The burning of Smyrna in September 1922 changed everything for a 16-year-old boy watching from the deck of a ship. Aristotle Onassis stood helpless as his birthplace was consumed by flames, along with his family’s fortune and their entire world.
Born on January 20, 1906, in the Kordelio suburb of Smyrna, Aristotle had grown up in comfort. His father, Socrates Onassis, was a successful tobacco merchant and shipping entrepreneur. By age 16, the young Aristotle spoke Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and English, and attended the city’s prestigious evangelical Greek school.
The Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922 ended that life. When Turkish forces retook Smyrna in September 1922, they set it ablaze. Three of Aristotle’s uncles, an aunt, her husband, and their daughter were burned to death in a church where 500 Christians had sought shelter.
The family escaped to Greece as refugees, settling in Athens with hundreds of thousands of others. They had survived, but they had lost nearly everything. For young Aristotle, the lesson was brutal and clear: nothing is permanent, and the only person you can rely on is yourself.
Within a year, Socrates Onassis reluctantly supported his son’s decision to leave Greece and start fresh in Argentina. On August 21, 1923, Aristotle landed in Buenos Aires with $250 in his pocket and a Nansen passport, the document issued to stateless refugees.
Buenos Aires in 1923 was not kind to Greek refugees. Aristotle took whatever work he could find, starting as a hod carrier and dishwasher before landing a job as a night shift switchboard operator for the British United River Plate Telephone Company. The position paid poorly, but it gave him something more valuable: information.
Working nights left his days free, and Aristotle used that time to help revive his family’s tobacco business. His father and uncle had founded a tobacco export business in Piraeus and began sending Turkish tobacco to Argentina. But Argentine cigarette manufacturers were not interested in meeting with a teenage refugee.
His switchboard position became his secret weapon. By eavesdropping on business calls, he learned about deals and opportunities, then used that insider knowledge to set up his own arrangements. He operated as an important businessman during the day while still working the phone lines in coveralls at night.
His big break came in the mid-1920s when he overheard a conversation about a new talking picture where the main character would smoke cigarettes. Aristotle immediately grasped the marketing opportunity. He approached Juan Gaona, owner of Argentina’s most successful cigarette company, and stalked him for days until Gaona finally agreed to talk.
The audacity worked. Gaona placed an immediate order for $10,000 worth of Turkish tobacco from the Onassis family business. Then Aristotle created his own cigarette brand aimed specifically at women, whose smoking habits were changing as the feminist movement gained momentum. He persuaded the famous opera singer Claudia Muzio to publicly smoke his cigarettes.
By age 25, Aristotle Onassis was a millionaire, earning over $100,000 from tobacco commissions alone. The Greek government recognized his business acumen and made him consul general, asking him to negotiate a trade agreement with Argentina in 1928. He obtained Argentine citizenship in 1929.
But Aristotle’s ambition did not stop at tobacco. In 1932, the same year his father died, he observed that the shipping magnates who hauled the tobacco made more money than the cigarette manufacturers. While everyone else was fleeing the shipping industry during the Great Depression, Aristotle bought six freight ships for less than half their normal cost.
Other businessmen thought he was insane. But Aristotle understood that the depression would not last forever. When the economy recovered, there would be massive demand for shipping and ship prices would skyrocket. By buying when everyone else was selling, he positioned himself to dominate when the market turned.
In 1938, Aristotle commissioned his first oil tanker. By the time World War II broke out, he owned three. He made another brilliant, if morally questionable, decision: he registered his fleet of cargo ships to Panama, giving him tax-free status and dramatically reducing his overhead costs.
During the war, he leased his tankers and other vessels to the Allies. The arrangement was enormously profitable. The Allies desperately needed shipping capacity, and Aristotle offered reduced prices on military equipment in exchange for favorable contracts and protection. His fleet grew while others were being sunk by German U-boats.
After the war, Aristotle purchased 23 surplus Liberty ships from the United States at bargain prices. Then he embarked on the strategy that would make him legendary in the shipping industry: bigger ships. In 1954 alone, he commissioned 17 super tankers.
The economics were staggering. A super tanker could be paid for with a single six-month lease, meaning the remaining 20 years of the ship’s lifespan generated almost pure profit. During the Arab-Israeli wars in 1956 and 1967, when the Suez Canal closed, Aristotle’s super tankers reaped immense profits transporting oil from the Middle East via the Cape of Good Hope.
By the early 1950s, Aristotle Onassis commanded a fleet larger than the navies of many countries. He was one of only two men in the world to own a private airline, the other being Howard Hughes of TWA. His Olympic Airways, acquired in 1957, became known for its golden era of service quality with gold-plated utensils and candles in first class.
He fought Prince Rainier III for economic control of Monaco through his ownership of the Société des Bains de Mer, which owned the Monte Carlo casino and resort properties. He bought the Greek island of Skorpios for 3.5 million drachmas, transforming it into a private paradise. His yacht, the Christina, named after his daughter, became one of the most famous vessels in the world.
On December 28, 1946, 40-year-old Aristotle Onassis married Athena Mary “Tina” Livanos. She was 17 years old. Tina was the daughter of Stavros G. Livanos, himself a shipping magnate, which made the marriage both a love match and a strategic alliance between two powerful Greek shipping families.
The couple had two children, both born in New York City. Alexander arrived on April 30, 1948, and Christina was born on December 11, 1950. For a time, the family projected an image of wealth and happiness.
But cracks were already forming. By the mid-1950s, Aristotle and Tina were living separately. According to Onassis biographer Peter Evans, the beginning of the end came when Tina found Aristotle in bed with a friend of hers at their home in Cap d’Antibes, the Château de la Croë. The betrayal shattered whatever remained of their marriage.
Aristotle had already met the woman who would become the love of his life. Her name was Maria Callas, and she was the most famous opera singer in the world.
In the summer of 1957, at a party in Venice hosted by the famous gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, Aristotle Onassis met Maria Callas for the first time. Later, he commented to a friend that there was a natural curiosity between them. After all, they were the most famous Greeks alive in the world.
Maria Callas, born in New York in December 1923 to Greek immigrants, had risen to become opera’s greatest soprano. At the time of their meeting, she was married to Giovanni Battista Meneghini, an Italian industrialist 30 years her senior, who also served as her manager. Aristotle was still married to Tina, though their relationship had deteriorated into a facade maintained for appearances and the children.
In 1959, Aristotle invited Callas and Meneghini for a three-week Mediterranean cruise aboard his yacht, the Christina. Other illustrious guests included former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife. The cruise was supposed to be a sophisticated social gathering among the elite. Instead, it became the beginning of the most public, tempestuous love affair of the decade.
Callas initially found Onassis overattentive and unattractive, but his persistent courtship gradually won her over. For Aristotle, Callas represented someone whose fame matched his own, someone whose Greek heritage connected to his own identity in ways no one else could match. For Maria, Aristotle offered escape from a career that had become increasingly difficult.
By the time the 1959 cruise ended, it was evident to everyone aboard that Aristotle and Maria had fallen completely in love. Tina Livanos, who had enjoyed Callas’s company at the start of the cruise, hastily disembarked the ship, unable to watch her husband’s affair unfold before her eyes.
In November 1959, Callas left her husband, ending a 10-year marriage. Tina filed for divorce in the Supreme Court of New York in 1960, citing adultery, and filed for custody of Alexander and Christina. The divorce was granted in June 1960.
What followed was a nine-year relationship that oscillated between bliss and warfare. After both lovers divorced their spouses, they alternately adored and raged at each other. Friends described their relationship as finding excitement in physical altercations and thundering curses.
Maria wanted to retire from the stage, settle down, and have children with Aristotle. She became pregnant in 1960 but lost the baby. According to some biographers, including Nicholas Gage, the child was a boy who died hours after birth on March 30, 1960. She conceived again in 1963 but lost that baby as well, again while Aristotle was away.
The relationship was deeply dysfunctional. Callas, despite her fame and talent, had little self-esteem when it came to personal relationships. Aristotle held all the power, controlling her emotionally while refusing to marry her even after both had divorced their spouses.
At JFK’s birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in 1962, Maria attended and even performed, but the event is now remembered only for Marilyn Monroe’s sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Aristotle attended with Maria, but he told her afterward that no one cared about Monroe’s voice, just as no one cared about Callas’s body. The comment was devastating.
Maria largely abandoned her career for Aristotle. Her vocal problems accelerated, her performances became rarer, and her focus shifted entirely to the relationship. When Franco Zeffirelli asked her in 1963 why she hadn’t practiced her singing, she responded that she had been trying to fulfill her life as a woman.
In 1963, everything changed. On the Christina, Aristotle hosted a gathering attended by Princess Lee Radziwill and her sister Jacqueline Kennedy. Lee was rumored to be having an affair with Aristotle, and Maria noticed his overt attention to both sisters.
After President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963, Jacqueline entered a period of deep grief. Lee Radziwill invited Jackie to join her on the Christina to recuperate. At the end of that voyage, the dynamics had shifted dramatically. Aristotle gave Jackie a diamond necklace. He gave Lee a bracelet so insignificant that she later sniped that not even six-year-old Caroline would wear the thing.
But it would take five more years before he acted on it. Five years of continued relationship with Maria, continued promises that never quite materialized into the commitment she wanted. Five years of Aristotle pursuing Jackie Kennedy with careful discretion while maintaining his relationship with Maria.
On October 20, 1968, on Skorpios, Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, widow of the 35th president of the United States. The marriage shocked the world and nearly destroyed Maria Callas.
Before the wedding, an agreement was reached between Onassis and Ted Kennedy, Jacqueline’s former brother-in-law. Jackie would receive $3 million plus $1 million for each of her two children, Caroline and John Jr., to compensate for the $150,000 she received from the Kennedy Family Trust, which she would lose by remarrying. Upon Aristotle’s death, she would continue to receive $150,000 each year for the rest of her life.
The marriage was troubled from the start. During their time together in Acapulco, their relationship deteriorated so badly that Aristotle handwrote his will on a private jet, stipulating that if Jackie contested it, she would receive only the minimal spousal bequest dictated by Greek law, 12.5 percent, and would be responsible for all legal fees.
According to Onassis’s private secretary and other close associates, even while married to Jackie, Aristotle frequently met with Maria in Paris. They resumed what had become a clandestine affair. He allegedly told Maria that he had realized she was the true love of his life, but by then it was too late to repair what he had broken.
The marriage to Jackie, according to many in Aristotle’s Greek circle, was an act of hubris that the gods would punish. And punish him they did with a cruelty that would break the man who had survived the burning of Smyrna, poverty, war, and every business challenge the world could throw at him.
On January 22, 1973, 24-year-old Alexander Onassis arrived at Hellinikon International Airport in Athens for what should have been a routine test flight. As president of Olympic Aviation, a subsidiary of his father’s Olympic Airways, Alexander was overseeing pilot instruction for Donald McCusker, a potential new recruit.
Alexander had earned his pilot’s license in 1967 and accumulated 1,500 flying hours. His poor eyesight meant he couldn’t hold an air transport license, but he could possess a commercial pilot certificate. He loved flying. It was one of the few things in his life that was truly his own, separate from his father’s overwhelming influence.
Alexander’s relationship with his father had always been complicated. He and his sister Christina had been devastated by their parents’ divorce in 1960, then horrified when their father married Jacqueline Kennedy in 1968. Alexander reportedly said about the marriage that his father loved the names and Jackie loved the money.
To make matters worse, Alexander was in a secret relationship with Fiona Campbell-Walter, the former wife of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. She was 16 years older than Alexander. Aristotle disapproved intensely. Alexander had announced to Aristotle that he would soon be leaving the company and marrying Fiona, determined to escape his father’s unbearable psychological pressures.
On that January afternoon, Alexander boarded his personal Piaggio P.136 L2 amphibious aircraft with McCusker and Donald McGregor, his regular pilot, who was recovering from an eye infection. The plan was to practice amphibious landings between the Saronic Gulf islands of Aegina and Poros.
A few seconds after takeoff from runway 33, the plane’s right wing dropped and stayed down. The plane crashed, losing control in a flight lasting no more than 15 seconds. All three men aboard suffered serious injuries.
Alexander was rushed first to the American military base hospital near the airport, then to the KAT hospital in Athens. Aristotle was in New York City when he received the news. According to witnesses, he collapsed from the shock before swiftly making his way to the airport.
The following day, January 23rd, he arrived in Athens with Jackie and went directly to the hospital. Alexander’s mother, Tina, arrived from Switzerland with her new husband, Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle’s chief business and social rival, who had married Tina after her divorce from Aristotle.
Aristotle flew English neurosurgeon Alan Richardson from London to Athens. But Richardson told him what he didn’t want to hear. Alexander had suffered serious cranial cerebral injuries. He had no chance of surviving.
At 7:00 p.m. on January 23rd, 1973, 27 hours after the crash, Alexander Onassis died. The forensic diagnosis was severe brain hemorrhage from the injuries sustained in the accident. Miraculously, the two American pilots who had been with Alexander suffered only relatively minor injuries.
The discrepancy haunted Aristotle. He refused to believe it was an accident. His son, a skilled pilot with 1,500 hours of experience, dies in a 15-second flight while the other two men survive. Impossible. It had to be sabotage. It had to be murder.
Aristotle considered having Alexander’s body cryogenically frozen but was persuaded against it. Instead, Alexander was embalmed and buried next to the chapel on Skorpios, the private island that had been the setting for so much happiness now held the body of Aristotle’s only son.
Less than a month after Alexander’s death, manslaughter proceedings were initiated against McCusker. In January 1974, six people were charged in connection with the crash, with indictments indicating that faulty controls had been fitted to the plane.
Aristotle blamed everyone: the CIA, the Greek military junta leader Georgios Papadopoulos, Stavros Niarchos, even Olympic Airways employees. In December 1974, Aristotle took out a paid advertisement offering a $1 million reward for proof that Alexander’s death had been the result of deliberate action rather than negligence.
The official inquiry had concluded it was an accident caused by faulty controls installed during maintenance. The reward was never paid. All charges were later dropped. In 1978, three years after Aristotle’s death, McCusker was awarded $800,000 by Olympic Airways.
The official cause remained what it had always been: reversed aileron connecting cables during the installation of a new control column during maintenance. But for Aristotle Onassis, the truth didn’t matter. His son was dead. His heir was gone.
Aristotle never recovered. He had survived wars, business rivalries, the destruction of his childhood home, poverty, and exile. But he could not survive the death of his son.
After Alexander’s death, Aristotle Onassis aged overnight. Friends and associates reported that the vibrant, energetic man they’d known became a shell. He had always been superstitious, and now those superstitions consumed him. He believed Jackie had brought a curse on the family. Both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated. Now his son was dead.
His relationship with Jackie deteriorated completely. She spent less and less time with him, preferring her life in New York to the grief-stricken man who blamed her for his son’s death. Christina, his daughter, made it clear that she disliked Jackie intensely. The household became toxic, filled with suspicion, grief, and resentment.
Aristotle’s health began to fail. He had suffered from respiratory problems for years, but now they worsened dramatically. His business empire, once his greatest pride, lost its appeal. What was the point of building an empire if there was no son to inherit it?
Maria Callas, the woman he had abandoned for Jackie Kennedy, became his comfort again. They spent time together in Paris, reconnecting in ways they hadn’t in years. Aristotle reportedly told Maria that he had realized she was the true love of his life. But the recognition came too late.
In early 1975, Aristotle’s condition worsened severely. He checked into the American Hospital in Paris, bringing with him a red Kashmir Hermès blanket that Maria had given him. Even at the end, surrounded by doctors and nurses, he clung to that physical reminder of the woman he had truly loved.
On March 15, 1975, at age 69, Aristotle Onassis died of respiratory failure in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. The man who had built the largest private shipping fleet in the world, who had married a president’s widow, who had amassed a fortune so vast that he was one of the few billionaires when that term actually meant something, died in a hospital bed broken by grief and illness.
He was buried on Skorpios, the island he had bought during his relationship with Maria Callas, next to his son Alexander. Later, his sister Artemis would be buried there as well. And in 1988, Christina would join them after dying of a heart attack at age 37 in Buenos Aires.
After Aristotle’s death, Christina settled with Jackie for $25 million in exchange for Jackie not contesting the will. Jackie received her agreed-upon payments for the rest of her life. Christina inherited 55 percent of her father’s fortune, then estimated at $500 million. The remaining 45 percent funded the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, established in memory of the son who had died too young.
Maria Callas never recovered from Aristotle’s death. She had sacrificed her career, her voice, her health, all for a man who had married someone else but never stopped loving her. On September 16, 1977, at age 53, she died alone and isolated in her Paris apartment of a heart attack. In 1979, her ashes were scattered off the coast of Skorpios, finally resting near the man who had been both her greatest love and her greatest pain.
Aristotle Onassis spent his life accumulating wealth and power on a scale few humans ever achieve. He built an empire from nothing, surviving catastrophes that would have destroyed lesser men. He married into shipping aristocracy, then married into American royalty. He owned an airline, controlled a casino, commanded a fleet larger than many nations’ navies.
But in the end, none of it mattered. All the money couldn’t save his son from a 15-second flight that ended in disaster. All the power couldn’t prevent the slow deterioration of his health. All the fame couldn’t fill the emptiness left by Alexander’s death.
His daughter Christina inherited his empire but not his strength. She married four times, each marriage ending in divorce. She battled weight problems, depression, and the inability to find lasting happiness despite wealth beyond imagination. When she died at 37, the empire passed to her daughter, Athena Onassis Roussel, who was only three years old.
The Christina yacht was eventually sold and converted into a floating museum. Olympic Airways was returned to the Greek government and went through various transformations. The Skorpios island remained in the family until it was eventually sold decades later.
What remains is the story. The refugee who became a billionaire. The man who loved Maria Callas but married Jackie Kennedy. The tycoon who built an empire but couldn’t protect his son. The legend who discovered too late that wealth is meaningless without the people you love.
In his handwritten will, composed during that Acapulco trip with Jackie when their relationship was already crumbling, Aristotle left instructions for what would become the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. It remains active today, supporting initiatives in education, medicine, and culture. The foundation promotes Greek culture worldwide, funds scholarships for Greek university students, and awards prizes for achievement in various fields.
It’s a fitting legacy for a man who rose from the ashes of Smyrna to build something extraordinary. But anyone who knew Aristotle Onassis in his final years would tell you that he would have traded it all, every dollar, every ship, every property and possession, for one more day with his son.
Some empires fall to invaders, some collapse under their own weight. Aristotle Onassis’s empire survived him, but the man himself fell to grief. He had conquered the business world and lost the battle that truly mattered. And that’s the loneliest fall of all.