Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  Ari suggested that Jackie use the Spanish architect Julio Fuentes to help her with the project. Fuentes was already drawing up plans for a gigantic villa that Ari was thinking of building on the crest of the island. Ari had in mind something like the Trianon at Versailles, or a kind of domesticated Acropolis, though Jackie vowed that she would never let him build such a house there.

  Instead of Fuentes, however, Jackie summoned the American decorator Billy Baldwin, who had done residences for her and Bunny Mellon.

  “This house I want to be a total surprise,” Ari told Baldwin shortly after he arrived. “I trust you and I trust Jackie, and I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  But as Baldwin soon discovered, that was not the way things worked in a Greek marriage.

  “Onassis had made me responsible for the island,” said Stefanos Daroussos, “and I was expected to know down to the last penny exactly what was being spent. Jackie was no exception. She could not spend Onassis’s money without his prior knowledge and approval. She needed to discuss with him all her decorating and landscaping ideas. Then I would get orders directly from Onassis, not from her. Everything came from him. Everything had to be in writing, even Jackie’s garden plan.”

  Before long, Ari grew fed up with Billy Baldwin’s exorbitant fees, and Jackie had to let him go. She turned to the interior designer Renzo Mongiardino, who had done Lee’s spectacular New York apartment. But Mongiardino’s tastes were too grand for Jackie, who wanted the Pink House to be a simple cottage. In exasperation, she called Bunny Mellon for help. Bunny dispatched her own private decorator, Paul Leonard, to Skorpios to replace Mongiardino.

  “I went there and helped her pull this cottage together,” Leonard said. “One day, we were sitting there, and she looked out the window and said, ‘Look at all those snapdragons. They shouldn’t be on this island. It looks like a Burpee’s catalogue.’

  “She sounded just like Mrs. Mellon,” Leonard continued. “I recalled that Mrs. Mellon had once written, Too much should not be explained about a garden. Its greatest reality is not a reality, for a garden, hovering always in a state of becoming, sums up its own past and its future.’ Jackie had the same taste as Mrs. Mellon, so I knew exactly what she wanted. Nothing should be noticed.”

  Jackie intended to bring unity and order to Skorpios. She tackled the Pink House and the landscaping with the same zeal that she had brought to the restoration of the White House and Lafayette Square.

  “Onassis had made Skorpios a garden of showy tropical plants,” Niki Goulandris said. “The head gardener on Skorpios had planted cultivated roses at Ari’s request. He had to be dealt with discreetly, so as not to hurt his feelings. Jackie and I were trying to repair and restore Skorpios to its original, natural state. Ari was not thrilled, but he didn’t interfere.

  “Jackie and I drew up plans,” Niki continued. “She dedicated much of her time during the first couple of years of her marriage to this project. We visited nurseries specializing in Greek plants and trees. We had hundreds of plants and shrubs, and thousands of fully grown trees hauled by trailer truck to Nydri, the small town across the bay, then shipped on barges to Skorpios. We landscaped the Pink House, the Hill House, and up the hill from the harbor. Jackie wanted to make it a Greek island again.”

  THE JOURNEY TO ITHACA

  In the early summer, Niki Goulandris fell ill, and had to go to the hospital. While she was recuperating, she received a letter from Jackie about her life on Skorpios. Written on the stationery of the Christina, the letter provided a unique glimpse of Jackie’s state of almost child-like contentment in the second year of her marriage to Ari. She wrote of the delight she took in planning her garden and watching it slowly mature.

  “I can’t wait to talk to you about everything. I won’t drag you around and tire you out—but how wonderful to have started a garden—and now to watch it develop each year like a child….”

  After Niki recovered from her illness, she and her husband joined Alexis Miotis, the director of the Greek National Theater, for a cruise of the Greek islands on board the Christina. Niki and Alexis took great pleasure in introducing Jackie to Greece. This was not the modern Greece of pollution and tourists, but the ancient Greece of poetry, and philosophy, and art.

  They visited Delphi, the temple of the legendary oracle. They went to mass at Corfu’s St. Francis Church. They searched for antiques and old books on Greek art. And they attended plays at Epidaurus, with its ancient Greek stage dating back to the fourth century B.C.

  In Jackie’s mind, Greece acquired some of the mythic attributes of Camelot. It had more to do with legend, saga, and story than with politics and history. In many ways, Jackie admired a past that had never existed. But it did not seem to matter.

  “In the beginning,” recalled Miotis, “Jackie and Ari seemed harmonious. Jackie is a sweet person, very noble. Her behavior sets a standard for those around her. Obviously many people thought the marriage a sham, but I saw nothing wrong with it.

  “Ari had a sense of glory about everything,” Miotis continued. “He paid a good deal of attention to the ‘glorious’ people. He admired Jackie because she was First Lady, not only in the White House but First Lady of the land. Ari wanted to be Emperor of the Seas, and wanted a Cleopatra to sit by his side.

  “For Jackie, it was his charm combined with his money. He had money, yes, but he also had charisma. He was a domineering personality. He was the one man she could marry who would never become Mr. Jackie Kennedy.”

  For her part, Niki was impressed by how well Ari got along with ten-year-old John.

  “Ari took him on his knee and explained the Greek myths to him,” Niki said. “Especially the myth of Daedalus. He told John how Daedalus was a fabulously cunning artisan, and made a pair of wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus. And Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions, and flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, and he fell to his death in the sea. And Ari told John, ‘Never go beyond the prudent mean, or the gods will destroy you.’ ”

  Jackie listened to Ari’s stories of the Greek myths, and he became mixed up in her mind with her mythological view of John Kennedy, a man who had paid with his life for defying fate.

  She wrote about all this in a letter to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had served in the Kennedy White House as the unofficial historian of the New Frontier.

  There is a conflict in the hearts and minds of the Greeks. Greeks have esteem and respect for the gods; yet the Greek was the first to write and proclaim that Man was the measure of all things. This conflict with the gods is the essence of the Greek tragedy, and a key to the Greek character.

  On the piano in the salon of the Christina, there was a huge red leather-bound book that Jackie had given to Ari as a present.

  “In her own handwriting, Jackie had filled the book with English translations from Homer’s Odyssey, and she had illustrated it in the margins with her own photos of Ari,” Niki Goulandris said. “Part of Jackie’s fascination with Ari was her search for a contemporary Greek hero, and this can be seen in her photos, particularly one of Ari on the bow of the boat with wind blowing in his hair. An image of the contemporary Ulysses.”

  One day during the cruise, Ari was standing on the bow of the Christina, looking very much like the photo in Jackie’s leather-bound book.

  “There, there!” he suddenly shouted. “You can see it! Ithaca!”

  Jackie had just finished reading Homer’s description of Ithaca—the fountains of Arethusa, the cave of the Naiads, the stalls of the swineherd Eumaeus, the orchard of Laertes. She was all fired up when the Christina weighed anchor and a launch took them ashore. Ari had arranged for a guide to give them a tour of the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann, the brilliant nineteenth-century German archaeologist, who had also discovered the remains of the Homeric cities of Troy and Mycenae.

  Jackie was deeply moved by Schliemann’s story, especially by how he had overcome an impoverished boyhood and poor health to ma
ster thirteen languages and restore to the world the glories of a heroic civilization. The ruins of Ithaca were like a giant stage set, and the place appealed to the art director in Jackie.

  During a break in their tour, Jackie showed Ari a book of modern Greek poetry that had been given to her by Niki Goulandris. She especially liked C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca.”

  When you start on your journey to Ithaca,

  then pray that the road is long,

  full of adventure, full of knowledge….

  That the summer mornings are many,

  that you will enter ports seen for the first time

  with such pleasure, with such joy! …

  Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.

  To arrive there is your ultimate goal.

  But do not hurry the voyage at all.

  It is better to let it last for long years….

  One of the Christina’s passengers overheard the following exchange between Ari and Jackie:

  “What does it mean?” asked Ari, who did not go in much for poetry.

  “It means that our dreams and goals are never completely realized,” said Jackie. “They are always there before our eyes, but always just slightly out of reach. And so, as we strive to fulfill our vision, we must make the most of every living moment.”

  “Indeed we should, my lady,” Ari said. “You and I are in complete accord.”

  THE CABAL

  As soon as they returned from Ithaca, however, Jackie began to pack her bags and prepare to leave for New York.

  “Caroline and John need me to help them get ready for the new school year,” she explained to Ari.

  “Your husband needs you, too,” he said.

  “I know you do, Telis,” she said. “But gosh, I’ll only be gone a month.”

  After she was gone, Ari phoned his old friend Costa Gratsos.

  “Aristo!” Gratsos said. “Where are you? What’s up?”

  “I’m in Athens,” Ari said. “Alone. I just put Jackie on a plane to New York.”

  Gratsos knew how upset Ari became every time Jackie left Greece. “Shit on that!” Gratsos said. “Excuse me for saying so, but Jackie’s never around any more.”

  “Don’t call her Jackie,” Ari said sharply. “Call her Mrs. Jacqueline, or Mrs. Onassis. Show some respect!”

  “Okay, Mrs. Jacqueline,” Gratsos said. “But still, I say a wife’s place is beside her husband.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ari lied.

  “Shit on that!” Gratsos repeated.

  “Look,” Ari said, “I’m free. I want to get the hell out of here. Let’s go to Paris and have some fun.”

  Ari was only dimly aware of the connection between Jackie’s absences and his bad moods. Introspection was not one of his strong points, and it did not occur to him that whenever a woman withdrew from him, either physically or emotionally, he suffered the pangs of abandonment that he had felt when he lost his mother.

  He knew that he had no right to be annoyed with Jackie. After all, hadn’t he said early in their marriage that they were both free to do exactly as they pleased? However, Ari was approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, and as he slowed down, he found that he valued the companionship of a wife more than before. The freedom to do as one pleased, he concluded, should apply to him, not to Jackie. Like most Greek husbands, he lived by a double standard.

  “He was a Greek—that says it all, really—a Greek seaman who’d be home for a short while, then go away all over the world, then expect his wife and children to be waiting for him at home whenever he got back,” said Costa Gratsos’s executive secretary, Lynn Alpha Smith. “There was no way Jackie could give him that continuity. Nor did she understand his world. She was Catholic, Anglo-Saxon. He was an Eastern Orthodox, Mediterranean, and Jackie just didn’t understand.”

  As far as Ari was concerned, only three women had ever completely understood him: his sainted mother Penelope, his sister Artemis, and Maria Callas. Of course, that was his narcissism and self-pity talking. But when he expressed this opinion to his friends, they were quick to agree.

  It was all a matter of being Greek, they said. To be Greek, you had to grow up in Greece, speak the language, go to Greek schools, attend Orthodox services, eat Greek food, breathe the sun and air of Greece. You did not become Greek by reading books and visiting ancient ruins!

  Ari was aware that, although his marriage was immensely popular among ordinary Greeks, none of his friends liked Jackie. They had banded together in a loose sort of cabal that had no use for Jackie. This cabal was composed of a half dozen people: Ari’s children, Alexander and Christina, who hated Jackie with a passion; Costa Gratsos, who was Christina’s honorary uncle, and had stayed close to Maria Callas after her breakup with Ari; Johnny Meyer; Maggie van Zuylen, a socialite who had introduced Maria to Ari; and Willi Frischauer, Ari’s authorized biographer, who believed that Jackie’s identity—and that of her children—had more to do with her dead husband than with her living spouse.

  “JFK’s ghost will always cast a dark shadow over your marriage,” Frischauer warned Ari.

  The members of the cabal seized every opportunity to bring up the subject of Maria Callas. She was Greek, they said. She would never leave Ari.

  As the society columnist Taki wrote: “Gratsos loved Maria, stuck by her until the end, and, more important, told Ari that Jackie K. O. was a woman who not only would ruin his life, but would bring him bad luck.”

  Maggie van Zuylen played an important part in this drama, as well. She let Ari know that Maria was still madly in love with him, sincerely in love with him, unlike you-know-who. Maria was waiting for him to return to her.

  “She had a mad passion for him,” Maggie said. “They were like two wild beasts together. They got along well, but in the end she wasn’t glamorous enough for him. Jackie Kennedy was glamorous. Maria learned of the marriage not from Onassis but by reading about it in the newspapers, like everybody else. She was totally devastated. It was dreadful, awful. She was so frightfully broken up, so disappointed, so profoundly hurt.”

  “Not Paris,” Gratsos said in reply to Ari’s suggestion that they go off and have some fun together. “I’ve got a better idea.”

  “What’s that?” Ari asked.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Gratsos said. “Maria is on her way back to Greece.”

  Maria had been invited to Greece by Perry Embiricos, the scion of a prominent Greek shipping family. A confirmed bachelor in his fifties, whose passion was music, Perry had asked Maria to spend some time on Tragonisi, his private island in the Aegean. He had also invited Pier Paolo Pasolini, the notorious Italian homosexual writer and film director, who had directed Maria in the film version of Medea; Nadia Standoff, Maria’s half-American, half-Bulgarian private secretary and best friend; and Costa Gratsos and his wife Anastasia.

  “Why don’t you join us on Tragonisi?” Gratsos said to Ari. “Saturday is the Feast of the Holy Virgin. It’s Maria’s name day. You’re allowed to give her a kiss.”

  On Saturday morning, August 15, Ari slipped a pair of antique diamond earrings into his pocket, climbed aboard an Olympic Airways helicopter, and took off for Tragonisi, which was located just south of Euboea, one of the largest islands of Greece.

  From the air, Ari could see the wooden drop bridge at Chalkis, the capital of Euboea; the bridge spanned the narrow Euripos channel. Legend had it that in 322 B.C. Aristotle drowned himself in the Euripos because he could not explain the enigma of how its current changed direction from north-south to south-north as many as fourteen times a day.

  A moment later, Ari spotted Perry Embiricos’s marvelous gardens on Tragonisi.

  The helicopter landed on the beach, and Ari got out. Maria was a hundred yards away, under a big beach umbrella with Djedda, the poodle Ari had given her. Her hard peasant skin had turned nut brown under the Aegean sun, and her black hair was pulled back in a sleek bun.

  She looked up, and saw Ari coming toward her.

  CHIPPED INTO STO
NE

  It was not the first time that Ari and Maria had met since his marriage to Jackie. Back in December 1968, shortly after Ari had celebrated his first Christmas with Jackie, he flew to Paris, where he dined with Maria at Maxim’s, and then lunched with her the next day at Maggie van Zuylen’s home. The face-to-face meetings between the two former lovers attracted the attention of the press, and spawned the first generation of rumors that Ari’s marriage to Jackie was on the rocks.

  However, these encounters were brief, and not the romantic trysts they appeared to be. In fact, they were about business. Ari was still handling some of Maria’s financial affairs, as he was those of Lee Radziwill, and he needed to talk to Maria about her investments. In addition, he and the opera singer had to discuss business arrangements that had been left unresolved from their joint lawsuit against Panaghis Vergottis, an old friend with whom they had had a bitter falling out.

  Despite rumors of a divorce, Costa Gratsos and the other members of the anti-Jackie cabal knew that Ari was still madly in love with his American wife. There was nothing they could do about it but bide their time. Their patience was rewarded when all the letters that Jackie had written to her former escort Roswell Gilpatric, the New Frontiersman, were stolen from his office safe, and published. One letter in particular, which Jackie had written from the Christina during her honeymoon, caught everybody’s attention.

  Dearest Ros

  I would have told you before I left—but then everything happened so much more quickly than I’d planned. I saw somewhere what you had said and I was very touched—dear Ros—I hope you know all you were and are and will ever be to me—

  With my love,

  Jackie

  The day after the letter was published, Gilpatric’s third wife, Madeline, filed separation papers, leaving the impression that she, for one, suspected her husband had committed adultery with Jackie. Shortly thereafter, sensational stories began to appear in the press offering readers the inside scoop on Onassis’s private reaction to the Gilpatric affair.