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Actually, her choice of Onassis may well represent a distillation of many desires. Onassis is a man of considerable magnetism. Some of his friends profess to see him as part Alexander the Great (for whom he probably named his son), part a Hellenic Great Gatsby. He is iron-willed, infinitely considerate of his women, vain of his limitless ability to charm, entertain and protect those whom he likes or loves.
Born in Smyrna on Jan. 20, 1906, the son of Socrates, a well-to-do tobacco dealer, he witnessed as a youth the savage Turkish invasion of 1922, during which an uncle was lynched in the town square. His family fled to mainland Greece. At 17, Aristotle embarked for Argentina with $60 in his pocket, to seek his fortune.
Down to the Sea
After starting in Buenos Aires as a telephone lineman at 25ยข an hour, he worked into the tobacco business, importing Turkish and Bulgarian blends that became immensely popular in Latin America. Three years later, he had saved $20,000; by the age of 23, his tobacco had made him a dollar millionaire. Then came the Depression, and with an eye for a bargain and a hankering for the sea (Odysseus was always his hero, Ithaca his spiritual homeland), Onassis began buying merchant ships. From Canadian National Railways, he purchased half a dozen vessels in 1930 at $20,000 apiece. Each had cost $2,000,000 to build ten years earlier. When World War II broke out, Onassis owned many of the precious tankers in Allied waters.
His worth vastly enhanced by wartime earnings, Onassis in 1946 married the younger daughter of Stavros Livanos, then one of the most powerful of the Greek shipping magnates. (Another Livanos daughter subsequently married and divorced Niarchos, now 59, whose tanker fleet today is reputed to be larger than the Onassis flotilla.) Athina ("Tina") Livanos Onassis was only 17 when she married the stocky (5 ft. 5 in.) Greco-Argentine; she bore him two children: Alexander, now 20, and Christina, 18.
Tina Onassis won an Alabama divorce in 1960 on the ground of mental cruelty, and later married the jet-set Marquess of Blandford. The split resulted from Onassis' liaison with Diva Maria Callas, now 44, a decade-long affair that ended only five months ago at Ari's initiative. During their often fiery involvement, La Callas sometimes occupied a suite in Monte Carlo's L'Hermitage hotel, near Onassis' apartment and offices; a tunnel connected the two. Though Callas was most frequently photographed aboard the yacht, it had been Tina who inspired "Telis," as his friends call him,* to buy the Canadian frigate Stormont in 1954 and convert it to a yacht, which he named for his daughter Christina.
Some $2,500,000 worth of improvements have transformed the 1,600-ton 325-foot ship into a floating Elysium. Capable of 22 knots, mounting an amphibian Piaggio aircraft plus a landing craft, the yacht boasts a black-sweatered crew of 50 ("More than it needs to run a 40,000-ton tanker," says Onassis), two chefs, 42 extension phones, a bathtub that glitters with mosaic dolphins and flying fish and was copied from King Minos' palace at Knossos, and a swimming pool big enough to hold a Kennedy sloop.
Canny Timing