Let me tell you something about money.
About real money. The kind that doesn't keep a tally of itself and the curious effect it has on daughters. It makes them luminous. It makes them reckless. It makes them, in the particular case of Stavros Livanos, into two of the most coveted women in the world, both of whom would be married to the same man. Not simultaneously, naturally. Though with that set, one never entirely rules it out.
Stavros Livanos.
THE Stavros Livanos, to be precise.
Patriarch, shipping magnate, Greek national monument in a suit who built one of the great maritime fortunes of the twentieth century in the quiet and unremarkable way that very rich Greeks tend to accumulate such things: methodically, and with a genius for being underestimated. His tankers crossed every ocean worth crossing. His money sat in every bank worth trusting. And his daughters, well, his daughters were another kind of fleet entirely.
There were two of them, Eugenia and Tina, born in the 1920s into a world that was already organizing itself around their convenience. Eugenia first, in 1926, and then Tina, christened Athina, in 1929, the year the American stock market collapsed and took with it any lingering pretense that the world was orderly or fair.
The Livanos family did not notice.
Their world was neither orderly nor fair either, but it was considerably more comfortable.
They grew up between London and the Côte d'Azur, educated in the manner of Greek shipping heiresses, which is to say impeccably. Their English immaculate, their French flirtatious, and their Greek reserved for family arguments of a truly spectacular register. They were trained, without anyone explicitly saying so, for exactly what became of them: magnificent marriages to magnificent men, conducted in the full, unblinking gaze of the international press.
(One must pause here to acknowledge a certain architectural irony: Stavros Livanos, a man who spent his life moving cargo across oceans, produced daughters who would themselves be endlessly transported, from villa to yacht to château to divorce court by the wealthiest men alive. There is probably a metaphor in there somewhere. He would not have appreciated it.)
Eugenia was the elder, and the elder sisters of legend always carry a particular quality. Something watchful behind the eyes, something that had already assessed the room before you noticed she'd entered. She was, by all accounts, beautiful in a way that photographs never quite captured: dark-eyed, composed, with the kind of calmness that in certain lights reads as serenity and in others as the absolute certainty that she holds all the cards.
In 1947, at twenty-one, she married Stavros Niarchos. Which, if you are keeping a list of consequential decisions made by the beautiful people in the 1940s, should be very near the top.
Niarchos at the time was thirty-seven, self-made in the most operatic sense of the term, already rich enough to be called eccentric, and possessed of the particular magnetism of a man who has decided that the normal rules simply do not apply to him. He had originally come to Stavros Livanos asking for Tina’s hand. Her father told him to wait. In the interval, and one suspects this is not entirely coincidental, he married Eugenia instead. History, as ever, had a sense of humor about these things, as you will see, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
They were, for a while, genuinely happy.
Or something close enough to it that the difference would have been imperceptible from the deck of their yacht. They had four children, Philip, Spyros, Konstantinos, and Maria. All raised at the particular altitude of the very rich: private islands, school terms in several countries, and the innate understanding that the world beyond their circumstances was theoretical at best. He repaid her, somewhere in the middle of all this, with an affair with Pamela Churchill.
Then, in 1965, a Mexican divorce followed by a marriage to Henry Ford II’s daughter Charlotte, which tells you something about the company Niarchos kept and the uses to which he put it. That marriage lasted two years. Then he came back to Eugenia, and Eugenia, well, she let him. One does not spend too long wondering why. One looks at the island, and the alternatives, and one moves on.
On the night of May 3rd, 1970, a maid found Eugenia on the bedroom floor of their Spetsopoula villa, deep in a coma, an empty bottle of Seconal nearby. Niarchos summoned a doctor from Athens by helicopter. By the time the doctor arrived, it was two in the morning. Half an hour later, Eugenia was dead.
She was forty-three.
The doctor declined to sign the death certificate. The police noted bruises on her throat and abdomen. The autopsy added her head and chest to the inventory. The public prosecutor in Piraeus recommended Niarchos be charged with fatally injuring his wife.
An inquiry was conducted but the Livanos family stood by Niarchos. The bruising, they maintained, had occurred when he attempted to revive her. There are those who believe he was ultimately exonerated less by the evidence than by his closeness to the ruling military junta. This settled the matter officially, in the way such matters are settled among people with enough money and enough friends in the right places to determine what is and is not settled.
And then there is the other story.
The one that surfaces only in accounts attributed to those who floated in the same orbit and have never been named.
That Tina was on the island. That Eugenia had found Niarchos attempting to force himself upon her younger sister.
That what followed was not a woman alone with her pills, but something considerably louder and more terrible.
Eugenia was buried quietly in Lausanne, Switzerland. The inquiry was closed. Everyone agreed it was very sad, and moved on to the next island, the next season, the next thing.
Now. Tina.
If Eugenia was a still lake — deep, reflective, impossible to stir without effort — then Tina was something considerably more volatile. A river in a canyon. A fire in a ballroom. She was the younger by seven years and she arrived, always, with the particular energy of someone who has spent her whole life slightly impatient to be wherever she isn't yet.
She was spectacular. Photographs from the 1950s show a woman of genuinely startling beauty, blonde which surprised everyone given her origins, blue-eyed, with cheekbones that a sculptor would have wept over and a laugh that, according to everyone who heard it, preceded her into rooms. She was petite and she was radiant and she wore clothes the way that certain women do, as if the clothes had been waiting their whole lives for exactly this assignment.
In 1946 (she was seventeen, which tells you everything you need to know about the pace at which this world moved), Tina married Aristotle Onassis. Niarchos had asked for her first, it should be noted. He had approached Stavros Livanos directly, with the directness of a man used to closing deals, and was told, politely but firmly, that the elder daughter must marry before the younger. So Niarchos waited — and then married Eugenia. Meanwhile, Onassis arrived, and Onassis did not wait at all: he pursued Tina for years, with gifts and yacht trips and a persistence that could be viewed as romantic or alarming depending on your tolerance for Greek shipping magnates, and in 1946 he won.
Tina and Onassis had two children. Alexander in 1948 and Christina in 1950, both of whom inherited their father's intensity and their mother's composure in combinations that would ultimately prove catastrophic for each of them. But that is another story, or rather several other stories, each one darker and more operatic than the last.
The marriage functioned beautifully for awhile but darling, even beautiful things eventually run their course. The proximate cause of its failure was Maria Callas, but Callas was less a cause than a symptom: of a man constitutionally incapable of monogamy, and of a woman who had finally, at thirty-one, decided she was done performing the part of the patient wife. Callas and Onassis had been conducting their affair with a lack of discretion that had become, by 1959, essentially a public event. Tina endured it with a dignity that must have taken considerable internal engineering and then, in 1960, she stopped enduring it.
It is impossible to write accurately about this world without writing about the yachts. They are not incidental. They are, in fact, the setting. The floating principalities in which the drama of these lives was conducted, largely out of reach of jurisdiction, occasionally out of reach of common sense.
Onassis had the Christina O, named for his daughter and fitted out with a bar whose stools were upholstered in, and I want you to take this in for a moment, whale foreskin. He was enormously proud of this detail. He pointed it out to guests. He was, for all his genius, a man who occasionally pointed at whale foreskin and expected admiration.
Niarchos countered with the Creole, a three-masted schooner of such beauty that it genuinely deserved the word magnificent, and then the Atlantis, because one beautiful yacht when your rival has a beautiful yacht is simply insufficient. The arms race between these two men, in yachts, in islands (Onassis bought Skorpios; Niarchos bought Spetsopoula), in art, in celebrity, in sheer accumulated splendor, was one of the sustained aesthetic events of the postwar decades, and Tina and Eugenia were its most elegant participants.
The sisters moved through this world with the ease of women who have never known any other, which is both a great privilege and, one suspects, a great limitation. When you have always had everything, the loss of any particular thing carries a disproportionate weight. Not because you are ungrateful (though perhaps you are, a little) but because the architecture of your life has been built without any load-bearing walls, and so when something gives, the whole structure trembles.
Tina divorced Onassis in 1960. What she did next was unexpected in the particular way that only very beautiful women with very good instincts can manage. She reinvented herself as an English aristocrat. In October 1961, she married John Spencer-Churchill, the Marquess of Blandford, heir to the dukedom of Marlborough, heir to Blenheim Palace, heir to one of the most extravagant titles in England, a man who would, in time, inherit all of it and become the eleventh Duke of Marlborough. Tina, for the decade of their marriage, was therefore styled the Marchioness of Blandford, and then, when the old duke died and the titles cascaded downward as they do in England, with the gravity of very old money, she would have become the Duchess of Marlborough.
Blenheim Palace.
Tina had arrived, if arrival is still the word when you have been circling the summit your entire life, at Blenheim Palace. She was not, by most accounts, content in it. Blenheim Palace is many things: historic, vast, overwhelming in the manner of institutions built to communicate power rather than comfort but it is not, perhaps, what a sun-loving Greek girl from the Côte d'Azur had in mind when she imagined happiness.
The marriage lasted a decade, until 1971. One has the impression, reading between the lines of the extremely discreet press coverage of the period, that it had stopped functioning considerably before it officially ended.
And here is where the story curdles, slightly, in the way that stories about very rich people occasionally do when the money has insulated everyone from the ordinary correctives of shame and judgment.
In October 1971, only months after her divorce from Marlborough was finalized, Tina married Stavros Niarchos.
Her late sister's husband. Her former brother-in-law.
The man who had, thirty years prior, asked her father for her hand before being redirected toward Eugenia, and who had apparently been patient in the intervening decades in ways that were only now becoming clear.
There are many things one could say about this. Society said most of them, at considerable volume and in several languages. The Greek press was incandescent. The European press was incredulous. The English press was the English press, which is to say it managed to be simultaneously prurient and reproachful in the same sentence. The Onassis camp (and there was, absolutely, an Onassis camp, there was always an Onassis camp) regarded the marriage as a provocation of almost geometric precision. Tina had, in marrying Niarchos, handed her ex-husband's greatest rival a victory of a peculiarly personal kind. Onassis himself opposed it openly. Their son Alexander, opposed it. The opposition, it should be noted, accomplished nothing whatsoever.
The Livanos family gave their blessing publicly, which functioned as an absolution, a signal that they did not hold Niarchos responsible for Eugenia's death, whatever the questions that had swirled around it. Whether this absolution was sincere or strategic or simply the path of least resistance in a world where everyone already knew everyone is a question one is not positioned to answer.
Why she did it is a question that admits of several answers, none of them entirely satisfying.
Love perhaps, as Niarchos was, whatever else he was, compelling, and he had wanted her first.
Grief perhaps, as Eugenia's death had devastated her, and Niarchos was a man who had known Eugenia too, in his way. Or something darker and less articulable: the pull of a world so hermetically sealed that its members could really only orbit each other, over and over, until someone died.
Tina died in 1974. She was forty-five years old, found in the bedroom of the Niarchos suite at the Hôtel de Chanaleilles in Paris. The official cause was pulmonary edema. She had been, in her final years, increasingly unwell. There were whispers of barbiturates, of a fragility that the decades of performance had never quite concealed, of a woman whose scaffolding had finally become load-bearing and then buckled.
And before Paris, there was, of course, Athens. On January 23, 1973, Alexander, Tina’s son with Aristotle, twenty-four years old and recently made President of Olympic Aviation, died from injuries sustained when his amphibious Piaggio aircraft crashed on the runway at Hellinikon Airport. He had been unconscious from the moment of impact.
He never woke up.
He was buried on Skorpios, his father’s island, under the shade of olive trees, in a place that had once been paradise and was now something else entirely. Tina was photographed at the chapel in Athens where the body was received, standing beside Niarchos, composed as she had always been, as composure was the one inheritance none of her husbands had managed to strip from her.
But there are losses that performance cannot metabolize. She had been at a distance from her children for years. The divorce, the remarriages, the geography of the very rich is its own kind of estrangement.
But a mother’s grief does not require proximity. Alexander’s death had deeply affected her in ways that the social calendar could not absorb, that Niarchos money could not insulate against. She had outlived a marriage, a sister, a name. Now she had outlived a child.
(Within a twenty-nine-month period, the almost entire immediate family would be gone.
Alexander first. Then Tina.
Then Aristotle, destroyed by grief and myasthenia gravis, following his son into the ground in March 1975.
Christina would be left to stand in the wreckage of it, inheriting everything, debts to sorrow, until 1988, when her body was found by her maid in the bathtub of a mansion outside of Buenos Aires, where she had been staying. An autopsy found that Onassis had died of a heart attack caused by acute pulmonary edema.
The circumstances of Tina’s death generated the kind of press coverage that money can suppress but not entirely eliminate. Niarchos had been at the center of controversy before; Eugenia's death in 1970 had prompted a Greek investigation, though no charges were ever filed, and now, again, the questions circled. Nothing was ever proven because nothing, in that world, ever quite was. Christina Onassis, Tina's daughter, sued Niarchos for her mother's estate, claiming the marriage should be annulled under Greek law. The lawsuit went the way of most lawsuits involving very rich people and very good lawyers: that is to say, expensively and sideways.
What one is left with is something that doesn't quite fit the category of tragedy, though it borrows the word.
They had everything. Genuinely everything.
The beauty, the money, the access, the husbands, the yachts, the islands, the palaces. They were not oppressed. They were not victims in any simple sense. They were something more complicated and, in its way, more melancholy: women of enormous capacity for life who had been placed in a gilded environment so total that their capacity had nowhere particular to go.
Eugenia chose stillness and was consumed by circumstance. Tina chose motion and was consumed by velocity. Between the two of them, they had been married six times, to a roster including the two most powerful Greeks alive, and an English duke, and they had done it all with a style so absolute that it feels almost operatic in its ruin.
I think about the Livanos sisters the way I think about certain very beautiful and very expensive things that were made to last and then, somehow, didn't. The fault is never entirely in the object. It is in the handling. It is in the company kept, and these two kept the worst possible company, which is to say the kind of men who love enormously and selfishly and leave behind, always, a wake.
Stavros Livanos died in 1963, having watched his fleet cross every ocean and his bloodline do the same. One imagines him at the end: still composed, still assessing, the shipping magnate who had once looked at his two daughters and seen futures so bright they were nearly blinding.
He was not wrong about that. He was simply wrong about how long the brightness would hold.
But then, darling, that's the thing about the very rich and the very beautiful.
They do not come with guarantees.
They come with yachts. They come with diamonds. They come with names that attach themselves to history like barnacles to a hull.
They come, and they shine, and then they go.
And we, the rest of us, who were never invited onto any of those yachts, have the considerable consolation of watching the whole thing and knowing that the view from down here was probably better than the view from up there.
Probably.
Comments
Post a Comment