Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

and they paid a call on the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church there, who blessed them as “the world’s greatest singer and the greatest seaman of the modern world, the new Ulysses.” After that, Maria began acting like a different woman. Her singing career, which she had treated until now like a religious calling, suddenly seemed unimportant, and she retired from the stage. She allowed herself to be swept into the vortex of Ari’s life—drinking until dawn at Régine’s, attending other people’s opening nights, shopping for new clothes, going to the races, gambling at Monte Carlo.

“[But] Onassis, a master of the art of pleasing women, was no less a master of the art of crushing them,” wrote Maria’s biographer, Arianna Stassinopoulos. “And there was something in Maria’s way of treating him like a sultan or a god that brought out the despot in him. Underneath the easy sophistication of the cafe society habitué (and not that far below the surface), Onassis had retained all the primitive male impulses of the old-fashioned Greek….

“[A] 11 the suppressed violence in him came out in the way he treated her, especially in front of his children,” Stassinopoulos continued. “He would walk ahead with them, leaving her behind, and he belittled her constantly: ‘What are you? Nothing. You must have a whistle in your throat that no longer works.’ ”

One of Maria’s friends, Maggie van Zuylen, tried to comfort her.

“Of course he loves you,” she said. “That’s why he yells and abuses you and puts you down. If he didn’t love you he would just ignore you and be totally indifferent to you.”

Ari’s violence and infidelities were not Maria’s only problems. She also had to contend with Ari’s formidable sister Artemis.

A fragile-looking woman who did not weigh a hundred pounds, Artemis Garofolidis was a tiny dynamo. She was married to a wealthy doctor of orthopedics who spent more time pursuing his favorite hobby, hunting, than he did attending to patients in his office. His long absences were explained by the fact that he and his wife had suffered the loss of their only child, a daughter named Popin, who died of a rare disease at the age of eighteen. Artemis was left to focus her inexhaustible supply of energy on her brother Aristo. She doted on him and made no secret of her contempt for “that opera singer.”

“They are both big bosses,” she said of Ari and Maria. “Neither one knows how to give in. I do not want my brother to marry Maria. She is not right for him. Her personality is too strong for him. She is not elegant enough for him.”

The Onassis-Callas affair fascinated the European press. Wherever Ari went, reporters wanted to know: Did he love Callas?

“Of course, how could I help but be flattered if a woman with the class of Maria Callas fell in love with someone like me?” he told reporters in Venice. “Who wouldn’t?”

All this was too much for Ari’s wife Tina, who flew off with their children to New York to seek a divorce.

“She has kidnapped the children and is demanding $20 million ransom,” Ari complained.

Ari’s Greek sense of honor demanded restitution. While he tried to work out the best possible terms of divorce, Costa Gratsos, his friend since the Argentinean days, took matters into his own hands. Gratsos telephoned reporters on several of New York’s tabloid newspapers, and fed them outrageous—and false—accusations against Tina, Ari’s soon-to-be ex-wife.

Gratsos told the reporters that Tina Livanos Onassis was a heartless woman and a compulsive materialist who was spending Ari blind. Gratsos would use the same smear tactics against Jackie many years later.

Like most ne’er-do-well sons, Gratsos had an inflated sense of his own importance, and he loved the company of glamorous stars like Maria Callas. When Ari and Maria visited New York, Gratsos made his apartment available, providing them with the privacy they required. He tried to convince Ari that, while Tina might have been unwilling to put up with his long absences and chronic infidelities, Maria loved him enough to tolerate anything.

But Gratsos miscalculated Maria’s tolerance for repeated public humiliations. When Maria heard that Jackie Kennedy had been invited for a recuperative cruise on the Christina after Patrick Bouvier’s death, she refused to go along.

“The watching game was turning deadly serious, and the pain, killing,” wrote Arianna Stassinopoulos. “[Maria] knew that Jackie had been given the Ithaca suite, the suite reserved for special guests, the suite that was Churchill’s, the suite she herself had stayed in. She knew, because she had lived it so many times, the routine on the Christina, the times for lunch and dinner, the ritual cocktails on the deck at sunset; she knew the maids who would look after Jackie, the waiters who would wait on Jackie, the chef who would cook for Jackie…. In her private hell, Maria lived their cruise with them. It was at this time that she began to find it impossible to sleep without pills.”

When Ari flew to Washington to be by Jackie’s side after John Kennedy’s assassination, Maria was apoplectic.

“Aristotle is obsessed by famous women,” she said. “He was obsessed with me because I was famous. Jackie is even more famous.”

However, neither Maria nor anyone else could have predicted what the end of her affair with Ari would be like. It dragged on for years, and it resembled the last scene of an opera in which the heroine dies a thousand deaths.

“TYPICAL JACKIE”

In the summer of 1967, Jackie accepted an invitation from Ari to visit Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea.

“That was the year I went to Skorpios with Gianni Agnelli [the Fiat automobile heir],” said a man who was a friend of the Onassis family. “It was August. We came suddenly …; we were cruising down to Greece in Gianni’s boat, pulled up at the island, dropped anchor, and sent a message that we were there.

“Down came Onassis with his car, and just as he arrived, we saw