archive Photos)
Jackie, age eighteen, with her father, John Vernou Bouvier 111. As Jackie’s greatest mentor in the arts of life, “Blackjack” taught her that women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men. (Morgan Collection/Archive Photos)
Less than a month after the assassination of John Kennedy, Jackie stands in the doorway of the Harriman house, her temporary residence in Georgetown, and bids goodbye to visitors Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel. The relationship between Jackie and Bobby was passionate but chaste. (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)
