Ari and Jackie Odd couple?
Even among those who knew them as real people and appreciated their human complexities, the marriage of Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis is often reduced to a clash of identity labels: age, social backgrounds, physical appearance, nationality, education, ethnicity, religion.
A number of internal yet powerful factors, however, allowed their genuine mutual affection to develop into a mature appreciation if not romantic love for who each really was as a person.
Common bonds?
For well over half of their six year and five month marriage, Ari and Jackie Onassis shared a depth of knowledge about Greek culture and continuously pursued even more of it. No place seemed to focus this passion more than the base they shared, a place in that country of unearthly natural beauty, their home of Skorpios Island (which they tended to spell with a “c” not a “k”).
Press speculation on their lifestyle.
The immediate public reaction to the October 20, 1968 Onassis marriage was hostile shock.
Even Mao gossiped about Ari and Jackie.
Within two weeks, however, an intense curiosity about the newlyweds arose around the world, arousing seemingly everyone with an opinion about the match.
Even the usually humorless Mao Tse-tung, revolutionary Chairman of Communist China, couldn’t refrain from a bit of speculative, amused gossip about the marriage: “If Soviet premier Khrushchev had been killed instead of Kennedy, I don’t think Mr. Onassis would have married Mrs Kruschev.”
Not only supermarket gossip magazines but legitimate news sources were soon enough offering sweeping assessments about the newlyweds, based on tidbits emerging in off-handed remarks by those who had been with them on Scorpios.
Jackie Onassis wearing the jewel-encrusted “Apollo 11″ earrings shaped like the moon with attached rockets encircling them, a gift from Ari.
Ari’s diamond ring for Jackie.
Ari’s wealth and Jackie’s fame were always an element in the stories about them.
Most of the news about them was drivel, reporting what diamonds Ari allegedly placed on her breakfast tray or what type of caviar Jackie ordered for their baked potatoes in restaurants, all tapping into the mythically outlandish assumptions always made about the outrageously rich.
Then a story about a pre-nuptial contract appeared.
Going…
Coming…
With or without a news story that might be factual or fantastical, photos of Ari and Jackie Onassis by the thousands continually appeared in newspapers and magazines.
Invariably, however, the pictures showed them entering or exiting cars, restaurants and airports.
All the public really learned about them as people was that they didn’t drive themselves, liked to eat out and took planes more than boats to get around the world.
Only those very few people invited to spend time with both of them in the rooms of their private spaces shared by the couple who had a real sense of how they lived, be it on the yacht or the island.
An invitation engraved with this return address was rare.
The Yacht: Christina
The most prurient yet persistent question, however, remained unanswered: what did the room they shared look like?
The prize of his life: Onassis and his yacht in the late 50s.
Following a restoration of the yacht long after Ari and Jackie Onassis lived on it, the famous barstools remained.
As photos showed, all three claims were true.
The dance floor converted to a pool.
Please check the numerous vintage images of the Christina O yacht that can be seeon on my blog, they offer a suggestion of how the couple lived, at least while aboard the yacht.
The Island: Skorpios
Unlike the photographs of the yacht, those taken of the Onassis family, and the former First Lady in particular, and their life on Skorpios and Athens are almost all previously unpublished, certainly in the U.S.
Skorpios.
The color images provide the first pubic glimpse into the place Ari and Jackie Onassis called home, although it is difficult to always discern which rooms are from which house.
The main house is a large villa situated at an elevation affording breathtaking views of the water from stone terraces.
Apparently built by Onassis for Jackie, its grand exterior seems to belie a simple and modern interior architecture.
“Jackie’s Villa,” the larger of the two main houses.
The Onassis’s “Pink House.”
A closer view of the Pink House..
He called it “The Pink House.”Onassis had purchased Skorpios only six years before Jackie Kennedy came to live there with him as his wife.
There are three residences on the island and several smaller buildings which can house up to almost fifty guests, the thirty servants and eighteen gardeners who worked there full-time and utility centers for the considerable upkeep of the entire property.
The recently-discovered color images of the Onassis Skorpios island rooms, appearing in numerous Greek publications but none thus far, apparently, in the U.S. do not delineate which room is from which home, but some scrutiny of the exterior structure of “Jackie’s Villa,” and the “Pink House” offer some suggestion. It is unclear if a family member took the images in the 1970s or later, during the brief occupancy of Christina Onassis alone, or who the original photographer and thus copyright holder may be.
Certainly, an inviting space seen in the new pictures is a large living room with breathtaking views of the island. It seems fairly clear that this room was located on perhaps of the second story of “Jackie’s Villa.” Some of the images, once enlarged, become blurry but nevertheless provide a sense of the room.
The large windows of the main living room on the upper floor offered breathtaking views of Skorpios.
Another corner of the Onassis living room.
A corner of the Onassis living room.
Onassis bedroom with traditional chintzes and native woods.
Jackie Onassis’s private bedroom in the Pink House, with the wrought-iron canopy, made in Greece; it seems to be the same one she later used on her Martha’s Vineyard home.
Household manager Marta Scubin with Ari and Jackie Onassis in the Pink House on Skorpios; the picture is from Scubin’s cookbook about her years with Mrs. Onassis, Cooking for Madame)
The pool and a man-made waterfall at left.
A greenhouse afforded freshly-cut flowers all year. There was a helipad built to permit the Onassis helicopter a place to land. His two seaplanes were docked at an interior cove, reached by small launches.
The Greek Orthodox chapel where Jackie and Onassis wed and where he remains buried in a family crypt with his children Alex and Christina.
A lushly wild but otherwise barren property when Onassis first purchased it, he immediately began landscaping portions of Skorpios with pine and palm trees and those bearing fruit and nuts. Paved roadways encircle the island and a drive through an endless grove of olive trees is said to be an especially magical experience.
Pine trees were among the many types of green life Ari landscaped into Skorpios as this view shows looking out from the island.
After coming to live on Skorpios, Jackie Kennedy would introduce wild blueberry bushes into the loamy soil near the shoreline, the moisture and temperature being a perfect match to that of Long Island’s East Hampton in New York where she’d spent many hours of her childhood summers rambling through the brush gathering and snacking on her favorite fruit.
Some of the birds naetie to Skorpios.
The couple happily discovered that it served as a protective wall of cover resistant to the prying telephoto lenses of paparazzi who rowed as close as they could to the island without getting arrested for trespassing.
The foliage is also home to a wide variety of native and exotic birds who flocked their feathers there permanently for several generations now.
While the edges of the island were landscaped and maintained, the vast majority of it remained wild and overgrown with a forest variety indigenous to other Ionian Sea islands.
The simple homes and the relatively plain rooms seem to have been created to give fuller attention to the more remarkable natural beauty of Skorpios which surrounds them.
Almost more impressive than any structure on the island is the precise and meticulous stone masonry work of the courtyards, terraces and balconies around the homes, the stairs and the walls which lined the paved driveways and walkways.
None of this was ever apparent in the relatively few images of Skorpios which had been previously seen publicly.
One of several terraces finished with flagstone overlooking the water.
Along with the breaktaking natural life, Skorpios has expert masonry work craftsmanship, using flagstone, brick, pebbles and native stones. This image shows the Christina at dock.
Ari and Jackie reading on the “back porch” of “Jackie’s Villa.” (picturecollect)
A terrace outside “Jackie’s Villa.”
To create it instantly, he shipped in tens of thousands of tons of fine sand. Here he built a one-story beach cottage with terra-cotta walls and open-air windows through which soft breezes wafted.
The family referred to it as the “taverna.”
The “taverna” on Skorpios.
View of the cove from the roof of the “taverna.”
“Jackie O “in the shade of the grape arbor.
Jackie Onassis carrying out food to the lunch table.
Jackie Onassis getting the lunch table ready at the “taverna.”
Yet even on this remote paradise with all of its houses, this person who fiercely protected her personal privacy needed not only time alone for herself, but an isolated place for her solitude.
Also on Skorpios, tucked into a cove which is so shrouded in a tall, leafy grove where the water laps the shore is a small and simple cottage, with one door, that Ari built for Jackie Onassis. More than any other place, this was “Jackie’s Villa.”
As much as she was able to control his schedule, Jackie Onassis resisted inviting too many guests for too long a time to Skorpios, and usually did so only when she knew her husband would be away from her for an extended period.
Her stepson and stepdaughter, Alex and Christina Onassis would drop in frequently but as young adults more often than not preferred to spend their time among their young European crowd in the south of France, London or New York.
It wasn’t that Onassis didn’t love his children; problems came from his never expressing it and his tyranny towards them.
While Alex and Christina Onassis have always been depicted as hating their stepmother, it wasn’t a matter of particularly disliking Jackie Kennedy as much as that their father’s remarriage forever ended their hope he’d someday remarry their mother Tina Livanos. They had resented their father’s mistress Maria Callas with equal intensity.
Another ignored factor was that Alex Onassis had begun to display an open hostility towards his father before his marriage to Jackie Kennedy, a resentment of Ari’s intense control to groom him as heir to all of his many business interests.
Christina Onassis (seen here with her father during his wedding reception) was less hostile to her new stepmother.
Onassis listens to his son Alexander at anightclub.
While Alex Onassis refused to acknowledge Jackie when they were forced to sit at the same table, he never openly belittled her.
In contrast, he told his own mother he would never see or speak to her again, after she married Stavros Niarchos, who was not only his father’s primary rival but her late sister’s husband.
“Maria Callas never liked me very much,” Christina Onassis bluntly told a reporter in 1971, “but Jackie is mo stepmother and she is a great friend.”
Jacqueline Onassis, Caroline Kennedy and Christina Onassis attend Christmas church services in Lefkas, Greece, 1968.
During the Easter season in 1969, they even attended a service in each church.
Ari was not big on church.
Along with Alex, Christina also made at least one Christmas season and summer stay on Skorpios with them and Jackie’s children Caroline Kennedy and John Kennedy, Jr.
This post first appeared on Aristotle Onassis - Αριστοτέλης Ωνάσης, please read the originial post: here
