Just Jackie (39 page)

In Paris, a whole clutch of journalists had assembled outside Onassis’s apartment at 88 Avenue Foch. There were five television crews, and photographers from
Paris-Match, Stern, Oggi
, and many other magazines and newspapers.

“I want to walk from this car under my own steam,” Onassis told Jackie and his daughter. “I don’t want those sons of bitches to see me being held up by a couple of women.”

Jackie and Christina watched him make his way through the gauntlet of shouting paparazzi.

“How do you feel, Ari?”

“This way, Ari!”

“Ari, over here!”

“Ari, are reports that you’re dying true?”

He walked slowly, looking neither left nor right, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue overcoat. Once inside, he went straight to bed.

“When he awoke, shortly after 10
P.M.,”
wrote Nigel Dempster, “he took a Pyridostigmine slow-release capsule to get him through the night; the capsule [which was prescribed for myasthenia gravis and increased muscle strength] released one-third (sixty milligrams) of its dosage immediately, and gave him a surge of energy into which he crammed as much business as he could manage, and saw the people he wanted to see.

“One of the people he sent for on this night was [his old henchman] Johnny Meyer. They talked about the past, swapped familiar anecdotes. After one long silence when Meyer thought he had fallen asleep, Ari said:

“ ‘Soon I shall be on Skorpios with Alexander.’

“ ‘You’re crazy, Ari,’ Meyer replied. ‘Who ever heard of anybody dying from droopy eyelids.’ ”

“He was operated on on Sunday,” Johnny Meyer told a press conference two days later in the American Hospital
in Paris. “It was a small operation, and now he is feeling much better. He can stand up. That’s all I can say.”

In fact, Onassis was being kept alive by a respirator in room 217 of the Eisenhower wing of the hospital. He suffered from jaundice, heart problems, pneumonia, and complications from his myasthenia gravis. Just as Dr. Rosenfeld had predicted, the cortisone lowered his resistance to infection and made his pneumonia hard to control.

At times he was delirious, and rambled on incoherently about Skorpios, and his problems with the government in Athens over the sale of his beloved Olympic Airways. He spoke mainly in Greek, which, of course, excluded Jackie.

She knew that Ari had told Christina and his sisters of his plans to divorce her. She felt mortified and chagrined by her situation. In the eyes of these Greek women, Jackie had scant claim to the title of Onassis’s wife. When she and Christina found themselves alone in Onassis’s hospital room, they did not exchange a word.

“I was in Paris with Jackie at the time,” said Niki Goulandris. “She visited him in the hospital daily, although her time with him was restricted because he was in the intensive care station. We went to Notre Dame together, and she got down on her knees and prayed for Ari, even though she knew his condition was hopeless. She knew it was the end.

“But the doctors advised her that Ari could hang on like that for weeks, perhaps even months,” Niki continued. “Jackie felt that she could be of more use in New York to her children than she could in Paris to Ari. So she left.”

As soon as Jackie arrived at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, she called her sister-in-law Artemis in Paris, who told her that Ari was doing as well as could be expected. Four days later, Artemis again assured her that Ari was
fine. However, late that night, he took a turn for the worse, and Artemis woke Jackie and urged her to return to Paris immediately.

Jackie was packing to leave the next morning, when the phone rang again.

“He’s dead,” said Artemis. “Christina was with him when he left us.”

A
fusillade of flashbulbs greeted Jackie as she stepped off the Olympic Airways plane at Orly Airport. When the photographs of the frenzied crowds were printed the next day, they reminded people of the scene of pandemonium created by Charles Lindbergh’s historic landing nearly fifty years before.

The crowds wanted to see for themselves how Jackie was bearing up under her loss. In their eyes, she had changed since her marriage to Onassis. She was no longer the same Jackie whose flawless performance at President Kennedy’s funeral had transformed her into a paragon of virtue. But if Jackie was not that person, it was not clear who she was now.

Perhaps more than any other people on earth, the French adored Jackie. But they needed to hear from Jackie herself why she had not been at Onassis’s side when he died. It was the behavior of a wife who did not love her husband, and it made them wonder if Jackie had become like the woman in John Keats’s poem “La Belle
Dame sans Merci”: a beautiful woman who was incapable of feeling love.

Dressed in black, Jackie approached the bank of microphones and took out a piece of paper that contained a single paragraph. The prepared statement was notable for its clarity and lack of sentimentality.

“Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows,” she said, as the salvo of flashbulbs began again. “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.”

E
ven
The New York Times
sent a reporter to cover the funeral.

“The courtyard [of the chapel] was lined with hundreds of white lilies, their pots draped in red velvet,” the paper’s Steven V. Roberts reported from Skorpios. “On the terraced hillside behind the chapel, cherry trees blossomed pink. In the distance was anchored the
Christina
, Mr. Onassis’s 325-foot yacht. Its Liberian flag was at half-mast.”

On the yacht itself, John Vinocur, who was then a correspondent for the Associated Press, telephoned a dispatch from the dining room. He held the receiver close to his mouth, and relayed a piece of color about Jackie’s
mother, Janet Auchincloss. Suddenly, he was interrupted by Janet herself.

“The Kennedy children’s grandmother is not having breakfast at ten-thirty in the morning,” she said firmly. “She ate hours ago.”

Thousands of words were filed that day from Skorpios, but one scene stood out from all the others and was etched in the world’s collective memory. It was the scene of Jackie, wearing a new black Valentino dress beneath a black, tightly cinched leather coat, walking beside a heavily sedated Christina, and offering her an arm for support.

“Oh God,” Christina moaned.

“Hang on,” said Jackie, who had some experience with funerals. “Take it easy now. It’ll soon be over.”

They stepped into a waiting limousine, and were joined by Jackie’s former brother-in-law, Senator Edward Kennedy. The chauffeur shut the rear door, then slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

Although no reporters were present, the world was later treated to a blow-by-blow description of what transpired among the grieving passengers in the sealed compartment of the limousine. Teddy Kennedy—bloated, perhaps drunk, certainly insensitive to Christina’s feelings—leaned forward and began talking to her about money. The anonymous source for this story was the indefatigable Costa Gratsos.

“Now,” Teddy Kennedy said to Christina—or so Gratsos claimed—“it’s time to take care of Jackie.”

“Stop the car!” shouted Christina.

She struggled with the door until she finally managed to get it open. Then she fled to another car in the cortege, and sat with her aunts.

Later, Gratsos explained to reporters why Christina had been so “cool” to her stepmother during the funeral. It was because Senator Kennedy had attempted to discuss “financial matters,” he told them.

This story became part of the permanent lore of tabloid journalism. However, it was just as false as most of Gratsos’s stories were.

“It’s true that Teddy acted awkwardly,” said Stelio Papadimitriou, “but that did not occur until after the burial. During a Greek funeral, there is a ritual where you offer fish, which has the mystical meaning of resurrection in Christianity. When that was over, Teddy approached me, and took me aside. He said he would like to talk to me about money.

“It was not the time or place to make such a suggestion, but we agreed to meet as soon as possible. Christina heard about this conversation, and got mad. But all that came later, quite a bit later, when we began to work out the financial arrangements.”

I
n his will, Onassis established a German-style
Stiftung
, or foundation, in Lichtenstein in memory of his son. The foundation would award scholarships for Greeks to study abroad, grant prizes for cultural and humanitarian achievement, and help treat sick people. But the
Stiftung
differed from an American charitable foundation in that it also ran a business, one of the world’s most modern fleets of tankers and dry-cargo ships. Onassis had stipulated that all of his money—about $500 million at the time—go to the
Stiftung
, with half of it held in trust for Christina.

“But she objected to the financial arrangements in
her father’s will,” Stelio Papadimitriou told the author of this book.

“She told me, ‘Stelio, I do not wish to be subject to the foundation. If you compel me, I will be forced to go to litigation.’

“So we reinterpreted the will. We divided the entire estate into two equal parts—so many ships, so much cash, shares, real estate, etcetera—and wrote it all down on two slips and labeled them Tart A‘ and Tart B.’ We went to a notary public in Zurich, and Christina agreed in writing that the two slips were of equal value, about $250 million apiece. We put the slips of paper into a small box, and Christina reached in and picked out Tart B.”

“She said, ‘Gentlemen, now I give it to you to manage for me. Not because my father wanted it that way, but because I wanted it to happen.’ ”

The final reckoning with Jackie proved to be a far more difficult task. On April 18, 1975, a month after Onassis died,
The New York Times
ran a story reporting that he had been planning to divorce Jackie, and had retained the attorney Roy Cohn to handle the American end of the proceedings. The fingerprints of Costa Gratsos were all over the story.

“Several friends of the Onassis family have said that Mrs. Onassis wants more money,” John Corry reported on the front page of the
Times
. “[Christina] is said to be bitterly hostile to Mrs. Onassis.”

Jackie went through the roof when she read the story.

“According to what I was told by very reliable sources on the Christina side,” Roy Cohn said, “Jackie was calling up Christina in Monte Carlo after the story had been printed, threatening that unless Christina put out a statement saying that everything had been all lovey-dovey and wonderful between her father and Jackie, she was going to make no end of trouble over the estate, and everything else.”

Four days later, the
Times
ran a wire-service story from Paris headlined:
MISS ONASSIS DENIES HER FATHER PLANNED DIVORCE
. But Christina’s statement only fueled speculation that things were not right between Jackie and the Greek side of the family.