Just Jackie (37 page)

“I try at all times to be as decent as possible,” Papadimitriou said.

Then Jackie turned to Ari.

“I don’t want to divorce you,” she said. “But if that is your final decision, I accept it in sadness. I’ll never forget the good life we had together.”

Onassis sat there, and for once said nothing.

Then Jackie addressed Papadimitriou again.

“I know that you have been drafting writs of divorce,” she said.

“I laughed like a fool, and did not know what to say,” Papadimitriou recalled. “I felt sorry for Jackie. She was in a real bind. She could not satisfy her husband’s requirements and, at the same time, the requirements of her children. In her eyes, her children required her presence more than he did.

“Onassis wanted her around all the time. He wanted feminine company. He wanted to be the centerpiece. But Jackie was never there when he needed her. That made him very angry. He had me drafting and redrafting divorce papers for him.

“He always gave me the same instructions: ‘Say that Jackie is very nice, very kind, very polite.’

“And I would tell him, ‘No judge will grant you a divorce that way.’

“And he would say, ‘I don’t care. Do it the way I say.’

“And then, he would either tear up my draft, or put it in the shredding machine.

“This went on for two solid years. And all that time, from what I could tell, Onassis and Jackie continued to be intimate. And he never initiated divorce proceedings, which made me wonder what all the fuss was about.

“And I came to the only conclusion that made sense. In my view, Onassis never really wanted to divorce Jackie. All his talk about divorce was part of his deal-maker’s psychology. It was a negotiating tactic. His goal was to bring Jackie back to him. The only thing is, I don’t think Jackie realized that it was an empty threat.”

J
ack Anderson barreled through the door of the “21” Club, a New York restaurant favored by the barons of business. The hatcheck counter was three-deep with patrons shedding their bulky coats, but Anderson, a crack investigative journalist who wrote the syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was traveling light. Despite the chill in the fall air, he was hatless and coatless. The only thing he carried was a small spiral notebook, which was jammed into the side pocket of his rumpled suit jacket.

He was recognized by the “21” Club’s sharp-eyed greeter, Harry Lavin, who steered him to a table located just inside
the entrance of the Bar Room. There, slumped over a half-empty tumbler of whisky, his dark glasses failing to hide the loose strips of Scotch tape that dangled from his eyelids, was Aristotle Onassis.

“Onassis had reserved the best table in the place,” Anderson said. “As soon as I sat down, he began making a start on Jackie: ‘What does she do with all those clothes? All I ever see her wearing is blue jeans,’ and then he would stop, apparently out of tact, delicacy, or reticence.

“I didn’t get much more out of him than that,” Anderson continued. “However, after lunch, he invited me back to his office to meet several of his colleagues, including Costa Gratsos, a tall, smooth-talking fellow with a white mane of hair and a pipe. Before we got started, I asked if I could call my chief assistant and legman, Les Whitten, who was in New York, and have him join us at the office. Onassis and Gratsos had no problem with that.”

“By the time I got there,” said Whitten, picking up the story, “Onassis had disappeared, and Jack [Anderson] was huddled with Gratsos and Gratsos’s secretary, a woman named Lynn Alpha Smith. They were showing Jack some confidential documents, one of which they claimed was a copy of Onassis’s premarital agreement with Jackie.

“Gratsos was a tough guy,” Whitten continued, “and it was clear that he wasn’t fond of Jackie in the least. In fact, his sole purpose in meeting us was to discredit her. His real worry was who was going to get Onassis’s millions after he died. He sure didn’t want that money to go to Jackie.”

Gratsos had been hatching plots against Jackie from the day she married Onassis. He had managed to convince most of the world that Jackie had a serious psychological flaw, and was a pathological spender. He made certain that Onassis got to see these negative stories, because he knew that Onassis, an avid consumer of gossip, was ready to believe the worst about people. Yet, for a long time, this strategy had failed. Gratsos, despite his best efforts,
had not succeeded in hardening Onassis’s heart against his wife.

Now, however, Onassis was staring death in the face, and Jackie, who had been so important to him before, no longer seemed as significant in the great scheme of things. It was not so much that he cared for her less. He still loved her, in his fashion, but he cared more about the survival of his shipping empire.

His sole living descendant was his daughter Christina. She was poised to inherit Onassis’s fleet of ships, his banks, pier facilities, real estate (including the just-completed Olympic Towers on Fifth Avenue, and a quarter interest in New York’s Pierre Hotel), his residences in Athens, Monte Carlo, Montevideo, and Paris, his yacht, the island of Skorpios, and tens of millions of dollars in stocks and bonds and other liquid assets.

Christina would soon be one of the richest women in the world. As her honorary uncle and trusted adviser, Gratsos had great expectations. After all, Christina had no experience in running a worldwide shipping business, while Gratsos was the son of a shipowner. After her father’s death, Christina would lean on Gratsos even more than before, and he would become the power behind the Onassis throne. Or so he hoped.

But the handover from Onassis to Christina was not going smoothly. Christina had recently botched another suicide attempt. What was more, her mother, Tina Niarchos, whom Onassis had named as chief executor of his will, had been found dead in the Hotel de Chanaleilles in Paris, the apparent victim of an edema of the lung, though some suspected her husband Stavros Niarchos of more foul play. Onassis was so distraught that he could not bring himself to attend Tina’s funeral.

In the midst of these family catastrophes, Onassis’s aides informed him that Olympic Airways faced imminent bankruptcy. He had no choice but to sell his beloved jewel. Negotiations with the Greek government could not
have come at a worse time for him. With the downturn in the oil-tanker business, Onassis’s net worth had plummeted from $1 billion to $500 million, and his financial condition worsened by the day.

The enforced sale of Olympic Airways represented the greatest setback in Onassis’s business career. The very thought of losing his airline drove him into a rage. Sick as he was, Onassis came into the office, and he bellowed at everyone. Where was Papadimitriou? Onassis wanted to see him immediately! Where was Konialidas? Where was Johnny Meyer?

Most important of all, where was Jackie?

“Jackie seemed determined to stand aside from Ari’s problems,” said an aide. “There was not a lot she could have done in Athens except be there. They were some of the worst weeks of his life. He could have used some wifely comforting, not to mention her public relations pull…. He was putting up the backs of the very people he needed to beguile. His language even to those whose help he needed most was either sullen or griping. He’d lost his touch completely, he was played out. His name had once acted like a spell in Athens; now his world had turned upside down.”

“He had climbed to the top of the tree, and there was nothing there,” said Gratsos. “I don’t think he ever knew what he wanted. The difference was that in his last years he knew he would never get it.”

Onassis had run out of luck. Desperately sick, and frightened of dying, he felt more alone than at any time since he was a little boy, and his beloved mother Penelope had abandoned him and gone to heaven. He thought a lot about the past—past loves, past triumphs, past
mistakes
. With so little time left, he did not want to make any more mistakes. He was ready to listen to his oldest friend, Costa Gratsos.

And Gratsos did not spare him. He told Onassis that if
he died while he was still married to Jackie, his prenuptial agreement would probably not hold up in court, and Jackie would walk away with more than $60 million. On the other hand, if Onassis instituted divorce proceedings against Jackie while he was in his current weakened condition, Jackie might be emboldened to fight him in the courts of Greece and America.

As Gratsos saw it, there was only one solution to this dilemma. They must attack Jackie where she was the most vulnerable: they must do it through personal exposure in the press. They must reveal her faults, her frailties, her excesses, and her pretensions. And they must do all this in such a brutal way that Jackie would be struck with fear, and would cringe from the idea of fighting over Onassis’s millions.

What better way for them to get started, Gratsos said, than for Onassis to call Roy M. Cohn, the Attila the Hun of divorce attorneys. Cohn had served in the 1950s on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and had been described by
Esquire
magazine as “the toughest, meanest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.” He had once come close to trading blows with his co-counsel Bobby Kennedy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. He was, in short, no friend of the Kennedys.

“Mr. Onassis had definitely concluded that he wanted to break the marriage,” Cohn said, “and had been consulting Greek lawyers, and so on, and there were a lot of complications over there, and he wanted to know whether I would be prepared to handle the American end—because he had assets over here—and participate in the overall strategy. He anticipated that the matter would be settled, because he did not think that Jackie would want to make a big thing out of it, but he also viewed the possibility that her appetite for money would be such that it might not be amicably settled.”

In addition to unleashing Roy Cohn, Gratsos also convinced
Onassis to meet with the muckraking Washington journalist Jack Anderson. All Onassis had to do, Gratsos assured Onassis, was have a pleasant lunch at the “21” Club with the reporter, then leave the dirty work to him.

Gratsos was savvy in the ways of the press. After Onassis left them, Gratsos spoke to Anderson “on background,” which meant that the information from the interview was on the record, but that Anderson could not reveal his precise source. Gratsos would get his message across, but his name would not appear in print.

Over the course of several hours, Gratsos gave Anderson his version of the inner workings of Jackie’s marriage to Onassis. No reporter had heard anything like this before, and every so often, Gratsos would ask Anderson if he realized how lucky he was to be the first to get the story. But Anderson was a seasoned journalist, and he was not easily impressed. He knew that it was going to be difficult to check out Gratsos’s story and unravel his truths from his half truths and outright lies.

While Anderson asked probing questions, Les Whitten took down Gratsos’s answers. Later, Whitten typed up his notes, using only lowercase letters to save himself time. His five-page summary of Anderson’s interview amounted to a sweeping indictment of Jackie as an acquisitive monster who shamelessly exploited her husband. It formed the basis for Anderson’s bombshell columns, as well as for each new Jackie biography that appeared at the rate of one a year for the next twenty years of her life.

Whitten wrote:

And that was just for starters. Whitten continued: