Socialite, heiress, victim: Christina Onassis was a great many things — and her short
life was filled with both drama and tragedy.
Christina Onassis was born on December 11th, 1950, in New York City.
By that time, the family fortune had already been made, though it hadn't quite reached
into the billions yet.
Christina's father, Aristotle Onassis, arrived in Argentina almost 30 years earlier as a
poor Greek immigrant and transformed himself into an international tycoon through his shipping
business — a story impressive enough that it would one day become the fodder of a TV
movie.
"I could cut the competition, slice by slice, until they were on their knees."
Expanding that business seemed to be a factor in Aristotle's choice of bride; in 1946, he
married Athina "Tina" Livanos, daughter to another Greek shipping magnate.
Two years later, the couple had their first child, Alexander Onassis.
One son and heir was all the children Aristotle wanted.
Aristotle told many people, including his wife, that more children would dilute the
value of his name and complicate the future of the business.
Tina acquiesced by terminating two pregnancies.
But when she became pregnant again in 1950, Tina didn't want to risk her own health with
another abortion — and not even a violent beating from Aristotle could change her mind.
When Christina was born, however, Tina was in some ways the more resentful parent.
Though she loved her daughter, she was disturbed by Christina's close physical resemblance
to Aristotle and doubted her own fitness to be a mother to her child.
Growing up, Christina Onassis rarely held her parents' full attention.
Despite loving her children, her mother struggled to overcome her own mental health issues and
a nagging doubt that she didn't know how to mother.
Aristotle, who hadn't wanted any more children after his son, was affectionate enough with
Christina to give her the nickname "Chryso mou" — or "my golden one" in Greek.
But he was often away on business.
Both had personal and professional concerns that did not include their children, who were
primarily raised by servants.
Against this family backdrop, Christina suddenly stopped speaking at age 3.
This regression brought her the undivided attention of her parents and household staff,
albeit briefly.
A psychological assessment in Zürich concluded that she had developed a form of selective
mutism that was subsequently blamed on an overprotective home environment.
Author William Wright suggested in his biography All the Pain That Money Can Buy that Christina
refused to talk in order to gain the attention of parents who spent too little time with
her… rather than too much.
If it was a deliberate act, however, it was one Christina claimed not to remember when
she grew up.
And her mutism would later return, to some extent, when she learned of her parents' divorce.
Divorce is a difficult thing for children to comprehend and accept.
For Christina, that acceptance never came.
Her parents separated in 1959, when she was 8 years old, and divorced the year after.
While the marriage of Aristotle and Tina Onassis had long been unstable, his open affair with
the opera singer Maria Callas proved the last straw.
Aristotle had tolerated an affair of Tina's years earlier, but the ostentatious display
he made of his dalliance infuriated his wife.
She left with the children and arranged for as visible and scandalous a divorce announcement
as she could.
Well into adulthood, Christina regarded the divorce as an unwelcome intrusion into a happy
home life, despite the fact that her parents were often distant and neglectful.
Later, her father married again — to one of history's most famous widows.
"From Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. central standard
time."
Christina quickly decided that she didn't like Jackie Kennedy either.
She even once described Kennedy as her father's "unfortunate obsession."
Kennedy's personality and the vast age difference between her and Aristotle upset Christina
in particular — but it couldn't have helped that Aristotle pressured Christina to take
after her stepmother.
The major players in the Greek shipping business often took a dynastic attitude toward their
work, and Christina Onassis found herself a pawn of both her parents' schemes over the
years.
When she was 22, her mother tried to arrange a marriage between Christina and Philippe
Niarchos.
Philippe was the son of Stavros Niarchos, Aristotle Onassis' great business rival, and
Eugenia Livanos, Tina's sister.
Of course, this made Philippe Christina's first cousin.
If that didn't make the proposed marriage weird enough, Tina had actually married Stavros
after her divorce and her sister's death.
Christina and Philippe were willing to try marriage for the sake of their family, but
it wasn't happening, and the wedding was soon called off.
But Christina could not so easily escape her father's matchmaking efforts.
He later wanted her to marry Peter Goulandris, another Greek shipping heir whose fortune
might be brought into the Onassis fold.
Tina approved of Goulandris and helped Aristotle to pressure their daughter into marriage.
Christina rebelled by persisting with her own romance with another man, as well as dodging
her father's calls.
But Aristotle wouldn't take no for an answer; he extracted a deathbed promise from Christina
to marry Goulandris.
She didn't keep it.
Christina Onassis' upbringing was complicated and often unhappy, but she still loved her
family.
And she lost them all in fewer than three years.
The first to go was her brother, Alexander Onassis.
After years maintaining a distant relationship, he and Christina reconnected as adults, in
part out of mutual frustration with their father.
As the firstborn, and a son, Alexander was in line to inherit the Onassis family business,
and he and Aristotle Onassis often clashed.
One of their fights was over Alexander's hobby of flying planes.
Despite being a careful pilot, he was killed in a plane crash in 1972.
Alexander's death consumed his family.
Aristotle, who began training Christina to run his shipping empire, never fully recovered
from the loss.
He fell into paranoid suspicions of murder, suspecting nearly everyone close to him of
killing Alexander — except Christina.
His own health suffered, and he died in 1975 after undergoing gallbladder surgery, with
Christina by his bedside.
"I'm glad you came to say goodbye."
In between Alexander and Aristotle's deaths, Christina's mother died.
Tina's death was blamed on pulmonary edema after an overdose of pills, but Christina
always suspected her mother's husband, Stavros Niarchos, of foul play.
Notably, Tina's sister and Niarchos' earlier wife, Eugenia Niarchos, had died under similar
circumstances several years before.
On top of the many unfortunate episodes in her life, Christina Onassis struggled with
clinical depression.
Her aunt and mother both died of overdoses, and Christina, who believed her uncle-stepfather
to have murdered his previous wife, overdosed herself when she learned that her mother and
Niarchos planned to marry.
She turned to pills again during a difficult period in her relationship with Peter Goulandris,
who she remained with in part to please her ailing father.
And in 1975, after literally standing by her father's side in his final hours, Christina
fell into another wave of depression.
After her father's death, she attempted suicide at the hospital with a stolen surgeon's tool.
Only the intervention of the staff prevented her from succeeding.
It wasn't only Christina who harbored suspicions about Stavros Niarchos' involvement in her
aunt and mother's death: Her brother and her father both felt the same.
It was only the Livanos family, Christina's mother included, who thought that Niarchos
didn't have something to do with Eugenia's death, despite the numerous injuries on her
body.
Tina Onassis was unmarked at the time of her death, but Niarchos was confirmed to have
been in the house when she died, only inflaming Christina's suspicions.
Aristotle, fearful after his daughter's recent suicide attempt, tried to quell these suspicions
— despite sharing them.
Against her father's wishes, Christina sought an autopsy on her mother and fed her theories
to the press.
In retaliation, Niarchos leaked knowledge of one of Christina's suicide attempts and
insinuated that the worry and stress it caused Tina had contributed to her death.
Christina Onassis married four times, and each of her marriages ended in divorce.
The reasons varied, as did the impact on Onassis herself.
But only one of her marriages became a subject of interest for intelligence agencies: her
union with husband number three, Sergei Kauzov.
Like Onassis herself, Kauzov was in the shipping business, in this case based in Russia.
But Kauzov's lifestyle seemed disproportionately lavish in relation to his reported earnings.
An unremarkable apartment in Moscow stood in stark contrast to the time he spent in
the luxurious lifestyle in France that he detailed in expatriate newspapers.
A fear grew in some corners of the CIA that Kauzov was a KGB agent, and that his entire
relationship with Onassis was part of a Soviet plot.
As head of a major Western shipping firm, Onassis would have valuable information about
energy developments in the free world.
Who better than a husband to pry such information out of her?
Onassis biographer Nigel Dempster rejected the theory, however, as did experts on the
KGB.
Kauzov didn't fit the profile of a suave seducer, and other details about his life and movements
didn't add up.
At most, the KGB might have seen some propaganda value in having Onassis marry into a notable
Russian family.
But she found life in Moscow dull, and by the time she and Kauzov tied the knot, the
romance was all but gone from their relationship.
"Lawyers for the shipping heiress, Miss Christina Onassis, say they've been told to start proceedings
for divorce from her Russian husband, Mister Sergei Kauzov."
Put simply, Christina Onassis' love life was a total disaster.
For whatever reason, all of her romantic relationships fell apart.
In this, she was not unlike her father, though Onassis saw an important distinction.
She once told the Chicago Tribune:
"My father was never happy in love, but he was always successful.
With me, [it’s] always the other way around."
But there was one romantic attachment that was neither happy nor successful for Christina.
In her youth, her eye was caught by Mick Flick, the heir to the Mercedes-Benz fortune, and
he remained a source of infatuation for her throughout the years.
Given Flick's vast wealth, Onassis' father wasn't against the thought of him as a son-in-law.
But Flick consistently declined Onassis' affections.
Onassis eventually became obsessed enough that, when she got wind of the women Flick
did date, she would harass them on the phone for details.
And while the two kept crossing paths, Onassis' love was never requited.
The forces working against Christina Onassis' four marriages were many.
Not least of these was the campaign her father waged against her first husband, Joseph Bolker.
Twenty-seven years Christina's senior, Bolker was a sympathetic husband.
But his age, his Jewish background, and the fact that he hadn't been personally chosen
by Aristotle Onassis inspired the family patriarch to wage a fierce smear campaign against him.
She and Bolker divorced after nine months.
Christina's father and family initially approved of her second husband, Alexander Andreadis.
He was Greek like them, and he was a shipping magnate in his own right.
But after they tied the knot, it emerged that the Andreadis fortune was in trouble.
He wanted $20 million from his wife, who had just come into her own inheritance from her
father.
Christina had hoped that Andreadis' background was a guarantee against his wanting her for
her money, but she was now convinced he was a gold-digger.
They divorced after 14 months.
Her final marriage, to Thierry Roussel, ended on a less dramatic but equally painful note
for Christina; Roussel had an affair.
Christina Onassis died in 1988, at just 37 years old.
Like her mother, she had suffered a pulmonary edema.
Whispers soon spread about the nature of her death.
A judge had found cause to open an investigation into the circumstances, and there were rumors
of murder, suicide, or a medication overdose.
These were refuted by the autopsy, however, which found no grounds to suspect any such
circumstances.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Onassis' death was that, when it came, her life was
finally beginning to turn around.
Though her fourth marriage had ended in divorce like the rest, she and ex-husband Thierry
Roussel were still in each other's lives.
They'd had a child together, Athina Roussel, and planned to have more through artificial
insemination.
Onassis was enjoying time in Argentina and had just bought a ranch near Buenos Aires.
She was also losing weight, which biographer Nigel Dempster suspected might have led to
her death.
He suggests that a lifetime of compulsive eating and diet pills weakened her body and
put her especially at risk of the edema that killed her.