In the final year of his life, Aristotle Onassis hired Roy Cohn, the most aggressive and least scrupulous lawyer in New York, to draft divorce papers. The Greek shipping magnate did not simply want the marriage ended. He wanted the process to be as damaging, humiliating, and punishing for his wife as the law would allow. He also hired private investigators to follow her, hoping to gather material that could be used against her in the proceedings.
The man pursuing this campaign was physically failing, unable to hold his eyelids open without taping them, and he was spending his remaining energy and money on an operation to surveil and publicly destroy the woman he had married six years earlier. The marriage had been one of the most astonishing unions of the century. On October 20, 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in a small chapel on Scorpios, his privately owned island in the Ionian Sea. It rained.
There were roughly two dozen guests, including her two children, and a press contingent kept off the island by his security staff and the Greek Navy. She was 39. He was 62. She was the widow of a murdered American president.
He was a Greek shipping magnate with a complicated reputation, a divorce behind him, and a decade-long public relationship with the opera singer Maria Callas. The American press treated it as something close to a defection. In Greece, it was closer to national triumph. A boy from Smyrna who had arrived in Argentina with almost nothing had married the widow of an American president.
What is usually missed is how rational the decision was on her side. She had watched her husband murdered while sitting beside him. She had watched his brother Robert murdered in June 1968, four months before this wedding. She had two young children carrying the Kennedy surname, and she believed her family was being hunted.
In the summer of 1968, that was not paranoia. Onassis could offer something the United States government could not: a private island, a private airline, private security in numbers, and the financial capacity to make two American children genuinely difficult for anyone to reach. The marriage was from the beginning a transaction that both parties understood. Before the wedding, they signed a prenuptial agreement containing somewhere between 170 and 173 separate clauses.
It was a corporate document, negotiated over months by lawyers on both sides. It reportedly covered how much time the couple would be obliged to spend in one another’s company, financial provision in the event of a divorce initiated by either side, an annual income guaranteed to her in the event of his death, property and residence rights, and, most importantly to her, comprehensive arrangements for the physical protection of her and her two children for the rest of their lives. He approached his own marriage the way he approached a shipping charter: he attempted to cap his exposure and define his liabilities in advance. For roughly four years it worked.
He was, by most accounts, genuinely delighted with the whole thing. He showed her off constantly, bought her extraordinary jewelry, and she appeared to be having the most relaxed years she had experienced since her twenties. Scorpios gave her privacy, something she had not had since 1960. There were no crowds, no cameras beyond the perimeter.
Her children could behave like children without a photographer in a boat offshore. She also had no public role whatsoever. For a woman who had spent a decade being a national institution, that was not nothing. Then, in January of 1973, something happened that ended the marriage in every way except the legal one.
Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s only son, was 24 years old and the designated heir to the entire shipping empire. He was the single most important person in his father’s life. On January 22, 1973, Alexander was aboard a small amphibious aircraft taking off from Athens airport. He was in the right-hand seat to help check out a new pilot.
The aircraft banked sharply and came down within seconds of leaving the ground. He suffered catastrophic head injuries. His father chartered a neurosurgeon from London to fly out overnight. It made no difference.
Alexander died the following day. Onassis did not recover from it. A famously vital, dominating, almost absurdly energetic man aged a decade inside a matter of months. He refused to accept that the crash had been an accident.
He spent very large sums funding private investigations into the possibility of sabotage, convinced the aircraft had been tampered with and that his son had been killed as an attack on him personally. Nothing was ever substantiated. He pursued it anyway for the remaining two years of his life. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he turned on his wife.
This is the part of the story that is difficult to convey without it sounding invented. After Alexander’s death, Onassis began telling friends, associates, and employees that Jacqueline had brought misfortune into his life. He used the language of curses. He referred to her in conversation using a Greek word that carries connotations of a woman who brings ruin on a household.
He was not a superstitious man. He was a hard-headed operator who had built a fleet out of nothing. But he had lost his son, and he needed the loss to have a cause. The cause he settled on was the American woman he had married four years earlier.
She had nothing whatsoever to do with an aircraft accident in Athens. She had not even been in the country. But grief does not distribute itself fairly. There was also a piece of grim arithmetic underneath it.
Alexander’s death meant the empire would now pass to his daughter Christina, who had no interest in running it. The thing Onassis had built his entire life around had lost its purpose in the space of thirty-six hours. Everything after that was a man looking for somewhere to put the anger. There was one more voice in his ear.
Christina Onassis, 22 when her brother died, had never warmed to her stepmother, and the feeling had been mutual from early on. After Alexander was gone, she became the sole remaining heir, and she was in her father’s company constantly through his decline. A grieving man being told by his only surviving child that the American woman was the problem is not a man likely to arrive at a balanced view. The proof of how far that went came after he died.
Christina fought the estate settlement for two years and by several accounts wanted to give her stepmother nothing at all and had to be persuaded by lawyers that Greek law made that impossible. The marriage did not end in an argument. It ended in geography. Scorpios had been the center of the arrangement, the thing he had that nobody else could offer her.
After Alexander died, Onassis stopped going. He buried his son in the small chapel there, the same chapel he had been married in five years earlier, and afterward he found the place difficult to be in. She continued to use it. He increasingly did not.
Two people simply stopped occupying the same space. The first place the collapse showed was in her allowance. Jacqueline Onassis spent money at a rate that startled a man who owned an island. Reports from the period put her annual expenditure in the region of a million dollars or more.
She bought in volume: dozens of pairs of shoes at a time, coats, handbags, a good deal of it never worn. After Alexander’s death, by multiple accounts, he cut her monthly allowance by roughly a third. For a couple at that level of wealth, it was not a financial measure. It was a message.
During those same years, he went back to the woman he had never really left. Onassis had begun his relationship with Maria Callas in 1959. She had left her husband for him, and by the accounts of everyone around her, she expected to marry him. She had gone as far as renouncing her American citizenship in 1966, which cleared the legal path to a wedding.
He married Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968 without telling her. By multiple accounts, she found out the way the rest of the world did. What is less widely known is that the relationship did not end there. In his final years, the two were in regular communication.
He would appear at her Paris apartment. On at least one occasion, he was turned away at the door and stood outside, whistling up at her window like a man forty years younger. Around this same period, his own staff began doing something genuinely remarkable. Costa Gratsos, one of Onassis’s oldest and closest associates, who ran a significant part of the operation out of New York, disliked Jacqueline intensely.
In the final years of the marriage, by multiple well-sourced accounts, he began feeding unflattering stories about her to journalists and gossip columnists with his employer’s knowledge and approval. The husband was using his own organization to brief the press against his own wife during the marriage, while she was still living under his name, under his protection, and under a contract that obliged him to provide both. The portrait that emerged in the early 1970s of a cold and calculating woman who had priced herself and sold did not arise organically from public sentiment. A good deal of it was manufactured deliberately by people being paid by her husband.
In the last year of his life, he decided to end the marriage and chose his instrument with some care. Roy Cohn had made his name as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the hearings of the 1950s. He was not a family lawyer. He was the man you retained when you wanted somebody hurt in public.
According to the account given by biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, Onassis instructed Cohn to begin preparing divorce proceedings and was explicit that he wanted the process to be as humiliating and punishing for his wife as it could legally be made. He could have simply divorced her. The prenuptial agreement he had negotiated in 1968 laid out exactly what that would cost. He chose not to handle it cleanly.
He hired Roy Cohn instead, which is a decision about feelings rather than money. He did not get to finish it. His body ran out first. Onassis had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune condition that progressively weakens the muscles.
By late 1974, it had advanced considerably. His eyelid muscles had failed to the point where he had to tape his eyes open in order to see. In February 1975, he was flown to the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris. He underwent gallbladder surgery and never really recovered.
Jacqueline was in New York for a significant portion of that time. She came when things deteriorated, and then, according to the accounts of that period, returned to New York again shortly before the end. On March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died in Paris at the age of 69. His wife was not in the country.
His daughter Christina was at the hospital, and it was Christina’s face that ran in the newspapers the following morning. The clearest evidence of what Onassis actually felt is in the document he left behind. He left the overwhelming majority of his fortune to his daughter Christina and to a charitable foundation established in his son Alexander’s memory. What he left to his wife of six years was, relative to the size of the estate, modest.
He had also, by multiple accounts, revised the will in his final period specifically to reduce her share. The man who had spent months in 1968 negotiating what she would receive if the marriage ended had spent part of 1974 negotiating it downward. What followed was a legal dispute between Jacqueline and Christina that ran for roughly two years. In 1977, they settled.
Jacqueline accepted a reported $26 million and formally relinquished any further claim on the estate. Measured against a fortune estimated in the high hundreds of millions, it was a fraction. Christina reportedly insisted on a provision that her stepmother renounce all rights to the Onassis name and estate entirely and permanently. Jacqueline agreed without argument, took the money, and never used the name again in any public capacity.
After his death, Jacqueline released a public statement. It was short, gracious, and entirely generous. She described a man who had come into her life at a period when it felt as though everything around her had been engulfed in shadows, who had brought her back out into the world and into the light, and who had given her a happiness she would always be grateful for. She never publicly said anything else about him for the rest of her life.
So did Aristotle Onassis regret marrying Jacqueline Kennedy? The evidence points overwhelmingly toward yes, and the evidence is behavioral rather than confessional. He never sat down in an interview and said it. What he did instead was cut her money, brief against her through his own staff, hire the most aggressive lawyer in New York to end the marriage as painfully as the law permitted, put private investigators on her, spend his final months in a different country, and rewrite his will to limit what she would inherit.
The more interesting question is what exactly he was regretting. He married her in 1968 at the absolute height of his powers. It was, among other things, an acquisition: the most famous widow in the world. Five years later his son was dead, his body was failing, and the empire had no heir worth the name.
It had cost him Maria Callas, who he appears to have genuinely loved, and it had produced at the end a wife who was not in the building when he went. A man in that position does not necessarily regret the person he married. He regrets what he traded to get her and what he received in return. Whether he was right about that is an entirely different question, and the answer is probably no.
Jacqueline did not kill his son. She did not make him ill. She did not lose him Callas, which he managed entirely on his own by getting married without telling her. She had held up her side of a contract that both of them had signed with their eyes wide open.
She was called a traitor. She was accused of selling herself. And a large part of the reason the accusation stuck was that a Greek shipping office in New York was quietly helping it along. She never answered any of it.
She took the settlement, went back to New York, took a job as a book editor at a publishing house for a modest salary, and worked at it seriously for the rest of her life. In the end, the whole answer is this. A man lost the only thing he had actually been building for, could not accept that it had happened for no reason, and spent his last two years assembling a case against the nearest available defendant.
Decades on, the wedding photographs from Scorpios still get used to illustrate one of the great romances of the twentieth century, which is a fairly remarkable achievement for a marriage that ended with a private detective, a lawyer best known for McCarthy, and an unfinished set of divorce papers sitting in a drawer in New York.