Just Jackie (22 page)

His good humor and patience were rewarded when the phone rang with a call from Jackie. She asked that Onassis come upstairs for a private chat. He was the only visitor outside of family and a few heads of state to be accorded such a special honor by the widow of the slain President.

When Onassis entered the Yellow Oval Room of the Family Quarters, he found Jackie sitting on a sofa. He took a place beside her, and immediately started speaking. He did not ask her any questions—not how she felt, nor if she was all right, nor if there was anything he could do for her. He knew how to talk to a woman. He loved words, had a huge storehouse of facts at his disposal, and possessed a keen intelligence. He consoled Jackie with his facts, and wooed her with his native charm.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been dead for less than two days.

After the assassination, and Jackie’s move to New York, huge bunches of red roses began arriving at her apartment every morning with cards in Greek signed “Aristotle Onassis.” In the evening, identical bunches of roses were delivered with the same good wishes. Ari behaved like a man who had nothing better to do than pay court to Jackie.

“Ari began courting Jackie with all his resources, wooing
her with his vast wealth, his vast power, and his earthy charm,” recalled Aileen Mehle, who wrote a society gossip column under the name Suzy. “Vulnerable, despairing, and at a total loss after Jack’s death, she was overwhelmed by the attention. Here was someone, she thought, who loved her truly, coming to her rescue. He, amazed at his luck at winning the world’s most famous and sought-after woman, could not stop crowing over his prize.”

Little by little, he gained Jackie’s confidence and assumed a many-sided role—father confessor, financial adviser, and potential lover. He made no secret of his desire to replace Bobby Kennedy as Jackie’s chief male protector, but he felt that an invisible barrier stood in his way.

One fall day in 1967, they were sitting in the library of Jackie’s apartment, and Ari turned to her and said:

“Jackie, you have no right to isolate yourself like this.”

Just then, Marta, Jackie’s housekeeper, came in with a tray of tea and madeleines, Jackie’s favorite sweet. Ari waited until Marta had left, then continued:

“It is not good for you, and not good for the children. You have done all the mourning that anyone can humanly expect of you. The dead are dead. You are the living.”

For a long time, Ari attributed Jackie’s standoffish behavior to Bobby Kennedy’s influence. Bobby simply did not like him. Ari had heard about Jackie’s relationships with other men: Roswell Gilpatric, the former undersecretary of defense; David Ormsby-Gore, who was now Lord Harlech; and John Warnecke. But Ari told himself that these men were just friends, and meant nothing to Jackie.

He was right—at least when it came to Lord Harlech and Ros Gilpatric.

“There was a lot of nasty stuff going around town about Jackie and Ros Gilpatric,” one of Jackie’s closest friends told the author. “Ros’s wife, Pam, was an old friend of mine, as was Jackie, so I knew the truth. That
story was absolute rubbish. Jackie never had an affair with Ros, who had lots of affairs with other women, but never one with her.”

Ari considered himself Jackie’s most serious suitor. And yet, Ari had a sixth sense about things, and he must have noticed the change that came over Jackie at about this time of her life. Although Ari did not know it, Jackie had recently stopped sleeping with Jack Warnecke, and she seemed more receptive to Ari’s overtures. In turn, he stepped up his campaign to win her over. Shrewdly, he began paying more attention to Caroline and John.

Ari had two children of his own, Alexander and Christina, but he had never bothered to be a real father to them. As they were growing up, they had no home life. Ari hardly ever saw them, and rarely mentioned them to Jackie. He made her feel as if she and
her
children were the only ones he cared about.

A
s Jackie and Ari drank their tea and ate the made-leines, they talked about her problems with the press. Reporters and cameramen were camped outside her Fifth Avenue apartment. Each time Jackie made an exit under the long green canopy, the slavering media beast was there waiting to devour her. So were women with their hair in rollers, tourists with Instamatics, and strollers with their dogs. Her public ordeal brought back tormenting memories of the day they shot Jack.

In the shadows cast by the library fire, Ari reminded
Jackie of her father in his latter years. If Jack Warnecke had represented one side of Black Jack Bouvier’s character, Ari represented the other. He was a bad boy who held out the promise of raw adventure. He danced and romanced like a real-life Zorba the Greek. He knew how to break through Jackie’s introverted personality, and make her feel like a bit of a she-devil.

Ari and Black Jack were both men of the world, men who enjoyed the drama of the mating game. Like Black Jack, Ari had an endless supply of anecdotes about his sexual escapades, and Jackie enjoyed listening to them.

There was, for instance, the story of his brief affair with Eva Perón, the wife of the president of Argentina. This had taken place a very long time before, in 1947, to be exact, when Eva was touring Europe, and staying at a villa on the Italian Riviera. After she and Ari made love, Eva cooked him an omelette, and he wrote out a check for $10,000 as a donation to one of her favorite charities.

“It was the most expensive omelette I have ever had,” he told Jackie.

Then there was Ingeborg Dedichen, the beautiful blonde daughter of one of Norway’s leading shipowners. Ari called her by the Italian nickname Mamita, “Little Mother,” and she called him Mamico, “Little Daddy.”

Ari described for Jackie in the most graphic detail his love life with Mamita—how he licked her between each of her toes, embraced every part of her body, covered her with kisses, then devoted himself again to her feet, which he adored. He had a thing about feet, he admitted, and he found Mamita’s feet as soft as a baby’s bottom.

Despite such candor, he chose to omit some of the less flattering details of his relationship with Mamita. For one thing, he did not tell Jackie that he enjoyed putting on Mamita’s clothes now and then and parading around their apartment dressed like a woman. For another, it was not only her feet that fascinated Ari. He was also into bottoms, the anus, and anal humor.

He once told Mamita that he had piles, and would have to see a doctor the first thing the following morning. He then asked her to examine his anus, and when she did so, he let out a loud fart in her face. He found the joke very amusing.

Mamita was older than Ari, and when they met, she was far more sophisticated than he. They lived together for more than ten years, and she taught the refugee from Smyrna about good manners, and how to order food from a French menu. But her real value lay in her connections to the elite members of the oil-tanker business in Britain, Sweden, and Norway.

“In the mid-1930s, tankers were still a comparatively small business,” noted
The Times
of London. “Oil accounted for only 15 percent of the world’s total energy requirements: coal was king…. Onassis was not the first Greek into tankers…. One or two other small operators were active during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 onward, supplying both sides impartially. What Onassis perceived most clearly was that tankers could be much bigger than anyone then considered feasible. He envisaged heroic economies of scale in operating costs. Having done so, he had the courage to push his vision through.”

Ari and Mamita spent the war years in New York, which was headquarters for most of the prominent Greek shipowning families. It was about this time that the lovers reached a tacit understanding: they were free to come and go as they pleased. Ari slept with other women, and Mamita liked hearing about these sexual liaisons. They became, as Mamita put it, “accomplices rather than lovers.”

“We sat in L.A. screwing the girls, a very pleasant occupation,” Ari’s good friend Costa Gratsos recalled of those war years. “There were starlets, semistars, and stars, an endless supply.”

“He was very sweet,” said Veronica Lake, one of Ari’s
girlfriends, who spent some Hollywood nights with him at Romanoff’s. “But, oh, God, those black eyes! They look like they are going straight through the back of your head.”

Meanwhile, Mamita had become friends with the second wife of Stavros Niarchos, who, like Ari, was a parvenu in the Greek shipowning community.

“It was after dinner with the Niarchoses that Ari, for the first time in their relationship, beat Ingse,” an article in
The Times
of London reported years later. “There had been an argument on the Chris-Craft over her insistence on wearing a pair of green and yellow plaid pants that he found unbecoming. He was uncharacteristically silent throughout dinner, and on the way back. When they were home again, his pent-up rage turned to uncontrolled violence, and he kicked and hit Ingse until he was finally exhausted and went to bed.”

Later, Mamita provided her own description of Ari’s violent temper:

Ari was drinking heavily now, and the beatings continued, sometimes leaving Mamita so badly battered—“like a boxer who has just lost a fight,” she said—that she had to be treated by a doctor. But Mamita and Mamico had developed a relationship of mutual dependence, and she could not leave him. When Ari proposed marriage, he promised to buy Mamita her own yacht and a private Greek island. He gave her an antique Egyptian necklace to wear at the wedding. First, however, Mamita required
an operation to enable her to have children. When the operation failed, she made a botched attempt at suicide.

After the end of the war, Ari phased Ingeborg Dedichen out of his life like a rusty ship. He married Athina Livanos, the younger daughter of Stavros Livanos, one of the wealthiest of the Greek shipowners. Ari was forty years old, and Tina—a petite, blonde tomboy with a passion for horses—was seventeen. Ari was marrying up.

Almost a year later, Stavros Niarchos, who had also been attracted to Tina, divorced his wife, and married Tina’s sister Eugenie. The stage was set for the monumental rivalry that would obsess Niarchos and Onassis for the next thirty years.

Tina was attractive and well educated, but like Ingeborg Dedichen, she soon became the victim of her husband’s uncontrollable anger. When he was displeased with Tina, Ari disciplined her with the tip of his hot cigar.

“Every Greek, and there are no exceptions, beats his wife,” he said. “It is good for them. It keeps them in line.”

Jackie enjoyed listening to Ari’s stories of his women. But of all his paramours, it was Maria Callas who interested her the most. Ari had carried on a love affair with Maria for more than a decade, and like everyone else, Jackie was curious to know what he thought about the legendary soprano.

In private, Maria was a shy, insecure, and humorless woman. But she was transformed into a commanding presence whenever she walked out onto an opera stage. She was a big woman, with huge black eyes and lustrous black hair, and she held audiences spellbound with her soaring, unconventional voice. Her fiery interpretations of
Norma, I Puritani
, and
Tosca
were talked about for years, until they took on almost mythic proportions. Gradually, Maria began to confuse herself with her
press clippings, and she turned into a stereotype of the spoiled diva.

“Callas was difficult to live with,” said Stelio Papadimitriou, Ari’s private attorney, who came to function as his second-in-command. “When they visited his office in Monte Carlo, Onassis would order the elevator to stop so that Callas could have quiet. The staff had to climb the four floors on foot. But Callas did not like the sound of their footfalls. So they in the upper floors had to take off their shoes.”

Ari and Maria shared a common language—Greek—which they used for screaming and cursing at each other. And they shared a common background—they had both come up the hard way.

“I have always had a great admiration for Madame Callas,” Ari said. “More than her artistic talent, even more than her success as a great singer, what always impressed me was the story of her early struggles as a poor girl in her teens when she sailed through unusually rough and merciless waters.”

Ari and Maria traveled to Istanbul on the
Christina
, and they paid a call on the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church there, who blessed them as “the world’s greatest singer and the greatest seaman of the modern world, the new Ulysses.” After that, Maria began acting like a different woman. Her singing career, which she had treated until now like a religious calling, suddenly seemed unimportant, and she retired from the stage. She allowed herself to be swept into the vortex of Ari’s life—drinking until dawn at Régine’s, attending other people’s opening nights, shopping for new clothes, going to the races, gambling at Monte Carlo.