Was Jackie Kennedy Actually Beautiful? Or Just Media Hype ht
Am I the only one who couldn’t see the beauty in Jackie Kennedy? Someone wrote that in a YouTube comment section and it pulled 167 likes and 67 replies. The highest reply count in the entire section. Not because the question was provocative, because it was honest. Because for 50 years, millions of people had been holding that exact thought.
Watching the breathless reverence surrounding this woman and quietly wondering whether they were missing something the rest of the world could see. They weren’t missing anything. But the question opens a door to something far larger than Jackie Kennedy’s looks. This is the story of Aristotle Onassis, the most self-made man of his generation.
A man with $500 million and the world’s largest privately owned shipping fleet and a mind that could read a deal, a person or a geopolitical moment better than almost anyone alive. A man who had built an empire from $120,000 and six small ships. Who had outsmarted the United States government, the British government and his own brother-in-law simultaneously across four decades.
And this is the story of what happened to that man when the American media machine showed him a story so seamlessly constructed, so universally believed, so relentlessly distributed that his finest instincts, the very instincts that had built everything, simply failed. The media had already decided she was the most beautiful woman alive and Onassis believed them.
What that belief cost him wasn’t really measured in dollars, though the dollars were real. It was measured in his son, in the love of his life, in the inner circle that turned against him, in his happiness and finally, in his will to live. One day people will understand that money does not mean anything if you aren’t happy. Aristotle Onassis proved that not in theory, but in documented historical fact.
In a suburb of Paris in March 1975, dying at 69 with everything the world could offer and nothing that actually mattered. To understand how a man of his caliber ended up there, we need to understand the machine that got him there. In 1958, when John F. Kennedy was beginning his run for the presidency, his father made a specific decision.
He hired a photographer named Jacques Lowe to help craft his son’s public image. That isn’t a paraphrase or an inference. That is how the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, which now holds Lowe’s archive, describes the engagement. Lowe was brought in explicitly to build the image, not merely to document it.
Over the next 3 years, he took approximately 40,000 photographs of the Kennedy family. What he produced wasn’t journalism in the traditional sense. It was a sustained visual argument. The images were intimate, luminous, aspirational. They showed a young, beautiful couple who appeared to belong to a world slightly elevated above ordinary life.
Close enough to feel real, refined enough to feel exceptional. His photographs, the Briscoe Center notes, helped create the legend of the Kennedy presidency known as Camelot. Not accidentally and not organically. By design. They were building a legend before they got to the White House. Life magazine ran Jackie Kennedy on its cover on August 24th, 1959, more than a year before her husband won the presidency.
The headline? Jackie Kennedy, a front-runner’s appealing wife. She wasn’t yet a first lady. She was already a product. By March 1961, barely 2 months after the inauguration, Women’s Wear Daily was tracking what it called the Jackie look as a measurable cultural trend. Oleg Cassini was the engine behind that look.
He had been named Jackie’s personal designer, her secretary of style, as she dubbed him, in early 1961. His background was Hollywood. He had worked at Paramount alongside Edith Head, the most decorated costume designer in the history of film. He understood something most fashion designers didn’t. On television, a first lady wasn’t a private person in her own clothes.
She was a character in a performance and every garment was a costume decision. He said this explicitly. He described Jacqueline Kennedy as the star in a major film in which she played a first lady and he used his costume design expertise accordingly. Between 1961 and 1963, he created more than 300 outfits for her.
The pillbox hat, the A-line silhouette, the oversized buttons, the deliberate simplicity that photographed as elegance, chiffon, lace, emotive fabrics, as he called them. He visualized her as an American queen. This wasn’t personal taste. It was a production brief. By 1961, Eugenia Sheppard of the New York Herald Tribune reported that the best known name in American fashion was Oleg Cassini, not Chanel, not Dior, but the man who dressed the first lady.
Then came Valentine’s Day, 1962. If you watched television that evening, you remember the image. A woman in a bright red wool suit moving through the rooms of the White House with that soft, breathy voice, pausing at a portrait, at a mantelpiece, at a pair of chairs, speaking without notes, placing each object in its historical moment as though she had been born knowing the provenance.
A tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, produced by CBS, aired simultaneously on CBS and NBC. All three major networks had agreed, in a rare arrangement, to share costs for the privilege of broadcasting the same program. Three out of four American television viewers watched the initial broadcast, roughly 56 million Americans.
It was then syndicated to 50 countries, including China and the Soviet Union. The FCC chairman, Newton Minow, called President Kennedy after getting the overnight ratings. Kennedy asked what the numbers were. Minow told him they were higher than his press conferences. She won an honorary Emmy. The New York Times called her a virtuoso among guides.
What Secret Service agent Clint Hill observed and recounted in a chapter cut from his published memoir and later released on his own website, was the preparation behind it. In the weeks prior to filming, he watched Jackie Kennedy spend days at their Virginia retreat surrounded by boxes of files and research materials.
She memorized not just historical facts, but the names of every donor who had contributed pieces to the restoration. Because she knew that publicly crediting donors on national television would motivate others in the same social circle to give. Hill’s final assessment? She knew exactly what she was doing.
She was a virtuoso and this particular kind of virtuosity is built, not born. She had studied at the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre on a year-long exchange program through Smith College. Then completed her actual degree at George Washington University. Her French was fluent and thoroughly attested.
She had worked as the inquiring camera girl for the Washington Times-Herald before her marriage, photographing and interviewing people in the street, covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London in 1953, interviewing a young senator named Kennedy that same year. Arthur Schlesinger, who observed her closely in July 1959, described her as having tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment.
That’s not an assessment of charm. That’s an assessment of political intelligence operating behind a composed exterior. Her voice was a calculated instrument. What White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige once described as Locust Valley lockjaw. That breathy, slightly stilted, performatively elevated accent was reportedly something she had deliberately cultivated.
Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, recounts that Jackie was reportedly told by her father that a whispery voice draws men closer, makes them lean in to hear you. Acoustic studies comparing her actual voice to Natalie Portman’s portrayal of her in the 2016 film confirmed that the breathy register was consistent, defining and unlike any natural conversational pattern.
It was the sound of the product and when the product needed its mythology sealed permanently, Jackie Kennedy did something that stands as perhaps the most remarkable act of public image construction in American political history. 13 days after Dallas, December 6th, 1963. If you watch the news in those weeks, you remember everything about it.
The pink suit, the walk behind the casket down Pennsylvania Avenue, the children, the flame at Arlington. She had, as one historian put it, supervised the graceful spectacle of the president’s funeral. A phrase that describes something more than grief. The pink suit, the decision not to change out of the blood stained dress, the walk behind the casket.
These were choices made by a woman who understood what those images would mean and what they would do. Then, 13 days after the assassination, she invited one journalist to her family compound in Hyannis Port, Theodore White, Pulitzer Prize winner of Life magazine. The same magazine that had carried her on its cover in 1959.
The same outlet that had tracked the Kennedys through the thousand days of the administration. In two pages, White produced for President Kennedy an epilogue, published December 6th, 1963. It introduced Camelot to the cultural vocabulary. Jackie had suggested the reference, drawn from the Broadway musical JFK had loved. One brief shining moment.
White later donated his handwritten notes from that conversation to the Kennedy Library. Those notes, made public after Jackie’s death, reveal something specific. The extent to which she guided the framing, not merely answering White’s questions, but shaping the mythology. The paper is exposed, as one analysis noted, the extent to which she participated in crafting the Camelot image that would stick with the family for decades to come.
She chose the outlet. She chose the journalist. She chose the metaphor. Norman Mailer, who studied her closely enough to call her the prisoner of celebrity, understood that the prisoner had helped design her own cell. This isn’t a diminishment. It’s the most sophisticated thing you can say about someone.
The point of establishing all of this isn’t to reduce her. She was genuinely educated, genuinely multilingual, genuinely passionate about American cultural heritage. The White House restoration project, which established the first permanent White House curator, created the fine arts committee, recovered furniture from private donors that had been dispersed across a century of presidential carelessness, and cost approximately $2 million, was serious was serious institutional work by any measure. Clint Hill, who knew her without the camera, described a woman of real depth. But all of those genuine qualities had been assembled into a product so polished, so consistently presented, so distributed through the most powerful media apparatus in the world, that it became impossible for almost anyone to distinguish the woman from the icon. The icon was real.
The woman was real. But the beauty, that specific, globally agreed upon designation of Jackie Kennedy as the most desirable woman alive, that was manufactured. Built by a costume designer who called her a film star. Photographed by a man specifically hired to craft a legend. Distributed through a White House press operation that was the first in history to include a dedicated press secretary.
The beauty was the synthesis, and Aristotle Onassis was about to pay the highest price of his life for a synthesis. He was born in 1906 in Smyrna, present-day Izmir, Turkey, to a family whose patriarch was, as Onassis himself once described his father, one of the wealthiest tobacco merchants in the city.
Not poverty, disruption. The Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 destroyed the family’s position, and Onassis arrived in Buenos Aires at 17 with commercial knowledge and not much else. He read the market. Greek tobacco was milder than the Cuban and Brazilian varieties dominant in Argentina, preferred once you knew to offer it.
He built a business around that single insight. By 25, the tobacco money had grown enough to buy six small ships for $120,000. That purchase was the foundation of what would eventually become the world’s largest privately owned shipping fleet. His methods were aggressive and layered. He created 164 Panamanian shell companies and 19 Liberian ones through which he ran his business.
The FBI put him under surveillance as early as 1942. An arrest warrant was issued against him in 1954, charging conspiracy to defraud the United States government over surplus cargo ships. He navigated that, settled it, and kept building. He acquired the Greek national airline and rebuilt it as Olympic Airways.
He did deals with Saudi Arabia, fought his rival and brother-in-law Stavros Niarchos across multiple continents simultaneously. His net worth at death was approximately $500 million, equivalent to two or three billion dollars today. The British Embassy in Athens, whose internal cables from the early 1970s are now in the National Archives at Kew, describes him with a mixture of frustration and reluctant admiration.
“He was like a jellyfish,” one diplomat wrote, “difficult to grasp, and one is liable to be stung.” Even his critics conceded that in conversation he was pleasant, friendly, informative. He had built an empire partly on his ability to understand what motivated other human beings before they could use that understanding against him.
A CIA report from July 1954 labeled him a smart Greek. The label was meant dismissively, but stripped of its prejudice, it was accurate. “In England,” Onassis once said, “I would have been knighted. In America, I was indicted.” This was the man who met Jacqueline Kennedy in 1958. The meeting took place at an event organized at Winston Churchill’s invitation.
He noticed everything about her, from her clothing to her short dark hair blowing in the evening breeze, according to accounts from his inner circle. He told his closest aide, Costa Gratsos, “There’s something damned willful about her. There’s something provocative about that lady. She’s got a carnal soul.” That phrase is worth pausing on.
Carnal soul suggests a perception of something unfiltered beneath the composed surface. The ruthlessness Schlesinger had identified. The calculating intelligence behind the practiced grace. He was trying to read her, and something he saw struck him as more real than the image. A man who spent his life detecting what people were actually made of thought he was seeing the thing behind the performance.
The problem is that by 1958, the performance had been running for years. It had been built from 40,000 photographs, a cover story in Life magazine, a Hollywood designer’s 300 outfit production brief, and a voice that made men lean in to hear it. Whatever Onassis thought he was perceiving through the image may have been real. Her intelligence was real.
Her willfulness was real. Schlesinger had noted the ruthless judgment as early as 1959. But he was seeing all of it through a frame that the most powerful media machine in the world had constructed, and he couldn’t separate the two. His biographer Peter Evans, who spent years reconstructing the relationship and interviewed people from the Onassis inner circle, described the motivations more plainly than the romantic accounts allow.
In a CBS News interview, Evans said, “He needed Jackie. He needed her for his business affairs. She was going to help him, he believed, with a huge deal that he was setting up in Greece with the fascist regime there.” Evans also stated that Onassis would never have married Jackie had Bobby lived. Robert Kennedy had opposed the marriage explicitly, reportedly telling associates he would marry Jackie himself over his dead body.
Bobby Kennedy was shot on June 5th, 1968. The wedding was announced 4 and 1/2 months later. There was also, in accounts from people close to him, something more nakedly transactional about the status calculation. Jackie’s half-brother Jamie Auchincloss recalled Onassis’s framing in terms that made it explicit.
He reportedly said, “I feel it’s my duty to help a widow in distress. I also can likely get a lot of mileage out of doing so, just in terms of status in the world.” Mileage. The word of a man doing arithmetic on an acquisition. Biographical sources describe him consistently as someone obsessed with celebrities to the point of addiction, who sought self-aggrandizement through his associations with the rich, the famous, and the powerful.
His yacht, the Christina, had hosted Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Cary Grant. He had befriended Winston Churchill. He understood the social economy of association and worked it deliberately. But Jackie Kennedy wasn’t simply the most famous woman in the world. She was someone the most powerful media apparatus in the world had unanimously designated as the embodiment of beauty, elegance, and grace repeatedly, without dissent, across 15 years.
He wasn’t buying a person. He was acquiring a symbol. The distinction would destroy him. Before the marriage and after it and throughout every year of it, there was Maria Callas. They had met in 1957. By 1959, after a cruise aboard his yacht, she had left her 10-year marriage to the impresario Giovanni Battista Menegini and reorganized her life entirely around Onassis.
Their relationship lasted from 1959 through 1968, when he married Jackie. And it didn’t end there. His personal secretary, Kiki Feroudi Mousatsos, who watched both relationships from inside and later wrote a memoir about the Onassis women, described what she observed. He couldn’t live without Maria.
Maria was a piece of his soul, of his body, of his brain. That’s why they never believed that they could be separate. Onassis continued to see Callas in secret after marrying Jackie. Mousatsos arranged those meetings. That was part of her job. Jackie knew and was hurt by it. The affair had not ended because the legal arrangement on Skorpios had begun.
It continued because Callas remained the emotional center, regardless of what the marriage papers said. She died on September 16th, 1977, alone in her Paris apartment at 53, 2 years after Onassis. When her maid found her, there was a photograph on the bedside table. Callas and Onassis together. She had kept it there until she died.
He is buried on the island where he had once brought her. Those two facts tell you everything the biographies take hundreds of pages to establish. On October 20th, 1968, Aristotle Onassis married Jacqueline Kennedy in a small chapel on his private island of Skorpios. She was 39. He was 62. Ted Kennedy had flown in to negotiate the prenuptial agreement on his sister-in-law’s behalf.
The financial terms: $3 million to Jackie upfront, $1 million for each of her two children, Caroline and John Jr., a monthly allowance of $30,000 after taxes, more than 200,000 a month in current values. A 1971 newspaper archive captured the annual commitment in dry, specific language. Onassis was committed to lay out the sum of at least $625,000 a year for his wife’s comfort, pleasure, and children.
The marriage contract reportedly contained 170 clauses. The American press ran a headline that captured the public mood precisely. Jackie marries blank check. If you remember that morning in October 1968, you remember the shock. She had been the noble widow, the woman in the pink suit walking behind the casket as the whole world watched.
She was the keeper of Camelot, the mother of two Kennedy children, the woman who had held the national grief for 5 years. And now? She was marrying a 62-year-old Greek shipping magnate who had been indicted for fraud in the United States, who the press described as too old, too foreign, too small, too dark, and too rich.
The Vatican issued criticism. Editorials ran under headlines including Jack Kennedy dies today a second time and America has lost a saint. Greek society reacted with consternation. One American graffito, Jackie forgot to beware Greeks bearing gifts. His children were more direct than the press.
Both Alexander and Christina, from the moment the marriage was announced, used the same word for her. They called her the gold digger. His oldest aide, Kostas Gratsos, was unequivocal in his denunciation of the marriage, according to accounts from the Onassis circle. The inner circle turned against it. The people who had watched Aristotle Onassis operate for decades, who had seen the full range of his intelligence and his instincts, looked at this particular decision and saw something wrong.
Something the man who had never missed a read had somehow missed entirely. The marriage had what one biographical account diplomatically describes as an element of unreality from the beginning. Jackie was kept away from his business affairs. They spent much of their time in different cities.
She maintained her life in New York. He moved between Skorpios, Athens, and Paris. His personal secretary noted that Jackie was never screaming, never fighting about the continuing Callas affair. She was very smart in how she managed the awareness of it, pretending she didn’t know what she knew. Katherine Jellison, a professor of US gender history at Ohio University, described the marriage as characterized by fondness and I think respect and added, It wasn’t a great love story.
In many ways, he was a father-protector figure as well as a husband. Jackie herself, in a statement after his death, chose notably careful words. Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows. We lived through many beautiful experiences together, for which I will be eternally grateful.
Rescued. Grateful. Not love, not grief. The language of someone describing a transaction that had served its purpose. In the first year of the marriage, Jackie spent an estimated $1.25 million on clothing. Most of it, by one account, on items from New York that were never worn. Her annual spending ran close to a million dollars throughout the early years.
Against a $500 million the actual dollars weren’t the wound. The $3 million prenuptial lump sum represented roughly 0.6% of his total wealth. The financial cost was almost symbolic in its smallness. The real cost was relational and it had started before the wedding. His inner circle had opposed the marriage.
His children despised his wife. His oldest aide had denounced the union. The man whose empire had been built partly on his ability to read what other people were actually made of was now surrounded by the people who knew him best and they were telling him, uniformly, persistently, without ambiguity, that he had made the worst decision of his life.
Onassis had spent his career at the intersection of ambition and clear sight. The intersection was where he lived and now something had compromised the clear sight. Something the image was powerful enough to do. And then, on January 23rd, 1973, his son Alexander died. He was 24 years old. He had logged 1,500 flying hours and held a professional pilot’s license and had been appointed president of Olympic Aviation.
The previous day, January 22nd, his personal Piaggio P.136 L2 amphibious airplane had crashed at Hellenikon Airport in Athens during a check flight. The right wing had dropped seconds after takeoff and the plane had gone down in roughly 15 seconds. He died from a brain hemorrhage the following afternoon.
The New York Times ran the notice on January 24th, 1973. Alexander Onassis, the 24-year-old only son of Aristotle Onassis, the multimillionaire, died in hospital here of a brain hemorrhage tonight. Aristotle flew in from New York. He brought a neurosurgeon from London, an American neurosurgeon from New York.
The renowned English neurosurgeon, Alan Richardson, examined Alexander and told the father plainly his son had no chance of surviving his injuries. Aristotle Onassis was so unwilling to accept this that he investigated having Alexander’s body cryogenically preserved. He was persuaded against it. If you watched the news in those January days, you remember the photographs from outside the hospital.
“That face.” Alexander had said at some point during the years of the marriage, what the adults around him apparently couldn’t bring themselves to say. “My father loved the names and Jackie loved the money.” The boy had seen it clearly. So had Costas Gratsos. So had Christina. So had most of the inner circle.
The man himself had been the last to understand what he had done. What happened inside Aristotle Onassis after Alexander’s death is described consistently in every account. He never recovered from the loss of his son, slowly losing the will to live. Friends and family described him as a man transformed.
The shipping magnate who had outmaneuvered governments and rivals across four decades, the man described by those who worked with him as charismatic, hardworking, open to suggestions, creative, friendly, and a passionate businessman was gone after January 23rd, 1973. He was, after Alexander’s death, a broken, dead man walking.
He became convinced that Jackie had brought bad luck into his marriage. The bitterness that had been accumulating through the hollow years hardened after Alexander died into something specific, a direct connection in his mind between the decision he had made on Scorpios in October 1968 and the loss he was now living inside.
The foundation he eventually established to carry his legacy, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, bears his son’s name, not his own. “His foundation,” his papers note, “was given the name of Alexander, not Aristotle.” The father had always understood somewhere where the meaning actually lived.
Now the meaning was gone. Jackie had reportedly concluded during Alexander’s critical weeks that he wasn’t as ill as the situation suggested and had returned to the United States. Accounts of her presence during Alexander’s final days conflict, but the emotional gap at the marriage’s center became impossible to ignore at the moment it mattered most.
That gap had been there from the beginning. It just hadn’t been painful enough to be undeniable until now. He began taking steps toward divorce. The documentation is consistent, if imprecise, about legal formality. A 1981 UPI account reported that Aristotle Onassis had grown bitter against Jacqueline Kennedy and was planning to divorce her.
The word betrayal, used in connection with his ongoing attachment to Callas, as though marrying Jackie had been a betrayal of the real thing. One biographical source states that Onassis had initiated divorce proceedings against Jackie and that only his death in March 1975 prevented the marriage from ending formally.
His daughter, Christina, would later confirm that she believed her father had been planning the divorce in his final months. His will told the story with the precision of a financial document. When it was read, Jackie received $3 million. The New York Times reported on April 12th, 1975, that this was far less than published reports indicated she would receive.
Christina Onassis, who had called Jackie “the gold digger” from the wedding day and “the angel of death” after her father died, controlled the estate. The bitter negotiation that followed produced a final settlement of approximately $26 million, which required Jackie to sign away any further claims to the Onassis estate and relinquish the name.
Christina Onassis died in 1988. Alexander had died in 1973. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994. The woman both Onassis children had spent years trying to drive out outlasted them both. By 1974, Onassis had been diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease that progressively attacks voluntary muscle control.
He declined through 1974 and into early 1975. A cardiologist who treated him described finding him suffering from a lassitude and physical deterioration that seemed to go deeper than the diagnosis. A man whose body was surrendering what his mind had already given up after January 1973. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, in March 1975.
Christina was at his side. He was 69 years old. Not surrounded by the world of glamour he had purchased at such cost, not on his island, not on his yacht, the Christina, with its 42 telephones and El Greco paintings and gold-plated fittings. He died in a suburb of Paris with his daughter, the daughter who had raged at his choices, watched the marriage hollow him out, and stayed anyway.
Jackie had remained in Paris during his final illness, and she was nearby. But Christina was the one who was with him when it ended. What did he take with him? He took nothing. No one does. But in his case, the accounting of what he had and what it amounted to is unusually clear.
This is where the story demands to be stated plainly, because the audience that watched this unfold in real time already knows the answer and just wants someone to say it. Money does not mean anything if you aren’t happy. The comment that pulled 115 likes and 35 replies isn’t a platitude when you place it alongside the specific facts of Aristotle Onassis’s last years.
It’s a verdict rendered by evidence. The man had $500 million. He had an island and a fleet and a yacht and paintings by El Greco. He had, for 7 years, the most famous woman in the world as his wife. He wasn’t happy. He died not happy, not even close to happy by any account from anyone who was near him in those final years.
The shrewdest businessman of his generation, a man whose reputation for reading other human beings was the foundation of everything he built, had spent his final decade and his final fortune chasing a construction, a beautiful, elaborate, historically significant construction, a woman with genuine intelligence, confirmed fluency in French, genuine passion for American cultural heritage, real curatorial accomplishment in the White House restoration, and a mind that Schlesinger had described in 1959 as possessing ruthless judgment. All of that was authentic. But the specific quality the world kept agreeing upon, the beauty that those 167 YouTube comments and 67 replies finally admitted they couldn’t quite see, that had been produced, assembled, broadcast. The 300 designed outfits, the 40,000
curated photographs, the Valentine’s Day broadcast watched by roughly 56 million Americans on the initial broadcast alone, the breathy voice that her father had reportedly told her would make men draw closer, the Camelot interview Jackie herself had guided to cement the mythology, all of it flowing into a single, globally distributed consensus.
“This woman is the most desirable in the world.” The media had already decided she was the most beautiful woman alive, and Onassis believed them. He had believed the consensus that 50 million television viewers and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a dedicated press secretary and a Hollywood costume designer and a personal photographer hired to build a legend had constructed together over 15 years without a single dissenting voice.
He wasn’t a fool. His instincts were extraordinary. He had read markets and governments and rivals with uncanny accuracy for 40 years. But those instincts were up against the most powerful image machine in the world, and the image machine won. The tragedy isn’t that he was deceived. The tragedy is that this particular man, whose specific talent was seeing through what people were presenting to find what was actually there, had never managed to see through this one.
Because the story being told was so beautiful, so seamlessly constructed, so universally believed, that doubting it felt not like clear-sightedness, but like failure of perception. Billions of people couldn’t be wrong. The most celebrated widow in American history couldn’t be just a well-constructed persona. The cover of Life magazine couldn’t be wrong.
Except it was. In the specific sense that mattered to him, not a fraud, not a villain, a real person inside an image so powerful that the image had become the reality. And the man whose empire rested on his ability to see through images had never quite managed to see through this one. There is a verse from the first letter to Timothy that has been read at English-speaking funerals for centuries.
We brought nothing into this world, and it’s certain we can carry nothing out. Aristotle Onassis was Greek Orthodox. He is buried on Skorpios in the chapel on his private island next to his son Alexander. That is where his story ends. Not in Paris, not in New York, not surrounded by the trappings of the empire he built, but on an island in the Ionian Sea next to the 24-year-old boy whose death took whatever remained of his will.
Greek Orthodox tradition carries the same understanding the verse encodes. What survives a human life has no price tag and no address. Ecclesiastes puts it plainly, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” He had $500 million. He had the world’s largest private shipping fleet. He had an island and a yacht and the collection of art.
He had for 7 years the most famous woman in the world as his wife. He had built all of this from $120,000 and six small ships and a mind that read other people’s overlooked assets better than anyone. And in March 1975, when the myasthenia gravis finally took what remained, what went with him was the same as what goes with everyone.
Nothing. He wasn’t a fool. He was human. And the media machine is very, very good at making humans believe in things that aren’t real. If this story stayed with you, subscribe. There are more like this one.