by Edward Klein
Father and son had a volatile relationship. They argued constantly, especially about Jackie. Still, Ari had begun to trust Alexander with day-to-day business affairs. Not that Ari was ready to retire. But as he approached his sixty-seventh birthday, and began to experience health problems, his future no longer seemed as limitless as before.
Ari did not find it easy to delegate authority to Alexander. He was never sure whether he approved or disapproved of his son. Depending on his mood, Ari’s feelings toward Alexander alternated between a gushing sentimentality and a raging contempt. But he had named his son after Alexander the Great. Alexander represented Ari’s bid for immortality.
Alexander normally showed up at the Olympic Airways office dressed in a dark navy suit, silk shirt, and conservative tie. The women there often remarked on how handsome he looked—especially for an Onassis—though they carefully avoided mentioning that they could detect a deep sadness in Alexander’s eyes. He had not inherited his father’s magnetic personality. He was more like his mother Tina—moody and mournful.
Today, however, Alexander appeared to be in better spirits than usual. He was an experienced pilot who had flown everything from Piper Cubs to big commercial jets, and his calendar was filled with appointments related to aviation, his great passion. He was booked to have lunch with two German pilots at his favorite fish restaurant in Athens, Antonopoulos. And right after lunch, he had made a date, at his father’s urging, to train an American pilot in the operation of the family’s Piaggio amphibian airplane.
It was rare to see the young man in a good mood. Over the past couple of years, the Onassis family had been battered by one crisis after another.
To begin with, Alexander’s mother had divorced her second husband, the Marquess of Blandford, who was related to the Churchills, and married Ari’s archrival, Stavros Niarchos. To her son, Tina’s choice of a third mate seemed totally inexplicable, since Niarchos was widely suspected of having murdered his previous wife, Tina’s own sister Eugenie.
Then, Christina Onassis, Alexander’s sister, had run off and married an obscure American real estate man named Joseph Bolker. This had so enraged Ari that he began tapping the couple’s phones, and had them followed by private detectives. Christina finally threw up her hands in surrender and started divorce proceedings.
Then, father and son had been engaged for months in a brutal argument over Alexander’s mistress, Fiona Thyssen, a divorced baroness who was old enough to be his mother. Ari had more than once threatened to disinherit Alexander if he married Fiona.
And finally, there was the biggest problem of all—Jackie.
Alexander never called his stepmother by her proper name. To show his contempt, he referred to her as “the widow,” or “the geisha,” or “that woman.”
One night at Maxim’s, after Ari had berated Alexander for his romantic involvement with Fiona, the subject shifted to a showgirl who was taking an older man for everything he was worth. Alexander turned to Jackie, and said:
“You certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong in a girl marrying for money, do you?”
At the last moment, one of the Germans developed stomach problems, and Alexander’s lunch was canceled. He left for the airport on an empty stomach. About an hour and a half later, a secretary at the Olympic office received a shocking phone call from Athens International Airport.
Alexander’s SX-BDC Piaggio 136 had taken off from runway F, banked sharply, cartwheeled for 460 feet, and then crashed nosefirst into the ground. Rescue teams who rushed to the scene of the accident found the badly mangled body of a man whose face and skull were reduced to pulp. The only way they could identify him was by the monogram on his bloodstained handkerchief. It was AO—Alexander Onassis.
Before the secretary had a chance to digest this cataclysmic news, Aristotle Onassis’s cousin, Costa Konialidas, arrived in the office. In tears, the secretary told him what had happened. For a long moment, Konialidas was speechless. Then he said:
“How can I find a way to tell Aristo?”
“ALL MY SHIPS, ALL MY PROPERTY, ALL MY PLANES …”
By the time Jackie and Ari arrived at the hospital on the outskirts of Athens, a team of neurosurgeons had performed two operations on Alexander’s crushed skull. Under the white hospital sheets, the young man looked as though he had already been mummified. His head was wrapped in a bandage. There were two holes for his eyes, which were closed, and an opening for oxygen.
His aunts—Artemis, Kalliroi, and Merope—sat in a corner of the room, three Greek Furies dressed in black from head to toe, keening and moaning. In the corridor outside the room, family members spoke in hushed tones. Tina and her husband Stavros Niarchos had flown in from Switzerland. Christina had arrived from Brazil, Fiona Thyssen from Germany.
“Only a miracle will save him,” a doctor told Ari.
Over the next two days, Ari brought in top physicians from around the world—a neurosurgeon from Boston, a heart specialist from Dallas, a brain specialist from London. While they worked feverishly to save his son, Ari summoned a fourth doctor—a plastic surgeon from Geneva by the name of Dr. Popen.
When Popen arrived the next day, Ari took him aside.
“You must fix his face,” Ari said. “You must make him look like Alexander again so that I can remember his face as it was.”
Alexander was slipping deeper and deeper into a coma, and the specialists objected to the operation by Popen. But Ari insisted that Popen go ahead even though, for all intents and purposes, Alexander was already dead.
At seven o’clock that evening, Ari returned to the Olympic Airways office. His black-and-silver hair had turned white.
“I have lost my boy,” he said.
“No, I do not believe it,” a secretary replied.
He asked her to call the hospital. When she reached the chief doctor, Ari took the phone.
“If I give you all my ships, all my property, all my planes, and all the money that I have,” he said, “would there be any hope to save my boy?”
The doctor told Ari that his son had suffered irreversible brain damage. Alexander was neurologically dead. Only the machines were keeping him alive. There was nothing more that could be done for him.
“We can keep him alive through extraordinary measures for three or four days at the most,” the doctor said.
“All right then,” said Ari, “leave him be in calm.”
The tubes were removed from Alexander’s body, and within hours, he was gone.
“We decided it was in vain, so we gave the doctors the orders to stop,” Ari said later. “We weren’t killing him. We were just letting him die. There is no question of euthanasia here. If he had lived, he would have been dead as a human being. His brain was destroyed and his features completely disfigured. Nothing could be done for him.”
HUBRIS
At first Ari wanted Alexander’s body to be deep-frozen and kept in a cryonic state until medical science could find a way to rebuild his shattered brain and bring him back to life. To carry out his wishes, Ari instructed Johnny Meyer to get in touch with the Life Extension Society in Washington, which specialized in cryonics. But at the last moment, an old Onassis friend, Yanni Georgakis, who had debated theological issues with Ari and was not afraid to speak his mind, put a stop to these macabre arrangements.
“A father has no right to impede the journey of his son’s soul,” Georgakis said.
Ari accepted Georgakis’s reasoning. But before he would agree to bury Alexander, he insisted that Dr. Popen perform one last plastic-surgery procedure on his son’s face. Only then did Ari have Alexander’s body embalmed, then airlifted to Skorpios.
There, Alexander’s coffin was put into a truck and driven from the harbor up the road that Jackie, with Niki Goulandris, had lovingly landscaped. In a few minutes, the funeral procession reached the tiny chapel of Panayitsa, where Jackie and Ari had been married. Jackie stood in the dim, candle-lit chapel as the priest said his prayers. The workmen slid the
heavy lid over Alexander’s imposing tomb, which was cut from the same pure white marble used to build the Parthenon. The lid made a loud thud as it fell into place.
This was the second time in less than ten years that Jackie had stood beside a husband and watched him bury a son. John Kennedy had been staggered by the loss of Patrick Bouvier, and had collapsed in sobs and tears. But his behavior was restrained compared to the flood of anguish unloosed by Ari, who gnashed his teeth, and howled at God.
The display of raw emotion always terrified Jackie, though she probably could not have said why. Perhaps it was because she felt responsible, like Guinevere, for the death and destruction that always seemed to follow in her wake. Or perhaps it was because the suffering and misery of others reminded her of her own submerged feelings, which she was afraid to express. Whatever the reason, Ari’s pain was too great for her to bear, and she managed to get through Alexander’s funeral the way she had gotten through Jack’s funeral—by becoming the detached observer, and watching everything from her art director’s chair hanging in space.
For weeks after the funeral, Ari lived in a trancelike state. He stared off into space, his face a study in grief. He was a deeply superstitious man, and he could not believe that Alexander’s death was a matter of pure chance. It must have been the result of cause and effect. There must have been a connection between Ari’s own actions and the tragedy that had befallen his son.
As time went on, Ari came to the conclusion that the fatal accident was a punishment for his god-defying arrogance, the excessive pride that the ancient Greeks had called hubris. But what was the exact nature of his hubris?
It could only be one thing, he decided. His hubris had led him to marry Jackie. He had overreached himself. He had failed to take the advice he had given his own stepson, John Kennedy Jr. He had flown too close to the sun, and the gods had destroyed him.
“Onassis was conscience-stricken,” said Stelio Papadimitriou. “First of all, he started feeling remorse for having let the relationship with his former wife deteriorate. He really loved Tina. He felt bad that she had married Niarchos. He felt bad that his children didn’t like Jackie. He saw his life in a bad light. And the death of Alexander exacerbated his feelings that his life was not good.”
Ari’s personality underwent a dramatic alteration. Friends and associates said he was a different man. He seemed to lose all hope. His raison d’etre had disappeared along with Alexander.
“In his own eyes, his life resembled the life of the ancient Greeks,” said Papadimitriou. “He was guilty of the sin of hubris, overweening pride, and he had suffered the punishment of the gods. It was like something out of Aeschylus’s great trilogy of tragedies, the Oresteia. It was like the fall of the House of Atreus.”
TWELVE
LOVE, DEATH,
AND MONEY
October 1973–September 1977
TO HELL AND BACK
“I have houses in Acapulco, Florida, Normandy, Lausanne, and Paris,” Loel Guiness, the English banking magnate, was saying. “I have a yacht and a plane, and because of Gloria, I never have to worry about any of it.”
It was a few minutes past noon, and Guiness was sitting by the side of the swimming pool at his home in Lantana, Florida, and talking to his guest, Aileen Mehle, better known to the readers of her society column as Suzy. He was extolling the domestic virtues of his wife, Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Fahkry Guiness, a twice-divorced Mexican beauty who had the lithe figure and regal profile of a princess in an ancient Egyptian frieze.
“Just look at her,” said Guiness, pointing to his wife. “Jackie and Ari decide at the very last minute that they would like to come for lunch, and Gloria has everything under control.”
Before she snagged her rich husband, Gloria had been a manicurist. But like so many women who managed to scale the heights of society, her origins were of little importance. Born with equal amounts of brains, beauty, and style, she was one of those women Truman Capote lovingly referred to as “swans.” She often made a boldfaced appearance in Aileen’s “Suzy” column, usually a paragraph or two away from her sister swans: Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and C. Z. Guest.
No one knew more about the strange connubial habits of the swans and their superrich husbands than Aileen. Despite the evident pride Guiness took in his wife, he was away from home most of the time, and on those rare occasions when he and Gloria found themselves together without the company of others, he paid her scant attention. Like most men of wealth, he placed his wife in the same category as his houses, yacht, and plane. She was another pretty possession to impress his wealthy friends.
During her long hours of solitude, Gloria suffered from bouts of depression, as in fact did many of the swans. Still, her main goal in life was to please Loel, and she had outdone herself decorating the Guiness residence in Florida. Loel had bought the house from Bunny Mel-Ion’s father, Gerard Lambert, who had designed it himself. Called Gemini, it was built on a parcel of land that ran from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth. The beach house on the ocean side was connected to the pool on the lake side by an underground music room, which was a marvel of engineering, and had a skylight, a working fireplace, and an electric organ.
Gloria was supervising the servants as they set a table under a large market umbrella by the pool. The terrace overlooked six hundred feet of manicured lawn, which was spotted with tall coconut palms, bayans, screw pines, gumbo limbos, and hibiscus plants. Gloria waved a note at Aileen. Written by Jackie in her precise handwriting, it announced that Jackie was bringing Ari and her children for lunch.
“We must try to cheer her up,” Gloria told Aileen.
Gloria had heard that Jackie and Ari were not getting along. Ordinarily this would not have fazed her, for whatever her private demons, Gloria dealt with public occasions in a confident, down-to-earth manner. She had once told Noel Coward at a dinner party that she could not bear to sleep in the same bed as her husband because “he farts too much.” But Gloria seemed unusually nervous today, perhaps because she had also heard that Ari had recently taken to airing his dissatisfaction with Jackie in public.
In fact, even as she rearranged the Christofle teaspoons so they were exactly parallel with the edge of the Pratesi place mats, Gloria was expecting the worst.
Jackie had tried everything she could think of to cheer up her husband after the death of Alexander. She neglected Caroline and John in order to spend more time with Ari. She accompanied Ari on long cruises. She gave dinner parties at her New York apartment, and invited friends, like the photographer Peter Beard and the feminist Gloria Steinem, who she knew would interest him. Nothing seemed to help. The style that Jackie had used all her life to camouflage unpleasant things was no longer working.
Ari was drinking more heavily than ever. He looked out-of-sorts and complained of headaches. His lifelong insomnia had grown worse. At night on Skorpios, he often took long walks, invariably ending up at the tomb of his son. He squatted there on his haunches like a peasant, staring at the large marble sarcophagus. One time, an American woman, unable to sleep herself, came upon him. He did not notice her presence.
“For a man to be that enclosed, it seemed to be a kind of happiness,” she said later. “I had the feeling that if Alexander were alive and at his side, Ari would have been no nearer to the boy than he was at that moment.”
Ari’s crushing personal loss was compounded by devastating reversals in business. Several months after Alexander’s death, the Arabs declared an oil embargo, and the bottom fell out of the world tanker market. In the past, Ari might have seen the crisis coming and taken steps to ward off the worst. But since the death of Alexander, he seemed to have lost his mental acuity. The Arab embargo caught him completely by surprise.
“More than a third of his tonnage was already laid up, none of the oil giants was interested in long-term charters, and he was forced to cancel the two French ULCCs [ultra-large cargo container ships], at a loss of $12.5 million,” noted Peter Evans.
; The skyrocketing price of oil put a terrible squeeze on Olympic Airways, which Ari had transformed from a dilapidated company into the jewel in the crown of his empire. Ari asked the government of Constantine Karamanlis, which had recently replaced the ruling military junta in Athens, to authorize an increase in ticket prices to help him cover the skyrocketing cost of fuel. Karamanlis, a friend of many years, turned Ari down flat.
At half past noon, Ari’s limousine swung off the ocean road into the Guiness estate and headed down a winding gravel driveway that was planted with lush tropical specimens. The car came to a halt in a square courtyard in front of the imposing entrance of Gemini. Ari, Jackie, and her children entered the front hall, which was covered from floor to ceiling in milky white marble. A maid escorted them through the living loggia to the pool, where they were greeted warmly by the Guinesses.
“Gloria, black hair falling to her shoulders, golden bangles sliding up and down her arms, looked like a ravishing gypsy,” Aileen Mehle recalled.
Gloria’s superb sense of style was not the result of her husband’s money. He was actually quite stingy with her, and her trademark Florida sun hat was a jaunty straw model from the local five-and-ten. Once, when a reporter for Time magazine asked Gloria what her favorite at-home costume was during the day, she answered: “Comfortable robes that I pick up for twelve ninety-five apiece in Manhattan.”
“Loel, true Brit that he is, was as sartorially splendid as ever, blazer and ascot impeccable,” Aileen continued. “I, too, had done my best…. The Greek tycoon, even at his nattiest, could never set Savile Row on fire, so his rumpled state was nothing new.
