In the early afternoon of October 20, 1968, on a small island in the Ionian Sea, a Greek Orthodox priest prepared a small candlelit church for a wedding. The church was called Panagitsa, the little church of the Holy Virgin. Rain fell on the island of Skorpios that day. Outside the courtyard, about fifty journalists who had come by boat from a neighboring island waited under the rain for a glimpse of the bride.
The ceremony began at four in the afternoon. Two children carried the candles, a seven-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, and they were the children of an assassinated American president. The bride was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, then thirty-nine years old and perhaps the most admired woman in the world. This is the story of Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipping magnate from Smyrna who built the largest privately owned fleet on earth, managed his whims the way corporations manage their acquisitions, married the most admired woman in the world after the assassination of the only Kennedy who could have prevented it, kept a mistress in Paris two streets away from his marital apartment, and died in 1975 while his lawyers were still preparing the divorce papers that would have humiliated his wife.
Onassis was born in January 1906 in the Karatas district of Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The exact day cannot be determined because the records that would have established it burned with most of the city in 1922. The commonly accepted date is January 20. The destruction of the records left room for dispute, so much so that one historian placed his birth in 1903, suggesting that Onassis later subtracted three years from his age to evade Turkish conscription.
The Argentine passport he later carried showed a different year and an entirely different city of birth. That a man could have a negotiable date of birth is useful to remember when evaluating everything that followed, because the habit of arranging the facts of his life to fit the moment began at the very start. His father, Socrates Onassis, was a tobacco merchant and banker counted among the city’s wealthy, and the boy grew up in comfort that made what followed all the crueler. In the early twentieth century, Karatas was one of the thriving Greek quarters of a city whose Greek presence on the Aegean coast dated back to antiquity.
The Onassis family was Greek Orthodox, commercially established, and safely positioned within a Greek community that seemed, by every measure, permanent in Smyrna. That appearance evaporated in a single September. He was sixteen years old in September 1922 when the Turkish army entered Smyrna and the fire began. From the deck of a ship in the harbor, he watched his birthplace burn.
The family fortune was destroyed. Three of his uncles and an aunt were among the dead. His father was imprisoned and sentenced to death. What the boy did to free him became the story Onassis told decades later to the journalist Peter Evans, whom he personally summoned to write his biography.
According to that account, the teenager entered a sexual relationship with an older Turkish lieutenant, and that relationship secured his father’s release and the return of some confiscated family property. This story cannot be independently confirmed. It rests on what Onassis himself chose to reveal to a single biographer. Evans, who spent nine months in intense conversation with him, would later describe Onassis as a monster.
What matters is not whether every detail of that disclosure was true. What matters is what the man believed the incident had taught him. That intimacy was something to be spent like currency to buy a ticket out of a burning place. The lesson he carried from Smyrna would govern the rest of his dealings with the world.
The man who entered the church of Panagitsa in 1968 had been spending people for nearly half a century by then. He had simply become rich enough that the currency never ran out. The boy from Karatas had converted one catastrophe into a practical theory of human relations, and he never revised it. Every subsequent relationship in his life would be measured against the lesson he learned at sixteen on a ship’s deck.
He had watched his city burn from the deck of a ship that had been arranged for him in exchange for what he had proven willing to do for an older Turkish lieutenant. People could be spent. That premise governed everything that followed in the life of Aristotle Onassis. In August 1923, Aristotle Onassis sailed to Argentina on a Nansen passport, a document issued to stateless refugees, with somewhere between sixty and two hundred fifty dollars in his pocket, depending on which account one trusts.
He worked nights as a keyboard operator in Buenos Aires. He ran a tobacco import company during the day, drawing on connections that had survived his father’s old trade. Within six years of his arrival, he had obtained Argentine citizenship. Shortly after that, he possessed his first million dollars in capital, the first of many milestones he would treat as routine business indicators.
In 1932, while the Great Depression drove ship prices down to a fraction of their value, he bought his first six cargo ships. From cargo ships he moved to oil tankers, building larger and larger vessels, until in 1954 alone he contracted for seventeen supertankers at once. Nearly two decades after stepping off the boat in Buenos Aires, he owned the largest private cargo fleet on earth, a fleet many writers compared to a national navy. The ways it was built did not remain clean, and the United States government eventually made that a matter of public record.
The investigation that led to the settlement began in 1950 when CIA officers, based on photographic evidence, determined that Greek shipping magnates resident in New York were transporting cargo on American-built ships not only for the United States and its allies but also for North Korea and China. The Korean War was at its most bloody stage. Intelligence opened an investigation. The charge that resulted was narrower and more technical: conspiracy to defraud the United States in the illegal acquisition of twenty-three surplus American ships under a 1946 law that prohibited non-citizen control of American-flagged vessels.
In December 1955, Onassis agreed to pay seven million dollars in fines. Criminal fines of one hundred sixty thousand dollars were imposed on six of his companies, all of which pleaded guilty. Onassis himself emerged without a conviction in his personal name, as the corporate entities he controlled absorbed the official stigma. That distinction mattered to him and to no one else.
It became the model for the rest of his life: place the liability in the structure, keep the man clean. The corporate vehicles he used were registered in half a dozen jurisdictions—Panama, Liberia, Argentina, Greece—each chosen to exploit a particular tax or regulatory exemption. The man in the Argentine passport, in his Greek shipping registers, and in the Liberian flag-of-convenience files was, depending on the document one consulted, three different versions of the same person. The seven-million-dollar fine, enormous at the time, was for him like a parking ticket to an ordinary man.
He had learned in Smyrna that the world could be bought out of. The Department of Justice had just confirmed that lesson on a grand scale. The man who emerged from the 1955 settlement was wealthier than the man who entered it. The seven-million-dollar fine did not slow the fleet.
The tanker contracts were not cancelled. The countries he carried oil for continued to deal with him. What he needed now was a stage worthy of the man he believed himself to be. He named his yacht Christina O after his daughter and turned it into a five-hundred-foot declaration of what unlimited money could buy when restraint ceased to be a consideration.
The ship had originally been HMCS Stormont, a Canadian frigate that had escorted Atlantic convoys during the Second World War for the Royal Canadian Navy. Onassis acquired it in the early 1950s at a price barely above scrap value. The rebuild took four years and millions of dollars. This was a time when most yacht owners measured their vessels in tens of meters.
Christina O was about one hundred fifty meters long. It carried a crew of more than fifty, making it operationally not a yacht so much as a small ship running under a private flag. The crew lived aboard year-round while the owner traveled, which he did relentlessly. The guests who passed through it were the names of that era, and those names became the prizes just as the prizes in his father’s tobacco shop had once been products.
The interior took years and a small fortune to finish. There was a swimming pool whose mosaic floor rose on hydraulic systems to become a dance floor. There were taps that pumped both saltwater and fresh. There was an operating room.
There was a bar called Ari’s Bar where the footrests were made from sperm whale teeth. The bar stools were upholstered in leather tanned from whale foreskin. The interior design was executed by a team of European designers, but the most distinctive details were Onassis’s own contributions. The bar stools were one of those contributions.
Some of those whales came from his own whaling fleet, which the Peruvian navy intercepted in November 1954 for hunting inside waters Peru claimed as its own. A Peruvian maritime court fined him three million dollars on the thirtieth of that month. The whaling fleet operated on the same logic as everything else he did: sailing into waters another state claimed, taking what he wanted until a navy stopped him. The Peruvian fine, like the American settlement a year later, was merely a cost of doing business the way he chose.
He hunted the whales. He skinned them. He upholstered his furniture in their most private anatomy. Then he built a comic routine around making his guests sit on it.
The bar stools gave birth to the phrase the yacht is best remembered for. He would seat a female guest, like Greta Garbo or Grace Kelly, and tell her she was sitting on the biggest prick in the world. No contemporary book or interview has ever been found that records those words for the first time. The phrase traveled into yachting journalism the way such things do, repeated until repetition became evidence.
It survives because it is exactly the kind of thing the documented facts about this man make plausible: the joke of a man who had decided that other people existed primarily for his amusement. The yacht functioned as a theater, and everyone who boarded it became an element in a continuous performance about Aristotle Onassis. The yacht was where Aristotle Onassis became entirely himself, surrounded by guests whose presence depended on his hospitality. Tolerance for his behavior was purchased by that very fact.
A man could show you what he really valued if you gave him an unlimited budget and an audience with no power to object. Onassis showed it. Soon the yacht Christina O hosted the cruise that ended two marriages in a single summer on the Mediterranean. On December 28, 1946, Onassis married Athina Livanos, called Tina, the seventeen-year-old daughter of shipping magnate Stavros Livanos.
The groom was in his forties. The marriage was, by all accounts, a business alliance in shipping: a marriage arranged by two Greek shipping families for the same reason royal families once arranged theirs. The couple had two children, Alexander in 1948 and Christina in 1950. For a decade, the marriage maintained the form the alliance required.
Then on September 3, 1957, at a party given in her honor in Venice by the American hostess Elsa Maxwell, Onassis met the soprano Maria Callas, the most famous opera singer of her generation. Callas was at that time married to the Italian industrialist Giovanni Battista Meneghini. He would later refer to the natural curiosity that arose between them, being the two most famous Greeks alive in the world. Within two years, that curiosity had become the central fact in the lives of four people.
In the summer of 1959, Onassis organized a Mediterranean cruise aboard Christina O. On July 22, the guests assembled in Monaco. Among them were Sir Winston Churchill, Maria Callas, her husband Meneghini, and Onassis’s wife Tina. The cruise was, by all contemporary accounts, where the affair began.
His obituary in The Times later recorded that cruise with unusual precision. By the time the cruise began, the gossip columns had already begun linking Onassis and Callas, and by the time it ended, it was clear that both the Onassis marriage and the Meneghini marriage would end as well. Within weeks, Callas separated from Meneghini. The following June, Tina filed for divorce in New York, citing adultery with a woman she referred to only as JR to avoid putting Callas’s name in the public record.
The divorce was finalized in June 1960. What Callas gave up to be near Onassis was more than a husband. Before Onassis, she had been the most disciplined artist in the opera world, a woman whose voice was the product of relentless work. The years she spent with him saw that voice decline, as her life reorganized itself around a man who treated her presence as a comfort rather than a professional mission.
The relationship never took her toward what she wanted, marriage and a child. It took her steadily away from the stage that had made her a star. The discipline that produced that voice required the life Callas had lived before Onassis: the rehearsals, the isolation, a schedule built around performance dates. Life with Onassis was nightclubs in Monte Carlo, dinners aboard Christina O, travel arranged around his calendar, not hers.
By the early 1960s, the voice that had defined opera for a decade was audibly weaker. The decline was not steady. It was an erosion that became apparent in one performance and then receded, only to return, an unstable course for a singer whose instrument depended on conditions she no longer controlled. The critics who had once called her the greatest singer of her generation began writing about a decline they could only speculate about.
The most likely cause sat in the front row at most of her remaining performances. Onassis had taken her out of the rehearsal schedule her voice required, and the voice was responding to the change in her circumstances by losing the very qualities her audiences paid to hear. She would remain near him, two streets from his deathbed, sixteen years after the cruise that began everything. The first Mrs.
Onassis died in Paris in 1974 of a barbiturate overdose. She was the first of the women in this story to be destroyed by proximity to him. Before Jackie, there was her sister. During the early 1960s, while Jacqueline Kennedy was First Lady of the United States, Onassis was conducting an affair with her younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, then Princess Lee Radziwill, a prominent socialite married to a Polish prince.
The relationship is documented in the reports of Peter Evans and confirmed through multiple accounts. It placed Onassis inside the Kennedy family orbit through the First Lady’s own sister, a situation the President’s brother found intolerable. According to Evans, Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, was so angered by Onassis’s proximity to the White House and to the two Bouvier sisters that he ordered Jackie to tell her Greek friend that he would not return until after Jack’s reelection, a very long time, or perhaps never at all. This account rests entirely on what Evans wrote in his 2004 book Nemesis and has never been confirmed by any independent document, witness, or recording.
It is consistent with the documented enmity between the two men, but its sole source is a single secondary one and must be treated on that basis. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The state funeral took place three days later. Onassis was in Washington that night.
The more recent and detailed account, given by biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, has Onassis calling Jackie to tell her he was in town and staying at a hotel, leaving her with no choice but to invite him to the White House, where he stayed in a vacant staff residence. Another more widespread version has Lee extending the invitation on Jackie’s behalf, because it would not have been proper for Jackie to appear to invite him herself. In either case, Onassis was among the few people hosted at the White House during the funeral period.
He was not invited to Arlington. He did not attend the ceremonies. He remained in the nearly empty house while the nation buried its president, and afterward he was invited into the widow’s private quarters. In the years following Dallas, there was also money moving to Jackie, though the evidence must be scrutinized rather than accepted at face value.
Peter Evans reports in Nemesis that Jackie, under financial strain as a widow, received cash from Onassis in envelopes, up to one hundred thousand dollars a year, a specific mechanism that rests on Evans alone and has no documentary support. The facts surrounding this matter are more solid: the congressional widow’s pension and income from her late husband’s estate were real but limited. The costs of the life Jackie was expected to maintain were not. Historians who have studied the period acknowledge that generous allowances from Onassis were welcome by 1968.
The picture that closes the chapter is of a man positioned at the heart of national mourning by his usefulness rather than his welcome. He had been the sister’s lover, and he was tolerated as the widow’s guest. He was present in the house the night of the funeral, not because anyone wanted him there, but because he had made himself, as he always did, the person with the resources a grieving woman needed. That arrangement was, in its own way, the Smyrna lesson applied on the widest possible scale.
The Smyrna lesson held. He spent his money to get into that room. He had spent his money to get out of every other room since 1922, and the lesson had outlived the city that taught it to him. The most sensational claim attached to those years is that Jackie and Robert Kennedy became lovers.
This claim must be treated with the care the evidence requires, because its principal source is a writer whose entire body of work has been discredited. David Heymann, in his 2009 book Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, claimed a four-year affair beginning in late 1963 and continuing until Bobby entered the presidential race in 1968. He cited prominent figures including Pierre Salinger, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , but Heymann’s credibility collapsed under examination.
A 2014 Newsweek investigation by writer David K. Johnston concluded his biographies were filled with errors and fabrications. NPR issued a public correction in 2015 after relying on one of his books. Writer John Dean stated plainly that Heymann was a fraud.
Any claim resting on Heymann alone cannot be presented as fact. Many of the most dramatic details in this part of the story rest on Heymann alone. One scene illustrates the problem precisely. On May 27, 1964, two days before what would have been the late president’s forty-seventh birthday, the family and some friends gathered for a dinner cruise aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia.
Arthur Schlesinger was among them, a detail confirmed by his own records and one guest’s later account. Heymann’s book claims that Bobby and Jackie disappeared below deck while Ethel remained above, and quotes Schlesinger describing them on their return as looking intimate and relaxed like Cheshire cats. The cruise is real. The quotation attributed to Schlesinger does not appear in the authorized published edition of his diaries, edited by his sons from an archive of six thousand pages.
There is no way to verify the original manuscript without the access Heymann claimed to have had. The same applies to a remark Onassis reportedly made to Heymann that he could “bury that idiot,” even if he would lose Jackie in the process. Its source is an unnamed informant in a discredited book. The same pattern repeats in the sensational claims.
A well-known, credible figure is invoked. A vivid scene is constructed. Then verification becomes impossible because the only path to it runs through this writer. The journalistic record has destroyed that claim.
What can be said responsibly is more limited and therefore more useful. The British biographer Sarah Bradford independently alleged an unusual relationship between Bobby and Jackie in her 2000 book America’s Queen, drawing on her own unnamed sources, lending the general thesis weight that Heymann’s book does not provide. Kennedy family members have denied it, with Robert Kennedy Jr. calling the claims a total exaggeration.
The fair verdict is that closeness between them is plausible, but the individual scenes remain unproven. A story this important deserves to be told without claiming a certainty it has not earned. The honest summary of the evidence is that Bobby and Jackie shared a deep relationship of some kind, that the romantic claims rest largely on a fabulist author, and that the true version cannot be reconstructed from available sources. What the available evidence does confirm is that Onassis resented that closeness, that the Kennedy family resented his, and that the hatred between Onassis and Robert Kennedy was real enough to leave traces in the public record on both sides.
What can be stated with certainty is what happened next. Whatever the truth of the relationship between Jackie and Robert Kennedy, the man who was said to have sworn that her marriage to Onassis would happen only over his dead body was about to enter the kitchen of a hotel in Los Angeles. On June 5, 1968, in a hotel kitchen corridor at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, moments after his victory speech in the California Democratic primary, Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy. He died the next day.
He was forty-two years old. Whatever the truth of his relationship with Jackie, his death removed the only Kennedy who still stood between her and Aristotle Onassis. Four and a half months later, on October 20, 1968, she married Onassis on the island of Skorpios. That intervening period is the core of the argument of that chapter, and those around Jackie understood it that way.
Jackie made the decision in such secrecy that she told no one, not even her sister. Lee learned of the engagement not from Jackie but from Onassis himself, who called her by telephone while she was vacationing in Tunisia. The call was made to deliver a personal invitation and, by several accounts, to plead with Lee to attend. Lee had been his mistress earlier.
Now Onassis was asking her to stand at her sister’s wedding to that man. The distressed Lee called Truman Capote to tell him what she considered an unimaginable betrayal. She came anyway. She arrived in time to be part of the wedding at Aristotle’s invitation, not her sister’s.
The speed of the matter troubled even those closest to Jackie. Capote, to whom Lee carried her grief, would become the keeper of the sisters’ wounds. The rift between Jackie and Lee that began that autumn never fully healed. That woman, who stood as a bridesmaid at a wedding she learned of from the groom himself, remained offended for the rest of her life.
There is a conflicting account claiming Lee did not attend the wedding at all and sent a telegram instead. The photographic record of Lee and her daughter arriving in Athens en route to Skorpios on the wedding day, along with the confirmations of leading biographers, settles the matter in favor of her attendance. She was there in the small rain-soaked church, witnessing her sister’s marriage to the man who had been her own lover. Onassis had personally begged her to attend, while her sister had told her nothing at all.
The accounts of that betrayal were settled decades later, and done so with great coldness. When Jackie died in 1994, her will contained one sentence concerning the sister who had been her bridesmaid, stating that she had left her nothing because she had already given her enough during her lifetime: a sentence that left Lee nothing while establishing trusts for Lee’s children. The bride who told no one had arranged matters herself, deciding who would be informed and who excluded, both at the engagement and in the will, and the symmetry between the two silences reflects a deliberately managed life. The Skorpios wedding itself was small and intimate, staged almost entirely for the people who were not invited.
The journalists who crossed the water in the rain to stand outside the courtyard were the audience the ceremony was designed to keep at a distance. The silence surrounding the wedding carried its own message. The most famous American widow had made a choice, and that choice was hers alone. What Jackie was entering into at Skorpios was a contract her brother-in-law himself had helped negotiate.
The number everyone remembers, one hundred seventy items, comes from a single named witness with an interest in the matter. Christian Cafarakis, the former chief steward aboard Christina, sold what he revealed to a London newspaper in 1971. Jackie’s office rushed to deny Cafarakis, with her assistant Nancy Tuckerman calling the contract completely fabricated and ridiculous. The number itself cannot be confirmed.
Later accounts inflated it to one hundred seventy-three or nearly two hundred. What can be confirmed is that an official marriage document did exist. The notarized settlement document later sold at auction, signed by Jackie and Christina Onassis, refers directly to the original agreement made at the marriage. The document was real, even if the details of its contents remain claims in conflict.
The clauses everyone quotes are a steward’s account. The existence of the agreement is established in the records. The negotiations behind it were conducted by professionals on both sides. Ted Kennedy, Jackie’s brother-in-law, opened the negotiations on her behalf and was prepared to accept around one and a half million dollars.
Hugh Auchincloss, Jackie’s mother’s husband, urged asking for more, and the matter went to André Meyer, the Lazard Frères banker trusted by the Kennedy family. Meyer was angered by the initial figure and pushed it upward, reportedly proposing twenty million before Onassis warned him that his client might price herself out of the market. The notarized document confirms a payment of two million dollars at the marriage, not the three million some biographers cite. The steward’s accounts describe the remaining details precisely: monthly cash allowances for personal expenses, separate bedrooms in each of the couple’s six residences, trusts for her children with annual interest paid to her, and an annual allowance for what Cafarakis called her safety and well-being, which included a budget for round-the-clock bodyguards.
The divorce provision was set at about seventeen million if Onassis ended the marriage. The figure that explains the deal is the one Greek law would have imposed automatically. Under Greek compulsory inheritance rules in 1968, a widow was entitled to a fixed share of her husband’s estate, one-eighth of an estate later estimated at about five hundred million dollars. That share would have come to about sixty-two million at his death.
By signing the contract, Jackie traded the larger automatic inheritance for guaranteed cash in the present and a fixed number in the future. She was buying security at a discount, trading a widow’s uncertain fortune for a certain monthly income. That trade made sense for a woman who had already watched from the passenger seat in Dallas how quickly wealth could turn into widowhood. The conflicting financial figures in the various accounts are worth noting, as they show how a disputed document acquires false precision through retelling.
Reports of first-year spending ranged between five hundred eighty thousand and one and a half million dollars. Journalist Fred Sparks calculated the couple’s total spending at an average of more than three hundred eighty thousand dollars per week. That is the basis for his book title The $20,000,000 Honeymoon. None of these figures can be matched precisely because the underlying contract was never published in full.
What remains instead is a cloud of numbers circling a document whose existence those involved confirmed and whose contents they refused to disclose. The pattern of contested numbers is itself the story. A document of this magnitude, signed by parties of this fame, exists in popular memory as a list of clauses rather than a legal document anyone actually read. What the contract did not buy her is the one thing the marriage marketed itself as providing.
The contract gave Jackie a title and material income. It did not buy her the man’s attention, because that attention had belonged to someone else since 1959. Onassis kept his apartment at 88 Avenue Foch in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. Maria Callas kept hers a short walk away at 36 Rue Georges Mandel.
According to his personal secretary, Kiki Moutsatsos, the two never stopped seeing each other from the beginning of their relationship because they could not live without each other. Moutsatsos described this open secret within the household in an interview published by People magazine in December 2024. When she called the staff in Athens or Paris every morning, they would tell her jokingly that Mr. Onassis was very, very tired.
When she asked why, they said Maria had visited him during the night. Everyone in the house knew. Jackie knew too. Jackie complained to Onassis’s sister, Artemis, who advised her not to fight and to ignore it.
Moutsatsos said Jackie behaved like a cat, very clever and cunning, waiting for the right moment to confront him with his behavior. The cruelty within the household was not limited to infidelity. The more serious claims concern the medical staff Onassis kept. Biographer Arianna Stassinopoulos, in her 1981 book on Callas’s life, based on more than two thousand letters from the singer to her godfather and extensive interviews, wrote that Callas had an abortion in 1966 at Onassis’s insistence.
He told her he would end the relationship if she kept the child, having already resolved to marry Mrs. Kennedy as the grand prize in his pursuit of status. Major American newspapers published this claim in February and March of that year. The academic consensus has rejected another account by Nicholas Gage claiming a live birth in 1960, as based on falsified hospital records.
More disturbingly, Lyndsy Spence’s 2021 biography Cast a Diver, built on previously unseen archives at Stanford, claims that Onassis kept an abortionist on his personal staff. According to Spence, the doctor was used not only with Callas but with his first wife Tina, and with his daughter Christina when she became pregnant at nineteen. The geography of the arrangement was a silent cruelty of its own. The two apartments were in the same upscale district, close enough for a man to leave one in the evening and reach the other on foot.
According to Moutsatsos, that is exactly what Onassis did on the nights when staff reported he was too tired to take calls. Jackie occupied the residence with the title and the contract clauses. Callas occupied the apartment the man actually visited, in an arrangement the staff in both residences understood from the first week of the marriage. The wife who had insisted on separate bedrooms in her marriage contract found the clause she had demanded redundant, because the bedroom that mattered was in an entirely different building.
The advice she received from her sister-in-law was to pay no attention to any of it. And publicly, she did not. She complained only in private, and only to a few intimates who could be trusted to keep their counsel. The public Jackie remained unchanged throughout the marriage.
Just as the cameras had captured her at the wedding church, a woman composed above her circumstances with complete control of her expression. What she could not prevent was the conversion of her humiliation into public consumption in the one place she believed entirely private. In the early 1970s summer, a team of ten photographers carried out a covert operation against Jackie on the island of Skorpios. The scale deserves to be stated clearly.
According to the American press in late November 1972, the magazine that published the photos claimed the photographers had been pursuing Jackie since January 1971, a campaign of nearly a year and a half. They worked from fast boats, wore underwater breathing apparatus, and carried waterproof cameras so they could appear near a beach she believed no lens could reach. They treated her body as a commodity to be harvested in the one place on earth she thought entirely private. Photographs of Jackie sunbathing and walking naked were first published on nine pages in the men’s magazine Playmen in Rome in November 1972.
That page count was reported by The New York Times at the time and has not been inflated in later accounts. Three years later, American publisher Larry Flynt bought the American rights for eighteen thousand dollars and published some of them, four as full pages, in the August 1975 issue of Hustler. He ordered a much larger print run than usual for the magazine, and his gamble paid off completely. The issue sold out within days, with sales jumping from a few thousand copies to over two million.
Those photos launched Flynt’s publishing empire, and he would later describe the purchase as the smartest investment of his life. What turns the violation into something darker is the identity of the person who, according to one account, arranged it. Christopher Anderson’s 2014 biography The Good Son names Onassis himself as the source who unleashed the photographers. Anderson writes that in November 1972, ten photographers wore wetsuits and slipped into the waters off Skorpios, and that the detailed maps of the island, the dates, times, and expected locations of Jackie, were all provided by Ari.
According to Anderson’s account, Onassis had grown tired of financing his wife’s privacy lawsuits and devised a plan to embarrass Jackie so completely that the press would have nothing left to do to hurt her, while wounding the woman he always mocked with the nickname “the Widow. ” The photographers, using the maps and schedule he provided, took dozens of color photographs of her. Anderson’s claim is disputed. The daughter of one of the photographers objected, insisting her father acted alone.
The photographer, Settimo Garritano, only admitted that an Olympic Airways employee had guided him, and never confirmed that Onassis gave the order. What Jackie did in response captures the powerlessness of her position. She had previously filed privacy lawsuits. Those were the very lawsuits Anderson says her husband refused to continue funding.
But faced with photographs already printed and sold in two countries, no court could recover them. The most photographed woman of her century bore the exposure in public silence. Stripped of that era’s language of scandal and men’s magazines, what remains is the non-consensual publication of intimate photographs of a woman with no means to prevent it, sold for profit, and if Anderson is right, arranged by her husband to break her. The material reward for the photographers and the agents who brokered the sale was, in its own way, the final invoice of the operation.
The photographs functioned as a financial transaction at every stage, and the woman in them received nothing from any of the parties profiting from her nakedness. The campaign to break her would continue until grief broke her husband first. On January 22, 1973, Alexander Onassis, his only son and the heir for whom he had built everything, was a passenger in a small amphibious aircraft that crashed on takeoff at Hellinikon Airport in Athens. He died of his injuries the next day at the age of twenty-four.
The loss broke something in Onassis that no fortune could repair. He poured his grief onto his wife. In private he began calling Jackie “the witch. ” He told his closest aides that she carried a curse, justifying it with the dark superstitions of a broken man.
The first important man in her life had died, then the second, and now his son had died while she was Mrs. Onassis. His daughter Christina, who had called Jackie a gold digger from the start, fed the belief. Her brother, whom she had lost, summed it up once clearly: “My father loved titles, and Jackie loved money.
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The following year, Onassis set about ending the marriage with deliberate cruelty. He commissioned lawyer Roy Cohn in 1974 to begin drafting divorce proceedings, a fact Cohn confirmed to The New York Times in 1981, making it one of the few claims in this entire story directly corroborated by the person involved. Stassinopoulos reported that Onassis hired a private investigator to track Jackie and obtain evidence of her infidelity, and that he decided to divorce her, but only after making it as humiliating as possible, a phrase UPI quoted directly from the book. The groundwork for the campaign of cruelty had been laid years earlier, in February 1970, when four personal letters from Jackie to Roswell Gilpatric appeared in a Manhattan autograph shop, and Time magazine reported them.
That embarrassment had occurred during her marriage, and her husband was not about to let her forget it. The circle around Onassis was also emptying of people, and each loss seemed to confirm the superstition he had attached to his wife. His first wife, Tina, mother of the son he had just buried, died in Paris in October 1974 of a barbiturate overdose, a year and nine months after Alexander’s plane crash. Christina, who had loathed Jackie since the wedding and called her a gold digger and worse, became the chief prosecutor of the curse theory.
She told her father that the American woman had brought the family its bad luck. The conviction already formed by grief in Onassis’s mind was reinforced by the daughter most eager to see the wife gone. Onassis had spent decades drawing people into his orbit, and that orbit was now visibly collapsing inward on the man at its center. Instead of examining the excesses that had drawn them all to him, he searched for a single cursed figure to blame, and found her in the bedroom at the end of the hall, the one the contract had guaranteed would remain separate from his.
His body was failing as quickly as his marriage. He suffered from myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that strips the muscles of their ability to respond. In his final months, he appeared in public with his eyelids taped open because he could no longer raise them himself. A man who had spent his life arranging how others appeared had lost control of his own face.
Cohn’s involvement was tangible enough that papers existed, and those papers would later end up in the hands of Constantine Gratsos, Onassis’s closest aide. He spent that terrible last year trying to arrange one final humiliation for the wife he had bought and ended up hating. Onassis died on March 15, 1975, at the American Hospital in Paris, of acute pneumonia caused by myasthenia gravis. He died before the divorce he had initiated was filed, and so Jackie technically remained his widow.
His will was the final instrument of the campaign he did not live to complete. He left 55 percent of his fortune to his daughter Christina and 45 percent to the foundation bearing his dead son’s name. He reduced his widow’s share to the minimum a Greek widow could receive, which insiders estimated at about three million dollars. Christina, who had wanted Jackie gone since the wedding, seized the opportunity, and the two women fought through lawyers for two years.
The settlement gave Jackie about twenty-six million dollars in exchange for relinquishing any further claim. That figure was not a victory so much as a withdrawal, the price at which she agreed to stop being an Onassis in everything except the name she would keep. She handed the money to Maurice Tempelsman, the Belgian-born American diamond merchant who would become her companion in her final years. Over the following decade, Tempelsman quadrupled the amount.
There was someone in the apartment on Rue Georges Mandel. Maria Callas reached Onassis in his hospital room, according to one account, via the service elevator while he was in a coma. Her red Hermès blanket was kept near him in his final moments. Two and a half years after his death, on September 16, 1977, Callas died of a heart attack in that apartment at the age of fifty-three.
She had spent her final years in seclusion, dependent on the sedatives her biographers describe, in a loneliness everyone confirmed. According to Stassinopoulos, citing Onassis’s closest aide Constantine Gratsos, who held the unfiled divorce papers, Onassis said in his final months that Maria was the true love of his life. He said his marriage to Jackie was the greatest betrayal of her in his life. He said he had been preparing to leave Jackie and return to Maria at the moment his body failed him.
Set against all that, Jackie’s public statement on his death reads like a document drafted by a lawyer. She said Aristotle Onassis had rescued her at a moment when her life was engulfed in shadows, that they had shared many beautiful experiences together, and that she would be forever grateful to him. She said nothing about love, no mention of grief, not a single word that could be used against her by anyone reading the statement carefully. The widow gave the public a document drafted with the same care her late husband had once devoted to their marriage contract.
The verbs are verbs of rescue and transaction, expressing gratitude, not loss. She had chosen each word she gave the public for thirty years. The same composed widow who had stood in the rain at the church of Panagitsa walked out of the funeral home in 1975 to negotiate a settlement, decide on reconciliation with her sister, and begin a second chapter of her life that lasted thirty years. Jackie lived with Tempelsman, who moved into her Fifth Avenue apartment in 1988, though he never divorced the wife he had separated from years earlier.
She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the winter of 1993 and died on May 19, 1994. In her final months, she burned her letters and photographs with her own hands. A friend once said Jackie lived three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. The burning was the final editorial act of a woman who had spent her life deciding what others were allowed to know.
She made sure that after her death only the first life remained, and that the restrained erasure she performed in her final months matched the silence she had maintained throughout her decades as a public figure. The man who had spent his life arranging what people were allowed to see was ultimately outdone by a woman whose secrecy equaled his excess.
