Just Jackie (35 page)

The display of raw emotion always terrified Jackie, though she probably could not have said why. Perhaps it was because she felt responsible, like Guinevere, for the death and destruction that always seemed to follow in her wake. Or perhaps it was because the suffering and misery of others reminded her of her own submerged feelings, which she was afraid to express. Whatever the reason, Ari’s pain was too great for her to bear, and she managed to get through Alexander’s funeral the way she had gotten through Jack’s funeral—by becoming the detached observer, and watching everything from her art director’s chair hanging in space.

For weeks after the funeral, Ari lived in a trancelike state. He stared off into space, his face a study in grief. He was a deeply superstitious man, and he could not believe that Alexander’s death was a matter of pure chance. It must have been the result of cause and effect. There must have been a connection between Ari’s own actions and the tragedy that had befallen his son.

As time went on, Ari came to the conclusion that the fatal accident was a punishment for his god-defying arrogance, the excessive pride that the ancient Greeks had called hubris. But what was the exact nature of his hubris?

It could only be one thing, he decided. His hubris had led him to marry Jackie. He had overreached himself. He had failed to take the advice he had given his own stepson, John Kennedy Jr. He had flown too close to the sun, and the gods had destroyed him.

“Onassis was conscience-stricken,” said Stelio Papadimitriou. “First of all, he started feeling remorse for having let the relationship with his former wife deteriorate. He really loved Tina. He felt bad that she had married Niarchos. He felt bad that his children didn’t like Jackie. He saw his life in a bad light. And the death of Alexander exacerbated his feelings that his life was not good.”

Ari’s personality underwent a dramatic alteration. Friends and associates said he was a different man. He seemed to lose all hope. His raison d’etre had disappeared along with Alexander.

“In his own eyes, his life resembled the life of the ancient Greeks,” said Papadimitriou. “He was guilty of the sin of hubris, overweening pride, and he had suffered the punishment of the gods. It was like something out of Aeschylus’s great trilogy of tragedies, the
Oresteia
. It was like the fall of the House of Atreus.”

LOVE, DEATH,
AND MONEY

October 1973–September 1977

“I
have houses in Acapulco, Florida, Normandy, Lausanne, and Paris,” Loel Guiness, the English banking magnate, was saying. “I have a yacht and a plane, and because of Gloria, I never have to worry about any of it.”

It was a few minutes past noon, and Guiness was sitting by the side of the swimming pool at his home in Lantana, Florida, and talking to his guest, Aileen Mehle, better known to the readers of her society column as Suzy. He was extolling the domestic virtues of his wife, Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Fahkry Guiness, a twice-divorced Mexican beauty who had the lithe figure and regal profile of a princess in an ancient Egyptian frieze.

“Just look at her,” said Guiness, pointing to his wife. “Jackie and Ari decide at the very last minute that they would like to come for lunch, and Gloria has everything under control.”

Before she snagged her rich husband, Gloria had been a manicurist. But like so many women who managed to scale the heights of society, her origins were of little importance. Born with equal amounts of brains, beauty, and style, she was one of those women Truman Capote lovingly referred to as “swans.” She often made a boldfaced appearance in Aileen’s “Suzy” column, usually a paragraph or two away from her sister swans: Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and C. Z. Guest.

No one knew more about the strange connubial habits
of the swans and their superrich husbands than Aileen. Despite the evident pride Guiness took in his wife, he was away from home most of the time, and on those rare occasions when he and Gloria found themselves together without the company of others, he paid her scant attention. Like most men of wealth, he placed his wife in the same category as his houses, yacht, and plane. She was another pretty possession to impress his wealthy friends.

During her long hours of solitude, Gloria suffered from bouts of depression, as in fact did many of the swans. Still, her main goal in life was to please Loel, and she had outdone herself decorating the Guiness residence in Florida. Loel had bought the house from Bunny Mel-Ion’s father, Gerard Lambert, who had designed it himself. Called Gemini, it was built on a parcel of land that ran from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth. The beach house on the ocean side was connected to the pool on the lake side by an underground music room, which was a marvel of engineering, and had a skylight, a working fireplace, and an electric organ.

Gloria was supervising the servants as they set a table under a large market umbrella by the pool. The terrace overlooked six hundred feet of manicured lawn, which was spotted with tall coconut palms, bayans, screw pines, gumbo limbos, and hibiscus plants. Gloria waved a note at Aileen. Written by Jackie in her precise handwriting, it announced that Jackie was bringing Ari and her children for lunch.

“We must try to cheer her up,” Gloria told Aileen.

Gloria had heard that Jackie and Ari were not getting along. Ordinarily this would not have fazed her, for whatever her private demons, Gloria dealt with public occasions in a confident, down-to-earth manner. She had once told Noel Coward at a dinner party that she could not bear to sleep in the same bed as her husband because “he farts too much.” But Gloria seemed unusually nervous today, perhaps because she had also heard that Ari
had recently taken to airing his dissatisfaction with Jackie in public.

In fact, even as she rearranged the Christofle teaspoons so they were exactly parallel with the edge of the Pratesi place mats, Gloria was expecting the worst.

Jackie had tried everything she could think of to cheer up her husband after the death of Alexander. She neglected Caroline and John in order to spend more time with Ari. She accompanied Ari on long cruises. She gave dinner parties at her New York apartment, and invited friends, like the photographer Peter Beard and the feminist Gloria Steinem, who she knew would interest him. Nothing seemed to help. The style that Jackie had used all her life to camouflage unpleasant things was no longer working.

Ari was drinking more heavily than ever. He looked out-of-sorts and complained of headaches. His lifelong insomnia had grown worse. At night on Skorpios, he often took long walks, invariably ending up at the tomb of his son. He squatted there on his haunches like a peasant, staring at the large marble sarcophagus. One time, an American woman, unable to sleep herself, came upon him. He did not notice her presence.

“For a man to be that enclosed, it seemed to be a kind of happiness,” she said later. “I had the feeling that if Alexander were alive and at his side, Ari would have been no nearer to the boy than he was at that moment.”

Ari’s crushing personal loss was compounded by devastating reversals in business. Several months after Alexander’s death, the Arabs declared an oil embargo, and the bottom fell out of the world tanker market. In the past, Ari might have seen the crisis coming and taken steps to ward off the worst. But since the death of Alexander, he seemed to have lost his mental acuity. The Arab embargo caught him completely by surprise.

“More than a third of his tonnage was already laid up,
none of the oil giants was interested in long-term charters, and he was forced to cancel the two French ULCCs [ultra-large cargo container ships], at a loss of $12.5 million,” noted Peter Evans.

The skyrocketing price of oil put a terrible squeeze on Olympic Airways, which Ari had transformed from a dilapidated company into the jewel in the crown of his empire. Ari asked the government of Constantine Karamanlis, which had recently replaced the ruling military junta in Athens, to authorize an increase in ticket prices to help him cover the skyrocketing cost of fuel. Karamanlis, a friend of many years, turned Ari down flat.

At half past noon, Ari’s limousine swung off the ocean road into the Guiness estate and headed down a winding gravel driveway that was planted with lush tropical specimens. The car came to a halt in a square courtyard in front of the imposing entrance of Gemini. Ari, Jackie, and her children entered the front hall, which was covered from floor to ceiling in milky white marble. A maid escorted them through the living loggia to the pool, where they were greeted warmly by the Guinesses.

“Gloria, black hair falling to her shoulders, golden bangles sliding up and down her arms, looked like a ravishing gypsy,” Aileen Mehle recalled.

Gloria’s superb sense of style was not the result of her husband’s money. He was actually quite stingy with her, and her trademark Florida sun hat was a jaunty straw model from the local five-and-ten. Once, when a reporter for
Time
magazine asked Gloria what her favorite at-home costume was during the day, she answered: “Comfortable robes that I pick up for twelve ninety-five apiece in Manhattan.”

“Loel, true Brit that he is, was as sartorially splendid as ever, blazer and ascot impeccable,” Aileen continued. “I, too, had done my best…. The Greek tycoon, even at
his nattiest, could never set Savile Row on fire, so his rumpled state was nothing new.

“It was Jackie who was the big surprise. Always before when I had seen her, she was marvelously pulled together, secure in that throwaway chic that was so much a part of her. But this day was another matter. One look and it was clear she had been to hell and back: no sign of makeup, an unbecoming cotton dress that didn’t know where it began or ended. An odd cotton scarf, knotted at four corners, was tied on her head, covering her hair completely.

“While we took startled note, Ari took revenge—he had an audience.

“ ‘Look at you,’ he said, pointing. ‘How can you be seen looking like that? You don’t see Gloria and Aileen in that kind of getup. What is your problem?’

“Her problem was doing the pointing. We could not believe what we were hearing. We cringed—but Jackie didn’t.

“Just for a second, a look of hurt and sadness crossed her face, but then she smiled her brightest smile and said, ‘Yes, don’t they look great!’ And then without missing a beat, ‘Loel, after lunch will you take John for a ride in your helicopter? He has been looking forward to it all day.’

“Her husband had humiliated her in front of her friends, and while another woman might have snapped back in anger, she handled this awkward moment with grace and charm, turning aside an ugly incident. …

“As was his way, [Ari] laughed boisterously and joked at lunch, drinking glass after glass of red wine. Now I watched as he stumbled out to the beach, curling on the sand in a fetal ball, falling into a deep, uneasy sleep. … He was no longer in love with [Jackie]—if he ever was—and nothing she could do was right.”

L
ate in the evening on Christmas Day in 1973, Onassis phoned Stelio Papadimitriou, his personal attorney and number-two man in Athens.