 |
| Christina Onassis |
All the Pain that Money can buy: The Story of Christina Onassis by William Wright
It is axiomatic that wealth cannot purchase genuine joy, and exploitative predators will feign affection in hopes of financial gain. Still, it is hard to fathom what profound insecurity led the daughter of the affluent Aristotle Onassis to allow herself to have been subjected to the series of friends, lovers and husbands described in this biography.Born in 1950, her parents’ divorce in 1960 may have deprived Christina of the stability of a strong family unit. Her mother’s later death, due to a somewhat suspect drug overdose, resulting in her bequeathing her large fortune to Onassis, may have left Christina with a mistrust of men, while creating a depthless void for a female anchor.
This search was shown when, during a party in her early twenties, Christina pleaded with a female stranger, nearly twenty years her senior, to be her friend. False friends seemed to pervade her existence. At one point, hospitalized to an emotional breakdown, one supposed friend visited her to request a significant financial loan. When Christina explained she felt unable to reach any such decision before her recovery and release, this “friend” persisted until Christina succumbed consequent to complete exhaustion. Later, she was forced to bring court action in order to have this money returned.
A further hurdle lay in what the fashion world viewed as her failure to morph into the expected mystique of wealthy women. In a mean-spirited jibe, comedienne Joan Rivers sneered that while women without much money were allowed to be overweight and frumpish, heiresses such as Christina Onassis ought to be slim and elegant. In an effort to keep her weight within bounds, Christina substituted tablets of various kinds to provide her with those pleasures her peers gained from alcohol. It seems she took a great many.
Not surprisingly, Christina’s romantic life reflected its other aspects of chaos. Due to space limitations, we will focus here on her final 1984 marriage to businessman Thierry Roussel. Shortly after their marriage, Thierry prevailed upon Christina to allow his “former” mistress, a Swedish model called “Gaby” by whom he had fathered two children before his union with Christina, to move into a guest house on her estate.
In a gesture of deep compassion, Christina agreed. Predictably, although ostensibly as a platonic arrangement, Thierry soon began to persuade Christina that while she had her guests and hired help for companionship during the night, Gaby would be desolate. One dinner guest, appalled at this ruse, felt helpless to intervene; it needed to be Christina’s decision, however demeaning.
While interpretations differ, it seems Christina divorced Thierry after learning he had conceived a child with Gaby after Christina had married and trusted him. After their divorce, the reasons for Christina’s death will always remain obscure. By that time, her weight and other physical limitations had compelled her to use a wheelchair, ideally on a temporary basis.
During a stay at a friend’s mansion in Argentina, her maid found she had died in the bath. The most probable reasons for her death were an amalgam of weight gain, lack of mobility, and the large amount of tablets she had been ingesting each day for years. Physicians diagnosed its cause as a cardiac arrest.
Having finished this often heart-wrenching book, I was left with a sense that Christina had detached herself from any major concern as to living or dying. While not suicidal as such, she had grown apathetic as the consequences of her constant drug-taking.
