Jackie After O

by Tina Cassidy

  That was then.

  Now, Jackie knew that the French, like the rest of the world, were wondering why she was not at Onassis’s side when he died.

  Her plane landed in Paris at 7:00 AM. She made no statement, waited in the VIP lounge while customs handled passport formalities, and then a chauffeur drove her to 88 Avenue Foch. There, she shut herself in from the media horde and let most of the day pass. At 5:15 she emerged, accompanied by Onassis’s private nurse, Monique Clouthier, an imposing bodyguard, and her sisters-in-law Artemis and Kalliroi.30 The group left for American Hospital, where her husband’s body was laid out on a bier in a hospital chapel, surrounded by white flowers.

  Christina had been at her father’s side since Friday and into Saturday, when he died. But she was not at the hospital when Jackie arrived Sunday evening. The two were not friendly, not from the very beginning. In fact, Christina and her brother had cried during the reception on the yacht after their father’s wedding to Jackie, the siblings clinging to the childish fantasy that their divorced parents would reunite. But Christina was not just avoiding her stepmother at the hospital. She was devastated. Indeed her life was a Greek tragedy. In 1946, Onassis had married Athina (Tina) Livanos, the teenage daughter of shipping magnate Stavros Livanos—Onassis’s industrial rival. Tina divorced him in 1960 after catching him having sex with Callas in the saloon of the yacht. Tina then married Stavros Niarchos—another shipping rival—whose previous wife, Eugenia, was Tina’s sister. Eugenia had recently died of a suspicious overdose. With her mother married to her uncle, Christina—who battled weight problems, dressed sloppily, and was woefully insecure about her relationships and appearance—now had to endure an international fashion icon for a stepmother, leaving the young woman to feel even worse about herself (despite constant dieting and a nose job). Christina, of course, also had assumed that Jackie was a gold digger. Then, in the last two years, another string of tragedies pushed her to the brink. Her mother and brother dead, she had married California real estate broker Joseph Bolker and divorced him within a nine-month period after her father threatened to cut her out of his will over the relationship. But Christina had reconciled with Onassis.31 Now both men in her life were gone.

  Jackie, in her leather trench, looked like a very different widow this time. She wore no hat or veil as she pushed through the heavy bronze doors of the hospital’s chilly chapel where Onassis’s body laid with a Greek Orthodox icon on his chest and flowers, including the orchid she had sent. She spent fifteen minutes with the body.32

  The last time she had knelt before a husband’s bier, it was in the East Room of the White House, at 4:00 AM, immediately after Jack’s body had been transferred from the naval hospital. A priest had said a few words and there were white candles around the casket, along with Kennedy’s closest associates. Jackie approached the casket, buried her head in the flag, and then left after a few moments.33 Jackie had begun visualizing JFK’s funeral on the Air Force One flight back from Dallas, directing even the smallest details that would be meaningful, such as having military cadets, with whom the president had been impressed on a trip to Ireland, lay a wreath. She told Bobby to check a guidebook on Lincoln’s funeral for answers about the lying-in-state process. And she had the White House upholsterer use the black cambric fabric he would typically apply as a finishing touch on the bottom of a chair to drape over the windows, mantels, and chandeliers. There was plenty of it to hang and the upholsterer and his wife worked through the night to get it done before Jackie and the president’s body arrived.34

  For RFK’s funeral, besides ensuring that Ethel had the nuns she had requested singing at the Mass, Jackie noticed that Bobby’s casket was only inches off the floor of the funeral train car as it traveled between New York and Washington. With so many people coming to the tracks along the route to pay their respects, she asked for help in raising the casket. “It should be elevated so that the crowds of people watching the train might have the chance to see it,” she implored one man on the train.35

  But Jackie did not need to bother herself with the funeral details of her now late husband; those were being handled by the Onassis clan and his loyal associates. As she left the hospital chapel, escorted again by the nurse and the bodyguard, she put her glasses back on and knew that this time she would not be stage crafting the event. She simply needed to show up at the same chapel on Skorpios where they had been married not quite seven years before.

  While Jackie and Onassis had pulled away from each other toward the end, Christina’s relationship with her father had become closer. They had nothing left but each other. Having been there when he died, Christina, twenty-four, refused to leave his body on the flight from Paris to Aktion, near Skorpios, where he would be buried. Jackie, Ted Kennedy, and the three Onassis sisters had flown ahead and were waiting on the tarmac to greet the casket and a heavily sedated Christina. As Christina descended the plane steps, Jackie approached her and gently held her hand. Fragile under the best of circumstances, Christina was weeping, her black hair flying in the wind, her skin a yellow hue.36

  March 18, 1975. Jackie walks with Christina, followed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, as they leave an Olympic Airlines plane carrying Onassis’s body. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  “Why are all these people around us? Get them away,” she demanded.

  “Take it easy now,” Jackie told her. “It will soon be over.”37

  Separately, the Kennedy children and their grandmother Janet had arrived in Aktion, and from there everyone drove in limos to Nydri, a tiny fishing village, before transferring by boat to Skorpios. It was a cool, wet day—March 18, 1975.

  John, fourteen, and Caroline, seventeen, in jeans and sweaters, drove a golf cart around Skorpios, reminiscing about happier times there: his speedboat, her white pony, fishing trips, long days under the sun with their cousins. But they could hear the hum and chop of boats and helicopters bringing mourners and the unwelcomed media to the private island. Now it was time for them to head to their guesthouse to change into more appropriate funeral attire—a blue blazer and tie for him and a blue sweater and gray skirt for her—and head for the dock. There was nothing left to do but wait there with their grandmother for the cabin cruiser containing the casket that held Onassis. Among those waiting were Onassis’s little dog, Vana, a stray that had attached herself to the magnate and always had a sixth sense about his arrival on Skorpios.38

  In the distance was the Christina, with its anchor down. Its flag was at half-mast. The crew wore black. The Skorpios chapel’s bell tolled.

  March 18, 1975. Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss (left), with John Jr., Caroline, and several others, awaiting the arrival of Onassis’s body on Skorpios. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  In the months leading up to this day, Onassis’s zest and sturdy body had been slowly diminished by his disease, which forced him to clip tape or the adhesive strips from Band-Aids and tack them onto his eyelids to hold them open. He had also been suddenly ravaged by the right-left-right punches of flu, pneumonia, and gallbladder surgery, from which he never recovered.

  And here he was, on his last journey to Skorpios from American Hospital in Paris. A second launch carried Jackie, Senator Ted Kennedy, Christina, and his three sisters. Other mourners were arriving by ferry.

  A light rain fell as John and Caroline stood on the dock, waiting to greet their mother and say good-bye to her husband one final time.

  Jackie was a widow again. After Kennedy’s soul-crushing death, and then the devastating back-to-back murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, capping a decade of despair, she seemed to take this funeral in stride. Disembarking onto Skorpios still wearing the black leather trench coat and her fly-eye sunglasses, this death, with this husband, had been long and slow, and she was as ready as she could ever be.

  “A widow for a second time,” whispered one old woman in a black shawl as the funeral procession walked by. Others whispered about a curse that Jackie had brought on the Onassis family—and w
hether Maria Callas would be coming.39

  Once again, what appeared to be a Mona Lisa smile swept beneath Jackie’s glasses.40

  The village priest led the six pallbearers some two hundred yards up the hill toward the chapel, with about sixty mourners trailing slowly behind. The procession’s pecking order was clear. Jackie held John’s arm. Caroline stood between her mother and her uncle Ted, who was wearing a navy blue trench. Christina walked ahead of all of them—closest to the casket—surrounded by her aunts, arm in arm, an old Greek custom, though it looked as if they were forming a wall to block out Jackie and her children.41

  March 18, 1975. Onassis’s funeral procession to the chapel on Skorpios. Christina Onassis, center front, surrounded by her aunts; second row: John Jr., Jackie, Caroline, and Ted Kennedy. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  The chapel courtyard was lined with hundreds of white lilies in pots draped with red velvet. There were seven large wreaths on white tripods outside the chapel. Set in theatrical and coordinating fashion against the dazzling pink blossoms of cherry trees on the terraced hillside behind the Chapel of the Little Virgin, one of the wreaths, made of white and pink carnations, pink hyacinths, and white lilies had a banner across it that read: TO ARI FROM JACKIE. Four other wreaths were from a Swiss bank.

  Not all of the sixty invited mourners could squeeze into the eighteenth-century chapel. And Onassis employees—gardeners, domestics, and sailors—each in job-specific uniforms, huddled near the entrance holding candles. Inside, the walls were lined with decorative columns and arched niches painted sky blue. Greek Orthodox priest Zavitsanos Apostolous, with his thick black beard, black cap, and ceremonial robe, read from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Thessalonians. A small choir sang in verse: “I went to the grave and saw the naked bones, and I said to myself, who are you? King or soldier? Rich or poor? Sinner or just?”

  One of Onassis’s sisters rushed out of the chapel, overwhelmed with grief.

  “Come and give him your last kiss,” Father Apostolous said to those before him, prompting the tradition of mourners to touch their lips to an icon on top of the simple wooden coffin. One by one, they did, each leaving a white flower on top. When it was Christina’s turn, she shook and swayed, and was helped back to her seat. Jackie, who appeared drawn but tearless, stepped forward, kissed the oak lid, and bid him good-bye.

  Beyond that, there was no eulogy. Onassis did not want one. When the funeral was over, pallbearers carried the coffin by its four silver handles and placed it on a concrete sarcophagus beneath a cypress tree to the left of the chapel, opposite the grave of his son. Alexander Onassis had died at age twenty-five when his Piaggio plane, part of Onassis’s Olympic Airways fleet, had dipped its right wing just after takeoff and dived into the runway. The freakish loss of his only son had plagued the millionaire with a deep depression—many believed it was then that he lost his will to live—and the suspicion that an enemy had fatally rigged the aircraft.42

  Onassis had chosen this grave site for himself shortly after Alexander died, telling one adviser to leave the cypress tree there and giving very specific instructions to pass along to the architect.43

  March 18, 1975. Christina Onassis and her aunt say a final good-bye to Aristotle. Jackie stands to the left of Caroline. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  As Jackie stepped out of the chapel following the coffin, which had his name and the face of his patron saint on it, she slipped on her sunglasses even though the skies had darkened further, the clouds releasing a few big drops. The priest said more prayers and a dazed Christina tossed some dirt on the coffin as it was lowered into the vault. Jackie’s face crumpled. With quivering lips, she struggled to stay composed.44

  But she would soon recover.

  After Onassis’s funeral, she returned to Athens, stayed a few days with Artemis, and then boarded the plane for home. But before she did so, Jackie granted a brief interview with an Athens newspaper: “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows,” she said, with flashbulbs popping. “He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.”45

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Target

  Back in New York, Jackie checked in almost daily with Artemis to see how she was doing and, more subtly, to check on Christina’s mood. After all, her stepdaughter would be the one to determine whether there would be a battle over the estate. When Jackie married Onassis, she had asked the federal government to stop the regular payments that had begun after the assassination. Financial support from the Kennedy family also ended with her marriage to Onassis. Although the children had trust funds, Jackie had a lifestyle to maintain and no active income. No job. Still, Jackie never wanted a public catfight over money. Christina knew it—and sharpened her claws. She instructed one of her father’s henchmen to leak a story—a big story—that would embarrass the widow and make it impossible for her to demand a big number.

  Jackie, who always canceled her newspaper and magazine subscriptions around assassination anniversaries or salacious book releases so she did not have to relive her tragedies or read unflattering stories, must have been blindsided on April 12, 1975, when she picked up her New York Times. There, on the front page, was a bold scoop by John Corry with a double-deck headline: ONASSIS SAID TO HAVE PLANNED DIVORCE, PROVIDED $3-MILLION FOR WIDOW IN WILL. That the article was in the paper of record, one that did not have a gossip column, gave the story credibility. The article contradicted earlier reports circulating for months that said she could receive up to $200 million after his death. Corry also reported the secret discussions with Roy Cohn the previous December, when Onassis asked him to begin divorce proceedings, saying that Onassis only dropped the issue because his health had rapidly deteriorated.

  The story was not only embarrassing and infuriating, but the timing was horrible. The Municipal Art Society had planned an enormous concert rally for later that week at Grand Central, where organizers would unveil the campaign’s slogan—“No more bites out of the Big Apple”—with Benny Goodman and Dick Cavett, among others. Now she could not attend without becoming a distraction.1 She was also set to leave for Greece the next week, on April 20, to attend a service on Skorpios marking the end of the forty-day Greek Orthodox mourning period.

  Jackie demanded that Christina issue a denial of the report. Christina, still in Paris, was not yet fluent in handling the sort of high-profile public negotiations that her father had been expert in; she broke quickly and issued a statement saying her father’s marriage indeed had been a happy one and “all rumors of intended divorce are untrue.” Christina also denied that she and Jackie were arguing over the will.2

  The New York Times story prompted Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson to finally publish the story Onassis had given him months before about Jackie’s spending, MRS. ONASSIS SELLS USED WARDROBE, the headline tattled, going on to say, “Associates recall hearing Onassis gripe about a $9,000 bill for gowns from Valentino’s of Rome. ‘What does she do with all the clothes,’ he exploded. ‘I never see her in anything but blue jeans.’”3

  Reselling clothes was not new for Jackie. She would trade suits, gowns, blouses, pants, purses—some of which were never used and some of which were designed by Halston, Valentino, or Yves Saint Laurent—for cash. One favorite resale shop was Encore in Manhattan. While in the White House, she would have resale commission checks sent to her secretary, Mary Gallagher, who kept the books for the couple. Jackie’s clothing was resold under Gallagher’s name and the Encore checks would be sent to the secretary’s home; she’d deposit the funds and then repay Jackie.

  Jackie was outraged by the media frenzy but she left for Greece to attend Onassis’s final service, leaving her mother to deal with the Associated Press reporter who tracked her down at home in Washington. Janet rarely spoke publicly about her daughter. But this time, she unleashed.

  “Th
ere was never any question of divorce,” Janet told the media. “All marriages have their spots and they came from very different backgrounds and countries. They had their difficult moments as you and I have probably had … Obviously there was a good difference in ages. She had children in this country. He didn’t want to be in this country very much, and they lived a life where they came and went when either one of them wanted to see the other one. It’s difficult being married to somebody who has a very strong character with whom you had little in common through the years when you were growing up, when you come from a different country with different customs and ideas … But whose business is it besides your own? If you have enough sense and dignity to work it out between you … Actually I think she’s going to miss him very much, at least she told me she was.”

  Rumors of divorce, Janet added, “just make me sick.”4

  When Jackie landed in Athens to mark the end of the mourning, the strain of all she had been through this year showed when she walked off the plane. She looked thin and pale, exacerbated by the tradition of not wearing makeup or jewelry during that period of grief.

  Artemis, the oldest of the Onassis sisters, and the one who was closest with Aristotle, brought Jackie back to her villa for the night. Christina purposely stayed away. The next day, waiting in the Olympic Airways’ VIP lounge for a plane to Skorpios, employees came to greet her. Jackie greeted them warmly by name, held their hands, and thanked them for their sympathy.5