Marlene Wagman-Geller

     The world’s greatest tragic heroines sprung from the ancient Greeks who squeezed every nuance of pain from the dark forces that knit their destinies. Medea, the archetypal woman scorned, wreaked vengeance on Jason by serving him a stew- its chief ingredient their two sons. In her footsteps walked an heiress relentlessly pursued by the Furies.

        The oxymoron “poor little rich girl” existed prior to Christina Onassis, but she proved its ill-starred embodiment. She was born in New York City, the only daughter of two Greek shipping dynasties: her father was Aristotle Socrates Onassis; her mother was Athina Livanos. Her elder brother, Alexander, was the heir apparent, and Christina’s role was to partake of pampered privilege and to propagate the dynasty.

     From her earliest days, Christina was at the eye of the media storm; the public never grew jaded with news of the girl on whom the cornucopia had been upended. She first saw her family’s floating Xanadu at age three when her father pointed to the yacht whose prow bore her name. While Shirley Temple sang “The Good Ship Lollipop,” Christina had her own six-million-dollar version. The mural on her nursery wall came from the brush of Madeline artist Ludwig Bemelmans; her dolls wore clothes handmade from the House of Dior. On the bulkheads, hung a Gauguin, a Pissarro, and two El Grecos. The barstools in the luxury liner were fashioned from the foreskins of whales that led to Onassis’s favorite bon mot, “You are sitting on the largest penis in the world.” Little Christina was the owner of a pure-bred Mongolian horse, a gift from the King of Saudi Arabia. Other Onassis pleasure domes were in Paris, London, New York, the Riviera; and the one nearest and dearest to his heart, his fiefdom on the private island of Skorpios, situated on the Ionian Sea. The constant stream of guests on the Christina O were those of legend: Winston Churchill praised her youthful drawings; Greta Garbo and Gregory Peck fussed over her.  Aristotle showered presents on his daughter and cooked her Greek dishes; she favored her American nanny’s cheeseburgers.

     An adorable toddler, as Christina matured, her features favored her father, and she fell short of her mother Athina and her Aunt Eugenia’s Grace Kelly beauty. Plump and shy, she also suffered as a silent witness to her parents’ stormy marriage and their frequent absences as Aristotle pursued additional millions, and Athina frequented jet-set soirees. Lonely without her parents, the palatial houses never equated to homes.

        The first dramatis persona in Christina’s tragedy was opera great Maria Callas, a guest on a Mediterranean cruise that included Sir Winston and Lady Clementine Churchill. The diva and the tycoon developed a powerful attraction that no camouflage could cover. They danced the night away on the yacht’s swimming pool whose décor displayed a mosaic of the Minotaur; it had the capacity to transform to a makeshift ballroom. Athina smoldered at her husband’s public philandering; however, Aristotle-with fortune and hubris at its height -was indifferent to her fury. When the Christina O docked at Monte Carlo, Maria and her husband departed for Italy with Onassis in hot pursuit. Athina had enough and, with children in tow, abandoned the ship. Christina recalled, “That night was confused-Daddy wasn’t there. I imagined that I was losing something important. I didn’t know what. Mother only said we had to leave, and she was sure we were not coming back.” The heiress hated the other woman who she blamed for her parents’ divorce; whenever she visited her father, Aristotle made sure his mistress was never in sight.

       The affair between the diva and the billionaire continued until Onassis set his eyes on the world’s most famous widow: the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. As Princess Grace and Prince Rainier had done a decade before, the Greek tycoon and the American celebrity held their wedding reception aboard the Christina O. Aristotle celebrated the acquisition of his ultimate trophy wife while Jacqueline celebrated the acquisition of her trophy ring. Onassis’s son and daughter wept-and not from tears of joy.  Alexander said of his new step-mother, “It’s a perfect match. My father loves names and Jackie loves money.” The international press went into overdrive and dubbed the new Mrs. Onassis Jackie O; Christina employed a less charitable epithet.

       Aristotle had planned to give his daughter twenty-one ships as a coming-of-age present; however, in retaliation against his marriage to the woman she referred to as “my father’s unfortunate obsession,” Christina took her own trip down the aisle in a three-minute Las Vegas civil ceremony. The groom, Joe Bolker, was a divorced realtor twenty-seven years her senior, father of four, with a penchant for heiresses. Aristotle reacted with a Zeus-like fury and threatened to cut her off from her birthday present of a trust-fund of seventy-five million dollars. Part of her father’s anger stemmed from Bolker’s Judaism; he feared his son-in-law’s religion would alienate his Arab connection that was instrumental to his shipping empire. Distraught at the fatherly fury, Christina checked into a hospital, reputedly a result of a suicide attempt. After a grueling nine months, the Bolkers divorced. Joe later said of his short-lived nuptial, “Listen, when a billion dollars leans on you, you can feel it.” Aristotle rewarded his prodigal daughter with a whirlwind trip around the world.

       Christina was thrilled to be reconciled with her father but soon Hamlet’s admonition came to call, “When sorrows come/They come not in single spies but in battalions.” The first of these was when her Aunt Eugenia, married to Ari’s archrival Stavros Niarchos, committed suicide. Three years later the twenty-four-year-old Alexander, whom his father referred to as his alpha and omega, died from injuries sustained in a plane crash. The crushing blow transformed the dashing Aristotle into an old man, and in their shared grief, father and daughter drew closer. Christina, still reeling from her losses, soon had to deal with another: her mother, who had married her brother-in-law, took an overdose of sleeping pills. When Christina arrived to pay her final respects, she found Niarchos dining with eighteen guests at a table adorned with candles, silver, and wine while Athina’s body lay in the next room. The callousness shook Christina to the core. Mere months later, with the Fates weaving overtime, Aristotle became ill. Christina lamented, “Happiness is not based on money. And the best proof of this is our family.” At his funeral, Jackie showed up with Ted Kennedy who infuriated a grief-stricken Christina by talking about Jackie’s share of the estate. Her step-daughter wrote out a check for twenty-six million dollars and later remarked, “The joke is, I would have given her 50 times what I gave her for the pleasure of never having to see her again.”

     Perhaps in a posthumous mea culpa to her father, four months after his passing, she wed the man who Aristotle had wanted as a son-in-law, Greek shipping heir Alexander Andreadis. The union, undertaken for dynastic purposes, soon foundered on the rocky cliffs of the Aegean. On Skorpios, Alexander injured his leg in a motorcycle accident. His wife signed his cast, “Bon voyage, Alexandros, better luck next time.” She then boarded her private jet for her luxurious apartment overlooking the harbor of Monte Carlo.

          After the demise of her family and two marriages, Christina once again found herself alone-and solitude had always proven an Orwellian Room 101. As an antidote to depression, she medicated her pain with junk food and ballooned to two hundred pounds. Her private humiliation was fueled with public pillorying:  gossip columnists referred to her as “Thunderthighs” and “The Greek Tanker.” In the belief diet Coke helped curtail cravings, as her beverage of choice was only available in the United States, she dispatched her private jet to America once a month for a fresh supply at the cost of thirty-thousand dollars per trip for fuel,  pilots’ salaries, and beverage.

     Obese and despairing, Christina desperately sought companionship, and, as with everything else, it was something for which she was willing to pay. In case friends might be elsewhere when needed, she put them on her payroll- thirty-thousand dollars a month-with the stipulation they come when called. And when she played hostess, they were compelled to abide by her unique house rules. No one was allowed to go to bed until she had worked off her own amphetamine-induced insomnia. In addition, there was to be no love-making under her roof: if she did not have something, no one else could either. Maids were instructed to check the bed sheets each morning for tell-tale signs of transgression; offenders were exiled. 

         Christina had once stated, “My most fervent wish is that I shall meet a man who loves me for myself and not my money.” Husband number three was a peculiar choice: Sergei Kauzov, a Moscow-based member of the Communist Party. Perhaps as the daughter of Midas, she was attracted to his gold teeth though the allure of his glass-eye remains enigmatic. For her part, Christina gave up her European homes, and on his end, he relinquished his cellist wife, Natasha, and their nine-year-old daughter. Alas, just as the Russian winter defeated the French Napoleon, it did likewise for the Greek heiress. Fourteen months later-with a ship as alimony, the marriage hit the rocks.

       The fourth trip down the aisle was with the man who was the love of Christina’s life. In 1984, she married French businessman Thierry Roussel who the international press dubbed “The World’s Most Successful Gigolo.” To mark the occasion, she gifted him ten million dollars; on a less romantic note, he requested she drop fifteen kilos. What would have been far more jarring, unbeknownst to the bride, he had been living with a Swedish beauty, Gaby Landhage, for a decade and was not about to let a foray into holy matrimony interfere with his relationship. The marriage brought Christina her crown jewel: daughter, Athina Helene Roussel. What dampened the joys of motherhood was five months later Gaby gave birth to a son. Christina still remained committed to her vows until Gaby’s second child arrived, and Christina obtained a quickie divorce. Nevertheless, she still wanted another child, and Thierry complied by conveniently supplying her with a bank of his sperm. Christina expressed her gratitude with a $160,000 Ferrari Testarossa sports car and the promise of a ten-million-dollar bonus if she delivered another baby.  

      Christina was distraught at the failure of marriage to her American, Greek, Russian, and French husbands and flew to Buenos Aires hoping to find the happiness that had always proved elusive. In the city whose name translates to “good air,” she paid Luis Sosa Basualdo one thousand dollars a day for companionship and sex. He remarked she was “about as sexy as a walloping hippo.” 

        In South America, the thirty-seven-year-old Christina seemed to have at last managed to find contentment. She had lost forty-five pounds at a Swiss clinic, doted on her daughter, and had another prospect for romance: Jorge Tchomlekdjoglou, an Argentine she hoped would become husband number five. On the night of November 19, 1988, Christina took her nightly sleeping pill; the next morning her maid Eleni discovered her lifeless body in a bathtub. The official cause of death was a heart attack brought on by years of binge eating, grueling diets, and heavy doses of amphetamines. 

      The heiress lay in a white satin-lined casket, and even in death, she was subject to the scrutiny she had always endured. Camera crews were allowed into the chapel, and the deceased, clad in a white tunic with her hands folded around a single red rose, became for the final time the object of the paparazzi’s flashbulbs. Her final resting place was in the family crypt in Skorpios, where the heiress lies beside her father the modern Midas, whose term of affection for his daughter had been, “Chryso mou,” “My gold.”