Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  It was said that Jackie’s letter was a blow to Ari’s Greek manhood, and that he felt his American wife had emasculated him. He had suffered the very thing he feared the most—social humiliation. The whole world was laughing at him behind his back.

  The stories had the ring of truth. And they were given added credibility by Ari’s own bitter words, which ran between quotation marks in all the newspapers.

  “My God, what a fool I have made of myself,” he was quoted as saying. “What a fool. I’m afraid my wife is a calculating woman, cold-hearted and shallow.”

  Or another quote: “This woman is a bore. Why didn’t I see that before I married her?”

  Or yet another: “She is always reading.”

  There was only one problem with the press coverage of the Gilpatric affair. Through it all, Ari did not speak to a single reporter. Nor, for that matter, did he authorize his public relations man, Nigel Neilson, to issue any statements, on or off the record, on his behalf. Whatever Ari had to say, he said in private to Jackie, and of course no one but the two of them knew what that was. The entire press campaign—quotes and all—was the invention of Gratsos and the cabal.

  Willi Frischauer, Ari’s biographer, portrayed Jackie as a woman who did not know when to leave well enough alone. She found her husband’s taste to be vulgar, and tried to get rid of the whale-scrotum upholstery and the Vertez murals on the Christina. She was dissatisfied with her surroundings, so she kept her homes in a constant state of upheaval.

  “The syndrome seemed almost pathological,” Frischauer said. “Find a place, rent it, buy it, decorate it, then leave it. Find another place, et cetera.”

  But it was Costa Gratsos who inflicted the most damage on Jackie’s reputation.

  “Gratsos had the bad habit of saying strange things about people just for the fun of it,” Stelio Papadimitriou said. “It was a way of getting people to pay him attention and respect.”

  In his talks with reporters, Gratsos sought to create an image of Jackie as a selfish ingrate.

  “[Ari] was very generous with Jackie’s children,” Gratsos said. “He bought John-John a speedboat and Caroline a sailboat for use at Skorpios. He bought John-John a jukebox and a mini jeep to ride around the island. He gave them Shetland pomes.

  “But beyond presents, he tried to give himself, to be with them,” Gratsos continued. “He attended their school plays in New York, and went out to Jackie’s place in New Jersey to watch them ride. And the truth is, Ari hated it there. He didn’t care for horses at all. But he’d go out anyway, when he was in New York, and most of the time he’d just stand around. He was always complaining that the mud and the horse dung ruined his shoes and pants.

  “Once when he complained, Jackie told him off. ‘You’re so badly dressed, what difference does it make?’ she said.”

  Costa Gratsos provided the river of sludge that spilled from the pages of the first book-length examination of the Onassis marriage. This book, which set the tone for dozens of others that were to come, was written by Fred Sparks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who seemed to have forgotten everything he had ever learned about responsible journalism. In The $20 Million Honeymoon: Jackie and Ari’s First Year, Sparks alleged that Ari managed to spend a mind-boggling $20 million during the first year of marriage, the great bulk of it on things for Jackie.

  Since most people assumed that Jackie had married the aging, gnomelike shipping tycoon for his money, they were ready to accept almost anything that Sparks said.

  “Probably Jackie is now spending more on herself than any other woman in the world,” Sparks wrote, “and that includes such extravagant ladies as the wife of the Shah of Persia, Mrs. William Paley, and Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband, Richard Burton, recently said: ‘Liz can spend $1,000 a minute, and I’m not joking.’ ”

  But Sparks’s $20 million figure (the equivalent in today’s money of $120 million a year) was grossly misleading. The fact was that Ari’s basic expenses—for his offices around the world, his far-flung residences, his yacht, his several hundred employees, and his own lavish lifestyle—did not change substantially after he married Jackie. At most, Jackie’s upkeep may have added a million or two to his annual budget—at a time when financial publications estimated that his yearly income from shipping alone was $50 million.

  Jackie herself did not help matters when she joked about a pair of fabulously expensive earrings that Ari had given her for her fortieth birthday. The earrings represented the earth and the moon joined by a miniature Apollo 11 spaceship.

  “Ari was actually quite apologetic about them,” she told Greek actress Katina Paxinou. “He felt they were such trifles. But he promised me that, if I’m good, next year he’ll give me the moon itself.”

  Her self-mocking humor was lost on most people. Even The New York Times seemed to prefer the pathological Jackie to the real one. In a review of Sparks’s book, the Times portrayed Jackie as an “emotionally malnourished” woman whose slow-motion nervous breakdown during perimenopause took the form of shopping.

  Jackie’s reputation as a compulsive shopper was being chipped into stone.

  AN EVEN DOZEN

  John Fairchild, the editor of Women’s Wear Daily, and the reigning arbiter of style and fashion, dubbed Onassis “Daddy O” in recognition of his sugar-daddy status. Jackie became known forever more as “Jackie O,” a nickname that, among other things, was an allusion to the sex-slave heroine of the sadomasochistic French novel The Story of O. But even as the world’s imagination was being inflamed by tales of Jackie’s orgiastic shopping, Ari happily continued to indulge his wife’s fancy.

  One day he took her to the exclusive Park Avenue boutique owned by Hélène Arpels, an international fashion plate and the wife of the proprietor of Van Cleef & Arpels. Hélène had known Jackie for more than twenty years, and had been advising her on her wardrobe since before she married John Kennedy.

  Hélène was waiting at the door when Jackie arrived with Ari. Her shop was decorated with tasteful Chinese furniture. A voluptuous antique Chinese rug, owned by Hélène’s partner, Andre Azria, was laid on the wall-to-wall blue carpeting. Three Chinese salesgirls, hands clasped demurely at their waists, looked on as Madame Arpels bussed her friends French-style on both cheeks.

  “I love your shoes,” Jackie said as she looked around.

  Everything in the shop was designed by Hélène herself. Each pair of shoes cost several hundred dollars.

  “I’m glad you like them,” Hélène said.

  “Do you have something in my size?” Jackie asked. “Preferably low heels.”

  “I knew Jackie’s taste very well,” Hélène told the author of this book. “I had gone with her many times in Paris to the House of Givenchy. I helped her choose things. It was I who had lent her the jewels that she had worn in 1961 when she and President Kennedy visited de Gaulle at the Elysee Palace.

  “Despite what the newspapers said about Jackie,” Hélène continued, “I knew from first-hand experience that she was not a compulsive shopper. She was not extravagant, not at all like the acquisitive monster portrayed in the press. Yes, she liked to have money, but believe me, she was not a big spender. A good deal of what she bought, she sent back to the stores. Many of those stories about her spending came from Costa Gratsos. Ari’s Greek associates didn’t like Jackie. They believed she had married Ari for his money, and they resented it.”

  One of the salesgirls helped Jackie try on a pair of low-heeled shoes.

  “Hélène,” Ari said, “I like these better.” He was holding a shoe with a very high heel. “A woman is exciting in high heels,” he said.

  “But I would prefer to have low heels,” Jackie said. “I’m tall enough as it is.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Ari said to Hélène. “Make it an even dozen. Give her six pair of low heels and six pair of high heels.”

  NO HOLDS BARRED

  No matter how hard he tried, however, Ari could not remain emotionally unaffected by the press’s pict
ure of him as a hapless victim of his own wife. Beneath his calloused exterior, there was a delicate personality that bruised easily. He believed that his mystique—not to mention his success in business—depended on his image of potency. He could not afford to look like a fool. And so he grew determined to show the world once and for all that he was the master of his fate.

  In May, Henri Pessar, a French journalist who specialized in Ari-watching, reported that Ari spent four successive evenings at Maria Callas’s apartment on Avenue George Mandel. Ari was seen leaving between twelve-thirty and one A.M. each night. On the evening of May 21, Ari tipped off the press that he and Maria would be at Maxim’s with Maggie van Zuylen. The photograph of the radiant couple with their friend was flashed around the world.

  When Jackie saw the photo in the New York Post, she phoned Ari and tearfully informed him that she was leaving for Paris immediately. The next night, she and Ari were seen at the same table in Maxim’s where Ari and Maria had dined with Maggie van Zuylen. Once again, photographers had been tipped off, and they recorded the event. In the photo, Jackie did not look very happy, but she had made a public statement.

  “Maria heard it all too clearly,” wrote Arianna Stassinopoulos. “She knew that Aristo had opened his heart to her as to no one else. He had complained about Jackie, he had raged against Jackie, he had defied Jackie by appearing with Maria at Maxim’s. But when Jackie instantly demanded a symbolic replay of his dinner with Maria, Aristo did what Jackie wanted.”

  Four days later, Maria was admitted to the American Hospital in Neuilly, on the outskirts of Paris, with a condition that was officially diagnosed as sinus trouble. However, one of the nurses leaked the true story to a reporter. In a fit of depression, Maria had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

  Maria was still in a depression in early August when she arrived at Tragonisi, Perry Embiricos’s private island in the Aegean. She spent hours lying on the beach, pouring out her soul to her friend Nadia Stancioff.

  “She seemed obsessed by death at the time,” Nadia recalled. “In an instinctive, almost primitive way, she believed in reincarnation. ‘I wonder what I’ll be when I come back,’ she said once. ‘I don’t want to be buried,’ she told me at another time. ‘I want to be burned. I don’t want to become a worm.’ Like many Greeks, she was superstitious about preparing a will, as if writing things down brought bad luck.”

  This was Maria’s frame of mind when she looked up from her beach blanket and saw Ari coming toward her.

  When he reached her, Ari leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth. Then he sat down beside her, and kissed her poodle.

  “Chronia polla, “ he said. “Happy birthday.”

  Maria was instantly his.

  Once again, their meeting was recorded by a photographer.

  “Responding like a dalmatian to the fire bell,” Time magazine reported, “Jackie flew to Greece, to Onassis, to the yacht Christina, and to squelch rumors.”

  Jackie had been accustomed to prying reporters when she was in public life, but she was dismayed by the escalating coverage of her private life. There was something new about this kind of journalism, and it was not simply the fact that a reputable publication like Time was following the lurid details of the Ari-Jackie-Maria soap opera.

  Since the turn of the century, serious publications had devoted space to scandals involving people prominent in society. The best publications had followed the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the murder of Stanford White by Harry Thaw, and the Lindbergh kidnapping. But now, journalists had powerful new tools at their disposal to record and disseminate their stories—superfast 35 mm film, powerful telephoto lenses, miniature tape recorders, travel by jet airplane, telephone and TV communication via satellite. Nothing seemed beyond a reporter’s reach. The most intimate details of a person’s life could be communicated to vast audiences within a matter of hours, even minutes.

  Jackie was one of the first victims of this technological revolution in mass communications. She had sought privacy and protection by marrying Ari, but now she was as exposed and vulnerable as she had been after John Kennedy’s assassination.

  Shortly after the Time story appeared, Niki Goulandris invited Jackie for tea. Niki expected that her friend would be an emotional wreck because of the press coverage of her husband’s renewed relationship with Maria Callas. To her surprise, however, Niki found Jackie in a cheerful mood.

  All of Jackie’s old defense mechanisms, which she had developed as the child of an alcoholic, had come back into play. She did not hear things she did not want to hear, did not see things she did not want to see. She was in a state of complete denial about Maria Callas.

  “You know, Niki,” Jackie said, “since I’ve been married, I’m sure that Ari has never been with another woman.”

  ELEVEN

  THE FALL

  OF THE HOUSE

  OF ATREUS

  January 1973

  PANICKED OR STUNNED

  War was still raging in Vietnam, and each week hundreds of American casualties were airlifted straight from the battlefield to veterans’ hospitals all over America. Kitty Carlisle Hart, who had arranged a stage audition for Lee Radziwill nearly eight years before, was now on the board of the American Red Cross, and someone suggested that she bring a friend to the veterans’ hospital in the borough of Queens in New York City to cheer up the wounded soldiers. She asked Jackie to come along.

  “Well,” said Kitty, “I had no idea that these very young men, teenagers, were just thirty-six hours away from the battlefield. I worried—you know how shy Jackie was. They were missing limbs, some of them. Row after row, panicked or stunned, in bandages. Some of them were dying—in fact, some of them were dying as we spoke to them.

  “And Jackie just went from bed to bed, and she talked with them. I don’t know how she did it, but, somehow, some way, Jackie seemed to calm them, and comfort them. No hanging back. I just followed in her wake, because she was doing it all herself.

  “She just knew what to say, and what to do. No fear, hesitation, or anxiety. She cared a great deal about these poor souls.”

  RESUSI-ANNIE

  On a frigid January evening in 1973, Jackie dined with Ari and an American friend at the Coach House, a Greenwich Village restaurant that was owned by a Greek and that specialized in fine American cuisine. The friend had heard tales of Jackie’s troubled marriage, and as he dipped his spoon into a bowl of the Coach House’s famous black bean soup, he was on the lookout for signs of marital discord.

  There was none. Ari treated Jackie with a tenderness bordering on reverence. And she, in turn, seemed to be genuinely concerned about her husband’s welfare. A good deal of champagne was consumed during the course of the meal, and by the time dessert came around—generous slabs of rich pecan pie topped with dollops of whipped cream—Jackie was in a light, playful mood.

  “I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” she teased Ari.

  “A secret?” Ari said, feigning concern. “What kind of a secret?”

  “A deep dark secret,” Jackie went on. “And you’ll never guess what it is.”

  “All right, let’s have it,” Ari said, playing along.

  “Well,” Jackie said, “I had a consultation with Doctor Rosenfeld.”

  Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld was an eminent heart specialist who treated Ari for minor cardiac symptoms.

  “What on earth for?” Ari asked.

  Suddenly, he was no longer playacting.

  “I’m going to tell you,” Jackie said.

  She had phoned Dr. Rosenfeld and asked, “What would happen if Ari had a heart attack?”

  “Someone would have to resuscitate him,” the doctor replied.

  “How?” Jackie asked.

  “In the first instance, by chest compression and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” the doctor told her.

  “I want you to show me how to do that,” Jackie said.

  A few days later, Rosenfeld showed up at Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartm
ent. He was followed off the elevator by Dr. Michael Wolk, his bright young partner, who was carrying a four-foot-tall vinyl doll.

  “What’s that?” Jackie asked.

  “It’s called a Resusi-Annie,” Rosenfeld explained, “and we use it in hospitals to teach CPR techniques.”

  Jackie ushered the doctors into her living room, where Wolk laid the Resusi-Annie on the floor.

  “He’s going to give you a demonstration,” Rosenfeld told Jackie.

  Wolk pressed down on the doll, whose chest swelled to suggest a woman’s breasts. Then he performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  “Okay,” Rosenfeld said to Jackie, “now it’s your turn.”

  Jackie got down on her hands and knees, and bent over the Resusi-Annie. She placed her lips over the doll’s mouth, and pretended that she was breathing life into the lungs of Aristotle Onassis.

  “Now, that is a very good secret,” Ari said when Jackie had finished her story.

  “You really like it?” Jackie asked.

  “Of course I like it,” Ari said.

  Jackie basked in his approval.

  “You see,” Ari said, turning to the American friend sitting at their table. “People say Jackie and I don’t get along. But does a wife who is not getting along with her husband take lessons on how to save him from a heart attack? No! She doesn’t. She gives him a heart attack. And then she collects his money.”

  THE HEIR APPARENT

  The day after Jackie and Ari dined at the Coach House in Greenwich Village, Alexander Onassis pulled up in front of the Olympic Airways office in Athens in his red Ferrari. Alexander was twenty-four years old, and his face and body were finally beginning to fill out. He had matured considerably since his father had anointed him the heir apparent of his vast shipping empire, whose worth had nearly doubled to a billion dollars in the past few years.