Given the gossip swirling about her relationship with Onassis, it was no surprise that Ari was not among the two thousand people invited to Bobby’s funeral. Lord Harlech, one of the ten pallbearers, felt it was obvious that Onassis’s presence would have been “in very poor taste.”
For the moment, taste was not at the top of Jackie’s list of things to look for in a mate. She not only feared for the safety of her children, but she also craved privacy, seclusion—a life where all three of the people Jack left behind wouldn’t be hounded by the press essentially around the clock.
It was becoming increasingly clear that Ari was the solution to all of Jackie’s problems. No one, it seemed, was better equipped to provide for the safety of John and Caroline. The family’s current four-man Secret Service detail paled in comparison to Onassis’s machine-gun-equipped, seventy-five-member security force augmented by attack dogs. Privacy? Onassis offered that and much more behind the gates of his palatial homes in Athens, Paris, and Montevideo, Uruguay—not to mention aboard the Christina, in penthouse suites sprinkled across the globe, and on his own private island of Skorpios.
Just days after Bobby was laid to rest, Ari arrived at Hammersmith Farm with his daughter, Christina, in tow. “It was definitely a case of ‘Ari to the rescue,’ ” said Jackie’s columnist friend Aileen Mehle, better known as Suzy. “He showered jewels on her, he wooed her . . . He was repulsive, of course, but it wasn’t just the money. He was so alive, so vibrant, and so vigorous. He was this life force.”
For the remainder of the summer, Jackie led a charm offensive designed to persuade friends and family in New York, Newport, Hyannis Port, and Palm Beach that Onassis was suitable marriage material for JFK’s widow. She failed miserably. “The term ‘Eurotrash’ hadn’t been invented yet,” Truman Capote said, “but that’s definitely what they thought old Ari was.”
Nor did it help that everyone knew Onassis was still carrying on his affair with Callas. “Everybody here knows three things about Aristotle Onassis,” he told Johnny Meyer. Those three things: “I’m fucking Maria Callas, I’m fucking Jacqueline Kennedy—and I’m fucking rich.” In the end, he had no illusions about ever being accepted by the Kennedys, the Auchinclosses, or any of Jackie’s Social Register crowd. “They hate,” he told Gratsos, “my Greek guts.”
Onassis understood that, in addition to Jackie, there were only two people whose opinion mattered—one was ten years old, the other, seven. In Jackie’s eyes, Bobby was the perfect surrogate father and male role model for her son. Now she was particularly anxious about what impact Bobby’s death would have on John, and Ari faced the formidable task of convincing her that he could fill the void.
“When Ari wanted something,” his friend Doris Lilly said, “he stopped at nothing to get it. And he wanted Jackie’s kids to love him, especially John.” Onassis waded into the surf with both children, went on long walks with them, bought them ice cream, and even spent hours with Caroline and John hunched over board games and puzzles. It certainly helped that, whenever he came to visit, he was trailed by servants carrying armloads of toys purchased from New York’s premier toy store, FAO Schwarz.
Ari pulled out all the stops with John. “You know what you and I are, John?” he would ask the little boy. “We are filaracos.” Filaracos, Ari hastened to remind him, is the Greek word for “buddies.”
Wherever they went, John and Onassis were difficult to miss—the stocky, dour-faced, pinky-ring-flashing mogul and everyone’s favorite, tousle-haired all-American son. Shadowed by a half dozen hulking bodyguards, this odd couple turned heads in baseball stadiums, movie theaters, and amusement parks. On Cape Cod, Onassis even took the boy fishing. “Here,” he said, handing John two crisp hundred-dollar bills. “Go buy some worms.”
It also helped that Ari clearly made Mummy, as John called her, happy. “Jackie bounced back much more quickly after Bobby’s death,” Gilpatric said. “There wasn’t that element of doubt about what she would do next. Onassis was right there with the solution: him.”
Ari’s spectacular wealth was a big part of the equation. For the first time in her life, she would no longer be treated as the poor relation. “The Kennedy women had always flaunted their money and power,” George Smathers said. “This was Jackie’s opportunity to say to them, ‘Okay, what are you going to say now that I can buy and sell you?’ ”
As important as the money undoubtedly was, it was equally true that Jackie and Ari behaved for all intents and purposes like two people very much in love. Whether she was in New York or Hyannis Port or London, Jackie always awoke to a bouquet of orchids or roses and the note J.I.L.Y. (for “Jackie I Love You”).
According to Larry Newman, the Kennedys’ longtime next-door neighbor in Hyannis Port, they appeared to be “a far more romantic couple than Jack and Jackie—at least that’s the way it looked early on.”
Indeed, until that final year leading up to Dallas, Jack and Jackie seldom showed tenderness toward one another. “Jackie could be very playful, try and give Jack a hug or a kiss,” Newman remembered, “but he’d turn very stiff . . . I felt sorry for Jackie when that happened.” With Onassis, on the other hand, things “were totally different. They’d hold hands, or they’d have their arms around each other. Sometimes they’d do these cute little dance steps, or they’d be whistling . . .”
Older and of a more naturally analytical nature than her brother, Caroline took a cautious approach toward the new man in her mother’s life. After all, she still cut pictures of her father out of newspapers and magazines to add to the collection she started on November 22, 1963. By this point, they papered the walls of her bedroom. The loss of her uncle had left her feeling even more lost and vulnerable. “She had been so close to Bobby,” Plimpton said, “that it took maybe a little longer for her to warm up to Onassis. But she liked Ari, absolutely. It was impossible not to when he turned on the Greek charm.”
John was no less loyal to the memory of his dad. Whenever another child was visiting, he would inevitably ask, “Would you like to hear my father?” Then he turned to a small stack of records and selected one to play—usually JFK’s inaugural address or his rousing “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. “Jackie played these for him to keep the connection alive in John’s mind,” Tish Baldrige said. “I think it became a ritual for him. He was also proud. Why wouldn’t the other boys want to hear his famous daddy?” After a few respectful minutes listening to Jack intone “Ask not what your country can do for you,” John returned to the floor to play.
Onassis was savvy enough to listen attentively when John played his daddy’s speeches, and to praise the late president as a great and good man, someone he deeply admired and respected. Jackie’s wily lover stressed to John that no one could replace Jack Kennedy in their lives—certainly not him, although he would do his best to try to make John’s mother happy.
It would turn out to be an expensive undertaking. Notwithstanding all the joy Ari seemed to bring her, Jackie enlisted Teddy’s help in negotiating a prenuptial agreement with Onassis. That August, they made a special trip to Skorpios to hammer out the details. But when the Massachusetts senator made a spectacle of himself after getting drunk on ouzo, Jackie turned instead to her no-nonsense financial adviser, André Meyer. In the end Meyer succeeded in getting Ari to ante up $3 million in cash for Jackie up front and a $l million trust fund for each of her children.
As the juggernaut rolled on, John and Caroline were kept completely in the dark about their mother’s intentions. Not once did their mother mention the word marriage when discussing Mr. Onassis; as far as the children were concerned, he was, like Lord Harlech, Gilpatric, and the rest, just one in the passing parade of well-dressed older gentlemen Mummy had spent time with since Daddy’s death.
While the grown-ups continued to make wedding preparations in secret, another drama was unfolding at Jackie’s Bernardsville, New Jersey, country estate. One weekend, members of the Secret Service Kiddie Detail followed the wrong car out of the
driveway and allegedly “misplaced” John and Caroline. For the next two hours, a frantic search for the children was under way as Secret Service higher-ups in Washington feared the worst—that John and Caroline had been abducted.
The sun had already set by the time Jackie’s New Jersey neighbor Peggy McDonnell drove up with Jackie’s kids in the backseat. They had been playing with her children, and when no Secret Service car came to pick them up, she decided to drive them over herself. Understandably, Jackie was furious when told of this shocking security breach. If she needed another reason to marry into the heavily guarded Onassis family, it was hard to beat the day the Secret Service lost JFK’s children.
John seemed oblivious to all the premarital intrigue swirling around him, in part because he had so many other things on his mind. When his teachers at St. David’s told Jackie that her son lacked maturity and would have to repeat the first grade, she yanked him out of the school and enrolled him in the prestigious Collegiate School on the other side of Central Park.
This was another abrupt change for John, who had made so many friends among the students at St. David’s. Since John loved hansom cabs, Jackie took him for a ride around Central Park, and broke the news to him then. This had one advantage: “I couldn’t go anywhere—I couldn’t escape. I had to sit and listen to her,” John said. From that point on, “that’s what she did. After a while, if we got in a horse-drawn carriage I would wonder what the big news was going to be.”
Jackie obviously wasn’t going to be walking her son to school anymore, but that didn’t mean John could climb aboard Collegiate’s yellow school bus and ride with his friends to school, either. Each morning at 7:50, a battered tan-and-cream Oldsmobile driven by JFK’s crusty personal driver Muggsy O’Leary pulled up to a side entrance at 1040 Fifth and a Secret Service agent held open the right rear passenger door.
Five minutes later, Marta Sgubin and John emerged. Wearing Collegiate’s blue blazer with its gold, orange, and purple crest, John clutched a large brown leather briefcase covered with travel stickers as he strode purposefully toward the car. The Secret Service agent then took his place in the front seat, next to Muggsy. Cutting straight through Central Park using the Eighty-fifth Street transverse, John usually arrived at 241 West Seventy-seventh Street seven or eight minutes later—in plenty of time to blend in with the other shaggy-maned sons of privilege as they streamed through Collegiate’s high wooden doors.
Inside, Collegiate resembled any other school—public or private—in the city. John’s home room had forest green carpeting on the floor, fluorescent lights, cinder-block walls, pull-down maps, wooden desks, and chalkboards. Mornings were devoted to the usual subjects: reading, spelling, geography, math, English, and a foreign language—in John’s case, French.
Early on, John showed an interest in the theater, writing a short pantomime about kite-flying that his class performed during a special after-school assembly for parents. Following John’s script, one of the boys tugs too hard on the string and it drifts away—a metaphor, the teacher later explained, for love and loss. A collective sigh was heard among the mothers in the audience. “Everyone knew what John had already gone through,” said the mother of the boy who tugged too hard. His little pantomime struck her as nothing less than “charming and poetic.”
Still, John was easily distractible and not exactly a stellar student—he later claimed it was clear that he suffered from attention deficit disorder (ADD)—but he did excel at athletics. After lunch, he and the other boys either went to the gym to play basketball or headed for Central Park to play soccer, baseball, or football.
John was still quick to make friends, and was not above angling for an introduction when it seemed the other boy outclassed him. Such was the case of Hans Hageman, one of the few African Americans at Collegiate and the school’s star ten-year-old wrestler and runner. “At Collegiate,” said journalist Nancy Moran, “being a good athlete is more prestigious than being the son of a president.”
His own athletic skills notwithstanding, John still had to cope with teasing from the other kids. It didn’t help that Jackie, clinging to her own notions of propriety, insisted John continue to wear shorts even though all the other boys his age were in long pants.
Unfortunately for the boys who taunted John, members of his Secret Service detail had been giving him boxing lessons. Anyone who called John “John-John” or made fun of his short pants could expect to collide with John’s tiny fists of fury. “He socked me in the nose the very first day of school,” a classmate said. “I wasn’t the last one he gave a bloody nose to, either.”
* * *
TAUNTS OF AN entirely different nature would soon be giving John new reasons to lash out. Doris Lilly was booed and heckled when she predicted on television’s popular Merv Griffin Show that Jackie was about to marry Onassis. Leaving the show’s Times Square studios, Lilly was then pushed, kicked, and cursed at as she walked down the street.
The rest of the Kennedys were no less outraged. When Pierre Salinger, who had been let in early on Jackie’s plans, confirmed to Kennedy family spokesman Stephen Smith that she was indeed going to marry Onassis, Smith could only manage a two-word response: “Oh shit.”
Jackie grew tired of hearing friends beseeching her to find someone less controversial, more . . . American. “I can’t very well,” she sighed to Truman Capote over lunch at La Côte Basque, “marry a dentist from New Jersey.” Another friend warned her that marriage to Onassis would topple her from her pedestal. “It’s better than freezing there,” Jackie answered.
Jackie’s only real concerns were religious. She was marrying a divorced man in a Greek Orthodox ceremony, and she knew that several of her Kennedy in-laws were pressuring Cardinal Cushing to threaten her with excommunication. Jackie made a special pilgrimage to Boston and promised Cushing that John and Caroline were to keep their Kennedy name and be raised Roman Catholic. Cushing declined to give Jackie and Ari his blessing, but he wasn’t about to denounce them publicly, either.
On October 15, 1968, the Boston Herald-Traveler broke the story on its front page, tipping Jackie’s hand. Before telling anyone else, Jackie piled the kids in a hansom cab for a ride around the park. John would always remember the clip-clop sound of horse hooves on pavement when Jackie told them she was marrying Onassis and that they were getting a stepfather.
Once she had told her children, Jackie frantically worked the phones, calling relatives on both sides of the family with the news. Janet Auchincloss was furious and accused Jackie of marrying Ari just to get back at her for divorcing Jackie’s beloved rogue of a father, Black Jack Bouvier.
John’s Grandmother Rose was the only family member to give the union her blessing. “Stunned” by the news, her thoughts “awhirl,” the Kennedy matriarch wondered aloud if such a union would be accepted by the church, and if John and Caroline would accept Onassis as a stepfather. But she conceded that Jackie was not the sort of person who “would jump rashly into anything as important as this, so she must have her own very good reasons.”
“She of all people was the one who encouraged me,” Jackie later said. “Here I was, I was married to her son and I have his children, but she was the one who was saying, if this what you think is best, go ahead.”
Rose’s motives may not have been entirely altruistic. “I’m sure she did encourage Jackie to marry Onassis,” said Smathers, who pointed out that Joe Kennedy’s office was still taking care of Jackie’s expenses. “She was tired of paying all those bills!”
“How could she do this to me?” Lee Radziwill shrieked over the phone to Truman Capote when she heard the news. Lee had had her own designs on Onassis back when Jackie was still in the White House. “How could this happen?!”
Onassis’s own children, twenty-year-old Alexander and eighteen-year-old Christina, were devastated. They had clung to the hope that someday their parents would reconcile. “It’s a perfect match,” Alexander told his sister. “Our father loves Jackie and Jackie loves mon
ey.”
No one felt the sting of betrayal more than Maria Callas, whose relationship with Onassis gave new dimension to the word stormy. Ari’s friend Doris Lilly said the couple “fought like cats and dogs. Callas was a proud woman. She never said anything about the beatings, no matter how savage, and always wore makeup to conceal the bruises. As I heard Ari say many times, all Greek men beat their wives.” More precisely, the Onassis mantra, which his friends knew by heart, went like this: “Every Greek, and there are no exceptions, beats his wife. It’s good for them. It keeps them in line.”
Callas made the ultimate sacrifice in 1966 when Ari demanded that she abort their son—the child she desperately wanted to keep—or risk losing him forever. She went ahead and had the abortion, but never forgave him for it.
The diva divina had also faithfully guarded his many secrets—among them, his passion for dressing in drag. Guests aboard the Christina as well as lovers like the Norwegian shipping heiress Ingeborg Dedichen, Gloria Swanson, Paulette Goddard, and Callas all remembered how Onassis loved to slip into lingerie, nylons, earrings, jangling bracelets, and high heels before parading around as “Arianna.”
Swanson, who later learned that Onassis was in fact bisexual, couldn’t help but be impressed. “He was an ugly man,” Swanson said, “but as a woman he was, well, unforgettable.”
Callas had endured many humiliations at Ari’s hands. When her magnificent voice began to falter with age, he needled her mercilessly. “What are you?” he demanded. “Nothing. You just have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.” This time, Lilly said, Callas was “destroyed” by the news that he was marrying Jackie. “But she wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing the pain Jackie and Onassis were costing her.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 14
