On the afternoon of October 20, 1968, on a small island in the Ionian Sea, a Greek Orthodox priest prepared a small candlelit church for a wedding. The church was called Panagitsa, meaning the Little Holy Virgin Church. Rain fell on the island of Skorpios that day. Outside the courtyard, about 50 journalists who had arrived by boat from a neighboring island waited in the rain for a glimpse of the bride. The ceremony began at four in the afternoon. Two children carried candles, a seven-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, the children of an assassinated American president. The bride was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, then 39 years old, and perhaps the most admired woman in the world.
This is the story of Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipping magnate from Smyrna who built the largest privately owned fleet on earth, managed his whims the way corporations manage acquisitions, and married the most admired woman in the world after the assassination of the only Kennedy capable of preventing it. He kept a mistress in Paris two streets away from his marital apartment, and died in 1975 while his lawyers were still preparing the divorce papers that would have humiliated his wife.
Onassis was born in January 1906 in the Karatas district of Smyrna, in what was then the Ottoman Empire. The exact day cannot be determined because the records that would have proven it burned with most of the city in 1922. The commonly accepted date is January 20. The destruction of records left room for debate, with one historian suggesting Onassis lowered his age by three years to evade Turkish conscription. His Argentine passport later showed a different year and a completely different city of birth.
His father Socrates Onassis was a tobacco merchant and banker counted among the city's wealthy, and the boy grew up in comfort that made what followed crueler. In September 1922, when he was sixteen, the Turkish army entered Smyrna and the fire began. From the deck of a ship in the harbor, he watched his hometown burn. The family fortune was destroyed. Three of his uncles and an aunt were among the dead. His father was imprisoned and sentenced to death.
What the boy did to free him became the story Onassis told decades later to journalist Peter Evans, who was personally summoned to write his biography. According to that account, the teenager entered into a sexual relationship with an older Turkish lieutenant, and that relationship secured his father's release and the return of some confiscated family property. This story cannot be independently confirmed. Evans, who spent nine months in intense conversations with him, would later describe Onassis as a monster. The lesson he carried from Smyrna would govern his remaining dealings with the world: intimacy was something you spent like currency to buy a ticket out of a burning place.
In August 1923, Onassis sailed to Argentina with a Nansen passport, a document given to stateless refugees, with between 60 and 250 dollars in his pocket. He worked nights as a keyboard operator in Buenos Aires and ran a tobacco importing business during the day. Within six years of arriving, he obtained Argentine citizenship. Shortly after, he owned his first million dollars in capital. In 1932, while the Great Depression sent ship prices crashing to a fraction of their value, he bought his first six cargo ships.
From cargo ships, he moved to oil tankers, building larger and larger vessels until in 1954 alone he contracted to build 17 giant oil tankers at once. Within two decades of stepping off the boat in Buenos Aires, he owned the largest private cargo fleet on earth. The ways he built it were not clean, and the United States government eventually made that a matter of public record. The investigation that led to a settlement began in 1950 when intelligence agents determined that Greek shipping magnates based in New York were moving cargo on American-built ships, not only for the US and its allies, but also for North Korea and China. The resulting charge was narrower and more technical: conspiracy to defraud the United States in the illegal acquisition of 23 surplus American ships under a 1946 law prohibiting non-citizen control of American-flagged vessels.
In December 1955, Onassis agreed to pay 7 million dollars in fines. Criminal fines of 160,000 dollars were imposed on six of his companies, all of which pleaded guilty. Onassis himself emerged without a conviction in his own name, as the corporate entities he controlled absorbed the official stigma. The 7 million dollar fine, huge at the time, was like a parking ticket to him. He had learned in Smyrna that the world could be bought out of. The Justice Department had just confirmed that lesson on a grand scale.
He named his yacht Christina O after his daughter and turned it into a 500-foot advertisement for what unlimited money could buy when restraint was no longer a consideration. The ship was originally the HMCS Stormont, a Canadian frigate that escorted Atlantic convoys during World War II. Onassis acquired it in the early 1950s for barely scrap value. The rebuild took four years and millions of dollars. At around 150 meters long, it carried a crew of over 50 people. There was a swimming pool with a mosaic floor that rose hydraulically to become a dance floor. There were taps pumping salt and fresh water. There was an operating room. There was a bar called the Ari Bar where the footrests were made from the teeth of sperm whales, and the bar stools were upholstered in leather tanned from whale foreskin.
The yacht hosted the cruise that ended two marriages in one summer on the Mediterranean. On December 28, 1946, Onassis married Athina Livanos, called Tina, the 17-year-old daughter of shipping magnate Stavros Livanos. The groom was forty. The marriage was, by all accounts, a shipping business alliance. The couple had two children, Alexander in 1948 and Christina in 1950.
On September 3, 1957, at a party given in her honor in Venice by American hostess Elsa Maxwell, Onassis met soprano Maria Callas, the most famous opera singer of her generation. Callas was married at the time to Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini. Within two years, that curiosity became the central fact in the lives of four people. In the summer of 1959, Onassis organized a Mediterranean cruise on the Christina O. On July 22, guests gathered in Monaco. Among them were Sir Winston Churchill, Maria Callas, her husband Meneghini, and Onassis's wife Tina. The cruise, by all contemporary accounts, was where the affair began.
Callas gave up more than a husband to be near Onassis. She was the most disciplined artist in the opera world, a woman whose voice was the product of tireless work. The years with him saw that voice decline, as her life reorganized itself around a man whose existence was a source of comfort rather than a professional calling. The relationship never moved toward what she wanted, marriage and a child. Instead, it moved her steadily away from the stage that had made her famous. By the early 1960s, the voice that had defined opera for a decade was audibly weaker. Critics who once called her the greatest singer of her generation wrote of a decline they could only speculate about. The most likely reason was sitting in the front row at most of her remaining performances. Onassis had taken her out of the training schedule her voice required, and the voice responded by losing the qualities audiences paid to hear.
Onassis kept his apartment at 88 Avenue Georges Mandel in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Callas kept her apartment a short distance away at 36 Rue Georges Mandel. According to his personal secretary, Kiki Moutsatsos, the two never stopped seeing each other since the beginning of their relationship because they could not live without each other. When she called the staff in Athens or Paris each morning, they would tell her jokingly that Mr. Onassis was very, very tired. When she asked why, they would say Maria had visited him during the night. Everyone in the house knew about it. Jackie knew too. Jackie complained to Onassis's sister Artemis, who advised her not to fight it and to ignore it. Moutsatsos said Jackie behaved like a cat, very intelligent and cunning, waiting for the right moment to confront him about his behavior.
More serious claims concern the medical staff Onassis kept. Biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, in her 1981 book about Callas's life, drawing on more than 2000 letters from the singer to her godfather and extensive interviews, stated that Callas had an abortion in 1966 at Onassis's insistence. He told her he would end their relationship if she kept the child, as he had already decided to marry Mrs. Kennedy as a grand prize in his pursuit of status. Major American newspapers published this claim in February and March of that year.
The cruelty within the household was not limited to infidelity. In the early 1970s, a team of 10 photographers carried out a covert operation against Jackie on the island of Skorpios. According to reports in the American press in late November 1972, the magazine that published the photos claimed the photographers had been pursuing Jackie since January 1971, a campaign lasting almost a year and a half. They worked from fast boats, wore underwater breathing apparatus, and carried waterproof cameras to appear near a beach she thought no lens could reach. Photos of Jackie sunbathing and walking naked were first published across nine pages in a men's magazine in Rome in November 1972. Three years later, American publisher Larry Flynt bought the American rights for 18,000 dollars and published some of them, four in full page, in the August 1975 issue of Hustler. He ordered a much larger print run than usual, and the gamble paid off completely. The issue sold out within days, with sales jumping from a few thousand copies to over two million. Flynt would later describe the purchase as the smartest investment of his life.
What makes this violation darker is the identity of the person who, according to one account, orchestrated it. Christopher Anderson's 2014 biography The Son Bearer cites Onassis himself as the source who tipped off the photographers. Anderson writes that in November 1972, 10 photographers donned wetsuits and infiltrated the waters of Skorpios, and that the detailed maps of the island, and the dates, times, and places of Jackie's expected whereabouts, were all provided by Ari. According to Anderson's account, Onassis had grown tired of financing his wife's privacy lawsuits and devised a plan to embarrass Jackie so completely that the press would have nothing left to do to hurt her, while wounding the woman he always mocked as "the Widow." The claim is disputed. The photographer involved only admitted that an Olympic Airways employee tipped him off, and never confirmed Onassis gave the order.
What Jackie did in response shows how powerless her position was. She had previously filed lawsuits for invasion of privacy. Those are the same lawsuits Anderson says her husband refused to continue funding. But faced with photos already printed and sold in two countries, no court could recover those images. The most photographed woman of her century bore this exposure in public silence. The photos worked as a financial transaction at every stage, and the woman depicted received nothing from any of the parties profiting from her exposure.
The campaign to break her would continue until grief broke her husband first. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis, his only son and the heir for whom he had built everything, was a passenger in a small amphibious plane that crashed on takeoff at Hellinikon Airport in Athens. He died of his injuries the next day at age 24. This loss broke something in Onassis that no fortune could repair. He poured his grief onto his wife. He began secretly calling Jackie "the witch." He told his closest aides she carried a curse, justifying it with the dark superstitions of a broken man. Her first important man had died, then the second, and now his son had died while she was Mrs. Onassis. His daughter Christina, who had called Jackie a gold digger from the start, fueled this belief.
Onassis spent his last year trying to arrange one final insult to the wife he had bought and come to hate. He suffered from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that strips muscles of their ability to respond. In his final months, he appeared in public with his eyelids taped open because he could no longer lift them himself. A man who had spent his life arranging how others appeared lost control of his own face. The affair was concrete enough to have papers, and those papers would later end up in the hands of Constantine Gratsos, Onassis's closest aide.
Onassis died on March 15, 1975, at the American Hospital in Paris, of severe pneumonia caused by myasthenia gravis. He died before the divorce he had initiated was finalized, so Jackie technically remained his widow. His will was the final tool of the campaign he did not live to finish. He left 55% of his fortune to his daughter Christina and 45% to the foundation bearing his dead son's name. He reduced his widow's share to the minimum a Greek widow could receive, which insiders estimated at about 3 million dollars.
Christina, who had wanted Jackie gone since the wedding, seized the opportunity, and the two women fought through lawyers for two years. The settlement gave Jackie about 26 million dollars in exchange for relinquishing any further claim. The money was handed to Maurice Tempelsman, the Belgian-American diamond merchant who would become her companion in her final years. Over the next decade, Tempelsman quadrupled that amount.
Maria Callas arrived at Onassis's hospital room, according to one account, via the service elevator while he was in a coma. She kept her red Hermès blanket near him in his final moments. Two and a half years after his death, on September 16, 1977, Callas died of a heart attack in that apartment at age 53. She had spent her final years in isolation, dependent on sedatives. According to Onassis's closest aide Constantine Gratsos, who held the unfiled divorce papers, Onassis said in his final months that Maria was his one true love. He said his marriage to Jackie was the greatest betrayal of his life. He said he was preparing to leave Jackie and return to Maria the moment his body failed him.
Jackie's public statement on his death was a document drafted by a lawyer. She said Onassis rescued her at a moment when her life was engulfed in shadows, that they had shared many beautiful experiences, and that she would be forever grateful to him. She mentioned no love, no grief, not a single word that could be used against her. The widow gave the public a statement formulated with the same care her late husband once gave his marriage contract. The verbs were ones of rescue and transaction, expressing gratitude, not loss.
Jackie lived with Tempelsman, who moved into her Fifth Avenue apartment in 1988, though he never divorced his wife from whom he had been separated for years. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the winter of 1993 and died on May 19, 1994. In her final months, she burned her letters and personal photographs with her own hands. A friend once said Jackie lived three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The burning was the final editorial act of a woman who had spent her life deciding what others were allowed to know. She made sure that after her death, only the first life remained, and that the restrained erasure she carried out in her final months matched the discretion she had maintained for decades as a public figure. The man who spent his life arranging what people were allowed to see was ultimately outdone by a woman whose discretion equaled his appetite.