Just Jackie (23 page)

“[But] Onassis, a master of the art of pleasing women, was no less a master of the art of crushing them,” wrote Maria’s biographer, Arianna Stassinopoulos. “And there was something in Maria’s way of treating him like a
sultan or a god that brought out the despot in him. Underneath the easy sophistication of the cafe society habitué (and not that far below the surface), Onassis had retained all the primitive male impulses of the old-fashioned Greek….

“[A] 11 the suppressed violence in him came out in the way he treated her, especially in front of his children,” Stassinopoulos continued. “He would walk ahead with them, leaving her behind, and he belittled her constantly: ‘What are you? Nothing. You must have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.’ ”

One of Maria’s friends, Maggie van Zuylen, tried to comfort her.

“Of course he loves you,” she said. “That’s why he yells and abuses you and puts you down. If he didn’t love you he would just ignore you and be totally indifferent to you.”

Ari’s violence and infidelities were not Maria’s only problems. She also had to contend with Ari’s formidable sister Artemis.

A fragile-looking woman who did not weigh a hundred pounds, Artemis Garofolidis was a tiny dynamo. She was married to a wealthy doctor of orthopedics who spent more time pursuing his favorite hobby, hunting, than he did attending to patients in his office. His long absences were explained by the fact that he and his wife had suffered the loss of their only child, a daughter named Popin, who died of a rare disease at the age of eighteen. Artemis was left to focus her inexhaustible supply of energy on her brother Aristo. She doted on him and made no secret of her contempt for “that opera singer.”

“They are both big bosses,” she said of Ari and Maria. “Neither one knows how to give in. I do not want my brother to marry Maria. She is not right for him. Her personality is too strong for him. She is not elegant enough for him.”

The Onassis-Callas affair fascinated the European
press. Wherever Ari went, reporters wanted to know: Did he love Callas?

“Of course, how could I help but be flattered if a woman with the class of Maria Callas fell in love with someone like me?” he told reporters in Venice. “Who wouldn’t?”

All this was too much for Ari’s wife Tina, who flew off with their children to New York to seek a divorce.

“She has kidnapped the children and is demanding $20 million ransom,” Ari complained.

Ari’s Greek sense of honor demanded restitution. While he tried to work out the best possible terms of divorce, Costa Gratsos, his friend since the Argentinean days, took matters into his own hands. Gratsos telephoned reporters on several of New York’s tabloid newspapers, and fed them outrageous—and false—accusations against Tina, Ari’s soon-to-be ex-wife.

Gratsos told the reporters that Tina Livanos Onassis was a heartless woman and a compulsive materialist who was spending Ari blind. Gratsos would use the same smear tactics against Jackie many years later.

Like most ne’er-do-well sons, Gratsos had an inflated sense of his own importance, and he loved the company of glamorous stars like Maria Callas. When Ari and Maria visited New York, Gratsos made his apartment available, providing them with the privacy they required. He tried to convince Ari that, while Tina might have been unwilling to put up with his long absences and chronic infidelities, Maria loved him enough to tolerate anything.

But Gratsos miscalculated Maria’s tolerance for repeated public humiliations. When Maria heard that Jackie Kennedy had been invited for a recuperative cruise on the
Christina
after Patrick Bouvier’s death, she refused to go along.

“The watching game was turning deadly serious, and
the pain, killing,” wrote Arianna Stassinopoulos. “[Maria] knew that Jackie had been given the Ithaca suite, the suite reserved for special guests, the suite that was Churchill’s, the suite she herself had stayed in. She knew, because she had lived it so many times, the routine on the
Christina
, the times for lunch and dinner, the ritual cocktails on the deck at sunset; she knew the maids who would look after Jackie, the waiters who would wait on Jackie, the chef who would cook for Jackie…. In her private hell, Maria lived their cruise with them. It was at this time that she began to find it impossible to sleep without pills.”

When Ari flew to Washington to be by Jackie’s side after John Kennedy’s assassination, Maria was apoplectic.

“Aristotle is obsessed by famous women,” she said. “He was obsessed with me because I was famous. Jackie is even more famous.”

However, neither Maria nor anyone else could have predicted what the end of her affair with Ari would be like. It dragged on for years, and it resembled the last scene of an opera in which the heroine dies a thousand deaths.

I
n the summer of 1967, Jackie accepted an invitation from Ari to visit Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea.

“That was the year I went to Skorpios with Gianni Agnelli [the Fiat automobile heir],” said a man who was a friend of the Onassis family. “It was August. We came
suddenly …; we were cruising down to Greece in Gianni’s boat, pulled up at the island, dropped anchor, and sent a message that we were there.

“Down came Onassis with his car, and just as he arrived, we saw Jackie waterskiing; she never even stopped to say hello. Later, when she was finished, we all had lunch. In those days, she was extremely friendly, extremely nice to me, and she spoke to Gianni in that whispery voice: ‘Oh, Gianni.’ Typical Jackie.

“Onassis drove us around in his car; he was just building Skorpios then, and I remember that once he backed up and we nearly went off a cliff. He was sweating, and he wore a lot of cologne. I remember it well: it was August 1967. Jackie, not married, spent the summer on Skorpios, the colonels were in power in Greece, my wife was trying to leave me, and I got back together with her, and we had a good time—it was a magical summer.

“Christina [Onassis] was insignificant in the scheme of things; in the presence of her father, she was often silent. In those days, in a Greek household, a talkative child was not tolerated, and she was—what?—sixteen then.

“I’m ninety-nine percent certain that there was another Kennedy on Skorpios that summer as well, either Bobby or Teddy, although I would assume it was Teddy; Bobby was always pulling Onassis’s leg, trying to get money out of him. Onassis didn’t like the Kennedys, but he was a businessman; he got along with them fine. He would have gone to bed with the devil if it meant getting close to power.”

FALLEN IDOL

Spring–Fall 1968

A
ristotle Onassis was in Paris in the spring of 1968 when he heard the good news: Robert Kennedy, the man who stood in the way of his marrying Jackie, had taken the plunge back into national politics. Bobby had decided to challenge President Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, the leading anti-Vietnam War candidate, for his party’s presidential nomination.

“Now the kid’s got other fish to fry,” said Ari.

America was convulsed by its greatest crisis since the Civil War. The Viet Cong had just launched their Tet offensive, invading the United States Embassy in Saigon, and the streets and campuses of America were exploding in demonstrations.

Other traumas followed in quick succession: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, setting off massive rioting by blacks in more than one hundred cities. Students took over the president’s office at Columbia University, leaving their own feces as a calling card on his desk. The Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, set up Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., a fifteen-acre campsite between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And on the nightly news, LBJ announced that he was not a candidate for reelection.

While Bobby huddled with his advisers at Hickory Hill, Ari made his move in Paris. At a cocktail reception in the swank George V Hotel, he launched into a flowery
monologue about his lifelong search for the ideal woman. Someone asked him for his opinion of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Ari’s face lit up. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

“She is a totally misunderstood woman,” he said. “Perhaps she even misunderstands herself. She’s being held up as a model of propriety, constancy, and so many of those boring American female virtues. She’s now utterly devoid of mystery. She needs a small scandal to bring her alive. A peccadillo, an indiscretion. Something should happen to her to win our fresh compassion. The world loves to pity fallen grandeur.”

The words struck his listeners as indiscreet. But, as usual, Ari knew what he was doing. He believed that Jackie wanted to marry him as much as he wanted to marry her, but that she was still in bondage to Bobby. Bobby was the sole remaining obstacle to the conclusion of the biggest deal of Ari’s life—marrying Jackie.

“He needed to make deals,” wrote Peter Evans, another Onassis biographer. “Deals had always been essential to him, in some psychic way he needed them; a deal meant an opponent, an opponent meant confrontation, and confrontation was the source of his strength. He could not live without adversaries, no more than a tree can live without soil.”

Bobby was the enemy, but he was an enemy Ari did not understand. Why wasn’t Bobby upset when Jackie flew off to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and strolled through the moonlit Mayan ruins with Roswell Gilpatric? Why didn’t it faze Bobby when Jackie invited Lord Harlech for an intimate weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port?

Ari had not slept with Jackie yet, and being Greek, he could not be sure of her until he did. He was seized by feelings of resentment and jealousy. Were Jackie and Lord Harlech lovers? How about Ros Gilpatric? Was
there more to that friendship than met the eye? Who else was Jackie seeing on the sly? What about those rumors of John Warnecke?

“He was fascinated by scandal,” said Joan Thring, who was Rudolf Nureyev’s personal assistant and was up on all the latest gossip. “I knew that whatever I said was important to him. Winning Jackie meant everything to him. It was the only time I ever sensed vulnerability in the man.”

It galled Ari that nobody took him seriously as Jackie’s suitor. People could not conceive that the dewy queen of Camelot would want to make love to the toadlike Onassis. Her kisses would never turn
him
into a prince. The same gossip columnists who wrote about Ros Gilpatric and Lord Harlech hardly noticed when Ari slipped into Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a quiet tête-à-tête, or when he dined with her and Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn at Mikonos, one of his favorite Greek restaurants in New York.

At one of those dinners, Nureyev leaned over to Jackie, and said in his heavily accented English:

“Every fact in world must have been printed about you now. To be this public is not good for soul.”

“Oh, they’re still on the fanciful embellishments,” Jackie said. “The essence is still untouched.”

Ari intended to change all that. He was feeling quite smug as he left the cocktail reception at the George V Hotel and climbed into the backseat of his limousine next to one of his henchmen, Johnny Meyer, the former Howard Hughes associate, who helped Nigel Neilson with publicity.