The House of Kennedy(81)
The paintings are returned.
Chapter 54
Suddenly, in 1968, John and Caroline gain a new member of the family: stepfather Aristotle Onassis.
When JFK made his spring 1961 state visit to France, President Charles de Gaulle was fascinated by the “unique” Jackie, predicting to his Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux, “I can see her in about ten years from now on the yacht of a Greek oil millionaire.”
He’s only off by a few years.
After Bobby’s assassination in June 1968, Jackie has an ever-present fear: “If they’re killing Kennedys, my kids are number one targets.” More than anything else, it fuels in her a desire to leave the United States. It also opens her up to the possibility of remarrying.
Although she has several other suitors, Jackie is most drawn to millionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, despite the twenty-three-year age gap between them. She fondly credits Onassis for the comfort he offered her in August 1963, when she traveled to Greece while in mourning over the death of her son Patrick. Onassis had been crucial in buoying her spirits back then.
Perhaps he could do so again now.
More than anything, Jackie’s former assistant says, “I think she was very lonely. She needed somebody to talk to.”
Jackie herself agrees, telling one former suitor, “I know [my marriage] comes as a surprise to so many people,” but that Onassis understands her situation, and “wants to protect me from being lonely. And he is wise and kind.”
“Not a single friend thought Jackie should marry Onassis,” journalist Peter Evans remarks. “But now that Bobby was gone, there was no one who could stop her.”
On October 20, 1968, Jackie and Onassis marry on Skorpios. “We are very happy,” Jackie tells reporters. Patricia Kennedy, who attends the wedding, tells her mother, Rose, that the bride did seem happy—leading Jackie’s former sister-in-law and mother-in-law to conclude, “Who wouldn’t be with 400 or 500 million dollars and a ruby [a wedding gift from Onassis], which is worth $1,000,000?”
But another guest had a harsher take, observing that “It was like a business transaction,” and that “Jackie’s glance kept turning anxiously toward Caroline.” Jackie’s ten-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son are candle-bearers at the ceremony. Afterward, just as Charles de Gaulle had foreseen, the couple holds their wedding reception aboard Onassis’s luxury yacht, Christina, named for Onassis’s then-seventeen-year-old daughter. (“The fabled vessel,” proclaims People magazine, “remains in a class of its own,” and has been site to several other celebrity wedding celebrations, including that of movie star Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956, and supermodel Heidi Klum and musician husband Tom Kaulitz in 2019.)
But the devotees of the Camelot legend Jackie created are shocked that she is rewriting the ending. “Jackie, How Could You?” pleads a Swedish newspaper headline. On what would have been her fiftieth wedding anniversary to Onassis, the Washington Post reflects:
“Fifty years ago, the world mourned the end of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
‘The reaction here is anger, shock and dismay,’ declared the New York Times.
‘The gods are weeping,’ read a quote in the Washington Post.
A German newspaper announced: ‘America has lost a saint.’
But Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t died. She had only become Mrs. Onassis.”
The marriage is not destined to last as long as that, however. Although the former First Lady—thereafter nicknamed “Jackie O”—says “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a time when my life was engulfed in shadows. He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find happiness and love.” From the start they tend to live two separate lives. Jackie’s assistant recalls, though, that in addition to being famous for his extravagant gift-giving—according to Newsweek, he buys John a speedboat, a jukebox, and a Jeep—Onassis “was a good father to John and Caroline,” who “would sit with them at the dining room table and ask how was school. He might have been an older man, but he paid attention to them, and they loved him.”
Still, Jackie never cuts the ties she’s been building with the Kennedy family for fifteen years, as a daughter-in-law, and as a protector of heirs to an American dynasty. “Her [Caroline’s] father was gone, but her mother never flinched or withdrew from her obligations. She handled the loss, as a widow and mother, quietly and taught her only daughter the grace of dignity,” Rita Dallas observes of Jackie. “After her marriage, she still maintained her home on the compound and saw to it that both of her children remained Kennedys.”
But Jackie’s new union is clouded by a second premonition—one far more troubling than de Gaulle’s. Just as Jackie had sensed when she met Jack that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence on her life,” Onassis’s daughter, Christina (who is not a fan of her new stepmother), similarly believes that she will bring tragedy upon her father, cruelly blaming Jackie for the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. When a number of Onassis’s business ventures start to downturn—and, most tragically, after his son Alexander is killed in a plane crash in January 1973—Onassis’s health takes a sudden decline. He bitterly reflects on his daughter’s warning (though Christina’s prediction may have been self-fulfilling: in 1988, she dies of a heart attack determined to be caused by years of drug abuse), and he and Jackie separate, though they do not officially divorce.