The Marriage of Jackie and Onassis: The Pre-Agreement and How the Couple Got Close

Until then it was perfect. The most elegant first lady and most dignified widow the world has ever known. Her pink chanel was stained with her husband’s blood on November 22, 1963, as tragedy struck her exemplary family and with it the American dream, her mourning veil and her hands clutching lavender-colored small cards of her small children.

Jackie Bouvier Kennedy It was a film. The image of a country that is viable and broken with one shot – four, strictly speaking – and will show society and world leaders that the strength to be whole and the pieces can still be put together. Aristotle Onassis It was the opposite. An unsightly man who has not yet been made handsome by the cartoon monster’s stereotypical money: a Batracian-faced mobster. They get married five years after his funeral, which is later sanctified John Fitzgerald Kennedy It was read as a betrayal of his legacy and the American people.

He questioned marriage

Only Alexander, the son of Onassis, understood the world-shaking marriage: “It’s the perfect union. My dad likes last names and Jackie likes money. The divine Maria Callas, who lost even her perfect soprano voice for the love of a shipping magnate she met in 1959, died on Scorpios Island in October when she learned from the newspapers that her ari had married America’s widow. 20, 1968. “It was like being hit in the head,” he said shortly before his death in 1977. It was horrible. I’m just trying to survive. I gave up an incredible career in a complicated job for him. I am praying to God to help me through this moment.

Her Ari, the man with the toad-like round eyes, gave Kalas’ charm another halo, left the diva without explanation, and charged Jackie for all the world. As can explain the cares of love. Now let us rejoice that a young woman has suffered personal and state misfortune—and the double pain of losing a brother-in-law. Bobby Kennedy, who, according to her biographers, was much more to her than a mother-in-law, could rebuild her life with a mature love and a millionaire on top of it. But that was another context and Jackie’s independence for years was a shame.

He met the world’s biggest naval industrialist in 1963 In the same boat – the legendary Christina O., baptized in honor of Aristotle’s daughter – in which Onassis fell in love with Callas, and in that way the singer was separated from her husband, who traveled with her when landing in Monte Carlo. He divorced Athena Livanos, the mother of his two children, the following year.

Onassis was perhaps the most ugly or least dominant of these times, almost an eyesore compared to JFK’s graceful aura., but it had a history and was created alone and from below: a Greek survivor of the Turkish massacre at Smyrna who, after settling in Argentina and restoring the family business, made Greece a re-interesting power and a luxurious luxury. . That path from window washer to world’s richest man included the American dream of Jackie and JFK in the Hamptons. It was even more literal: the dream of immigrants who came to “become America” ​​came true.

When Aristotle met Jackie

He met Jackie at her saddest moment when she lost her youngest son, Patrick, just two days old. It was August 1963, which brought the first lady an even more terrifying sense of helplessness, but between that pain and the attack in Dallas, she had a break that her sister Lee Radziwill organized to help her recover: a walk. Onassis on board, her last boyfriend by then. By the chancellor’s decision, Kalas was not invited for the trip. It was clear that the President’s wife could not condescend to share the ship with her spouse.

The truth is, Ari doesn’t sew without thread, and his reputation for shadowing business isn’t so crystal clear in matters of the heart. His lack of physical attractiveness was compensated by an enormous power, and as the famous philosopher said: “The wallet kills the handsome man”. He had wanted to meet Jackie for a long time and it didn’t take him long to woo her as his confidant at sea, knowing that in principle he could only be friends with the President’s wife. America, he is 23 years younger. But after a month Lee Harvey Oswald He fired the four shots that changed history, and a distraught Onassis – who followed the funeral on television – saw the iron figure of the widow and said: “There’s my next wife”. As with everything he set out to do in life, he accomplished less than expected.

When he manages to win her over, Jackie agrees to marry him. For the ceremony, the Kennedys wore an ivory Valentino dress and a crown of orange blossoms, in keeping with Greek Orthodox tradition, as if all of the Kennedys’ Irish Catholicism had been forgotten by their new fortune.

Caroline and John are the children of John, Jackie and JFK Between the ages of 10 and 7, they were as central to the ceremony as their father’s funeral, but neither that nor the low-key island ceremony Onassis bought for Callas could change the social judgment, as if the girl was in no way responsible. He now had the right to claim his destiny for himself. Because he was ruthless, he did it anyway. In some strange way, the American widow and the Greek billionaire have more in common than they appear in the photos: excessive ambition and thirst for mutual status.

The B-side of Jackie and Aristotle’s wedding

It was that ambition that led her to claim it A prenuptial agreement with 170 clauses This often benefited her greatly, and the elder Ari finally seemed to submit to her power out of love. In the terms, if they separate, she will keep one-third of his wealth. The other condition: the widow did not want to take off Kennedy’s surname, which, despite the initial resentment of American society, was the key to keeping the doors open to his inherent popularity in his home: he continued to belong to the extreme. American dynasty. Also, she can live alone.

Marriage is all about love. Far from the sobriety that has always been her hallmark, she spends strangely astronomical figures, and even sends 300 kilometers to buy bread in the Chancellor’s private plane. Onassis wanted to undo the union without losing the money, but he was bound by the strict clauses of the contract. He saw Maria Callas again without hiding, but something had already disappeared in the singer, and he did not fully forgive him. Onassis later fell into a deep depression, reportedly exacerbated by the death of her 23-year-old son in a plane crash — adding another sad point in common with Jackie in a precarious future.

Jacqueline Bouvier’s name Jackie O shook the world. Seven years after the marriage that transformed Brand, Arie would die of pneumonia, a complication of his late-life myasthenia gravis. Widowed for the second time at 47, this time she was not by her husband’s side in the American hospital in Paris, and instead of weeping at the funeral, she quarreled with her daughter Christina, Onassis’ universal heir. He took the estimated $26 million negotiated by his brother-in-law Ted Kennedy. The last love of her life, financier and diamond magnate Maurice Tempelsmann, helps her quadruple that fortune.

Until his death in 1994, At just 64, she became a prolific and respected author, as described in William Kuhn’s autobiography, Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books; and Jackie as an Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Greg Lawrence. In the end, she departed with the dignity that the First World had found in her. At home, she was determined not to let cancer destroy her body. After all, Jackie O. A film is (and always will be).

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