Just Jackie (21 page)

“His most characteristic stance is with shoulders slightly hunched, arms spread out, and swaying a little on the balls of his feet like a bantamweight watching which way his opponent is going,” wrote Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, in an article for the London
Evening Standard
. Randolph went on to note:

Jackie fell completely under his spell. She hardly noticed that Ari drank heavily—mostly Dom Perignon champagne and Courvoisier—and that he sweated so profusely that he had to change his clothes frequently throughout the day. After she got over the initial shock of his appearance, she hardly gave it a second thought.

For Ari, talk was the breath of life. And as the cruise continued, Jackie sat with him on the poop deck under the stars, listening to the tales of his youth, which he made sound like an adventure yarn starring himself as the plucky hero. Jackie was especially attracted to Ari’s portrait of himself as the underdog.

He lied to her about his origins, repeating the rags-to-riches legend of his childhood. In fact, his father had been a prosperous tobacco merchant in the Turkish port city of Smyrna. The Greek pale of settlement on the western shores of the Ottoman empire was the cradle of the ancient Ionian civilization.

“Ionia is the birthplace of Homer, and of all true Greeks like me,” Ari said.

He was the only son, and his mother, Penelope, whom
he remembered all his life as being very beautiful, died as the result of a kidney operation when he was six years old. The early loss of his mother was, most likely, the source of his lifelong melancholy, and of the deep insecurities that he always sought to cover up.

When his father remarried, Aristo did not accept his stepmother, Helen, whom he regarded as a usurper. Nor did he develop much affection for the two stepsisters, Merope and Kalliroi, who joined the family over the next few years. He reserved all his love for his full sister, Artemis, and his grandmother, Gethsemane, a deeply religious woman, who regularly scrubbed the little boy’s body and washed his mind of sins.

Among Greeks, modesty is not a highly regarded virtue, and when Aristo’s rebellion against his stepmother led to cruel beatings by his father, the young boy was determined to show up the old man. He entered a famous athletic contest run by his uncle Homer at the Pelops Club in Smyrna. But he failed to win the top prize, “Champion of Champions.”

“A friend told me, ‘Cheer up, Aristo, there’s always next year,’ “ Ari told Jackie. “And I said, ‘Idiot! Do you think I am going to hang around this piddling town? For me, the whole world is small…. You will marvel one day at what I shall do.’ ”

That day came sooner than expected, for in 1922, when Aristo was sixteen years old, the Turkish army fell upon Smyrna and slaughtered the Greek population in a bloodthirsty campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Onassis tobacco warehouse went up in flames. Aristo’s father was arrested. His grandmother Gethsemane perished in the holocaust. The traumatic experience sealed for all time the bond he had with his full-blooded sister Artemis.

When a Turkish officer showed up at the Onassis home to requisition the residence, Aristo convinced him that he could be of service.

“You usually find that if you make things comfortable for people, they like you,” Ari explained.

In the midst of the fighting and turmoil, he escaped on a boat, wearing the disguise of a sailor, and carrying a large portion of the family fortune. But later he could not resist embroidering even this dramatic incident. He told Jackie that he had seen his uncle Homer being hanged by the Turks—which was false—and that he had to swim under a withering fusillade of gunfire to reach the boat that carried him to Athens, and to freedom.

“In those days,” he said, “overseas Greeks were not particularly welcomed in Greece, where we were known as
Turkospori
—Turk’s sperm.’ ”

He used the family money that he had smuggled out of Turkey to secure his father’s release from prison. But when the old man arrived in Athens, he showed little gratitude. He demanded that his son give him an accounting of every penny he had spent.

“People forget quickly,” Ari said. “Only a few weeks earlier they may have been on the verge of death. Then comes safety and the grumbles and complaints begin—over all sorts of trivialities.”

Ari’s closest friend was Constantine (“Costa”) Gratsos, a tall, handsome man who invariably sported a pipe in his mouth and a pretty young woman on his arm. The ne’er-do-well son of a rich Greek shipowner, Gratsos was an alcoholic who squandered his patrimony, and ended up working for Onassis as a paid companion.

Gratsos believed that Aristo was motivated to succeed by his difficult relationship with his father. It seemed to Gratsos that Onassis developed a passion for money and power as a way of winning the approval of his father and, later, of the entire world.

No one, not even Aristo, could say what his motives were, but there was no doubt that he felt humiliated by his father’s rebuke. He packed a battered suitcase, put together a few hundred dollars, and emigrated to Argentina.
He traveled steerage class on the twelve-thousand-ton
Tomaso di Savoya
, but he bribed a boatswain to let him sleep in the aft of the ship in a cage that held the ship’s stern lines.

In Buenos Aires, the eighteen-year-old Ari added a couple of years to the birth date entered on the documents he carried in his pocket. No longer would he need parental permission to seek work. He had dark hair, dark eyebrows, and an abundance of optimism and self-confidence, and he was an immediate hit with the girls.

“I liked the girls a lot, as do all boys of that age, and I must admit that I did have the gift of attracting them more than any of the rest of my friends,” he said. “I spoke Spanish with ease and I suppose they must have found my conversation full of charm.

“You know,” he continued, “the first five thousand dollars is always the hardest to make. But I was soon on my way to making my first fortune by importing oriental tobacco leaf from my father in Greece and selling it to local cigarette manufacturers. But money was never an end in itself. I never confused accumulation with enjoyment. Money gave me a sense of power, and I used it for my own pleasure, even when I was a young man.”

Buenos Aires was a bustling port city, handling the country’s massive exports of beef and grain, and Ari decided to take the money he had made in the tobacco business—about $600,000—and invest it in shipping. It was the midst of the Great Depression, and dry-cargo freighters could be bought for less than their scrap value. Ari gambled that shipping would recover, and would make him what he had always wanted to become—the champion of champions.

J
ackie was mesmerized by Ari’s life story. The other passengers on board the
Christina
could not help but notice that a certain chemistry was developing between her and the Greek shipowner. Every morning at breakfast, there were feverish conversations among Princess Irene Galitzine; Arkadi Guerney, Jackie’s old friend from her student days in Paris; and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who had been sent along by Jack Kennedy to watch over his wife.

“Maria Callas wasn’t [on board] for the first time in four years,” Roosevelt recalled. “Jackie’s sister brought Stas Radziwill along, but Stas left during the trip. We began to look like a boat full of jet-setters, and President Kennedy didn’t want that image.”

Between times with Ari, Jackie sat in the sun reading Greek history. One of her favorite books was
The Splendor of Greece
, by Robert Payne, who wrote:

The ancient Greeks, Jackie read, were the first to develop the arts, and to live a full and free life of personal freedom—just the kind of life that Jackie yearned for. Homer’s hero in the
Odyssey
reminded Jackie of Ari; they were both great fighters, wily schemers, ready speakers, and men of stout heart. Little by little, the salt air, the warm Ionian sun, the opulence of life aboard the
Christina
, the myths of the ancient Greeks, the stories of Ari’s youth—all this began to work on Jackie. Myth, legend, saga, and story became jumbled in her mind.

“[Jackie and Onassis] got along famously, speaking voraciously in English, Spanish and French,” Frank Brady wrote. “[Onassis] all at once offered to be her friend, provider, companion, father confessor and possible lover…. She was amused and fascinated at his seemingly unending supply of anecdotes, and she was impressed that even on the cruise he was able to constantly conduct and control business throughout the world. Cables and telephone calls arrived from heads of state and the presidents of the world’s largest corporations, and Onassis, sometimes even between dinner courses, dictated replies and returned calls that had multimillion-dollar implications. Whereas Jack Kennedy ruled a country, Onassis seemed to rule the world.”

On the last night of the cruise, Ari presented Jackie with a magnificent diamond-and-ruby necklace.

“Ari has showered Jackie with so many presents, I can’t stand it,” Lee joked in a letter to President Kennedy. “All I’ve got is three dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t even wear to her own birthday party.”

O
nassis was in Hamburg, Germany, overseeing the construction of a new tanker, the
Olympic Chivalry
, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. He immediately contacted Lee, who was still under the impression that he was going to ask her to marry him. Lee insisted that Ari accompany her to Washington.

There, he presented himself at the gate of the White House and demanded to be admitted. Angier Biddle Duke, the chief of protocol, who was in charge of all foreign dignitaries, balked at letting Onassis in. Duke checked with the Kennedy family, and to his amazement, he was instructed to admit the Greek shipowner.

“My job was to keep the foreign guests penned up in Blair House, and a Greek getting through my fingers bothered me,” Duke recalled. “Later, of course, I came to realize that Jackie was making all the decisions about the funeral, and this Greek wouldn’t have gotten near the Family Quarters without her say-so.”

A kind of Irish wake was taking place in the White House as Onassis made his entrance. Ted Kennedy was doing imitations. Robert McNamara was wearing one of Ethel Kennedy’s wigs. After dinner, Bobby Kennedy came down from the third floor, where Jackie was resting, and started to badger Onassis about his yacht and all his wealth. The puritanical Attorney General did not like the sybaritic Greek.

“I have never made the mistake of thinking it is a sin
to make money,” Onassis said. “I’ve dealt with a lot of people, and they haven’t always been scouts. It’s impossible for an entrepreneur, a man like me, not to tread on somebody’s toes. All profit is an injustice to somebody. I’ve made a lot of enemies … but what the hell! No excuses. I’m as rich as I know how to be, and rich I know about.”

Bobby drew up a bogus document stipulating that the Greek shipowner would give away half of his wealth to the poor of Latin America. Playing along, Onassis signed the document in Greek.