He was a small man — only 5 feet 5 inches tall — but a giant in his business dealings and personal life, which spanned the globe. Never handsome, he had, according to Veronica Lake, piercing “black eyes [that] look like they are going straight through to the back of your head.” Churchill called him “a man of mark,” and many women thought he was the most charming man they had ever met. An early teacher of his said he was “one of those people who would either destroy themselves or succeed brilliantly.” Yet in a sense he did both, for, although the media habitually viewed him as little more than an amiable supercapitalist, Aristotle Onassis was a surprisingly complex, passionate man.
Now the award-winning London Sunday Times team of investigative reporters breaks through the public poses to paint an intimate, definitive portrait of Onassis in all his moody genius. The authors follow the young Onassis from war-torn Smyrna to South America, where, starting with only a few hundred dollars, he was eventually able to amass one of the world’s largest personal fortunes and create a business empire so intricate that even he himself could not remember how it all fitted together.
We are taken aboard Onassis’s fabulous yacht, the Christina — a seagoing pleasure palace and his only real home, where he plied the jet set with immoderate luxury. We meet the women in his life, including the most important of all — the little-known Ingse Dedichen, Onassis’s lover of twelve years who “civilized” him.
The authors show exactly how Onassis, with his customary stealth and panache, “bought the bank at Monte Carlo” and touched off a feud with Prince Rainier that was to endure for more than fifteen years. And they reveal why Onassis was investigated by the FBI and the CIA, his scandalous venture into the whaling industry, and his stormy and sometimes painful personal and family affairs, including the full story of the untimely death of his only son, which Onassis was convinced was part of a conspiracy by his enemies.
Here, too, is the often amusing account of how the people of a small New Hampshire town thwarted one of Onassis’s biggest deals and shattered one of his firmest beliefs — that everyone has a price.
Loved and hated, feared and revered, Onassis emerges as a brill ant, beguiling rogue — a man who “had everyt hing” yet never knew exactly what he wanted, who in the end perhaps became the hero of his own Greek tragedy. With more than fifty photographs, this superb biography does full justice to one of the larger-than-life figures of recent times.