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

Hélène continued, “I knew from first-hand experience that she was not a compulsive shopper. She was not extravagant, not at all like the acquisitive monster portrayed in the press. Yes, she liked to have money, but believe me, she was not a big spender. A good deal of what she bought, she sent back to the stores. Many of those stories about her spending came from Costa Gratsos. Ari’s Greek associates didn’t like Jackie. They believed she had married Ari for his money, and they resented it.”

One of the salesgirls helped Jackie try on a pair of low-heeled shoes.

“Hélène,” Ari said, “I like these better.” He was holding a shoe with a very high heel. “A woman is exciting in high heels,” he said.

“But I would prefer to have low heels,” Jackie said. “I’m tall enough as it is.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Ari said to Hélène. “Make it an even dozen. Give her six pair of low heels and six pair of high heels.”

NO HOLDS BARRED

No matter how hard he tried, however, Ari could not remain emotionally unaffected by the press’s picture of him as a hapless victim of his own wife. Beneath his calloused exterior, there was a delicate personality that bruised easily. He believed that his mystique—not to mention his success in business—depended on his image of potency. He could not afford to look like a fool. And so he grew determined to show the world once and for all that he was the master of his fate.

In May, Henri Pessar, a French journalist who specialized in Ari-watching, reported that Ari spent four successive evenings at Maria Callas’s apartment on Avenue George Mandel. Ari was seen leaving between twelve-thirty and one A.M. each night. On the evening of May 21, Ari tipped off the press that he and Maria would be at Maxim’s with Maggie van Zuylen. The photograph of the radiant couple with their friend was flashed around the world.

When Jackie saw the photo in the New York Post, she phoned Ari and tearfully informed him that she was leaving for Paris immediately. The next night, she and Ari were seen at the same table in Maxim’s where Ari and Maria had dined with Maggie van Zuylen. Once again, photographers had been tipped off, and they recorded the event. In the photo, Jackie did not look very happy, but she had made a public statement.

“Maria heard it all too clearly,” wrote Arianna Stassinopoulos. “She knew that Aristo had opened his heart to her as to no one else. He had complained about Jackie, he had raged against Jackie, he had defied Jackie by appearing with Maria at Maxim’s. But when Jackie instantly demanded a symbolic replay of his dinner with Maria, Aristo did what Jackie wanted.”

Four days later, Maria was admitted to the American Hospital in Neuilly, on the outskirts of Paris, with a condition that was officially diagnosed as sinus trouble. However, one of the nurses leaked the true story to a reporter. In a fit of depression, Maria had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Maria was still in a depression in early August when she arrived at Tragonisi, Perry Embiricos’s private island in the Aegean. She spent hours lying on the beach, pouring out her soul to her friend Nadia Stancioff.

“She seemed obsessed by death at the time,” Nadia recalled. “In an instinctive, almost primitive way, she believed in reincarnation. ‘I wonder what I’ll be when I come back,’ she said once. ‘I don’t want to be buried,’ she told me at another time. ‘I want to be burned. I don’t want to become a worm.’ Like many Greeks, she was superstitious about preparing a will, as if writing things down brought bad luck.”

This was Maria’s frame of mind when she looked up from her beach blanket and saw Ari coming toward her.

When he reached her, Ari leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth. Then he sat down beside her, and kissed her poodle.

“Chronia polla, “ he said. “Happy birthday.”

Maria was instantly his.

Once again, their meeting was recorded by a photographer.

“Responding like a dalmatian to the fire bell,” Time magazine reported, “Jackie flew to Greece, to Onassis, to the yacht Christina, and to squelch rumors.”

Jackie had been accustomed to prying reporters when she was in public life, but she was dismayed by the escalating coverage of her private life. There was something new about this kind of journalism, and it was not simply the fact that a reputable publication like Time was following the lurid details of the Ari-Jackie-Maria soap opera.

Since the turn of the century, serious publications had devoted space to scandals involving people prominent in society. The best publications had followed the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the murder of Stanford White by Harry Thaw, and the Lindbergh kidnapping. But now, journalists had powerful new tools at their disposal to record and disseminate their stories—superfast 35 mm film, powerful telephoto lenses, miniature tape recorders, travel by jet airplane, telephone and TV communication via satellite. Nothing seemed beyond a reporter’s reach. The most intimate details of a person’s life could be communicated to vast audiences within a matter of hours, even minutes.

Jackie was one of the first victims of this technological revolution in mass communications. She had sought privacy and protection by marrying Ari, but now she was as exposed and vulnerable as she had been after John Kennedy’s assassination.

Shortly after the Time story appeared, Niki Goulandris invited Jackie for tea. Niki expected that her friend would be an emotional wreck because of the press coverage of her husband’s renewed relationship with Maria Callas. To her surprise, however, Niki found Jackie in a cheerful mood.

All of Jackie’s old defense mechanisms, which she had developed as the child of an alcoholic, had come back into play. She did not hear things she did not want to hear, did not see things she did not want to see. She was in a state of complete denial about Maria