Business, History

Ari O.

Woody Allen once said that if he was reincarnated, he would like to come back as Warren Beatty’s finger tips. Me? I’d be Ari O – Aristotle Onassis. Vulgarian. Eco-nightmare. Outsider. Rascal. Onassis crammed a lot into his 69 years and was born in ‘interesting times’ as the Chinese would say. He died rich as Croesus and made his first million dollars by the age of 25 after the unpromising start of escaping with his life in the Catastrophe of Smyrna in 1922. The combination of a great fire that raged across the city for a week and the occupation of his native Smyrna in Asia Minor by Turkish forces forced his family to flee to mainland Greece. Here, led by his entrepreneurial father (who Ari, only in his teens, saved from the Turkish firing squad), the family rebuilt their tobacco business until Ari went to Argentina to find his own fortune, teaching himself Spanish on the boat trip from Piraeus to Buenos Ares.

I have always admired those great souls in the world who re-invent themselves. The ones who triumph personally over circumstance and bend the world to their shape. Those who disregard convention and what is considered decent behaviour and forge an identity completely their own. I am drawn to these people: the Richard Burtons of this world. The Michael Caines. The Vito Corleones. The Ari Onassis. Onassis was half shade, half light. He enjoyed both facets of his character. It is what makes him so fascinating as a man and so attractive to so many women. He welcomed that duality, that Janus faced humanity and was shameless about it. He would say that he was a mere peasant so must be forgiven for his outbursts and vulgar speech. This disarming honesty was also charming and sexy – here was a man so self-confident he could be totally honest about who he was.

The Onassis Family yacht is available to charter for the summer | Tatler
Burton and Taylor – the archetypes of modern celebrity on board the Christina with Ari

For those on the wrong side of his business dealings, it made him scurrilous, untrustworthy, sly. It also made him shrewd, sharp and cunning in search of a deal and profit – two things he was legendarily brilliant at creating. For those on the wrong side of his egocentricity, he was faithless, cheating and selfish. But he could also be thoughtful and caring – a regular guest on his iconic yacht, Christina O, was Winston Churchill, then in his incontinent dotage. Ari looked after him and his needs personally and welcomed him aboard whenever the Great Man wanted a voyage.

Churchill – a regular visitor

Onassis stories are legion. He has been depicted in film and attracted controversy and headlines in both serious national newspapers and in the celebrity gossip magazines. He married the heiress to another shipping fortune – and lost that wife to his arch shipping rival, Stavros Niarchos, after she tired of his affairs. He pulled off the marriage coup of the C20th by convincing JFK’s widow, Jackie, then the most eligible woman in the world, to become Jackie O. Perhaps unwisely as her spending habits shocked even this paragon of generosity. And the great love of his life was La Divina herself, the American born Greek soprano, Maria Callas.

La Divina

But my favourite story about Onassis is not about women. It is not about business. It is about the nature of the man. His approach to those who opposed him. Much of his business life and all of his relationships were characterised by huge drama. The anti-Trust suit brought against the Onassis shipping line by the US Government; the failed deal of the century struck with the Kingdom of Saudi that went sour; the controversy over his rapacious and indiscriminate whaling activities in defiance of the law. His troubled relationships with his children and the seemingly loveless mismatch with Jackie Kennedy – was she just a bauble to signal acceptance by the establishment? I don’t envy him any of these heartaches, even though – a mark of the man – he shrugged them all off stoicly and even revelled in the notoriety some of them brought. And I certainly don’t envy him having to bury his beloved son, Alexander, who died at the controls in a plane crash – a tragedy the tycoon never recovered from and which broke his heart.

No. None of these stories.

You member? No. Me owner.

I like this story, the story about Onassis buying the Monte Carlo Casino. The casino in Monte Carlo is famous. Not just because James Bond plays there. In its heyday, it was the most glamorous place in the world. The Czarina of all the Russias brought the Imperial Russian Ballet to dance whilst she gambled and an aggrieved patron lobbed a hand grenade on to one of the tables after losing at roulette. There is even a song about the place: The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
With an independent air
You can hear the girls declare
“He must be a Millionaire.”
You can hear them sigh and wish to die
You can see them wink the other eye
At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo

Fred Gilbert 1892

Onassis wanted offices in the Mediterranean and he had struck up a friendship with Prince Rainier, the ruler of Monaco (Onassis pretty much paid for Rainier’s wedding to the movie star Grace Kelly and the after party was held on Onassis’s yacht). Naturally, he turned to Monte Carlo as the intended location. The Societe des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Strangers (Sea Bathing Society and Foreigners Club) controlled the casino and about a third of all land in the principality, but they rejected Onassis’s request to rent office space. So Onassis bought them. And moved in.

How brilliant. How magnificently one up. Churlish. Vain. Couldn’t make it up. Revenge against the establishment’s snobbery and antipathy to an outsider. But also, good business and very good new business – Ari used his connection with Ranier to stitch up the deal behind the SBM board’s back. He out established the establishment. He had better allies than they did and totally outmanoeuvred their Machiavellian ruse. It is the stuff of movie plots, of third rate novels, and yet, like so much of Onassis’ larger than life life, it happened. Onassis was, for real, the man that broke the bank at Monte Carlo.

Pad in Antibes

Ari had homes in Paris, New York, Montevideo and Antibes. But his home was a converted Canadian Navy anti-submarine frigate which had protected North Atlantic convoys in the war and also been at the D-Day landings: the Christina O. She was converted by Onassis to be a combined pleasure palace and office and she represented his character more completely than any of his other hideaways. With 17 cabins she could handle parties for over 150 people and had some breathtaking innovations: a Roman mosaic tiled swimming pool which had a floor to conceal the pool when the space was needed for entertaining and a bar where the stools were covered in whale foreskin. Onassis delighted in telling his female guests that they were now sitting on the largest cock in the world.

It was this coarse vulgarity that both attracted people to him and repelled them. The man himself just laughed, whatever the reaction.

Onassis did life superbly well. He witnessed everything he knew go up in flames as a boy and arrived from Anatolia in Turkey to Athens in Greece as a refugee. He learnt to speak seven languages fluently. He was diminutive in size but his presence and influence were immense. He partied and joked and flirted and fucked, collected art and artefacts, spoilt his children and consorts, amassed wealth akin to Roman Emperors. He counted the good and the great as personal friends and had everything at his fingertips and whim. But he also worked like a demon, in the wee small hours, labouring through the night until dawn after all his guests had partied out and gone to bed. He was inexhaustible. He was alive with life. He was all that a man is – both the terrible rage and ruthlessness as well as the fun and light heartedness. His command of details was ferocious and even if he was bettered, he would usually turn setback to his profit – if not financially then karmically.

I like largesse. I like flamboyance – when done stylishly and without having to be the centre of attention personally. These were Onassis’ qualities. A barrel chested force of nature. Brilliant. Unstoppable. International. Fast. Impatient. Wily. Terrific company. An enjoyer. Entirely self-made. Scion of Greece. A Greek. A man. Aristotle Socrates Onassis. Hero.

Happy – Onassis and his great love, La Divina Maria Callas

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