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

That evening after dinner in the main house, an inebriated Onassis started berating Jackie again.

“Why do you continue to buy British paintings of Irish horses?” he asked. “You know I don’t like those paintings. In any case, the art dealers in Britain always cheat you on the price.”

Jackie ignored him and turned to Papadimitriou.

“If Ari dies,” she said, “I know who my opponent will be. It will be you, Mr. Papadimitriou. You will carry out his final wishes. But I know something else. I can trust you. You are a fair man, and you will be fair to me when it comes to money.”

“I try at all times to be as decent as possible,” Papadimitriou said.

Then Jackie turned to Ari.

“I don’t want to divorce you,” she said. “But if that is your final decision, I accept it in sadness. I’ll never forget the good life we had together.”

Onassis sat there, and for once said nothing.

Then Jackie addressed Papadimitriou again.

“I know that you have been drafting writs of divorce,” she said.

“I laughed like a fool, and did not know what to say,” Papadimitriou recalled. “I felt sorry for Jackie. She was in a real bind. She could not satisfy her husband’s requirements and, at the same time, the requirements of her children. In her eyes, her children required her presence more than he did.

“Onassis wanted her around all the time. He wanted feminine company. He wanted to be the centerpiece. But Jackie was never there when he needed her. That made him very angry. He had me drafting and redrafting divorce papers for him.

“He always gave me the same instructions: ‘Say that Jackie is very nice, very kind, very polite.’

“And I would tell him, ‘No judge will grant you a divorce that way.’

“And he would say, ‘I don’t care. Do it the way I say.’

“And then, he would either tear up my draft, or put it in the shredding machine.

“This went on for two solid years. And all that time, from what I could tell, Onassis and Jackie continued to be intimate. And he never initiated divorce proceedings, which made me wonder what all the fuss was about.

“And I came to the only conclusion that made sense. In my view, Onassis never really wanted to divorce Jackie. All his talk about divorce was part of his deal-maker’s psychology. It was a negotiating tactic. His goal was to bring Jackie back to him. The only thing is, I don’t think Jackie realized that it was an empty threat.”

A SWEEPING INDICTMENT

Jack Anderson barreled through the door of the “21” Club, a New York restaurant favored by the barons of business. The hatcheck counter was three-deep with patrons shedding their bulky coats, but Anderson, a crack investigative journalist who wrote the syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was traveling light. Despite the chill in the fall air, he was hatless and coatless. The only thing he carried was a small spiral notebook, which was jammed into the side pocket of his rumpled suit jacket.

He was recognized by the “21” Club’s sharp-eyed greeter, Harry Lavin, who steered him to a table located just inside the entrance of the Bar Room. There, slumped over a half-empty tumbler of whisky, his dark glasses failing to hide the loose strips of Scotch tape that dangled from his eyelids, was Aristotle Onassis.

“Onassis had reserved the best table in the place,” Anderson said. “As soon as I sat down, he began making a start on Jackie: ‘What does she do with all those clothes? All I ever see her wearing is blue jeans,’ and then he would stop, apparently out of tact, delicacy, or reticence.

“I didn’t get much more out of him than that,” Anderson continued. “However, after lunch, he invited me back to his office to meet several of his colleagues, including Costa Gratsos, a tall, smooth-talking fellow with a white mane of hair and a pipe. Before we got started, I asked if I could call my chief assistant and legman, Les Whitten, who was in New York, and have him join us at the office. Onassis and Gratsos had no problem with that.”

“By the time I got there,” said Whitten, picking up the story, “Onassis had disappeared, and Jack [Anderson] was huddled with Gratsos and Gratsos’s secretary, a woman named Lynn Alpha Smith. They were showing Jack some confidential documents, one of which they claimed was a copy of Onassis’s premarital agreement with Jackie.

“Gratsos was a tough guy,” Whitten continued, “and it was clear that he wasn’t fond of Jackie in the least. In fact, his sole purpose in meeting us was to discredit her. His real worry was who was going to get Onassis’s millions after he died. He sure didn’t want that money to go to Jackie.”

Gratsos had been hatching plots against Jackie from the day she married Onassis. He had managed to convince most of the world that Jackie had a serious psychological flaw, and was a pathological spender. He made certain that Onassis got to see these negative stories, because he knew that Onassis, an avid consumer of gossip, was ready to believe the worst about people. Yet, for a long time, this strategy had failed. Gratsos, despite his best efforts, had not succeeded in hardening Onassis’s heart against his wife.

Now, however, Onassis was staring death in the face, and Jackie, who had been so important to him before, no longer seemed as significant in the great scheme of things. It was not so much that he cared for her less. He still loved her, in his fashion, but he cared more about the survival of his shipping empire.

His sole living descendant was his daughter Christina. She was poised to inherit Onassis’s fleet of ships, his banks, pier facilities, real estate (including the just-completed Olympic Towers on Fifth Avenue, and a quarter interest in New York’s Pierre Hotel), his residences in Athens, Monte Carlo, Montevideo, and Paris, his yacht, the