Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  “I want to walk from this car under my own steam,” Onassis told Jackie and his daughter. “I don’t want those sons of bitches to see me being held up by a couple of women.”

  Jackie and Christina watched him make his way through the gauntlet of shouting paparazzi.

  “How do you feel, Ari?”

  “This way, Ari!”

  “Ari, over here!”

  “Ari, are reports that you’re dying true?”

  He walked slowly, looking neither left nor right, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue overcoat. Once inside, he went straight to bed.

  “When he awoke, shortly after 10 P.M.,” wrote Nigel Dempster, “he took a Pyridostigmine slow-release capsule to get him through the night; the capsule [which was prescribed for myasthenia gravis and increased muscle strength] released one-third (sixty milligrams) of its dosage immediately, and gave him a surge of energy into which he crammed as much business as he could manage, and saw the people he wanted to see.

  “One of the people he sent for on this night was [his old henchman] Johnny Meyer. They talked about the past, swapped familiar anecdotes. After one long silence when Meyer thought he had fallen asleep, Ari said:

  “ ‘Soon I shall be on Skorpios with Alexander.’

  “ ‘You’re crazy, Ari,’ Meyer replied. ‘Who ever heard of anybody dying from droopy eyelids.’ ”

  “He was operated on on Sunday,” Johnny Meyer told a press conference two days later in the American Hospital in Paris. “It was a small operation, and now he is feeling much better. He can stand up. That’s all I can say.”

  In fact, Onassis was being kept alive by a respirator in room 217 of the Eisenhower wing of the hospital. He suffered from jaundice, heart problems, pneumonia, and complications from his myasthenia gravis. Just as Dr. Rosenfeld had predicted, the cortisone lowered his resistance to infection and made his pneumonia hard to control.

  At times he was delirious, and rambled on incoherently about Skorpios, and his problems with the government in Athens over the sale of his beloved Olympic Airways. He spoke mainly in Greek, which, of course, excluded Jackie.

  She knew that Ari had told Christina and his sisters of his plans to divorce her. She felt mortified and chagrined by her situation. In the eyes of these Greek women, Jackie had scant claim to the title of Onassis’s wife. When she and Christina found themselves alone in Onassis’s hospital room, they did not exchange a word.

  “I was in Paris with Jackie at the time,” said Niki Goulandris. “She visited him in the hospital daily, although her time with him was restricted because he was in the intensive care station. We went to Notre Dame together, and she got down on her knees and prayed for Ari, even though she knew his condition was hopeless. She knew it was the end.

  “But the doctors advised her that Ari could hang on like that for weeks, perhaps even months,” Niki continued. “Jackie felt that she could be of more use in New York to her children than she could in Paris to Ari. So she left.”

  As soon as Jackie arrived at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, she called her sister-in-law Artemis in Paris, who told her that Ari was doing as well as could be expected. Four days later, Artemis again assured her that Ari was fine. However, late that night, he took a turn for the worse, and Artemis woke Jackie and urged her to return to Paris immediately.

  Jackie was packing to leave the next morning, when the phone rang again.

  “He’s dead,” said Artemis. “Christina was with him when he left us.”

  “HE MEANT A LOT TO ME”

  A fusillade of flashbulbs greeted Jackie as she stepped off the Olympic Airways plane at Orly Airport. When the photographs of the frenzied crowds were printed the next day, they reminded people of the scene of pandemonium created by Charles Lindbergh’s historic landing nearly fifty years before.

  The crowds wanted to see for themselves how Jackie was bearing up under her loss. In their eyes, she had changed since her marriage to Onassis. She was no longer the same Jackie whose flawless performance at President Kennedy’s funeral had transformed her into a paragon of virtue. But if Jackie was not that person, it was not clear who she was now.

  Perhaps more than any other people on earth, the French adored Jackie. But they needed to hear from Jackie herself why she had not been at Onassis’s side when he died. It was the behavior of a wife who did not love her husband, and it made them wonder if Jackie had become like the woman in John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci”: a beautiful woman who was incapable of feeling love.

  Dressed in black, Jackie approached the bank of microphones and took out a piece of paper that contained a single paragraph. The prepared statement was notable for its clarity and lack of sentimentality.

  “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows,” she said, as the salvo of flashbulbs began again. “He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.”

  “TIME TO TAKE CARE OF JACKIE”

  Even The New York Times sent a reporter to cover the funeral.

  “The courtyard [of the chapel] was lined with hundreds of white lilies, their pots draped in red velvet,” the paper’s Steven V. Roberts reported from Skorpios. “On the terraced hillside behind the chapel, cherry trees blossomed pink. In the distance was anchored the Christina, Mr. Onassis’s 325-foot yacht. Its Liberian flag was at half-mast.”

  On the yacht itself, John Vinocur, who was then a correspondent for the Associated Press, telephoned a dispatch from the dining room. He held the receiver close to his mouth, and relayed a piece of color about Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss. Suddenly, he was interrupted by Janet herself.

  “The Kennedy children’s grandmother is not having breakfast at ten-thirty in the morning,” she said firmly. “She ate hours ago.”

  Thousands of words were filed that day from Skorpios, but one scene stood out from all the others and was etched in the world’s collective memory. It was the scene of Jackie, wearing a new black Valentino dress beneath a black, tightly cinched leather coat, walking beside a heavily sedated Christina, and offering her an arm for support.

  “Oh God,” Christina moaned.

  “Hang on,” said Jackie, who had some experience with funerals. “Take it easy now. It’ll soon be over.”

  They stepped into a waiting limousine, and were joined by Jackie’s former brother-in-law, Senator Edward Kennedy. The chauffeur shut the rear door, then slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Although no reporters were present, the world was later treated to a blow-by-blow description of what transpired among the grieving passengers in the sealed compartment of the limousine. Teddy Kennedy—bloated, perhaps drunk, certainly insensitive to Christina’s feelings—leaned forward and began talking to her about money. The anonymous source for this story was the indefatigable Costa Gratsos.

  “Now,” Teddy Kennedy said to Christina—or so Gratsos claimed—“it’s time to take care of Jackie.”

  “Stop the car!” shouted Christina.

  She struggled with the door until she finally managed to get it open. Then she fled to another car in the cortege, and sat with her aunts.

  Later, Gratsos explained to reporters why Christina had been so “cool” to her stepmother during the funeral. It was because Senator Kennedy had attempted to discuss “financial matters,” he told them.

  This story became part of the permanent lore of tabloid journalism. However, it was just as false as most of Gratsos’s stories were.

  “It’s true that Teddy acted awkwardly,” said Stelio Papadimitriou, “but that did not occur until after the burial. During a Greek funeral, there is a ritual where you offer fish, which has the mystical meaning of resurrection in Christianity. When that was over, Teddy approached me, and took me aside. He said he would like to talk to me about money.

  “It
was not the time or place to make such a suggestion, but we agreed to meet as soon as possible. Christina heard about this conversation, and got mad. But all that came later, quite a bit later, when we began to work out the financial arrangements.”

  THE RECKONING

  In his will, Onassis established a German-style Stiftung, or foundation, in Lichtenstein in memory of his son. The foundation would award scholarships for Greeks to study abroad, grant prizes for cultural and humanitarian achievement, and help treat sick people. But the Stiftung differed from an American charitable foundation in that it also ran a business, one of the world’s most modern fleets of tankers and dry-cargo ships. Onassis had stipulated that all of his money—about $500 million at the time—go to the Stiftung, with half of it held in trust for Christina.

  “But she objected to the financial arrangements in her father’s will,” Stelio Papadimitriou told the author of this book.

  “She told me, ‘Stelio, I do not wish to be subject to the foundation. If you compel me, I will be forced to go to litigation.’

  “So we reinterpreted the will. We divided the entire estate into two equal parts—so many ships, so much cash, shares, real estate, etcetera—and wrote it all down on two slips and labeled them Tart A‘ and Tart B.’ We went to a notary public in Zurich, and Christina agreed in writing that the two slips were of equal value, about $250 million apiece. We put the slips of paper into a small box, and Christina reached in and picked out Tart B.”

  “She said, ‘Gentlemen, now I give it to you to manage for me. Not because my father wanted it that way, but because I wanted it to happen.’ ”

  The final reckoning with Jackie proved to be a far more difficult task. On April 18, 1975, a month after Onassis died, The New York Times ran a story reporting that he had been planning to divorce Jackie, and had retained the attorney Roy Cohn to handle the American end of the proceedings. The fingerprints of Costa Gratsos were all over the story.

  “Several friends of the Onassis family have said that Mrs. Onassis wants more money,” John Corry reported on the front page of the Times. “[Christina] is said to be bitterly hostile to Mrs. Onassis.”

  Jackie went through the roof when she read the story.

  “According to what I was told by very reliable sources on the Christina side,” Roy Cohn said, “Jackie was calling up Christina in Monte Carlo after the story had been printed, threatening that unless Christina put out a statement saying that everything had been all lovey-dovey and wonderful between her father and Jackie, she was going to make no end of trouble over the estate, and everything else.”

  Four days later, the Times ran a wire-service story from Paris headlined: MISS ONASSIS DENIES HER FATHER PLANNED DIVORCE. But Christina’s statement only fueled speculation that things were not right between Jackie and the Greek side of the family.

  Shortly thereafter, Christina flew to New York and confronted Jackie in a face-to-face meeting.

  “How much money do you want in return for giving up all further claims to my father’s estate?” Christina asked.

  When Jackie refused to be pinned down, Christina threatened her with the public humiliation of a lawsuit.

  Jackie responded with a not-so-veiled threat of her own. She told Christina that her attorney, Simon Rifkind, a distinguished former federal judge, doubted that Onassis’s will was legally binding. If it came to a lawsuit, Jackie said, she was prepared to challenge the validity of the will.

  Under Greek law, a last will and testament had to be composed “in a single sitting in a single location.” But according to Onassis’s own handwriting, he had written his will on an airplane as it winged its way over international borders from Mexico to America. If Rifkind could prove that Onassis had died intestate, or without an enforceable will, Jackie would be entitled to receive 12.5 percent of his estate, or more than $60 million. That was a whopping three hundred times more than Onassis had bequeathed her (and was the equivalent of about $300 million in today’s dollars).

  Money aside, Jackie also wanted to keep her 25 percent share in the Christina and Skorpios, as well as her seat on the board of directors of the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. In a letter, she asked Niki Goulandris to act as her proxy on the board of the foundation because of her fear that the other members of the board would give away money to any hospital or orphanage coming along.

  She wrote, “Ari’s thought was beautiful—but he didn’t have time to complete his gesture—If we could complete it for him—in a way that will truly do good….”

  But Jackie was deluding herself if she believed that Christina would allow her to continue to participate in the affairs of the Onassis family. As always, Christina’s attitude was reflected—and considerably exaggerated—by Costa Gratsos, who was interviewed by Kitty Kelley for her book Jackie Oh!

  “Please don’t talk to me about that woman,” Gratsos told Kelley about Jackie. “She’s despicable. I can’t bring myself to even think about her. If it was something else I’d try to help you, but on this I can’t. And don’t even try to see Christina, because she can’t bear the thought of that woman. She will turn you down flat. She never wants to see her again, or even hear her name.”

  “I represented Christina, assisted by Nicolas Cokkinis, the first managing director of the Onassis companies, in negotiations with Jackie,” said Papadimitriou. “She was represented by Alexander Forger of the American law firm Millbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy. The negotiations took place at the Olympic Maritime headquarters in Monte Carlo.

  “We met several times,” Papadimitriou continued. “Christina was angry as hell. She thought that Jackie was behaving badly by asking for a bigger share of the estate. Costa Gratsos was egging Christina on, urging her to resist Jackie’s demands. But I thought Jackie was entitled to a piece of the cake, and that she was being reasonable about what she asked for. I had to fight very hard with Christina, who wanted to give Jackie nothing.

  “We finally settled on a reasonable cash figure, which was a fraction of what Jackie would have obtained by application of the forced heirship provisions of Greek law before the amendment of the law, but much more than what Onassis had contemplated under his will pursuant to the application of the amendment of the law. We thought that Jackie, as the widow of Aristotle Onassis, was entitled to a comfortable life to the end.”

  Jackie received $25.5 million, of which $6 million went for estate taxes, and $500,000 was for Jackie’s lawyers. That left Jackie with $19 million. In addition, she received an annuity of $150,000 for the remainder of her life. John and Caroline received yearly payments of $50,000 apiece until they reached the age of twenty-one, after which their payments went to Jackie. All of the payments were tied to the inflation rate.

  “In return for this, Jackie agreed to give up Skorpios, the Christina, and her position on the board of the foundation,” said Papadimitriou. “She would have been entitled to one fifteenth of two percent of the profits of the foundation, as I was, plus a reasonable retirement plan, and medical expenses. If you deduct all the benefits that she renounced, Jackie ended up with a comfortable amount considering her status as the widow of a wealthy person.”

  “I COULDN’T SAVE EITHER ONE”

  All through the long and bitter struggle with Christina over Aristotle Onassis’s money, Jackie continued to be friends with Ari’s sister Artemis. The two women talked on the phone two or three times a week. And when Jackie was in Greece, she made it a point to visit Artemis in Glyfada.

  The spacious seaside villa was full of memories for Jackie of her early days in Greece, when life seemed to be full of light, and there was an endless supply of laughter. She and Artemis took long walks before dinner. They reminisced about Ari and the old days, before the death of Alexander changed everything. The stories made them sad, and they often fell silent as they strolled through Glyfada’s streets that ran down to the sea.

  Artemis knew that it was not only the memories of former gaiety that haunted Jackie. In the months following Onas
sis’s death, Jackie suffered one humiliating public blow after another. In August 1975, Hustler magazine ran a five-page picture spread of Jackie sunbathing nude on Skorpios. In September, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Operations, chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, subpoenaed Judith Campbell Exner, who testified that she had a close personal relationship with President Kennedy and with Sam Giancana, the Chicago crime boss, who had been hired by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. In December, Judith Campbell Exner appeared at a press conference in San Diego. Her tanned face partly hidden behind saucer-shaped sunglasses, she said that she had visited Kennedy twenty-three times in the White House, lunched with him in his office, joined him on road trips, and phoned in frequently—at least seventy times, according to official logs.

  Caroline was eighteen, John fifteen, when the heroic legend of their father began to sink into the sludge of gossip and innuendo. The towers of Camelot, so painstakingly constructed by Jackie in her famous interview with Teddy White, were beginning to fall into ruins.

  Desperate, Jackie tried to fight the campaign of de-sanctification by inviting friends who had worked closely with Kennedy to come to her home and speak to her children about their father. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Robert McNamara were among those she invited to give Caroline and John informal private seminars on the authentic legacy of President Kennedy. But the damage had been done, and the lights seemed to go out on the one brief shining moment that was Camelot.

  Artemis invited Jackie’s old friends to dinner in an effort to cheer her up. One evening, when all the guests had departed, Jackie turned to Artemis, and said:

  “I am feeling so fragile. Sometimes I think that I am responsible for my misfortune. My first husband died in my arms. I was always telling him that he should be protected, but he would not listen to me. Before my second husband died, I was always telling him to take care of himself, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t visit the doctor. He could have [died] at any moment during our marriage. No matter what I did, I couldn’t save either one of the two men I loved.”