Aristotle Onassis compelled Jackie Kennedy to have intercourse in wild public areas – and their 170-clause marriage contract dictated the exact variety of occasions she needed to endure it, MAUREEN CALLAHAN reveals

On Friday, Maureen Callahan’s new e book ‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Ladies They Destroyed’ revealed explosive and untold secrets and techniques of JFK’s assassination. Now, on this second unique extract, uncover the scandalous fact of Jackie Onassis’s second marriage…

Few wedding ceremony bulletins would have generated such common outrage.

How might she?

In October 1968, nearly 5 years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, his revered widow introduced she could be marrying billionaire Greek delivery magnate Aristotle Onassis.

Jackie Kennedy was 39 years outdated, the epitome of dignity and magnificence, whereas Onassis was 62 and considered by excessive society as a crass, gnome-like vulgarian. His affair with the opera singer Maria Callas was well-known.

Much less so was his bisexuality. Or that he had a string of bought-and-paid-for younger males, a few of whom he savagely beat after intercourse.

The Kennedy-Onassis engagement made the entrance web page of the New York Occasions: ‘The response right here is anger, shock and dismay,’ learn the headline.

Germany’s Bild, the second-most-read paper in Europe: ‘All of the world is indignant.’

A Fleet Road tabloid roared: ‘Jackie weds clean cheque.’

The Vatican denounced her.

Jackie Kennedy — America’s one-time heroine — would now be talked and written about as nothing greater than a prostitute who’d bought herself on the worldwide market.

The reality, nevertheless, was way more difficult than that… as was the opposite unlikely love affair she’d embarked upon after JFK’s loss of life.

On November 25, 1963, Jackie Kennedy knelt earlier than the world’s cameras and lit the everlasting flame at JFK’s grave.

After the service, Jack’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, stayed behind within the White Home to console Jackie.

That evening, he turned to her and mentioned: ‘Lets go go to our good friend?’

Bobby left his spouse Ethel, mom of their seven kids, behind.

It was an specific acknowledgment of a brand new and horrible bond between Jackie and Bobby, the 2 most vital folks in Jack’s life. This shared trauma would quickly result in a years-long affair.

Whispered about of their social circles, this most scandalous liaison was well-known among the many press corps — not least as a result of Jackie and Bobby could be seen eating out in New York Metropolis, overtly kissing and cuddling.

This affair, had anybody revealed it, would have been cataclysmic. However as a result of it was the Kennedys — due to what occurred to the president — the key was saved.

Jackie’s delicate psychological state was an element, too. As she mentioned greater than as soon as, Bobby was the one individual retaining her from killing herself.

Not one of the sleeping capsules she took might cease her from obsessively replaying the horrible occasions in Dallas. They did not cease the nightmares. The one one who might rouse her from her grief, from sleeping her days away, from ingesting and weeping and fearing ever going exterior once more, was Bobby Kennedy.

But Bobby, too, was destroyed and disconsolate. Already wiry, he’d begun dropping an alarming quantity of weight. Like Jackie, he cried on a regular basis and suffered insomnia. He started spending an increasing number of time at Jackie’s new DC townhouse, extra time together with her two kids than his personal.

Bobby and Jackie have been practising Catholics who nonetheless bristled when others tried to elucidate Jack’s homicide as ‘God’s plan,’ or instructed Jack was now in a greater place. Religion, for Bobby and Jackie, had its limits.

When Jackie’s good friend Susan Alsop — one of many few outsiders she noticed throughout this time — got here for tea, she discovered that lesson all too nicely.

‘A minimum of,’ Susan mentioned, ‘Jack is resting peacefully with God.’

‘That is the silliest factor I’ve ever heard,’ Jackie replied.

She by no means spoke to Susan once more.

Bobby discovered his spouse’s religiosity equally insufferable. When considered one of their company introduced up a governmental conundrum, Ethel mentioned: ‘Effectively, Jack will maintain that. He is up in heaven, and he is trying down on us, and he’ll present us what to do.’

‘The voice you simply heard,’ Bobby interjected sharply, ‘belongs to the spouse of the lawyer normal of the US. Let’s hear no extra out of her.’

All through late 1963 and early 1964, Bobby was so distraught that he was on the verge of quitting public life. It was Jackie who talked him out of it, Jackie who ensured that, in 1968, he’d make a pitch for the presidency himself.

However there was one factor Bobby merely could not supply Jackie: marriage.

One who might, and did, was Aristotle Onassis. By the spring of 1968, Jackie wished out of the Kennedy crucible, out of being a residing American saint. She wished to smash that picture to items.

Bobby, whose presidential marketing campaign was heating up, was apoplectic.

‘For God’s sake, Jackie,’ he mentioned. ‘This might value me 5 states.’

Bobby had recognized Onassis for years and hated him. The sensation was mutual, for each private and enterprise causes.

Onassis fearful that if Bobby grew to become president, he’d maintain Onassis’s oil tankers from ever docking in American ports. And years earlier than, Bobby had had the temerity to inform Onassis to cease sleeping with Jackie’s sister Lee, then a princess by her personal marriage to Prince Stas Radziwill.

Onassis, figuring out full nicely that Bobby and Jack Kennedy have been each sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, took umbrage.

‘Bobby,’ he snapped, ‘you and Jack f*** your film queen and I will f*** my princess.’

Bobby was additionally motivated by jealousy; he had lengthy suspected that Jackie loved a fling with Onassis whereas Jack was nonetheless alive.

Nonetheless, for Bobby’s sake, Jackie agreed to attend till after the November 1968 presidential election.

However her attraction to Onassis wasn’t nearly cash or escape. Ari, in contrast to Bobby, understood what Jackie was attempting to do.

‘Jackie wants a small scandal to carry her alive,’ Onassis mentioned. ‘The world loves fallen grandeur.’

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, whereas out campaigning in Los Angeles, Bobby was shot by an murderer.

Information crews and photographers captured him on the ground, bleeding from the top, asking if everybody else was okay.

Inside hours, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the subsequent nice hope of the Kennedy dynasty, was pronounced mind lifeless.

Jackie flew instantly from her house in New York Metropolis to LA.

Whether or not or not Ethel ever suspected the affair with Bobby, she allowed Jackie to consolation her, to make the choice she couldn’t: to show off Bobby’s life-support machines.

‘In the event that they’re killing Kennedys,’ Jackie mentioned, ‘my kids are the primary targets. I need to get out of this nation.’

Aristotle Onassis was her one-way ticket. He had a personal Greek island, a personal military and a yacht the scale of a navy destroyer.

And Jackie might do one thing for him, too. As she wrote to at least one former lover, Ari was ‘lonely and needs to guard me from being lonely… Solely I can determine if he can, and I made a decision. I do know it comes as a shock to so many individuals. However they see issues for me that I by no means wished for myself.’

Onassis had been in Jackie’s life for a very long time. Upon their first assembly within the late Fifties, when she and Jack accepted his invitation for drinks on his yacht, Jackie had impressed him together with her cool reserve.

Later, in 1963, Onassis invited her for an prolonged keep on the yacht following the lack of her child Patrick, who had died simply 39 hours after his beginning. It proved a remarkably therapeutic time, and he or she by no means forgot Ari’s kindness.

When Jack was killed, Onassis was among the many chosen few to remain on the White Home within the rapid aftermath.

Later, he would declare that he, in contrast to Jack Kennedy, had at all times seen beneath Jackie’s prim veneer to what he referred to as her ‘carnal soul.’

He wasn’t conventionally engaging like Jack, however he was extremely sexual. Amongst his favourite possessions was a set of barstools he’d had coated in whale scrotum.

It did not actually trouble Ari that the beau monde thought him crude.

‘Happily, folks with class are normally keen to miss this flaw,’ he mentioned, ‘as a result of I’m very wealthy.’

For all their protestations of affection, Jackie and Onassis have been each conscious that their union was a merger of two international manufacturers.

Her monetary adviser, André Meyer, opened the pre-nuptial bidding by proposing the billionaire pay $20 million to make the wedding occur.

‘Your shopper,’ Onassis replied, ‘might value herself proper out of the market.’

Jackie ended up receiving $3 million upfront, $1 million for every of her kids, $600,000 a 12 months for journey and thousands and thousands extra within the occasion of divorce or Onassis’s loss of life.

In all, she negotiated 170 clauses in her marriage contract. She insisted, as an example, that they need to have separate bedrooms at their shared residences, although they agreed theirs could be a wedding in each sense, save kids.

But there have been stipulations as to what number of occasions a 12 months Jackie would have intercourse together with her new husband.

On October 20, 1968, Jackie wed Ari on his personal Greek island of Skorpios. She wore a high-necked, knee-length, white Valentino costume, a white bow in her hair, trying like a lady taking her First Communion.

It was a rebuke to the church that had denounced her and a sign to the world: Jackie Kennedy, as they knew her, was lifeless.

Allow them to recoil in disgust — all the higher.

Jackie O, as she was now recognized, was dressing for a brand new period, the Nineteen Seventies, and her new incarnation. She strolled the streets of Greece and Italy barefoot in tight white capris, her nipples poking by way of tissue-thin black T-shirts.

Onassis reveled on this new Jackie and spoiled her. Costly jewels have been nestled on her breakfast tray. She lunched. She sunbathed. She did yoga by the pool and shopped extravagantly.

As within the White Home, she demanded that her mattress linens (12 pairs of hand-embroidered Italian pink sheets, which she at all times travelled with) be cleaned and ironed each morning and each afternoon, after her every day nap.

No quantity of luxurious, nevertheless, might obliterate the horrors of Jack’s loss of life. November, now and for the remainder of her life, could be her darkest month.

‘I am a freak,’ she’d say. ‘I will at all times be a freak. Generally I feel I’ll by no means be capable to be really blissful once more.’

She suffered excruciating, pulsating ache in her neck, which she believed was everlasting nerve harm from clutching Jack’s shattered head in her lap. There have been nonetheless days when she could not get off the bed.

So what if, in her higher moments, she shopped and shopped and shopped? So what?

Her dread that nobody would ever actually know or perceive her could possibly be quelled, for a short while, with issues. As might her nervousness that, at any second, Onassis may tire of her, the newest object in his empire.

Her buying sprees went into vengeful overdrive every time she suspected her new husband was secretly romancing his outdated flame Maria Callas.

She was proper: Ari had began dishonest on Jackie simply two weeks into their marriage.

And so Jackie began flashing his bank cards on this planet’s most costly department shops, shopping for doubles and triples of shirts and sweaters within the most interesting cashmere, secretly reselling half her purchases and pocketing the money.

There have been occasions when Onassis handled the previous First Girl like a prostitute. He’d summon Jackie from her New York Metropolis house to Greece at a second’s discover and ship her away simply as swiftly, to remind her, he mentioned, of ‘what she actually was.’

He additionally liked to have intercourse together with her in locations the place folks might see them — behind a first-class curtain, in a young tethered to his yacht, in his bed room with the door cracked open. It thrilled him to defile this American icon of dignity, exhibiting that he owned her and will humiliate her.

For Jackie, there was one thing novel in her second husband’s open lust. Jack had by no means been so passionate, and Onassis loosened her up sexually.

The concept Jackie Kennedy would watch a pornographic film in public was unthinkable, however in 1969, Jackie O was photographed exiting a screening of an grownup movie in New York.

Coco Chanel, whose picture Jackie embodied in that pink bouclé go well with on the day of the assassination, mentioned that the world had by no means met the true Jacqueline Kennedy.

‘Everybody knew,’ Chanel mentioned, that Jackie ‘was not minimize out for dignity. You should not ask a girl with a contact of vulgarity to spend the remainder of her life over a corpse.’

But nobody criticized Aristotle Onassis.

Nobody reported his betrayal when he tipped off paparazzi to Jackie’s nude sunbathing on his personal island, or allowed them to shoot her with their lengthy lenses.

Nobody stood up for Jackie when Hustler journal printed footage of her exercising topless, calling her ‘The Billion Greenback Bush.’

And nobody requested how paparazzi had managed to get unobstructed pictures of Jackie and Ari having intercourse on the seashore.

Two years into the wedding, Onassis grew to become overtly contemptuous of his spouse; as feared, Jackie was a once-glittering acquisition that had misplaced its luster.

He started to insult Jackie in entrance of their company, one thing Jack, for all his faults, by no means would have achieved.

She more and more sought refuge in her beloved New York Metropolis. There, in 1971, she began seeing a psychiatrist.

Dr. Marianne Kris recognized Jackie with PTSD and defined that her trauma not solely stemmed from that day in Dallas, but in addition from her marriage to Jack — the fixed infidelities, his assignations within the White Home swimming pool and their marital mattress, the pressure of maintaining appearances – the good lie of their good union.

The media would quickly study the reality about her marriage to Jack.

And whether or not she realized it or not, Jackie was bracing for the world to evaluate her yet again.

She nonetheless had a lot rage in the direction of Jack. ‘His loss of life actually robbed me of my probability to be offended with him,’ Jackie informed Dr. Kris. ‘He actually went out in a blaze of glory.’

Reviews circulated that Jackie and Onassis have been separating, that he’d had sufficient. That Jackie — callow, egocentric, vainglorious, materialistic Jackie — was getting what she deserved.

Most embarrassing was a Nationwide Enquirer cowl picture, which confirmed her stomach trying distended. ‘Is she or is not she anticipating?’ was the coverline.

All the time fanatical about her weight — actually, at all times within the throes of disordered consuming, making an attempt to manage the one factor she might — Jackie went on a crash hunger eating regimen.

Every day, she allowed herself simply half a grapefruit, a little bit yogurt, 2½ ounces of meat, one apple, 3½ ounces of inexperienced greens, and a salad with out dressing.

She misplaced 24 kilos in 9 days, began having panic assaults and will barely rise up. She wound up within the hospital.

Onassis confirmed as a lot take care of Jackie’s crises as JFK had — none. He was busy flaunting his affair with Callas.

‘Everyone is aware of three issues about Aristotle Onassis,’ he would say. ‘I am f***ing Maria Callas, I am f***ing Jacqueline Kennedy, and I am f***ing wealthy.’

Onassis had no tolerance for Jackie’s depressions or her more and more prolonged absences. Nor might he perceive why she hadn’t held up her finish of the cut price to broaden his empire, to make him palatable to politicians and CEOs.

For Jackie, this era was nightmarish: she was reliving Jack’s humiliation of her, however this time on a worldwide scale. But, in 1973, she — greater than anybody — helped Onassis get well after he misplaced his 24-year-old son Alexander in a airplane crash. She understood that type of ache. She held him and let him cry.

To distract Ari — as he had distracted her after dropping child Patrick — she took him house to the States for every week to her mom and stepfather’s property in Rhode Island. Nobody knew they have been there, and Ari tried to heal.

He was moved by such kindness, however his softening did not final lengthy. That very same 12 months, their fourth collectively, Onassis started ingesting closely and blaming Jackie for Alexander’s loss of life.

She was the Black Widow, the residing embodiment of the Kennedy Curse, visiting loss of life upon his solely son. He hit Jackie within the face and gave her a black eye.

By March of 1975, Jackie was prepared to go away Onassis — and get what he owed her for struggling by way of this marriage.

She did not have to attend any longer.

Jackie was in New York Metropolis, at her 14-room house on Fifth Avenue, when she received phrase: Ari had died on the American Hospital in Paris, making her one of many richest ladies on this planet.

The cash was solely half of it. For the primary time in her grownup life, Jackie was free.

‘Her new fortune can be a buffer in opposition to the world,’ a household good friend mentioned. ‘At her age, this second widowhood could also be liberating fairly than hampering.’

Certainly.

Throughout her marriage to Ari, Jackie had nearly agreed to host a TV particular about endangered relics in Cambodia and Italy, however her husband forbade it.

‘No Greek spouse works,’ he informed her. It was 1973.

Now, two years later, Jackie was no person’s spouse. Her biggest problem lay forward: What would she, the world’s most well-known lady, do with herself now?

UK READERS: Tailored from ‘Ask Not’ by Maureen Callahan, to be printed by Harper Collins on July 4 at £25. © Maureen Callahan 2024. To order a duplicate for £22.50 (supply legitimate to 30/06/24; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or name 02031762937.

US READERS: Tailored from ‘Ask Not’ by Maureen Callahan. Copyright © 2024 by Maureen Callahan. Used with permission of Little, Brown and Firm. New York, NY. All rights reserved. Order a duplicate right here.