The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  Away from the press, Callas reacted by throwing the kind of seismic tantrum for which she was famous—opening the windows of her Paris apartment and screaming into the night. Officially, she projected an aura of benign, even benevolent, acceptance. Callas wished the lovebirds well, then blithely remarked to the press that Jackie “did well to give a grandfather to her children.”

  No one was prepared for the global orgy of outrage that followed the wedding announcement of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. AMERICA HAS LOST A SAINT, screamed Germany’s Bild-Zeitung. JACK KENNEDY DIES TODAY FOR A SECOND TIME, proclaimed Rome’s Il Messagero, while the Stockholm Express asked, JACKIE, HOW COULD YOU? As far as the editors of France-Soir were concerned, the union was nothing less than “sad and shameful.”

  The venerable New York Times acknowledged in its front-page story that Americans were reacting with “anger, shock, and dismay.” As far as the world was concerned, Doris Lilly observed, Jackie had gone “from Prince Charming to Caliban.”

  * * *

  AT THE EPICENTER of the storm were John and Caroline, who were scooped up by Jackie and Ari and rushed to the airport bearing their father’s name. There they boarded an empty Olympic Airways 707 (the plane’s ninety-three passengers had been unceremoniously kicked off only moments before), where they were soon joined by Auchincloss and Kennedy relatives. With just eleven passengers aboard, the plane flew to Andravida, a Greek military base. There on the tarmac with its engines running was Ari’s Piaggio seaplane, waiting to whisk them to Skorpios.

  Jackie didn’t want any reporters present at the wedding.

  “Please don’t bring them here,” she begged her fiancé. But Ari was not about to let his ultimate moment go unrecorded. Over the objections of the entire world, he was about to make John F. Kennedy’s beautiful, glamorous, and (until now) revered widow his wife. “Next to marrying the Queen of England,” said the longtime dean of White House reporters, Helen Thomas, “he couldn’t have done better. He wanted acceptance in the highest social circles, and he assumed this was a fast and easy way to get it. Or so he thought.”

  On the issue of press coverage, Ari persuaded Jackie to compromise. A small group of journalists would be permitted to cover the wedding party as it entered and left the whitewashed neoclassic Chapel of Panyitsa (“Chapel of the Little Virgin”). Hoping to keep the mayhem to a minimum, Jackie made her own plea to the press. “We know you understand that even though people may be well known,” she wrote, “they still hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth—birth, marriage, and death. We wish our wedding to be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses of Skorpios with only members of the family present—five of them little children. If you will give us these moments, we will gladly give you all the cooperation possible for you to take the pictures you need.”

  Shortly after 5 p.m. on October 20, 1968, Jackie appeared on the flagstone walk leading to the chapel. Cameras whirred and clicked as she and the groom made their way toward the chapel filled with twenty-two family members and friends. Once they reached the doorway, Jackie turned to the wall of photographers and said, firmly, “No. Not in here.”

  Five minutes later, John and Caroline flanked the bride and groom. Each stood ramrod straight and clutched a tall white candle. The flickering light revealed what one guest described as “an expression of worry and fear on their sweet little faces.” They were not alone. Standing on the groom’s side, Alexander and Christina looked as if they were attending a funeral, not a wedding. That day, said Ari’s friend Willi Frischauer, both Onassis children “wept bitter tears.”

  Seemingly oblivious to the tensions simmering just beneath the surface, Jackie beamed throughout the short service. Everyone in the room agreed that the bride was stunning in a beige chiffon dress by Valentino—oddly, the same dress she had worn six months earlier to a friend’s wedding in Virginia. She also wore flat shoes that matched her dress and Ari wore lifts—but Jackie still towered at least four inches above her betrothed. Callas liked to joke that Onassis “has all his suits made in London—unfortunately he is in New York at the time.” But today Aristo looked undeniably dapper in a blue suit and burgundy tie.

  To get to the chapel, guests had had to run through a light drizzle. As a result, everyone was wet—a good omen in his country, Polycarpos Athanassiou, the bearded Greek Orthodox priest who was conducting the ceremony, hastened to point out. It did not bode well, however, that Ari was clearly drunk. A Secret Service agent who made his own feelings about the wedding known by wearing a PT-109 tie clasp, pointed out that the groom was “unmistakably intoxicated.”

  Ari weaved noticeably as he and Jackie were crowned with wreaths of orange blossoms, placed wedding bands on each other’s fingers, and then sipped wine from a silver chalice. The final ritual was the “Dance of Isaiah,” in which the bride and groom walk around the altar three times, each trying to step on the other’s first foot to determine who would call the shots in the marriage. To John’s obvious delight, Jackie won.

  As they left the church, the crowd outside tossed rice and—to ensure happiness, according to Greek custom—sugared almonds. “How are you feeling?” one reporter asked Ari.

  “I feel very well, my boy,” Onassis answered as Jackie looked on, smiling broadly.

  “And how about you, John?” the same reporter asked. “How are you feeling?”

  John studied the man’s face for a moment before turning away.

  Swallowed up by the mob of reporters, the new Mr. and Mrs. Onassis managed to make their way to a waiting gold-plated Jeep. With a grim-faced Caroline perched on her mother’s lap, John sitting in the backseat, and a smiling Ari at the wheel, they sped off to the reception aboard the Christina.

  As they drove off, John and Caroline looked “afraid, absolutely terrified by the circus,” said Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire. “Imagine how scary this all was to them,” agreed Onassis’s personal secretary, Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos. John and Caroline “had to be worrying about what would happen to them now that their mother was marrying a man they hardly knew.”

  Undoubtedly adding to the fear factor were the Greek navy gunboats and cruisers patrolling the waters surrounding the Christina, not to mention the bullhorn-equipped helicopters that kept swooping down to warn reporters to keep their distance. “It was more like a war zone,” Cheshire said, “than a wedding reception.”

  Sipping pink champagne, Jackie stepped out onto the deck with Caroline to say hello to a select few American journalists, and then returned to her guests gathered around the grand piano in the Christina’s glass-walled sitting room. After a few moments, the curtains were finally drawn—and Jackie was finally able to light the first of several L&Ms while Ari dispensed gifts to everyone in the room.

  Out of concern for John and Caroline, Kiki Moutsatsos walked up to them and started a conversation. “There was no doubt that the children were overwhelmed by what was going on around them,” she said. “Yet it was also obvious they were polite, well-brought-up, adored children.”

  With Marta Sgubin sitting next to him, John sipped an orange soda, while Ari lavished $1.2 million worth of jewels on his bride: an eye-popping cabochon ruby ring and heart-shaped ruby-and-diamond earrings to match, two ruby-and-gold Capricorn ram’s-head bracelets (she was a Leo, he was a Capricorn), and two diamond Capricorn rings. Not about to neglect his new in-laws, Onassis gave Lee and the Kennedy sisters diamond-and-gold rings with their particular sign of the zodiac. For Jackie’s mother, Janet, who despised Onassis, there was a platinum-and-diamond pin.

  Ari didn’t forget the children, either. Caroline and her cousins Sydney and Tina squealed with joy when he presented them with sapphire-and-diamond bracelets. John perked up when he and Lee’s son Tony each got a thousand-dollar wristwatch.

  As far as his new stepchildren were concerned, Ari’s largesse would know no bounds. So that they wouldn’t get bored on
Skorpios, Ari bought Caroline a sailboat and a Shetland pony. John got his own Shetland pony as well, but Ari also bought the boy a jukebox, a red speedboat with his name written in large letters across the bow, and a mini-Jeep. When John wanted his pet rabbit flown to Greece aboard an Olympic Airways jet, the rabbit was not allowed his own seat in first class—Ari insisted that the pilot himself watch over it in the cockpit. And whenever Jackie or the children craved American hot dogs, as they frequently did, Onassis had them purchased in Coney Island and flown straight to Athens.

  It was easy for John—or for that matter anyone—to understand why the Christina, christened after his adored only daughter, was Ari’s pride. The yacht boasted a ballroom, a formal dining room, a private screening room, an El Greco hanging in the paneled study, an Olympic-size swimming pool, solid gold bathroom fixtures, several bars, a children’s playroom decorated by Jackie’s old friend, Madeline creator Ludwig Bemelmans, and mosaic floors throughout depicting scenes from Greek mythology.

  To keep his guests amused, the yacht also carried on board a small sailboat, four speedboats, two kayaks, a Jeep, three dinghies, a glass-bottom boat, and a five-passenger Piaggio seaplane. A sixty-member crew, including two chefs and two full-time hairdressers, catered to the passengers’ needs.

  Aboard the Christina, John preferred to eat belowdecks with the crew. “He was such a curious kid—always asking about how the boat ran, how the engines worked, and always asking if he could help,” a crew member recalled. While his mother and stepfather were entertaining upstairs, John “scrubbed pots and pans in the galley and loved it.” John’s favorite job aboard the Christina: donning the captain’s hat and helping him steer the ship. “He was very serious about it. We all knew he’d make a hell of a sailor someday. Everybody on the Christina loved him.”

  When they weren’t sailing to exotic ports of call, there was the seaside villa nineteen miles outside Athens at Glyfada, the gated mansion in Montevideo, his pied-à-terre on avenue Foch in Paris—and John’s favorite: Skorpios.

  Heavy with the scent of bougainvillea and jasmine, sprinkled with olive trees, fig trees, oleander, and cypresses, Ari’s five-hundred-acre island paradise was suddenly the Kennedy kids’ favorite playground. They spent weeks at a time there swimming, hiking, sailing, and for a time, horseback riding. When Caroline fancied a horse that the owners refused to sell, Ari did the next best thing and bought the horse’s parents and siblings for his stepdaughter. Unfortunately, Jackie eventually called a halt to riding on the island; she felt the jagged, rock-strewn landscape posed too many dangers. No matter. Caroline was promptly given her own mini-Jeep so that she could keep up with John in his.

  Despite the idyllic setting, cracks in the Onassis marriage began to appear early. When Jackie refused to meet Greek strongman George Papadopoulos or to accompany her husband to the formal announcement of his mammoth new Project Omega just days after the wedding, Ari was furious—even though she had made it clear before they exchanged vows that she was not willing to be used as a shill. “I didn’t do it for Jack,” she declared, somewhat disingenuously, “and I won’t do it for you.” At that point, Onassis was angry enough to tell Olympic Airways chairman Yannis Georgakis that marrying her may have been “the biggest mistake” of his life.

  Ari’s grumblings aside, Jackie seemed almost giddy as she settled into her new life as wife to one of the world’s richest men. It helped that she was being waited on by a staff of more than seventy servants spread across three continents—not counting the Christina’s sixty-member crew. “I had never seen her in such high spirits,” said her old friend Billy Baldwin, who arrived two days after the wedding to begin redecorating the Christina, the Skorpios house, and the Glyfada estate. “She had never seemed so free.”

  It wasn’t all about the money, Jackie explained, or even what she insisted was her genuine affection for Ari. “It liberated me from the Kennedys,” she said of the marriage, adding that simple ethnic prejudice was at the heart of most people’s objections to it. “None of them could understand why I would want that funny little squiggly name when I had the greatest name of all. I like,” she added with a wink, “seeing all those politicians dealing with Ari’s squiggly name.”

  Unfortunately, during those first few weeks after the wedding, Jackie was left alone on Skorpios while her husband boomeranged from Athens to Paris and back again on business. Feeling abandoned, at least temporarily, Jackie dashed off a heartfelt letter to Roswell Gilpatric. “Dearest Ros,” she wrote, “I would have told you before I left—but then everything happened so much more quickly than I’d planned. I saw somewhere what you had said and I was touched—dear Ros—I hope you know all you were and are and will ever be to me—With my love, Jackie.”

  Onassis somehow got wind of Jackie’s note to Ros and dashed back to his bride’s side. He spent the next three weeks honeymooning with Jackie on Skorpios. They swam, sunbathed, went for long walks across the island, snorkeled, and fed the miniature horses stabled on the island. They sailed the Christina to Rhodes, and when it was over, she joined John and Caroline in Manhattan.

  With Jackie out of the picture, Ari began bombarding Callas with roses and phone calls. It was only when he showed up outside her Paris apartment at 36 avenue Georges Mandel and threatened to crash his Mercedes through the front door that she finally relented. Starting with discreet dinners in out-of-the-way restaurants, the couple rekindled their romance.

  From this point on Ari and Callas, who now bitterly referred to Jackie as “the False Lady,” saw each other almost constantly, according to Onassis’s longtime chauffeur Jacinto Rosa. “Right up until a month before his death—for the truth is that Maria was the only true love of Onassis’s life. She was his ‘real wife’—even though they weren’t officially married.”

  Yet even Rosa conceded that, in the beginning, Jackie and Ari behaved like a couple very much in love. Kitty Carlisle Hart was among the chosen few invited to 1040 Fifth for Thanksgiving that year—Ari’s first. “We were all trying to explain to this foreigner the history of this purely American ritual,” Hart said, “and to him it all sounded rather, well, silly.” Eventually, Jackie just “threw up her hands and laughed.” To Hart, “they seemed, at least in that first year together, to be very much in love with each other.”

  Ari called Jackie his “Class A Lady”—a line cribbed from the language on the packs of the L&Ms she chain-smoked: “20 Class A Cigarettes.” But it was more than just pet names and public displays of affection. “Jackie must have said at least ten times to me, ‘Isn’t it weird that everybody thinks I married Ari for his money?’ ” Plimpton said. “I knew Jackie really, really well. She confided in me. If she had married Ari for money, she would have talked about it. Sure, the money was part of Ari’s attraction, but only a part. She really loved him.”

  “There was a tenderness between them that was really moving,” agreed society bandleader Peter Duchin, a close friend of Jackie’s who spent time with the Onassises in New York and on board the Christina. “They really loved each other, and I think in a way that neither had loved anyone before . . . And they had fun! Ari took tremendous pleasure and pride in Jackie, and when she looked at him—well, there was obvious passion there.”

  Oddly enough, the marriage marked a sort of sexual renaissance for Jackie. Onassis, who had no qualms about discussing his prowess in the bedroom and sharing the details of his sex life, bragged that he and Jackie made love “five times a night—she surpasses all the women I have ever known.” Salinger winced when he recalled “the graphic way Ari described their sexual relationship. Believe me, it was more than any of us wanted to hear.” For her part, Jackie let it be known that, after a lifetime of following Catholic doctrine and not practicing birth control, she was placed on the pill at age thirty-nine. “Ari doesn’t want any more children, and neither do I,” she explained matter-of-factly.

  “He was crazy about her,” Moutsatsos said, “and, despite his appearance, she was just as crazy a
bout him. They shared a great physical love,” she continued, “one they enhanced by taking a variety of drugs Ari got from other people to increase sexual stamina and desire.”

  Ari’s principal source was La Prairie, the Swiss clinic founded by controversial longevity pioneer Dr. Paul Niehans. Soon Jackie and Ari were being injected with a serum of live sheep cells that Niehans billed as both a powerful aphrodisiac and an elixir of youth. Not one to come to the party empty-handed, Jackie brought along what Doris Lilly described as “her own bag of goodies. She got Ari to start taking shots from Dr. Feelgood”—the same amphetamine-steroid mixture that Dr. Max Jacobson had given both Jack and Jackie Kennedy to get through their most stressful times in the White House.

  The newlyweds also spiced things up by making love in less-than-conventional settings. They ripped out all the seats in the first-class cabin of an Olympic Airlines jet and turned it into their own airborne boudoir. Crew members of the Christina came upon the couple in the throes of passion beneath the canvas covering a lifeboat, and on another occasion in the dinghy that was tethered to the yacht.

  Yet, with Ari often doing business in Europe and Jackie still rooted in Manhattan, the Onassises also spent long stretches of time apart. John and Caroline did not see their stepfather for weeks, even months at a time. Ari explained, unconvincingly, that this was all for the sake of John and Caroline. “Jackie is often at the other end of the world with her children—whom I should say I love very much,” he said. “But they need time to get used to me, and I want to give them that time.”

  Not that he always made himself emotionally available to them—even when he was in the same room. Shortly after Thanksgiving of 1968, he joined Jackie and the children at her Bernardsville, New Jersey, farmhouse. Even before Ari set foot on the property, he put up barricades to block the road leading to the house and had a French photographer arrested for trespassing.