Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

was stocked with rare vintage wines, and had a sommelier to serve them. There were two chefs—one for French cuisine, the other for Greek dishes, including Ari’s favorite, papatsakia, eggplant baked with onions, cheese, celery, tomatoes, and peppers. A Swedish masseur and two hairdressers were on call twenty-four hours a day. There were nine double guest cabins, each decorated in a different style and named after a different Greek island. Jackie was given “Ithaca,” which was the most lavish, and had been occupied at various times by Lady Pamela Churchill, Greta Garbo, Maria Callas, and Lee Radziwill. Her bathroom was done in solid pink marble.

Late on her first night out at sea, Jackie retired to her cabin and wrote a long, rambling letter to Jack. She began by describing her visit to the palatial villa of Greek shipowner Markos Nomikos and his wife Aspasia, and ended the letter by trying to tell Jack how much she missed him. When she finished, she read it over, and was dissatisfied. She tore it into small pieces, threw it away, and started all over again.

She wrote for the next couple of hours, filling seven pages. It was an unabashed love letter, the most passionate letter of her life. She poured out her heart, telling Jack how much she missed him, how she knew that he had suffered from the death of Patrick, how their relationship had been deepened and transformed by the baby’s death. She said that she felt there was a new, stronger bond between them. She loved him more than ever before. She promised to be a better wife, to campaign with him whenever and wherever he wanted. She wrote:

I miss you very much, which is nice though it is also a bit sad—but then I think how lucky I am to be able to miss you—I know that I always exaggerate—but I feel sorry for everyone else who is married—I realize here so much that I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension—I wish so much that I could give you that—so I give you every day while I think of you everything I have to give.

The next morning, she handed the sealed letter to the Christina’s purser and asked him to mail it at their next port of call. The love letter would be postmarked October 6—six weeks and six days before her husband’s assassination.

From Lesbos the Christina made its way to Crete. Still, none of the guests had laid eyes on Onassis. He had decided to remain below decks in his cabin, discreetly out of sight, as a concession to Jackie’s reputation, and to John Kennedy’s political ambitions. Finally, after they had docked at Smyrna, the birthplace of Onassis, Jackie sent Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to implore him to join the others. To everyone’s delight, their host sent back word that he would act as their guide.

And with that, Aristotle Onassis made his entrance.

ARISTO

He was a short man, not even five feet six, with a barrel chest, thick forearms, and the face of a gangster. He gave off the impression that he was both dangerous and disreputable, and this sinister aura was enhanced by the tinted glasses he wore to protect his weak eyes.

Jackie had heard all the rumors about Onassis—how he was a skirt-chaser, a star-fucker, and a loud vulgarian. He might not be the richest man in the world, people said, but he was second to none when it came to fraud, deceit, and double-dealing. It therefore came as a great surprise to Jackie to discover that Onassis was nothing like his reputation.

He turned out to be the most completely sociable person she had ever met, not excepting Jack Kennedy, who was no slouch in that department. Ari struck her as a man with a conflicted personality, as insecure and vulnerable as he was egotistical and grandiose. One moment, he could be brash, exuberant, and effervescent; the next, he was plunged into a mood of deep melancholy. He was like a chameleon, constantly changing to adapt to his surroundings.

“His most characteristic stance is with shoulders slightly hunched, arms spread out, and swaying a little on the balls of his feet like a bantamweight watching which way his opponent is going,” wrote Randolph Churchill, Winston’s son, in an article for the London Evening Standard. Randolph went on to note:

As well as Greek, he speaks fluent Spanish, French, and English. Though his choice of words in English is sometimes slightly off-center, his sense of the balance of a spoken sentence is uncannily acute. He is a born orator with a poetic sense and can build up a list of adjectives in an ascending order of emphasis and weight which are as perfect as a phrase of music.

Just as his listener is caught by the spell, he will suddenly bring the whole edifice tumbling down by a deliberate piece of comic bathos. He will burst into laughter at the very moment when almost any other man would be exploding into passion. Sometimes he changes from a gentle whisper to a deafening bellow between two words.

Jackie fell completely under his spell. She hardly noticed that Ari drank heavily—mostly Dom Perignon champagne and Courvoisier—and that he sweated so profusely that he had to change his clothes frequently throughout the day. After she got over the initial shock of his appearance, she hardly gave it a second thought.

For Ari, talk was the breath of life. And as the cruise continued, Jackie sat with him on the poop deck under the stars, listening to the tales of his youth, which he made sound like an adventure yarn starring himself as the plucky hero. Jackie was especially attracted to Ari’s portrait of himself as the underdog.

He lied to her about his origins, repeating the rags-to-riches legend of his childhood. In fact, his father had been a prosperous tobacco merchant in the Turkish port city of Smyrna. The Greek pale of settlement on the western shores of the