On a warm November afternoon in 1988, in a rented house on the flat green edge of Buenos Aires, a friend found the richest woman in the world lying dead in her bath. She was 37 years old. In the rooms around her sat more than 40 different bottles of pills. She owned a private island, a fleet of oil tankers, and a yacht with her own name painted along its hull.
She had a fortune the newspapers could never quite count, somewhere near half a billion dollars. She had a little daughter, only three, asleep in another country. And she had almost no one. Thirty-seven years earlier, a Greek shipping king had looked down at his newborn girl and named the most beautiful boat on earth after her.
This is the story of everything in between. The girl whose name was on the boat came into the world on the 11th of December 1950 in a clinic in New York City, the second child and only daughter of Aristotle Socrates Onassis. Her father was already one of the richest men alive, a Greek shipping magnate whose tankers moved a good share of the world’s oil. When his daughter arrived, he did what men of his kind did with the people they owned.
He turned her into a monument. He named his private yacht the Christina, a converted warship more than 300 feet long, and he sailed it around the Mediterranean with her name on the hull for kings and film stars to admire. To the outside world it was a fairy tale, and the outside world was invited to watch. The little girl was dressed in gowns from the great fashion houses of Paris before she could speak.
She was photographed on the deck beside a swimming pool whose mosaic floor could rise on hidden machinery to become a dance floor. She had a private island waiting for her in the Ionian Sea. The magazines called her the luckiest girl in the world, and for a while nobody thought to ask the girl. Here is what the photographs did not show.
At the age of five, Christina simply stopped speaking. She went silent for reasons no one around her could name. Her parents responded in the only way very rich people knew how. They did not sit with her.
They hired specialists and put the silent child on an aircraft and flew her to Zurich to be diagnosed, as though her sadness were a mechanical fault that money could send away to be repaired. She came back and learned to speak again. But she carried something out of that silence that never left her. She was raised largely by staff, by nannies and tutors and the crew of the boat, shuttled between the great houses of a father who was always somewhere else, closing a deal, courting a starlet, building the empire.
She was schooled in England and France, sent away, a small dark girl among strangers, measured constantly against a golden older brother whom her father plainly preferred. A profile published after her death put it exactly that way. She understood from very young that her father found her plain and was ashamed of it. She had the couture and the island and the boat with her name on it.
And she did not have the one thing a child actually needs, the feeling of being wanted for herself. To understand how a fortune can kill a family, you first have to understand how much money there was. Aristotle Onassis had come from nothing, or close to it, a refugee from the Greek community of Smyrna who arrived in Argentina as a young man with a few hundred dollars and a gift for the deal. By the time Christina was a girl, he sat on top of an empire built on oil tankers, the enormous ships that carried crude across the oceans in the decades when the world’s hunger for oil seemed to have no ceiling.
He owned dozens of them. He founded Olympic Airways and made it the flag carrier of Greece. He counted prime ministers and film stars among his friends. He had not built it alone, in the sense that he had married into shipping as well as earned it.
Christina’s mother was Athina Livanos, known to everyone as Tina, the daughter of Stavros Livanos, another Greek shipping titan. When Aristotle married Tina in 1946, he joined the house of Onassis to the house of Livanos, two of the great dynasties of the sea. Christina was not simply a rich man’s daughter. She was the meeting point of two empires, and later, through her mother’s remarriage, she would be linked to a third, the house of Niarchos.
In that world a child was never only a child. A child was an alliance, a bridge, a piece on a board. The system had a single rule: succession. A fortune of that size existed to be inherited, and to be inherited, it needed an heir who could hold it.
Aristotle wanted a son. He had one, Alexander, born in 1948, two years before Christina, and from the beginning the family arranged itself around that fact. Alexander was the prince. Yet here is a number that tells the whole story of how that household worked.
Alexander, the only son of one of the richest men on earth, earned around $12,000 a year working in his father’s business. He was kept short on purpose, made to feel small beside the old man’s wealth, intimidated by it, dependent on it. If that was how the favorite child was treated, imagine the space left over for the plain silent daughter who was not expected to inherit anything except a good marriage. Daughters in the dynastic system had a specific and narrow value.
They were currency in the marriage market. Their weddings could seal alliances with other shipping houses, bind fortunes together, extend the family’s reach. A daughter who married well was an asset. A daughter who married the wrong man was a threat, a leak in the hull, a danger to the fortune itself.
From her earliest years Christina absorbed a single lesson, taught not in words but in the arrangement of her whole life. Her value lay in what she represented, not in who she was. Later, when she was grown and rich beyond measure, she would say that the only people she could truly trust were the people she was paying. When Christina was nine, her mother caught her father with the most famous voice in the world, and the family began to come apart.
The woman was Maria Callas, the great opera soprano. The affair between her and Aristotle Onassis was not a quiet thing. It played out on the deck of the yacht that bore Christina’s name, in front of guests, in front of the press, in front of the children. Tina filed for divorce in 1960, and the marriage that had joined two shipping dynasties ended in headlines around the world.
A child does not read the society columns as gossip. A child reads them as the truth about her own home, printed for strangers to enjoy. Her mother did not disappear quietly. In time Tina remarried, and here the story turns strange and dark.
She married Stavros Niarchos, who was not only another shipping billionaire but her former brother-in-law and her late sister’s widower. Niarchos had been married to Tina’s own sister Eugenia, and Eugenia had died in 1970 under circumstances the family never fully explained, involving severe distress and an overdose of barbiturates. The women of this family kept dying young, and the same shadow, the same bottles of pills, kept falling across their deaths. Then in October of 1968, her father delivered the blow that finished off any warmth left in the family.
Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated American president, the most admired woman in the world. To the public it was the wedding of the decade. To Christina it was a betrayal. She believed, and said, that Jacqueline had married her father for his money, and she never warmed to her.
The arrangements around that union, the settlements and the understandings about what she would and would not inherit, were negotiated like any other deal. When Aristotle died, his widow’s claim on the estate would have to be bought off, and it would be Christina who wrote the check. At 20, she married a divorced father of four who was old enough to be her own father, and her family nearly destroyed her for it. His name was Joseph Bolker, a real estate developer from Los Angeles, a charming and decent man by most accounts.
He was not Greek. He was not shipping. He was not rich on the Onassis scale. He was about 27 years older than she was, divorced, with four children of his own.
In the marriage market of the dynasties he was worthless as an alliance. They married in the summer of 1971 in a quick ceremony that stunned her family. It was, in its way, the bravest thing she had ever done. It was also, by the logic of her world, an act of war against her own father.
Aristotle responded like a man whose property had been stolen. He is reported to have threatened to disinherit her, to cut her off from the fortune entirely. The pressure came down on the young couple from every direction. The marriage lasted only about nine months before the divorce in 1972.
Something happened inside that brief marriage that the family would later speak of only in whispers. Members of the family said that during this period Christina attempted to take her own life. There is no medical record to confirm it, and it must be treated as a family account rather than a documented fact. But it fits everything else we know.
Here was a young woman who had finally reached for happiness on her own terms and watched her own father tear it out of her hands. On a January morning in 1973, her brother climbed into a small seaplane at Athens, and 15 seconds later the curse began. Alexander Onassis was 24 years old, the heir, the prince, the son around whom the whole machine had been built. He was at the airport in Athens that day to help check out a pilot on the family’s small amphibious aircraft, a Piaggio flying boat.
The plane took off from the runway. Within seconds something went badly wrong. The right wing dropped. The aircraft lost control and came down in a crash so violent that the young man never recovered.
He died the following day, the 23rd of January 1973, from his injuries. The effect on Aristotle Onassis is almost impossible to overstate. The man who had built the empire, who believed he could control any outcome with enough money and enough force, could not control this. His son, the whole point of the fortune, was dead at 24.
Aristotle refused to believe it was an accident. He became convinced his son had been murdered, that the crash had been sabotaged, that enemies had reached into the aircraft to kill the heir and strike at the father. He offered a reward of one million dollars for proof of deliberate action. He entertained theories that reached into the highest and darkest corners of the Cold War.
The official investigation found a mechanical cause: reversed control cables, a fault in the machine, not a plot. Then, within a year of burying her brother, Christina stood at her mother’s grave. Tina Livanos died in 1974, only months after Alexander’s crash, still a relatively young woman. The cause was reported in different ways by different sources: a heart attack in some accounts, fluid on the lungs in others, and in still others something darker, a suspected overdose of barbiturates, the same class of drugs that shadowed so many of these deaths.
The family kept the exact truth behind closed doors. But the pattern was plain to a daughter watching. Her own sister, Christina’s aunt Eugenia, had died the same way a few years earlier. Two sisters, both married in turn to the same billionaire, and both dead too young, with the same shadow of sedatives falling across their ends.
In these decades, the standard answer to a woman’s depression, anxiety, weight, or grief was a prescription. Amphetamines to keep her thin and bright, barbiturates to bring her down and let her sleep. A whole generation of wealthy, glamorous, unhappy women was quietly medicated into dependence, and a grim number of them died with those same pills in their blood. Christina was already taking the pills.
In the span of about two years she had lost her brother in a crash and her mother to whatever combination of illness and sedatives took her, and the young woman left behind reached for the same chemistry that had run through her family for a generation. In the spring of 1975, her father died, and she became the richest woman in the world on the same day she became an orphan. Aristotle Onassis had been failing for two years. On top of the grief came illness, a muscle-wasting disease called myasthenia gravis that left him weak and drooping, so weak at times that he taped his own eyelids open to see.
He died in March of 1975 in a hospital near Paris. Christina was 24 years old. In 29 months she had lost her brother, her mother, and now her father. She stood alone at the top of one of the greatest fortunes on earth, and there was no one left to share it with.
The estimates of Aristotle’s wealth at his death ranged widely, from around $500 million at the low end to as much as a billion dollars in the boldest accounts. His will split the empire roughly in two. A little over half, most often reported as 55 percent, passed to Christina. The remaining 45 percent went to fund a charitable foundation established in the name of the dead son, the Alexander S.
Onassis Foundation, so that even in the structure of the will, the favored boy who had died shaped what the surviving daughter received. She inherited the tankers, a share of the airline, the island of Skorpios, and three quarters of the yacht that carried her name. There was an older debt still to settle, the one her father’s last marriage had left behind. Buying off Jacqueline Kennedy was Christina’s first great act as heir.
The most commonly cited figure is a payment of a little over $20 million, some accounts saying around 20. 5 million, others describing a total nearer $26 million once an annuity is counted. The stepmother was paid to step aside, and the daughter she resented took full control. Everyone expected the plain, grieving, over-medicated heiress to collapse or to squander it all.
Instead, Christina Onassis did something no one predicted. She went to work. She based herself in Monte Carlo, learned the shipping trade in real detail, and began actually to run the empire. She made deals and managed the fleet through the turbulent years of the 1970s, when the oil markets heaved and many shipping fortunes were lost.
In 1982, she became the first woman ever elected to the board of the Union of Greek Ship Owners. When freight rates collapsed and famous fleets went to the wall, she kept the Onassis operation intact. Whatever else the world said about her, the men who knew ships knew she could run them. But the regard of the industry did not reach the place the wound was.
She could command a room full of ship owners in the afternoon and go home to the pills and the loneliness at night. Even as she was proving herself in the boardroom, she was marrying again. In the summer of 1975, only months after her father’s death, she married Alexander Andreadis, a Greek shipping and banking heir. On paper it was the ideal dynastic match.
It lasted about 14 months. One writer described the union as dynastic bookkeeping. Having tried marrying for herself with Bolker and been crushed for it, having now tried marrying the approved way with Andreadis and found it empty, she was running out of scripts. At the height of the Cold War, the richest capitalist woman alive married a Soviet official in Moscow, and the world could not decide whether it was love or espionage.
His name was Sergei Kauzov. He was a Soviet shipping official, a functionary of the state that stood as the great enemy of everything her family’s capitalism represented. He was not handsome in the manner of her world. He had a glass eye.
He worked for a Soviet chartering agency, and it was through the chartering of ships that he and Christina first met. In 1978, to the astonishment of two continents, she married him. The theories flew immediately. Had the KGB engineered the marriage to get its hands on the Onassis fleet, or Onassis money, or Onassis secrets?
Newspapers on both sides of the Iron Curtain speculated openly that Kauzov was an agent. The truth was harder to sell, because the truth was just a sad woman who wanted to be loved. She spent part of her marriage living behind the Iron Curtain in the gray, watched, rationed world of the Soviet Union, reportedly in a small apartment belonging to Kauzov’s mother. The woman who could have lived in any palace in Europe chose a cramped Soviet flat because a man there seemed to want her.
The marriage ended around 1980 after roughly 16 months. In the settlement, Christina is reported to have given Kauzov a parting gift that only she could give: an oil tanker of his own. She had gone behind the Iron Curtain to be loved, and she came back out having handed over a tanker, and no less alone than when she went in. The last man she married gave her the child she longed for, and then let her pay him to sleep beside her instead of his mistress.
His name was Thierry Roussel, a French businessman she had known since they were young, a handsome man from a wealthy family. In March of 1984, she married him, her fourth husband. Then on the 29th of January 1985, she gave birth to a daughter in a hospital near Paris, and named the child Athina after her own late mother. For Christina, this was everything.
A child of her own blood, a family that could not be taken by a plane crash or a divorce or a bottle of pills. Throughout his marriage to Christina, Roussel continued his relationship with another woman, a Swedish companion named Marianne Landhage, known as Gaby. He did not merely stray. He maintained a whole parallel family.
Gaby bore him children while he was married to Christina. Rather than lose him, rather than be left alone again, Christina is reported to have paid her own husband to spend his nights with her rather than with his mistress. The heiress to the greatest fortune on earth, the woman worth close to half a billion dollars, reduced to writing payments to keep her own husband in her own bed. The marriage ended in 1987 in divorce, less than three years after it began.
Roussel went back to Gaby, whom he would later marry. Christina was left with the one thing that had gone right, her daughter Athina, and the wreckage of everything else. By the middle of the 1980s, her body had become a battlefield. Her weight swung violently from crash-diet lows to more than 200 pounds in the hard stretches.
She spent weeks at a time in expensive Swiss clinics. To stay thin and awake, she took amphetamines. To come down and sleep, she took barbiturates. Diet pills and sleeping pills and nerve pills, the full pharmacy of the wealthy unhappy woman of the 20th century.
She had been formally diagnosed with clinical depression by around the age of 30. She had been hospitalized at least once back in the 1970s for an overdose of sleeping pills. Christina was obsessed with Coca-Cola, and later with Diet Coke, reportedly drinking around 20 cans a day. She is said to have paid enormous sums, tens of thousands of dollars, to have her preferred version flown to her by private jet when she could not get it locally.
She kept an entourage on retainer, friends and companions paid handsomely to be available to travel with her, to fill the rooms so she would not be alone. There are reports of monthly payments running to tens of thousands of dollars to keep particular people near her. She swung, those who knew her said, between lavish generosity and sudden cruelty toward whoever happened to be standing closest. She had one true thing left, her daughter.
In the last stretch of her life, Athina was the center around which whatever hope Christina had left still turned. The little girl was only three years old by the autumn of 1988. It was with the child on her mind that Christina traveled in the late autumn of 1988 to Argentina, the country where her father had first made his name, to stay with wealthy friends on the flat green land outside Buenos Aires. On what turned out to be her final day, the richest woman in the world was not scheming or despairing.
She was making a mother’s plan. She was on the telephone about buying a piece of land so that her three-year-old daughter could have a horse, imagining a future on a ranch under the wide Argentine sky. On the night before, she had been at a country club party, and by the accounts of those there, she had seemed well, sociable, herself. There was no scene, no obvious crisis, no warning that anyone reported afterward.
Then on the 19th of November 1988, in the bathroom of the house where she was staying at Tortugas outside Buenos Aires, she was found dead. She was 37 years old. What actually killed her has never been fully settled. The first official finding was a heart attack brought on by fluid on the lungs, a condition called pulmonary edema, and the initial autopsy reported no evidence of suicide, of overdose, or of foul play.
But about three weeks later, traces of a barbiturate-based sedative, a medication called Optalidon, were confirmed in her system, and investigators noted the large number of medications in her rooms. A judge concluded that excessive intake of barbiturates could not be ruled out, though the exact quantity was never established. Some who loved her, including an aunt, insisted that she had died of natural causes and would never have taken her own life. They pointed to the party the night before and to the plans for the ranch and the pony, the plans of a woman looking forward.
Others looked at the 40 bottles and the barbiturate traces and the long history of pills and drew a darker conclusion. We do not know, and we may never know, whether the pills that ended her were an accident of long dependence or something more deliberate. What we know for certain is the shape of it. A woman who had spent her life managing an unmanageable grief with chemicals died at last with those chemicals in her blood, alone in a bathroom far from home.
Her mother’s death had carried the same shadow of barbiturates. Her aunt’s death had carried it too. The pattern had finished itself on the daughter. They brought her body home to Greece and buried her on Skorpios, the private island her father had bought as a kingdom, in the family plot beside the father and the brother she had lost 13 years and a lifetime before.
And in a nursery in Europe, a little girl of three who would remember almost nothing of her mother was now the heir to everything. Athina Onassis Roussel was raised in Switzerland by her father, Thierry Roussel, and by Gaby Landhage, the woman whose parallel family had helped destroy Christina’s marriage. The daughter of the richest woman in the world grew up, in effect, in the household of the mistress. A board of administrators managed the money until the girl came of age.
On her 18th birthday in 2003, Athina took control of her mother’s inheritance. The newspapers crowned her one of the youngest billionaires in the world, the poor little rich girl for a new generation. Athina did not go into shipping. She became a competitive show jumper, an equestrian, and competed internationally, even representing Greece.
She married a Brazilian show jumper, Álvaro de Miranda Neto, known as Doda, in 2005. The marriage did not last either. They separated after roughly a decade and divorced in 2017, amid disputes over money and horses and the terms of their parting. And one by one, the pieces of the empire were sold or slipped away, until the most sacred piece of all was gone.
In the years after she inherited, Athina let go of Skorpios, the island where her mother, grandfather, and uncle lay buried. The island passed through a set of trusts to the family of a Russian billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev, in a deal reported at around 153 million. The private kingdom that Aristotle Onassis had bought to hold his dynasty forever became the property of strangers. The Onassis name no longer even owned the island where its dead were laid.
Christina Onassis lived almost her entire life in public, photographed, gossiped about, pitied, and mocked. And the pity was always a kind of entertainment. We watched her gain and lose weight on our magazine covers. We read about her marriages as if they were a serial.
We called her the luckiest woman alive, and we called her cursed. And both were ways of not looking at the actual person. The woman who believed since she was five years old that she was unlovable, who lost her whole family in 29 months, who paid her own husband to stay the night. The fortune everyone envied was the thing that isolated her.
She was not destroyed in spite of the money. She was destroyed by it, because the money made it impossible for anyone, including Christina herself, to see her as anything other than an inheritance. The curse that people spoke of was never really supernatural. It was the fortune itself, doing to each of them what it had always done, gathering them up and setting them apart and leaving them alone at the top with no one who wanted them for anything but the estate.
She said it herself in the end, as plainly as anyone could. She said that she had lost them all, her father, her mother, her brother, and that she was completely alone. She had a private island, a fleet of tankers, and a yacht with her own name painted along its hull. And she was right.
She was completely alone.
