Just Jackie (24 page)

Ari knew that his comments about Jackie’s needing a juicy scandal would be picked up by the wire services, and played back to America, and run in all the newspapers there. As his car headed down the Champs-Ely sees toward his home at 88 Avenue Foch, he turned to Johnny Meyer and said:

“That should set the cat among the pigeons at Hickory Hill.”

A
ri kept many henchmen like Johnny Meyer on his payroll, but at the critical moments of his life, he turned to his sister Artemis. She was the only person he really trusted. Unlike Merope and Kalliroi, Artemis shared the same mother and father with Aristotle. They had the same genes, the same blood. And in the end, it is always blood that counts to a Greek.

In May, he telephoned Artemis from the Caribbean and asked her to come to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where the
Christina
would be docked.

“A VIP is coming aboard,” he told her.

“Who can be so important that I have to drop everything and get on an airplane?” Artemis wanted to know.

Ari knew that his sister would do whatever he asked of her, and he refused to tell her the identity of his mystery guest.

“I thought the
Christina
was going to St. Thomas to pick up Callas,” Artemis recalled. “I was afraid Aristo was going to listen to Costa Gratsos, and ask Callas to marry him. Gratsos and my brother were forever talking about women, and for some reason, Gratsos had taken a strong dislike to Jackie from the start. Maybe Gratsos was jealous that Aristo liked Jackie more than he liked him. Whatever the reason, Gratsos was pushing Callas over Jackie.”

Like most Greeks, Gratsos saw romantic love as a destructive force. Art’s love of Jackie was dangerous, and Gratsos did his best to turn Art against her.

“To Onassis’s face, Gratsos described her with a phrase in Greek that is not polite—it is obscene—but which meant that she was poisonous,” said one of Art’s friends. “And he prophesied that [Jackie] would bring bad luck.”

When Artemis arrived in St. Thomas, she found her brother in a state of acute anxiety. She had never seen him like this before. He was sweating even more profusely than usual. He had ordered the oil painting of Tina Onassis, his former wife and the mother of his children, to be removed from its place of honor over the fireplace in the yacht’s salon. In its place he had hung a large, hand-tinted photograph of his beloved mother, Penelope, who had died when he was six. He had asked all but one of his passengers on the
Christina
to leave the ship at the previous port of call, St. John. Only Joan Thring remained on board.

“I thought that a very big deal must have been in the works,” Thring said. “In the past, no matter how many important matters were on his mind, he had been able to shut off and concentrate on the most trifling thing when he was entertaining aboard the
Christina.”

The next day, Art sent a delegation composed of Artemis, Captain Costa Anastassiadis, and the chief engineer of the
Christina
, Stefanos Daroussos, to the St. Thomas airport to pick up his guest. None of them was told in advance whom they were meeting. Artemis said a silent little prayer as the door of the first-class section swung open.

Out stepped Jackie, looking glorious in a brown Valentino dress. Her large sunglasses were pushed up into her hair to keep it from being blown by the wind. Artemis was so thrilled that she rushed forward in the busy terminal, threw her arms around Jackie, and kissed
her on both cheeks. Jackie would make a far better wife for her brother than Maria Callas.

“As soon as Jackie came on board,” Captain Anastassiadis said, “the crew started speculating that something would happen. A visit by a lone woman was not usual.”

“For Chrissake, stick close,” Ari told Joan Thring after they had weighed anchor and were out at sea. “Don’t leave her side during the day. I don’t want any sonofabitches getting any of those Peeping Tom pictures of just the two of us, making it look like we’re horsing around alone out here.”

Late one evening after dinner, Ari asked Jackie to join him for a nightcap on the deck. They stood in silence for several minutes, peering up at the vast shower of stars that spilled into the black expanse of the sea. Jackie always traveled with a portable record player and a collection of her favorite tunes, and the voice of O. C. Smith could be heard coming from the yacht’s salon. He was singing “Little Green Apples.”

The air was warm and clear. For a change, Ari was not fouling it with one of his Cuban cigars. As he later confided to Costa Gratsos, he did not want to spoil the romantic moment. He recalled that he was feeling as nervous as a schoolboy about to steal his first kiss.

“Jackie,” he said, “the time has come for us to discuss plans for marriage.”

“Oh, Telis,” Jackie said, using her pet name for Ari, short for Aristotelis, the Greek form of his name.

But that was all she said. She left the rest up to him.

“He made it clear to her,” wrote his biographer, Frank Brady, “that if they married, she would be free to go wherever and whenever she pleased—with him or without him—and that she would enjoy the position of being among the richest women in the world.”

Ari was deliberately drawing an equation between money and peace of mind. He was offering Jackie the chance to recapture the life she had with Jack Kennedy, a life with all the power and the glory.

“Jackie, like many Bouviers, especially her father and grandfather, [was] highly susceptible to beauty, luxury, and great wealth,” wrote her first cousin John H. Davis. “Who could put more beauty, luxury, and wealth into her life than Aristotle Onassis? A Greek island of her own. Apartments in all the capitals of Europe. One of the most luxurious yachts in the world. A fortune that made the money President Kennedy had left her seem modest in comparison.”

Jackie knew that any woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the notorious Golden Greek, would be accused of doing it solely for the money. Even she would not escape the sting of that criticism. Some people would call her venal; others would accuse her of surrendering her integrity.

But Jackie believed she could handle it. Let them carp. She knew the truth. And the truth was that Ari’s money was only part of the overall picture.

“She didn’t
need just
money,” said Jackie’s friend Vivian Crespi. “She needed to escape for sanity. I went out to a Martha Graham performance with her one night. Some strange woman came up to her and said Jackie
killed her husband. It was ghastly, really a horrible way to live, putting up with this every day.”

“She told me in the late spring, before she married, that she felt she could really count on Onassis to be there for her children,” said Roswell Gilpatric. “That he was extremely protective of her, that he truly worried about her well-being. He could afford to build the buffers she then needed to ensure some degree of privacy from the public eye.”

For Jackie, feelings of attraction, affection, and sexual desire were roused when her emotional needs were fulfilled. This was probably more true of Jackie than it was of most women. After Dallas, she had an urgent need to feel safe.

“Onassis roamed the seas of the earth, a lord unto himself,” said Pamela Harriman, who knew a thing or two about why women were attracted to men. “Imagine being able to slip into that, away from the real world after so much sadness.”

But did Jackie
love
Ari?

The answer to that question depended in large part on whether Ari fulfilled another of Jackie’s needs. Though no one could explain it, including Jackie herself, she had a compelling need to surrender herself to a man. William Manchester had noted this when he visited her in Hyannis Port, and Jackie had automatically handed him the keys to her convertible. Men drive; women are driven. That was the logic of things to her.

No man since Jack had made as much sense to Jackie as Ari. Other people, including her own mother, might find Ari’s features coarse and gangsterish, and wonder how Jackie could possibly sleep with such a hideous man. But Jackie saw Ari through her own prism. He appeared to her as a strong and masterful man. She had been searching since Jack’s death for a man who could rescue her from her feelings of helplessness. In Ari, she
had finally found the man. By affiliating herself with Ari, she would regain all her lost power.

If that was love, then Jacqueline Kennedy loved Aristotle Onassis.

J
ackie could hardly wait to call Bobby on the
Christina’s
ship-to-shore radio the next morning and tell him about Ari’s proposal of marriage.

“You’re not serious,” Bobby said.

For a stunning moment, Jackie did not know what to say.

“I’ve agreed to marry Ari,” she said at last. Then she added: “In principle.”

“You must be joking,” Bobby said.

“We’ll discuss it when I get back,” Jackie said.

On the long flight back to New York, Jackie had time to consider the consequences of her decision. If she married Ari, a divorced man, she ran the risk of being excommunicated from the Catholic Church. She would tarnish the Kennedy image and damage Bobby’s chances for the presidential nomination. And she would be asking an awful lot of Caroline and John, who were now eleven and eight years old.

“During the few times they met, Caroline was at best sullen and reserved toward Onassis, and on some occasions overtly hostile,” wrote Frank Brady. “John was more open and friendly toward Onassis, but the question
of whether he could ever consider this sixty-two-year-old man his father was one that disturbed Jackie. Each time Onassis met the children, he brought gifts and toys for them, but the role he seemed to be developing with them was less paternal than that of a rich uncle or kindly grandfather.”

Once back in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, Jackie started to hear from all the people who had heard from Bobby. It was obvious that Ethel, Joan, and Ted had compared notes, because they used the same words in their effort to argue her out of marrying Ari:

“You’ll destroy everything that Jack worked for before he was murdered.”

Her financial guru, Andre Meyer, got into the act. Meyer had done business with Ari, and he knew the man’s fundamental character.

“He’s not good enough for you, Jackie,” Meyer said. “If you marry Onassis, you will topple from your position at the pinnacle of society.”

Then it was Robert McNamara on the phone. He believed that Onassis was beneath contempt. His message: “Don’t marry him!”

Truman Capote filled her in on Lee’s reaction.

“How could she do this to me!” Lee had screamed at Truman over the phone. “How COULD she! How could this HAPPEN!”

By the time Bobby arrived at Jackie’s apartment, her resolve had begun to crumble. There was something about her relationship with Ari that always seemed to bring out the guilt in Jackie. This had happened when she came back from her first extended trip on the
Christina
in 1963. Jack had sensed her guilt, and got her to agree to accompany him on the trip to Texas. Now, Bobby played the same guilt card.

According to what he and Jackie told their friends later, their exchange was less like a conversation than an interrogation.

“Why Onassis?” Bobby asked. “Can you give me one good reason why him out of all the men you have to choose from?”

“You know I’ve always talked about going to the Mediterranean to stay,” Jackie answered. “Ari is there. The moment is there.”

“I guess he’s a family weakness,” Bobby said, alluding to Lee’s earlier liaison with Ari. “He is a complete rogue on a grand scale.”

Jackie protested. Bobby didn’t know Ari. He was a kind and generous man. He was wonderful with her children.