Jackie and Maria

by Gill Paul

  Did Lee sleep with her brother-in-law? Several biographers report Jackie telling friends in the 1970s that she had known about it at the time. It could have been one of the factors that caused the sisters to grow apart, although it seems clear that the biggest rift between them was caused by Jackie marrying Ari. By all accounts, their relationship never fully recovered from that.

  How long did Lee’s affair with Ari continue? Some biographers date the start to 1962, and J. Randy Taraborrelli claims that Ari tried to prevent Lee from marrying Stas in the Catholic Church in June 1963, dangling an implication that he might marry her instead. Truman Capote reported that when Lee heard of her sister’s impending marriage to Ari she screamed, “How could she do that to me?”—but he is not the most impartial of witnesses, since he had spectacularly fallen out with Lee by then. It is true that Ari gave Lee a valuable piece of land near Athens around the time of his marriage to Jackie, and I think it’s obvious that their relationship was far more serious than a fling.

  Lee is a fascinating character in her own right, and an entire novel could be written from her point of view. How difficult it must have been always to feel second best! Yet she kept a sense of humor, saying to a friend in the early ’70s, “My sister married my rich ex-lover. My marriage to a prince just ended in divorce. . . . But all things considered, I’m doing quite well, thank you for asking.” Several biographers relate that Jackie raised Lee’s children for at least part of their teenage years, while Lee was going off the rails. Diana DuBois, author of In Her Sister’s Shadow, reports Jackie taking Lee to her first AA meeting in 1981.

  The events around JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations will be well known to many readers, and I didn’t mess with them, but I did try to step into Jackie’s shoes and imagine why she made the decisions she did. Did she sleep with Bobby? It doesn’t sound plausible to me. They were clearly very close, but I think the values she had absorbed from her Catholic upbringing would have stopped her from taking the next step with her brother-in-law. Besides, there were other men on the scene: several biographers claim she was having an affair with John Warnecke in 1964 and 1965, a man Bobby disliked intensely. Perhaps the most difficult decision to understand is why, of all the men who pursued her after Jack’s death, she picked Onassis. Did she have any idea of how upset her sister would be? Did she genuinely think his affair with Maria Callas was over, or did she not care either way? Did she really not consider which continent she and her children would live on? Or how the press would react? These are questions I tried to unravel in the novel.

  Barbara Leaming’s excellent biography convincingly shows that Jackie’s behavior after Jack’s death was consistent with someone suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and this theory seemed to me to explain best why she married Onassis. She did begin to see a therapist, but only after Ari’s death—and in a bizarre coincidence, it was a former analyst of Marilyn Monroe’s, named Dr. Marianne Kris. No one else was party to their discussions, so I invented what Dr. Kris might have said, and speculated that she might have commented on Jackie’s compulsive shopping, which can be a symptom of low self-esteem or lack of a strong self-image, as well as a comforting behavior.

  AND WHAT OF Ari? The #MeToo generation will have little sympathy for such a scheming seducer, but in his era many male celebrities behaved the same way with equal impunity. In reality, reports are that he was much crueler to Maria than I have described: taunting her with his other women, neglecting her, and then sweeping back into town with a choice piece of jewelry as a consolation prize. But there is no doubt that she was the love of his life. He said as much to those closest to him—Costa Gratsos, in particular.

  In truth, Ari never wanted his marriage to Tina to end. He tried desperately to save it, all the while keeping Maria dangling. We can be sure that he did not enjoy having to part with so much money in the divorce settlement, but I think he was also furious that Tina was the one who left. He was a man for whom pride and public image were all-important.

  So why did he marry Jackie? I am speculating when I imagine in the novel that she wouldn’t sleep with him before she got a ring on her finger. No one knows when they first fell into bed together, although it is reported by several sources that Jackie enjoyed their sex life. I bet Ari would have been happy to keep her as a mistress rather than marry her, had she let him. Instead, he made her his extremely expensive “trophy wife,” a strategy that backfired spectacularly when the media portrayed him as a sad sugar daddy.

  I didn’t want to bog down my narrative with too many details about how Ari made his millions or all the deals he was negotiating simultaneously, but I hope there’s enough to give a sense of how incredibly smart he was in business. It’s not clear whether Onassis was genuinely the richest man in the world at the time—oil millionaire John Paul Getty provided strong competition—but he was certainly high on the list. I invented the company importing oil to Cuba and the insider trading over Standard Oil’s merger with British Petroleum, but I’m sure that Ari did use Jackie’s name for his own business purposes during the six and a half years of their marriage. He was ambitious and driven, generous and wily, arrogant and loving, all at once.

  MOST SCENES AND almost all the dialogue in the novel have been invented. None of the main protagonists wrote autobiographies, so I felt free to do this. Details of private scenes, such as the births and deaths of Jackie’s babies, Jack’s proposal to Jackie, Ari’s excuses for not marrying Maria, the way Maria found out about Ari’s affair with Lee, the way Jackie found out about Lee sleeping with Jack—all these are figments of my imagination.

  Dates have sometimes been shifted to fit the interlocking dual narrative, and many characters and events have been omitted so as not to overcomplicate the story. I didn’t mention several people who were important in Maria’s life, such as the impresario Larry Kelly, who was in Paris when Maria was hospitalized following her overdose in 1968, and who took her back to the United States with him for that road trip. I didn’t mention that Maria discovered Battista was siphoning off her earnings to support his family, and that toward the end of her marriage she asked to be paid into a bank account he had no access to. I left out Maria’s 1960 concert at Epidaurus, the first time she had sung in Greece since leaving after the war, a wildly successful event which was attended by her father and sister. And I didn’t explain that she flew to Palm Beach shortly before Ari died because it was too difficult for her to get access to him in the Paris hospital and she couldn’t bear sitting around without being able to see him.

  I made changes on the other side of the narrative too. It was 1955 when Jack, Jackie, and Lee had drinks on Onassis’s yacht, so Caroline had not yet been born, but I wanted to start my story in 1957, when Maria first met Ari, so I moved their meeting to 1958. I didn’t mention Nancy Tuckerman, who was Jackie’s school friend, bridesmaid, private secretary from the White House years, and lifelong confidante. And I didn’t mention that the children’s nanny Maud Shaw wrote a book about her life with Caroline and John, which made Jackie furious.

  I could go on, but you get the drift. This is a novel, not a biography. I can recommend the following sources for anyone who wants to read more about the four of them.

  ON JACKIE AND LEE:

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  Bradford, Sarah. America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, 2000.

  DuBois, Diana. In Her Sister’s Shadow: The Bitter Legacy of Lee Radziwill, 1995.

  Heymann, C. David. A Woman Named Jackie, 1989.

  Kashner, Sam and Schoenberger, Nancy. The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters, 2018.

  Leaming, Barbara. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story, 2014.

  Taraborrelli, J. Randy. Jackie, Janet & Lee, 2018.

  Thornton, Stephanie Marie. And They Called It Camelot, 2020.

  Vanity Fair has several insightful articles on Jackie, Jack, and Lee, which you can search for in its archive.

  ON MARIA:

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  Gage, Nicholas. Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis, 2000.

  Galatopoulos, Stelios. Maria Callas: Sacred Monster, 1998.

  Palmer, Tony. Callas, 2013 (DVD).

  Stassinopoulos, Arianna. Maria Callas: The Woman Behind the Legend, 1981.

  Volf, Tom. Maria by Callas, 2018 (DVD/Blu-ray).

  Maria’s mother, ex-husband, and sister all wrote books about her, which are worth reading as historical documents but need to be taken with a huge grain of salt!

  Time magazine cover article, “The Prima Donna,” October 29, 1956.

  Today interview of Maria Callas by Barbara Walters, April 15, 1974.

  For those unfamiliar with Maria’s singing, I suggest you search for her “Casta Diva” on YouTube and feel the goose bumps.

  ON ONASSIS:

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  Brady, Frank. Onassis: An Extravagant Life, 2013.

  Evans, Peter. Nemesis: Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys, 2004.

  The website aristotle-onassis.blogspot.com is a wonderful resource, full of personal photos and commentary.

  What Happened Next?

  Maria Callas

  After Ari died, Maria stayed in her Paris flat, largely a recluse. Several directors tried to tempt her to perform again, and she toyed with a few offers but backed out every time. She spent a brief vacation with friends in the Greek islands in 1976 but fled when the paparazzi tried to photograph her.

  On September 16, 1977, she had breakfast in bed, then collapsed on her way to the bathroom. Her maid, Bruna, called for a doctor, but before he arrived Maria was dead from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-three. She had outlived Ari by just two and a half years. It seems that her careless consumption of psychopharmaceutical drugs may have played a part in her tragically early death.

  Her funeral on September 20 was attended by Princess Grace of Monaco and a huge crowd of friends and fellow musicians, as well as the world’s media. Wreaths were sent by the presidents of France and Greece, as well as opera houses from around the globe.

  Earlier that year, Maria had written a will, leaving her entire estate to Bruna and her butler, Ferruccio, but she had not signed it. Battista produced an alternative will from 1954 in which Maria had bequeathed everything to him, but it was hotly contested by her sister, Jacinthy, and they ended up splitting her possessions between them.

  In the spring of 1979, Maria’s ashes were sprinkled in the Aegean Sea.

  Christina Onassis

  The archetypal “poor little rich girl,” Christina Onassis lost her brother, mother, and father between January 1973 and March 1975, a string of tragedies that she blamed on the “curse of the Kennedys.” She inherited 55 percent of the Onassis estate, leaving her fantastically wealthy, but she suffered from clinical depression and a lifelong struggle with her weight that involved comfort eating followed by crash diets. She took a range of prescription and recreational drugs, once paying $30,000 to hire a plane to pick up a shipment of cocaine.

  Her love life was disastrous. She married four times, the longest marriage being to her fourth husband, Thierry Roussel, with whom she had a daughter, Athina, in 1985. However, she divorced Thierry after less than three years, upon finding out he had fathered two children with his Swedish mistress during their marriage.

  In 1988, Christina died in the bathtub at a friend’s house in Buenos Aires. She was just thirty-seven years old. An inquest blamed pulmonary edema, but the cocaine couldn’t have helped. She was buried on Skorpios, along with Ari and Alexander.

  Ari’s only grandchild, Athina, was brought up by Thierry Roussel and his Swedish partner, and became a professional show jumper. She married in 2005, but the marriage ended in divorce in 2016, on the grounds of his infidelity.

  Jackie Kennedy Onassis

  Despite the waiver that Ari made her sign, Jackie was awarded a settlement from his estate thought to be worth about $26 million—enough to leave her independently wealthy for life. It seems she finally “found” herself through her work in publishing, first at Viking and then at Doubleday, where she was a much- respected editor. She never married again but found happiness in her final relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, a diamond merchant, who was her close companion for the last fourteen years of her life.

  In December 1993, after suspicious symptoms were spotted following a fall from a horse, Jackie was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and began a course of chemotherapy. At first it was thought to be treatable and she carried on working between treatments, but it spread quickly to her spinal cord. In May 1994, she discharged herself from the hospital and came home to die in her Fifth Avenue apartment with her family around her. When announcing her death, her son, John, said, “She did it in her own way, and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that.” She was sixty-four years old.

  Lee Radziwill

  Lee did not receive a bequest from her sister. She struggled for financial security, so a lump sum would not have been unappreciated, but Jackie said in her will, “I have made no provision . . . for my sister . . . for whom I have great affection, because I have already done so during my lifetime.” It raised eyebrows at the time, even though she left a sizable sum to Lee’s son and daughter, who had spent part of their teens living with her.

  In truth, the sisters’ relationship never fully recovered from Jackie’s marriage to Onassis. Lee’s lifelong resentment that Jackie “always came first” must have been confirmed all over again when she snared the multimillionaire businessman. Lee was a talented and creative woman in her own right, who dressed beautifully, drew well, and could possibly have been a better actress if she had started at the bottom and worked her way up instead of being thrust into the spotlight from the outset. “Whatever I did, or tried to do, got disproportionate coverage because of Jackie being my sister,” she explained. Her interior-design business had some success, but her forays into writing were stunted when she failed to deliver two memoirs that she had been signed to produce. Perhaps her most successful role was as a PR executive for designer Giorgio Armani.

  In 1988, she married film director Herbert Ross, her third marriage, but they divorced shortly before his death in 2001. She was reported to be suffering from dementia in the final years before her death in 2019, at the age of eighty-five.

  John Kennedy Jr. and Anthony Radziwill

  In 1999, a double tragedy hit the Kennedy and Radziwill families.

  Anthony Radziwill, Lee’s son, had been diagnosed with testicular cancer a decade earlier. He received treatment that left him in remission and was able to return to work as a respected TV producer. He married in 1994, but, at around the same time, his cancer recurred, and he spent the next five years undergoing treatment, cared for by his wife, Carole.

  In 1996, Anthony was the best man at the wedding of his cousin, John Kennedy—Jackie’s son—to Carolyn Bessette. John had studied law before becoming the founding editor of George magazine, and Carolyn was a publicist for designer Calvin Klein. They were an über-glamorous couple, much photographed in the media. Anthony and John were close, and so were their wives.

  John Kennedy achieved a lifetime ambition in 1998 when he was awarded his pilot’s license, and he lost no time buying himself a Piper Saratoga. On July 16, 1999, he was flying his wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren from New Jersey to Martha’s Vineyard and Hyannis Port, when he lost control of the plane en route and it plummeted into the sea, killing all three of them.

  Less than a month later, Anthony Radziwill died of cancer. For a personal memoir of this traumatizing time, I recommend Carole Radziwill’s book What Remains. Many commentators remarked on how fortunate it was that Jackie did not live to see the double tragedy, but Lee did, and she must have been devastated.

  Caroline Kennedy and Tina Radziwill

  Jackie and Jack’s only surviving child, Caroline, has had a long, successful career in politics, law, and journalism. She campaigned for Barack Obama in 2008 and was
the U.S. ambassador to Japan during his presidency. She has written several books and devised a number of initiatives to protect her family’s legacy, such as the Profiles in Courage Award, which she launched in 1989. She has three children with her husband, Edwin Schlossberg—Rose, Tatiana, and Jack.

  Tina Radziwill, Lee’s only surviving child, worked in the film business, having been introduced to it when she helped on the film sets of her stepfather, Herbert Ross. She was married from 1999 to 2005 to a professor of medicine at Columbia University. They had no children, and Tina has lived quietly, outside of the media spotlight. She inherited all of her mother’s estate, including a trust set up in Lee’s name in 1975 by Janet Auchincloss.

  The Kennedys

  Was there a “curse of the Kennedys”? Rose and Joe Kennedy were certainly unlucky that four of their nine children died prematurely and one spent her adult life in an institution.

  Their eldest son, Joseph, died in August 1944 while serving as a wartime bomber pilot. He was the son whom Joe had hoped would be president one day, but after his death attention turned to Jack.

  Their eldest daughter, Rosemary, had a learning disability that some experts think could have resulted from oxygen deprivation during birth. She could read and write but was prone to emotional outbursts and “inappropriate behavior” in public. When she was twenty-three years old, Joe Kennedy decided that she should undergo a lobotomy to curb her impulsiveness, which could have proved “embarrassing” to a future presidential candidate. Following the operation, Rosemary could no longer walk or speak, and she regressed to the intellectual level of a two-year-old. Joe decided that she should be institutionalized and separated from her family. For a long time, her siblings were not told where she was, and her mother did not visit her for twenty years. Rosemary lived in an institution till 2005, when she died of natural causes.