BOOK EXCERPT: How nude pictures of Jackie Kennedy Onassis were set up by her husband – EXCLUSIVE
'The Good Son: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved' details how Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis cheated on John F. Kennedy's widow throughout their marriage and went to great lengths to smear her in the press.
BY Christopher Andersen
special to the NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, October 26, 2014, 12:01 AM
Jacqueline
Onassis is seen with her son John F. Kennedy Jr. and husband Aristotle
Onassis as they walk along Fifth Ave. to their limousine after a quiet
lunch at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel. Five minutes after Bobby’s death was announced, Onassis called his closest friend, Costa Gratsos, in Athens. “She’s free of the Kennedys,” Onassis gloated. “The last link broke.” Gratsos was not surprised at his friend’s callous reaction. “As far as Aristo was concerned,” Gratsos said, “his biggest headache had been eliminated.”
Just days after Bobby was laid to rest, Ari arrived at Hammersmith Farm with his daughter, Christina, in tow. “It was definitely a case of ‘Ari to the rescue,’ ” said Jackie’s columnist friend Aileen Mehle, better known as Suzy. “He showered jewels on her, he wooed her . . . He was repulsive, of course, but it wasn’t just the money. He was so alive, so vibrant, and so vigorous. He was this life force.”
For the remainder of the summer, Jackie led a charm offensive designed to persuade friends and family in New York, Newport, Hyannis Port, and Palm Beach that Onassis was suitable marriage material for JFK’s widow. She failed miserably. “The term ‘Eurotrash’ hadn’t been invented yet,” Truman Capote said, “but that’s definitely what they thought old Ari was.”
Aristotle
Onassis stands with his new wife Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis after their
marriage in the tiny chapel on the island of Skorpios in Greece on Oct.
20, 1968. Nor did it help that everyone knew Onassis was still carrying on his affair with Callas. “Everybody here knows three things about Aristotle Onassis,” he told Johnny Meyer. Those three things: “I’m f---ing Maria Callas, I’m f---ing Jacqueline Kennedy — and I’m f---ing rich.” In the end, he had no illusions about ever being accepted by the Kennedys, the Auchinclosses, or any of Jackie’s Social Register crowd. “They hate,” he told Gratsos, “my Greek guts.”
Doris Lilly was booed and heckled when she predicted on television’s popular “The Merv Griffin Show” that Jackie was about to marry Onassis. Leaving the show’s Times Square studios, Lilly was then pushed, kicked, and cursed at as she walked down the street.
The rest of the Kennedys were no less outraged. When Pierre Salinger, who had been let in early on Jackie’s plans, confirmed to Kennedy family spokesman Stephen Smith that she was indeed going to marry Onassis, Smith could only manage a two-word response: “Oh, s---.”
Copyright
© 2014 by Andersen Productions. From the forthcoming book 'THE GOOD
SON: JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved' by Christopher Andersen to be
published by Gallery Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Printed by permission. During those first few weeks after the wedding, Jackie was left alone on Skorpios while her husband boomeranged from Athens to Paris and back again on business. Feeling abandoned, at least temporarily, Jackie dashed off a heartfelt letter to Roswell Gilpatric. “Dearest Ros,” she wrote, “I would have told you before I left — but then everything happened so much more quickly than I’d planned. I saw somewhere what you had said and I was touched — dear Ros — I hope you know all you were and are and will ever be to me — With my love, Jackie.”
frank Hurley/New York Daily News Jacqueline
Kennedy touches the casket of her assassinated brother-in-law Robert
Kennedy at the funeral service in 1968. Four months later, Jackie
married Aristotle Onassis. Onassis somehow got wind of Jackie’s note to Ros and dashed back to his bride’s side. He spent the next three weeks honeymooning with Jackie on Skorpios. They swam, sunbathed, went for long walks across the island, snorkeled, and fed the miniature horses stabled on the island. They sailed the Christina to Rhodes, and when it was over, she joined John and Caroline in Manhattan.
With Jackie out of the picture, Ari began bombarding Callas with roses and phone calls. It was only when he showed up outside her Paris apartment at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel and threatened to crash his Mercedes through the front door that she finally relented. Starting with discreet dinners in out-of-the-way restaurants, the couple rekindled their romance.
From this point on Ari and Callas, who now bitterly referred to Jackie as “the False Lady,” saw each other almost constantly, according to Onassis’s longtime chauffeur Jacinto Rosa. “Right up until a month before his death — for the truth is that Maria was the only true love of Onassis’s life. She was his ‘real wife’ — even though they weren’t officially married.”
On the streets of Manhattan, Ari continued to pursue a genuine father-son relationship with JFK Jr. Jackie often looked down from the window of her apartment and saw Ari and her son walking hand in hand, Onassis leaning down to say something to John, then tilting his head to hear the boy’s response.
“Just what is it you two talk about?” Jackie asked Ari after dinner one evening.
“I am teaching him,” Onassis replied enigmatically.
JIM PRINGLE/Ap Jackie Kennedy weds Aristotle Onassis in 1968. Jackie looked at him quizzically. “Teaching him what?” she asked.
“To be a successful man,” Ari said, as if the answer were perfectly obvious.
Later, she told Kiki Moutsatsos that she wondered exactly what her husband meant. “Probably how to act like a grown-up person,” Moutsatsos answered with a shrug, “not a little boy. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
Jackie was not convinced. “Oh, dear,” she said, shaking her head. “I just hope he isn’t spending all their time together telling John how to get a woman.”
Although cracks in the relationship had already begun to show, it was a single indiscretion that signaled the beginning of the end for the Onassis marriage. In February 1970, five of the highly personal letters Jackie had written to Roswell Gilpatric — four written while she was married to Jack as well as the note she dashed off during her honeymoon with Ari — fell into the hands of Manhattan autograph dealer Charles Hamilton.
Ari didn’t mind being portrayed as an uncouth cretin, a pirate, a dirty old man, or even a crook. But the idea of being cuckolded in public — and by a woman who had just spent $60,000 (nearly $500,000 in 2014 dollars) on two hundred pairs of shoes — was a blow to his manhood.
“My God,” he told Costa Gratsos. “What a fool I have made of myself.”
By way of retaliation, on May 21, 1970, Ari dined openly with Callas at Maxim’s in Paris — and made certain photographers were there to capture the moment. Like everyone else, John saw the story splashed across the front pages of the New York Post and the Daily News. But he also had a ringside seat for his mother’s characteristically swift and inspired reaction.
AP Aristotle Onassis carried on an affair with Maria Callas (center) throughout his marriage.
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On the morning of May 22, Jackie phoned Ari with the news that she was headed for Paris. The very next night, Ari was back at Maxim’s — only this time with Jackie, and sitting at precisely the same table he shared with Callas just 24 hours before.
“For Jackie it wasn’t so much a supper,” said Ari’s aide Johnny Meyer, “as a sock in the eye for Maria.”
Three days later, Jackie was in Athens spending thousands on hand-woven rugs and stopped to sip ouzo at a bistro. She was quickly spotted by a reporter and asked if the rumors of the Ari-Maria Callas story were true. “Oh my God,” Jackie said, smiling, “what will they think of next!”
Unbeknownst to Jackie, at that moment paramedics in Paris were frantically working to save Callas, who became so despondent over the photo of Jackie and Ari at Maxim’s that she tried to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. The diva survived, and would soon be back at Ari’s side.
Onassis was not above holding John’s mother up to ridicule, especially if it might teach her a lesson. Fed up with hearing Jackie complain about the press and no longer willing to finance her costly invasion-of-privacy lawsuits, Ari hatched a plan to embarrass Jackie to such an extent that there would be nothing more that the press could do to hurt her. As an added benefit, it would deeply hurt the woman he continued to deride as “the Widow.”
In November 1972, ten photographers put on wetsuits and slipped into the waters off Skorpios. With detailed maps of the island, the dates, times, and places where Jackie was expected to be — all provided by Ari — they snapped scores of color photos of Jackie sunbathing and strolling around in the altogether. The full-frontal images caused a sensation when they ran in the Italian skin magazine Playmen and were then picked up by Larry Flynt’s Hustler. Solely on the basis of the nude Jackie O shots, Hustler went from sales of a few thousand copies to over two million — launching Flynt’s publishing empire overnigh
Needless to say, Ari’s ill-conceived plan did not have the desired effect. John and Caroline cringed with embarrassment over having to see photographs of their mother — even censored photographs — displayed on every newsstand and supermarket counter in New York. Despite John’s popularity at school, the teasing from classmates over what one magazine trumpeted as Jackie’s “Billion Dollar Bush” was merciless and unrelenting.
Jackie, unaware that her husband was behind the whole fiasco, was livid. Instead of backing down, she demanded that Ari sue every photographer and every publication involved. Instead, Ari went straight to Roy Cohn’s Upper East Side townhouse and informed him he was divorcing Jackie. Mindful of the fact that Jackie wasn’t about to settle for the $3 million spelled out in their prenup, Onassis agreed to fork over an extra $1 million. “That’s all the Widow gets,” he said. “Not one penny more.”
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