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

the refugee from Smyrna about good manners, and how to order food from a French menu. But her real value lay in her connections to the elite members of the oil-tanker business in Britain, Sweden, and Norway.

“In the mid-1930s, tankers were still a comparatively small business,” noted The Times of London. “Oil accounted for only 15 percent of the world’s total energy requirements: coal was king…. Onassis was not the first Greek into tankers…. One or two other small operators were active during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 onward, supplying both sides impartially. What Onassis perceived most clearly was that tankers could be much bigger than anyone then considered feasible. He envisaged heroic economies of scale in operating costs. Having done so, he had the courage to push his vision through.”

Ari and Mamita spent the war years in New York, which was headquarters for most of the prominent Greek shipowning families. It was about this time that the lovers reached a tacit understanding: they were free to come and go as they pleased. Ari slept with other women, and Mamita liked hearing about these sexual liaisons. They became, as Mamita put it, “accomplices rather than lovers.”

“We sat in L.A. screwing the girls, a very pleasant occupation,” Ari’s good friend Costa Gratsos recalled of those war years. “There were starlets, semistars, and stars, an endless supply.”

“He was very sweet,” said Veronica Lake, one of Ari’s girlfriends, who spent some Hollywood nights with him at Romanoff’s. “But, oh, God, those black eyes! They look like they are going straight through the back of your head.”

Meanwhile, Mamita had become friends with the second wife of Stavros Niarchos, who, like Ari, was a parvenu in the Greek shipowning community.

“It was after dinner with the Niarchoses that Ari, for the first time in their relationship, beat Ingse,” an article in The Times of London reported years later. “There had been an argument on the Chris-Craft over her insistence on wearing a pair of green and yellow plaid pants that he found unbecoming. He was uncharacteristically silent throughout dinner, and on the way back. When they were home again, his pent-up rage turned to uncontrolled violence, and he kicked and hit Ingse until he was finally exhausted and went to bed.”

Later, Mamita provided her own description of Ari’s violent temper:

He needed some victim on whom he could release his nervous tension. It would not have suited his complicated character to discuss what was at issue between us, and we never did. He was always trying to put me in the wrong, because he always needed to keep his victims within his power … he had to have them “in the palm of his hand.”

Ari was drinking heavily now, and the beatings continued, sometimes leaving Mamita so badly battered—“like a boxer who has just lost a fight,” she said—that she had to be treated by a doctor. But Mamita and Mamico had developed a relationship of mutual dependence, and she could not leave him. When Ari proposed marriage, he promised to buy Mamita her own yacht and a private Greek island. He gave her an antique Egyptian necklace to wear at the wedding. First, however, Mamita required an operation to enable her to have children. When the operation failed, she made a botched attempt at suicide.

After the end of the war, Ari phased Ingeborg Dedichen out of his life like a rusty ship. He married Athina Livanos, the younger daughter of Stavros Livanos, one of the wealthiest of the Greek shipowners. Ari was forty years old, and Tina—a petite, blonde tomboy with a passion for horses—was seventeen. Ari was marrying up.

Almost a year later, Stavros Niarchos, who had also been attracted to Tina, divorced his wife, and married Tina’s sister Eugenie. The stage was set for the monumental rivalry that would obsess Niarchos and Onassis for the next thirty years.

Tina was attractive and well educated, but like Ingeborg Dedichen, she soon became the victim of her husband’s uncontrollable anger. When he was displeased with Tina, Ari disciplined her with the tip of his hot cigar.

“Every Greek, and there are no exceptions, beats his wife,” he said. “It is good for them. It keeps them in line.”

Jackie enjoyed listening to Ari’s stories of his women. But of all his paramours, it was Maria Callas who interested her the most. Ari had carried on a love affair with Maria for more than a decade, and like everyone else, Jackie was curious to know what he thought about the legendary soprano.

In private, Maria was a shy, insecure, and humorless woman. But she was transformed into a commanding presence whenever she walked out onto an opera stage. She was a big woman, with huge black eyes and lustrous black hair, and she held audiences spellbound with her soaring, unconventional voice. Her fiery interpretations of Norma, I Puritani, and Tosca were talked about for years, until they took on almost mythic proportions. Gradually, Maria began to confuse herself with her press clippings, and she turned into a stereotype of the spoiled diva.

“Callas was difficult to live with,” said Stelio Papadimitriou, Ari’s private attorney, who came to function as his second-in-command. “When they visited his office in Monte Carlo, Onassis would order the elevator to stop so that Callas could have quiet. The staff had to climb the four floors on foot. But Callas did not like the sound of their footfalls. So they in the upper floors had to take off their shoes.”

Ari and Maria shared a common language—Greek—which they used for screaming and cursing at each other. And they shared a common background—they had both come up the hard way.

“I have always had a great admiration for Madame Callas,” Ari said. “More than her artistic talent, even more than her success as a great singer, what always impressed me was the story of her early struggles as a poor girl in her teens when she sailed through unusually rough and merciless waters.”

Ari and Maria traveled to Istanbul on the Christina,