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

Johnny Meyer to get in touch with the Life Extension Society in Washington, which specialized in cryonics. But at the last moment, an old Onassis friend, Yanni Georgakis, who had debated theological issues with Ari and was not afraid to speak his mind, put a stop to these macabre arrangements.

“A father has no right to impede the journey of his son’s soul,” Georgakis said.

Ari accepted Georgakis’s reasoning. But before he would agree to bury Alexander, he insisted that Dr. Popen perform one last plastic-surgery procedure on his son’s face. Only then did Ari have Alexander’s body embalmed, then airlifted to Skorpios.

There, Alexander’s coffin was put into a truck and driven from the harbor up the road that Jackie, with Niki Goulandris, had lovingly landscaped. In a few minutes, the funeral procession reached the tiny chapel of Panayitsa, where Jackie and Ari had been married. Jackie stood in the dim, candle-lit chapel as the priest said his prayers. The workmen slid the heavy lid over Alexander’s imposing tomb, which was cut from the same pure white marble used to build the Parthenon. The lid made a loud thud as it fell into place.

This was the second time in less than ten years that Jackie had stood beside a husband and watched him bury a son. John Kennedy had been staggered by the loss of Patrick Bouvier, and had collapsed in sobs and tears. But his behavior was restrained compared to the flood of anguish unloosed by Ari, who gnashed his teeth, and howled at God.

The display of raw emotion always terrified Jackie, though she probably could not have said why. Perhaps it was because she felt responsible, like Guinevere, for the death and destruction that always seemed to follow in her wake. Or perhaps it was because the suffering and misery of others reminded her of her own submerged feelings, which she was afraid to express. Whatever the reason, Ari’s pain was too great for her to bear, and she managed to get through Alexander’s funeral the way she had gotten through Jack’s funeral—by becoming the detached observer, and watching everything from her art director’s chair hanging in space.

For weeks after the funeral, Ari lived in a trancelike state. He stared off into space, his face a study in grief. He was a deeply superstitious man, and he could not believe that Alexander’s death was a matter of pure chance. It must have been the result of cause and effect. There must have been a connection between Ari’s own actions and the tragedy that had befallen his son.

As time went on, Ari came to the conclusion that the fatal accident was a punishment for his god-defying arrogance, the excessive pride that the ancient Greeks had called hubris. But what was the exact nature of his hubris?

It could only be one thing, he decided. His hubris had led him to marry Jackie. He had overreached himself. He had failed to take the advice he had given his own stepson, John Kennedy Jr. He had flown too close to the sun, and the gods had destroyed him.

“Onassis was conscience-stricken,” said Stelio Papadimitriou. “First of all, he started feeling remorse for having let the relationship with his former wife deteriorate. He really loved Tina. He felt bad that she had married Niarchos. He felt bad that his children didn’t like Jackie. He saw his life in a bad light. And the death of Alexander exacerbated his feelings that his life was not good.”

Ari’s personality underwent a dramatic alteration. Friends and associates said he was a different man. He seemed to lose all hope. His raison d’etre had disappeared along with Alexander.

“In his own eyes, his life resembled the life of the ancient Greeks,” said Papadimitriou. “He was guilty of the sin of hubris, overweening pride, and he had suffered the punishment of the gods. It was like something out of Aeschylus’s great trilogy of tragedies, the Oresteia. It was like the fall of the House of Atreus.”

TWELVE

LOVE, DEATH,

AND MONEY

October 1973–September 1977

TO HELL AND BACK

“I have houses in Acapulco, Florida, Normandy, Lausanne, and Paris,” Loel Guiness, the English banking magnate, was saying. “I have a yacht and a plane, and because of Gloria, I never have to worry about any of it.”

It was a few minutes past noon, and Guiness was sitting by the side of the swimming pool at his home in Lantana, Florida, and talking to his guest, Aileen Mehle, better known to the readers of her society column as Suzy. He was extolling the domestic virtues of his wife, Gloria Rubio von Furstenberg Fahkry Guiness, a twice-divorced Mexican beauty who had the lithe figure and regal profile of a princess in an ancient Egyptian frieze.

“Just look at her,” said Guiness, pointing to his wife. “Jackie and Ari decide at the very last minute that they would like to come for lunch, and Gloria has everything under control.”

Before she snagged her rich husband, Gloria had been a manicurist. But like so many women who managed to scale the heights of society, her origins were of little importance. Born with equal amounts of brains, beauty, and style, she was one of those women Truman Capote lovingly referred to as “swans.” She often made a boldfaced appearance in Aileen’s “Suzy” column, usually a paragraph or two away from her sister swans: Babe Paley, Slim Keith, and C. Z. Guest.

No one knew more about the strange connubial habits of the swans and their superrich husbands than Aileen. Despite the evident pride Guiness took in his wife, he was away from home most of the time, and on those rare occasions when he and Gloria found themselves together without the company of others, he paid her scant attention. Like most men of wealth, he placed his wife in the same category as his houses, yacht, and plane. She was another pretty possession to impress his wealthy friends.

During her long hours of solitude, Gloria suffered from