September 26th, 1968. A Greek Orthodox ceremony on the island of Skorpios. A priest, candles, golden crowns, and a widow. The American story loves the grieving first lady who found shelter in the arms of a powerful man. Look at the guest list instead. Fewer than two dozen people, no sitting American officials, no Kennedy family in the front row, and a bride who had spent the previous five years being told in print by her own countrymen exactly who she was allowed to be.
She signed her name Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis that day, and she never went back to the shorter version. People who knew her well said she liked all four names together, not Jackie, not Mrs. Kennedy. The whole thing stacked up like a wall. Before the wall, before Skorpios, before the pink suit that nobody could make her take off on the plane back from Dallas, there was a girl from East Hampton who had spent her entire childhood watching what happened to women who needed things from men and had decided, at an age when most people are still deciding what to
have for breakfast, that she was never going to need anything she couldn’t supply herself. She didn’t quite manage it. Nobody does. But she got further than almost anyone who ever tried, and the marriage to Aristotle Onassis is the chapter in her life where the attempt becomes the most visible because it was also the chapter where she scared people the most.
If you want to understand what that marriage actually was, you have to start by understanding what both of them were performing for the rest of the world because the performance is the point. Neither of them was a civilian. Both of them had been famous before they met each other. Both of them understood exactly what they were walking into, and the thing that the magazine covers and the biographies and the 30-year parade of retrospectives consistently get wrong is the assumption that one of them was the transaction and the other was the
transactor. They were both transactors. That’s what made it work for as long as it did, and what made it stop working when it did. Subscribe now if you want the real version of things. You’ll want to stay for all of it. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28th, 1929 in Southampton, New York to a family that had the architecture of old money and a great deal less of the actual substance.
Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, known to everyone as Blackjack, was a stockbroker with a drinking problem, a gambling problem, an infidelity problem, and cheekbones that could cut glass. Her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, was the daughter of a self-made Irish Catholic real estate developer who had accumulated significant wealth and was determined that his grandchildren would never have to acknowledge where it came from.
The Bouviers performed aristocracy. They did not have it. Not in the way the word actually means anything. The family genealogy that circulated for decades, tracing the line back to French nobility, was largely invented. A cousin who looked into it properly said so in print.
The Bouviers were Americans doing what Americans have always done with sufficient money, which is purchase a backstory. Janet understood this. She also understood what happened to women who depended on men like Blackjack. So, when the marriage fell apart, which it did completely and publicly when Jacqueline was 11 and her sister Lee was seven, Janet did what the situation required.
She went looking for a man who was the opposite of her first husband in every quantifiable way. She found Hugh Auchincloss, a Standard Oil heir, twice divorced, gentle, dull, reliably present, and very, very rich. She married him in 1942. The girls acquired a stepfather, two stepbrothers, and access to Hammersmith Farm in Newport and Merrywood in Virginia.
They also acquired a template. Janet had surveyed the available men, assessed the variables, and selected accordingly. She had done it without sentiment and without apology, and the result was that her daughters grew up in houses with horses and staff, and the particular kind of quiet that only serious money buys.
Jacqueline watched all of it. She was not by any account that survives from people who knew her in those years, a passive observer. She read constantly. She drew well. She spoke French before she was 10, and she had a quality that teachers and relatives kept reaching for different words to describe.
Watchful is the one that appears most often. She watched how rooms worked. She watched who deferred to whom and why. She watched what women did when they wanted something from a man, and what happened to them afterward. At Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, which is where families like the assembled Bouviers and Auchinclosses sent their daughters to become correctly finished, she listed her ambition in the school yearbook as not to be a housewife.
That line has been quoted so many times it has lost its edge, which is a shame, because it’s worth restoring. In 1947, for a girl of her class and era, not wanting to be a housewife was not a feminist statement. It was a technical observation about risk. She had watched her mother’s first marriage, and she knew what a housewife looked like when the husband stopped performing his half of the arrangement.
She wanted something the husband couldn’t revoke. She spent a year at Vassar, a year studying in France, and then transferred to George Washington University, where she finished her degree in French literature. Uh In 1951, she won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest, a writing competition that offered the winner a year split between the New York and Paris offices.
She won it and then turned it down, which tells you something about how she thought. She had proved she could. She did not need to go. She got a job at the Washington Times-Herald as an inquiring photographer, which meant she walked around Washington with a camera and a question and wrote up what people said. She was paid $42.
50 a week. She interviewed senators and construction workers and school children and she was, by every account, genuinely good at it. Not good in the way rich girls are sometimes described as good at things they are merely presentable at. Good in the way where her editors knew she was going to be somewhere else very soon and wanted her work while they could get it.
The somewhere else arrived in the form of a dinner party in 1951, where a friend seated her next to a young congressman from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Here is what she is reported to have said about him later to a friend. She said he was like a little boy and a little bit dangerous, which is a precise description of Black Jack Bouvier.
John Kennedy was not a stable prospect. His health was genuinely poor in ways his family worked very hard to conceal. He had a medical history that included Addison’s disease, chronic back problems serious enough to require a corset, and a pattern of hospitalizations that would have alarmed any insurance company that knew about them.
He also had a sexual history that would have alarmed anyone who cared about that kind of thing, and Jacqueline Bouvier, who had grown up with Black Jack, cared about it in the specific way of someone who had already done the math and decided the math was not the point. He had money. His father had more. He had ambition so consuming that people in the same room with him said they could feel it the way you feel a change in air pressure before a storm.
He was going to be something very large and she knew it before he did and that was part of the attraction. They were engaged in June 1953. The wedding was September 12th, 1953 in Newport. 700 guests at the ceremony, 1200 at the reception. Her stepfather paid for it. Her father showed up drunk and her mother wouldn’t let him walk her down the aisle.
So, Hugh Auchincloss did it instead. That substitution is the whole marriage in miniature. Blackjack was there, but he was managed out of the significant moment. The significant moment was performed by the steady, reliable man with the money. And Jacqueline Bouvier, who understood what was happening better than anyone in that church, walked down the aisle on the arm of the right man and did not look sideways.
She was 24 years old and she knew exactly what she had signed. The marriage to Kennedy has been written about so many times and from so many angles that the danger now is not ignorance, but accretion. Too many stories, too many people with something to protect or sell. So, let me stay with what the primary sources establish and leave the mythology where it belongs.
She miscarried in 1955. [clears throat] She had a stillborn daughter in 1956 and Kennedy was on a boat in the Mediterranean when it happened and did not come back immediately. And she knew he wasn’t coming back immediately before it happened because this was consistent with how he operated.
Caroline was born in 1957. John Jr. was born in 1960, 3 weeks after his father was elected president. Patrick was born prematurely in August 1963 and died 2 days later. She had been the president’s wife for a thousand days. In those thousand days, she had redecorated the White House and cataloged its contents and established the principle that it was a historic property rather than a state-funded hotel for whoever happened to be living there.
She had conducted a televised tour that remains one of the most watched programs in American broadcast history. She had hosted heads of state and artists and musicians and scientists and done it with a fluency that left the officials around her visibly catching up. She had learned that her husband was conducting an affair with a woman named Judith Exner, who was also involved with Sam Giancana and had somehow continued to appear at his side in public without once in front of a camera letting it show.
She was very good at not letting things show. On November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, she was sitting beside him when the shots came. She was wearing the pink suit. There are things she did in the minutes immediately following that motorcade that the record confirms and that the mythology has distorted in both directions, making her either a saint or a ghost, neither of which is accurate or fair.
What is accurate is that she refused to change her clothes on Air Force One when Lyndon Johnson’s staff suggested it. And when someone explained that it might be better not to appear before the public covered in her husband’s blood, she said she wanted them to see what they had done. That is not grief talking. That is someone operating in extremis at the highest level of political communication.
She knew what the image would mean. She chose it deliberately. around the world in hours and it has never stopped traveling. She was 34 years old and she was a widow and she was the most famous woman on the planet and she had two small children and she moved out of the White House 14 days after the assassination because she was too intelligent to let the new first lady be photographed waiting for her to leave.
What came next is the part nobody tells accurately because it does not fit any of the available story templates. She was not destroyed by grief, though she grieved. She was not immediately strong, though strength came. She was enraged, not privately, not quietly. She told people, she wrote letters, she said to William Manchester, the historian she had authorized to write the official account of the assassination, things so unguarded that she spent years trying to suppress the book afterward. She felt that Dallas had
belonged to her and her husband and that history was being written by people who had not been in the car. She moved to New York with Caroline and John. She got an apartment on Fifth Avenue across from the park at 10:40. She hired Secret Service and she managed them and she went to work reconstructing the thing, a widow of 34 with two famous children and no independent income needed most urgently, which was a life that she controlled.
The Kennedy family paid her a widow’s pension and she had the life insurance and she had the social world that came with the name, but she did not have money in the sense of money that was hers. This is the financial reality that most accounts of her post-assassination years elided because it complicates the legend.
She was the most famous woman in the world and she was financially dependent on her dead husband’s family and on the goodwill of a father-in-law who was himself declining into illness and had his own views about what the widow of a Kennedy should look like. She understood this. She had understood something like it since she was 11 years old watching her mother make calculations.
She also understood that understanding a situation does not make it comfortable to live inside and by 1965 and 1966 she was living inside a situation that had become genuinely intolerable in ways that had nothing to do with money. She could not walk out of her apartment without being followed by photographers.
Her children could not go to school without it becoming an event. She received death threats regularly enough that her security was a permanent feature of her life rather than a temporary precaution. Two of the most powerful men in her orbit, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, were assassinated within 3 months of each other in 1968.
Robert Kennedy was killed in June of that year. She was with him in Los Angeles. After Robert was shot, she told a friend something that has been quoted often enough to be verifiable. She said that she hated this country and that she did not want her children to grow up in America because she did not believe America was capable of protecting them.
That statement has been used to portray her as unpatriotic, which is an extraordinary reading of what a woman says immediately after watching a second member of her family shot to death in public. What it actually is is a risk assessment, and risk assessment was the thing she was best at. The question she was asking, as precisely as she had ever asked anything, was this: Given the observable pattern of events, which environment gives my children the best probability of survival? Aristotle Socrates had an island. He had
a yacht that was larger than most hotels. He had homes in Paris and Monte Carlo and Athens and a personal security apparatus that answered only to him. He had been under surveillance by American intelligence services and had been involved in disputes with the United States government and had survived all of it because the thing about Onassis, the thing that the softened versions of him miss, is that he had spent his entire life being underestimated by officials who thought they understood what kind of man he was.
He was not the kind of man they thought he was. He was a great deal more interesting than that. Aristotle Onassis was born on January 20th, 1906 in Smyrna, which is now Izmir in Turkey. He was Greek from a prosperous merchant family. His mother died when he was sick. His father, Socrates Onassis, remarried a woman named Helen Vagliano, who was, by the accounts of people who knew that household, not interested in raising another woman’s children.
Onassis said in later years that his stepmother had been cold to him. People who study his biography more carefully say that is an understatement. In 1922, when Aristotle was 16, the Turkish army entered Smyrna and what followed was a catastrophe of a scale and deliberateness that historians now classify as a genocide.
The Greek and Armenian populations of the city were massacred or driven to the waterfront while the city burned. Onassis’s father was arrested by Turkish authorities. His grandmother, his aunts, several relatives died or were lost in the violence. The family’s property was confiscated. He got out. He got out at 16 with very little and he went to Buenos Aires, where he knew no one, spoke no Spanish, and had no connections in the tobacco trade he was trying to enter.
Within 5 years, he was a millionaire. This is not hyperbole for effect. It is the documented record of what happened when you placed Aristotle Onassis in an environment with no floor and told him there was money somewhere in the room. He found it by importing Greek tobacco to Argentina and selling it to cigarette manufacturers, then leveraged those contacts into broader import-export business, then recognized during the depression that shipping companies were selling their vessels for fractions of what they had cost because nobody had
cargo to move, and he bought six cargo ships for a combined price that he later described as less than one of them would have cost five years earlier. He had not grown up on the water. He had not trained as a shipping man. He simply understood that price and value were two different things and that the gap between them in moments of general panic is enormous.
That understanding applied consistently over 30 years produced a fleet that at its peak was the largest privately owned merchant fleet in the world. He also produced along the way a legend that was considerably more complex than the legend that got attached to him. He had been investigated by American authorities for the technical ownership arrangements of his ships.
A dispute about whether American flagged vessels were being operated in ways that circumvented legal requirements. He paid a settlement in 1955. He had relationships with political figures across Europe and the Middle East that would have required a full-time analyst to map. He had been involved in a dispute over Saudi Arabian oil transport rights that had made him briefly an adversary of the United States government.
He had survived all of it. He had also been since the late 1950s involved in one of the most publicized relationships in the world with the opera singer Maria Callas. That relationship, its intensity, its drama, its ending has been the subject of books and films and documentaries and is still being produced as content as recently as the last few years.
What is relevant here is not the romance of it but the structure of it. Callas was at the height of her powers probably the most famous woman in the world who was not Jacqueline Kennedy. She was also married to someone else, a man named Giovanni Battista Meneghini who had been her manager and patron. When she left Meneghini for Onassis, the Catholic Church was directly involved in attempts to to it and the scandal was genuinely international.
Onassis conducted that relationship for nearly a decade without marrying her. This is a fact that has been discussed mostly in terms of what it meant to Callas. What it means in terms of understanding Onassis is that he was capable of sustained serious attachment to a woman over many years while simultaneously declining to formalize it.
And that he was comfortable with the public costs of that arrangement in a way that most powerful men of his generation were not. He was not afraid of scandal. He was afraid of being controlled. Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis had known each other for several years before the marriage. She had visited the Christina, his famous converted Canadian frigate yacht, in 1963 before the assassination with a group that included her sister Lee and others.
Lee Radziwill, née Lee Bouvier, had her own connection to Onassis that predated Jacqueline’s, a connection that was described by some people at the time as romantic and by others as nothing of the kind, and about which Lee herself gave different accounts at different times. What is established is that the relationship between the two sisters around the time of Jacqueline’s marriage to Onassis was complicated in ways that neither of them publicly elaborated on, and that Lee had reportedly hoped for something from Onassis that did not
materialize. That detail is worth holding. We will come back to what it tells us about how Onassis made decisions. After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June 1968, after the statement about not trusting America to protect her children, after the fifth year of living in a photograph she had not consented to, Jacqueline Kennedy contacted Aristotle Onassis and the negotiations began.
And they were negotiations. This is not a romantic framing, and it is not a cynical one, either. It is the accurate description of what happened. Terms were discussed by lawyers. A prenuptial agreement was drafted. The specific terms of that agreement have been the subject of significant reporting and some speculation, and the complete document has never been fully published, but enough of it became known through legal proceedings and through the accounts of people involved to establish its general shape.
She received a lump sum upon marriage. She received annual payments. There were provisions about what happened if they separated or if he died. The amounts reported in various accounts range quite widely, from one set of numbers suggesting a marriage settlement of $3 million to figures that run considerably higher.
And the discrepancy reflects both the complexity of the arrangements and the fact that several of the people reporting them had interests in making the settlement seem either larger or smaller, depending on their argument. What is not in dispute is that there was an agreement, that she had lawyers and he had lawyers, and that the lawyers talked to each other at length before the ceremony on Scorpios.
Cardinal Cushing of Boston, who had presided at her first wedding and at the funeral, was privately involved in seeking assurance that the marriage would not result in the formal excommunication of a woman who was, in the eyes of millions of American Catholics, something close to a secular saint.
He did not get that assurance because the church’s position on marriage to a divorced man was what it was, but he made public statements that softened the ecclesiastical response, and Jackie’s brother-in-law Ted Kennedy flew to Boston to discuss it with him before the wedding, which tells you how seriously the Kennedy family took the optics even as they were publicly trying to appear above them.
Her mother was present on Scorpios. Her children were present. Several of Onassis’ associates and a small number of close friends completed the guest list. The international press response was immediate and largely furious, which is interesting in retrospect because the fury was aimed at her far more than at him.
He was described as ruthless and ugly and old, which he was by then 62, and she was described as mercenary and faithless and as having betrayed something that was never precisely defined but had something to do with the veil and the eternal flame and the pink suit and the cultural property that a grieving nation had decided it owned in her.
People wrote editorials. People sent letters. A German newspaper ran the headline that became the most quoted of all, “Jackie, how could you?” The answer, which she did not give publicly, is embedded in everything that happened between 1963 and 1968 and it is not complicated. She had watched two members of her family shot to death in public.
She had lived 5 years inside a security arrangement that could not actually keep her safe because it could not stop cameras. She had two children she was desperate to protect. She had no independent financial foundation that was hers without reference to a dead husband’s family. She had found a man who had an island and a fleet and a private security force and who had demonstrated over many decades that he was genuinely difficult to destroy.
She made a decision. She made it with lawyers present and then she flew to Greece. What actually went on inside the marriage is the question this entire script is attempting to answer honestly, which means acknowledging the limits of what can be answered honestly because the people who were inside it are mostly dead and the accounts that survive are the accounts of people who were observers or who had reasons of their own for telling particular versions.
Here is what the primary record establishes. They spent significant time apart. This was known at the time and was treated by the press as evidence of a failing marriage, though it is worth noting that spending time apart when you own multiple properties on multiple continents and have professional obligations in several countries is not inherently a symptom of failure.
It is a logistical reality. She was in New York more than she was anywhere else. She had her apartment at 1040 5th Avenue. She had her children in school. She was building a social world in New York that was genuinely hers, not the Kennedy world and not the Onassis world. She developed friendships, some of them lifelong, with people who had no connection to either of those institutions.
She was reading, she was translating, she was engaged with the intellectual and artistic life of New York in a way that had not been available to her during the White House years, where everything she did was official. She also spent time on the Christina and on Scorpios and in Paris. There are photographs of her from those years, not the pressed and managed photographs of the White House period, but something more relaxed, something that people who saw her during that time described as genuine.
Several people who encountered her in Greece said she seemed happy in a way that surprised them, happy and present and willing to sit somewhere without it being a performance. Onassis was proud of her. This is documented. He showed her off, which is a thing people hold against him, but showing your wife off and being proud of her are not always separable, and the people who knew him said that the pride had something real in it.
He had grown up in Smyrna, where he had lost everything at 16, and he had spent the intervening decades building the most extravagant version of a world that could not be taken away from him, and Jackie Kennedy was part of that world, the most beautiful and famous part of it, and he He aware of it every day. He was also aware that she was not a manageable acquisition.
This is where the marriage became genuinely interesting and where the accounts diverge most sharply. Onassis had been involved for years in a particular kind of relationship with women, which is to say a relationship in which he was the larger planet and everything else orbited him. He was generous and he could be tender and he was also by the accounts of people who watched him operate someone who expected deference in the final analysis.
He had not married Callas partly because marrying Callas would have meant operating in a world in which two enormous forces had equal claim and he was constitutionally unsuited to that arrangement. Jacqueline Kennedy was not deferential. She had never been deferential. She had learned to perform deference with extraordinary skill during the Kennedy years when the political stakes made it necessary, but performance is not the same as the genuine article and Onassis, who was very good at reading people, understood the difference. He had
married a woman who was his equal in terms of global fame and who had no intention of becoming smaller. There were arguments. The nature of the arguments has been described by various people with various amounts of directness and the accounts range from the relatively bland suggestion that they disagreed about money and lifestyle to considerably more dramatic descriptions of confrontations on the Christina that guests witnessed and felt uncomfortable about.
The specific sources for the dramatic versions are not always people whose neutrality is beyond question. So, they should be taken as indications of texture rather than established fact. What is established is that the marriage became difficult within a relatively short period and that the difficulty was not reducible to a single cause.
There is the question of Callas, which is large enough to require its own attention. Onassis did not stop seeing Callas after the marriage. This has been established by multiple independent sources, including people who were close to Callas, people who were close to Onassis, and journalists who were covering both at the time.
Whether the relationship with Callas after the marriage was sexual or platonic is one of those questions that generates more heat than light because the answer does not actually change the structure of the situation. He maintained a connection to Callas that was clearly significant to him and that he did not fully conceal from his wife.
Jackie Kennedy had grown up with Black Jack Bouvier and had then spent 10 years married to John Kennedy. She was not operating without data on the subject of powerful men and other women. What she had decided, in the very deliberate way she decided things, is a question the record does not fully answer. What the record does show is that she did not leave and that she continued to operate within the marriage with full capability during the period when the Callas connection was most openly discussed and that she also spent money in a way that became, by 1970 and 1971,
a genuine flashpoint. The spending is the part of the marriage that every account mentions and very few accounts examine with any care. The figures cited are dramatic. Spending on clothes and jewelry and household and travel and furnishings that ran, in various reported estimates, to millions of dollars a year.
Onassis’ associates said he complained about it. His son, Alexander, said things about her that were not polite. The word gold digger appeared in print so many times in those years that it had worn its meaning smooth. Here is what the spending actually was. Jackie Kennedy had spent her entire adult life in households that were controlled by someone else.
Merrywood and Hammersmith Farm belonged to Hugh Auchincloss. The houses during the Kennedy years were official residences that were technically government property. The apartment on Fifth Avenue was paid for initially by Kennedy money. She had spent her life making beautiful the spaces of other people, deploying her extraordinary taste in rooms she did not own, arranging flowers and hanging paintings in houses she would eventually leave.
When she had, for the first time in her adult life, access to money that was hers by legal agreement, she spent it on things that were also hers. Clothes that she chose, jewelry that she kept, objects that belonged to her rather than to the estate of a dead husband or the record of an official administration.
You can read that as recklessness. You can also read it as a woman in her early 40s finally furnishing a self that she had been constructing for 25 years. Both readings can be true simultaneously. The more interesting question is why the spending became a problem in the marriage, and the answer to that question is about power rather than money.
Onassis had money that would have made her spending trivial if the spending were truly trivial to him. He was not poor. He was not financially stressed in a way that made her clothing bills a genuine burden. The bills were a problem because control of money is a way of establishing who in a relationship is the larger planet, and Jackie Kennedy had a legal agreement that gave her access to significant funds without requiring her to ask him for them, and she used it.
That is not a comfortable arrangement for a man who had spent 50 years being the person everyone asked. In January 1973, Alexander Onassis, Aristotle’s son and the person he had identified as his successor in the shipping empire, was critically injured in a plane crash near Athens Airport.
He had been piloting an amphibious aircraft, and the crash was catastrophic. He was taken to hospital and was never conscious again in any meaningful sense. He died in February 1973 at 24 years old. Aristotle Onassis was destroyed by it. The word is not chosen carelessly. Every account of him from that period, from friends, from employees, from journalists who were around him, converges on the same description.
He had wanted his son to have the world he had built, and the world he had built had failed to protect his son, and he did not have the psychological resources to process that failure because Aristotle Onassis had spent his entire adult life from the age of 16, when the world burned around him in Smyrna, building those resources outward into ships and islands and money and power, rather than inward into anything that could sustain him when the ships and islands and money and power He blamed the amphibious aircraft. He
blamed the people around Alexander. He is reported by people who were there to have at some point settled on the belief that the crash was connected to his wife’s former family, a belief for which there was no evidence and which was the product of grief-producing irrationality rather than investigation-producing conclusions. But he told this to people.
He said it aloud, and the marriage, which had been difficult, became something else. He consulted lawyers about the possibility of divorce. This is documented. His lawyers discussed it with him. The negotiations that had produced the prenuptial agreement had also included provisions for this eventuality, and both parties knew what the financial structure of a divorce would be because they had built the financial structure of the marriage around the possibility. He did not file.
He did not formally separate from her. He gave an interview in which he said things about the marriage that were unkind and that she responded to with a silence that was more articulate than any reply she could have made. He was photographed again with Callas. He was visibly unwell. Jackie Kennedy did not pretend the marriage was healthy during this period. She also did not leave.
The situation was in some ways the mirror image of choices she had made before. She had stayed in a marriage to a man who was conducting significant affairs because leaving would have cost too much politically and because she was not certain the cost of leaving was less than the cost of staying. Now she was in a different marriage that was failing in different ways and the calculation had different variables, but it was still a calculation.
She spent time in New York. She spent time with her children who were at school in New York and who were by now teenagers and who had grown up inside a level of public scrutiny that was by any reasonable measure harmful and she had been trying to manage that scrutiny for their entire lives. Aristotle Onassis died on March 15th, 1975 in the American Hospital in Paris from bronchial pneumonia following a long decline that had included myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular condition that affects the muscles and that had been
causing him visible difficulties for the last year of his life. She was with him in Paris. She had been there at his side through the final weeks of his illness. The accounts of that period suggest that whatever the marriage had been and whatever it had cost and whatever had been said in the bad years after Alexander’s death, she was present in a way that the situation required of her and she did not manage it from a distance.
He left her according to the terms of the prenuptial agreement and his will and the subsequent legal proceedings, a settlement that has been reported in various amounts with $250,000 a year appearing in many accounts and a lump sum payment appearing in others. The specifics varying enough between sources to resist confident assertion.
What is confirmed is that the amounts were less than what the prenuptial agreement had specified she would receive in the event of divorce, and considerably less than what he left to his daughter Christina, who received the bulk of the estate. Christina Onassis was 24 when her father died, and she had disliked Jackie Kennedy from the beginning with an openness that most people in her position would have been coached out of.
She had called her stepmother the geisha and other things less repeatable, and the relationship between the two women had been poor throughout the marriage. After Aristotle died, Christina pursued legal actions relating to the estate, and the resolution of those actions involved payments to Jackie Kennedy that eventually arrived at a reported figure of $26 million.
The pursuit of that settlement is the chapter in Jackie Kennedy’s life that people find the most uncomfortable, which is revealing because it should be the least uncomfortable. She had entered a legal agreement. The legal agreement had specific terms. Those terms were not being honored. She had lawyers, and the lawyers went to work.
The result was a payment that reflected the terms of the agreement she had signed. That is how legal agreements are supposed to function. The discomfort is not about the law. The discomfort is that she wanted the money, and she went and got it, and she was not apologetic about it, and there is a persistent cultural expectation that women of a certain iconic status should operate above want, should be sustained by legend alone, should not have lawyers.
She went back to New York with the settlement, and she built a life that was, by every account of the people around her in those years, the most genuinely satisfying one she had managed. She took a job at Viking Press in 1975 as a consulting editor, which is a title that could have been ceremonial if she had allowed it to be and was not because she did not allow things to be ceremonial when they could be actual.
She became a working editor. She acquired books. She worked with authors. She had opinions about manuscripts and cover design and marketing and she expressed those opinions as a professional rather than as a famous person doing someone a favor. She moved to Doubleday in 1978 and stayed for the rest of her working life eventually achieving the title of senior editor.
Her colleagues were asked about her repeatedly by journalists who assumed she could not possibly be doing real work and the colleagues responded with a consistency that eventually became difficult to discount. She read manuscripts on weekends. She knew the text of the books she was editing. She was early to meetings.
She had the same arguments about the same kinds of editorial decisions that every editor has and she won some and lost some and she came back the next day. The books she acquired are a useful document of who she was when she was not being looked at. She acquired a book about the restoration of historic architecture in Egypt.
She acquired a book about the making of the Olympic Games. She acquired books about dance and design and archaeology and folklore. She acquired a book by Michael Jackson and brought it in on time and on budget and it sold enormously. She was not precious about commerce. She told an interviewer once that what she found most interesting about editing was being able to ask any question without having to pretend she already knew the answer.
She had spent most of her public life being required to perform certainty or grace under circumstances that allowed neither. She ran in Central Park in the mornings. She had a relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, a diamond merchant and financier that began in the early 1980s and continued for the rest of her life. Tempelsman was married, though separated from his wife, and he was attentive and intellectually serious, and he had the quality that she had always identified as most important in the men around her, which was that he did not need to be
larger than she was. He did not need her to be smaller. The relationship was quiet in a way that none of her previous relationships had been allowed to be because she managed the access and the access was not granted. She was photographed occasionally. She gave almost no interviews. She was still the most famous woman in America, possibly in the world, and she had concluded that fame was not a resource she needed to cultivate and was not something she owed anyone.
And she simply declined to perform it except on her own terms. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in January 1994. She told very few people. She continued working for several weeks. When the diagnosis became public, she handled the disclosure in a statement that said what needed to be said and nothing more.
She returned to her apartment on 5th Avenue and she did not go back to the hospital except when it was necessary. She died on May 19th, 1994 in her apartment at 1040 5th Avenue with Maurice Tempelsman and her children and a priest present. She was 64 years old. The inventory of her estate, sold at auction by Sotheby’s in 1996, produced four days of bidding and 34 and a half million dollars.
Objects she had accumulated from every phase of her life, furniture and paintings and jewelry and books and small personal things that had no value except that they had been hers, went to strangers who wanted to own something she had touched. A set of fake pearls, a costume piece worth perhaps a few hundred dollars, sold for 211,000.
A rocking chair sold for 450,000. That auction is usually cited as evidence of how much people loved her. It is also evidence of something less comfortable, which is that people who had spent 30 years demanding access to her were still demanding it after she was gone, purchasing the nearest available substitute to the thing she had always declined to give them, which was herself.
Now look at the marriage to Onassis again. Not the scandal of it, not the magazine version, not the how could you question, but the actual transaction between two actual people. She was a woman of 39 who had watched two members of her family shot to death in public, who had no independent financial foundation, who was living inside a security apparatus that could not secure her children, who had spent five years being told by her own country that her grief was a public resource and her person was a public property. He was a man of 62 who
had built everything.
