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

island of Skorpios, and tens of millions of dollars in stocks and bonds and other liquid assets.

Christina would soon be one of the richest women in the world. As her honorary uncle and trusted adviser, Gratsos had great expectations. After all, Christina had no experience in running a worldwide shipping business, while Gratsos was the son of a shipowner. After her father’s death, Christina would lean on Gratsos even more than before, and he would become the power behind the Onassis throne. Or so he hoped.

But the handover from Onassis to Christina was not going smoothly. Christina had recently botched another suicide attempt. What was more, her mother, Tina Niarchos, whom Onassis had named as chief executor of his will, had been found dead in the Hotel de Chanaleilles in Paris, the apparent victim of an edema of the lung, though some suspected her husband Stavros Niarchos of more foul play. Onassis was so distraught that he could not bring himself to attend Tina’s funeral.

In the midst of these family catastrophes, Onassis’s aides informed him that Olympic Airways faced imminent bankruptcy. He had no choice but to sell his beloved jewel. Negotiations with the Greek government could not have come at a worse time for him. With the downturn in the oil-tanker business, Onassis’s net worth had plummeted from $1 billion to $500 million, and his financial condition worsened by the day.

The enforced sale of Olympic Airways represented the greatest setback in Onassis’s business career. The very thought of losing his airline drove him into a rage. Sick as he was, Onassis came into the office, and he bellowed at everyone. Where was Papadimitriou? Onassis wanted to see him immediately! Where was Konialidas? Where was Johnny Meyer?

Most important of all, where was Jackie?

“Jackie seemed determined to stand aside from Ari’s problems,” said an aide. “There was not a lot she could have done in Athens except be there. They were some of the worst weeks of his life. He could have used some wifely comforting, not to mention her public relations pull…. He was putting up the backs of the very people he needed to beguile. His language even to those whose help he needed most was either sullen or griping. He’d lost his touch completely, he was played out. His name had once acted like a spell in Athens; now his world had turned upside down.”

“He had climbed to the top of the tree, and there was nothing there,” said Gratsos. “I don’t think he ever knew what he wanted. The difference was that in his last years he knew he would never get it.”

Onassis had run out of luck. Desperately sick, and frightened of dying, he felt more alone than at any time since he was a little boy, and his beloved mother Penelope had abandoned him and gone to heaven. He thought a lot about the past—past loves, past triumphs, past mistakes. With so little time left, he did not want to make any more mistakes. He was ready to listen to his oldest friend, Costa Gratsos.

And Gratsos did not spare him. He told Onassis that if he died while he was still married to Jackie, his prenuptial agreement would probably not hold up in court, and Jackie would walk away with more than $60 million. On the other hand, if Onassis instituted divorce proceedings against Jackie while he was in his current weakened condition, Jackie might be emboldened to fight him in the courts of Greece and America.

As Gratsos saw it, there was only one solution to this dilemma. They must attack Jackie where she was the most vulnerable: they must do it through personal exposure in the press. They must reveal her faults, her frailties, her excesses, and her pretensions. And they must do all this in such a brutal way that Jackie would be struck with fear, and would cringe from the idea of fighting over Onassis’s millions.

What better way for them to get started, Gratsos said, than for Onassis to call Roy M. Cohn, the Attila the Hun of divorce attorneys. Cohn had served in the 1950s on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and had been described by Esquire magazine as “the toughest, meanest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.” He had once come close to trading blows with his co-counsel Bobby Kennedy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. He was, in short, no friend of the Kennedys.

“Mr. Onassis had definitely concluded that he wanted to break the marriage,” Cohn said, “and had been consulting Greek lawyers, and so on, and there were a lot of complications over there, and he wanted to know whether I would be prepared to handle the American end—because he had assets over here—and participate in the overall strategy. He anticipated that the matter would be settled, because he did not think that Jackie would want to make a big thing out of it, but he also viewed the possibility that her appetite for money would be such that it might not be amicably settled.”

In addition to unleashing Roy Cohn, Gratsos also convinced Onassis to meet with the muckraking Washington journalist Jack Anderson. All Onassis had to do, Gratsos assured Onassis, was have a pleasant lunch at the “21” Club with the reporter, then leave the dirty work to him.

Gratsos was savvy in the ways of the press. After Onassis left them, Gratsos spoke to Anderson “on background,” which meant that the information from the interview was on the record, but that Anderson could not reveal his precise source. Gratsos would get his message across, but his name would not appear in print.

Over the course of several hours, Gratsos gave Anderson his version of the inner workings of Jackie’s marriage to Onassis. No reporter had heard anything like this before, and every so often, Gratsos would ask Anderson if he realized how lucky he was to be the first to get the story. But Anderson was a seasoned journalist, and he