Christina Onassis: The Heiress Who Had Everything But Couldn’t Find Peace D
When she wanted company and her friends told her they were busy, she paid them as much as $30,000 a month to clear their schedules and simply be present with her, to sit in the same room and talk and eat and exist alongside her in the way that ordinary friendship provides for free. She once dispatched a private jet to the United States at a personal cost of $30,000 for the sole purpose of restocking her supply of Diet Coca-Cola, a beverage she reportedly consumed in quantities of approximately 20 cans a day, an addiction so consuming that when her supply ran low, the solution that presented itself was an intercontinental aircraft rather than a different drink. She sent a helicopter from Austria to Switzerland to retrieve a cassette tape she’d accidentally left behind at a friend’s house, not sent someone in a car, sent a helicopter. She lent her closest Argentine friends, Alberto and Marina Dodero, $4 million interest-free, with no formal repayment
schedule, and with the unspoken but clearly understood expectation that they would be available to her whenever she needed them, that the loan was not really a loan at all, but a financial architecture for the purchase of company, for the securing of presence, for the construction of something that resembled, at sufficient distance, the feeling of being at home.
That single cluster of details contains, in compressed and slightly horrifying form, almost everything that was true about Cristina Onassis. The scale of the wealth was real. The depth of the loneliness was equally real, and the connection between the two was not incidental or ironic, but structural.
Because the money and the emptiness had grown from the same soil, had been watered by the same absences, and had become, by the time Cristina was old enough to understand what was happening to her, two aspects of the same condition rather than separate problems that might be separately solved. The tabloids called her the poor little rich girl.
She hated that phrase with a consistency that lasted her entire adult life. She had considerable reason to hate it. The phrase implies passivity. It implies someone to whom things happen, someone defined entirely by what she lacks rather than by what she attempts, someone whose story is essentially a story about disappointment rather than about effort.
And Christina Onassis was not passive and her story was not simply about disappointment. She ran one of the largest privately owned shipping fleets in the world at 24 years old. In one of the worst market conditions that industry had experienced in the 20th century. She negotiated a contested $26 million legal settlement in approximately 15 minutes.
She flew to Moscow to pursue a man she loved and was prepared to live in a Soviet apartment to be near him. She restructured a global enterprise, made difficult decisions correctly, kept a complicated operation functioning for more than a decade, and did all of this while managing a private life of such sustained difficulty that it would have incapacitated most people entirely.
None of that is the version that made the newspapers. What made the newspapers was the weight, always the weight, and the four marriages that ended in four divorces, and the drugs, and the loneliness expressed at a scale that only extraordinary wealth makes possible, and that only a certain kind of poverty makes necessary.
The tabloids had their sentence and they used it for 37 years, and they were not entirely wrong. But they were incomplete in ways that matter considerably because the woman living inside that sentence was more interesting and more capable and more persistently hopeful than the sentence allowed. What actually happened to Christina Onassis takes time to tell properly.
It is a more complicated and more human story than the version that circulated in the press. It is the story of a person who was given everything that money could provide and denied the one category of thing that money cannot provide. Who understood this about her own situation and could not find a way around it.
Who tried anyway with remarkable and sometimes heartbreaking persistence and who died at 37 years old still trying, still hoping, still making plans for the year ahead. Before we go further into that story, take a moment and drop a comment below and tell us where in the world you are watching from today.
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If this is the kind of documentary biography you want more of, please subscribe to the channel. We release new stories every single week and we would love to have you with us for what comes next. Now, to understand what happened to Christina Onassis, you have to understand the world she was born into.
And that world did not begin with her. It began with her father and it began in Buenos Aires. And it began with nothing. Aristotle Socrates Onassis was not born into wealth. He was born in 1906 in the city of Smyrna in what is now Turkey into a family of Greek tobacco merchants who had lived comfortably for generations and who lost nearly everything when the Greco-Turkish War consumed their city in 1922.
The burning of Smyrna was one of the defining catastrophes of that region in that century. A conflagration that killed tens of thousands of people and drove hundreds of thousands of Greeks from the only home they had ever known. Aristotle was 16 years old when his family fled.
His uncle who had been hanged by a Turkish military tribunal during the violence, was the first person the family lost to history’s indifference toward individual human life. He would not be the last. Aristotle arrived in Buenos Aires as a young man with essentially nothing in his pockets and a quality that people who encountered him in those early years consistently described as almost frightening in its concentration and its intensity.
A hunger for accumulation that had no natural ceiling and no instinct for satisfaction. He built his first money in tobacco, learning the Argentine market, developing contacts, understanding the mechanics of commerce in a country that was itself in the process of becoming something larger than it had been.
He moved into shipping in 1932, purchasing four Canadian freighters at a moment when the Great Depression had made most sensible people deeply reluctant to invest in anything. He was not most sensible people. He understood that the bottom of the market is the moment when the next generation of assets becomes affordable.
And he acted on that understanding with a clarity that would characterize his decision-making for the rest of his life. What he built from that starting point, across the following four decades, through calculated risk and strategic marriage, and audacious negotiation, and a capacity for sustained effort that exhausted and sometimes alarmed the people around him, was one of the largest privately owned shipping empires the world had produced.
He owned supertankers at a time when supertankers were a new idea, and most of his competitors were still thinking about smaller vessels. He built Olympic Airways from a single long-range aircraft in 1956 into Greece’s national carrier, serving multiple continents. He took controlling interest in Monaco’s most important investment company, becoming the second most powerful man in a principality that had previously belonged entirely to its prince.
He owned the Olympic Tower in Manhattan, a 52-story building on Fifth Avenue. He maintained apartments in Paris, and London, and Monaco, and Athens, and Acapulco, and held accounts in 217 banks and countries across the world. And he owned a private Greek island. Skorpios, purchased in 1962 for the equivalent of approximately 10,000 British pounds, a price that in retrospect seems almost comically small for what the island would come to represent.
He transformed it over the years into a compound of gardens and villas and walking paths with a private chapel built near the water’s edge that would become, before the story was over, the most important building in the family’s geography. He said of Skorpios that it was the only place in the world where he did not feel a stranger. He meant it.
A man who had been a refugee at 16 and who had spent his entire adult life in motion needed somewhere that it felt permanent, and Skorpios was it. By the time his daughter Christina was born on the 11th of December 1950 at the Leroy Sanitarium in Lenox Hill, Manhattan, the Onassis family was among the wealthiest in the world.
Her mother was Athina Mary Livanos, known universally as Tina, the daughter of Stavros Livanos who had built his own shipping empire of comparable scale, and who was regarded as one of the foundational figures of the Greek maritime industry. The marriage between Aristotle and in 1946 had united two of the most powerful families in that world, and it had done so with the specific mixture of genuine feeling and strategic advantage that characterizes the best marriages of dynasties, where love and commerce reinforce each other rather than competing. Christina’s maternal uncle by marriage, Stavros Niarchos, was Aristotle’s fiercest and most formidable commercial rival, a relationship that would reverberate through Christina’s life in ways she could not possibly have anticipated when she was born into it as an infant. Christina had an older brother, Alexander, born 2 years before her in April of 1948.
The two of them grew up inside a material world that placed them at an almost incomprehensible distance from ordinary childhood experience. The family’s 325-ft yacht, named the Christina by her father, had been converted from a Canadian naval frigate at a cost of $4 million into what contemporary accounts described as the most luxurious private vessel in the world.
It was air-conditioned throughout, featured a grand spiral staircase, and had a heated swimming pool whose mosaic floor could be raised hydraulically to create a dance floor at the touch of a button. The guests who moved through it over the years included Winston Churchill, who came so regularly that Aristotle had a special electric cart built to help him navigate the decks when his walking became difficult, along with Grace Kelly and Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, and any number of heads of state and industrialists and artists who inhabited the Onassis social world. Christina’s dolls wore Christian Dior dresses, tailored specially in the latest Parisian fashions, because her dolls wore what the best-dressed women in Paris wore, because the daughter of Aristotle Onassis lived in a world where this was simply what was done. The ponies she rode had been gifts from the King of Saudi Arabia. Her father, when he was present and focused on her,
called her Chrysomallo, his golden one, and the warmth he turned on her in those moments was genuine and sustaining and everything she needed. The problem was the frequency of those moments, which was not what she needed at all. Because both parents were in the way that children most urgently require parents to be present, absent.
Aristotle was consumed by the business of building and expanding and outmaneuvering, by the deals that needed to be made and the competitors who needed to be beaten, and the opportunities that kept appearing on every horizon. He was also from the late 1950s onward consumed by his affair with Maria Callas, the Greek opera soprano whose voice and presence and particular form of glamour had absorbed his attention in the way that only a few things ever fully absorbed his attention.
Tina, for her part, inhabited the world of international high society with the apparent ease of someone who had been born into it, which she essentially had been. Moving through the social world of the jet-set class with beautiful clothes and considerable charm and by the accounts of people who knew her, limited interest in the interior lives of her children.
Christina and Alexander were raised primarily by governesses and staff, the way children of that class in that era were raised, which is to say they were cared for in every material sense and attended to in every practical sense and left, in the deepest and most important sense, to work out who they were without the guidance that parents specifically provide.
They were educated at a succession of expensive schools across multiple countries, the Hewitt School in New York, St. George’s College, the Swiss finishing school in Lausanne, the Headington School in Oxford, brief study at Queen’s College in London, five languages absorbed over the course of this nomadic upholstered education, Greek and English and French and Spanish and Italian, the languages of the world her parents moved through, rather than the languages of any place that felt like home, because no place in particular felt like home. And then there was what Tina reportedly said to Christina about her own appearance, that her dark features and her heavier, more solid build had come from Aristotle rather than from Tina’s own slender, blonde elegance. This was said in front of Christina, said more than once. Said by the woman whose approval Christina needed most urgently and could not quite secure regardless of what she
did or how she appeared. Whether Tina understood the damage she was inflicting, whether she was simply speaking without thinking in the way that people sometimes say the most permanently damaging things, whether there was something more deliberate in it, none of that can be established now. What can be established is the effect.
The first voice that told Christina her body was wrong arrived before she was old enough to evaluate its authority or to question its accuracy, which meant it arrived not as an opinion that could be revised, but as simple truth, as reliable and as fixed as anything else she understood about the world.
She would spend the next three decades trying to correct it and she would never manage to because the voice had settled in permanently before she had developed any defenses against it. Her parents divorced in 1960 when Christina was approximately 9 years old. The precipitating cause was Aristotle’s affair with Maria Callas, which had been an open secret in the world they moved in for some time before it became officially public and which was covered by the press with the enthusiasm that the press brings to the private disasters of very famous people. The divorce was public in the way that a private catastrophe becomes public when the people experiencing it are sufficiently interesting to the world outside, which is to say it was available as an entertainment to anyone who wanted it and as protection to no one inside it. Christina absorbed the humiliation alongside everything else and filed it in the accumulating record of things that had happened to her family without
her consent or her input. None of the material abundance around her was given with cruelty. All of it was given instead of something else. That is the essential fact of Christina’s childhood, the thing that everything afterward grew from. That the people who were responsible for her were not cruel and were not indifferent, exactly, but were simply not present in the way that the research on human development consistently shows children require in order to build the internal structures that allow them to navigate their own lives. She had everything money could provide and a persistent, unnamed, inarticulate hunger for the one thing money cannot provide. And she was 9 years old when the family structure that might have provided it dissolved publicly, in the newspapers, while the world watched. By the time Christina was a teenager, the Onassis family had become something that families of extraordinary wealth sometimes become. Not merely rich, but famous for being
rich, which is an entirely different condition and considerably less comfortable from the inside. Famously rich means that your name appears in the newspapers when you do nothing at all, that your romantic life is public property, whether you consent to that or not, that your face is known to people you have never met, and that those people feel entitled to opinions about your choices.
Christina inhabited this condition from adolescence onward, and the tabloid machinery that would track her for the rest of her life was already fully operational before she was old enough to vote. The event that intensified that machinery beyond anything that had come before was announced in 1968 when Christina was 17 years old.
Aristotle Onassis, her father, intended to marry Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated American president, arguably the most famous and most scrutinized woman in the Western world. The marriage, conducted on Skorpios in October of 1968, transformed the Onassis family from a very prominent, wealthy Greek family into the central subject of what the global press treated as the social event of the decade.
Both Christina and Alexander had reportedly begged their father not to proceed. They had hoped, according to people who were close to the family during those months, that he might eventually return to their mother, whose own remarriage to the Duke of Marlborough had not, in their minds, closed the possibility entirely.
Christina distrusted Jackie Kennedy with a consistency that never softened, believing her interest in Aristotle was primarily financial rather than romantic. And she said so to people she trusted, referring to Jackie in conversations with the biographer Peter Evans as her father’s unfortunate obsession.
The opinion was noted and disregarded. The marriage went forward. What the Jackie Kennedy marriage meant for Christina’s adolescence was that she became, overnight, a supporting character in someone else’s spectacle. She was 17. Her feelings about her father’s choices were available for public speculation, but utterly irrelevant to the outcome of those choices.
The lesson this reinforced, on top of the lesson the divorce had already delivered, was that the feelings of the people closest to Aristotle Onassis did not factor meaningfully into the decisions he made. That love, or what functioned as love in this family, did not protect you from being overruled. That the people you needed to matter to most could proceed without reference to your needs.
Alexander shared her alienation completely. He was reportedly to observe that his father loved the names and Jackie loved the money, a formulation that captures something true about the arrangement, while also being the kind of thing a young man says when he is hurt and trying to be sophisticated about it.
The two Onassis children were united in their disapproval and in their total inability to change anything. And they had each other in the way that siblings who share a particular kind of gilded isolation can have each other. Two people who did not need to explain to each other what it was like to be them, who understood from the inside the specific combination of material abundance and emotional deprivation that structured their lives, who were, in the most important sense, the only people in the world who fully knew what the other one was carrying. For a little while longer, they had each other. In January of 1973, Alexander Onassis climbed into a plane at Athens Airport for what was scheduled to be a routine flight. He was 24 years old. The cause of the crash that followed was established through subsequent investigation as a wiring fault in the aileron control system, the result of connecting cables that had been reversed during the installation of a new control
column during a maintenance procedure. The reversal was not caught before the flight. When the plane began behaving unexpectedly, Alexander attempted to correct it and could not because the plane was responding to the exact opposite of what his hands were instructing. He lingered in hospital for several days following the crash, long enough for his father to reach him, long enough for the hope of recovery to exist, and then to be extinguished.
He died without recovering consciousness in any meaningful sense. He was 24 years old. He had never in his short life managed to fully escape the shadow of his father’s enormous presence, and now he never would. The impact on Aristotle was catastrophic, and by every account of people who knew him in those final years, permanent.
He had been directing the considerable force of his will and his vision toward Alexander, shaping him as the intended successor, the person who would carry the name forward. After the burial on Skorpios, Aristotle reportedly went to the chapel every night for a month in the dark, lighting candles and speaking to his dead son for hours at a time.
A close friend eventually told him, with real force, that he had no right to torment the soul of his son with his own unresolved grief, however legitimate and however total that grief was. Aristotle reduced the nightly visits. The underlying damage was not reduced at all. He had been a man of ferocious energy and inexhaustible appetite.
And Alexander’s death took both of those things from him in a way that no business reversal or personal disappointment had ever managed. For Christina, the loss was different in character, but no smaller in weight. Alexander was the person who understood her life from the inside if in a way that no one else did and no one else could.
He was her companion in the specific experience of being born Onassis, of growing up inside an extraordinary material life with very little of the ordinary emotional warmth that makes a childhood into something a person can carry forward without significant damage. He was the one person she did not need to explain herself to.
The one person with whom certain things simply did not require explanation. And now, he was in the ground of the island they had grown up on, beside the chapel their father had built, and the island that had been their shared refuge was now also his grave. Within a year, their mother was dead as well.
Tina Livanos Niarchos died in 1974. The official cause was listed as heart failure. Multiple accounts, including contemporaneous press reporting and later retrospective journalism, suggest the actual cause was pulmonary edema brought on by a barbiturate overdose, and many people close to the family believe the death was a suicide.
She had been living with Stavros Niarchos, her second husband after her divorce from Aristotle, who was simultaneously Aristotle’s greatest commercial rival and the widower of Tina’s own sister, Eugenia. Eugenia Livanos Niarchos had died years earlier under circumstances that multiple sources describe as disturbing and murky, involving evidence of physical abuse and a barbiturate overdose.
The Niarchos household had already produced one death of this kind in circumstances that had never been fully clarified or held to account. The timing of Tina’s death in relation to Christina’s own crisis during the preceding period is worth noting with some care. In the aftermath of her first marriage’s collapse and the sustained family pressure that had contributed to that collapse and following the romantic rejection she had experienced from Peter Goulandris, the young man from another Greek shipping family whom her father had wanted her to marry and who had declined to proceed, Christina had broken down. Her maid, Eleni, the woman who had been her most constant attendant for years, raised the alarm when Christina had been unable to leave her bed for 12 consecutive days. An ambulance was called. Doctors found she had taken too many sleeping pills. It was a suicide attempt or something close enough to one that the distinction is not meaningful. Tina came in what was described by everyone who witnessed it as an unusual
and striking display of maternal responsiveness. Tina came immediately to her daughter’s side. She was there. She was present in the way that Christina had been needing her to be present for most of her life and it was real and it mattered and it was, in some accounts, the closest the two of them ever came to the relationship Christina had always wanted with her mother.
Two months after Tina came to her daughter’s bedside, Tina was dead. The mother had come when the daughter needed her most and then the mother was gone. The lesson of that sequence, the particular cruelty of its timing, is not something that language fully accommodates. It happened. Christina absorbed it into the accumulating record of things that had happened to her alongside everything else. Aristotle was failing.
The myasthenia gravis he had been managing for several years worsened progressively after Alexander’s death as though the body had decided that if the will to live was gone, it would not be long detained. The legendary appetite for building and acquiring and outmaneuvering that had constructed the empire around them grew dim.
He told an associate during this period that it was not always millions that resolved what a man needed. He died on the 15th of March, 1975 at the American Hospital in Paris, a hospital his daughter would later donate to in his memory. Christina’s reported words when she was told he was gone were these, “I am all alone in the world now.
” She was 24 years old. Her brother had died in January of 1973. Her mother had died in 1974. Her father was gone in March of 1975. The total span between the first death and the last was 29 months. 29 months and the entire immediate family was erased. She was 24 years old and she was the richest woman in the world and she had no one left to call.
The inheritance was 55% of an estate then valued at approximately $500 million. The assets included more than 50 ships of various classes and sizes, accounts in 217 banks worldwide, the Olympic Tower in Manhattan, the island of Scorpios, the 325-ft yacht that bore her name, homes in Paris and Athens and Acapulco and London and Monaco, an art collection of considerable value, and a guaranteed annual income of $250,000 for life.
The remaining 45% of the estate went to fund the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, established in her brother’s memory to support Greek cultural and academic initiatives internationally. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis negotiated her own separate settlement with the estate. Christina reportedly settled those negotiations for $26 million and the entire transaction, according to people who were present for it, took approximately 15 minutes from start to finish.
People who witnessed it described the performance as a demonstration of remarkable legal and financial clarity from a 24-year-old woman who had buried her father fewer than 3 months earlier. What happened next tends to get omitted or minimized in most accounts of Christina Onassis’s life. And that omission is a significant distortion of who she actually was and what she actually did.
The Greek shipping fraternity watched Christina’s assumption of control with deep and barely concealed skepticism. She was 24 years old. She was female. She had no executive track record. She was inheriting control of one of the world’s most complex private shipping enterprises at precisely the worst possible moment in the history of that enterprise.
The global tanker market was in the most severe depression anyone in the industry could remember. Overbuilding by shipyards in the early 1970s, combined with the sharp and sustained decline in oil demand that followed the energy crisis of 1973, had left a full 10% of the world’s tanker fleet sitting idle at anchor in fjords and bays around the world, costing their owners money every day simply by existing.
The industry consensus was that an inexperienced 24-year-old heiress would preside politely over the gradual dissolution of her father’s legacy, managed in practice by the professional advisors who surrounded her, until the assets were sold off and the name Onassis referred only to a foundation and a set of photographs.
That is not what happened. Christina moved into the operational headquarters of Olympic Maritime in Monte Carlo and began exercising authority in ways that surprised everyone around her. Her first significant decision was personnel. She brought in Louis Anderson, a Greek-American executive who had spent his career running Exxon’s marine operations, and who was regarded throughout the industry as one of the most capable people in the field to head the day-to-day management of the fleet.
Alongside this, she began systematically replacing the aging Onassis loyalists who had served her father for decades. Men in their 60s and 70s whose considerable experience of the old shipping world made them less useful in the new one. With younger talent who understood the market as it currently existed, rather than as it had existed in Aristotle’s prime.
This required real nerve. Those men were deeply embedded in the organization. They had relationships and institutional memory and the specific authority that comes from having been trusted by the founder. Replacing them was not a popular decision. She made it anyway. She presided at management meetings in Monte Carlo with a regularity and a substantive engagement that the industry had not expected.
She visited the Onassis offices in London and Athens and Manhattan on a rotating basis, maintaining visible authority over an operation that had offices across multiple continents and needed someone at the center of it who was genuinely there, rather than nominally there. Constantino Gratsos, who had been one of Aristotle’s most senior advisers, and who understood the organization as well as anyone alive, was quoted in a 1977 Time magazine profile saying plainly that not a single decision of substance got by without Christina’s approval. This was not the behavior of a figurehead. This was the behavior of someone who understood what she was responsible for and was taking that responsibility seriously. Her restructuring decisions were significant and given the conditions she was operating in, largely correct. She made the decision to scrap 14 aging tankers that together represented nearly 500,000
tons of fleet capacity. Removing vessels from the operation that were generating maintenance costs and insurance obligations without generating sufficient revenue in a market that had no use for them. This was not a sentimental decision. It was a hard one. Because those ships were part of what her father had built and dismantling pieces of what her father had built was not emotionally uncomplicated.
She made it anyway. She canceled orders for new supertankers that would have arrived into a market already suffering from severe overcapacity, avoiding the trap that had destroyed other operators who had committed to expansion during the boom years and could not adjust to the bust.
She sold Olympic Airways, the Greek national airline her father had built from a single aircraft into a carrier serving five continents, to the Greek government for $104 million. dollars. This was the most symbolically painful decision of her management years. Because Olympic Airways was among the most publicly visible things Aristotle had ever created.
The enterprise whose name was most associated in the public mind with the Onassis legacy. She sold it because the shipping operations needed capital and because maintaining an airline in a difficult aviation market while simultaneously managing a fleet through a shipping depression was more than any single organization needed to be doing at once.
There was also a contrarian bet that alarmed industry observers and that revealed something specific about how Christina Onassis thought. At what was arguably the very bottom of the tanker market, she paid $27 million dollars for an unchartered supertanker that the previous owner, the American maritime investor Daniel Ludwig, had been unable to charter and had been seeking to sell.
She renamed it the Aristotle S. Onassis. Industry observers were divided in their reactions. Some called the purchase irrational, pointing out that vessels of that size were sitting idle around the world with no prospect of near-term employment, and that the insurance and maintenance costs of an unchartered supertanker were substantial.
Others noted that she had paid approximately half the vessel’s original construction price, and that the logic underlying the purchase, acquiring undervalued assets at the bottom of a cycle, in anticipation of eventual recovery, was precisely the logic that had driven her father’s most successful moves throughout his career.
She was making at 26 the same kind of bet he had made at 32 when he bought his first freighters in the middle of the Great Depression. One Manhattan shipbroker described her as extremely bright and suggested the deal could prove considerably smarter than it appeared. The fleet under her management maintained 37 vessels with an aggregate capacity of 5.
4 million tons, predominantly oil tankers operating under long-term charter arrangements that provided a measure of revenue predictability through the difficult market years. She renounced her American citizenship after her father’s death and donated the American portion of her holdings in the company to the American Hospital in Paris, where Aristotle had died, a decision that was simultaneously a practical tax consideration and a personal gesture of a kind that she did not explain publicly.
The Jackie Kennedy settlement, negotiated in 15 minutes for $26 million, had demonstrated that she understood legal and financial negotiation with a speed and a clarity that surprised people who had not expected to be surprised by her. The woman the press was calling the poor little rich girl was, in the years between 1975 and the mid-1980s, actually running a global shipping operation, not holding a title while others ran it.
Running it. Making the personnel decisions and the asset decisions and the restructuring decisions that kept a complex organization functional through a decade of sustained market difficulty. She was doing this at ages when most people have not yet held a significant professional position of any kind.
She was doing it while managing a private life of extraordinary difficulty. And she was by the measures available doing it competently. But the offices in Monte Carlo were only part of the life she was living. And the other part the part that generated the tabloid coverage was considerably harder to manage than any tanker fleet in any market condition.
In a period of 16 years, Christina Onassis married four times. Every marriage ended in divorce. Every one of them was in its own specific way a different version of the same essential search. An attempt to build and sustain the connection that the wealth and the business success and the accumulated achievement could not provide and that she had been missing since long before she had words to describe what was missing.
The first marriage came in 1971 in the period before the family losses had accumulated. When Christina was testing the limits of her own agency against the considerable gravitational force of her father’s preferences. Joseph Bolker was an American real estate developer based in Hollywood. A man of 57 years at the time.
A divorced father of four daughters. 47 years old to Christina’s 20 when they first met in Monte Carlo and 27 years her senior when they married in Las Vegas in July of 1971. The marriage was kept secret for as long as secrecy was possible, which was not long given the level of press attention the Onassis name attracted.
When Aristotle learned of it, his reaction was immediate and sustained. He cut off Christina’s trust fund. The family pressure on both of them was intense and unrelenting. The marriage lasted 9 months and when it ended Christina’s health collapsed in a way that went beyond ordinary disappointment. Her maid Eleni raised the alarm after 12 days during which Christina had been unable to leave her bed.
Doctors determined she had taken too many sleeping pills. Her mother came to her side. Two months later, her mother was dead. The pattern established by the Bolker marriage would repeat itself with variations in the specifics but not in the structure across the following decade and a half. Christina was drawn to men who required pursuit, men who were older or complicated or unavailable in some essential way, and she pursued them with the same relentless ferocious energy she brought to everything she attempted. She did not wait for love to come to her. She went after it with the same determination that had characterized her approach to the Monte Carlo management meetings and the Jackie Kennedy settlement. She committed completely. She pursued across geographic and political and cultural borders without apparent concern for how the pursuit appeared to the people watching it. The tragedy was not that she was passive or that she failed to try. The tragedy was that trying in this domain was not
sufficient, and she could not find a way to accept that. Her second husband, Alexander Andreadis, was a Greek shipping and banking heir from a family of established standing, a match made 3 months after her father’s death in 1975 in circumstances that most accounts describe as arranged, as a union between dynasties designed to consolidate position rather than to satisfy the requirements of two particular people. It lasted 14 months.
It was not, by any account, characterized by happiness for either party. Then came Sergei Kauzov, and this marriage reveals more about Christina Onassis than perhaps any other episode in her life. Kauzov was a Soviet shipping agent, a graduate of a Moscow foreign language institute who spoke fluent French and English, a quiet man with thinning blond hair who worked for a Soviet trading organization based in Paris.
Christina met him in 1976 at a business lunch where she was negotiating a deal to lease several of the Onassis tankers to Soviet shipping interests. A transaction that made commercial sense for both parties and that brought Kauzov to the table as a representative of the Soviet side.
She drove him home in her limousine after the lunch. More meetings followed at Russian restaurants in Paris, at apartments borrowed from friends, in the careful circling way that relationships develop when both parties understand that what is happening is more than professional. When Kauzov was recalled to Moscow in the autumn of 1976, Christina did not accept the separation.
She pursued him by phone and by telex and by personal courier. She traveled to Moscow. She visited a city that was in the context of the Cold War 1970s, the symbolic opposite of everything the Onassis world represented. The closed, gray, ideologically opposed capital of the Soviet bloc. Because the man she wanted was there.
American intelligence officials who were monitoring the situation reached the conclusion that it was extremely likely Kauzov had or had previously had KGB connections. Press reports at the time suggested the relationship had been initiated on Soviet orders as a way of gaining access to intelligence about Western oil shipping through the heiress of one of the world’s largest tanker fleets.
What the evidence actually shows is more human and less dramatic than that. Kauzov appeared to have developed genuine feelings for Christina that exceeded whatever his initial brief had been and the relationship, whatever its origins, took on a life of its own that the people who were supposed to be managing it from Moscow were not fully in control of.
Christina was prepared to live in a Soviet cooperative apartment or a dacha outside Moscow. She was prepared to remake her entire existence, to step entirely out of the world she had grown up in, to give up the yacht and the island and the Monte Carlo offices and the European social circuit for this man in this city behind the Iron Curtain because she was in love with him and because she had concluded that being in love with him in Moscow was better than being without him in any of the more comfortable places available to her. They married in Moscow on the 2nd of August 1978. For a brief period she shopped for Soviet real estate and contemplated a life in which Diet Coke or Cola would have been very difficult to obtain. The marriage lasted approximately 1 year. Between the Kauzov marriage and the fourth, there was an episode involving a young man named Nikki Mavroleon, a member of a Greek shipping family that illustrates with particular clarity the cost the search was extracting from
Christina by this point in her life. She lent Mavroleon $50,000. She spent approximately 3 months in his company. When he attempted to end the relationship, she told him she was pregnant with his child. She was not. The claim was an act of desperation of someone who had concluded that the truth of her own feelings was insufficient to keep someone close and that perhaps a manufactured obligation would succeed where authentic connection had not.
She eventually confessed that the pregnancy was not real. The admission broke the last possibility of the relationship and what followed by accounts from people around her during that period was one of the most severe depressive episodes she had experienced accompanied by a return to complete dependency on the amphetamines and antidepressants that had become a structural feature of her daily life.
Her fourth husband was Thierry Roussel, a French pharmaceutical heir, the son of the head of the Roussel Uclaf pharmaceutical company, a man who was by external appearance everything that a person in Christina’s position might have designed as a suitable partner. They met in 1983. They married on the 17th of March, 1984.
By every account from people who knew Christina during the early months of the marriage, this was the relationship that felt different to her. This was the one she believed in completely. This was the man she described in the private conversations of that period as the love of her life.
Athena Roussel was born on the 29th of January, 1985 at the American Hospital in Paris. Christina named her daughter after the mother she had lost more than a decade before. Photographs taken at the hospital that day show an expression on Christina’s face that people who had known her for years described as the most uncomplicated, purely happy they had ever witnessed from her.
She had built something real. She had a daughter. She had a family. The search seemed, in that moment, to have reached its end. Thierry Roussel had been conducting a simultaneous relationship with a Swedish model named Marianne Gaby Landhage throughout the marriage. His son with Landhage, Eric, was born in July of 1985, 5 months after Athena.
A daughter, Sandrine, was born to Landhage in May of 1987. Two children fathered during the marriage to Christina with a woman Roussel had been involved with before the marriage and continued to be involved with throughout it. The parallel family existed openly enough that the concealment was eventually impossible and Christina discovered what had been happening.
She filed for divorce. She retained custody of Athena and established, with considerable legal precision, a board of four trustees to manage her daughter’s inheritance. Stelio Papadimitriou, Paul Ioannidis, Apostolos Zabelas, and Theodore Gabriellides. The structure was designed explicitly to keep Roussel away from financial control of the estate while not removing him from his daughter’s daily life.
A distinction Christina maintained with clarity even as the personal dimensions of the divorce were devastating her because she never stopped loving him. After the divorce was finalized, Christina approached Roussel with an arrangement that has no comfortable description in ordinary language. She wanted another child and she wanted him to be the father.
And because a conventional relationship was no longer available, she arranged a personal sperm bank from which she was being inseminated monthly. She compensated him for his participation with a Ferrari Testarossa, a vehicle valued at approximately $160,000. She promised him an additional bonus of $10 million in the event of a successful conception and delivery.
She was still undergoing the monthly procedures at the time of her death. And in the month before she traveled to Buenos Aires for the last time, she wrote Roussel into her will for the first time, providing an annual annuity of $1,200,000 for his role in caring for Athena. This is the detail that most requires the closest attention because it is the detail that most clearly reveals the kind of person Christina Onassis actually was.
This is not the behavior of someone who has given up. This is not the behavior of someone who has accepted defeat or settled into passivity or decided that hoping for more is futile. This is the behavior of someone who is still trying, still working toward the life she wanted. Still maintaining enough belief in the future to make monthly medical appointments aimed at building it.
The same woman who had been inseminated that month had also structured her daughter’s inheritance with sufficient legal sophistication that it would survive years of challenge. These were not the actions of a broken person. They were the actions of someone who was tired and damaged and still fundamentally unrelinquished in her desire for more time and more life and more of the things that made life worth the effort of continuing it.
She had written her will. She had arranged her daughter’s future with care and precision. She had not stopped hoping for her own. There is a version of Christina Onassis’ story in which the decades of struggle with her body and her dependency on prescription medications are presented as tabloid material. As the colorful and somewhat pitiful excess of a woman who had access to everything and used some of it badly.
That version fails to understand what was actually happening. Which was that Christina was engaged in a sustained, ultimately losing confrontation with a wound that had been inflicted so early and so completely that it had become part of the architecture of herself perception rather than a belief that could be revised through effort or information.
The wound arrived through her mother’s voice, through the reported comments about Christina’s dark features and heavier build being the inheritance of the wrong parent. It arrived in childhood. Which means it arrived during the period when the things we are told about ourselves settle into the foundation rather than remaining on the surface where they might be examined and questioned.
Tina’s words told Christina that her body was a form of failure, that she had received from her father the qualities that her mother found unappealing, that the body she inhabited was evidence of a deficiency she had not chosen and could not correct. This assessment arrived as truth rather than as opinion and it took root accordingly.
She grew to 5 ft 9 in and was built in a way that the social world she inhabited consistently coded as too much. The jet-set universe of the 1970s and 1980s was a world that treated female thinness as simultaneously an aesthetic preference, a class indicator and a moral achievement. Women in that world were expected to occupy as little physical space as possible, and the women who conformed to that expectation were rewarded with the social approval that Christina needed and consistently could not access on those terms. She did not conform and had never conformed and had been told from childhood that this was a specific failing she bore from the wrong parent. The resulting cycle was one of crash dieting and significant weight loss followed by depressive episodes that ended the diets and returned the weight followed by renewed shame that restarted the dieting. The amphetamines entered the picture as appetite suppressants prescribed but used in quantities and over periods that
moved well beyond any careful clinical intention. The barbiturates and the sleeping pills entered as management for the anxiety and the depression that the stimulants produced and that the dieting deepened and that the losses of the 1970s had installed so thoroughly that no pharmaceutical could fully reach them.
She was formally diagnosed with clinical depression at approximately 30 years old. The diagnosis named something that had been present and operational for well over a decade by that point. The suicide attempt connected to the Bolker divorce and the Gualandri’s rejection had been real and had been treated as a medical event rather than as a statement, which may have been the correct response to the immediate crisis but did not address the underlying condition.
The hospitalization for sleeping pill overdose in the 1970s was documented. The complete collapse following the Rollyan episode and its false pregnancy claim was described by people present during that period as among the most severe deteriorations they had witnessed in her. The daily consumption of approximately 20 cans of Coca-Cola an addiction documented across multiple sources and confirmed by people who were with her regularly in her final years added a specific and cumulative physiological burden. The combination of sustained stimulant and sedative use, the extreme cycling of crash dieting and weight regain, and the volume of carbonated sugar and caffeine being absorbed daily placed chronic stress on a cardiovascular system that was managing a great deal more than its intended load. And there was a pattern in this family that deserved more attention than it ever received. Her mother Tina had died of pulmonary edema with barbiturate involvement. Her mother’s sister Eugenia had died
under circumstances involving barbiturate overdose and what several sources describe as physical abuse. Christina herself would be found dead with large quantities of a barbiturate called Optalidon in her system. The official cause listed as pulmonary edema and heart attack. Three women in the same family dying through the same physiological mechanism across a span of roughly 15 years.
The pattern was visible to people who knew the family. It was never examined as a pattern by anyone with the authority or the inclination to do so. By the late 1980s, the body had been carrying more than its share of the weight for a very long time. What the people around Christina had not fully appreciated was that in some way she was trying in the months before Buenos Aires to put some of it down.
In Monte Carlo, the Olympic Maritime headquarters continued to manage a fleet of 37 vessels through the ongoing tanker market difficulties of the mid to late 1980s. The restructuring decisions Christina had made in the years immediately following her father’s death had kept the core operation viable through conditions that had eliminated less disciplined operators.
The scrapping of 14 aging tankers, the cancellation of the supertanker orders, the sale of Olympic Airways for $104 million. These These decisions had been difficult and in some cases symbolically painful and had been correct. The total value of the empire had declined from the approximately $500 peak at Aristotle’s death to approximately $250 million by the late 1980s.
A decline that reflected a decade of global tanker overcapacity and depressed charter rates rather than any specific failure of management. Other major tanker operators, companies with more experience and fewer personal complications, had fared no better in the same market conditions. What Christina had done was hold the core together, make the right strategic reductions, avoid the expansionary mistakes that destroyed her competitors, and keep the name meaningful in an industry that had been brutal to everyone operating in it. The decision to delegate day-to-day operations to professional management while retaining final authority on significant decisions had made her a different kind of executive than her father, who had been personally involved in everything and had operated with a level of autocratic detail that made the organization dependent on his presence in ways that were not always healthy. Christina’s approach was more institutional and in some ways more modern, though whether it reflected a deliberate management philosophy or a
degree of exhaustion with the demands of the business is a question that people who worked with her answered differently depending on when they were asked. What she had done by any honest accounting was keep it running. That was not a small thing. She had inherited the empire at 24 in the worst market conditions in memory with no executive experience and no family support structure, and she had kept it running for more than a decade.
The business her father had built in Buenos Aires and that she had maintained in Monte Carlo would eventually move its headquarters to Athens, returning to Greek soil after a lifetime spent in more cosmopolitan addresses. That felt like something. What she could not keep running by the autumn of 1988 was herself.
Christina Onassis arrived in Buenos Aires on the 20th of October 1988 to celebrate the 40th birthday of Marina Dodero. The flight from Geneva, which she had been finding increasingly intolerable in terms of its weather and its emotional associations, was a relief. She told Marina almost immediately that she could not bear the cold and the rain of the Swiss winter, that she wanted to stay, that she was thinking seriously about buying a ranch outside the Argentine capital where she and Athena could spend several months each year in the warmth and the open space. Buenos Aires held a resonance in the Onassis family story that went considerably beyond its role as the Dodero’s home city. This was the city where Aristotle had arrived with nothing in the 1920s and had built, through tobacco and then shipping, his first real money. This was the ground from which the entire empire had originally grown. The Argentine Greek community had
maintained connections with the Onassis family across generations, and the Dodero’s themselves were part of a long history of Argentine friendship with the family that preceded Christina’s own lifetime. For her to consider settling here, even partially, was a return to the origin point of the story she had been born into, a reaching back toward the moment before all the complications, toward something that felt, if not exactly like home, then at least like the place where home had once been possible. People who saw Christina during those October and November weeks described her as in better condition than she had been for some time. She had lost weight. She was talking about the future with an optimism that struck people who had known her through the difficult years as somewhat new, or at least less hedged than it had recently been. She was still undergoing the monthly inseminations with Roussel’s sperm. She was still working toward the second child. She had updated her will in the
month before leaving for Argentina, adding Roussel to it for the first time, and confirming everything to Athena, which is the behavior of a woman who is organizing her affairs rather than abandoning them. The monthly medical appointments, and the will update, and the ranch plans, and the conversations about staying, taken together, they present a picture of someone who was not finished, who was still oriented toward the future rather than away from it.
On the morning of the 19th of November, 1988, Christina Onassis was found unconscious by her long-time maid, Eleni Siros, in the bathroom of the Tortuguitas home belonging to Alberto and Marina Dodero, a private property approximately 20 mi north of Buenos Aires. A helicopter was called. She was transported to the Clinica del Sol in the city, Tsaidia, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.
She was 37 years old. The official cause of death was a heart attack brought on by acute pulmonary edema. The Argentine judge initially assigned to the case, Raul Borrino, ruled the circumstances suspicious and ordered further investigation after a box of pills was discovered near the body. The Dodero family reportedly initially declined to allow the medical examiner immediate access to the bathroom where Christina had been found, a detail that attracted press attention and official notice without ever receiving a satisfactory explanation. A separate judge with jurisdiction over matters involving drug-related deaths was brought in. Forensic tests reported by the Athens newspaper TA on the 14th of December, 1988, found large quantities of barbiturates in her system, specifically a compound called Optalidon, alongside three other medications found in her room, the nature and quantities of which the investigating authorities were in the
process of analyzing. The drug investigation judge stated publicly that the cause of death was, in his assessment, unfortunately not clear. The conclusion that was ultimately maintained in the official record was acute pulmonary edema with no formal finding of suicide and no formal finding of deliberate overdose.
What role precisely the barbiturates found in her system had played in the cardiac event that killed her was never definitively established. Whether they had contributed causally to the pulmonary edema or had been present in quantities that preceded the cardiac event without directly causing it or had been at a level that was itself a cause rather than a context remained a question the official proceedings closed without fully answering.
She had told Marina she wanted to stay. Whether she understood in some part of herself that her conscious mind had not brought fully to the surface that staying was no longer available to her as the kind of question that belongs permanently to the category of things that cannot be answered now. The body was returned to Greece on the 22nd of November after Argentine courts processed the legal documentation necessary to release it in a process that required a judicial order to be rushed to the airport minutes before the flight departed because the police could not allow the remains to leave the country without it. The paperwork followed her to the last. Hundreds of boats accompanied the coffin as it was brought to Scorpios. A private Greek Orthodox funeral service was held at the chapel on the island on the 20th of November attended by people from across the world of wealth and shipping and international society that her father had inhabited and that she had inherited and by the people who had
known her simply as a person rather than as a name. She was buried beside Aristotle and beside Alexander in the family plot beside the chapel in the ground of the island that her father had said was the only place in the world where he did not feel a stranger. Athena was 3 years old. She was being cared for at Christina’s estate outside Geneva when her mother died.
Roussel flew to Buenos Aires to assist with the arrangements for repatriating the body and then collected his daughter and brought her to his family home in France beginning the custody arrangement that would define the next 15 years of Athina’s childhood. The legal battles that followed were extensive and lasted years.
Roussel contested the management structures Christina had established to protect the inheritance using Athina’s place of residence as leverage in financial disputes with the trustees threatening at various points to relocate the child to France where the estate would face significantly higher tax obligations. In 1999 a court in Vaduz transferred management of Athina’s inheritance to the KPMG Fides auditing firm in Lucerne removing the direct management authority from both Roussel and the original trustees in what amounted to an institutional acknowledgement that the competing interests could not be allowed to continue controlling what was after all a child’s inheritance rather than a prize in a dispute between adults. Athina grew up in Switzerland and France raised by Roussel Landhage speaking Swedish and French with three half-siblings. She told an interviewer at 13 that she felt great aversion to anything Greek and blamed all the problems on the Onassis name.
The connection to the Greek identity that Christina had tried to preserve through the trust structure and the Greek trustees was not transmitted to the daughter who carried the name. When Athina reached adulthood she competed internationally as a show jumper representing Greece as Athina Onassis and her lawyers attempted when she was 21 to have her installed as president of the Onassis Foundation.
The board declined stating with considerable directness that she had no university education no work experience and no meaningful connection to Greek culture religion language or shared experience. The foundation that existed to honor Alexander’s memory and service to the Greek people was not the board concluded, appropriately headed by a person who had no Greek in her beyond the name.
Scorpios was eventually sold to interests connected with a Russian billionaire. The graves remained protected by the terms of the original will, which Aristotle had written to ensure that whatever happened to the island’s ownership, the ground where his family rested would stay undisturbed. Three stones, three names, together in the ground as they had never quite managed to be when they were all alive and moving separately through the world. The Alexander S.
Onassis Foundation, funded with 45% of Aristotle’s original estate, more than tripled in value in the decade following Christina’s death, growing to over $1 billion. The portion of the estate managed for Athena’s benefit approximately doubled during the same period, reaching approximately $600 million. The foundation continues to operate and to fund cultural and academic work internationally, giving grants in the name of a 24-year-old man who died because the cables in his aircraft’s control system had been installed in reverse. The phrase poor little rich girl was applied to Christina Onassis so consistently and for so long that it became, for the majority of people who had heard of her, the complete and sufficient account of her life. It was not entirely wrong. It captured something real about the gap between the material circumstances of her existence and the emotional satisfaction that those circumstances
failed to provide, but it was incomplete in ways that matter considerably and that did her a specific injustice worth correcting. She spoke five languages. She ran a global maritime enterprise through a sustained market crisis that eliminated stronger operators than herself. She negotiated a contested multi-million dollar estate settlement in 15 minutes.
She established a legal structure for her daughter’s inheritance sophisticated enough to survive years of determined challenge. She flew to Moscow for the man she loved. She moved into a Soviet apartment when her alternative was every luxury the Western world offered. She kept going to the fertility clinic every month because she had decided that the life she wanted was still available to her and that stopping was not the answer.
The former Olympic maritime executive quoted in People magazine after her death said that she may have had hundreds of millions of dollars, but she never really had a chance in life. That is half true. She had chances. She used every one. She used them in the boardroom and she used them in the borrowed apartments in Paris and she used them in the fertility clinic and she used them in Buenos Aires in the final weeks when she was talking about ranches and sunshine and the next year.
What she could not find with all of that effort and all of that wealth and all of that ferocious exhausting decades-long unwillingness to stop trying was the thing she had been missing since before she was old enough to name it. The thing that most people find without particularly working for it. The sense of being known by someone, loved by someone, stayed with by someone, of being the person that a specific other person chooses to remain beside.
She had a name that filled newspapers for 37 years. She carried an empire. She absorbed losses that would have ended most people entirely. She did not stop. The island of Skorpios is under different ownership now. The graves are still there protected by language written into a will by a man who understood, perhaps better than he understood most things about his children, that the dead deserve permanence.
Three stones, three names. The same three names that structured the shape of Christina’s life from before she could speak. From the moment her name was painted on the hull of a yacht. From the moment her father looked at her and decided she was his golden one and then went somewhere else.
She was born into a story that was already in progress. Her name was on the yacht before she could read it. Her father called her his golden one and then was largely absent. Her mother told her she had the wrong kind of beauty and then was gone. Her brother knew her better than anyone alive and then was buried in the chapel ground.
Her father followed 26 months later and she was 24 years old and the richest woman in the world and entirely alone. And she carried everything forward for 13 more years with a persistence that the tabloid sentence never captured and never tried to. She died in a bathroom in Buenos Aires on the 19th of November 1988 at 37 years old in the city where her father had built the first version of the fortune that built everything that came after.
She had told her friend she wanted to stay. She had been trying to stay in one form or another for most of her life. That is worth sitting with for a moment. Not the wealth, which was real and which could not fix the thing that was broken. Not the marriages, which were real and which she entered every time with genuine hope.
Not the tabloid sentence, which was not entirely wrong but was nowhere near enough. Just the fact that she kept going. The fact that in the last weeks of her life, the woman who had lost more by 24 than most people lose in a lifetime was thinking about ranches and sunshine and another year and a second child.
She wanted to stay. She had always wanted to stay. She just never quite found the place where staying felt like it was enough. If this story meant something to you, please like the video and subscribe to the channel. We release new biographical stories every single week and we would be glad to have you with us for what comes next.
