This is the second book I’ve read recently which, though a novel, had me scrolling Google Images. The first was about Lady Diana Spencer, a fashion icon, who married fame and found infidelity and tragedy. JACKIE AND MARIA is much the same in tone. We meet Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Aristotle Onassis, Maria Callas, and the entourage of characters great and small who populated their lives.
Jackie Kennedy, giving up any future career to marry John Kennedy, an upcoming charismatic young politician, doesn’t know what she is getting into. The press scorns her because she visits a supermarket on her husband’s glad-handing tour and has to ask women what the jobs are locally – mining - and she dresses in smart French instead of American fashions.
An elderly Winston Churchill and his wife are dinner guests on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, off the Greek islands. Churchill is getting senile and hardly knows where he is. This is just an example of the behaviour of the Greek shipping tycoon, a self-made man with a lot more fame and fortune in his sights. Maria Callas, already a famed Greek operatic soprano, is impressed and easily swept off her feet. Aristotle is married with kids, but he doesn’t let that stop him from having lovers. His wife eventually leaves, and Maria moves into the yacht. She thinks Ari will marry her next. However, the reader can easily understand that Ari just wants the cultured society and half-American identity Maria brings. He never has any intention of marrying his mistress.
I learned some interesting facts about the shipping tycoon, who went almost penniless to Argentina as a lad and made his way with investments instead of education. The focus of the story is on the two women, though; we read of Jackie’s lost children and a fictional, mirroring lost child of Maria’s. As this is set before I was born, I only know of the Kennedys from later reports, and it was very interesting to read of the early days, redecorating the White House and changing the way it handled entertaining guests, for instance. The tragedy in Dallas is hard to read and the scene will haunt many readers. No wonder we are shown Jackie with PTSD, barely understood in those days. A leaping press photographer with flash is enough to terrify her. In the aftermath of the second Kennedy assassination, she is so terrified for her children that she decides to leave Washington and go to live with someone who can provide security for her, Aristotle. Sadly, this means Maria has to be given the boot.
Looking at the press photos, I can’t understand what any of them saw in Aristotle. I also think our ideals of beautiful women have changed, due to more films and advertising. This story enables us to compare and contrast these two accomplished ladies. I admire Maria more, due to her career; but my admiration stops when she falls back into the old pattern rather than find a new man who genuinely deserves her. I understand Angelina Jolie has played Maria in a dramatisation of her life. Gill Paul has woven fiction into the fact, with salacious detail and notes on everything from meals to jewelry. JACKIE AND MARIA is well worth a read to catch up on modern history and learn about the lives of the rich and famous.
From the #1 bestselling author of The Secret Wife comes a story of love, passion, and tragedy as the lives of Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas are intertwined--and they become the ultimate rivals, in love with the same man.
The President's Wife; a Glamorous Superstar; the rivalry that shook the world...
Jackie Kennedy was beautiful, sophisticated, and contemplating leaving her ambitious young senator husband. Life in the public eye with an overly ambitious--and unfaithful--man who could hardly be coaxed to return from a vacation after the birth of a stillborn child was breaking her spirit. So when she's offered a holiday on the luxurious yacht owned by billionaire Ari Onassis, she says yes...to a meeting that will ultimately change her life.
Maria Callas is at the height of her operatic career and widely considered to be the finest soprano in the world. And then she's introduced to Aristotle Onassis, the world’s richest man and her fellow Greek. Stuck in a childless, sexless marriage, and with pressures on all sides from opera house managers and a hostile press, she finds her life being turned upside down by this hyper-intelligent and impeccably charming man...
Little by little, Maria’s and Jackie’s lives begin to overlap, and they come closer and closer until everything they know about the world changes on a dime.
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