Churchill's Connections

Aristotle Onassis

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1906-1975
Greek businessman

  1. Introduction
  2. Stories
  3. Biographical summary
  4. See also
  5. Further reading
  6. References

1. Introduction

‘Ari’ was a Greek businessman, known for his great wealth, yacht and associations with famous women, especially his second wife Jackie Kennedy (nee Bouvier). A refugee in his youth, he began with few resources in Argentina but went on to make a fortune in tobacco, shipping, real estate, whaling, aviation and other businesses, moving to New York and then to Monaco. Churchill went for several long cruises with him on his yacht the Christina O. Misfortunes in the family have become known as the ‘Onassis curse’. His wealth is now mainly in the hands of his charitable foundation and his granddaughter Athina Onassis.

2. Stories

  • After starting as a night-time telephone operator in Argentina, Onassis became one of the world’s richest men.
  • Onassis was introduced to Winston by his son Randolph at a dinner near Monaco in 1956, leading to many travels together.
  • Onassis’s charm and lifestyle attracted a number of high-profile, glamorous women.
  • Churchill met John F. Kennedy on Onassis’s yacht in 1958, after which Jackie Kennedy said that perhaps Churchill thought JFK was one of the waiters.
  • A legend has developed about ‘the Onassis curse’, due to various family tragedies.
  • Churchill broke his upper leg while staying in Onassis’s hotel in Monaco in 1962 and thought he was going to die.
  • Onassis’s fortune is now in the hands of his granddaughter Athina and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, named after his son.

After starting as a night-time telephone operator in Argentina, Onassis became one of the world’s richest men.

Onassis was born in what is now İzmir, Turkey, to a shipping entrepreneur and tobacco trader, but the family savings were nearly all lost when they fled as refugees to Greece towards the end of the Greco-Turkish War in 1919 to 1922. After tensions with his father, Aristotle moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and began as an operator at a telephone company at age 17 while studying commerce and port administration. He built up a lucrative tobacco import business, initially partly assisted by information he overheard on the telephone.

He gained Argentinian citizenship in 1929 and was appointed vice consul of Greece in Buenos Aires in 1931, a reward for warning the Greek government about an imminent port tariff war between Argentina and Greece. The year after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he bought six ships at half their price before the crash and earned a considerable amount on transatlantic trade routes as the global economy recovered.

In 1938, he commissioned his first oil tanker, the largest at the time at 15,000 tons and the first with a swimming pool. During World War II, he relocated to New York and leased his ships to the US government, afterwards purchasing additional vessels cheaply as war surplus. At its peak Onassis’s fleet consisted of over seventy cargo vessels and oil tankers. By registering them in Panama, he minimised his taxes and operating costs, being able to apply lower standards under a ‘flag of convenience’.

In 1950, Onassis entered the whaling business off the west coast of South America but sold it on to a Japanese company in 1956 amid allegations of illegal catches. He moved to Monaco in 1953 and purchased a controlling share of SBM, an organisation that owned a number of Monaco’s prestigious properties. He owned the Greek airline Olympic Airways from 1957 to 1974, making him one of only two individuals in the world at the time with their own airline, the other being Howard Hughes who owned Trans World Airlines (TWA). Other investments around the world included oil companies, gold processing plants and property including the 52-storey Olympic Tower in Manhattan, New York.

Onassis was introduced to Winston by his son Randolph at a dinner near Monaco in 1956, leading to many travels together.

In January 1956, Winston was staying with his literary agent and friend Emery Reves at Reves’ villa La Pausa, built by Coco Chanel. He wrote to Clementine, ‘Randolph brought Onassis (the one with the big yacht) to dinner last night. He made a good impression upon me. He is a v[er]y able and masterful man & told me a lot about Whales. He kissed my hand!’1

A few days later, Churchill and Reves dined again with Onassis, this time on his yacht the Christina O., named after his daughter. He bought it as a war surplus Canadian anti-submarine frigate in 1947 and converted it in Germany. Its luxurious features included a sinkable dance floor that could be flooded to make a swimming pool, which Onassis sometimes enjoyed doing during his guests’ dances. Churchill described it as ‘the most beautiful structure I have seen afloat’.2

Churchill went on eight cruises with Onassis over the period 1958 to 1963: six in the Mediterranean, one to the West Indies and Puerto Rico, and one to the east coast of the US via the Caribbean. Randolph accompanied his father on a trip in 1963 but had blazing rows with him in front of other guests. Onassis tactfully arranged for him to leave the yacht to conduct a hastily arranged interview with the King of Greece as a pretext for his ejection.

After Onassis’s death in 1975, his heir Christina donated the vessel to the Greek government as a presidential yacht (renamed Argo), but it fell into disrepair. It was bought in 1998 by a friend of the Onassis family, who restored it lavishly and changed its name back to Christina O. It now belongs to an Irish consortium. At 325 feet (99 metres), it is still among the top 60 longest yachts in the world, despite many huge newbuilds, and can host 34 guests in 17 cabins, with a crew of 36. In early 2021, it was available to be chartered from €560,000 per week (around £475,000 or US$625,000).

Onassis’s charm and lifestyle attracted a number of high-profile, glamorous women.

Onassis had many, often stormy relationships with famous women including first lady of Argentina Eva Perón, actress Greta Garbo and American-born Greek opera singer Maria Callas. His first of two marriages was at age 40 to 17-year-old Tina Livanos, daughter of another shipping magnate. It came to an end after 14 years in 1960 due to his infidelities, particularly with Maria Callas. Tina’s second marriage was to John Spencer-Churchill who became 11th Duke of Marlborough, grandson of Winston’s cousin ‘Sunny’, 9th Duke of Marlborough. Her third marriage was to Stavros Niarchos, her sister’s ex-husband and Onassis’s shipping rival.

Jackie Kennedy’s sister Lee (nee Bouvier; Princess Radziwill by marriage into the Polish royal family) became friends with Onassis, to the extent that the Washington Post wrote in 1963, ‘Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?’3 John F. Kennedy (‘JFK’) and his brother Bobby disliked Onassis; JFK described him as a ‘pirate’.4 After the death of Jackie’s newborn Patrick in August 1963, Lee invited the grief-stricken Jackie to spend some time with her on Onassis’s yacht, which she did for four weeks. The Kennedy brothers protested but acquiesced in the hope that she would help to extricate Lee from Onassis.

JFK was assassinated in November 1963, then Bobby in June 1968. Jackie wrote, ‘They’re killing Kennedys in America’5 and feared for the safety of her children. She found solace in Onassis’s attention and 75-strong security force. He had visited her several times in New York and she had cruised again on his yacht in the Virgin Islands in May 1968. They married in a small ceremony on Ari’s private Greek island Skorpios in October 1968, followed by a lavish reception on Christina O.

Lee was shocked but attended the wedding. US headlines included, ‘Jackie, how could you?’6 The couple did not share many interests, and Ari may have taken up again with Maria Callas soon afterwards. They remained married until Ari’s death in 1975, after which Jackie became the partner of diamond merchant and power-broker Maurice Tempelsman from 1980 until her death in 1994.

Churchill met John F. Kennedy on Onassis’s yacht in 1958, after which Jackie Kennedy said that perhaps Churchill thought JFK was one of the waiters.

JFK (also known as ‘Jack’) was an admirer of Churchill, reading his books from an early age and quoting him later in his speeches. In 1939, he stayed in London with his father Joe Kennedy, US ambassador to the UK, to research his Harvard dissertation Appeasement at Munich (1940). The subtitle disclosed his view that the Munich agreement was The Inevitable Result of the Slowness of Conversion of the British Democracy from a Disarmament to a Rearmament Policy. He ascribed the appeasement to the collective British political system rather than to any invididual.

JFK attended the visitors’ gallery at the House of Commons and was struck by one of Churchill’s speeches. Likewise, Jackie was thrilled to see Churchill at a Buckingham Palace garden party in 1948 while she was a visiting student, returning to the back of the queue to shake his hand a second time (she was still Jackie Bouvier at the time, marrying JFK in 1953).

In 1958, when JFK was a senator, he and Jackie were staying in Cannes when Churchill was on the Christina O. in Monte Carlo. They visited him on board, but it was late in the day and Churchill, now 83, was low on concentration. The conversation was rather muddled. JFK was wearing a white tuxedo and Jackie said to him afterwards, ‘Maybe he thought you were the waiter, Jack.’7

In 1961, Churchill travelled with Onassis on the Christina O. to New York, where it moored on the Hudson River. JFK, now president, invited Churchill to Washington, but Churchill’s private secretary Anthony Montague Browne declined the invitation, explaining that Churchill could not make the journey due to poor health.

In 1963, JFK announced Churchill’s honorary US citizenship, praising his courage, commitment to freedom and way with words (see Kay Halle and Ed Murrow). JFK’s father had recently had a stroke and watched the outdoor ceremony through a White House window, perhaps regretting his pro-appeasement stance, for which he was recalled from his UK ambassadorship by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941.

A legend has developed about ‘the Onassis curse’, due to various family tragedies.

Onassis’s mother Penelope died of kidney failure in her thirties when Onassis was a young boy. When he was 16, he lost four uncles, an aunt and a cousin in the great fire of Smyrna (now İzmir) at the end of the Greco-Turkish war. His son Alexander died in 1973, aged 24, after a plane crash in Greece. Enquiries found that the aileron cables had been negligently reversed, causing the aircraft to turn the opposite way to the direction intended. Aristotle believed that this was a deliberate action instigated by the CIA and the head of the Greek military junta.

The following year, Onassis’s ex-wife Tina died of fluid on the lungs, aged 45, although her death has sometimes been attributed to a drug overdose. A year later, Onassis himself died, still heartbroken from his son’s death. He had a neuromuscular illness and suffered respiratory failure, aged 69, in the American Hospital of Paris, where Churchill’s ex-daughter-in-law Pamela Harriman also died, 22 years later.

In 1988, Onassis’s daughter Christina died aged 37 from a heart attack caused by fluid on the lungs. She had had four marriages, all ending in divorce. She was buried next to her father and brother on Skorpios. Her stepbrother Konstantin Niarchos, from Tina’s third marriage, died from a cocaine overdose, in 1999, aged 37.

Christina’s daughter Athina, Onassis’s last direct descendent, was three when her mother died. In 2005, she married Álvaro ‘Doda’ de Miranda, an international showjumper like her, and helped to look after the children of his ex-partner Cibele Dorsa. In 2011, Cibele committed suicide, aged 36, two months after her then partner did the same. Three years later, Doda was found by security staff in bed with a woman with whom he had had an eight-year affair; Athina divorced him in 2017. From a young age, Athina attributed her family’s problems to its wealth. At 13, she said, ‘If I burn all the money, there will be no problem. No money, no problem.’8 However, she has not burnt it yet.

Onassis’s marriage to Jackie Kennedy also linked his family to the ‘Kennedy curse’ ascribed to a number of early deaths, accidents and other incidents, including the assassinations of JFK and his brother Bobby.

Churchill broke his upper leg while staying in Onassis’s hotel in Monaco in 1962 and thought he was going to die.

One of Onassis’s Monaco properties was the elegant Hôtel de Paris where Churchill had taken to staying from 1960 instead of with Emery Reves. Just before six a.m. one morning in June 1962, Churchill’s nurse Miss Robin Powell was sitting outside his eighth-floor penthouse bedroom when she heard a crash and went in to investigate. Churchill was lying on the floor after a fall.

He was taken to a new Monaco hospital and placed in a large plaster cast. During a visit by his private secretary Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill asked for all others to be dismissed and then said to him, ‘Remember, I want to die in England. Promise me that you will see to it.’9 Montague Browne gave his assurance, although he was not sure that Churchill would survive the journey home.

An RAF Comet ambulance jet was scrambled by UK prime minister Harold Macmillan to take him to Northolt airfield in west London. During the journey, Churchill’s only comment was ‘I don’t think I’ll go back to that place. It’s unlucky. First Toby and then this.’10 He was referring to the loss of his budgie Toby through a Hôtel de Paris window in 1960.

After an operation at Middlesex Hospital, he remained there recuperating for two months. Gill Morton was assigned to him as his full-time nurse. She recalls that when she put his waste basket outside his room in the mornings, it would be descended upon by ‘vultures’11 looking for cigar butts as mementos. One of these was sold for £2000 at auction in 2015.

When he was due to be discharged, crowds waited outside the hospital. They cheered as he was carried out of the front door on a wooden chair by five uniformed men and placed in the back of an ambulance, dressed in a suit and holding a cigar. He was met by further crowds at his London home of 28 Hyde Park Gate, indicating his continuing popularity at age 87.

The Onassis fortune is now in the hands of his granddaughter Athina and the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, named after his son.

Upon his death, Onassis’s net worth was probably around half a billion US dollars (around US$2.9 billion today or £2.0 billion), which was divided between his daughter Christina (55 percent) and a charitable foundation (45 percent), after a settlement for his widow Jackie.  Christina also inherited from her mother Tina.

It is not known how much Christina left her sole child Athina when she died in 1988. The inheritance was managed by trustees and an accounting firm until she reached the age of 18 in 2003, when her father Thierry Roussel (Christina’s fourth husband) took control. Athina appointed lawyers and secured full command of her finances in exchange for a settlement for Roussel.

Athina sold Skorpios Island in 2013 to a Russian heiress for a rumoured US$150 million (£105 million). It seems that her ex-husband Doda did not benefit much from their divorce settlement. The value of her current wealth is unknown and she has no children.

Onassis’s foundation consists of a Liechtenstein-based business organisation and an Athens-based public organisation that spends 40 percent of the business profits and re-invests the rest. The public spending goes towards cultural, educational and health projects, promoting Greek culture and Hellenic studies, providing scholarships to Greek students at home and abroad, and constructing healthcare facilities, particularly for cardiac surgery.

In 2006, Athina attempted to become president of the foundation but was rebuffed. The year before, its president Stelios Papadimitriou, said, ‘This is the most prominent foundation in Greece. We are not going to turn it over to someone who has no connection with our culture, our religion, our language, or our shared experiences, and who never went to college or worked a day in her life.’12

This was partly in response to her father ignoring his custody conditions to rear her in the Greek Orthodox religion and have her become fluent in the Greek language. To avoid these, he arranged for her to make a court declaration as a 13-year-old that she ‘felt great aversion to anything Greek’.13 She appears to have made only a couple of trips to Greece since 2007.

3. Biographical summary

OccupationBusinessman
CountryGreece; Nansen passport (refugee) in early 1920s; Argentinian citizenship from 1929
CareerTelephone operator, British United River Plate Telephone Company, Buenos Aires (1923). Founded and ran a tobacco and shipping business in Argentina (mid-late 1920s). Purchased six ships (1932). Owner-operator of a large international shipping business (1930s-1970s). Commissioned world’s largest oil tanker (1938). Various other businesses including New York property (1940-1970s). Whaling business off South America (1950-56). Monaco real estate (1953-67). Operated Olympic Airways (1957-74).
Born1906 in Karataş, Smyrna, Ottoman Empire (now Karataş, İzmir, Turkey) (32 years younger than Churchill)
FatherSocrates Onassis, tobacco merchant
MotherPenelope Dologou (c.1876-1909); died age 33 of kidney failure
SiblingsSecond of two siblings:
1. Artemis (sister)(1902-81); married twice
2. Aristotle (c.1906-1975)
Two half-sisters by father’s second marriage after Penelope’s death, to Elena:
– Meropi (1911-2012)
– Kalliroi (1918-2006)
EducationEvangelical Greek School, Smyrna; commerce and port administration, Argentine Customs
SpousesAthina ‘Tina’ Livanos (1929-1974), m. 1946, div. 1960; aged 17 at marriage, Onassis 40; daughter of Stavros Livanos, shipping magnate; second husband was John Spencer-Churchill, later 11th Duke of Marlborough; Tina’s sister Eugenia married Onassis’s rival Stavros Niarchos; Niarchos was later Tina’s third husband (she was his fifth wife)Jacqueline Bouvier (1929-1994), m. 1968 until his death in 1975; formerly married to John F. Kennedy (m. 1953 until his death in 1963), US President; after Onassis, partner of Maurice Tempelsman (1980 until her death in 1994), diamond business executive and power broker
RelationshipsNumerous, including Claudia Muzio (soprano), Geraldine Spreckels (actress), Veronica Lake (actress), Evita Perón (first lady of Argentina), Greta Garbo (actress), Maria Callas (soprano)
ChildrenBy Tina:
1. Alexander (1948-73), aviation executive; died age 24 after a plane crash
2. Christina (1950-88), businesswoman and socialite; 4 marriages; 4 divorces; one child, daughter Athina, from 4th marriage to Thierry Roussel; died aged 37 from a heart attack caused by fluid on the lungs
Died1975 at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, aged 69 (10 years after Churchill); respiratory failure from neuromuscular illness
BuriedSkorpios Island, Greece (own island)
ChartwellVisitors’ Book:
Other ClubYes (1962; only attended twice)
NicknameAri, Aristo, The Golden Greek
Height5’5” (1.65m)

4. See also

French Riviera

Churchill and the Kennedys

Greek-Turkish conflict

Churchill controversies

  • Financial affairs

5. Further reading

Onassis

  • Brady, Frank, Onassis, an Extravagant Life (Prentice-Hall, 1977)
  • Evans, Peter, Ari: The Life, Times and Women of Aristotle Onassis (Penguin, 1987)
  • Onassis Foundation, ‘Aristotle Onassis’, Onassis Foundation.

Onassis’s women

  • Brandus, Paul, Jackie: Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O (Post Hill Press, 2020)
  • Gage, Nicholas, Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis (Pan, 2001)
  • Moutsatsos, Kiki Feroudi, The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1998) (Onassis’s personal assistant)

Onassis’s family and friends

  • Montague Browne, Anthony, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (Cassell, 1995) (Churchill’s cruises with Onassis)
  • Wright, William, All the Pain Money Can Buy: The Life of Christina Onassis (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

Onassis and business

  • Harlaftis, Gelina, Creating Global Shipping: Aristotle Onassis, the Vagliano Brothers, and the Business of Shipping, c.1820–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
  • Lippman, Thomas W., Crude Oil, Crude Money: Aristotle Onassis, Saudi Arabia, and the CIA (ABC-CLIO, 2019)

Miscellaneous

6. References

1. Winston S. Churchill and Clementine Churchill, Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, ed. by Mary Soames (Black Swan, 1999), p. 601.

2. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Volume 8: Never Despair, 1945–1965 (Random House, 1988), p. 1180.

3. Sam Kashner, ‘The Complicated Sisterhood of Jackie Kennedy and Lee Radziwill’, 2016.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Jessica Contrera, ‘“How Could You?” The Day Jackie Kennedy Became Jackie Onassis.’, Washington Post, 2018.

7. Thomas Maier, When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys (Crown, 2014), p. [000].

8. Joan Paulson Gage and Nicholas Gage, ‘Inside the Lonely World of Athina Onassis’, Town & Country, 2016.

9. Anthony Montague Browne, Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill’s Last Private Secretary (Cassell, 1995), p. 312.

10. Ibid.

11. Gill Morton, ‘I Was Winston Churchill’s Nurse’, The Oldie, 2018.

12. Nicholas Gage, ‘The Last Onassis’, Vanity Fair, 2005.

13. Gage and Gage.