by Edward Klein
“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.”
ABANDONED
Late in the evening on Christmas Day in 1973, Onassis phoned Stelio Papadimitriou, his personal attorney and number-two man in Athens.
“Season’s greetings,” he said. “What’re you up to?”
“I’m with my family celebrating the holiday,” Papadimitriou said. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” Onassis said. “Jackie’s in New York with her children. I’m all alone.”
Papadimitriou detected a note of self-pity in Onassis’s voice, and he did not know how to respond.
“I’m going to the Olympic Airways office,” Onassis said. “I’ve asked Paul Ioannides [general manager and chief pilot of Olympic Airways] to join me. Will you come?”
“Of course,” Papadimitriou said. “I’ll be right there.”
When the short, dapper attorney arrived at the office, it was almost midnight. Nonetheless, the place was bustling with activity. The loyal members of Onassis’s inner circle had left their homes and families to rally round the boss.
“Jackie is always away,” Onassis complained to Papadimitriou. “I feel as though I don’t have a wife. I’m alone. My son is dead. I need someone to rely on.”
“It was natural for a sick man to feel that way,” Papadimitriou said in recalling this episode. “He was angry that Jackie was away so much. He felt that she was not around as much as before. Whether that was true or not—and, in my view, it was not—he did not know what to do with himself. His mother had died when he was young, and he was feeling abandoned all over again. He was used to abandoning other people. Now, for the first time, he was the one abandoned.”
“I STILL LOVE HER”
Right after Christmas, Onassis visited Papadimitriou at the Olympic Airways office and informed him that he and Jackie planned to fly to Acapulco for a few days in the sun. Before they left, however, there were two pressing matters that he wanted Papadimitriou to take care of.
“Of course,” said the attorney, removing a notepad from his desk drawer to jot down his orders.
Onassis seemed to sag, rather than sit, in his chair. As Papadimitriou knew, Onassis had just been shown the latest figures from the Petroleum Institute. Three months into the Arab oil embargo, world oil imports were still in a free-fall. Each day, more and more of his tankers were becoming idle. His cash flow was drying up.
Onassis leaned forward and tossed a set of papers on Papadimitriou’s desk.
“Here,” he said, “I’ve written out my will.”
Under Greek law, a will, to be valid, had to be in a person’s own handwriting. Papadimitriou flipped through the pages, and was satisfied that the document had been composed by Onassis in his precise penmanship. A quick glance also convinced him that he did not have to read what Onassis had written. Papadimitriou had done numerous drafts of the will for Onassis over the past year, and this was a handwritten copy of the most recent version.
“Having already taken care of my wife Jacqueline Bouvier,” Onassis wrote, “and having obtained a written agreement notarized by a Notary Public in U.S.A., by which she gives up her hereditary rights on my inheritance, I limit [the] share for her and her two children.”
Onassis bequeathed a lifetime income of $200,000 a year to Jackie, and $25,000 a year to Caroline and John each until they reached the age of twenty-one. In addition, Jackie was to be given a 25 percent share in both the Christina and Skorpios. It was the minimum Onassis could give her. If Jackie chose to dispute the will, she would immediately forfeit her annuity, and Onassis’s executors and the rest of his heirs were instructed to fight her “through all possible legal means.”
“I want you to hold this will for me,” Onassis said. “And when I die, consult with my daughter and my advisers, and decide whether to make the will public or not.”
“If you give me this will now,” Papadimitriou said, “I have a legal duty as an attorney to post it with the court.”
“I want you to withhold publication, but perform it,” Onassis said firmly.
“I can’t avoid publication,” said Papadimitriou, who refused to play the role of a yes-man. “I must deposit it in the court.”
“Then I’ll give it to someone else,” Onassis said.
“Fine,” Papadimitriou said, handing him back the document.
Onassis let out a weary sigh, then continued. “Okay, I have something else I want to talk about,” he said. “I hope we can make more progress on this matter.”
“I hope so, too,” Papadimitriou said.
“No matter what harsh words I may have used in the past about Jackie, you and I know that she is at heart a kind and good woman,” Onassis said.
“That is true,” Papadimitriou said. “She is a real lady.”
“I adore her,” Onassis said. “To tell the truth, I still love her. But I want to divorce her. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” Papadimitriou said.
Onassis rolled his eyes. “It is simple,” he said. “I want to divorce my wife in accordance with Greek law.”
“It is not that simple,” Papadimitriou told him. “As you know, there is no such thing as a consensual divorce in Greece. You have to prove the fault of the other party. You have to show the judge that the relationship is irreparably broken. But you’re asking me to draw up divorce papers while you’re praising your wife. That’s unheard of. No court will consider starting divorce proceedings under those conditions. You need to give me some complaints about Jackie.”
“I can’t do that,” Onassis said. “That’s totally out of the question.”
“Then there’s no point in my drawing up divorce papers,” Papadimitriou said.
“Just do what I tell you,” Onassis said, his voice betraying mounting exasperation.
He got up from his chair and went to the door. Then he turned back to Papadimitriou, and said calmly:
“Remember, Stelio. Don’t put in anything bad about Jackie.”
PLAYING FAIR
Jackie was on her widow’s walk on Skorpios, putting the finishing touches to yet another watercolor of the Ionian islands. As Oliver Smith had once said, there was a certain primitive charm to her style of painting. Her green islands zigzagged to the horizon, diminishing in size as they neared the point where the water met the sky. Yet she could not seem to get the farthest island right. The perspective of Ithaca still eluded her.
A
s she put away her paints and brushes, she became aware of the flutter of Ari’s approaching helicopter. She was not looking forward to seeing her husband. Ever since their vacation in Acapulco several months before, Ari had become impossible to deal with.
It was as if he was a different man. He had once possessed almost superhuman stamina. He could negotiate for days without end, and make love two and three times a night. But in Acapulco, he had run out of steam. During the day, it was hard for him to keep up with Jackie, who was more than twenty years his junior. And at night, when she put on his favorite Halston gown and joined him in bed, he had trouble performing the sex act even once.
Jackie’s vitality became an affront to him, and nothing she did or said pleased him. When she suggested that they look for a house to buy in Acapulco—an idea they had discussed many times before—he flew into an uncontrollable rage. His screaming went on for two or three days, and it continued on the flight back to America. He sat by himself in a corner of his Lear jet, took out his will, and signed and dated it. When he arrived in New York, he gave it to his American money manager Creon Broun for safekeeping.
Back in Greece, his health continued to deteriorate, and Jackie persuaded him to return to America and enter the New York Hospital for tests and observation. There, doctors informed him that he suffered from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease in which the body turns against itself. The progressive and sometimes fatal neuromuscular disorder induced fatigue, depression, and loss of muscle tone, especially in the muscles that controlled the eyelids.
The doctors prescribed massive doses of cortisone, the same medicine that John Kennedy had used to control his secret illness, Addison’s disease. There were dangers associated with the administration of cortisone. Doctors were unable to fine-tune the level of laboratory-produced cortisone in a patient’s bloodstream, and excess cortisone led to Cushing’s syndrome. Ari suffered from its symptoms: a full red face, headaches, back pain, and a feeling of vulnerability.
His face and body became bloated from the cortisone, but the myasthenia gravis progressed at an alarming rate. He could not hold his eyelids open. They had to be fastened to his forehead with transparent tape so that he could see. Before, he had been merely ugly; now he looked grotesque.
He was dying, and he knew it. He felt like the biblical Job, and he wondered why God had sent him so many afflictions in the final years of his life. He looked around for a scapegoat and found one in Jackie. He quarreled with her about her spending, her clothes, even the way she raised her children (he did not like their sloppy blue jeans). He grew more superstitious than before, and was certain that Jackie possessed supernatural powers and was responsible for the loss of his son. He called her “the witch.”
Appalling stories of Ari’s abuse began making the rounds.
“Onassis treated her so badly,” said Jackie’s friend, the photographer Peter Beard, who spent long stretches of time with Caroline and John on Skorpios. “I can’t tell you how many meals I sat through on Skorpios when Onassis would scream at her, and she would just continue eating. She took a lot of shit from him. He used to make insulting comparisons between Jackie and Callas. Jackie was just interested in superficial gossip. Callas was a real artist.”
Jackie sought advice from Ari’s sister Artemis, who, having suffered the loss of her only child years before, looked upon Jackie as a surrogate daughter.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Artemis said. “Despite my strenuous objections, Aristo has asked his lawyer to draw up divorce papers.”
The helicopter settled on the landing pad on top of Skorpios, and Ari stepped off, followed by a surprise guest: Stelio Papadimitriou.
Jackie had always gotten along with Ari’s attorney, and they greeted each other warmly. Then the three of them climbed into Jackie’s open jeep, and Ari drove them down the steep side of the island. On the way down, Ari pointed out the work that Jackie had completed on the Pink House. He seemed proud of her accomplishment. Papadimitriou took this as a good sign; perhaps Onassis was coming to his senses. The attorney complimented Jackie on the way she and Niki Goulandris had transformed the island into a glorious arboretum of indigenous plants, shrubs, and trees.
“It was pleasant chitchat,” Papadimitriou recalled, “but from the moment Jackie saw me get off the helicopter, I’m sure she knew why I had come to Skorpios.”
That evening after dinner in the main house, an inebriated Onassis started berating Jackie again.
“Why do you continue to buy British paintings of Irish horses?” he asked. “You know I don’t like those paintings. In any case, the art dealers in Britain always cheat you on the price.”
Jackie ignored him and turned to Papadimitriou.
“If Ari dies,” she said, “I know who my opponent will be. It will be you, Mr. Papadimitriou. You will carry out his final wishes. But I know something else. I can trust you. You are a fair man, and you will be fair to me when it comes to money.”
“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.”
A SWEEPING INDICTMENT
Jack 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.