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

Ottoman empire was the cradle of the ancient Ionian civilization.

“Ionia is the birthplace of Homer, and of all true Greeks like me,” Ari said.

He was the only son, and his mother, Penelope, whom he remembered all his life as being very beautiful, died as the result of a kidney operation when he was six years old. The early loss of his mother was, most likely, the source of his lifelong melancholy, and of the deep insecurities that he always sought to cover up.

When his father remarried, Aristo did not accept his stepmother, Helen, whom he regarded as a usurper. Nor did he develop much affection for the two stepsisters, Merope and Kalliroi, who joined the family over the next few years. He reserved all his love for his full sister, Artemis, and his grandmother, Gethsemane, a deeply religious woman, who regularly scrubbed the little boy’s body and washed his mind of sins.

Among Greeks, modesty is not a highly regarded virtue, and when Aristo’s rebellion against his stepmother led to cruel beatings by his father, the young boy was determined to show up the old man. He entered a famous athletic contest run by his uncle Homer at the Pelops Club in Smyrna. But he failed to win the top prize, “Champion of Champions.”

“A friend told me, ‘Cheer up, Aristo, there’s always next year,’ “ Ari told Jackie. “And I said, ‘Idiot! Do you think I am going to hang around this piddling town? For me, the whole world is small…. You will marvel one day at what I shall do.’ ”

That day came sooner than expected, for in 1922, when Aristo was sixteen years old, the Turkish army fell upon Smyrna and slaughtered the Greek population in a bloodthirsty campaign of ethnic cleansing. The Onassis tobacco warehouse went up in flames. Aristo’s father was arrested. His grandmother Gethsemane perished in the holocaust. The traumatic experience sealed for all time the bond he had with his full-blooded sister Artemis.

When a Turkish officer showed up at the Onassis home to requisition the residence, Aristo convinced him that he could be of service.

“You usually find that if you make things comfortable for people, they like you,” Ari explained.

In the midst of the fighting and turmoil, he escaped on a boat, wearing the disguise of a sailor, and carrying a large portion of the family fortune. But later he could not resist embroidering even this dramatic incident. He told Jackie that he had seen his uncle Homer being hanged by the Turks—which was false—and that he had to swim under a withering fusillade of gunfire to reach the boat that carried him to Athens, and to freedom.

“In those days,” he said, “overseas Greeks were not particularly welcomed in Greece, where we were known as Turkospori—Turk’s sperm.’ ”

He used the family money that he had smuggled out of Turkey to secure his father’s release from prison. But when the old man arrived in Athens, he showed little gratitude. He demanded that his son give him an accounting of every penny he had spent.

“People forget quickly,” Ari said. “Only a few weeks earlier they may have been on the verge of death. Then comes safety and the grumbles and complaints begin—over all sorts of trivialities.”

Ari’s closest friend was Constantine (“Costa”) Gratsos, a tall, handsome man who invariably sported a pipe in his mouth and a pretty young woman on his arm. The ne’er-do-well son of a rich Greek shipowner, Gratsos was an alcoholic who squandered his patrimony, and ended up working for Onassis as a paid companion.

Gratsos believed that Aristo was motivated to succeed by his difficult relationship with his father. It seemed to Gratsos that Onassis developed a passion for money and power as a way of winning the approval of his father and, later, of the entire world.

No one, not even Aristo, could say what his motives were, but there was no doubt that he felt humiliated by his father’s rebuke. He packed a battered suitcase, put together a few hundred dollars, and emigrated to Argentina. He traveled steerage class on the twelve-thousand-ton Tomaso di Savoya, but he bribed a boatswain to let him sleep in the aft of the ship in a cage that held the ship’s stern lines.

In Buenos Aires, the eighteen-year-old Ari added a couple of years to the birth date entered on the documents he carried in his pocket. No longer would he need parental permission to seek work. He had dark hair, dark eyebrows, and an abundance of optimism and self-confidence, and he was an immediate hit with the girls.

“I liked the girls a lot, as do all boys of that age, and I must admit that I did have the gift of attracting them more than any of the rest of my friends,” he said. “I spoke Spanish with ease and I suppose they must have found my conversation full of charm.

“You know,” he continued, “the first five thousand dollars is always the hardest to make. But I was soon on my way to making my first fortune by importing oriental tobacco leaf from my father in Greece and selling it to local cigarette manufacturers. But money was never an end in itself. I never confused accumulation with enjoyment. Money gave me a sense of power, and I used it for my own pleasure, even when I was a young man.”

Buenos Aires was a bustling port city, handling the country’s massive exports of beef and grain, and Ari decided to take the money he had made in the tobacco business—about $600,000—and invest it in shipping. It was the midst of the Great Depression, and dry-cargo freighters could be bought for less than their scrap value. Ari gambled that shipping would recover, and would make him what he had always wanted to become—the champion of champions.

THE SPLENDOR OF GREECE

Jackie was mesmerized by Ari’s life story. The other passengers on board the Christina could not help but notice that a certain chemistry was developing between