Christina Onassis inherited the most famous private fortune in the world at twenty-four years old. She ran it competently, expanded it strategically, and proved that her father had been right to train her as his successor. None of that saved her.
After the $26 million settlement with Jackie, Christina took control of the Onassis shipping empire. By most accounts she was sharp, decisive, and serious about the business. She relocated the company's operations, managed a fleet that spanned continents, and navigated the volatile shipping markets of the late 1970s and 1980s with the instincts her father had spent years building in her.
But the business was the only part of her life that held.
She married four times. Every marriage failed. Her first husband was an American real estate developer twenty-seven years her senior — her father cut off her trust fund in protest and pressured her until the marriage collapsed after nine months. Her second was a Greek shipping heir, married shortly after Aristotle's death, gone within fourteen months. Her third was Sergei Kauzov, a Soviet shipping agent whose background was unusual enough that Western intelligence services flagged the relationship. That marriage lasted roughly two years. Her fourth husband was a French businessman named Thierry Roussel. He fathered two children with his long-term mistress during the marriage. He didn't stop when Christina found out.
She was diagnosed with clinical depression at thirty. Her doctors prescribed barbiturates, amphetamines, and sleeping pills. She became dependent on all of them. She was hospitalized for overdose at least once during the 1970s. She went on crash diets that stripped weight rapidly, then regained it when the depression returned. She paid friends as much as thirty thousand dollars a month simply to clear their schedules and spend time with her.
By 1988 she had one thing she had wanted her entire life — a daughter, Athina, born in 1985 from her marriage to Roussel. She was trying to build something around that. She was in Argentina, staying with friends outside Buenos Aires, reportedly considering starting over there.
On November 19th, her maid found her unresponsive in the bathtub of the Dodero family home in Tortuguitas. The official cause of death was pulmonary edema — fluid in the lungs, heart failure. The Argentine judge handling the case stated publicly that he could not rule out the role of barbiturates or amphetamines. Greek press reporting from December 1988, drawing on autopsy results, confirmed large quantities of barbiturates in her system.
She was thirty-seven years old.
Her body was flown to Skorpios. She was buried in the family plot beside her father and her brother — the two people she had spent her entire adult life grieving. Her $250 million fortune passed to Athina, who was three years old.
Jackie Kennedy was fifty-nine and living in her Fifth Avenue apartment. She would live another six years, working as a book editor, attending cultural events, remaining one of the most recognized women in the world.
She outlived Christina Onassis by six years.
Jackie walked into the Onassis family in 1968 with nothing but leverage and walked out in 1975 with $26 million, a famous name, and her life intact. Christina was born into that family and it consumed everything she had.
