Just Jackie (32 page)

He knew that he had no right to be annoyed with Jackie. After all, hadn’t he said early in their marriage that they were both free to do exactly as they pleased? However, Ari was approaching his sixty-fifth birthday, and as he slowed down, he found that he valued the companionship of a wife more than before. The freedom to do as one pleased, he concluded, should apply to him, not to Jackie. Like most Greek husbands, he lived by a double standard.

“He was a Greek—that says it all, really—a Greek seaman who’d be home for a short while, then go away all over the world, then expect his wife and children to be waiting for him at home whenever he got back,” said Costa Gratsos’s executive secretary, Lynn Alpha Smith. “There was no way Jackie could give him that continuity. Nor did she understand his world. She was Catholic, Anglo-Saxon. He was an Eastern Orthodox, Mediterranean, and Jackie just didn’t understand.”

As far as Ari was concerned, only three women had ever completely understood him: his sainted mother Penelope, his sister Artemis, and Maria Callas. Of course, that was his narcissism and self-pity talking. But when he expressed this opinion to his friends, they were quick to agree.

It was all a matter of being Greek, they said. To be Greek, you had to grow up in Greece, speak the language, go to Greek schools, attend Orthodox services, eat Greek food, breathe the sun and air of Greece. You did not become Greek by reading books and visiting ancient ruins!

Ari was aware that, although his marriage was immensely popular among ordinary Greeks, none of his friends liked Jackie. They had banded together in a loose
sort of cabal that had no use for Jackie. This cabal was composed of a half dozen people: Ari’s children, Alexander and Christina, who hated Jackie with a passion; Costa Gratsos, who was Christina’s honorary uncle, and had stayed close to Maria Callas after her breakup with Ari; Johnny Meyer; Maggie van Zuylen, a socialite who had introduced Maria to Ari; and Willi Frischauer, Ari’s authorized biographer, who believed that Jackie’s identity—and that of her children—had more to do with her dead husband than with her living spouse.

“JFK’s ghost will always cast a dark shadow over your marriage,” Frischauer warned Ari.

The members of the cabal seized every opportunity to bring up the subject of Maria Callas.
She
was Greek, they said. She would never leave Ari.

As the society columnist Taki wrote: “Gratsos loved Maria, stuck by her until the end, and, more important, told Ari that Jackie K. O. was a woman who not only would ruin his life, but would bring him bad luck.”

Maggie van Zuylen played an important part in this drama, as well. She let Ari know that Maria was still madly in love with him,
sincerely
in love with him, unlike you-know-who. Maria was waiting for him to return to her.

“She had a mad passion for him,” Maggie said. “They were like two wild beasts together. They got along well, but in the end she wasn’t glamorous enough for him. Jackie Kennedy was glamorous. Maria learned of the marriage not from Onassis but by reading about it in the newspapers, like everybody else. She was totally devastated. It was dreadful, awful. She was so frightfully broken up, so disappointed, so profoundly hurt.”

“Not Paris,” Gratsos said in reply to Ari’s suggestion that they go off and have some fun together. “I’ve got a better idea.”

“What’s that?” Ari asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” Gratsos said. “Maria is on her way back to Greece.”

Maria had been invited to Greece by Perry Embiricos, the scion of a prominent Greek shipping family. A confirmed bachelor in his fifties, whose passion was music, Perry had asked Maria to spend some time on Tragonisi, his private island in the Aegean. He had also invited Pier Paolo Pasolini, the notorious Italian homosexual writer and film director, who had directed Maria in the film version of
Medea;
Nadia Standoff, Maria’s half-American, half-Bulgarian private secretary and best friend; and Costa Gratsos and his wife Anastasia.

“Why don’t you join us on Tragonisi?” Gratsos said to Ari. “Saturday is the Feast of the Holy Virgin. It’s Maria’s name day. You’re allowed to give her a kiss.”

On Saturday morning, August 15, Ari slipped a pair of antique diamond earrings into his pocket, climbed aboard an Olympic Airways helicopter, and took off for Tragonisi, which was located just south of Euboea, one of the largest islands of Greece.

From the air, Ari could see the wooden drop bridge at Chalkis, the capital of Euboea; the bridge spanned the narrow Euripos channel. Legend had it that in 322 B.C. Aristotle drowned himself in the Euripos because he could not explain the enigma of how its current changed direction from north-south to south-north as many as fourteen times a day.

A moment later, Ari spotted Perry Embiricos’s marvelous gardens on Tragonisi.

The helicopter landed on the beach, and Ari got out. Maria was a hundred yards away, under a big beach umbrella with Djedda, the poodle Ari had given her. Her hard peasant skin had turned nut brown under the Aegean sun, and her black hair was pulled back in a sleek bun.

She looked up, and saw Ari coming toward her.

I
t was not the first time that Ari and Maria had met since his marriage to Jackie. Back in December 1968, shortly after Ari had celebrated his first Christmas with Jackie, he flew to Paris, where he dined with Maria at Maxim’s, and then lunched with her the next day at Maggie van Zuylen’s home. The face-to-face meetings between the two former lovers attracted the attention of the press, and spawned the first generation of rumors that Ari’s marriage to Jackie was on the rocks.

However, these encounters were brief, and not the romantic trysts they appeared to be. In fact, they were about business. Ari was still handling some of Maria’s financial affairs, as he was those of Lee Radziwill, and he needed to talk to Maria about her investments. In addition, he and the opera singer had to discuss business arrangements that had been left unresolved from their joint lawsuit against Panaghis Vergottis, an old friend with whom they had had a bitter falling out.

Despite rumors of a divorce, Costa Gratsos and the other members of the anti-Jackie cabal knew that Ari was still madly in love with his American wife. There was nothing they could do about it but bide their time. Their patience was rewarded when all the letters that Jackie had written to her former escort Roswell Gilpatric, the New Frontiersman, were stolen from his office safe, and published. One letter in particular, which Jackie had
written from the
Christina
during her honeymoon, caught everybody’s attention.

The day after the letter was published, Gilpatric’s third wife, Madeline, filed separation papers, leaving the impression that she, for one, suspected her husband had committed adultery with Jackie. Shortly thereafter, sensational stories began to appear in the press offering readers the inside scoop on Onassis’s private reaction to the Gilpatric affair.

It was said that Jackie’s letter was a blow to Ari’s Greek manhood, and that he felt his American wife had emasculated him. He had suffered the very thing he feared the most—social humiliation. The whole world was laughing at him behind his back.

The stories had the ring of truth. And they were given added credibility by Ari’s own bitter words, which ran between quotation marks in all the newspapers.

“My God, what a fool I have made of myself,” he was quoted as saying. “What a fool. I’m afraid my wife is a calculating woman, cold-hearted and shallow.”

Or another quote: “This woman is a bore. Why didn’t I see that before I married her?”

Or yet another: “She is always reading.”

There was only one problem with the press coverage of the Gilpatric affair. Through it all, Ari did not speak to a single reporter. Nor, for that matter, did he authorize his public relations man, Nigel Neilson, to issue any statements,
on or off the record, on his behalf. Whatever Ari had to say, he said in private to Jackie, and of course no one but the two of them knew what that was. The entire press campaign—quotes and all—was the invention of Gratsos and the cabal.

Willi Frischauer, Ari’s biographer, portrayed Jackie as a woman who did not know when to leave well enough alone. She found her husband’s taste to be vulgar, and tried to get rid of the whale-scrotum upholstery and the Vertez murals on the
Christina
. She was dissatisfied with her surroundings, so she kept her homes in a constant state of upheaval.

“The syndrome seemed almost pathological,” Frischauer said. “Find a place, rent it, buy it, decorate it, then leave it. Find another place, et cetera.”

But it was Costa Gratsos who inflicted the most damage on Jackie’s reputation.

“Gratsos had the bad habit of saying strange things about people just for the fun of it,” Stelio Papadimitriou said. “It was a way of getting people to pay him attention and respect.”

In his talks with reporters, Gratsos sought to create an image of Jackie as a selfish ingrate.

“[Ari] was very generous with Jackie’s children,” Gratsos said. “He bought John-John a speedboat and Caroline a sailboat for use at Skorpios. He bought John-John a jukebox and a mini jeep to ride around the island. He gave them Shetland pomes.

“But beyond presents, he tried to give himself, to be with them,” Gratsos continued. “He attended their school plays in New York, and went out to Jackie’s place in New Jersey to watch them ride. And the truth is, Ari hated it there. He didn’t care for horses at all. But he’d go out anyway, when he was in New York, and most of the time he’d just stand around. He was always complaining that the mud and the horse dung ruined his shoes and pants.

“Once when he complained, Jackie told him off. ‘You’re so badly dressed, what difference does it make?’ she said.”

Costa Gratsos provided the river of sludge that spilled from the pages of the first book-length examination of the Onassis marriage. This book, which set the tone for dozens of others that were to come, was written by Fred Sparks, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who seemed to have forgotten everything he had ever learned about responsible journalism. In
The $20 Million Honeymoon: Jackie and Ari’s First Year
, Sparks alleged that Ari managed to spend a mind-boggling $20 million during the first year of marriage, the great bulk of it on things for Jackie.

Since most people assumed that Jackie had married the aging, gnomelike shipping tycoon for his money, they were ready to accept almost anything that Sparks said.

“Probably Jackie is now spending more on herself than any other woman in the world,” Sparks wrote, “and that includes such extravagant ladies as the wife of the Shah of Persia, Mrs. William Paley, and Elizabeth Taylor, whose husband, Richard Burton, recently said: ‘Liz can spend $1,000 a minute, and I’m not joking.’ ”

But Sparks’s $20 million figure (the equivalent in today’s money of $120 million a year) was grossly misleading. The fact was that Ari’s basic expenses—for his offices around the world, his far-flung residences, his yacht, his several hundred employees, and his own lavish lifestyle—did not change substantially after he married Jackie. At most, Jackie’s upkeep may have added a million or two to his annual budget—at a time when financial publications estimated that his yearly income from shipping alone was $50 million.

Jackie herself did not help matters when she joked about a pair of fabulously expensive earrings that Ari had given her for her fortieth birthday. The earrings represented
the earth and the moon joined by a miniature Apollo 11 spaceship.

“Ari was actually quite apologetic about them,” she told Greek actress Katina Paxinou. “He felt they were such trifles. But he promised me that, if I’m good, next year he’ll give me the moon itself.”

Her self-mocking humor was lost on most people. Even
The New York Times
seemed to prefer the pathological Jackie to the real one. In a review of Sparks’s book, the
Times
portrayed Jackie as an “emotionally malnourished” woman whose slow-motion nervous breakdown during perimenopause took the form of shopping.

Jackie’s reputation as a compulsive shopper was being chipped into stone.