Over the years, Jackie had developed a series of compulsions to help cope with stress: chain-smoking, nail-biting, nonstop exercise, marathon shopping—just to name a few. Now that she was being exposed to the more Levantine aspects of the Onassis family temperament—the volcanic eruptions, the black moods—she had to come up with something new: compulsive dieting.
Obeying the Duchess of Windsor’s dictum that you can never be too rich or too thin, Jackie survived—barely—on a daily diet that consisted of a half grapefruit, yogurt, two and a half ounces of meat, three and a half ounces of green vegetables, and one apple. In ten days, she dropped twenty-four pounds.
Anorexia nervosa and bulimia had not yet found their way into the medical lexicon, but many of those close to Jackie believed she suffered from both. “Jackie starved herself to stay thin,” said Roy Cohn, the controversial New York lawyer who first gained notoriety as Senator Joe McCarthy’s counsel during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Cohn knew the Kennedys and Onassis, and later went to work as Ari’s hired gun. “Sometimes she would go on a binge and eat everything she really liked—hot fudge sundaes, hot dogs, nothing fancy but the things she really liked—then that night before she went to bed she’d stick her finger down her throat and throw it all up. Ari never saw it himself, but one of the crew members on the Christina accidentally caught her in the act. At first they just assumed she was seasick, but then they figured out what was going on.”
Jackie’s eating disorder was rooted in her chubby adolescence, her mother’s constant carping about her weight—and sibling rivalry. “There she was, the most famous, glamorous woman in the world, married to one of the richest men in the world, and she was starving herself,” Doris Lilly said. “And for what? So she would look as chic as her sister Lee.” Jackie admitted that she had always been jealous of Lee’s delicate features and size-four figure. “She’s always been the pretty one,” Jackie said, “so I guess I’m the smart one.”
RIDDLE OF JACKIE’S ILLNESS, read the headline of the British weekly the People, while France Dimanche concluded unequivocally that “Jackie is ill. Her eyes give the impression of deep suffering.”
Even Jackie was worried, as it turned out. Startled at the suddenness of her weight loss and an unfamiliar lack of energy, she sought the opinion of France’s leading cancer specialist, Dr. Georges Mathé of Paris’s Villejuif Clinic. JACKIE SAID TO HAVE CANCER, screamed the front-page headline in the Athens Akropolis. HAS JACKIE GOT CANCER? chimed in the afternoon newspaper Ta Nea.
The children were understandably concerned, and Jackie reassured them that there was no truth to the rumors that she was ill. Caroline took her mother’s word at face value, but John was worried enough to ask his nanny if she thought Mummy was “too skinny.”
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NOW THAT CAROLINE was away at Concord Academy in Massachusetts, John was left alone with a ringside seat to the Onassises’ marital dysfunction. “He would always say, ‘The Widow wants this’ and ‘The Widow wants that,’ ” recalled Aileen Mehle. “She tried to keep up appearances, but it was obvious that he was mad at her. And I mean all the time.”
Ari made his displeasure known in other, not especially subtle, ways. “Jackie had a charming little rule,” Costa Gratsos told columnist Jack Anderson, “that Ari had to bring back a present from every part of the world he visited. Once, all he brought her was a simple apron from Africa. She was livid. I suppose she expected a shoe box full of raw diamonds.”
Ari did show up with Jackie for John’s stage debut as a member of Fagin’s gang of underage pickpockets in Collegiate’s Christmas production of the musical Oliver! John felt at home on the student stage; every year on Jackie’s birthday, Marta Sgubin staged a family production of one of Molière’s classic farces with John in the starring role.
This evening at Collegiate, however, there was no mistaking the tension between Mr. and Mrs. Onassis—even as they sat in the audience at a school play. “Jackie was all smiles,” another parent recalled, “and Onassis looked like he wanted to reach over and strangle her.”
Looking to make his own getaway, John pleaded with Jackie to send him on another manly adventure. This time she agreed to let John join his friend Bob Cramer at Camp Androscoggin, a summer camp in a wilderness area north of Portland, Maine.
John was almost out the door when Jackie called an abrupt halt to the trip. In July, Greek authorities announced the arrest of twelve terrorists—four members of Germany’s infamous 20 October Movement and eight Greek leftists—who were plotting to kidnap John and hold him for ransom.
Robbed of his annual adventure away from Mummy, John divided the summer of 1972 among Hyannis Port, Newport, the weekend house in New Jersey, Greece, and of course New York. On Skorpios and aboard the Christina, the atmosphere was different now. Alexander and Christina were still surprisingly warm toward John—especially Alexander, who continued to take John on spins around the island aboard his helicopter.
John’s Greek stepbrother, who had just undergone rhinoplasty to rid himself of the prominent Onassis nose, cared enough for John not to expose him to any unnecessary risk. When the boy begged to take a flight in Ari’s Piaggio amphibious plane, Alexander refused. Ari’s son believed that particular aircraft to be a “death trap,” and had already convinced his father to replace it with another helicopter.
Not that Ari spent much time with either Alexander or John. On those increasingly rare occasions when he was around, Onassis made his feelings toward John’s mother painfully clear. “After a certain point,” Aileen Mehle said, “I never saw love on his side when it came to Jackie. Now she was sweet and warm and affectionate. He was aloof.” What made it worse was that “this is the way Ari treated Jackie in public. I can’t imagine how awful he was toward her when nobody was around.”
In such close quarters on Skorpios and aboard Onassis’s floating Xanadu, John was exposed to the angry shouting, the hurled epithets, and the sound of crockery smashing—all part and parcel of marital disharmony in Greece.
“How confusing it must have been for this little boy,” George Plimpton said, “to have Ari be a big part of his life one minute and then gone the next.” As for the way he witnessed Onassis treating his mother: “Of course Jackie was everything to John and Caroline. As young as he was, John must have wanted to sock Ari in the eye for the things he did and said to Jackie.”
Onassis was not above holding John’s mother up to ridicule, especially if it might teach her a lesson. Fed up with hearing Jackie complain about the press and no longer willing to finance her costly invasion-of-privacy lawsuits, Ari hatched a plan to embarrass Jackie to such an extent that there would be nothing more that the press could do to hurt her. As an added benefit, it would deeply hurt the woman he continued to deride as “the Widow.”
In November 1972, ten photographers put on wetsuits and slipped into the waters off Skorpios. With detailed maps of the island, the dates, times, and places where Jackie was expected to be—all provided by Ari—they snapped scores of color photos of Jackie sunbathing and strolling around in the altogether. The full-frontal images caused a sensation when they ran in the Italian skin magazine Playmen and were then picked up by Larry Flynt’s Hustler. Solely on the basis of the nude Jackie O shots, Hustler went from sales of a few thousand copies to over two million—launching Flynt’s publishing empire overnight.
Needless to say, Ari’s ill-conceived plan did not have the desired effect. John and Caroline cringed with embarrassment over having to see photographs of their mother—even censored photographs—displayed on every newsstand and supermarket counter in New York. Despite John’s popularity at school, the teasing from classmates over what one magazine trumpeted as Jackie’s “Billion Dollar Bush” was merciless and unrelenting.
Jackie, unaware that her husband was behind the whole fiasco, was livid. Instead of backing down, she demanded that Ari sue every photographer and every publication involved. Instead, Ari went straight to Roy Cohn’s Upper Ea
st Side townhouse and informed him he was divorcing Jackie. Mindful of the fact that Jackie wasn’t about to settle for the $3 million spelled out in their prenup, Onassis agreed to fork over an extra $1 million. “That’s all the Widow gets,” he said. “Not one penny more.”
Not even Onassis believed Jackie would ever settle for such a trifling amount. He had recently learned that she was secretly selling her designer fashions to raise cash, and that concerned him. “He knew how greedy she was,” Cohn said. “Onassis was really worried that Jackie would try and hold him up for a huge amount—$100 million or more—and that scared him shitless.”
“The Widow” was completely in the dark about Ari’s plans when, in January 1973, he flew to Paris and broke the news to Alexander over dinner. Ari’s son was overjoyed, and promptly informed his sister. That same evening, Ari also reconfirmed his intention to eventually sell the Piaggio. In the meantime he asked Alexander, a seasoned pilot who had flown the Piaggio countless times, to take it up just once more, merely for the purpose of checking out a pilot he had just hired.
Less than three weeks later, at 3:12 p.m. on January 22, the Piaggio was taxiing into position with the new pilot at the controls and Alexander seated next to him. Fifteen seconds after takeoff, the plane banked sharply to the right and plummeted to earth, crashing into the tarmac.
Jackie and Ari were both in New York—she at her apartment, he at his Pierre Hotel suite—when they got the news that Alexander’s plane had crashed. Although both he and the pilot were badly hurt, only Alexander’s injuries were critical. Young Onassis’s head wounds were so severe, in fact, that airport personnel at the scene had to rely on his monogrammed silk handkerchief to identify him.
Jackie wasted no time calling Caroline at Concord Academy. Since leaving home, John’s sister had decided that she, too, wished to take to the skies. “People always think of John running up to welcome his father’s helicopter,” Pierre Salinger said. “They forget Caroline was on the White House lawn waiting for Daddy, too.” Moreover, JFK’s campaign plane was named after her—something she took considerable pride in as a little girl. “Caroline had been flying for years before John was even born,” George Plimpton said. “Flying was second nature to her, and it made perfect sense that she’d want to give it a try.” As enthusiastic as John was about aviation, it was their stepbrother who took them up in planes and helicopters whenever they visited Greece. Alexander’s passion for flying was “infectious,” Salinger said. “That may have rubbed off on them as well.”
For several weeks Caroline had been taking flying lessons aboard a Cessna two-seater not far from Concord Academy, at Hanscom Airfield. No longer. With this latest reminder of just how dangerous flying could be—something the Kennedys knew all too well—Jackie forbade Caroline to pursue her pilot’s license.
Alexander’s untimely accident also forced Jackie to reconsider John’s fascination with planes. An alarming number of Kennedys and extended family members had perished in plane crashes, and the crash that nearly killed Teddy in 1964 was still fresh in Jackie’s mind.
Jackie herself had been nonchalant about flying in small planes; now it occurred to her for the first time that they might pose a real threat to her children. From this point on, she would do all she could to discourage John’s dream of becoming a pilot.
John and Caroline stayed in the United States while Jackie and Ari flew to Athens. There Alexander, suffering from irreversible brain damage, lingered for hours before Ari made the gut-wrenching decision to end life support. Alexander was only twenty-four.
Onassis would never recover from his only son’s death—not because he had been a loving father, but because he was consumed with guilt over not having been one. Just as important, Onassis’s vast empire represented his bid for immortality; in highly patriarchal Greek society, Alexander was the embodiment of that future. Now Onassis would have to groom Christina (Ari’s Chryso Mou—“My Golden One”) for power. She would prove herself more than equal to the task—but things would never be the same.
Jackie, having experienced more than her share of grief, did what she could to ease Ari’s pain. Two days after Alexander’s funeral, she asked Pierre Salinger and his wife, Nicole, to fly to Dakar, Senegal and join them aboard the Christina. Onassis “loved” the intellectually challenging Pierre, Nicole said. “They went on for hours and hours, pacing up and down the deck, talking and arguing”—mostly about American history.
“Ari and I got along marvelously,” Salinger said. “But his mood changed whenever Jackie started talking about Jack. Nerves were frayed, and you wondered how much of an impact this tense atmosphere was having on the kids.”
At those times when John and Caroline saw Onassis lash out at their mother, Jackie patiently reminded them that their stepfather was still mourning the death of his only son. He was hurting, she explained, and not really responsible for his behavior. “They were two very sensitive, compassionate kids,” Salinger allowed. “If Jackie told them he was just too overcome with grief . . . they’d understand that—to a point.”
Salinger departed thinking the cruise “did seem to help,” but he was wrong. Ari was becoming increasingly unhinged; Alexander’s death had changed him forever. He was “no longer interested in life,” Jackie said, and had become “a perfect horror to live with.” Peter Duchin agreed that from this point on Ari was “moody, short with people”—what Mehle called Onassis’s “endless blue funk.”
Jackie kept trying to pull Ari out of this downward spiral of grief, distracting him with more travel—to the Caribbean, Mexico, Egypt, and Spain. None of it worked. Mehle ran into the couple in Florida. “I went down to the beach,” she recalled, “and there was Ari curled up on the sand in a fetal position. Onassis was a mortally wounded man.”
He was also becoming extremely paranoid, convinced that Alexander’s tragic death was the result of an elaborate CIA plot. By July 1973, Ari was offering a $l million reward to anyone who could prove that his son’s plane had been sabotaged. A man possessed, Ari sat alone in the dark for hours, drinking Johnnie Walker Black Label and listening to the cockpit tapes of the doomed pilots as they desperately tried to regain control of their planes right before impact.
Duchin agreed that Alexander’s death “knocked him out of the box. It completely changed Ari’s personality . . . He felt fate had turned against him.” Now Ari was “morose, nitpicking, critical—just extremely difficult to be in the same room with. All the spark he had was gone. Jackie got the worst of it.”
Peter Beard recalled witnessing “the biggest fights between them you could ever imagine. He would blow up all the time—tantrums about everything. Yelling and screaming at her.” Ari’s rages became increasingly terrifying—until the inevitable happened. “They were having one of their screaming matches when Ari lost his temper and hit Jackie across the face,” Cohn said. “She had a black eye, but since she wore dark glasses all the time nobody suspected a thing.”
Jackie urged Ari to seek psychiatric help for his worsening depression. Instead, he found other ways to vent his rage. According to those who knew and worked for him, Ari carried on several short-term relationships with young men. In the aftermath of his son’s death, these too turned violent.
Frank Monte, who worked as Ari’s bodyguard in 1973, remembered that when he was in Rome, Ari saw “two Italian boys. One lived in Mr. Onassis’s apartment and the other was always on call when Mr. Onassis wanted him. One was dark, the other was blond-haired but deeply tan. They were handsome, in their mid-twenties. Onassis would play around with them, making lewd jokes in front of me and the other bodyguards.”
Ari, who frequently brought up the role of homosexuality in ancient Greek history, would “often talk quite openly about his two regular boys and other occasional boys,” Monte said. But Ari’s employees became concerned when these young men were subjected to violence. “He mistreated them, even beat them for pleasure. He’d often take one or the other to his bedroom and after a while, the
re’d be the sounds of punches and screams,” Monte said. “Then we’d get a call from Mr. Onassis to fetch the poor kid and throw him out. Sometimes a boy would be yelling, ‘No, no, I love you.’ ”
(Onassis apparently did not confine himself to pursuing sexual relationships with anonymous young men. Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli and Rudolf Nureyev claimed that Ari made passes at them aboard the Christina.)
Despite the ongoing strains in his mother’s marriage prior to Alexander’s plane crash death, John had always somehow managed to see the underlying good in his stepfather. Now that was impossible. Gone was the kindly father figure, supplanted by a sullen, bitter, increasingly deranged old man who did nothing to disguise that most of his rage was directed squarely at John’s mother.
Onassis was never cruel to John or to Caroline. But he wasn’t particularly kind to them, either. Gone were the long walks through Central Park, the trips to the playoffs, and the extravagant gifts. When he searched the bleachers at school events now, John would no longer see Ari sitting there next to his mother. “Onassis was in the middle of what amounted to a nervous breakdown,” Tish Baldrige said. He had no way of comforting himself, much less make time for others.
Twelve-year-old John did what he could to cheer the old man up—asking Ari to join him at one of their neighborhood hangouts for ice cream, seeking his input for a school essay on Greek mythology. But Ari, according to one staff member, “was no longer interested in being a part of the Kennedys’ lives. In a strange way, he blamed Jackie for what had happened to Alexander.” Ari’s longtime friend and lawyer Stelios Papadimitriou explained that “Greeks are very superstitious. I think ever since he married Jackie, everything went bad for him.
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 18
