On November 19, 1988, a maid at the Tortugas Country Club outside Buenos Aires walked into a bathroom and found her employer dead in the bathtub. The woman was 37 years old. Her name was Christina Onassis, and at the time of her death she was one of the wealthiest people on Earth, the sole heir to a shipping empire built by her father, Aristotle Onassis. The cause of death was recorded as acute pulmonary edema, a buildup of fluid in the lungs.
It was the same cause of death that had been recorded for her mother, Tina, in a Paris bedroom fourteen years earlier. Two women, mother and daughter, both attached to the same fortune, both worn down over years by prescription medication, dying of the same thing a little over a decade apart. Christina was flown home to Greece and buried on Scorpios, the private island her father had bought as a symbol of everything he had built, in the small family plot alongside her father and her brother. Of the four people who had made up that household in the 1950s, three were now in the same piece of ground.
The fourth, her mother, was buried in Switzerland. Christina’s daughter Athena was three years old, and that three-year-old had just become one of the richest people alive. The girl who was never the favorite had been born on December 11, 1950, in Manhattan, into a level of wealth that most people cannot genuinely imagine and that even most wealthy people never encounter. Her father was Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate whose tankers moved a significant share of the world’s oil and whose name by mid-century had become shorthand for a certain kind of self-made global fortune.
Her mother was Athina Livanos, known to everyone as Tina, herself the daughter of another enormous Greek shipping dynasty, married to Onassis at seventeen in a union that had merged two of the largest fleets in the world. Christina had an older brother, Alexander, born two years before her. From the very beginning, there was an imbalance in that household that everyone around the family understood, even if nobody said it out loud in front of the children. Alexander was the son.
In the world of Greek shipping dynasties, fortunes passed down bloodlines and marriages were arranged partly as mergers. The son was the heir, the one being groomed to take over the fleet one day, the one flown to meetings, the one whose future actually mattered to the business. Christina was the daughter. She was loved.
She was indulged. She was given everything money could purchase, and she was not the point. She was also, from a very young age, deeply self-conscious about her appearance. She was a dark-haired, heavy-set girl growing up in a family and a social world obsessed with a very particular kind of thin, blond, effortless European glamour.
Her own mother was one of the most photographed society beauties of her generation. Christina grew up surrounded by people whose entire lives revolved around being looked at, and she never felt she measured up to any of it. Her weight became something she fought publicly and privately for the rest of her life, cycling through crash diets and appetite suppressants in a pattern that would eventually contribute directly to her death. Her childhood was spent moving between the family’s properties: the yacht Christina named after her, the private Greek island of Scorpios, apartments in Paris and New York, and a series of expensive boarding schools in England and Switzerland, including Queen’s College in London and schools in Oxford and Montreux.
From the outside it looked like the most fortunate life imaginable. From the inside, by the accounts she would later give friends, it was mostly a series of unfamiliar rooms and staff, with her parents somewhere else. Then in 1960, her parents’ marriage collapsed publicly and humiliatingly, and the reason was a woman whose name was about to become one of the most famous in Europe. In 1959, Aristotle Onassis had begun an affair with the opera singer Maria Callas, one of the most celebrated performers in the world.
It was not discreet. It began aboard his yacht during a Mediterranean cruise whose guest list included Winston Churchill, and it played out afterwards in restaurants across Europe and eventually across the front pages of newspapers on two continents. Both of them were married to other people at the time. Tina, humiliated, filed for divorce, and the marriage formally ended in 1960.
Christina was nine years old. What followed was a childhood split between two parents now moving in very different directions, with a famous mistress permanently in the background and a global press corps interested in every detail. A nine-year-old could, in principle, read about her own family’s disintegration in a newspaper. Tina would go on to marry twice more.
In 1961 she married John Spencer-Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, becoming a marchioness. That marriage ended in 1971. Then, in October of that same year, she made a decision that stunned even the people who thought they had seen everything from this family: she married Stavros Niarchos, her former husband’s greatest business rival and the widower of her own older sister, Eugenia. Eugenia had died in 1970 under circumstances that were never fully or publicly clarified, and the entire arrangement was regarded across Greek shipping circles as deeply strange.
Christina’s own brother, Alexander, openly opposed the marriage. That was the family Christina grew up inside. Enormous wealth, enormous scrutiny, marriages that functioned partly as business alliances and partly as retaliation, and a set of adults whose personal lives were conducted more or less in public. By her late teens, she was reportedly desperate to be taken seriously by her father, and equally desperate to be loved by somebody in a way that had nothing to do with the Onassis name.
In 1971, at twenty years old, she made her first serious attempt at both. It went about as badly as it possibly could have. In 1971, Christina met an American real estate developer named Joseph Bolker in Los Angeles. He was by any measure an unlikely match.
Bolker was forty-seven years old to her twenty. He was divorced with four daughters, some of them not far off Christina’s own age. He was Jewish, American, self-made in property rather than born into shipping, and entirely outside the closed dynastic world her father moved in. There was also, in the background, the collapse of an earlier romance.
Christina had been involved with Peter Goulandris, heir to another vast Greek shipping fortune, in exactly the sort of match her family would have celebrated. That relationship never made it to the altar. By the accounts of people who knew them both, Bolker was genuinely kind to her, patient in a way she was not used to, and interested in her rather than in what she represented. That may well have been the entire attraction.
On July 26, 1971, they married quietly in Las Vegas. Her father’s reaction was immediate and furious. Aristotle Onassis did not simply disapprove of the match. He applied pressure, and the pressure was financial.
Reports at the time and since described threats to cut her out of the family fortune entirely, alongside a sustained campaign of disapproval directed at both of them, conducted through intermediaries, lawyers, and the press. A twenty-year-old was being told in effect to choose between her husband and her inheritance. The marriage lasted roughly nine months. They divorced in 1972.
Bolker, for his part, appears to have come out of it with his dignity intact and without taking a cent, which is more than can be said for some of what followed. There is even a reasonable case that the marriage did her a genuine favor, because in its aftermath she moved to Monaco and began, for the first time in her life, actually working inside the family business rather than simply orbiting it. She started in a junior position, learning the operation from the inside, which was not something anyone had ever expected or asked of her. But the shape of the thing had now been established, and it would repeat.
Christina had tried to choose something for herself, and had been overruled by her father’s money. The next time she married, it would be to exactly the kind of man he would have approved of. The only problem was that by then her father would be dead, along with almost everyone else she loved. What happened to the Onassis family between January 1973 and March 1975 is even now difficult to take in as a sequence of real events.
On January 22, 1973, Christina’s brother, Alexander, was flying out of Athens airport in a small amphibious aircraft. He was twenty-four years old, the designated heir, and he was in the plane that day to help check out a new pilot who was taking over the aircraft. The plane crashed almost immediately after takeoff. Alexander suffered catastrophic head injuries.
He died the following day, January 23. Aristotle Onassis never recovered. By every account from people close to him, the death of his son broke something in him permanently and irreversibly. Friends described a man who aged years within months.
He became convinced the crash had been sabotage, an act of deliberate murder aimed at his family, and he spent enormous sums funding private investigations into a conspiracy that was never substantiated by anyone. He also, according to multiple biographers, turned a significant portion of that grief outward. He began telling friends and associates that his second wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had brought misfortune into his life, and the marriage, already strained, effectively never recovered from Alexander’s death either. For Christina, the loss was compounded by something else.
Alexander had been the heir. His death meant that the entire weight of the empire was now eventually going to land on her, the daughter who had never been groomed for any of it. Then, on October 10, 1974, Christina’s mother, Tina, was found dead in the bedroom of the Paris mansion she shared with Stavros Niarchos. She was forty-five years old.
The cause was determined to be pulmonary edema, a buildup of fluid in the lungs associated with a dependency on barbiturates. Because Niarchos’s previous wife, Tina’s own sister, had also died suddenly a few years earlier, the death generated years of speculation and rumor in Greek shipping circles, though no formal findings were ever brought against him in connection with either. Five months later, on March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died in Paris at the age of sixty-nine, after a long decline caused by myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune condition that had steadily robbed him of his physical strength. Christina was twenty-four years old.
In twenty-six months, she had lost her brother, her mother, and her father. She inherited the bulk of one of the largest privately held shipping fortunes in the world, and she inherited it essentially alone, surrounded by executives, lawyers, and a stepmother she was in the middle of a legal dispute with over the estate. Four months later, she got married again. On July 22, 1975, Christina married Alexander Andreadis, a Greek shipping and banking heir from a prominent Athens business family.
On paper, he was everything Joseph Bolker had not been: Greek, from the right kind of family, roughly her own age. The sort of marriage that Aristotle Onassis, had he lived four more months, might actually have blessed rather than sabotaged. It did not work. The couple were, by most accounts, poorly suited to one another almost from the start, and there was the additional pressure of Christina now running, or at least presiding over, an enormous international business while grieving three deaths in barely two years.
She had thrown herself into the work with genuine seriousness, taking a real role in the operations rather than acting as a figurehead, which left very little of her available for anything else. There was also the ongoing legal dispute with her stepmother over the estate, a conflict that dragged on for two years and consumed an enormous amount of her attention during exactly the period when the marriage needed it most. The marriage lasted around fourteen months before it collapsed. The divorce was finalized by 1977.
There is something quietly sad in the timing of it. Christina married a man who fit the template four months after the only person who cared about the template had died. The approval she was reaching for no longer existed anywhere in the world. There was nobody left to be pleased by the correct choice.
What she did next was so far outside anything her family, her business, or Western intelligence services expected that it made front pages around the world, and it involved a man from Moscow with a glass eye. In the mid-1970s, Christina met a Soviet shipping official named Sergei Kauzov. He worked for Sovfracht, the Soviet state ship chartering agency, and had been posted to Paris as its representative. A graduate of a Moscow foreign language institute, he was fluent in French and English as well as Russian.
They met over business in the middle of negotiations about leasing tankers to the Soviet Union, and by one account she drove him home from that first meeting in her limousine. Kauzov was not, on the face of it, a natural candidate to marry one of the wealthiest women alive. He was around ten years older than her, slight, quiet, with thinning blonde hair and a mouth full of gold teeth. He had a glass eye that he would on occasion calmly remove and replace in company.
He was a member of the Communist Party. He was also married to a woman named Natasha with a young daughter. What he did have was an entirely different manner from every other man circling her. According to accounts from people close to Christina at the time, Kauzov treated her without deference.
He did not fawn. He did not perform. And he did not appear especially impressed by her money or her name. One account describes him cutting a dinner short by simply announcing he had business to attend to and leaving, an act of casual indifference that almost nobody in her life would have dared.
In a life spent surrounded by people who wanted something, that was apparently intoxicating. Their relationship developed in Paris, at Russian restaurants, and in apartments lent to them by friends. Then photographs of the two of them found their way into the press, and Kauzov was recalled to Moscow. From the Soviet side, the affair was effectively terminated.
Christina refused to let it go. She pursued him with telephone calls, telex messages, and couriers. She flew to Moscow to find him. And in the middle of all this, Kauzov filed for divorce from his wife, gave her custody of their daughter, and moved back in with his mother.
On August 1, 1978, in Moscow, Christina Onassis married a Soviet citizen. She had renounced her American citizenship a few years earlier for tax reasons. She was now the heiress to a Western shipping empire, married into the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and reportedly shopping for a cooperative apartment in Moscow or a dacha outside it, or possibly both. Asked about the prospect of living there, she reportedly described herself as very adaptable.
A relative in Athens described the whole thing to reporters as a disaster that had befallen the family. Western intelligence services called it something considerably more interesting. Decades later, a former KGB general would put a name to it: Operation Olympia. Almost immediately the speculation began.
American and British intelligence officials considered it extremely likely that Kauzov had some affiliation with the KGB, on the straightforward logic that a Soviet official in that era did not conduct a private romance with a Western billionaire’s daughter in Paris without his own government knowing about it in considerable detail. His unusual freedom of movement as a foreign-based dealmaker only reinforced the suspicion. In 1980, a British newspaper ran the claim on its front page, alleging directly that Kauzov was a Soviet agent who had been ordered to pursue and marry the heiress in order to obtain confidential information about Western oil supplies. Years later, Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB major general who eventually defected to the West and was convicted of treason in absentia by Russia, gave his own account of what had happened behind the scenes.
By his telling, the relationship began as a genuine unauthorized attraction rather than an assignment. When photographs of the pair reached the press, it was treated internally as a serious breach of protocol, and the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was reportedly furious enough that there was talk of imprisoning Kauzov outright. Kalugin says he argued the other way, and his reasoning, as he later described it, was blunt and entirely unsentimental. Locking the man up would produce an international scandal.
Permitting the marriage might produce something far more valuable. If the couple went on to have a son, then a citizen of the Soviet Union would stand to inherit the Onassis empire. The matter was reportedly discussed at the level of the Politburo. The marriage was permitted.
And according to Kalugin, the operation had a name. It was called Olympia. Whether that account is entirely accurate is impossible to verify, and it should be treated with appropriate caution. Kalugin is a controversial figure with his own reasons for telling colorful stories about his former employers, and no documentation has ever surfaced to confirm the code name.
But what is not seriously disputed is that the Soviet leadership discussed the marriage at the very highest levels, and that Christina was for a period living a genuinely strange half-life in a Moscow apartment, a woman who personally owned a fleet of oil tankers navigating a city where almost nothing was available to buy. The practical reality of it seems to have worn thin quickly. She was accustomed to a life of near total mobility and near total service, and Moscow in 1978 offered neither. Friends who visited described a small flat, limited privacy, and a woman who had gone from moving between three continents on a whim to negotiating with the ordinary constraints of Soviet daily life.
She reportedly spent significant stretches of the marriage back in the West on business, which rather undercut the domestic experiment. The marriage lasted around seventeen months. They divorced in 1980. The official reasons were never really made public, and the most widely repeated explanation in the press at the time was the least dramatic one imaginable: simply that the novelty had worn off and she had become bored.
As a settlement, Christina reportedly gave Kauzov two oil tankers and property in England. He went on to become, by most accounts, a genuinely successful shipping businessman on the strength of it, living quietly in the West and avoiding the press almost entirely for the rest of his life. She had now been married three times before the age of thirty: to an American property developer, a Greek shipping heir, and a Soviet official. Three entirely different men, three entirely different worlds, three failures inside nine years.
The fourth marriage would be different. It would last longer than any of the others. It would produce her only child, and it would be the one that finally broke her. Christina had known Thierry Roussel since she was a teenager.
He was a French businessman, an heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, handsome, charming, and by every account extremely good at making her feel wanted. They had been involved on and off for years before it became serious, and he had been in some ways the great unfinished romance of her adult life, the one that kept resurfacing. On March 17, 1984, they married. Christina was thirty-three.
For a while, by the accounts of friends, she was genuinely visibly happy in a way she had not been for years. She lost weight, which for her was always the clearest external indicator of how things were going internally. She talked about the future. People who had watched her cycle through the previous decade allowed themselves to believe that this one might actually hold, that the fourth attempt might be the one that finally worked.
On January 29, 1985, at the American Hospital in Paris, she gave birth to a daughter. She named her Athina, after her mother. The child was baptized on Scorpios, the family island, in the same place her father and brother were buried. And by every account, Christina adored her completely and immediately.
Friends describe a genuine transformation: a woman who had spent her entire life inside a family that had never quite made room for her, and who had now made one of her own on her own terms, with a child who had no idea what any of the money meant, and who wanted nothing from her except her attention. There was one problem, and it had been there the whole time. Throughout his relationship with Christina and throughout the marriage itself, Thierry Roussel had been involved with a Swedish former model named Marianne Landhage, known to everyone as Gaby. This was not a brief indiscretion or a single lapse.
It was a parallel long-term relationship that had been running for years, with its own history and its own future plans. While Roussel was married to Christina, Landhage gave birth to his son. That child was born just a few months after Athina. Roussel now had two children by two different women born within the same year, and one of those women had no idea the other child existed.
When Christina found out, the marriage was effectively finished. Divorce proceedings began roughly eight months after Athina’s birth, and the divorce was finalized in 1987, three years after the wedding. But the situation did not end there. By multiple accounts, Christina did not simply cut Roussel off and move on with a conventional settlement.
She continued paying him, reportedly very substantial sums, in an arrangement that friends described as an attempt to keep him present in her life and in her daughter’s. Some accounts put the figures in the tens of millions. She was by this point one of the wealthiest women in the world, and she was using that money to try to purchase the continued attention of a man who had a second family waiting in the wings. The richest woman in the world paying a man to keep coming to see her.
She had spent her childhood watching her father use money as leverage over the people around him, including over her own first marriage, and she had ended up doing a version of the same thing from the other side, with even less success. Landhage went on to have a second child with Roussel while Christina was still alive. Roussel married her in 1990, two years after Christina’s death. The last years of Christina’s life were spent inside that arrangement, and they were also spent in a physical decline that the people around her could see clearly and could not stop.
There is a version of Christina Onassis that almost never makes it into the tabloid retellings, and it is worth putting on the record, because it complicates the picture of her as simply a tragic heiress drifting between husbands. She actually ran the company after her father’s death in 1975. Christina took over a business that almost everyone around her assumed she would hand off to professional managers and leave alone. She did not.
She took an active role in Olympic Maritime, the family shipping operation based in Monaco. She learned the business properly, sat in on negotiations, made decisions about the fleet, and dealt directly with charterers, bankers, and governments. The 1970s and 1980s were a genuinely brutal period for global shipping. The oil crisis, collapsing freight rates, and an enormous oversupply of tankers destroyed a large number of established shipping families entirely.
Fortunes that had looked permanent for generations simply evaporated inside a decade, and a number of the great Greek names of the era never recovered from it. Christina navigated that period and kept the core of her father’s empire intact, which is not something that can be said for many of her contemporaries, and which she managed while conducting the most publicly scrutinized personal life of any businesswoman alive. The tanker deal that first brought her into contact with Sergei Kauzov was her own initiative. She was leasing vessels to the Soviet Union at a moment when the Western shipping market was in serious trouble, and it was a shrewd piece of business.
The romance was the part the newspapers cared about. The deal underneath it was the reason she was in the room. She was, in other words, competent, and she worked hard, and almost none of the coverage of her during her lifetime was interested in that. The press wanted the weight, the marriages, the pills, and the parties.
Christina had struggled with her weight, with prescription medication, and with periods of serious depression for most of her adult life. The cycle was well established by the 1980s and had been running in one form or another since she was a teenager: extreme dieting, appetite suppressants, sedatives to sleep, and dramatic swings in weight that she monitored obsessively and that the press reported on with a cruelty that would be unthinkable today. Her body was public property. Every gain and loss was photographed and commented on.
By the late 1980s, friends were genuinely worried about her. She had built a life that was on paper enviable in every possible way, and she was reportedly deeply, persistently unhappy inside it. She talked openly about loneliness in a way that people found difficult to hear from someone with her resources. She surrounded herself with people almost constantly, moved between properties, maintained a large entourage of friends and staff, and struggled badly with being alone in a room.
Several people who knew her in that period have described the same pattern: a woman who would keep guests up until the early hours simply because she did not want the evening to end and the house to go quiet. There is also a detail from those final years that friends have mentioned repeatedly: she had grown genuinely fixated on the idea that the Onassis family was cursed. Given the twenty-six months that had taken her brother, her mother, and her father, and given what had happened to her aunt Eugenia before that, it is not difficult to understand where the idea came from, or why it had begun to feel to her like a prediction rather than a superstition. In November of 1988, she traveled to Argentina to stay with a close friend, Marina Dodero, at a property at the Tortugas Country Club outside Buenos Aires.
She had been spending increasing amounts of time in Argentina, had taken Argentine citizenship, and had talked about the country as somewhere she might build a different kind of life away from Europe and away from the press that had followed her since she was a child. Some accounts suggest she was seriously considering a fresh start there, and that she had been in reasonably good spirits in the days beforehand. On November 19, 1988, her maid found her in the bathtub. She was thirty-seven years old.
Christina left her fortune, estimated at around $250 million at the time and worth substantially more than half a billion in today’s money, to Athina. At three years old, the child became one of the wealthiest people on Earth, an inheritance held in trust and administered by a board of Greek trustees. Custody went to Thierry Roussel. Athina was raised in Switzerland by her father and by Gaby Landhage, the woman whose relationship with him had ended her mother’s marriage, alongside the half-siblings born from that relationship.
She grew up speaking French and Swedish in a household that was by design kept well away from the press and largely outside Greek life and the Onassis world entirely. The years that followed were dominated by a long bitter dispute between Roussel and the Greek trustees of the estate over how the fortune was being managed and over what Roussel himself was being paid to administer it on his daughter’s behalf. The conflict ran on for years, generating litigation across multiple countries, and was only really settled in 1999, when a court ordered the administration of Athina’s trust transferred to an independent private auditing firm. Athina gained control of a substantial portion of the estate on her eighteenth birthday in 2003, and the remainder later.
She became a serious competitive equestrian, good enough to compete at international level in show jumping, married a Brazilian show jumper and later divorced, and has spent her adult life avoiding publicity almost entirely, living quietly in Europe and making rare public appearances. She has had a famously distant relationship with her father in adulthood and has publicly distanced herself from him over the handling of her inheritance, in what became effectively one more generation of the same family fighting over the same money. She was three years old when her mother died. Whatever she remembers of Christina, she has kept it to herself, which, given everything the previous three generations of that family conducted in public, may be the healthiest decision anyone in it has ever made.
Looking at the whole shape of it, the thing that stands out about Christina Onassis’s four marriages is not that they failed. Plenty of people marry badly and often, and there is nothing especially remarkable in a run of divorces. It is that each one appears to have been an attempt to solve a different problem, and not one of those problems was something money could touch. The first was an attempt to choose something for herself, made at twenty, and it was overruled by her father inside nine months.
The second was an attempt to earn an approval from a man who was already dead by the time she made it. The third was an attempt to be wanted by someone who genuinely did not appear to care about the fortune, and it ended up being discussed by the Politburo and given a code name. The fourth was an attempt to build a family of her own, and it turned out there had been a second family running alongside it the entire time, with children born in the same year. Four attempts, four different strategies, sixteen years from the first wedding to the last divorce.
None of them worked, and not one of them lasted three full years. She was described endlessly during her lifetime as the richest woman in the world, and by most measures it was true. She controlled a fleet of tankers, a private island, homes across three continents, and a fortune that would be worth well over half a billion dollars today. She could go anywhere she liked and buy anything she wanted, and she had proven she was capable of running the business that generated it.
She spent most of her adult life trying to hold on to people, and she was not able to. There is a temptation with a story like this to reach for the idea of a curse, and Christina herself apparently reached for it in her final years. It is an understandable instinct given the sequence of events, but it does not really survive contact with the facts. There was no curse.
There was a family in which enormous wealth was consistently used as an instrument of control, in which marriages doubled as business arrangements, in which affection was conditional and frequently withdrawn, and in which a whole generation of children grew up learning that people arrive with terms attached. Decades on, the Onassis name still carries a particular kind of glamour: the yachts and the island, and the famous American second wife. Christina tends to appear in that story as a footnote, the difficult daughter, the one who married four times and died young in a bathtub in Argentina. The fuller version is harder and considerably more human.
A nine-year-old watching her parents’ marriage end across the front pages of two continents. A twenty-year-old told to choose between her husband and her inheritance. A twenty-four-year-old burying three of the four people she had grown up with in barely two years and inheriting an empire she had never been prepared for. A woman who kept that empire alive through the worst shipping market in a generation and who was still, at the end of it, paying a man to come and visit her.
A house outside Buenos Aires and a cause of death her mother had already been given fourteen years earlier. She was thirty-seven years old. She had been married four times and never once for longer than three years.
And the only relationship in her life that appears to have been entirely uncomplicated was with a daughter who was too young to remember her.
