Aristotle Onassis rose from the ashes of a burning city to become one of the wealthiest men of the 20th century, but the empire he built could not shield him from personal tragedy, public scandal, or the complicated relationships that would define his legacy. Born on January 20, 1906, in Smyrna, a cosmopolitan Mediterranean port city that was then part of the Ottoman Empire, Onassis grew up as the son of a prosperous Greek tobacco merchant. Fluent in four languages by the age of 16, he was educated, rebellious, and repeatedly suspended from school. His family’s comfortable world collapsed in September 1922, when the Greco-Turkish War ended in catastrophe for the Greeks of Smyrna.
The city was set ablaze, and the Greek and Armenian quarters burned for days. Hundreds of thousands fled to the waterfront, desperate to escape by sea. Onassis watched his city burn from a ship in the harbor. Several relatives, including uncles, an aunt, and a cousin, died in a church fire where hundreds of Christians had taken shelter.
His father was imprisoned by Turkish authorities, and the family lost nearly everything. The survivors reached Greece, but that country was already overwhelmed with refugees. In August 1923, armed with a Nansen passport issued to stateless refugees and roughly $250 in his pocket, the 17-year-old sailed to Buenos Aires. He worked nights as a telephone operator for a British company and spent his days trying to revive the family tobacco trade.
Working the switchboard, he listened to business calls not meant for his ears and used what he learned to position himself in deals before others knew they were happening. He spotted an opening in the Argentine cigarette market, built an import business around Turkish tobacco, and created a brand marketed specifically to women at a time when most cigarettes were sold only to men. By 21, he was a millionaire. During the Great Depression, when rational investors were fleeing shipping, he bought six cargo ships at a fraction of their value.
He ordered his first oil tanker in 1938 and, after World War II, acquired 23 surplus American Liberty ships. By the 1950s, he owned the Monte Carlo Casino, founded Olympic Airways in 1957, and commanded a fleet of more than 70 vessels sailing mostly under flags of convenience. His empire was vast, and he wanted it known. In 1946, Onassis married Athina Tina Livanos, the 17-year-old daughter of Stavros Livanos, the most powerful Greek shipping magnate of the era.
Onassis was 40. The wedding was the social event of the season for the Greek shipping world. The couple had two children, Alexander in 1948 and Christina in 1950. Onassis named his legendary superyacht, the Christina O, after his daughter.
The marriage also intensified his rivalry with Stavros Niarchos, another Greek shipping tycoon and perhaps the only man who operated at his level. Within a year of Onassis marrying Tina, Niarchos married her older sister, Eugenia. The two titans were now brothers-in-law. They competed over everything, the size of their tankers, the grandeur of their yachts, their access to the powerful.
Their rivalry was about identity, and there was only room for one at the top. By the mid-1950s, the marriage was quietly falling apart. According to biographer Peter Evans, it began to end when Tina discovered her husband in a compromising situation with a friend of hers at their house in Cap d’Antibes. Tina filed for divorce in 1959.
She later married John Spencer Churchill, the 11th Duke of Marlborough, in 1961. That marriage lasted nearly a decade. In 1971, she married Niarchos himself, the widower of her own sister Eugenia, whose death the year before had been ruled an accidental drug overdose. In 1957, Onassis attended a Venetian party hosted by socialite Elsa Maxwell in honor of Maria Callas, the Greek-American opera soprano and the most celebrated singer in the world.
Onassis later told a film producer that there was a natural curiosity between them, that they were, after all, the two most famous Greeks alive. Both were still married. In 1959, Onassis invited Callas and her husband, Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini, aboard the Christina for a Mediterranean cruise. Tina was also on board.
By the end of the journey, Tina had watched her husband fall for Callas in front of her. She disembarked early. Within weeks, Onassis and Callas were openly together in Milan. Callas confirmed her marriage was over on September 9, 1959.
Tina filed for divorce, citing adultery. The affair became one of the defining public romances of the era. Onassis divorced Tina formally in 1960. Callas separated from Meneghini.
For years, Onassis simply did not marry her. According to biographer Nicholas Gage, Callas bore Onassis a son in 1960 who died hours after birth. There were also reported miscarriages and an account of a pregnancy in 1966 that ended at Onassis’s urging. She wanted permanence.
He gave her everything except the one thing she asked for. Onassis had encountered Jacqueline Kennedy long before the assassination. In the fall of 1963, Jackie was struggling with depression following the death of her infant son, Patrick, who had died two days after his premature birth in August. Her sister, Lee Radziwill, invited her to recover aboard the Christina on a Mediterranean cruise.
President Kennedy had reservations. Onassis had been indicted by the U. S. government over his purchase of surplus American ships, and the State Department was uneasy.
But Jackie needed to get away, and Kennedy relented. She sailed with Onassis in October 1963 and had a wonderful time. The freedom of the Mediterranean, the attentiveness of a man who asked nothing of her, was the opposite of her life as first lady. She returned to Washington on October 17.
Five weeks later, she was beside her husband in Dallas. After the assassination, Onassis was one of the first to reach out. He attended the funeral, sent flowers, wrote letters, and visited in person. He maintained a steady, attentive presence through the following years.
Then, in June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. The second assassination in five years sent Jackie into a genuine, visceral fear. She turned to Onassis. The decision was not primarily romantic.
Jackie later described him as the man who rescued her when her life was engulfed in shadows. Onassis had a private island with its own security force, an airline, and resources that could protect her children in ways the U. S. government could not.
The engagement was reported. Maria Callas heard about it three weeks before the ceremony. On October 20, 1968, in a small chapel on the island of Skorpios, Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy before 40 guests. She wore knee-length ivory lace designed by Valentino.
Her children held ceremonial candles. His children, both deeply unhappy about the marriage, watched from a corner. Before the ceremony, a financial arrangement negotiated through Ted Kennedy gave Jackie $3 million immediately, $1 million for each of her two children, and an annual allowance of $150,000 after Onassis’s death. One newspaper ran the question, Jackie, how could you?
across its front page. The reaction in Europe was more hostile. Neither of them, by most accounts, cared. The marriage was unusual from the start.
Jackie lived primarily in New York, where her children were in school. Onassis kept an apartment in Paris and continued his business operations. They came together on Skorpios and the Christina. Family photographs show them at ease with each other, but there were tensions.
Jackie’s spending routinely exceeded her $30,000 monthly allowance, reportedly exceeding a million dollars on clothing alone in the first year. Onassis did not like being surprised by invoices, but he had pursued Jackie Kennedy for years and was not about to let money drive her away. The more fundamental problem was Maria Callas. Within weeks of the wedding, Onassis was visiting her in Paris.
His personal secretary later said he was seeing Callas three or four times a week immediately after the ceremony. Jackie was aware of what was happening. She handled it with perfect outer composure, the same way she had handled everything difficult in her public life. Callas found herself in the most painful possible position, the woman he apparently loved most, living alone in Paris while he was married to someone else.
In a 1974 interview, asked about Jacqueline Onassis, she said she did not know the woman and had never met her. The two never did meet. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s 24-year-old son, was at Hellenikon International Airport in Athens supervising a training exercise for a pilot of his personal aircraft. Seconds after takeoff, the plane’s right wing dropped.
The flight lasted no more than 15 seconds. Alexander survived the crash itself but had suffered catastrophic brain injuries. His father, in New York when he received the news, collapsed from shock and flew immediately to Greece. A neurosurgeon flown in from London told him there was no chance of survival.
Alexander died on January 23 without regaining consciousness. The investigation concluded that the crash was caused by the reversal of aileron control cables during installation of a new control column, a mechanical error, not a conspiracy. But Onassis refused to accept it. He offered a $1 million reward for proof that his son’s death had been deliberately arranged and suspected the CIA for the rest of his life.
No evidence ever emerged. What Alexander’s death did to Onassis was visible to everyone around him. He had built his empire to leave it to his son. That purpose was gone.
The energy that had driven him through every deal drained away. He sold Olympic Airways back to the Greek government at the end of 1974. He stopped making bold moves. His health deteriorated rapidly.
He developed myasthenia gravis, a condition that weakened the muscles around his eyes and face, and began taping his eyelids open with surgical tape to keep them from drooping shut. His marriage to Jackie had been cooling for some time. By 1974, he was reportedly considering divorce. Some reports indicated he had instructed lawyers to begin preparing papers.
Jackie was spending most of her time in New York building a degree of independence. Then came more grief. Tina Livanos, Onassis’s first wife, the mother of his children, died on October 10, 1974, in a hotel suite in Paris. She was 45.
The official cause was pulmonary edema, believed connected to her use of barbiturates. Her daughter Christina had already lost her brother less than two years earlier. On March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was 69.
The official cause was respiratory failure complicated by pneumonia and myasthenia gravis. Jackie was with him in the final weeks. He was buried on Skorpios beside his son, under the cypresses near the chapel where he had married Jackie seven years earlier. Jackie received her settlement, reportedly around $26 million negotiated by Ted Kennedy.
Christina Onassis, who had never warmed to her stepmother, agreed to the settlement in exchange for Jackie not contesting the will. Christina took control of the shipping empire and ran it with considerable skill, though her personal life was turbulent. She married four times, battled health problems, and died in Argentina on November 19, 1988, of cardiac arrest at 37. She was buried on Skorpios beside her father and brother.
Her daughter, Athina, born in 1985, was three years old and inherited everything. Jackie returned to New York. She was 45. She began working as a book editor, first at Viking Press and then at Doubleday, and took the work seriously.
Over the next 19 years, she acquired nearly a hundred works of fiction and non-fiction. She lived with financier Maurice Tempelsman from around 1980 until her death in 1994 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She never remarried and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside President Kennedy. Maria Callas spent her last years in near isolation in Paris.
She never performed on stage again after 1965, though she toured in 1973 and 1974 with tenor Giuseppe di Stefano. The voice was no longer what it had been, and she retreated entirely. She died on September 16, 1977, of a heart attack at 53, in the apartment Onassis had paid for. A red cashmere blanket she had given him, which he kept until the end of his life, had come back to her apartment.
The island of Skorpios was eventually sold by Athina Onassis Roussel decades later. The Christina O changed ownership several times. The empire was restructured and sold off in parts. What remained was the Onassis Foundation, established in memory of Alexander, which continues to fund scholarships and cultural programs.
And the name of a man who began as a teenage refugee watching his city burn, arrived in a foreign country with nothing, and built himself into something the world never quite looked away from.