In 1974, one of the richest men in the world hired a notoriously ruthless New York lawyer to draft his own divorce papers. He did not simply want the marriage ended. He wanted the process to hurt. The marriage itself had stunned the world six years earlier.
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. Roughly two dozen guests attended, including her two children, while his private security and the Greek Navy kept the press off the island. She was thirty-nine, the widow of a murdered American president and the most admired woman in the Western world.
He was sixty-two, a Greek shipping magnate with a divorce behind him, a long relationship with opera singer Maria Callas, and a business career that had repeatedly brushed against American authorities. The American press treated the wedding as something close to a defection. A German newspaper ran a headline about America losing a saint. In Greece, the reaction 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 often missed is how rational the decision was on her side. She had watched her husband murdered beside her and his brother Robert murdered five years later, four months before this wedding. She had two young children carrying the Kennedy name and had said privately that she believed her family was being hunted. Onassis could offer a private island, a private airline, private security, and the financial capacity to make two American children genuinely difficult to reach.
The marriage was, from the beginning, a transaction both parties understood. Before the wedding, they signed a prenuptial agreement that biographers describe as running to somewhere between 170 and 173 clauses. It reportedly covered how much time the couple would spend together, financial provision in the event of divorce, an annual income guaranteed to her if he died, property rights, and, most important to her, comprehensive lifelong protection for her and her children. Onassis approached the marriage the way he approached a shipping charter: cap the exposure, define the liabilities in advance.
Under Greek law at the time, a surviving spouse was entitled to a substantial statutory share of an estate regardless of a will. Much of the 1968 negotiation was about structuring around that. Two people entered a marriage having already agreed in exhaustive detail precisely what would happen when it ended. Not if.
When. For roughly four years, it more or less worked. Onassis was by most accounts delighted at first, almost boyish about it. He had acquired the most photographed woman alive and showed her off constantly.
He bought her extraordinary jewelry, including a ruby set that made international news. Scorpios gave her something unavailable since 1960: privacy. For the first time in a decade, she had no public role, no campaign, no state funerals, no obligation to be a symbol. There were signs of strain even then.
They were often apart, and the marriage always had a slightly theoretical quality. But accounts of genuine warmth in those early years come from too many directions to dismiss. It was a functioning arrangement that broke suddenly over something that had nothing to do with either of them. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s only son, twenty-four years old and the designated heir to the shipping empire, was aboard a small amphibious aircraft taking off from Athens.
It banked sharply and came down within seconds of leaving the ground. His father chartered a neurosurgeon from London overnight. It made no difference. Alexander died the following day, and the decision to withdraw support fell to Aristotle.
His father never recovered. Business associates who had dealt with him for thirty years described a different man afterward, someone who had aged a decade in months. He refused to accept that the crash had been an accident, spending enormous sums on private investigations into sabotage, convinced 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 that grief, he turned on his wife. After Alexander’s death, Onassis began telling friends and employees that Jacqueline had brought misfortune into his life. He used the language of curses, referring to her with a Greek word carrying connotations of a woman who brings ruin on a household.
He was not a superstitious man; he had built a shipping fleet from nothing in a business that punishes mysticism. But he had lost his son and needed the loss to have a cause. The cause he settled on was the American woman he had married four years earlier. There is no version in which that was fair.
But underneath it sat a piece of grim arithmetic: Alexander’s death meant the empire would now pass to his daughter Christina, who had no interest in running it and whom Onassis did not believe capable of it. The thing he had built his life around had lost its purpose inside thirty-six hours. Christina was twenty-two when her brother died. She had never warmed to her stepmother, and the feeling was mutual.
After Alexander was gone, she was in her father’s company constantly through his decline, and by every account she did not keep her opinion of Jacqueline to herself. There was a second, more organized front. Costa Gratsos, one of Onassis’s oldest associates, ran a significant part of the operation out of New York and had disliked Jacqueline from the start. In the final years of the marriage, by multiple well-sourced accounts, he began feeding unflattering stories about her to journalists with his employer’s knowledge and approval.
The stories that surfaced about her spending, her coldness, her calculation did not appear from nowhere. A number came directly out of his own office. The portrait of a cold, calculating woman did not arise organically from public sentiment. A good deal of it was manufactured by people being paid by her husband.
The marriage did not end in an argument. It ended in geography. Scorpios had been the center of the arrangement, the one thing he had that no one else could offer. After Alexander died, Onassis stopped going.
He buried his son in the same chapel where he had been married five years earlier and found the place unbearable afterward. She kept using it. He did not. He was in Paris, Athens, hospital rooms.
She was in New York with two teenagers. What had depended on both of them being in the same small number of places became two separate lives connected by a legal document. Money was the other fault line. Reports from the period put her annual spending north of a million dollars, shoes and coats ordered by the dozen, much of it never worn, some quietly returned.
He raised it with her directly for years and largely tolerated it as the cost of the arrangement. After Alexander died, by multiple accounts, he cut her monthly allowance by roughly a third. At that level of wealth it was not a financial measure. It was a message.
And 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 expected to marry him, even renouncing her American citizenship in 1966 to clear the legal path. He married Jacqueline instead without telling her; she reportedly found out the way the rest of the world did.
The relationship did not end there. By multiple accounts, Onassis resumed contact with Callas during his marriage, appearing at her Paris apartment in his final years. In the last year of his life, Onassis decided to end the marriage. He hired Roy Cohn, a New York attorney with a reputation for being the most aggressive and least scrupulous lawyer in the city, who had made his name as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
Cohn was not hired for expertise in matrimonial law. He was hired because everyone in New York understood what retaining him meant. According to biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, Onassis instructed Cohn to make the process as humiliating and punishing for his wife as the law would legally allow, and by multiple accounts hired private investigators to follow her, hoping to gather material he could use against her. Nothing useful was ever found.
Jacqueline had been under some form of surveillance for fifteen years and had become very good at giving nobody anything. Onassis had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune condition that progressively weakens the muscles. By late 1974 it had advanced considerably. In February 1975 he was flown to a hospital outside Paris for gallbladder surgery and never really recovered.
Jacqueline was in New York for much of that time. She came when things worsened, then returned to New York shortly before the end. On March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died in Paris at sixty-nine. His wife was not in the country.
His daughter Christina was at the hospital, and it was her face that ran in the papers the next morning. The marriage had lasted six years and five months. The clearest evidence of what Onassis actually felt is not in anyone’s recollection. It is in the document he left behind.
He left the overwhelming majority of his fortune to Christina and to a foundation in Alexander’s memory. What he left his wife of six years was, relative to the estate, modest. He had revised the will in his final period specifically to reduce her share, with a careful eye on the Greek statutory entitlements that would otherwise have given a widow considerably more. 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 running roughly two years, conducted mostly out of public view. By several accounts, Christina wanted to give her stepmother nothing at all and had to be persuaded by lawyers that Greek statutory law made that impossible. In 1977 they settled. Jacqueline accepted a reported twenty-six million dollars and formally relinquished any further claim, with Christina reportedly insisting on a provision that her stepmother renounce all rights to the Onassis name permanently.
Jacqueline agreed without argument, took the money, and never used the name publicly again. After his death, Jacqueline released a public statement, short, gracious, entirely generous. She described a man who had come into her life when everything around her felt engulfed in shadow, who had brought her back into the light and given her a happiness she would always be grateful for. Whether she knew the full extent of what he had done is genuinely unclear, but she almost certainly knew a substantial part.
She wrote that statement anyway and never publicly said anything else about him for the rest of her life. Did Onassis regret marrying Jacqueline Kennedy? The evidence points toward yes, and it is behavioral rather than confessional. He cut her allowance, briefed against her through his own staff, hired the most aggressive lawyer in New York to end the marriage as painfully as the law permitted, put investigators on her, spent his final months in another country, and rewrote his will to limit what she would inherit.
The more interesting question is what he was actually regretting. He had married her in 1968 at the height of his powers, the ultimate acquisition, final proof for a stateless refugee from Smyrna that there was nothing left on earth he could not obtain. Five years later his son was dead, his body was failing, and the acquisition was in New York spending his money. It had cost him Maria Callas, who he appears to have genuinely loved.
He needed the loss of Alexander to have a cause, and she was the thing in his life that had changed. That is the whole answer in the end: a man lost the only thing he had built his life for, could not accept it had happened for no reason, and spent his last two years assembling a case against the nearest available defendant.