Just Jackie (30 page)

Shortly after takeoff, a steward separated the curtains to the honeymoon suite by mistake, and was greeted by
the sight of two naked bodies in the throes of energetic and creative lovemaking. When he realized exactly what he was viewing, he pushed the curtains back together and staggered out of the first-class section.

“I could not believe what I was seeing,” he told a friend in Greece when he called from New York the next day. “But the fact that the two of them never even knew I was standing there, openmouthed, dumbfounded, and staring at them, amazed me even more.”

J
oan Rivers was headlining in Las Vegas at the time, and like countless comedians, she worked material about the Onassis wedding into her act.

“Come on, be honest, would
you
sleep with Onassis?” she asked the women in her audience. “Do you believe
she
does? Well, she has to do
something
. I mean, you can’t stay in Bergdorf ’s
shopping
all day.”

The reaction around the world was just as unflattering to Jackie.

JACKIE, HOW COULD YOU?
asked Stockholm’s
Expressen
.

French political commentator Andre Fontaine wrote in
Le Monde:
“Jackie, whose staunch courage during John’s funeral made such an impression, now chooses to shock by marrying a man who could be her father and whose career contradicts—rather strongly, to say the least—the liberal spirit that animated President Kennedy.”

If Jackie was offended by these comments, Ari was more philosophical.

“She’s got to learn to reconcile herself to being Mrs. Aristotle Onassis,” he told his henchman Johnny Meyer, “because the only place she’ll find sympathy from now on is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

A defense of Jackie came from a most unexpected source.

“Americans can’t understand a man like Onassis,” said Lee Radziwill. “If my sister’s new husband had been blonde, young, rich, and Anglo-Saxon, most Americans would have been much happier…. He’s an outstanding man. Not only as a financier, but also as a person … active, great vitality, very brilliant, up-to-date … amusing … a fascinating way with women. He surrounds them with attention. He makes sure that they feel admired and desired. He takes note of their slightest whim. He interests himself in them—exclusively and profoundly….

“My sister needs a man … who can protect her from the curiosity of the world,” Lee continued. “She’s tired of having to exercise such enormous control over herself, not to be able to move without all of her gestures being judged and all her steps being traced…. Onassis is rich enough to offer her a good life and powerful enough to protect her privacy.”

However, no one seemed ready to buy Lee’s argument. This was especially true of the defenders of the faith in the Vatican, who considered excommunicating Jackie because she had married a divorced man. While they pondered that extreme step, a spokesman for the Vatican declared that Jackie was no longer eligible to receive the sacraments of the Holy Church. The whole thing struck Jackie as a supreme irony. She had tried so hard not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, and yet she had ended up in the same predicament. Like her mother, Jackie felt herself to be a Catholic, but in the eyes of her church, she had lapsed irrevocably.

In the eyes of most ordinary Americans, Jackie was more than a lapsed Catholic. She was the Queen of
Camelot, who had betrayed her martyred husband by prostituting herself with a swarthy, lascivious foreigner. Her marriage to Onassis was another jolt in the wild ride of the 1960s. As a shocking cultural phenomenon, it ranked up there with urban riots, campus rebellion, bra burning, and black separatism. Theodore White was right. America
was
passing through an invisible membrane that separated an era of hope and idealism from an era of disillusionment. This time, however, Jackie was on the dark side of the great divide.

THE PEONIES
OF GREECE

Spring–Summer 1970

W
hile Ari was away on business, the summit of Skorpios became Jackie’s widow’s walk. She spent long hours there, walking, meditating, reading, and painting watercolors of the sea. In the purplish, slate-colored water, the Ionian islands sprawled like green stepping stones along the west coast of Greece. On a clear day Jackie could see the silhouette of Ithaca, the legendary home of Odysseus, far off on the horizon.

By the spring of 1970, Jackie’s life on Skorpios had settled into a comfortable routine. Each morning, she distributed a written schedule to Captain Anastassiadis, whose job it was to take Caroline and John fishing, water-skiing, and on day trips to neighboring islands.

John in particular needed looking after. As he grew older, his impulsive behavior, which had first become noticeable after the assassination, developed into a serious problem. He was restless, had a low threshold for boredom, and could not sit still for any length of time. He was disruptive in school and did poorly academically.

Jackie suffered a great deal of anguish over John. She tried to figure out how to help him do better in school. She passed up the more fashionable private schools in New York, Buckley and St. Bernard’s, and enrolled John in the Collegiate School, which had a less pressured atmosphere. Though Jackie never spoke of it directly, she conveyed the impression to friends, including to this
author, that she was concerned her son might have been born with a low IQ.

John was an exhibitionist like his stepfather, and he and Ari formed a special bond. Ari often took the boy to Athens in his Piaggio seaplane. While the tycoon conducted business, John, accompanied by his bodyguards, went off to the movies. Ari gave John and Caroline a twenty-eight-foot red sailboat, and when Caroline christened it the
Caroline
, Ari was concerned that John’s feelings would be hurt. So he gave him his own red speedboat with
JOHN
stenciled on the stern.

From her vantage point at the very top of the island, Jackie peered out to sea. Off in the distance, so far away that it looked at first like another island, she could spot Ari’s helicopter coming from the direction of Athens. It flew in low, stirring whirlpools in the calm surface of the water. When it got closer, it made such a racket that it scared away the flocks of imported finches that inhabited the island.

Jackie put away her brushes and paints, and waved to the helicopter. To a remarkable degree, she and Ari lived separate lives. Ari was constantly flitting from Athens to Paris to London. For her part, Jackie spent a good deal of time in New York, where her children went to school. During the first year of their marriage, the couple spent a total of 225 days together and 140 days apart. Their record of togetherness in the second year was even more dismal.

Yet if the truth be told, Jackie enjoyed her solitary life. She had always been more comfortable alone or in crowds than in one-to-one relationships, and she found it hard to be with anyone for a sustained period of time. All through her childhood, she had spent hours alone with books, spinning fantasies in which she was the heroine of her own romantic stories. Now she was living out one of those stories on Skorpios. In Ari she had found a man after
her own heart; he was so absorbed in himself and his work that he left her mostly alone.

“Jackie is a little bird that needs its freedom as well as its security,” Ari said, “and she gets both from me. She can do exactly as she pleases—visit international fashion shows, and travel, and go out with friends to the theater or anyplace. And I, of course, will do exactly as I please. I never question her, and she never questions me.”

The arrangement was similar to the one that Ari had established with Ingeborg Dedichen, but it seemed to work for Jackie. When they were together, she doted on her Greek husband, sketching his portrait, buying him modish neckties to offset his somber suits, and presenting him with a cigar cutter so he would not bite off the tips of his long Havanas.

Ari gave Jackie expensive jewelry and lavished attention on her and her children. He also encouraged her to indulge her appetite for beautiful things. Once, in a published interview, he explained his tolerant attitude toward his wife’s spending.

“God knows Jackie has had her years of sorrow,” he said. “If she enjoys it, let her buy to her heart’s content…. There is nothing strange that my wife spends large sums of money. It would be abnormal if she didn’t. Think how people would react if Mrs. Onassis wore the same dresses for two years, or went to second-class beauty salons, or rode around in a family-type automobile. They would immediately say that I am on the verge of bankruptcy, and that soon my wife will be forced to work to earn a living. … If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.”

Indulged by her husband, Jackie was happier than she had been since the last few months of her marriage to Jack Kennedy.

“One day we were relaxing at the beach,” said Jackie’s friend Vivian Crespi. “We were lying in the sun … drinking wine in our bikinis. And Jackie turned to me.
‘Do you realize how lucky we are, Vivi?’ she said. To have gotten out of that world we came from. That narrow world of Newport. All that horrible anti-Semitism and bigotry. Going every day to that club with the same kinds of people. Don’t you feel sorry for them? You and I have taken such a big bite out of life.’ ”

The helicopter settled on the helipad, and a moment later a lone figure emerged from the swirling storm of dust. But instead of the short, stubby figure of her husband, Jackie saw the thin silhouette of a stylishly dressed woman.

This was Niki Goulandris, one of the richest women in all of Greece. Niki and her husband Angelos had founded the Goulandris Natural History Museum, the only private museum of its kind in the world. In addition to being a trained botanist and horticulturist, Niki was an accomplished botanical painter. She was presently engaged in an ambitious, years-long project of painting life-size pictures of the twelve different varieties of wild peony that were native to the hills and mountains of Greece.

Her interest in the study and portrayal of Greek peonies was a fitting project for a woman of Niki’s Greekness. Myth and legend surrounded such plants in ancient Greece. Magical powers were attributed to them, and it was said that their black seeds, when drunk in wine, guarded against nightmares. In many ways, Niki was a Greek replica of Jackie’s best American friend, Bunny Mellon. Both women embroidered life with flowers.

Jackie and Niki climbed into an open vehicle and began the bumpy ride down the steep side of the island. Below them they could see an excavation site swarming with workmen. Towering, full-grown trees, their roots wrapped in huge balls, were being unloaded by cranes from flatbed trucks and lowered into place.

For the most part, Ari ran Skorpios exactly as he saw fit. He hired all the help, set the menus for the meals, and
made up the seating arrangements for the parties. The island was his domain. In a certain way, Jackie was as much a guest on her husband’s island as were the many friends they invited to visit them each spring and summer.