Just Jackie (34 page)

“A deep dark secret,” Jackie went on. “And you’ll never guess what it is.”

“All right, let’s have it,” Ari said, playing along.

“Well,” Jackie said, “I had a consultation with Doctor Rosenfeld.”

Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld was an eminent heart specialist who treated Ari for minor cardiac symptoms.

“What on earth for?” Ari asked.

Suddenly, he was no longer playacting.

“I’m going to tell you,” Jackie said.

She had phoned Dr. Rosenfeld and asked, “What would happen if Ari had a heart attack?”

“Someone would have to resuscitate him,” the doctor replied.

“How?” Jackie asked.

“In the first instance, by chest compression and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” the doctor told her.

“I want you to show me how to do that,” Jackie said.

A few days later, Rosenfeld showed up at Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment. He was followed off the elevator by Dr. Michael Wolk, his bright young partner, who was carrying a four-foot-tall vinyl doll.

“What’s that?” Jackie asked.

“It’s called a Resusi-Annie,” Rosenfeld explained, “and we use it in hospitals to teach CPR techniques.”

Jackie ushered the doctors into her living room, where Wolk laid the Resusi-Annie on the floor.

“He’s going to give you a demonstration,” Rosenfeld told Jackie.

Wolk pressed down on the doll, whose chest swelled to suggest a woman’s breasts. Then he performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“Okay,” Rosenfeld said to Jackie, “now it’s your turn.”

Jackie got down on her hands and knees, and bent over the Resusi-Annie. She placed her lips over the doll’s mouth, and pretended that she was breathing life into the lungs of Aristotle Onassis.

“Now, that is a very good secret,” Ari said when Jackie had finished her story.

“You really like it?” Jackie asked.

“Of course I like it,” Ari said.

Jackie basked in his approval.

“You see,” Ari said, turning to the American friend sitting at their table. “People say Jackie and I don’t get along. But does a wife who is not getting along with her husband take lessons on how to save him from a heart attack? No! She doesn’t. She
gives
him a heart attack. And then she collects his money.”

T
he day after Jackie and Ari dined at the Coach House in Greenwich Village, Alexander Onassis pulled up in front of the Olympic Airways office in Athens in his red Ferrari. Alexander was twenty-four years old, and his face and body were finally beginning to fill out. He had matured considerably since his father had anointed him the heir apparent of his vast shipping empire, whose worth had nearly doubled to a billion dollars in the past few years.

Father and son had a volatile relationship. They argued constantly, especially about Jackie. Still, Ari had begun to trust Alexander with day-to-day business affairs. Not that Ari was ready to retire. But as he approached his sixty-seventh birthday, and began to experience health problems, his future no longer seemed as limitless as before.

Ari did not find it easy to delegate authority to Alexander. He was never sure whether he approved or disapproved of his son. Depending on his mood, Ari’s feelings toward Alexander alternated between a gushing sentimentality and a raging contempt. But he had named his
son after Alexander the Great. Alexander represented Ari’s bid for immortality.

Alexander normally showed up at the Olympic Airways office dressed in a dark navy suit, silk shirt, and conservative tie. The women there often remarked on how handsome he looked—especially for an Onassis—though they carefully avoided mentioning that they could detect a deep sadness in Alexander’s eyes. He had not inherited his father’s magnetic personality. He was more like his mother Tina—moody and mournful.

Today, however, Alexander appeared to be in better spirits than usual. He was an experienced pilot who had flown everything from Piper Cubs to big commercial jets, and his calendar was filled with appointments related to aviation, his great passion. He was booked to have lunch with two German pilots at his favorite fish restaurant in Athens, Antonopoulos. And right after lunch, he had made a date, at his father’s urging, to train an American pilot in the operation of the family’s Piaggio amphibian airplane.

It was rare to see the young man in a good mood. Over the past couple of years, the Onassis family had been battered by one crisis after another.

To begin with, Alexander’s mother had divorced her second husband, the Marquess of Blandford, who was related to the Churchills, and married Ari’s archrival, Stavros Niarchos. To her son, Tina’s choice of a third mate seemed totally inexplicable, since Niarchos was widely suspected of having murdered his previous wife, Tina’s own sister Eugenie.

Then, Christina Onassis, Alexander’s sister, had run off and married an obscure American real estate man named Joseph Bolker. This had so enraged Ari that he began tapping the couple’s phones, and had them followed by private detectives. Christina finally threw up her hands in surrender and started divorce proceedings.

Then, father and son had been engaged for months in a
brutal argument over Alexander’s mistress, Fiona Thyssen, a divorced baroness who was old enough to be his mother. Ari had more than once threatened to disinherit Alexander if he married Fiona.

And finally, there was the biggest problem of all—Jackie.

Alexander never called his stepmother by her proper name. To show his contempt, he referred to her as “the widow,” or “the geisha,” or “that woman.”

One night at Maxim’s, after Ari had berated Alexander for his romantic involvement with Fiona, the subject shifted to a showgirl who was taking an older man for everything he was worth. Alexander turned to Jackie, and said:

“You certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong in a girl marrying for money, do you?”

At the last moment, one of the Germans developed stomach problems, and Alexander’s lunch was canceled. He left for the airport on an empty stomach. About an hour and a half later, a secretary at the Olympic office received a shocking phone call from Athens International Airport.

Alexander’s SX-BDC Piaggio 136 had taken off from runway F, banked sharply, cartwheeled for 460 feet, and then crashed nosefirst into the ground. Rescue teams who rushed to the scene of the accident found the badly mangled body of a man whose face and skull were reduced to pulp. The only way they could identify him was by the monogram on his bloodstained handkerchief. It was AO—Alexander Onassis.

Before the secretary had a chance to digest this cataclysmic news, Aristotle Onassis’s cousin, Costa Konialidas, arrived in the office. In tears, the secretary told him what had happened. For a long moment, Konialidas was speechless. Then he said:

“How can I find a way to tell Aristo?”

B
y the time Jackie and Ari arrived at the hospital on the outskirts of Athens, a team of neurosurgeons had performed two operations on Alexander’s crushed skull. Under the white hospital sheets, the young man looked as though he had already been mummified. His head was wrapped in a bandage. There were two holes for his eyes, which were closed, and an opening for oxygen.

His aunts—Artemis, Kalliroi, and Merope—sat in a corner of the room, three Greek Furies dressed in black from head to toe, keening and moaning. In the corridor outside the room, family members spoke in hushed tones. Tina and her husband Stavros Niarchos had flown in from Switzerland. Christina had arrived from Brazil, Fiona Thyssen from Germany.

“Only a miracle will save him,” a doctor told Ari.

Over the next two days, Ari brought in top physicians from around the world—a neurosurgeon from Boston, a heart specialist from Dallas, a brain specialist from London. While they worked feverishly to save his son, Ari summoned a fourth doctor—a plastic surgeon from Geneva by the name of Dr. Popen.

When Popen arrived the next day, Ari took him aside.

“You must fix his face,” Ari said. “You must make him look like Alexander again so that I can remember his face as it was.”

Alexander was slipping deeper and deeper into a coma, and the specialists objected to the operation by
Popen. But Ari insisted that Popen go ahead even though, for all intents and purposes, Alexander was already dead.

At seven o’clock that evening, Ari returned to the Olympic Airways office. His black-and-silver hair had turned white.

“I have lost my boy,” he said.

“No, I do not believe it,” a secretary replied.

He asked her to call the hospital. When she reached the chief doctor, Ari took the phone.

“If I give you all my ships, all my property, all my planes, and all the money that I have,” he said, “would there be any hope to save my boy?”

The doctor told Ari that his son had suffered irreversible brain damage. Alexander was neurologically dead. Only the machines were keeping him alive. There was nothing more that could be done for him.

“We can keep him alive through extraordinary measures for three or four days at the most,” the doctor said.

“All right then,” said Ari, “leave him be in calm.”

The tubes were removed from Alexander’s body, and within hours, he was gone.

“We decided it was in vain, so we gave the doctors the orders to stop,” Ari said later. “We weren’t killing him. We were just letting him die. There is no question of euthanasia here. If he had lived, he would have been dead as a human being. His brain was destroyed and his features completely disfigured. Nothing could be done for him.”

A
t first Ari wanted Alexander’s body to be deep-frozen and kept in a cryonic state until medical science could find a way to rebuild his shattered brain and bring him back to life. To carry out his wishes, Ari instructed Johnny Meyer to get in touch with the Life Extension Society in Washington, which specialized in cryonics. But at the last moment, an old Onassis friend, Yanni Georgakis, who had debated theological issues with Ari and was not afraid to speak his mind, put a stop to these macabre arrangements.

“A father has no right to impede the journey of his son’s soul,” Georgakis said.

Ari accepted Georgakis’s reasoning. But before he would agree to bury Alexander, he insisted that Dr. Popen perform one last plastic-surgery procedure on his son’s face. Only then did Ari have Alexander’s body embalmed, then airlifted to Skorpios.

There, Alexander’s coffin was put into a truck and driven from the harbor up the road that Jackie, with Niki Goulandris, had lovingly landscaped. In a few minutes, the funeral procession reached the tiny chapel of Panayitsa, where Jackie and Ari had been married. Jackie stood in the dim, candle-lit chapel as the priest said his prayers. The workmen slid the heavy lid over Alexander’s imposing tomb, which was cut from the same pure white marble used to build the Parthenon. The lid made a loud thud as it fell into place.

This was the second time in less than ten years that Jackie had stood beside a husband and watched him bury a son. John Kennedy had been staggered by the loss of Patrick Bouvier, and had collapsed in sobs and tears. But his behavior was restrained compared to the flood of anguish unloosed by Ari, who gnashed his teeth, and howled at God.