Aristotle Onassis Couldn’t Escape The Kennedy Curse

The life of millionaire shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis is a fascinating story of pursuit and passion. His underhanded business dealings were constantly under suspicion, and so was his passion for women, especially married ones. Onasis married one of America’s most famous first ladies, Jackie Kennedy, but did that satisfy the Greek tycoon? Certainly not. He betrayed his wife with a famous old flame, and Jackie found out about the affair in a truly terrible way. While in America, she picked up a newspaper and saw her husband’s infidelity splashed across the front page; he was having a romantic dinner in Paris with Maria Callas. Seething with rage, Jackie immediately hopped on a plane to Paris to confront her cheating husband. When she arrived, she made a very bizarre demand, more on that later. Onasis had manipulated his romantic and commercial life with a lethal combination of extreme focus and undeniable charm. He wasn’t one for rules, and while that initially helped build his fortune, it would also lead to tragedy, as you will see. As Jackie’s husband, Onasis should have felt like the luckiest man in the world, but there were those close to him who considered the marriage cursed.

Aristotle Onassis was actually born in Smyrna, Turkey, in 1906. His father was a successful shipping entrepreneur, so little Onasis enjoyed a charmed childhood and received an esteemed education. Unfortunately, due to the Greco-Turkish War, the Onasis family lost all their property and became refugees in 1922. The young Onasis packed his bags and left to find his fortune at the tender age of 17. Onasis arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He landed a position as a telephone operator, but could Onasis ever be fulfilled at a nine-to-five job? Nope, but it was a job that promised to open the door to opportunity. Onasis’s job at the telephone company was part of his devious plan. He started listening in on business calls and using what he heard to make deals. He eavesdropped during the day and studied late into the night, learning about the import-export business. He knew one thing: he was destined to become one of the richest men in the world. Onasis began his business by importing a brand of cigarettes, and he planned to target his product at non-smoking women. All he needed now was a famous personality to be his brand ambassador. To make this happen, Onasis arrived at opera singer Claudia Muzio’s dressing room with flowers and free samples. As you will see, he had a bit of a thing for opera singers. Won over by Onasis’s oozing charm, Muzio agreed to be the model for his brand. Using this strategy, Onasis became a millionaire by the age of 25. Soon, he realized it was high time to expand his horizons. Onasis decided to begin shipping his products himself; he just needed to get a fleet of boats at a price he could afford. Luckily for him, this was the 1930s during the Great Depression, so Onasis offered to buy up vessels from companies that were going under.

He opened new offices in New York City, but Onasis wanted to go further. He looked at his biggest competitor and asked, “What does he have that I don’t?” The answer was status. He decided to marry his competitor’s 17-year-old daughter, Athena Livanos. Let’s just say the marriage looked a little suspicious. Onasis wanted to stick it to his father-in-law, Stavros Livanos. Livanos looked down on startups like Onasis, so by marrying Athena, Onasis elevated himself to Livanos’s level or brought his father-in-law down a few notches. Either way, Onasis won; his wallet was growing, and so was his ego. Onasis and his wife were both having affairs and mostly keeping them under wraps, at least until Onasis met opera singer Maria Callas. Onasis and Callas were both married when they met. To Onasis, the affair seemed inevitable; his reason was because they were the two most famous Greeks in the world. Onasis’s pride wouldn’t let him keep the affair a secret. What was the point of dating an opera star if no one knew about it? Onasis started to flaunt his relationship with Callas, and that’s when his wife put her foot down. The two divorced in 1960. So does that mean he turned around and married Callas? Not a chance. Callas wasn’t marriage material according to Onasis. There was, however, a certain first lady who was. In 1963, President Kennedy’s wife, Jackie, battled a harrowing depression after the passing of her third child. Jackie’s younger sister, Lee Radziwill, thought that a little fresh sea air might alleviate Jackie’s grief, but President Kennedy had his reservations. He worried over the impropriety of it all, especially considering the owner of the boat was none other than womanizer and millionaire Aristotle Onasis. The trip on the yacht went off without a hitch, and when Jackie was finally back on solid ground, she realized she’d made a new friend in Onasis. It didn’t matter that he’d once been romantically tied to her sister Lee; he was just someone to talk to.

To Jackie, this was an innocent friendship; however, Onasis had completely different plans. Inviting the married woman for a cruise was something Onasis had done before; previous to Kennedy, it had been Maria Callas. Callas boarded Onasis’s yacht a married woman and returned to shore convinced her marriage was over. Onasis’s charm seemed to take on superpowers while at sea. So where was Callas while the cruise with Kennedy was taking place? At that point, Onasis was actually living with Callas, so keeping her out of the way might have been difficult. Apparently, she’d spent the entire time holed up in her decadent Paris apartment, which he’d bought for her. It seemed pretty clear that Onasis was going out of his way to keep his different interests completely separate from one another. Onasis wasn’t above using his romantic charms to further his power; after all, it had worked wonders on Callas. So here Onasis was, making friends with the President of the United States’s wife, bear in mind this is someone who rarely does anything without a strategy. Tragically, Jackie Kennedy was about to meet all the friends she could get. On November 22nd, 1963, shots rang out that changed Jackie Kennedy’s life forever; the president had been assassinated, and suddenly Kennedy was a widow. Onasis, meanwhile, was waiting in the wings, ready to rush to Jackie’s side, but to his utter dismay, Jackie didn’t turn to him for support at all. Instead of leaning on Onasis, Jackie turned to her brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy. Jackie and Robert got very close in the aftermath of their shared tragedy; some said maybe too close. Even so, Onasis wouldn’t have to wait long for Jackie’s attention, as tragedy was about to strike her down once again. I don’t want to say that Onasis was happy about the next tragedy, but it certainly gave him an advantage. The shooting of Robert Kennedy left Jackie vulnerable and even more distraught than she was before.

Surely now was his moment to shine. After enduring two tragedies, Jackie Kennedy finally warmed to Onasis as more than a friend. Rumors about the two being in a romantic relationship emerged four months after Robert Kennedy’s demise, and in 1968, the two married. And if the happy couple expected a warm reaction from the American people, they were in for a rude awakening. In response to the marriage, The Washington Post dramatically said the gods are weeping, while The New York Times reported that the reaction to the marriage was anger, shock, and dismay. Everyone in America was wondering why Jackie Kennedy did it. Why did America’s sweetheart marry this rather, let’s be honest, immoral millionaire? He was 23 years older than her, a known womanizer, and his business dealings were far from scrupulous. The world wanted to know what Onasis was offering, and the answer was easy money. The moment Onasis and Jackie wed, Jackie lost her Kennedy trust fund. This would prove to be a hardship for Jackie, who had become accustomed to the luxurious life of a first lady. Onasis offered her a lump-sum payment of $1 million. He also threw in an annual stipend of $150,000 per year once he passed. These cold financial dealings led Onasis’s daughter, Christina, to call Jackie her father’s unfortunate obsession. The nuptials took place on Onasis’s private island in Greece. The location of the ceremony may have been a symbol of what Jackie wanted from the relationship; it was private, and most of all, it was safe. She had witnessed enough carnage over the past years and wanted a haven where she could finally relax. There was one strange requirement, though, and it had to do with Onasis’s vanity. Jackie didn’t seem to treat the wedding as a very special event; in fact, she didn’t even have a dress made for her, but wore a dress that she’d already worn to a friend’s wedding. Her footwear, however, had requirements: she had to wear flats so she wouldn’t bring attention to her fiancé’s height. But Onasis’s stature didn’t bother Jackie; she was after something else. Jackie had started to believe that just having the name Kennedy was a bad omen.

I mean, look at what happened to her husband and brother-in-law, so she took the unusual move of completely removing it. It was almost as if she were trying to erase her troubled past and replace it with Onasis. But there was a problem on the horizon she may not have been aware of. Now that Onasis was with Jackie, she was fair game to the tabloids; he’d effectively stripped her of her widowed first lady status, and the media refused to even use her new name, settling on Jackie O. What a slap in the face. Onasis had, with a great amount of effort, married the most famous woman in the world, but keeping her happy was an ordeal. After the wedding, Jackie quickly started redecorating and making huge additions to her already enormous wardrobe. After a year of marriage, the bill came in: she’d spent $15 million. Onasis, the man who owned his own island, said he’d never met anyone who could spend money like Jackie. For the most part, onlookers were very skeptical of this marriage, thinking it was a union of convenience, but Jackie’s assistant had a different story to tell. She said that Onasis would often sit with the children and ask them about their day at school. Onasis really did give a lot of attention to Jackie’s children, and they loved him for it; a good father, but not so great a husband. Just weeks after his marriage to Kennedy, Onasis was up to his old shenanigans. He tried to reignite his affair with ex-girlfriend Maria Callas. Callas, however, was no longer interested. You see, Onasis had never gotten around to telling her about his marriage to Jackie. She was livid and refused to see him, that is until he made a desperate threat. Onasis wouldn’t take no for an answer, so when Callas refused to see him, Onasis said he would take his Mercedes coupe and crash it into her front door. It’s not clear if Callas was fond of Onasis or just didn’t want to see a perfectly nice car smashed up, but for one reason or another, she let him back into her life. And Jackie’s response? Interesting to say the least. Jackie was in America when she noticed in the newspaper that Onasis was having a romantic dinner in Paris with Callas. Infuriated, Jackie raced across the pond and insisted that he have dinner with her as well, in the exact same restaurant. After all this, one thing was certainly clear: Onasis’s insatiable appetite for women was poisoning his personal life.

His love life was a hot mess, and his business was also about to take a terrible hit. In 1970, one of Onasis’s tankers, the SS Arrow, ran aground and drained its oily contents into a bay in Nova Scotia. It was a massive disaster and instigated a commission to find the cause of the spill. What the commission found destroyed Aristotle Onasis’s reputation as a businessman. The commission discovered more than just a few problems with the ship; in fact, the entire ship was in shambles. None of the navigation equipment was working properly, not the radar or the depth sensor. Even more damaging was the fact that the crew was completely inexperienced; the officer on watch the night of the accident didn’t even have a license to do his job. This certainly was bad for business, but Onasis’s troubles didn’t end there. The next accident hit much closer to home, and it was devastating. In 1973, Onasis’s son, Alexander, was a passenger on a small aircraft that crashed. Of the three men on board, only Alexander didn’t survive. This accident devastated Onasis and the entire family. Onasis’s daughter, Christina, caused a rift when she tried to convince her father that Alexander’s accident wasn’t really an accident at all. She claimed something much darker was responsible, that it was part of the Kennedy curse. And as if to prove her right, tragedy was about to strike again. After his son’s passing, Aristotle Onasis’s health deteriorated, and doctors told him he was terminally ill. His first thought, however, was scandalous: he wanted to divorce Jackie. With the clock ticking, he hatched a diabolical plan. He wanted to hire a private detective to catch Jackie committing adultery; this way, he could leave her with as little money as possible. Shortly after Onasis’s health had taken a turn for the worse, he was sent to a Paris hospital and didn’t have the time or the energy to proceed with the divorce. When Jackie heard about his hospitalization, she showed just how much she loved her husband by choosing to ski in Aspen instead of sitting by her husband’s hospital bed. Jackie did send a message, but it wasn’t for her husband. Jackie had no intention of visiting her husband in the hospital, but she did want control over who did, or more precisely, who couldn’t. Under no circumstances could Maria Callas visit Onasis’s hospital bed. How did Callas respond? She cleverly snuck into Onasis’s room.

Once she entered the room, it was clear this was the final goodbye; Onasis was in a coma. Callas stayed with him for an hour and then snuck out. In retrospect, she probably should have taken his wallet, and soon you will see why. In 1975, Onasis passed due to respiratory failure. He was buried on his private island next to his son Alexander. After his death, almost half of his estate went to a charity in the name of his son. Of course, there was still the other half of his gigantic fortune. Onasis left most of the remainder of his estate to his daughter Christina. Before he passed, he’d managed to keep Jackie’s portion to a bare minimum, but Jackie wouldn’t stand for it. She hadn’t married one of the world’s richest men for nothing, and with brother-in-law Ted Kennedy at her side, she contested the will. The stage was set for the estate trial of the century, but the trial never happened. Since there was more than enough money to go around, Christina Onasis made Jackie an offer. Christina never much cared for Jackie and she wanted to avoid the courtroom drama. Jackie received a cool $26 million in the settlement and another victory on a more personal level: Maria Callas received nothing. Aristotle Onasis had spent a lifetime and a fortune courting two of the most famous women in the world, Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy. Sadly, there wasn’t much to show for his efforts. He didn’t have children with either of them. To make matters worse, when Jackie passed in 1994, the name Onasis wasn’t mentioned at the funeral, not once. However, he did get a gravestone reference; Jackie reads Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis. I guess it’s better than just an O.