FROM CAMELOT TO ELYSIUM (VIA OLYMPIC AIRWAYS)

COVER STORY

No one who was aboard that night will soon forget the party on the yacht Christina last August. While the guests flirted, drank, dined, and danced the surtaki, a bouzouki band beat its heart out. The host listened with a touch of melancholy as the musicians played his favorite ballad:

These are bitter summers

And you have taught me to spend them with you . . .

The guest of honor nibbled on white grapes, and when her companion asked the band to play Adios Compagnia, she joined the bittersweet chorus. The candles guttered in their pink crystal holders, and then there was only the moon to illumine the close faces around the silvery deck.

A Symbolic Farewell

The Christina was docked again last week at the grey-green isle of Skorpiós, and the principal figures were the same—Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Aristotle Socrates Onassis. This time they were the center of rapt international attention. From practically every capital and every level of society, the guests and members of the wedding came, by jetliner, shuttle plane and helicopter, to the mountainous island in the sunny Ionian Sea. From Holland an elaborate airlift brought in mountains of tulips, and lemon buds to be woven into garlands for the bridal pair. From the mainland came Father Polykarpos Athanassion, pastor of the Kapnikarea Church in central Athens. Angelo of Athens descended on the isle to attend to the world’s most closely scrutinized coiffure. Bouzouki bandsmen were on hand to play the haunting melodies so dear to the bridegroom’s heart. Argosies of viands and wines were lightered in and unloaded while the white-hulled honeymoon yacht creaked at her quay.

In a cypress grove above the harbor, workmen labored long and lovingly on the task of refurbishing the tiny, neoclassic Chapel of Panayitsa (the Little Virgin). The centuries-old ritual was prescribed by Greek Orthodox tradition. The wedding ceremony called for the couple to walk around the altar three times; bride and groom traditionally try to be the first to step on the other’s feet (the winner is then able to claim supremacy in the household). Man and wife are crowned with wreaths and drink from a cup of wine in order to symbolize the “harmony of soul and bodies.” Everything, from sugared almonds to the waiting yacht, was ready to celebrate the new life of Mr. and Mrs. Aristotle Onassis. Everything, that is, except what is known as “the world,” which seemed unable to comprehend or accept the match.

Reaction in the U.S. and abroad ranged from dismay to a kind of shocked ribaldry. JACKIE, HOW COULD YOU? headlined Stockholm’s Expressen. “Nixon has a Greek running mate,” cracked Bob Hope, “and now everyone wants one.” Said a former Kennedy aide: “She’s gone from Prince Charming to Caliban.” In a more sober vein, French Political Commentator André Fontaine wrote in Le Monde: “Jackie, whose staunch courage during John’s funeral made such an impression, now chooses to shock by marrying a man who could be her father and whose career contradicts—rather strongly, to say the least—the liberal spirit that animated President Kennedy.”

To most Americans as well, Jackie’s marriage symbolized her goodbye to an era and a hero. “It’s the end of Camelot,” was a common reaction. Many were disturbed that she was marrying out of her church and culture. A certain residual puritanism (and at moments like this its lingering strength becomes most apparent) made many Americans feel that she was entering a frivolous, if not slightly wicked jet-set world. No one could reasonably expect her to remain unmarried, the guardian of the Kennedy legend. But people tend to be fastidious, even ruthless, about their heroes and heroines. The imagination of most Americans would not necessarily have preferred an American but, if a foreigner, something closer to an English aristocrat (many had been rather hopeful about Lord Harlech) or a swinging Prime Minister, like Canada’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Is it anyone’s business? Of course not. The speculation, the gossip, the judgment of new motives may well be seen as rude and a little absurd. They are either too solemn or too shallow. But Jackie Kennedy simply is not a private person who may escape such scrutiny.

To few men or women have Americans accorded the concern, sympathy and affection that they extended to her. Few living Americans, for that matter, have been so fervently admired by foreigners. Even before the assassination of the 35th President in 1963, her beauty and style captivated the world—including Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev. In the days after Jack Kennedy’s death, millions grieved for the widow whose poise and lonely courage helped carry the U.S. through one of the century’s worst ordeals.

Jackie took on a mythic quality in the American mind. She seemed to detest the world’s devouring and often cruel interest in her—but she might well have avoided the public gaze, had she wished, by adopting a different style of life. In choosing “Ari” Onassis, a man of 62 or 68,* a divorcee, a centimillionaire little known for generosity or wisdom and very well known for his flamboyant mode of life, Jacqueline Kennedy seemed brusquely to abdicate the throne that Americans had made for her.

Death and Liberation Thus, to some degree, the American shock at Jackie’s decision undoubtedly grew from a feeling of rejection. Friends note that she may well feel rejected herself: after Jack’s death, she took strength from Bob Kennedy, only to see him murdered too. “Perhaps she feels she has not been very well treated by America,” says a Kennedyite with poignant understatement.

Many of her countrymen developed what was perhaps an unduly adulatory impression of Jackie as a serious intellectual and political helpmeet to her husband. Actually, before she married J.F.K. in 1953 she had lived a pretty jetty life — the most expensive finishing schools, a year at the Sorbonne, the rounds of parties and balls at Newport, the Hamptons, Manhattan and Washington, a year of “roughing it” as inquiring photographer for the Washing ton Post.

Once in the White House, Jackie clearly relished its monarchical aspects. Her wardrobe was reputed to cost $50,000 a year in couturiers’ bills (“If so, I would be wearing sable underwear,” she countered). But from her first years as the wife of a junior Senator through her reign as First Lady, she never warmed fully to the capital’s political ambiance and never tried too hard to conceal the fact that she was bored by the machinations of government.

After her grief over Jack’s death wore off, she found herself liberated in a sense —and to an extent that she could never have known as the wife of the President. She sold her house in Georgetown and a country estate in Virginia, and moved with evident relief to Manhattan. She globetrotted, rode to hounds, sailed, delighted in candlelit tête-à -têtes with such figures as Pablo Casals, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn—luminaries her husband might have found unprepossessing—over French cuisine, for which he had little gusto. Despite her sophistication, world and national affairs were not necessarily her forte. Friends felt that she was truly interested in other things—music and books and art, and particularly her children.

Fascinating Speculation

From her 15-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, she has escorted her children to school, past the customary benchfuls of Jackie-watchers. Caroline, in a grey uniform, attends the Convent of the Sacred Heart; John, in an early-Beatle haircut, went to St. David’s until last term, when it was recommended he be held back. He now attends Collegiate, which has the reputation of being the most stimulating private boys’ school in New York. Occasionally, Jackie and the children could be seen licking ice-cream cones at a nearby Schrafft’s. When John Jr. punched a schoolmate in the nose, it made news around the world.

For the time being, at least until the children are older, the second Mrs. Onassis has indicated that she plans to spend most of the year in her comfortable Fifth Avenue abode, which has a big living room decorated in light colors and dominated by a deep fireplace and an easel on and around which stand a number of Jackie’s consciously primitive paintings. A large telescope has been observed poised before the Central Park window. In her closets, day suits and evening suits are segregated, evening dresses arranged by length, all clothing lined up by primary color and shades of color, pairs of shoes catalogued by the hundreds according to color and style.

On her public pedestal, under 24-hour surveillance by Secret Service agents, Jackie was of necessity extremely circumspect with her male acquaintances. Quite often, she borrowed husbands as safe escorts: Roswell Gilpatric, 61, former Deputy Defense Secretary who accompanied her to Yucatán; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 51, a charter New Frontiersman; Composer-Conductor Leonard Bernstein, 50; even Robert McNamara, 52, of whom one observer noted: “When Jackie’s around, the computer turns into a puppy dog wagging its tail.”

More fascinating was the speculation on the eligible bachelors whom Jackie dated. In the forefront was Britain’s Lord Harlech, 50, the former David Ormsby-Gore, who was British ambassador to Washington during John Kennedy’s presidency. A handsome widower, he escorted Jackie to Cambodia and the ruins of Angkor Wat last year, and to many his urbane manner and aristocratic bearing suggested a perfect match. Others felt he was too lenient with his quasi-hippie children, and far too “old shoe” for swinging Jackie, whom few could imagine as the doyenne of a damp and ancient mansion in Wales. Other potential husbands seemed even less likely: Antonio Garrigues y Diaz Canabate, at 64 a widower and the Spanish Ambassador to the Vatican, who escorted Jackie through Rome last year; Director Mike Nichols, 36, who offered amusing nights at the theater and clever chatter; Sportsman-Editor George Plimpton, 41, who was recently married.

Acquisitive Mania

It fell to a few movie magazines to suggest strongly that Onassis was a possible spouse—which suggests that perhaps movie magazines should be considered more seriously. Jackie, at the urging of her sister Princess Lee Radziwill, a close friend of Ari’s, had cruised on his yacht in 1963, shortly after the death of her infant son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. Onassis was one of the first non-clan visitors she received after J.F.K.’s death later that year. But Onassis appeared too rough-edged (“He’s not a man of the salon,” says one detractor. “He’s a man of the pier”) and too old to rate as a suitor.

He was, after all, a notorious collector. He collected status symbols like his yacht, which he purchased after his archrival, Stavros Niarchos, bought a superschooner; art works ranging from a bejeweled Buddha to a $250,000 El Greco; and important people. Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant—all the famed and beautiful cruised on Onassis’ yacht. In Maria Callas, whom Onassis lured away from a dull but decent Italian businessman-husband, he collected the “richest voice in the world,” as one intimate puts it, “while hating opera.” When he made a special effort to squire Jackie about, it seemed nothing more than another example of his inveterate collection mania, a completion of the Alpha to Omega that were his initials.

She, too, is an avid collector—of paintings, personages and new impressions. “Since Jack’s death, she has visited Ireland, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Hawaii, the Caribbean, Canada, Greece, Mexico, Cambodia and all the fashionable U.S. spas in season. She spent some time with Ari in the Caribbean and in Greece. Occasionally, like Onassis, she erupts: her highly publicized legal battle with Biographer William Manchester underscored her keen sense of violated privacy and an equal amount of hubris. “The American public would forgive me anything,” Jackie once remarked, “except running off with Eddie Fisher.” And indeed that was her problem—what man could possibly fill the demanding American public’s specifications for a Jack-surrogate? What man could possibly marry her, many wondered, and not end up as Mr. Jackie Kennedy? Aristotle Onassis, for one. While she will never be known simply as his wife, he will never be known simply as her husband.

Qualified Blessing

Jackie told him of her decision by long-distance phone: Yes, she said, she accepted his proposal. (He had already had a physical checkup by his doctor and told the physician that he would marry her.) If anything rang loud in her acceptance, it was a thunderous silence from the Kennedy camp. Senator Edward Kennedy’s statement wishing the couple well was chilling in its formality and its brevity. Joseph P. Kennedy, speechless since the stroke he suffered seven years ago, was wheeled into Jackie’s presence in her Fifth Avenue apartment and, by a kind of communication worked out between himself and his niece, conveyed his blessing on the pair. Even such Kennedy-leaning papers as the Boston Herald Traveler, which first broke the news, failed to elicit a single family reaction. The announcement of the impending marriage was made quite curtly, and belatedly, by Jackie’s mother, Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss. Had Bob Kennedy been alive and in presidential contention, it might never have been made. Though two Kennedy sisters, Mrs. Stephen Smith and Mrs. Peter Lawford, accompanied Jackie on her flight to Greece for the wedding, the Kennedy clan seemed less than delighted—especially the devout Rose Kennedy, who could hardly have approved of the religious problems involved.

The theology of the wedding is sufficiently intricate to serve as a test case for Aquinas. As a Roman Catholic, Jackie may not marry a divorced man. Indeed, in times past she would automatically have been excommunicated as a “public sinner” at the moment of her marriage. The Greek Orthodox creed followed by Onassis, however, permits a believer to wed three times (a fourth marriage is forbidden). As a first step toward solving the problem, Onassis could try to win an annulment of his first marriage from the Greek church. Then the Vatican would have to pass on the validity of the Greek annulment. Normally, such procedures in the Roman Rota, the church’s highest marriage court, require years. Still, it is likely that Jackie, who has had frequent audiences with the Pope is well aware of her difficulties.

Plausible Freudians

Religion aside, her decision to marry Onassis was a jolting one, and the theories regarding Jackie’s motivation were as wild as the news itself. Some observers, awed by Onassis’ wealth, suggested that money might have been a consideration. Jackie is worth roughly $20 million, but some of her inheritance may be tied up in trust funds for the children. And she has decidedly-expensive tastes. As Gossip Columnist Suzy Knickerbocker remarked: “She could never marry a nice doctor and settle down in Connecticut to ride horses!” The Freudians sounded a touch more plausible. They speculated that perhaps Jackie needs a “father image.” Her own father, John (“Black Jack”) Bouvier III, was divorced by her mother when Jackie was eleven. A swarthy, swashbuckling stockbroker, he was wistfully described by his daughter after his death in 1957 as “a most devastating figure”; clearly he was a key influence on her. Onassis, with his grey hair and courtly manner, his dark skin and authoritative air, seems at least fatherly—if not grandfatherly.

Actually, her choice of Onassis may well represent a distillation of many desires. Onassis is a man of considerable magnetism. Some of his friends profess to see him as part Alexander the Great (for whom he probably named his son), part a Hellenic Great Gatsby. He is iron-willed, infinitely considerate of his women, vain of his limitless ability to charm, entertain and protect those whom he likes or loves.

Born in Smyrna on Jan. 20, 1906, the son of Socrates, a well-to-do tobacco dealer, he witnessed as a youth the savage Turkish invasion of 1922, during which an uncle was lynched in the town square. His family fled to mainland Greece. At 17, Aristotle embarked for Argentina with $60 in his pocket, to seek his fortune.

Down to the Sea

After starting in Buenos Aires as a telephone lineman at 25¢ an hour, he worked into the tobacco business, importing Turkish and Bulgarian blends that became immensely popular in Latin America. Three years later, he had saved $20,000; by the age of 23, his tobacco had made him a dollar millionaire. Then came the Depression, and with an eye for a bargain and a hankering for the sea (Odysseus was always his hero, Ithaca his spiritual homeland), Onassis began buying merchant ships. From Canadian National Railways, he purchased half a dozen vessels in 1930 at $20,000 apiece. Each had cost $2,000,000 to build ten years earlier. When World War II broke out, Onassis owned many of the precious tankers in Allied waters.

His worth vastly enhanced by wartime earnings, Onassis in 1946 married the younger daughter of Stavros Livanos, then one of the most powerful of the Greek shipping magnates. (Another Livanos daughter subsequently married and divorced Niarchos, now 59, whose tanker fleet today is reputed to be larger than the Onassis flotilla.) Athina (“Tina”) Livanos Onassis was only 17 when she married the stocky (5 ft. 5 in.) Greco-Argentine; she bore him two children: Alexander, now 20, and Christina, 18.

Tina Onassis won an Alabama divorce in 1960 on the ground of mental cruelty, and later married the jet-set Marquess of Blandford. The split resulted from Onassis’ liaison with Diva Maria Callas, now 44, a decade-long affair that ended only five months ago at Ari’s initiative. During their often fiery involvement, La Callas sometimes occupied a suite in Monte Carlo’s L’Hermitage hotel, near Onassis’ apartment and offices; a tunnel connected the two. Though Callas was most frequently photographed aboard the yacht, it had been Tina who inspired “Telis,” as his friends call him,* to buy the Canadian frigate Stormont in 1954 and convert it to a yacht, which he named for his daughter Christina.

Some $2,500,000 worth of improvements have transformed the 1,600-ton 325-foot ship into a floating Elysium. Capable of 22 knots, mounting an amphibian Piaggio aircraft plus a landing craft, the yacht boasts a black-sweatered crew of 50 (“More than it needs to run a 40,000-ton tanker,” says Onassis), two chefs, 42 extension phones, a bathtub that glitters with mosaic dolphins and flying fish and was copied from King Minos’ palace at Knossos, and a swimming pool big enough to hold a Kennedy sloop.

Canny Timing

Onassis spends four or five months a year aboard the Christina, confirming his self-image as a latter-day Odysseus. Old Argentinian friends describe him as a “Vivo”—a shrewd, live-wire operator behind whose enigmatic, almost Oriental facade lies a volcanic rage and a long memory for a grudge. He is apolitical, and indeed could hardly be otherwise in the volatile Athenian climate. Forced to wheel and deal with the present junta for economic survival, he was last week on the verge of completing a $360 million deal to build a seaport, an aluminum-processing plant (with Reynolds) and a few hotels. Practical-minded Greeks feel that his alliance with a Kennedy will probably improve the junta’s image and perhaps help Greece’s lagging tourist business.

Onassis is not very imaginative: last August he reportedly gave Jackie a silver-filigree bracelet stamped J.I.L.Y. (for “Jackie I Love You”), just as he once gave an M.I.L.Y. bracelet to Maria and a T.I.L.Y. bracelet to Tina. He is no clotheshorse. His baggy suits (“Made in London while he’s in New York,” comments a Monacan critic) are always worn with a blue shirt and blue tie. He prefers to go shirtless on his yacht, and pays strict attention to his waistline.

Though largely self-educated, Onassis is well-read in classical Greek history and speaks six languages: Greek, Turkish, English, Spanish, French, Italian. A night person and an insomniac, he is a hypnotic raconteur and used to fascinate guests at dinner parties in Hyannisport with his recollections of Winston Churchill. Friends, particularly women, prize him as a perfect listener. Even more peripatetic than Jackie, he caroms around the world carrying only a battered attaché case and a gold-embossed red leather appointment book. Duplicate sets of clothing await him at his pieds-à -terre in Paris (on the Avenue Foch), London (Claridge’s), Montevideo, Athens and Manhattan (the Pierre). Under his ownership, Olympic Airways—on which he holds a charter from the Greek government until A.D. 2004—is an ever-ready magic carpet.

For all his wanderings, Onassis is only a superficial sophisticate. His humor has a peasant strain. One of his favorite jokes describes “the noisiest thing in the world—two skeletons making love on a tin roof.” A hardheaded Scotch drinker (only at night), he has smashed upwards of $700 worth of crockery in bouzouki establishments, and has been known to snore in a La Scala opera box during a Callas première. Even his fellow Greek shipping kings long dismissed him as a crude upstart. Says one acquaintance: “He was trash to some Greeks, the way old Joe Kennedy was trash to some Irish.”

Onassis’ canny business dealings have helped fuel such sentiments. In 1952, he alienated his friend Prince Rainier of Monaco by quietly buying up a majority interest in the Société des Bains de Mer, which runs the Monte Carlo Casino. His reason: he had been snubbed in his search for office space. When he finally sold his interest back to Rainier, he cleared $5,000,000. In a 1954 attempt to monopolize the Saudi Arabian oil market, he made a deal with King Saud that would have given him exclusive rights to ship that country’s petroleum. He thus brought down the collective wrath of the world’s oilmen, who finally brought him to heel.

Earlier in the 1950s, Onassis became intrigued with whaling, ran a 20-ship fleet. When his vessels invaded the territorial whaling waters of Peru, the Peruvian navy confiscated his flagship only to discover that, thanks to a Lloyd’s insurance policy, Onassis was not losing a penny. Divining correctly that the whaling industry faced hard times, Onassis sold his fleet to Japan in 1956, at a profit of $8.5 million.

His main strength is tankers, and wisely so. In the mid-1950s, when Onassis began building supertankers, which later grew to 250,000 tons, he was told that they would never pay because they could not negotiate the Suez Canal. When Nasser closed the canal in 1956, Onassis made more millions with his swift hauls around the Cape.

The key to success in the supertanker business is collateral. Like the other independents—a group that soon came to be known as the Argonauts—Onassis practiced a clever technique of self-financing. Because the oil companies were unwilling to tie up cash reserves in new hulls, he only asked them for long-term (seven years or more) charters to haul their crude. Armed with the charters, he made firm contracts with shipbuilders, banks and insurance concerns, pointing out that the new tankers, with life spans of up to 25 years, would earn back their cost in roughly a third of their working life.

Floating Crap Game

Successful as the scheme proved, the oil-tanker business remains a fragile floating crap game in international finance. Fortunately for Onassis, the demand for petroleum imposed by the Marshall Plan, the Korean War and now Viet Nam has kept the tankers cruising through the past 30 years at an ever accelerating pace. He has also been aided along the way by Oilman John Paul Getty, 75, whom Onassis admired and courted.

According to an American associate, Eliot Bailen, Onassis “is not an officer of any corporation, domestic or foreign, but an owner holding stock that gives him control of corporations.” As a result, he controls some 100 companies in a dozen nations, operating a fleet of perhaps 4,000,000 tons displacement under “flags of convenience.” Beyond that, he is engaged in developing the “supertankers of the air,” the next generation of giant jets and shuttle airbuses. His investments include hotels, banks, and seaports. But oil shipping remains his principal source of income. In a moment of self-deprecation, Onassis once described himself as a “mere porter—a transporter of oil from here to there. Who wants to be a porter all his life?” Many might, at his pay level.

Apart from making money, one of Onassis’ prime concerns in life is one-upping Stavros Niarchos. After Niarchos bought an island retreat off Greece, Onassis snapped up Skorpios in 1962 for $84,000. Since then he has pumped close to $10 million into developing the 500-acre Ionian outcropping. To keep curious neighbors away, he bought the nearby island of Sparti as well. Lighters daily haul water to springless Skorpios, whose slopes are now luxuriantly planted with cypresses, oleanders and fruit trees. To some, it is eerily reminiscent of Dr. No’s island in the Bond book. Sullen-looking, black-uniformed employees swarm on its newly built roads and jetty, and keep constant guard against intruders. Golf carts hum in tune with the cicadas; on the crest of one ridge is a raw clearing on which Onassis plans to erect a 160-room “cottage” for his bride.

Off the Pedestal

Indeed, there is no doubt that on Skorpios, Jacqueline Kennedy will be queen of far more than she can survey: mistress of a private empire sustained by 200 servants and employees, wafted wherever she desires in her choice of two amphibians, a helicopter, the entire Olympic Airways system, or the Christina. Beyond this island and its pleasure domes there is the whole domain of international life and amusements, which she patently enjoys. Having stepped down from an uncomfortable American pedestal, she may find precisely the sort of life she has long sought. Romantics, after getting over their first shock of vicarious loss, will simply have to accept that fact.

“What does she see in him?” and “Is it love?” will remain major topics of conversation even among worldlier citizens for some time. For the present, the favorite theory seems to be that he will protect her from the world, providing the security and devotion that a powerful, older husband can best offer. She, in turn (or so goes the scenario), may well transform him from a “meaningless rich man”—in an old acquaintance’s phrase—by interesting him in worthy philanthropies rather than self-gratifying expenditures. Even their ages are not too disparate if one goes by the old Oriental rule: the ideal wife should be half her husband’s age plus seven years. (According to that reckoning, Jackie is a year too old for Onassis.) When she was asked once to decide where and in what era she would have preferred to live, Jacqueline Kennedy picked 18th century France. The unfettered universe of Aristotle Socrates Onassis comes closer to the kingdom of Louis XV—if not of Camelot —than any other around.

* An Argentine passport issued to him in 1927 listed his birthdate as Sept. 21, 1900. He claims to be 62.

* Short for the full Greek name of Aristotelis. He used to joke that “Ari” was an American corruption generated by well-meaning acquaintances who thought he was an Irishman named ‘Arry O’Nassis.