A happy Ari and Jackie Onassis, winter 1973.
First, the island.
Now, the yacht.
Three months ago, the private Greek island Skorpios, home to shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and his wife, former American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was sold for $TK by his 28 year old granddaughter Athina Onassis.
The buyer is 24 year old Russian heiress Ekaterina Rybolovlevato, whose father built his $9.1 billion fortune on fertilizer production.
At the time of the island’s purchase, a spokesperson announced that the Harvard-educated heiress planned to possibly make Skorpios a luxury resort.
Three weeks ago, the fabled yacht Christina, so lavishly loved by Ari and Jackie Onassis, was put on the market for $32.4 million.
About a decade ago it had been sold by the Onassis Foundation, which managed some of the estate assets, to a company which then restored and rented it out for private cruises until just recently.
Already known for her genius marketing and business savvy, Ekaterina Rybolovlevato might well buy and return the yacht to its original mooring at Skorpios.
The Christina.
Reuniting the Onassis yacht with the Onassis island would make a Skorpios resort vacation of respite and cruises an irresistible once-in-a-lifetime experience which, a half-century ago, was enjoyed only by the elite of the elite, those relatively few living legends and recognizable faces among the many more famous bold-faced names who composed the class of European and American elite who socialized among each other.
In the 1950s they were called Cafe Society.
In the 1960s they were called the Jet Set.
They had New York apartments for weekdays, English country estates for weekends, and private planes to get them in between. They rented suites to ski Gstaad in winter and crews to race Cote d’Azur sailboats in summer. It was Palm Beach for New Year’s and Antigua for Easter. They were young stars, political powers, old scions, nouveau industrialists, titled nobility and High Society swells.
Onassis at the start of his career – when he was still able to sleep regular hours.
Onassis, however, had his own private island and yacht. Everyone flocked to him. That is, if they were invited.
After his 1957 purchase from the government of TAE Greek National Airlines, which he renamed as Olympic Airlines, he could even fly them down. The Onassis touch offered passengers food service with gold cutlery and music provided by a live pianist.
The Onassis logo for his new airlines. Later the “O” became much bigger.
Making his tens of millions in the oil cargo and shipping industry, Onassis bought the Ionian Sea island of Skorpios in 1962 for $10,000.
Not unlike his business headquarters in Monaco, an Avenue Foch apartment in Paris, a Hotel Pierre suite he kept in New York, and his surprisingly modest home on the outskirts of Athens, however, Skorpios seemed to be more of a way station, a place to briefly gather himself before going on the move again.
Onassis in his yacht office.
Onassis may have had a public reputation for partying, but with business deals being simultaneously conducted in every part of the world, managing his global empire meant he rarely slept for any given stretch of hours. More than than any one location, he was most at home on the move in his great pride and joy, his yacht Christina.
Onassis bought the 325-foot naval frigate for scrap metal in 1954 , paying $34,000 but spent $4 million to meticulously convert it into the fabled luxury yacht it soon became. Then married to the former Tina Livanos, by whom he had two children, Alexander born in 1948 and Christina, born in 1950, he named the vessel after his daughter.
Prince Rainier and Princess Grace Kelly on the Onassis yacht.
Soon enough, even those who never had a chance of being invited onto the Christina learned that it was the magnate’s magnet for drawing he world’s most famous celebrities.
Liz parties with Onassis
It was on the yacht that Onassis conducted his passionate love affair with opera singer Maria Callas. Here, he entertained famous beauties like Sophie Loren and Marilyn Monroe.
The Christina had enough suites (all named after different Greek islands) to accompany over two dozen guests at any given time.
American movie star Grace Kelly spent her 1956 honeymoon with Monaco’s Prince Rainier on the Christina.
A frequent repeat visitor was his friend American actress Elizabeth Taylor who came with her husband Richard Burton and alone, during breaking points in their tempestuous relationship.
Liz Taylor, Onassis, his sister Metrope, Richard Burton, unidentified woman; behind them are Alex Onassis in dark shirt and Christina Onassis in head scarf.
Onassis (dark suit) stands on his yacht alongside the seated Winston Churchill. (cruiselinehistory.com)
During a summer sojourn in the south of France, U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy had the chance to meet his hero on the yacht, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who was a close Onassis friend.
An Onassis party on his yacht with members of the international Jet Set.
Accompanying the Senator was his young wife, the former reporter Jacqueline Bouvier.
After this first look around the Onassis yacht, she famously came back a second time in late September and early October of 1963, a stay that was part of a more extensive vacation she made which included visits to Morocco as the guest of King Hassan and Yugoslavia, during her tenure as First Lady.
That private vacation had been arranged by her sister Lee, then married the deposed Polish prince Stanislaus Radzwill, both of whom would join her on it. Residents of London, the Radziwills had already been to some of the legendary Christina parties.
A Christina luncheon. (cruiselinehistory.com)
Much has been written about that trip, with President Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln later claiming that he was against his wife and sister-in-law being the guests of Onassis on his yacht because the magnate was then involved in questionable acts violating U.S. shipping regulations.
However, Pamela Turnure, the First Lady’s press secretary specifically recalled that other advisers were against the trip because of political repercussions (which did ensue), but that Kennedy insisted that she must chose to go if she wished, wanting her to seek the time for emotional recovery following the unexpected death of their prematurely-born son Patrick. As part of the U.S. entourage that escorted her, however, JFK send along his Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. and his wife Sue.
Wearing a kerchief and her trademark black sunglasses, First Lady Jackie Kennedy, escorted by her friends Navy Undersecretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. and his wife Sue (who flank her her) was first a guest aboard the famous yacht of Onassis (he stands in black shirt) in the fall of 1963.
Barely a month later, Onassis again saw Jackie Kennedy, this time invited by her as a personal guest for the November 26, 1963 funeral of President Kennedy, following his Dallas assassination three days earlier.
The widowed Jackie Kennedy snapped with Onassis for a night on the town in 1967.
In 1964, she settled permanently in the home where she lived longer than any other, a 15-room 15th floor cooperative apartment at 1040 First Avenue.
No eyebrows were raised when any number of male friends she’d known for a decade or so, came upstairs to dinner or escorted the globally-famous widow out for the evening, passing the ubiquitous paparazzi photographers waiting near the green awning of 1040, who’d begun to stalk her every move.
“Ari” as she called Onassis, was simply one of them.
He even appeared in the audience of guests watching her at the dedication of the U.S.S. John F. Kennedy in Newport News, Rhode Island.
Jackie emerges from the Ionian
A former debutante in the “High Society,” of Newport, Rhode Island Jackie Kennedy had long enjoyed life among the wealthy, and as the Sixties got swinging she often visited the palazzos and estates of such friends around the world, becoming the star of the International Jet Set.
A superb swimmer, she particularly enjoyed vacations in the Mediterranean, including a cruise on Ari’s yacht in 1967 and visits to his island the next year.
The Ari and Jackie Onassis wedding picture which appeared on the cover of Life magazine.
Still, when the new hit the wires that Ari and Jackie were getting married on October 20, 1968 in the Greek Orthodox chapel on Skorpios, followed by a wedding reception on the Christina, the world was stunned.
To this day, speculation runs riot on why the 39-year old sainted widow of the assassinated American President decided to accept the marriage proposal of the 62-year old Greek tycoon.
The reasons offered range from logic to conspiracy, from her truly loving him however differently than she had her first husband, to wanting access to his bottomless caverns of money.
There was no denying that the union damaged her idealized reputation, one European newspaper headline famously blaring, “Jackie, How Could You?”
The Onassis wedding reception held in the yacht’s main salon.
The vision of the tawny-haired bride and her shorter, slicked-back silver-haired groom on the cover of national magazines and then numerous black-and-white press snapshots of them in the daily newspapers initially unnerved and even depressed millions of people who reverentially followed her every move.
Jackie and Ari were lampooned on a comedy record.
Yet that’s what she hoped to escape. When a friend told her that marrying Onassis would knock her “off your pedestal,” she quipped, “That’s better than freezing there.”
Jackie, her daughter and new husband making their way from the church to a golf cart they took to the yacht.
Soon enough, the anger and shock at Jackie turned to belittling parody.
The same acting troupe which had parodied Jackie and the Kennedys in the White House on a comedy album now released a new one called, Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts.
In one segment, her new husband’s simultaneous generosity and parsimony was parodied by the sound gag of heavy bags of gold bullion being carried in and dumped at her feet as the “Jackie Onassis” character turns to a houseguest on the yacht and quips, “See how thoughtful he is? All I asked for was a quarter to the ladies room.”
The boats crammed with reporters and photographers surrounding the Onassis yacht.
Women’s Wear Daily newspaper christened them “Daddy O” and “Jackie O,” a nickname handle which stuck to her forever.
Coming two weeks before the 1968 election of Richard Nixon and his vice-presidential nominee Spiro Agnew, comedienne Bob Hope cracked about the former First Lady’s wedding, “Nixon got a Greek running mate. Now everyone wants one.”
The event itself became a fiasco.
Ari and Jackie Kennedy Onassis at their wedding reception aboard his yacht Christina.
Onassis, who had always enjoyed the publicity which came from his parties and exploits, convinced Jackie to cooperate with the press and let them get footage and snapshots of them as they emerged from the church.
The real problem was in the water around the Christina, however.
There motorboats and small vessels were overloaded with reporters and photographers from around the world.
Jackie just managed a smile when a mike was thrust before them.
Finally, the newlyweds emerged onto the deck to pose for more pictures before any of the small vessels capsized and someone could potentially drown.
If the images taken as they pose show the former First Lady a little less than happy on her wedding night, it may have only further affirmed the primary of practical reasons she had offered to some friends and family about why she was marrying Ari.
Wedding poses for the press.
He literally had an island and that was one place that could ensure her the privacy from the press and public which had so desperately sought.
Part of her determination was not just personal preference but fear. Just eighteen weeks earlier, Jackie Kennedy’s brother-in-law, United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) had been assassinated like her husband.
Such acts tend to bring out more such threats and as she was famously quoted as saying at the time, “my kids are next.”
The uncertain newlyweds.
Although she lost her Secret Service protection when she re-married, her daughter and son Caroline and John Kennedy, Jr. would continue to be trailed and watched by the agents assigned to them and thus further help ensure the privacy of Ari and Jackie.
When she was alone with her husband, however, the new Mrs. Onassis had to depend on the private guards which Ari only haphazardly hired at times.
(Forthcoming articles in this series will look at the married life of Ari and Jackie Kennedy Onassis on Skorpios and the yacht Christina, with new photographs, including some previously unpublished in the U.S.)
The new Mrs. Aristotle Onassis and husband.
Related articles
- Rybolovlev Dressed up as Ancient Greek (greece.greekreporter.com)
- Aristotle Onassis’ Island Sold to Ekaterina Rybolovleva (extravaganzi.com)
- Onassis’ Yacht Christina O For Sale (eu.greekreporter.com)
- Aristotle Onassis’s yacht was a floating Xanadu that seduced them all (telegraph.co.uk)
- Superyacht Aristotle Onassis wooed Jackie O, up for sale (cnn.com)
- Onassis’ Legendary Superyacht: Yours For £21m (news.sky.com)
- Elite craft: Onassis yacht goes on sale (sacbee.com)
- Ex-Canadian warship and luxury yacht Christina O on sale for $34M (canada.com)
- Historic Onassis yacht for sale (timesofmalta.com)
- Elite craft: Onassis yacht goes on sale (utsandiego.com)
Related articles
- Historic Onassis yacht for sale (timesofmalta.com)
- Elite craft: Onassis yacht goes on sale (utsandiego.com)
Categories: Ari & Jackie Onassis, First Ladies, The Kennedys
Ari & Jackie Onassis: Their “Blended” Family Adapts in Rare Photos (Part 3)
Very revealing story on how the rich and famous are cloistered by their money and noteriety.
To a point – yes that is true, but the most important and larger human experiences – that is impossible to escape regardless of wealth. At least, I think that’s true!
One of my favorite topics! I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I read someplace that, during the marriage negotiations, when Ted Kennedy reminded Onassis that Jackie would be losing her Secret Service protection, Onassis supposedly said: ‘And we all know just how much that’s worth!’ Marta Sgubin has some informative things to say about Scorpios and the Christina too. I’m so glad there will be a sequel to this great article.
That sounds like it may be true to the way Onassis thought. I’ve an image from Sgubin’s insightful book I’ll be posting in the forthcoming sequel, as well as many previously unpublished.
*Loved* the article, of course. Also never have seen so many photos depicting life on the “Christina” !!
Thank you so much – I appreciate your writing to say so….many, many, many more to come.
I think sometimes if there were no photographers hovering over those in the spotlight how much more privacy they could have. I’m sure Jacqueline felt overwhelmed at times and felt secure in that private island hide-away. I enjoyed reading your article. Thanks for posting.
Mary – That is an understatement. In the forthcoming articles in this series I will have a few photos of the photographers and the quite literally massive crowds that gathered to simply glimpse Jackie when she was merely emerging from a car or a building. It’s rather overwhelming. When one considers the trauma of the assassination and then forcing herself to simply accept the photographers and crowds as a part of what had become “normal” existence for her, one has a fuller understanding of perhaps her most revealing remark. Asked to name her greatest accomplishment, she replied, “I kept my sanity.”