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

V Hotel and climbed into the backseat of his limousine next to one of his henchmen, Johnny Meyer, the former Howard Hughes associate, who helped Nigel Neilson with publicity.

Ari knew that his comments about Jackie’s needing a juicy scandal would be picked up by the wire services, and played back to America, and run in all the newspapers there. As his car headed down the Champs-Ely sees toward his home at 88 Avenue Foch, he turned to Johnny Meyer and said:

“That should set the cat among the pigeons at Hickory Hill.”

LITTLE GREEN APPLES

Ari kept many henchmen like Johnny Meyer on his payroll, but at the critical moments of his life, he turned to his sister Artemis. She was the only person he really trusted. Unlike Merope and Kalliroi, Artemis shared the same mother and father with Aristotle. They had the same genes, the same blood. And in the end, it is always blood that counts to a Greek.

In May, he telephoned Artemis from the Caribbean and asked her to come to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where the Christina would be docked.

“A VIP is coming aboard,” he told her.

“Who can be so important that I have to drop everything and get on an airplane?” Artemis wanted to know.

Ari knew that his sister would do whatever he asked of her, and he refused to tell her the identity of his mystery guest.

“I thought the Christina was going to St. Thomas to pick up Callas,” Artemis recalled. “I was afraid Aristo was going to listen to Costa Gratsos, and ask Callas to marry him. Gratsos and my brother were forever talking about women, and for some reason, Gratsos had taken a strong dislike to Jackie from the start. Maybe Gratsos was jealous that Aristo liked Jackie more than he liked him. Whatever the reason, Gratsos was pushing Callas over Jackie.”

Like most Greeks, Gratsos saw romantic love as a destructive force. Art’s love of Jackie was dangerous, and Gratsos did his best to turn Art against her.

“To Onassis’s face, Gratsos described her with a phrase in Greek that is not polite—it is obscene—but which meant that she was poisonous,” said one of Art’s friends. “And he prophesied that [Jackie] would bring bad luck.”

When Artemis arrived in St. Thomas, she found her brother in a state of acute anxiety. She had never seen him like this before. He was sweating even more profusely than usual. He had ordered the oil painting of Tina Onassis, his former wife and the mother of his children, to be removed from its place of honor over the fireplace in the yacht’s salon. In its place he had hung a large, hand-tinted photograph of his beloved mother, Penelope, who had died when he was six. He had asked all but one of his passengers on the Christina to leave the ship at the previous port of call, St. John. Only Joan Thring remained on board.

“I thought that a very big deal must have been in the works,” Thring said. “In the past, no matter how many important matters were on his mind, he had been able to shut off and concentrate on the most trifling thing when he was entertaining aboard the Christina.”

The next day, Art sent a delegation composed of Artemis, Captain Costa Anastassiadis, and the chief engineer of the Christina, Stefanos Daroussos, to the St. Thomas airport to pick up his guest. None of them was told in advance whom they were meeting. Artemis said a silent little prayer as the door of the first-class section swung open.

Out stepped Jackie, looking glorious in a brown Valentino dress. Her large sunglasses were pushed up into her hair to keep it from being blown by the wind. Artemis was so thrilled that she rushed forward in the busy terminal, threw her arms around Jackie, and kissed her on both cheeks. Jackie would make a far better wife for her brother than Maria Callas.

“As soon as Jackie came on board,” Captain Anastassiadis said, “the crew started speculating that something would happen. A visit by a lone woman was not usual.”

“For Chrissake, stick close,” Ari told Joan Thring after they had weighed anchor and were out at sea. “Don’t leave her side during the day. I don’t want any sonofabitches getting any of those Peeping Tom pictures of just the two of us, making it look like we’re horsing around alone out here.”

Late one evening after dinner, Ari asked Jackie to join him for a nightcap on the deck. They stood in silence for several minutes, peering up at the vast shower of stars that spilled into the black expanse of the sea. Jackie always traveled with a portable record player and a collection of her favorite tunes, and the voice of O. C. Smith could be heard coming from the yacht’s salon. He was singing “Little Green Apples.”

And she reached out an’ takes my hand;

Squeezes it, says “How you feel-in’, Hon?”

And I look a-cross at smiling lips

That warm my heart and see my morning sun….

The air was warm and clear. For a change, Ari was not fouling it with one of his Cuban cigars. As he later confided to Costa Gratsos, he did not want to spoil the romantic moment. He recalled that he was feeling as nervous as a schoolboy about to steal his first kiss.

“Jackie,” he said, “the time has come for us to discuss plans for marriage.”

And if that’s not lov-in’ me, then all I’ve got to say:

God did-n’t make Little Green Apples

And it don’t rain in In-dian-ap-lis

In the sum-mer time.

“Oh, Telis,” Jackie said, using her pet name for Ari, short for Aristotelis, the Greek form of his name.

But that was all she said. She left the rest up to him.

“He made it clear to her,” wrote his biographer, Frank Brady, “that if they married, she would be free to go wherever and whenever she pleased—with him or without him—and that she would enjoy the