Athens
Summer 1973
Jackie was astonished by the physical changes in Ari in the months after Alexander’s death. He’d always had a muscular physique with a slight paunch, like a prizefighter who had eaten a few too many good dinners. Now he was scrawny, his muscles wasted, and his posture stooped like an old man’s, although he was only sixty-seven.
“Stand straight,” she urged, pressing the middle of his back. “Head up, shoulders down!”
He raised himself upright, only to slouch again minutes later, as if the effort was too much to maintain. His face had taken on the ruddy look of a drinker, and his eyes drooped as if the flesh were stretched and misshapen by all the tears he had shed.
Their five-year marriage had been through many trials: Jackie’s decision to spend the better part of the year in New York with her children; his explosions of temper about her spending; his affair with Maria Callas; his lies over his affair with Lee. Yet somehow they were still together, and with each passing year she’d grown fonder of him. Life hadn’t given him an easy ride, but he drove himself relentlessly in his desire to be “the best,” and she respected that.
She felt stronger after her secret sessions with her psychiatrist. As well as helping her control irrational panic, the therapist had also guided her to explore the reasons for her feelings of helplessness. When Jackie was a teenager, her mother had repeatedly emphasized the importance of finding a husband who earned enough to keep her in the style to which she had become accustomed: “Money and power, girls. That’s what you need to marry.” She’d cultivated in them an appetite for beautiful surroundings: antiques, designer clothes, fine porcelain, French perfume. Owning such things was the measure of a successful life, according to Janet Auchincloss. But because women of Jackie’s class did not work after marriage, that left her entirely reliant on her husband. She needed a man to look after her—then Jack was taken from her in a single shocking act of violence. It was no wonder her recovery was taking longer than might be expected for a normal bereavement.
Jackie had never told Ari about her sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch. He would have seen them as a sign of weakness. No one knew apart from her, the shrink, and the Secret Service officer who had recommended therapy. It was a place where she could talk about anything that was on her mind, without worrying about it ending up in the press. Quiet, private, just for her.
When Ari fell apart after Alexander died, it came as a surprise; he’d been such a lion of a man before. She couldn’t help but compare him to Rose Kennedy, who had stayed so strong after everything that had happened to her. Why couldn’t he do the same? Still, she felt huge compassion for him; perhaps it could even be called love.
AFTER ALEXANDER’S BURIAL on Skorpios, Jackie arranged a trip to the Caribbean aboard the Christina to distract her husband from his grief, but the voyage was marred by his heavy drinking and outbursts of uncontrollable rage. He refused to talk about his loss, refused to be comforted.
They flew to Skorpios for the long summer vacation, taking Jackie’s and Lee’s children—Lee was too busy to join them, she claimed—but none of his usual pursuits interested him. He had bought a Jet Ski and the children took turns on it, but Ari, who usually loved new toys, sat watching from a deck chair on the beach, his expression inscrutable behind dark glasses.
Previously he used to spend hours in his office, making deals over international telephone calls, but now the only thing that motivated him was hiring private investigators to prove that Alexander’s plane had been sabotaged. The first inquiry ruled that the cause of the crash had been mechanical failure, but Ari refused to accept it, offering a reward of $20 million to anyone who could prove that his son had been murdered. It became an obsession. He paced around the villa, muttering to himself about it.
Every night after dinner he took a bottle of ouzo and two glasses to Alexander’s tomb, by the chapel in which he and Jackie had been married, and sat, drinking himself into a stupor. He poured a glass for himself and a glass for Alex, and sat in the dark, talking to his son as if he were there. A stray dog that he had adopted always lay on the grass nearby. Jackie crept up to watch sometimes but did not intervene, for fear of sparking his temper.
She often overheard him on the telephone to Maria. He was invariably in a calmer mood after the calls, so she never interrupted. She could look after his physical needs and, if Maria was the person he chose to confide in, she was glad that at least he had someone.
By late summer, Jackie was beginning to wonder if the drooping around Ari’s eyes was caused by something other than weeping. She persuaded him to consult a private doctor in Athens, and he was sent for a battery of tests, after which he was diagnosed with a rare condition called myasthenia gravis.
“It’s a neurological disorder that causes weakening of the muscles,” his doctor told him. “It can usually be arrested by taking steroids, but you’ll need to come for regular checkups so we can adjust the dose and watch for side effects.”
“What caused it?” Ari asked.
“No one knows for sure,” the doctor said, “but grief can weaken the immune system so that it malfunctions. That’s one theory.”
Jackie reached over to grip Ari’s hand.
SHE CONSIDERED STAYING in Europe that winter to look after him, but he insisted that she fly home to New York with Caroline and John. Life there had become easier since a three-year legal battle with Ron Gallela had finally led to an order that he stay twenty-five feet away from her and thirty feet away from her children. Ari was furious at the astronomical lawyers’ bills that arrived in Olympic Airways’ New York office. He had maintained all along that Jackie should either learn to ignore the man or stay away from New York.
“Congratulations!” he mocked. “You’ve made Mr. Gallela a household name. He’ll get much better rates for his photos now.”
“I had no choice,” she argued. “You weren’t there. It wasn’t just me; the kids were petrified too.”
Her spending remained a flashpoint, so she tried to be careful. She couldn’t seem to curtail her shopping habit, but a store on the Upper West Side bought designer outfits that had been worn only once or twice, sometimes not at all, and paid cash for them. It gave her an extra income stream that Ari knew nothing about.
She knew he was having business worries. The price of oil had gone through the roof because of war in the Middle East, making it more expensive to run his ships; the deal he had been trying to make with the Greek colonels was never mentioned now; and she knew he was negotiating to hand over control of Olympic Airways to the government. Since his son’s death, he couldn’t bear to have anything to do with it.
October 1973 brought another crashing blow, when his first wife, Tina, died under suspicious circumstances at the home of her new husband, Stavros Niarchos. The autopsy ruled that she had suffered acute edema of the lung, but Ari didn’t believe it.
“He wooed her, then murdered her to get at me,” he raged. “I want that man locked up. Or dead. Preferably dead.”
The loss of Tina so soon after that of their son devastated him so completely that Jackie began to fear for his sanity. She discussed him with her psychiatrist, who suggested that Ari would benefit from some professional help of his own, but there was no chance of him agreeing to that. His indomitable pride stopped him from admitting weakness. In many ways, he was his own worst enemy.