Just Jackie (38 page)

The most damaging revelations, however, concerned Jackie’s spending on her wardrobe. According to Gratsos, after Jackie wore a costly garment once or twice, or sometimes not at all, she would resell it, and then squirrel away the cash. Her favorite resale house, Encore on Madison Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, did a steady business in Jackie’s slightly used and sometimes new clothes.

She peddled everything from coats, suits, and gowns to pocketbooks, blouses, and slacks. The labels were the best: Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino of Rome, Halston. Generally she would demand a fixed price; other times she would accept whatever the market would bear. Once, it took Encore six months to sell a white coat with a Valentino label at the price Jackie demanded.

“When it comes to Jackie’s spending habits, you can believe anything, anything,” Gratsos said. “She went on wild spending sprees. She was clocked at $3,000 a minute. Often, she didn’t bother with cash. Her face was her charge plate. She was virtually laundering money by charging couture clothes to Onassis’s account, and then reselling them to consignment stores in New York. She was embezzling money from Onassis. She was defrauding her own husband.”

To check out the charges against Jackie of money laundering, embezzlement, and fraud, Anderson sent Whitten to interview the manager of Encore, as well as those of the other resale stores in Manhattan. Whitten reported back to Anderson that Jackie had started taking her clothes to Encore long before she met Onassis. In fact, she had been dealing with Encore ever since she was the wife of Senator John Kennedy.

Whitten had stumbled upon a little-known sideshow to the main three-ring circus that made up New York society in the 1970s. Many wealthy men gave their wives hefty allowances to buy couture clothes and expensive accessories like hats, belts, handbags, and shoes. But once a woman was seen in a $5,000 Yves Saint Laurent dress or a $10,000 Givenchy gown, it had served its purpose, which was to define her husband as a rich man, and her as an avatar of current fashion. To appear in society in the same garment more than once or twice would have been, in a manner of speaking, counterproductive.

But what was a society woman to do with her used garments after she was done with them? She could have donated them to charity, and taken a substantial tax deduction. But since few of these women filed individual tax returns, the savings would have accrued to their husbands, and the women did not find that an appealing notion.

Instead, virtually all rich women sold their slightly used clothes to stores like Encore. Sometimes this was done with the knowledge and consent of their husbands; sometimes, what their husbands did not know did not hurt them. In any case, it was a practical way for women to stretch the dollars in their clothing allowance. At the same time, they received a psychological bonus, since
the money they got back helped them rationalize the astronomical sums they spent on their wardrobes.

This attitude was completely foreign to the middle class in America, where puritanical sumptuary laws against the wearing of extravagant garments had been common in Colonial-era New England. Even in modern-day America, most people still looked upon a woman who wore a dress only once or twice as not only wasteful, but sinful.

However, such high-minded middle-class values were not shared by the superrich. William Paley, the founder of CBS, set up a trust fund that provided his wife Babe with $160,000 a year (about $1 million in today’s money) to spend exclusively on her clothes. Although Jackie received considerably more than that from Onassis—$360,000 a year for the first two years of their marriage, if Gratsos could be believed—she also had sizable expenses that were not part of Babe’s budget. Jackie paid for the upkeep on her own apartment in New York and her weekend house in Peapack, New Jersey; her staff of servants; the feeding and grooming of her horses in New Jersey and Virginia; and private schools for Caroline and John.

Until Onassis lost his son, and his world began falling apart, he had encouraged Jackie to spend more, rather than less. He had operated by the rich man’s philosophy that when his wife looked good, he looked good. However, toward the end of his life, Onassis no longer felt that way. Beset by problems on all sides, and bitter over his fate, he came to see Jackie’s spendthrift ways as a symbol of her disregard for him and his generosity.

It was not hard to understand why he felt that way. Jackie’s allowance was, by any standard, exceedingly lavish. Of course, it did not begin to compare with Bunny Mellon’s outlay for clothing, which came to $1 million in 1974 dollars, or the equivalent of $6 million a year today.

I
n addition to all his other diseases and disorders, Aristotle Onassis began the new year with a rampant case of influenza. He lost forty pounds in eight weeks. He slurred his words, had trouble chewing his food, and could not speak without supporting his chin with the heel of his hand. The pains in his abdomen became so severe he could not stand up straight. On Sunday, February 2, 1975, he called Jackie, who was in New York, and complained of being alone. The next day he collapsed, and had to be helped out of his clothes and into bed.

The members of his retinue converged on his villa in Glyfada, filling the downstairs rooms like a somber assemblage of knights awaiting the passing of their liege lord. The ladies-in-waiting—Christina, Artemis, Merope, and Kalliroi—kept vigil outside his bedroom door. Everyone seemed prepared for the worst, except Christina. The daughter who had been the bane of her father’s existence for most of his life was the one who fought hardest to save him.

She made three telephone calls: to Professor Jean Caroli, a gastroenterologist in Paris; to Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, the heart specialist in New York; and to her stepmother, Jackie.

Come quickly, Christina told them. My father is very ill. He needs you now!

“I flew over with Jackie,” Rosenfeld said, “and when we arrived at Ari’s house in Glyfada, I examined him, and immediately made my diagnosis. In addition to his myasthenia gravis, he was suffering from acute gall bladder disease. He was taking a lot of cortisone, and was terribly weak. I ordered some equipment—oxygen and an electrocardiograph machine—and recommended that he fly to New York and undergo a period of intensive treatment there. We had an Olympic Airways plane ready to fly him to the New York Hospital.

“But the French gastroenterologist, Doctor Caroli, disagreed with me,” Rosenfeld continued. “He wanted to take Ari to Paris and operate at once to remove his gall bladder. He had Ari’s private jet primed and ready to fly him to the American Hospital in Paris.

“The French doctor did not seem to understand that Ari was not a good operative risk. He had myasthenia gravis, and the drugs being used for that would interfere with a successful surgery. I said that he was far too weak to survive such an operation.”

However, Christina and Onassis’s sisters did not agree. They were more familiar with Caroli than with Rosenfeld, and sided with the Frenchman in the heated debate that developed between the doctors.

“The family was pressing Onassis to go to the American Hospital in Paris,” Stelio Papadimitriou said. “He heard my cough, and called me upstairs, and just outside his bedroom I came upon Christina crying inconsolably. I asked her why, and she said, ‘Because my father refuses to go to Paris.’

“I went inside,” Papadimitriou continued. “It was a simple room with very few furnishings, and I found Onassis in a bad situation.

“I said, ‘Mr. Onassis, why are you behaving like a child? You should go to Paris. Or have you decided to leave everyone behind in a mess?’

“And he said, ‘Do you hear my daughter sobbing outside my door? Would you call her to enter the room?’

“I went and got Christina. The old man sat up in his bed and whispered to us in a weakened voice.

“ ‘I know that my daughter has serious shortcomings and will not be able to cope with life,’ he said. ‘And I know that you, Stelio, are a fiercely independent man who is always ready to resign his position, and that Christina will make you desperate. So if you wish me to go to Paris, let’s make a deal. Do you promise that no matter what my daughter does to you, you will never abandon her?’

“I said yes.

“And he said, ‘Bend to kiss me. From now on, Christina is your sister.’ ”

T
wo days later, Onassis, accompanied by Christina and Jackie, left his Glyfada villa for the airport. “He was clutching a book called
Supership
, in which author Noel Mostert reported that the first million-ton tanker, a ship so big that a cathedral could be lost in its bowels, would soon become a reality,” wrote the London
Daily Mail
columnist Nigel Dempster. “Ari sat with the book unopened on his lap for most of the flight; memories of the
Ariston
, the 15,000-ton ‘monster’ they said was impossible when he built her in the 1930s, must have been in his mind.”