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Park
Avenue South.
2:15 AM. Photo: JH.
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I
remember the afternoon in 1968 when it came over the news wires that Jackie
Kennedy was marrying
Aristotle Onassis.
I was in the technical analyst’s office of a Wall Street
firm long since lost in merger oblivion. One of the analyst’s
assistants pulled the paper out of the teletype machine and asked,
dumfounded: “who do you think Jackie Kennedy is going to
marry?”
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Jackie
and Ari in Capri
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“Aristotle Onassis,” I
answered.
He was shocked at my accuracy: “how did you know?”
In retrospect,
I don’t know how I knew. I must have read
about the two being seen together in one of the columns – most
likely in Suzy, whose society column in those days was in the Daily
News.
The analyst wasn’t the only one shocked by the news; the
whole country was. Shocked, and dismayed in that proprietary way
that individuals feel about the private lives of public persons.
Jackie Kennedy was, at that moment, the nearest thing to a saint
in the eyes of the American public – and maybe the world.
She belonged to the public whose memory of her at President John
F. Kennedy’s funeral a little less than five years before,
not only garnered an enormous and lasting outpouring of public
sympathy, but an even greater respect than she already had as First
Lady.
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Jackie
and Jack, 24 hours before Dallas. She'd agreed
to campaign with him after her "rest" on
the Christina.
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At the time of the Onassis announcement, Jackie was just thirty-nine. With
the exception of Elizabeth
Taylor, she was the most famous
woman in the world. And, unlike Taylor, whose fame was related
to her highly publicized love life, Jackie’s fame was beatific
— the beautiful, widowed mother of two small, now fatherless
children, who had emerged from the horrific with triumphal grace.
She was
an icon of such unimpeachable respectability and elegance that
she was beyond reproach.
She was well aware of her “public” persona we also
learned the year before, in 1967, when author William Machester
was about to publish his book “The Death of the President.” When
the author balked at making certain editorial changes that she
requested (changes which actually altered the truth), she tried
to stop its publication. Counseled that such an action could make
her look bad in the eyes of the public, she famously retorted: “The
only thing that could make me look bad would be if I ran off with
Eddie Fisher.” (Eddie Fisher, a few years before had been
publicly humiliated when Elizabeth Taylor left him for Richard
Burton.)
Aristotle Onassis was no Eddie Fisher although he
was not held in high regard by the American public. He was the
Greek shipping
tycoon, a somewhat mysterious figure who spent much of his time
on his 357-foot yacht the Christina and entertained the rich and
the famous, including his one time mistress, the fabled Maria
Callas,
as well as Sir Winston Churchill. Americans were
most familiar with Aristotle Onassis because only a month before
the assassination
of JFK, in October 1963, Jackie Kennedy, who had given premature
birth to a son who died less than two days later, went for a “rest” cruise
on the Onassis yacht in the Aegean.
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Jackie
and her sister Lee Radziwill during Jackie's first
trip on the Christina in the Aegean.
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Her sister Lee Radziwill, unbeknownst to the general
public, although still married to Prince Stanislas Radziwill,
had been having an
affair at the time with the Greek shipping tycoon. The trip was
presented to the American public as a chance for a rest away from
the hectic White House schedule and spend time in her sister’s
company. It was accepted that way also.
Peter Evans, a British journalist, has written a
book called Nemesis,
published this year by Regan Books, a division of HarperCollins,
about that trip and many other matters, shocking and almost incredible
were it not for the author’s detailed unfolding of the complicated
story. The book is subtitled: The True Story; Aristotle
Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle that Brought Down the
Kennedys. That’s a big chunk of change, quite a claim
to make about the most famous American family of the 20th century.
However.
“Nemesis” is a Greek word, if you didn’t know; the goddess
in classical mythological terms, of divine retribution. Or, as
the Random House Dictionary puts its: downfall, undoing, ruin.
Waterloo. After finishing this book in one sitting (or rather,
over the weekend), I was left wondering about its title. Who? Nemesis
of whom? Answer: everyone involved. |
Above,
left: Lee
and Ari in happier days. Above, right: Tina
Onassis with her sister Eugenie Niarchos. After Eugenie's
murder, Tina, previously divorced from Onassis and the
Marquess of Blandford, married Niarchos. |
This
is a story about the man, his wife — and mother of his
two children, Alexander and Christina Onassis — Tina
Livanos, who later married Sunny, the
present Duke of Marlborough and then Stavros
Niarchos, who had previously been married to Tina’s
older sister Eugenie, who was probably beaten
to death by her husband; Maria Callas, Prince Rainier,
Princess Grace, John and Robert Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Truman
Capote, Lee Radziwill, Jackie, and a large cast of individuals,
some known – such as Johnny Meyer who
worked for both Howard Hughes and Onassis; Charlotte
Ford, who was briefly married to Niarchos and was a
friend of Stash Radziwill; Fiona Thyssen, once
married to steel magnate Heinrich, and lover
of much younger Alexander Onassis – and
some unknown to most of us such as David Karr,
an international “fixer” and mystery man who introduced
Onassis to another man named Mahmould Hamshari who “just
after the Six Day War suggested to Fatah that they kill a high
profile American on American soil. Fatah declined but Hamshari
was undeterred.” The tale leads from Hamshari to Los Angeles
and among others, a hypnotherapist named William Joseph
Bryan Jr., and ultimately, as the dots connect, to a
Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan.
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Onassis
with Maria Callas, the love affair that broke up
both his marriage (to Tina) and her marriage, later
dashed by his affair with Lee Radziwill.
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Connecting the dots: Onassis hated Robert
Kennedy. The feeling was mutual. Nemesis.
Connecting the dots: when Jackie Kennedy
took that first trip on the Christina after the death
of her child, although the White House presented the voyage with
a “positive spin,” they did not want her to go. They
being her husband, the President, and his brother Bobby. They couldn’t
stop her, however, and one reason, according to Peter Evans’ book,
was because she was in a fury over her husband’s constant
dalliances including while she was in labor with the ill-fated
child. The trip on the Christina, changed everything:
Jackie, in effect, stole Onassis away from her sister, beginning
a relationship (sometimes an affair), that culminated in a marriage
announcement only weeks after the assassination of Robert Kennedy
in Los Angeles in June 1968. |
Did
this man, David Karr (above, left), introduce this
man, Mahmoud Hamshari (Above, middle), to Onassis
who put up the money to murder
this man,
RFK (Above, right)? |
A
friend of mine who spent a good deal of time with Onassis on
his yacht doesn’t want to read this book. He liked “Ari,” (as
he was known to his friends) and would rather not go there.
I thought of the
late Lady Sarah Churchill, the duke of Marlborough’s sister,
who also spent a lot of time with “Ari” on the Christina,
who adored him, found him “the most charming man in the world,” (and
who also, incidentally, didn’t care much for Jackie). She wouldn’t
have liked this book but probably little in it would have surprised her.
Nemesis. Most of the characters, the main players in this story,
are dead now, many of them under tragic circumstances: JFK, RFK, Marilyn Monroe,
Alexander Onassis, Eugenie Niarchos, Tina Onassis Niarchos, Callas, more than
a few of them (including the previously mentioned Karr and Hamshari and possibly
Bryan) were murdered or possibly murdered.
“So this it seems is what it is to be a king,” Jacqueline
Kennedy said to her host Mr. Onassis when first on board his yacht with its crew
of 58, two hairdressers (from Paris), three chefs (French, Italian and Greek),
a Swedish masseuse and a steward and private maid for every stateroom.
Five years after that initial trip, when Mrs. Kennedy was taking Mr. Onassis
around to introduce him to her “social” American friends, Peter Evans
writes in “Nemesis”: “... Their subtle ostracism” (referring
to Jackie’s friends) “was a source of amusement as well as anger
to Onassis. ‘Everybody here knows three things about Aristotle Onassis,’ he
answered when Johnny Meyer asked how he was coping with Jackie’s crowd: ‘I’m
fucking Maria Callas. I’m fucking Jackie Kennedy. And I’m fucking
rich.’”
That last sentence, those four words, put it all, succinctly, in a nutshell.
The American public was disappointed when Mrs. Kennedy took that initial trip
on the Christina. She was later surprised at the reaction because she
was well aware of the power of her public image. The public was even more disappointed
when she married Onassis but she was “forgiven” because of the circumstances
of her husband’s death and because of her children, to whom she was judged
to be a devoted mother. Although after her marriage to Onassis, there was much
press on her extravagant spending. So it was easily concluded, and also accepted,
that she was in it for the money.
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Click
on image to order Nemesis
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Chapter Thirteen of Peter Evan’s book begins with a
quotation of St. Marc Girardin (1801 – 1873): “Too heavy a price
may be paid for wealth.” After the death of Onassis, his widow (whom he
had been planning to divorce, and had hired Roy Cohn as his
lawyer), was left, according to Evans, “a fixed annual income of $200,000.
to be revoked – and his executors and heirs were instructed to fight her ‘through
all possible legal means’ – if she challenged the will in any way.”
Jackie did not take it sitting down. Jackie, claims Evans, knew “far too
much” and because of that, his principal heir, his daughter Christina,
caved to her stepmother’s demands. Twelve months later, the two parties
agreed to a final settlement of $26 million (about $200 million in today’s
currency), plus an annual income of $150,000. and many other items, including
paintings, sculpture, and objets d’art.
"… When Christina wrote out the final check – and ‘before
the ink was dry, Jackie reached over and pulled (it) out of her hand’ – Christina
laughed in her face.”
"It was dirty money anyway Johnny, and I reckoned she’d earned every
penny of it,’ she (Christina) told Johnny Meyer, enigmatically.”
Dirty isn’t the half of it. Read the book. |
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