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

He was an experienced pilot who had flown everything from Piper Cubs to big commercial jets, and his calendar was filled with appointments related to aviation, his great passion. He was booked to have lunch with two German pilots at his favorite fish restaurant in Athens, Antonopoulos. And right after lunch, he had made a date, at his father’s urging, to train an American pilot in the operation of the family’s Piaggio amphibian airplane.

It was rare to see the young man in a good mood. Over the past couple of years, the Onassis family had been battered by one crisis after another.

To begin with, Alexander’s mother had divorced her second husband, the Marquess of Blandford, who was related to the Churchills, and married Ari’s archrival, Stavros Niarchos. To her son, Tina’s choice of a third mate seemed totally inexplicable, since Niarchos was widely suspected of having murdered his previous wife, Tina’s own sister Eugenie.

Then, Christina Onassis, Alexander’s sister, had run off and married an obscure American real estate man named Joseph Bolker. This had so enraged Ari that he began tapping the couple’s phones, and had them followed by private detectives. Christina finally threw up her hands in surrender and started divorce proceedings.

Then, father and son had been engaged for months in a brutal argument over Alexander’s mistress, Fiona Thyssen, a divorced baroness who was old enough to be his mother. Ari had more than once threatened to disinherit Alexander if he married Fiona.

And finally, there was the biggest problem of all—Jackie.

Alexander never called his stepmother by her proper name. To show his contempt, he referred to her as “the widow,” or “the geisha,” or “that woman.”

One night at Maxim’s, after Ari had berated Alexander for his romantic involvement with Fiona, the subject shifted to a showgirl who was taking an older man for everything he was worth. Alexander turned to Jackie, and said:

“You certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong in a girl marrying for money, do you?”

At the last moment, one of the Germans developed stomach problems, and Alexander’s lunch was canceled. He left for the airport on an empty stomach. About an hour and a half later, a secretary at the Olympic office received a shocking phone call from Athens International Airport.

Alexander’s SX-BDC Piaggio 136 had taken off from runway F, banked sharply, cartwheeled for 460 feet, and then crashed nosefirst into the ground. Rescue teams who rushed to the scene of the accident found the badly mangled body of a man whose face and skull were reduced to pulp. The only way they could identify him was by the monogram on his bloodstained handkerchief. It was AO—Alexander Onassis.

Before the secretary had a chance to digest this cataclysmic news, Aristotle Onassis’s cousin, Costa Konialidas, arrived in the office. In tears, the secretary told him what had happened. For a long moment, Konialidas was speechless. Then he said:

“How can I find a way to tell Aristo?”

“ALL MY SHIPS, ALL MY PROPERTY, ALL MY PLANES …”

By the time Jackie and Ari arrived at the hospital on the outskirts of Athens, a team of neurosurgeons had performed two operations on Alexander’s crushed skull. Under the white hospital sheets, the young man looked as though he had already been mummified. His head was wrapped in a bandage. There were two holes for his eyes, which were closed, and an opening for oxygen.

His aunts—Artemis, Kalliroi, and Merope—sat in a corner of the room, three Greek Furies dressed in black from head to toe, keening and moaning. In the corridor outside the room, family members spoke in hushed tones. Tina and her husband Stavros Niarchos had flown in from Switzerland. Christina had arrived from Brazil, Fiona Thyssen from Germany.

“Only a miracle will save him,” a doctor told Ari.

Over the next two days, Ari brought in top physicians from around the world—a neurosurgeon from Boston, a heart specialist from Dallas, a brain specialist from London. While they worked feverishly to save his son, Ari summoned a fourth doctor—a plastic surgeon from Geneva by the name of Dr. Popen.

When Popen arrived the next day, Ari took him aside.

“You must fix his face,” Ari said. “You must make him look like Alexander again so that I can remember his face as it was.”

Alexander was slipping deeper and deeper into a coma, and the specialists objected to the operation by Popen. But Ari insisted that Popen go ahead even though, for all intents and purposes, Alexander was already dead.

At seven o’clock that evening, Ari returned to the Olympic Airways office. His black-and-silver hair had turned white.

“I have lost my boy,” he said.

“No, I do not believe it,” a secretary replied.

He asked her to call the hospital. When she reached the chief doctor, Ari took the phone.

“If I give you all my ships, all my property, all my planes, and all the money that I have,” he said, “would there be any hope to save my boy?”

The doctor told Ari that his son had suffered irreversible brain damage. Alexander was neurologically dead. Only the machines were keeping him alive. There was nothing more that could be done for him.

“We can keep him alive through extraordinary measures for three or four days at the most,” the doctor said.

“All right then,” said Ari, “leave him be in calm.”

The tubes were removed from Alexander’s body, and within hours, he was gone.

“We decided it was in vain, so we gave the doctors the orders to stop,” Ari said later. “We weren’t killing him. We were just letting him die. There is no question of euthanasia here. If he had lived, he would have been dead as a human being. His brain was destroyed and his features completely disfigured. Nothing could be done for him.”

HUBRIS

At first Ari wanted Alexander’s body to be deep-frozen and kept in a cryonic state until medical science could find a way to rebuild his shattered brain and bring him back to life. To carry out his wishes, Ari instructed