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

bouts of depression, as in fact did many of the swans. Still, her main goal in life was to please Loel, and she had outdone herself decorating the Guiness residence in Florida. Loel had bought the house from Bunny Mel-Ion’s father, Gerard Lambert, who had designed it himself. Called Gemini, it was built on a parcel of land that ran from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Worth. The beach house on the ocean side was connected to the pool on the lake side by an underground music room, which was a marvel of engineering, and had a skylight, a working fireplace, and an electric organ.

Gloria was supervising the servants as they set a table under a large market umbrella by the pool. The terrace overlooked six hundred feet of manicured lawn, which was spotted with tall coconut palms, bayans, screw pines, gumbo limbos, and hibiscus plants. Gloria waved a note at Aileen. Written by Jackie in her precise handwriting, it announced that Jackie was bringing Ari and her children for lunch.

“We must try to cheer her up,” Gloria told Aileen.

Gloria had heard that Jackie and Ari were not getting along. Ordinarily this would not have fazed her, for whatever her private demons, Gloria dealt with public occasions in a confident, down-to-earth manner. She had once told Noel Coward at a dinner party that she could not bear to sleep in the same bed as her husband because “he farts too much.” But Gloria seemed unusually nervous today, perhaps because she had also heard that Ari had recently taken to airing his dissatisfaction with Jackie in public.

In fact, even as she rearranged the Christofle teaspoons so they were exactly parallel with the edge of the Pratesi place mats, Gloria was expecting the worst.

Jackie had tried everything she could think of to cheer up her husband after the death of Alexander. She neglected Caroline and John in order to spend more time with Ari. She accompanied Ari on long cruises. She gave dinner parties at her New York apartment, and invited friends, like the photographer Peter Beard and the feminist Gloria Steinem, who she knew would interest him. Nothing seemed to help. The style that Jackie had used all her life to camouflage unpleasant things was no longer working.

Ari was drinking more heavily than ever. He looked out-of-sorts and complained of headaches. His lifelong insomnia had grown worse. At night on Skorpios, he often took long walks, invariably ending up at the tomb of his son. He squatted there on his haunches like a peasant, staring at the large marble sarcophagus. One time, an American woman, unable to sleep herself, came upon him. He did not notice her presence.

“For a man to be that enclosed, it seemed to be a kind of happiness,” she said later. “I had the feeling that if Alexander were alive and at his side, Ari would have been no nearer to the boy than he was at that moment.”

Ari’s crushing personal loss was compounded by devastating reversals in business. Several months after Alexander’s death, the Arabs declared an oil embargo, and the bottom fell out of the world tanker market. In the past, Ari might have seen the crisis coming and taken steps to ward off the worst. But since the death of Alexander, he seemed to have lost his mental acuity. The Arab embargo caught him completely by surprise.

“More than a third of his tonnage was already laid up, none of the oil giants was interested in long-term charters, and he was forced to cancel the two French ULCCs [ultra-large cargo container ships], at a loss of $12.5 million,” noted Peter Evans.

The skyrocketing price of oil put a terrible squeeze on Olympic Airways, which Ari had transformed from a dilapidated company into the jewel in the crown of his empire. Ari asked the government of Constantine Karamanlis, which had recently replaced the ruling military junta in Athens, to authorize an increase in ticket prices to help him cover the skyrocketing cost of fuel. Karamanlis, a friend of many years, turned Ari down flat.

At half past noon, Ari’s limousine swung off the ocean road into the Guiness estate and headed down a winding gravel driveway that was planted with lush tropical specimens. The car came to a halt in a square courtyard in front of the imposing entrance of Gemini. Ari, Jackie, and her children entered the front hall, which was covered from floor to ceiling in milky white marble. A maid escorted them through the living loggia to the pool, where they were greeted warmly by the Guinesses.

“Gloria, black hair falling to her shoulders, golden bangles sliding up and down her arms, looked like a ravishing gypsy,” Aileen Mehle recalled.

Gloria’s superb sense of style was not the result of her husband’s money. He was actually quite stingy with her, and her trademark Florida sun hat was a jaunty straw model from the local five-and-ten. Once, when a reporter for Time magazine asked Gloria what her favorite at-home costume was during the day, she answered: “Comfortable robes that I pick up for twelve ninety-five apiece in Manhattan.”

“Loel, true Brit that he is, was as sartorially splendid as ever, blazer and ascot impeccable,” Aileen continued. “I, too, had done my best…. The Greek tycoon, even at his nattiest, could never set Savile Row on fire, so his rumpled state was nothing new.

“It was Jackie who was the big surprise. Always before when I had seen her, she was marvelously pulled together, secure in that throwaway chic that was so much a part of her. But this day was another matter. One look and it was clear she had been to hell and back: no sign of makeup, an unbecoming cotton dress that didn’t know where it began or ended. An odd cotton scarf, knotted at four corners, was tied on her head, covering her hair completely.

“While we took startled note, Ari took revenge—he had an audience.

“ ‘Look at you,’ he said, pointing. ‘How can you be seen looking