by Edward Klein
His sole living descendant was his daughter Christina. She was poised to inherit Onassis’s fleet of ships, his banks, pier facilities, real estate (including the just-completed Olympic Towers on Fifth Avenue, and a quarter interest in New York’s Pierre Hotel), his residences in Athens, Monte Carlo, Montevideo, and Paris, his yacht, the island of Skorpios, and tens of millions of dollars in stocks and bonds and other liquid assets.
Christina would soon be one of the richest women in the world. As her honorary uncle and trusted adviser, Gratsos had great expectations. After all, Christina had no experience in running a worldwide shipping business, while Gratsos was the son of a shipowner. After her father’s death, Christina would lean on Gratsos even more than before, and he would become the power behind the Onassis throne. Or so he hoped.
But the handover from Onassis to Christina was not going smoothly. Christina had recently botched another suicide attempt. What was more, her mother, Tina Niarchos, whom Onassis had named as chief executor of his will, had been found dead in the Hotel de Chanaleilles in Paris, the apparent victim of an edema of the lung, though some suspected her husband Stavros Niarchos of more foul play. Onassis was so distraught that he could not bring himself to attend Tina’s funeral.
In the midst of these family catastrophes, Onassis’s aides informed him that Olympic Airways faced imminent bankruptcy. He had no choice but to sell his beloved jewel. Negotiations with the Greek government could not have come at a worse time for him. With the downturn in the oil-tanker business, Onassis’s net worth had plummeted from $1 billion to $500 million, and his financial condition worsened by the day.
The enforced sale of Olympic Airways represented the greatest setback in Onassis’s business career. The very thought of losing his airline drove him into a rage. Sick as he was, Onassis came into the office, and he bellowed at everyone. Where was Papadimitriou? Onassis wanted to see him immediately! Where was Konialidas? Where was Johnny Meyer?
Most important of all, where was Jackie?
“Jackie seemed determined to stand aside from Ari’s problems,” said an aide. “There was not a lot she could have done in Athens except be there. They were some of the worst weeks of his life. He could have used some wifely comforting, not to mention her public relations pull…. He was putting up the backs of the very people he needed to beguile. His language even to those whose help he needed most was either sullen or griping. He’d lost his touch completely, he was played out. His name had once acted like a spell in Athens; now his world had turned upside down.”
“He had climbed to the top of the tree, and there was nothing there,” said Gratsos. “I don’t think he ever knew what he wanted. The difference was that in his last years he knew he would never get it.”
Onassis had run out of luck. Desperately sick, and frightened of dying, he felt more alone than at any time since he was a little boy, and his beloved mother Penelope had abandoned him and gone to heaven. He thought a lot about the past—past loves, past triumphs, past mistakes. With so little time left, he did not want to make any more mistakes. He was ready to listen to his oldest friend, Costa Gratsos.
And Gratsos did not spare him. He told Onassis that if he died while he was still married to Jackie, his prenuptial agreement would probably not hold up in court, and Jackie would walk away with more than $60 million. On the other hand, if Onassis instituted divorce proceedings against Jackie while he was in his current weakened condition, Jackie might be emboldened to fight him in the courts of Greece and America.
As Gratsos saw it, there was only one solution to this dilemma. They must attack Jackie where she was the most vulnerable: they must do it through personal exposure in the press. They must reveal her faults, her frailties, her excesses, and her pretensions. And they must do all this in such a brutal way that Jackie would be struck with fear, and would cringe from the idea of fighting over Onassis’s millions.
What better way for them to get started, Gratsos said, than for Onassis to call Roy M. Cohn, the Attila the Hun of divorce attorneys. Cohn had served in the 1950s on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and had been described by Esquire magazine as “the toughest, meanest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.” He had once come close to trading blows with his co-counsel Bobby Kennedy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. He was, in short, no friend of the Kennedys.
“Mr. Onassis had definitely concluded that he wanted to break the marriage,” Cohn said, “and had been consulting Greek lawyers, and so on, and there were a lot of complications over there, and he wanted to know whether I would be prepared to handle the American end—because he had assets over here—and participate in the overall strategy. He anticipated that the matter would be settled, because he did not think that Jackie would want to make a big thing out of it, but he also viewed the possibility that her appetite for money would be such that it might not be amicably settled.”
In addition to unleashing Roy Cohn, Gratsos also convinced Onassis to meet with the muckraking Washington journalist Jack Anderson. All Onassis had to do, Gratsos assured Onassis, was have a pleasant lunch at the “21” Club with the reporter, then leave the dirty work to him.
Gratsos was savvy in the ways of the press. After Onassis left them, Gratsos spoke to Anderson “on background,” which meant that the information from the interview was on the record, but that Anderson could not reveal his precise source. Gratsos would get his message across, but his name would not appear in print.
Over the course of several hours, Gratsos gave Anderson his version of the inner workings of Jackie’s marriage to Onassis. No reporter had heard anything like this before, and every so often, Gratsos would ask Anderson if he realized how lucky he was to be the first to get the story. But Anderson was a seasoned journalist, and he was not easily impressed. He knew that it was going to be difficult to check out Gratsos’s story and unravel his truths from his half truths and outright lies.
While Anderson asked probing questions, Les Whitten took down Gratsos’s answers. Later, Whitten typed up his notes, using only lowercase letters to save himself time. His five-page summary of Anderson’s interview amounted to a sweeping indictment of Jackie as an acquisitive monster who shamelessly exploited her husband. It formed the basis for Anderson’s bombshell columns, as well as for each new Jackie biography that appeared at the rate of one a year for the next twenty years of her life.
Whitten wrote:
gratsos … says at first [Jackie] got $30,000 a month tax free. It was onassis’ personal money and could be given tax free because onassis is a foreigner. (I suspect this oversimplifies it)….
from time to time, nancy tuckerman [Jackie’s old school friend and personal secretary] would complain to creon broun [Onassis’s money manager in New York] that they (she and Jackie) had run out of money. the kindly creon advanced it to them, even though they had run short in the first 10 days and the money was sometimes given in mid-month instead of at the end.
gratsos ended this practice, about two years after the marriage, the payments were [reduced to $20,000 a month] and commenced from onassis hq. in monte carlo….
the advice of andre meyer, the senior partner of lazard freres brokers, cost jackie about $300,000. ari had wanted the money to stay in tax frees, but jackie heeded meyer’s advice and put it into the market….
john John’s pet rabbit was put in the care of an Olympic pilot in the cockpit so it could be delivered safely to its destination….
And that was just for starters. Whitten continued:
it was not just the extravagance but the total incompatibility of jackie and ari. and Jackie’s faggoty friends….
gradually, ari came to really resent her spending, not only did he pay her the allowance, but many of the bills were paid from monte carlo in addition to the $20,000-$30,000….
ari resolved to divorce her. he had lawyers working on it in greece and in the u.s. but he confided only in his friends, it had been informall
y determined that the greek orthodox would allow him to break it off on grounds of simply, but definite incompatibility….
ari by that time was “very unhappy” over the marriage, “they weren’t getting along at all.” a major factor, [Gratsos] repeated, was the “odd people” around her.
The most damaging revelations, however, concerned Jackie’s spending on her wardrobe. According to Gratsos, after Jackie wore a costly garment once or twice, or sometimes not at all, she would resell it, and then squirrel away the cash. Her favorite resale house, Encore on Madison Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, did a steady business in Jackie’s slightly used and sometimes new clothes.
She peddled everything from coats, suits, and gowns to pocketbooks, blouses, and slacks. The labels were the best: Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino of Rome, Halston. Generally she would demand a fixed price; other times she would accept whatever the market would bear. Once, it took Encore six months to sell a white coat with a Valentino label at the price Jackie demanded.
“When it comes to Jackie’s spending habits, you can believe anything, anything,” Gratsos said. “She went on wild spending sprees. She was clocked at $3,000 a minute. Often, she didn’t bother with cash. Her face was her charge plate. She was virtually laundering money by charging couture clothes to Onassis’s account, and then reselling them to consignment stores in New York. She was embezzling money from Onassis. She was defrauding her own husband.”
To check out the charges against Jackie of money laundering, embezzlement, and fraud, Anderson sent Whitten to interview the manager of Encore, as well as those of the other resale stores in Manhattan. Whitten reported back to Anderson that Jackie had started taking her clothes to Encore long before she met Onassis. In fact, she had been dealing with Encore ever since she was the wife of Senator John Kennedy.
encore, a busy fascinating place with clothes filling racks and women in minks or cloth seeking bargains even as their sisters lug stuff in in suitcases for appraisal. the store made an exception for jackie and sent over for the clothes to her flat, generally it was a maid who gave up the clothes, and tuckerman who talks the business….
some women were, of course, attracted to Jackie’s old clothes, some refused to buy them because they disliked the kennedys. encore and the other second hand … shops patronized by jackie are in the fashionable east 60s and 80s.
Whitten had stumbled upon a little-known sideshow to the main three-ring circus that made up New York society in the 1970s. Many wealthy men gave their wives hefty allowances to buy couture clothes and expensive accessories like hats, belts, handbags, and shoes. But once a woman was seen in a $5,000 Yves Saint Laurent dress or a $10,000 Givenchy gown, it had served its purpose, which was to define her husband as a rich man, and her as an avatar of current fashion. To appear in society in the same garment more than once or twice would have been, in a manner of speaking, counterproductive.
But what was a society woman to do with her used garments after she was done with them? She could have donated them to charity, and taken a substantial tax deduction. But since few of these women filed individual tax returns, the savings would have accrued to their husbands, and the women did not find that an appealing notion.
Instead, virtually all rich women sold their slightly used clothes to stores like Encore. Sometimes this was done with the knowledge and consent of their husbands; sometimes, what their husbands did not know did not hurt them. In any case, it was a practical way for women to stretch the dollars in their clothing allowance. At the same time, they received a psychological bonus, since the money they got back helped them rationalize the astronomical sums they spent on their wardrobes.
This attitude was completely foreign to the middle class in America, where puritanical sumptuary laws against the wearing of extravagant garments had been common in Colonial-era New England. Even in modern-day America, most people still looked upon a woman who wore a dress only once or twice as not only wasteful, but sinful.
However, such high-minded middle-class values were not shared by the superrich. William Paley, the founder of CBS, set up a trust fund that provided his wife Babe with $160,000 a year (about $1 million in today’s money) to spend exclusively on her clothes. Although Jackie received considerably more than that from Onassis—$360,000 a year for the first two years of their marriage, if Gratsos could be believed—she also had sizable expenses that were not part of Babe’s budget. Jackie paid for the upkeep on her own apartment in New York and her weekend house in Peapack, New Jersey; her staff of servants; the feeding and grooming of her horses in New Jersey and Virginia; and private schools for Caroline and John.
Until Onassis lost his son, and his world began falling apart, he had encouraged Jackie to spend more, rather than less. He had operated by the rich man’s philosophy that when his wife looked good, he looked good. However, toward the end of his life, Onassis no longer felt that way. Beset by problems on all sides, and bitter over his fate, he came to see Jackie’s spendthrift ways as a symbol of her disregard for him and his generosity.
It was not hard to understand why he felt that way. Jackie’s allowance was, by any standard, exceedingly lavish. Of course, it did not begin to compare with Bunny Mellon’s outlay for clothing, which came to $1 million in 1974 dollars, or the equivalent of $6 million a year today.
A LAST REQUEST
In addition to all his other diseases and disorders, Aristotle Onassis began the new year with a rampant case of influenza. He lost forty pounds in eight weeks. He slurred his words, had trouble chewing his food, and could not speak without supporting his chin with the heel of his hand. The pains in his abdomen became so severe he could not stand up straight. On Sunday, February 2, 1975, he called Jackie, who was in New York, and complained of being alone. The next day he collapsed, and had to be helped out of his clothes and into bed.
The members of his retinue converged on his villa in Glyfada, filling the downstairs rooms like a somber assemblage of knights awaiting the passing of their liege lord. The ladies-in-waiting—Christina, Artemis, Merope, and Kalliroi—kept vigil outside his bedroom door. Everyone seemed prepared for the worst, except Christina. The daughter who had been the bane of her father’s existence for most of his life was the one who fought hardest to save him.
She made three telephone calls: to Professor Jean Caroli, a gastroenterologist in Paris; to Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, the heart specialist in New York; and to her stepmother, Jackie.
Come quickly, Christina told them. My father is very ill. He needs you now!
“I flew over with Jackie,” Rosenfeld said, “and when we arrived at Ari’s house in Glyfada, I examined him, and immediately made my diagnosis. In addition to his myasthenia gravis, he was suffering from acute gall bladder disease. He was taking a lot of cortisone, and was terribly weak. I ordered some equipment—oxygen and an electrocardiograph machine—and recommended that he fly to New York and undergo a period of intensive treatment there. We had an Olympic Airways plane ready to fly him to the New York Hospital.
“But the French gastroenterologist, Doctor Caroli, disagreed with me,” Rosenfeld continued. “He wanted to take Ari to Paris and operate at once to remove his gall bladder. He had Ari’s private jet primed and ready to fly him to the American Hospital in Paris.
“The French doctor did not seem to understand that Ari was not a good operative risk. He had myasthenia gravis, and the drugs being used for that would interfere with a successful surgery. I said that he was far too weak to survive such an operation.”
However, Christina and Onassis’s sisters did not agree. They were more familiar with Caroli than with Rosenfeld, and sided with the Frenchman in the heated debate that developed between the doctors.
“The family was pressing Onassis to go to the American Hospital in Paris,” Stelio Papadimitriou said. “He heard my cough, and called me upstairs, and just outside his bedroom I came upon Christina crying inconsolably. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because my father refuses to go to Paris.’
“I said, ‘Mr. Onassis, why are you behaving like a child? You should go to Paris. Or have you decided to leave everyone behind in a mess?’
“And he said, ‘Do you hear my daughter sobbing outside my door? Would you call her to enter the room?’
“I went and got Christina. The old man sat up in his bed and whispered to us in a weakened voice.
“ ‘I know that my daughter has serious shortcomings and will not be able to cope with life,’ he said. ‘And I know that you, Stelio, are a fiercely independent man who is always ready to resign his position, and that Christina will make you desperate. So if you wish me to go to Paris, let’s make a deal. Do you promise that no matter what my daughter does to you, you will never abandon her?’
“I said yes.
“And he said, ‘Bend to kiss me. From now on, Christina is your sister.’ ”
ROOM 217
Two days later, Onassis, accompanied by Christina and Jackie, left his Glyfada villa for the airport. “He was clutching a book called Supership, in which author Noel Mostert reported that the first million-ton tanker, a ship so big that a cathedral could be lost in its bowels, would soon become a reality,” wrote the London Daily Mail columnist Nigel Dempster. “Ari sat with the book unopened on his lap for most of the flight; memories of the Ariston, the 15,000-ton ‘monster’ they said was impossible when he built her in the 1930s, must have been in his mind.”
In Paris, a whole clutch of journalists had assembled outside Onassis’s apartment at 88 Avenue Foch. There were five television crews, and photographers from Paris-Match, Stern, Oggi, and many other magazines and newspapers.
