An explosive new book by DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan reveals the scandals that dogged Jackie Kennedy’s life after JFK’s death.
On Friday, in the Mail’s first exclusive extract from ‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’, Callahan revealed untold secrets of JFK’s assassination in 1963 and his insatiable sexual appetite.
Now, in a new extract, Callahan explores Jackie’s marriage to her ‘gnome-like vulgarian’ second husband Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping billionaire.
Here we detail the extract’s ten most shocking revelations, from Aristotle’s secret bisexuality, to Jackie’s years-long affair with JFK’s married brother Bobby, and her hospitalization with an eating disorder:
Callahan explores Jackie’s scandalous marriage to her ‘gnome-like vulgarian’ second husband Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping billionaire.
1.
After JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Jackie and her dead husband’s brother Bobby bonded over their ‘shared trauma’ and embarked on a ‘years-long affair’ with the pair spotted ‘dining out in New York City, openly kissing and cuddling.’
The affair came to an end when Bobby made his presidential bid in 1968. It is not clear whether Bobby’s wife Ethel ever knew.
2.
Jackie’s second husband, Aristotle Onassis — who she she married in 1968 — was bisexual and ‘had a string of bought-and-paid-for young men, some of whom he savagely beat after sex,’ Callahan reveals.
3.
The former First Lady ‘negotiated 170 clauses in her marriage contract’ with Onassis, including rules on how often she would have sex with him. For her hand, Onassis paid Jackie ‘$3 million upfront and $1 million for each of her children’.
4.
Throughout their six year marriage, Onassis often treated Jackie ‘like a prostitute’ summoning her from New York to Greece ‘at a moment’s notice, to remind her, he said, of ‘what she really was.’
Onassis was an exhibitionist who ‘loved to have sex with [Jackie] in places where people could see them’ including ‘behind a first-class curtain and in a tender tethered to his yacht,’ Callahan writes.
Throughout their six year marriage, Onassis often treated Jackie ‘like a prostitute’ summoning her from New York to Greece ‘at a moment’s notice, to remind her, he said, of ‘what she really was.’ (Pictured: Jackie swimming in Italy, 1962).
5.
Cradling JFK’s head in her lap in the seconds after he was shot and killed in 1963 left Jackie with ‘permanent nerve damage’ and ‘excruciating, pulsating pain in her neck’ from which she never recovered.
6.
In 1971, Jackie started seeing psychiatrist Dr. Marianne Kris, who diagnosed her with PTSD — caused by both the trauma of JFK’s assassination itself and his ‘constant infidelities’.
7.
After the National Enquirer ran a front page featuring a picture of Jackie with her belly ‘looking distended’ and headlined, ‘Is she or isn’t she expecting?’, she ‘went on a crash starvation diet’, eating so little that she ‘lost 24 pounds in nine days’ and ‘wound up in the hospital’, Callahan reveals.
The former First Lady ‘negotiated 170 clauses in her marriage contract’ with Onassis, including rules on how often she would have sex with him. For her hand, Onassis paid Jackie ‘$3 million upfront and $1 million for each of her children’.
8.
When Onassis’s 24-year-old son Alexander died in a plane crash in 1973, he blamed Jackie, viewing her as the ‘living embodiment of the Kennedy Curse’. One time he ‘hit Jackie in the face and gave her a black eye.’
9.
Whenever Jackie feared Onassis was cheating on her with opera singer Maria Callas, she ‘started flashing his credit cards in the world’s most expensive department’. She would buy ‘doubles and triples’ of items, ‘reselling half her purchases and pocketing the cash,’ Callahan reveals.
10.
Jackie insisted that staff washed and ironed her bed linens — ’12 pairs of hand-embroidered Italian pink sheets’ — ‘every morning and every afternoon, after her daily nap.’