Aristotle Onassis, late at night, over an emptying whiskey bottle, liked to talk about Fate. In fanciful moments he would see himself as Odysseus, the seafarer, who mingled with the Gods on his wonderful journey. But he also believed in hubris, which is Greek for the pride that goeth before a fall. His second wife, the former Jacqueline Kennedy, told a friend Ari would sometimes peer under the bed, on the lookout for evil spirits (though a guest on his yacht, the Christina, who once found a listening device in his suite suggests the wily magnate would simply have been checking for bugs).

Christina, Ari's daughter, was heiress to his unhandsome looks and his tanker fleet, but not to his charm or his dreams. And she knew, from the celebrity magazines that made up most of her reading, and the gossip columns that were sent to her by a clippings service, that her own odyssey, unlike her father's, was seen as a sequence of adventures that veered between tragedy and bleak farce.

As she drifted through her thirties, the only people she trusted were people for whom she was paying; her only reliable comfort was her cosseted baby daughter, Athina; and the object of her amour fou was still Thierry Roussel, her fourth husband and Athina's father, whom she had divorced but so needed that, according to gleefully wagging tongues, she paid him $100,000 for every night that he spent in her arms and not those of his mistress.

Willy Rizzo, the Paris-based furniture designer and photographer, who was part of Christina Onassis's tiny coterie toward the end, once expressed his puzzlement to her. "I said, You are rich. You can have anything in the world you want," Rizzo told me. "So why are you not more content?

"Christina said, Je veux être dr aguée."

This argot means: I want to be.. .cruised, ogled, picked up.

It was simple. She wanted to be wanted by somebody she wanted. But during her adolescence, her father, whom she saw that she embarrassed, had drummed it into her that this would never happen, and she conducted herself as if daring life to prove him wrong. The weight of his millions, heavy as her flesh, couldn't buy her happiness.

That's the tiresome thing about truisms: they do, from time to time, come true. But more than the other, humdrum sagas of the depressed rich, the restless, empty voyage of Christina Onassis invokes Furies as ancient as greed and thwarted love, as modem as pharmaceutical enslavement. This was Christina Onassis, and her Fate.

It began, as stories invoking Fate often do, with a wedding. Two weddings, actually. The marriages of Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos to the two daughters of Stavros Livanos, Eugenie and Athina (always known as Tina), in New York just after the war. For both men, it was a coup.

Onassis's origins are now business lore. The birth in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, in 1900. The massacres in which three uncles perished (Uncle Homer survived). Onassis's own amour with a Turkish officer, his escape, and the freeing of his stern father, Socrates (the Asia Minor Greeks, belittled by their homeland kin, tended to overcompensate with imposing nomenclature). A struggle with his autocratic father over leadership of the family. Steerage to Buenos Aires. The murky beginnings of his burgeoning fortune (one later rumor had him running a string of girls, including the young Evita Perón). Importing tobacco. Moving into shipping. First London meeting in his thirties with another ambitious Greek, nine years younger, Stavros Niarchos, from a well-to-do Athenian family whose investments had fared poorly (one account has Stavros's father running a candy store in Buffalo). The outbreak of war, sending the Greek shipping establishment from London to New York, and Onassis hastening after. Niarchos's stint as an officer on an Allied destroyer in the North Sea, then to Washington as a Greek aide, then also to New York. The renewal of his friendship with Onassis—until the interest of both men focused on the daughters of Stavros Livanos.

Livanos, a doyen of the Greek shippers, came from the island of Chios. He was the third generation of his line afloat—a lineage to admire (Greece, remember, gained independence more recently than the United States). He was hugely rich, and had three children by his strong-willed wife, Arietta: Eugenie, Tina, and a son, George. A conservative islander like Livanos would not normally welcome as suitors Johnny-come-latelies into shipping like an Athenian and (worse) a provincial "Turk," but Livanos was as ambitious as he was rich. The two men were goers. Better yet, they wouldn't require large dowries.

Niarchos first paid court to the vivacious Tina. This was not proper—according to stiff Greek mores, the elder sister should be married first. Livanos turned him down. But Onassis, who handled himself more deftly, was accepted. Tina much enjoyed showing off her diamond to her Upper East Side schoolfriends. They were married on December 28, 1946. She was seventeen, her husband forty-six. Niarchos married Eugenie the following year.

The extraordinary feud had begun.

The two men were strikingly different. Onassis was ugly, crudely spoken, bored by "culture," and he dressed like a salesman. Niarchos was handsome, dapper, and, in time, possessed of social poise and the best in both art and horseflesh. Yet even those who do not instinctively genuflect to the extremely rich were overwhelmed by the Onassis charm, where Niarchos was routinely stigmatized as cold and dour. The mutual hatred, envy, and contempt of the brothers-in-law was not, oddly, a purely negative force in the life of either man. It became a motor, even an inspiration.

On April 30, 1948, Tina bore her husband a male heir, Alexander. Such was Ari's singular trust in Fate that he thought one child was quite enough, and one source says that when Tina again became pregnant, he beat her up (he had often beaten up lovers, "normal" behavior in some Greeks of his generation, doubtless exacerbated in his case by fits of impotence). Thus Christina entered the world in a New York hospital on December 11, 1950—ambivalently greeted from the start.

There were villas, and town houses, and hotel suites, and a Paris apartment at 88 Avenue Foch. Perhaps the most stable home Christina knew in her early years was the Château de la Croë, near Antibes, in the South of France. One neighbor in whom Onassis is never known to have expressed any interest was that other monstre sacré Pablo Picasso, but he was considerably irked by the arrival of another—Stavros Niarchos, who took an equally roomy château just up the coast. Tina nervously joked that he was following her.

After they had battled each other fruitlessly over the purchase of a Paris hotel, the rivals made a pact; in any future property deal each would offer a piece to the other. But Onassis neglected to abide by this in 1953, after taking over the Société des Bains de Mer, which (subject only to Prince Rainier's veto) controlled the tax haven Monaco. A mistake, this. The following year, Niarchos got wind of the "Jidda Agreement"—a giddily ambitious deal which would have secured Onassis a monopoly on transporting Saudi oil, in a secret agreement with an anti-Jewish clause—and scotched it. Onassis was in disgrace. Then, in 1956, Nasser closed the Suez Canal. Millions poured in to the tanker owners. The Egyptian colonel had created that icon of plutocracy, the Greek tycoon.

Onassis was now headquartered on the Christina, the yacht named for his daughter, which boasted such touches as barstools upholstered in whale scrotum. Greta Garbo may not have been amused to be told that she was sitting on the biggest penis in the world, but her presence aboard was no accident. Onassis liked to joke about his brother-in-law's social climbing, his entertaining of Princess Margaret, his acquisition of a private island, Spetsopoula (though Tina had promptly announced that she would rather like an island, too), but he was no mean hand himself at rounding up lions, like Garbo and Churchill (now not making much sense), and such lesser felines as society hairdressers. Also, unlike the closemouthed Niarchos, he was seductive with the press, and enjoyed flaunting his success—hubris or no.

His children were flaunted, too. The Monegasque cops allowed Alexander to drive a miniature car in public at nine, the same year he smashed up his first adult powerboat. Christina was showing off her jewels when she was seven. "I sometimes wonder if I can avoid spoiling them," Tina mused at the time. "Christina is not so difficult, I suppose because girls are usually more practical than boys." The truth was, they saw their father seldom. A reporter who reached Onassis on Christina's ninth birthday was told that they had just been on the telephone. "She said she missed me," Onassis said, "and I told her I am going to see her soon."

Where? "I don't know yet," Onassis said. "Then I asked Christina what she wanted for her birthday. She wasn't sure. So I told her to go out into New York and pick anything she wants."

The reporter said he'd like to know what she bought. Onassis, agreeably, followed up. "Just a doll," he told the journalist later. "What would you expect a little girl to buy? A Cadillac?"

More important, though, was what she was about to lose. Onassis was very Greek in his belief in face—philotimo— and it has been accepted by all, including his own children, that Tina walked out because of his love affair with the diva Maria Callas. Not so, according to an insider. Tina, a pretty woman with fair skin and (dyed) blond hair, "loved" her husband, but had fallen passionately for Reinaldo Herrera, an urbanely amusing Venezuelan some thirty years Ari's junior. Onassis tolerated the liaison, even deliberately leaving them alone on the Christina. "He admired Callas—he never loved her," says the insider, but the press bit. POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL TINA. . . AND THE HAPPINESS THAT MILLIONS CAN'T BUY, hollered Britain's Daily Express, eerily prefiguring her daughter's headlines to come.

Tina did waltz away from the marriage, much to Onassis's anger, but she didn't marry Herrera. "I cannot bear to be alone," she told a friend, explaining that she would be marrying "the nicest man I know." This was the Marquess of Blandford, nicknamed "Sunny," son of the Duke of Marlborough. At the age of twelve, Christina found herself at Lee Place, the Blandfords' country house in Oxfordshire near the Marlborough seat, Blenheim Palace, attending a private girls' school, Headington, and grappling with the customs of the British landed class.

In later years, Christina was seldom to contradict the impression that her childhood had been loveless, her mother and father being equally at fault. This wasn't so. A family friend remembers that despite the baby having the beginnings of her father's proboscis and such dark rings around her eyes that she looked like a raccoon, Tina would coo, "Isn't she sweet?" as though to metamorphose the tot through sheer will. "Tina was very affectionate," says Consuelo (Mimi) Russell, a cousin who was at Blenheim then, "and she was loved by everybody. I don't remember an unhappy little girl." "She was fourteen when I was five," says Lady Henrietta Gelber, Christina's stepsister. "She was always great fun. We used to go to gymkhanas together."

Gelber adds, though, that Christina was "always a big girl," and another guest notes that "she was a bit of an ugly duckling. Nobody ever expected her to amount to anything. " The ordinary resentments of an ungainly daughter for a thin and pretty mother were not lessened by Tina's obvious, excessive love for Christina's brother, Alexander. However, Alexander was little seen at Blenheim. He had been kicked out of a Paris lycée at sixteen for spending a weekend with a woman. Although his father had taken him to that famous Parisian purveyor of beautiful flesh, Madame Claude, at the age of fourteen for his rite of passage, Ari professed to be enraged, terminated Alexander's education, and put him to work. Fiona Thyssen, later Alexander's lover, believes the father simply did not want a son better educated than himself.

Onassis, the bull from the sea, by now had his own island, just like Niarchos, called Skorpios. Christina had a sense of power there. Quickly bored, in her father's fashion, and as disinclined to be alone, she nonetheless seldom tired of watching and listening to the waves.

Onassis and Niarchos's mutual hatred, envy, and contempt become a motor, even an inspiration.

Stavros Niarchos was introduced to Charlotte Ford by George Livanos, her beau and Stavros's much younger brother-in-law, in St. Tropez. Niarchos and Ford began an affair in the winter of 1964 in St. Moritz. It continued in the summer when their yachts were moored alongside each other off the Côte d'Azur. When Charlotte became pregnant, Henry Ford II and both his daughters, Charlotte and Anne, flew to London for a parley with Niarchos, who was being kept out of the U.S. by an I.R.S. demand for $25 million. Ford agreed to help with the tax claim. Niarchos said he would do the right thing by Charlotte. Eugenie Niarchos helped by going to Juárez, Mexico, for a divorce. Charlotte Ford, who was twenty-five, married the fifty-six-year-old Niarchos in the fall of 1965. A daughter, Elena, was born. The Niarchos-Ford marriage was terminated, again in Mexico, and Niarchos returned to Eugenie, to whom, in the eyes of the Greek Orthodox Church, he had been wedded all along. Even Homer nods. Even Greek tragedies sometimes turn to soap.

Christina's resentment that Alexander was her mother's favorite was equal to his that he was under his father's thumb while she was party going. "He thought she was spoilt," Fiona Thyssen says. "Christina was only interested in her couture fittings and what color her hair was going to be next week."

The father she adored was the least help of all. A man who saw them together during her late teens says the ugly man with the conquering charm, who was beloved by beautiful women, clearly found his daughter an embarrassment. "He didn't even like introducing her," the man says. "He tried to hide it, but it showed." As she approached marriageable age, he was always telling her: Don't be naïve. Don't trust anybody. All that any man will ever want is your money.

Actually Christina, if not Madame Claude material, was quite presentable. She and Alexander had both had the Onassis nose lopped. The dark circles were diminished. She would always have thickish legs, and be broad in the beam, but she was lissome. That said, her selection as Queen of the Corviglia Club provoked some levity in St. Moritz, especially since she had beaten out ravishing Lita, wife of her amiable uncle, George Livanos, himself now pursuing a shipping career.

Not that Christina was short of admirers, and by no means all of them were fortune hunters. She could be warm and gossipy. She could also be gauche, demanding, strident. Onassis, contemplating his sensitive son, his domineering daughter, once complained he'd got the genders mixed. He crushed his son and daughter alike—which only made them the more needy—and they both loathed Callas, whom they called "The Singer," and hoped to see their parents remarry. Both were shattered when Onassis married Jackie Kennedy on Skorpios on October 20, 1968. They called her "The Widow," and the tears Christina shed at the wedding were not of joy.

Eugenie Niarchos died in her bedroom on the Niarchos islet, Spetsopoula, soon after midnight on May 4, 1970. She had taken barbiturates, but there were welts on the body and bruises around the throat. At one stage the prosecutor contemplated charging Niarchos with "involuntary homicide," although after three autopsies, it had been concluded that Eugenie had died from the drugs, and that the injuries were caused by his vigorous efforts to revive her.

The buzz of speculation was not quieted when Eugenie's iron-willed mother, Arietta, long widowed, upheld her son-in-law. In that smallish world where such matters were obsessively discussed it was felt that Arietta Livanos believed the power and glory of the dynasty outweighed every other issue. Tina removed the two younger Niarchos children— there were three boys and a girl—to Oxfordshire.

The conviction that Eugenie had been murdered was one of the few things that united Onassis and his daughter. He had decided that it was time she should marry, and a highly suitable match to the shipping heir Peter Goulandris had all but been announced when Christina fled Skorpios. "Things were getting too Greek for her," said a friend. In Monte Carlo, beside a pool, she met an L.A. businessman on a jaunt. His name was Joseph Bolker.

Bolker had made a couple of million in real estate. He was thoroughly Californian, outgoing, uncomplicated, and, at forty-eight, had the trimly muscled body of a member of the keep-fit culture. A middle-aged Jewish realtor could hardly have been less what Onassis had in mind for his nineteen-year-old daughter, which, clearly, was one of Bolker's attractions for her—this was a time when if her father recommended she book into Claridge's, she would deliberately go to the Carlton Tower.

Christina flew to California and demanded that Bolker marry her. He refused. Then, having found her in the bedroom with an empty bottle of pills, he married her in Las Vegas on July 29, 1971. The rage of Onassis when he learned of the theft of his daughter was tremendous. He cut off her funds, as a preliminary to destroying the match, and Christina found herself plunged into a different, for her, surreal world: going to the market, cooking, doing dishes. She loved the crashing Pacific waves at La Jolla. It was even announced that she was going to sign on for courses at U.C.L.A. But within five weeks of the wedding she flew to see her mother in New York.

Tina gave her $200,000 and sent her back to her husband. This was not disinterested. "Tina wanted her out of her hair," says a friend. Because now, as coolly as she had left Onassis, she had walked out on Sunny Blandford.

On October 22, 1971, she married Stavros Niarchos in Paris. 

Onassis was astounded by this second blow. He thought the match unnatural, a flouting of Fate. As for Niarchos, no doubt he reveled in his rival's discomfiture ("Who was there left for him to marry, after Ari married Jackie? The Queen of England?" asks a friend. "Why not take Ari's own wife?"), but mostly he may be supposed at last to have married the woman he had wanted for so long.

Christina seemed to be making sure Athina's childhood was as unlike her own as possible.

Some professed to be surprised at the complaisance of Arietta Livanos, whose eldest daughter Niarchos had already buried, but not those who knew the steely matriarch. "All that interested Arietta Livanos was keeping the family fortune together," says another Greek shipping scion. "What it was really about was Stavros and George."

Tina's motives were more baffling. She walked out on a "kind" man, who was soon to inherit a dukedom and tremendous possessions, for a man who had, at the very least, made her elder sister bitterly unhappy. Moreover, Tina, who had had her customary share of flings during the last, empty years of her Onassis marriage, had never shown much interest in Niarchos.

"Tina never had a nice word to say about Stavros," says one puzzled friend. "She always talked about him almost as a figure of fun."

Why, then?

"I think Tina felt that her sister had willed her to do it. It was very strange. It was the beginning of Tina's end, really."

Onassis could not affect his wife's marriage, but his daughter's he could, and did. After reports of another halfhearted overdose, she flew to London by herself in November. Bolker told the press of "extraordinary parental pressures which are now seriously affecting her health."

Alexander, with whom she was still on chilly terms, was now working in his father's London office, earning just $15,000 a year at age twenty-three, and seeing Fiona Thyssen, the ex-wife of the art-collecting baron. A Scotswoman, a notable beauty, and sixteen years older than Alexander, she too was deemed unsuitable by Onassis, whom she describes as "a perfectly dreadful father—he always had to be the bull." Fiona had started going out with Alexander when he was nineteen, and was astonished to find it meant that her close friendship with Eugenie Niarchos was completely severed. As obsessed with Alexander as he was with her, she polished him up, from table manners—"which were as bad as his sister's"—to leisure pursuits, even persuading him over the course of their five years together to read a book. "Jonathan Livingston Seagull," she says. "He liked it." She also got him to stand up to his father. When she heard that Christina was in London, she promptly invited her round to tea. "I told them they needed each other," she says. The reconciliation was a success.

Fiona had learned that Onassis was trying to destroy Bolker. Christina said that Bolker was willing to give her a divorce, and had no financial demands. She was turbulent, though, and confused. "It took a few days to get her to face the fact that Bolker was not the enemy—her father was," Fiona says. "I said, Listen, divorce is so easy in California. For once, why doesn't somebody in your family behave with some dignity? She got on a plane and flew back. Next thing, they were divorced."

In terms of real time together, the marriage had lasted three months. Bolker, gentlemanly to the end, spoke no ill of Christina, but his views on Onassis as a father were close to Fiona Thyssen's. "When a billion dollars leans on you," he told Nigel Dempster of London's Daily Mail, "boy! You sure feel it!"

Her life as a Los Angeleno housewife over, Christina returned to her own world with gusto. If asked about her future, she would give the standard answers of a rich, young girl. She talked of journalism and movies. Her friend Geraldine Chaplin "gets so many parts," she said, "that she can easily pass a few on to me." The coterie that surrounded her included Atalanta Politis, a young Greek, and Hubert and Florence Michard-Pelissier, a brother and sister whose parents also had a Paris apartment at 88 Avenue Foch. Christina could be as good-hearted, loquacious, and awkward as a teenager, but she could also be whiny or controlling. "There were a lot of different people inside Christina," says Atalanta. "She was quite a tough cookie," says somebody who saw her each, winter in St. Moritz. "She could be kind, and knew how to turn on the charm, like her father, and then she could turn into a wild animal."

He remembers the time when, her face unrecognizably muffled, she crossed the course of a ski race. "Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach [of Krupp] shouted at her to get off. She took her scarf off, and said, Now are you sorry? He said, No. Get off! She started screaming that he was a Nazi."

She could be generous, too much so, as though finding it impossible to distinguish between money and friendship ("It was dangerous to admire something in a shop," says a friend. "She would try and buy it for you"), but she could also be impossibly autocratic. "She would leave a dinner party for the slightest reason," says another old St. Moritz hand, "and all her guests would have to go too. They were in awe of her."

She was equally volatile in her emotional life. Her approach to sexuality was uninhibited without being promiscuous, and she had some satisfying flings, like that with a Brazilian polo player, who was handsome, more than well-to-do, and is said to have been genuinely attached to her.

It didn't last. There was something out of kilter about Christina Onassis. She admitted to an early beau that she was always aware of her father's voice—nobody would ever love her really, they would only be after her money. She was . . .overpowering. "Christina was a grabber. It was sort of masculine. She wanted to be loved, but she slammed that door.'' She played the field energetically all the same. She had dates of varying consequence or inconsequentiality with various young men on that circuit, from titled photographers to socialite sportsmen, like the skier who had formerly been out with Brigitte Bardot, but mostly it was "Sons Of. . . like Thierry Roussel, the son of an heir to a French pharmaceutical fortune. Her friend Florence says that she fancied him as a matrimonial prospect right away. Her most "serious'' relationship, though, was with Mick Flick.

"Christina died of chagrin d'amour," Willy Rizzo says, simply. A broken heart.

Gert-Rudolf "Mick'' Flick, one of the identical-twin heirs to Daimler-Benz, was considered a bit of all right, even in tanker circles. Also he was handsome, and very "social.'' Onassis père seems to have approved the alliance. The press referred to them as "constant companions,'' which is the gossip writer's code for lovers. But the truth was: "Mick couldn't get it together with her," according to an Onassis friend. "They never did it once. She would complain about it. Christina was very outspoken about that kind of thing." She would often laugh off such disasters, making fun of herself. There was, anyway, no shortage of suitors. She was to look back on this as a good time. It ended on January 21, 1973.

As soon as Onassis had accepted that the seaplane crash at Athens airport had left his son brain-dead, he authorized the doctors to pull the plug, asking only that they wait for Christina, who was in Rio. Franco Rossellini, the movie producer, was delegated to meet her at Rome airport, and they flew to Athens. He was not a fan.

"She was a difficult girl—extremely stubborn," he says. "When Callas used to live with Aristo, she simply hated Callas. She hated Callas with all her might. Then she hated Mrs. Kennedy, and she became, all of a sudden, extremely close to Callas. This is the kind of unbalanced girl she was.

"During this incredible funeral, I could see that she was not on speaking terms with her mother, Tina. And, at this dramatic moment, she refused to speak to Jackie Onassis. It was embarrassing. I know that her father suffered from her strong head."

That year, oil-tanker profits reached record highs, but Onassis, devastated by Alexander's death, showed little interest. Attention now focused on Christina, as unexpected heiress to the Onassis interests. Jackie Onassis was once asked if her second husband ever displayed overt affection for his daughter. "Yes," she is said to have answered, "after Alexander died."

He put Christina to work in New York. She tried to keep office hours. She sat in on boardroom meetings. That she had business intelligence there was no doubt, and she applied herself with some diligence, but her attention span was as short as her temper. And she was already locked in the vicious two-step of gorging: she would shovel down two or three cheeseburgers or club sandwiches and could chugalug ten Cokes in a row—and would then pop amphetamine-laced appetite suppressants. She needed tranquilizers to sleep, and, after her brother's death, upped her dosage dramatically. The mood swings were savage. In London, in mid-August, once again, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. One of the most incompetent suicides ever, she wound up in the hospital. Tina flew over from Paris, and stayed with her troubled daughter until she was well, then returned to Niarchos.

On October 10, 1974, Tina Livanos Onassis Niarchos was found dead in the Niarchos Paris house. An overdose of barbiturates. She had never made overwhelming demands on life—she once said she was "not ambitious"—but Alexander's death and the uncertainty of Christina's life had worn her down. She had come to believe that her second marriage was unlucky, and had thought of using a Greek law forbidding the marriage of in-laws to break it.

The similarity between the deaths of the two sisters sparked a fire storm of gossip. By eleven that morning Christina had obtained a warrant ordering a postmortem. The implications were plain, and an infuriated Niarchos issued a press release, making public Christina's failed suicide "at a time when her mother still mourned the death of her son. Tina never recovered from the depression into which these blows plunged her."

Nor did Onassis, now in terminal decline with the muscle-degenerative disease myasthenia gravis. Christina spent five weeks at his bedside in Paris, and managed a degree of public togetherness with Jackie after his death on March 15, 1975. The two women swiftly agreed on a settlement of $20 million. Christina also settled her suit against Niarchos for the return of her mother's fortune. The feud, finally, was over. Christina had lost brother, mother, and father in twenty-seven months.

Onassis had died at an inopportune time. OPEC first flexed its muscles in the winter of 1973-74, and the halcyon days were over for the tanker owners. Six weeks after Onassis's death, some shipowners met in Geneva to discuss the future of his business. Word reached Christina, who said, "If they think they can walk in past me and take what my father built up, they are in for a shock." She scheduled meetings with her father's former clients, and proved as good as her word. She was twenty-three.

Contrary as always, she now found a Greek she wanted to marry. Alexander Andreadis, a pudgy thirty-year-old vintage-car enthusiast, made excellent business sense. His father, Professor Stratis Andreadis, had interests, mostly in banking, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions. It was assumed that Christina's husband would have an important hand in running her empire. The truth was less rosy. The professor had been in cahoots with the now discredited colonels who had run Greece, and urgently needed $20 million to keep his empire going.

Most of the professor's banks were nationalized anyway, and his son's marriage was soon tempestuous. Once, Andreadis, macho in the Greek mold, pulled his wife into Maxim's when she wanted to go shopping. Shortly after, she erupted out alone. Nor did she give Andreadis a role in her business. She flew alone to Moscow to work on a deal with the Soviet shipping agency, Sovfracht, where she was dealing with the head of its tanker division, Sergei Kauzov.

Kauzov, who had a wife, a child, a glass eye, several gold teeth, and a clear relationship with the K.G.B., would seem as unlikely a choice as Joseph Bolker, but Andreadis was dumped, and Christina's third nuptials, on August 1, 1978, were a ten-minute affair, attended by a chorus of journalists, in the Moscow Central Palace of Marriages. Kauzov said, "When you fall in love, what does it matter whether you are a Communist or a capitalist?"

It mattered to those who feared that control would fall into Soviet hands, and it mattered to the Soviets, who went to unusual lengths to make things comfortable for their improbable catch. The newlyweds were given a rare seven-room apartment, and she embarked on a second episode of surreal domesticity. Spotting a refrigerator in a store window, she was told it was a demonstration model and not for sale, but, as she boasted to her Paris friends, she said, "I couldn't care less," had it loaded into her car, and drove it home. She spoke of taking trips in her Mercedes through the doubtless surprised Soviet countryside. But Moscow soon palled. Within a week she was back in Paris. Kauzov was given a rare, but unsurprising, exit visa to follow.

Christina was back in her own world again: St. Moritz for the winter; Paris, London, or New York in the spring; often La Jolla—the waves that soothed her first marriage—in July; Skorpios in high summer; metropolitan life again in the fall; with ceaseless, restless journeying between, and strenuous fasts in Swiss clinics or at the Buchinger clinic outside Marbella, because Kauzov could no more curb her appetites than his predecessors.

As for Kauzov, his K.G.B. connection was repeatedly brought to her attention. She told her friends she simply didn't believe it. And they liked Kauzov best of all. "He was a charming man, and did her a power of good," says Lady Henrietta Gelber. "The Russian was charmant. Very sweet," says her Avenue Foch friend Florence, now married to tennis player Jean-Noel Grinda. "He did a lot for her. In business too." But Kauzov had come no closer than Andreadis to controlling the empire when he, too, was dumped. "She divorced him because he wasn't chic," says Florence Grinda. "He would sit at dinner and have nothing to say. It was stupid."

The gossip gap, in fact. It was a friendly divorce—he got an 18,000-ton tanker and temporary custody of Christina's dog. As with Bolker and Andreadis, she stressed that they were still "friends." The marriage had lasted twenty-one months.

The dutiful propaganda was that Christina was now running the Onassis empire. In early 1980, the sometimes scathingly witty Taki was asked to write Christina's life story. He refused, telling a New York columnist that his fellow Greek was "a vegetable." Eighteen hours later he had a telephone call in his room at the Carlyle Hotel.

"Taki. This is Christina."

She didn't say which Christina, but he recognized her accent, which despite her expensive British schooling was like that of a taxi driver from Queens. "Christina didn't really have a first language," Taki says. "She started spouting these naval terms. Double bottoms, twin-screws. She was furious. . . steaming. ''

In actuality, though, she was leaving the running of things more and more to her father's men, and was devoting herself to the quest for fun. It was a life light in ballast, lived among an equally unhefty set of friends. "There were no roots there," says a friend of her father's. "No substance. Ari was a seaman, a badly dressed adventurer—that was his charm— but the people he surrounded himself with were originals. With Christina it was just the caf6 society." Her odyssey, in short, was not a striving toward some golden goal but a meandering flight from ennui.

Like her father, she had no interest in culture, hated solitude, and went to bed late and with reluctance, as though fearful of what she might meet, alone, in the dark. Unlike her father, she seldom touched alcohol, but her bingeing was often uncontrollable. In her early thirties her body sometimes swelled up like a poisoned dog—a high of 260 pounds was reported in the tabloids—and she became a favorite target of paparazzi and gossip writers, who dubbed her "Thunderthighs" or "The Greek Tanker." Later she tried to cut this back with particularly powerful amphetamine tablets, nicknamed "Black Bombers," brought by a faithful pilot, formerly with the Onassis-owned Olympic airline. Absurdly, after dinner she would gobble chocolate, but only dark chocolate.

As she grew older, she seemed less and less inclined to trust anything or anybody she wasn't paying for. Luis Basualdo, an Argentinean polo player, nicknamed "The Bounder," who was in pressing need of funds after being kicked out by his rich English wife, got $1,000 a day just to be around at Avenue Foch. Basualdo, usually with his girlfriend, Clare, would be there when she got up, and she would toss them a couple of hundred dollars' lunch money (Basualdo would thriftily raid the refrigerator until the cook complained). Then she would have dinner parties in her apartment, usually with the same small group. "After dinner, she would watch movies alone, until four or five in the morning," he says. "If I dropped off, she would wake me and scream that she wasn't paying me a thousand dollars a day to have me fall asleep on her." When she wanted to go to sleep, she would take what she believed to be nine Nembutals—a massive dose, but Basualdo says he would ensure that four of them were placebos. His employment lasted for two and a half years. Then $1.2 million found its way from her account into a spurious account elsewhere. Basualdo took off for Buenos Aires. Christina, it seems, forgave him.

She seldom failed to gratify a whim. Florence Grinda owned a dog, a frisky mutt called Pongo, of whom Christina grew fond. She offered to buy Pongo for a thousand dollars. Grinda refused. Christina kept on upping her offer. "She offered me $100,000, and I was still saying no," Grinda says. How far Christina was willing to go was never discovered, because one day she sat on Pongo, who tried to bite her in the rear, and snapped at her thereafter.

For a life dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh, Christina's particular pleasures were singularly unracy. She once spoke to a friend after she had been out with a famous Hollywood satyr, expressing perplexity that he had asked her to perform fellatio on a first date. Had she? "Yes," she said. Why? "He looked so sad."

She was, indeed, a bit of a puritan. She forbade topless sunbathing on Skorpios, and chucked some people off the island for smoking marijuana. She discussed the well-known penchant of certain fellow Greeks for cocaine with a mixture of curiosity and distaste. As for her own drug use, she regarded it as wholly therapeutic, a pharmaceutical response to her giddy swoops and lunges up and down the scale, and mostly regretted because she knew it worked against her dearest wish: to have a baby.

And a baby required a husband who could put up with her. Or so she thought. "I told her, Just choose somebody. Go out, and have a baby. Why marry?" says Countess Marina Cicogna, a family friend. "She was shocked. She said, What would the people in the office think? She was strangely moralistic."

Her tempers grew worse and worse, her behavior more erratic. She would compulsively change her underwear several times a day, but would refuse to wash her hair or brush her teeth. "She explained that her nannies had always made her brush her teeth and now she didn't have to," says a friend. She read Poor Little Rich Girl, C. David Heymann's splendidly trashy biography of Barbara Hutton, as soon as it came out—just as, later, she watched the TV version—and told Florence Grinda that she was terrified that Hutton's end, broke and abandoned, would be her own.

It was then that a man re-entered her life who not only was someone she had fancied as a potential husband a decade before, but had since become a nephew by marriage to Florence Grinda. It was Thierry Roussel.

Thierry's father, Henry Roussel, an heir to the largest French pharmaceutical concern, had sold out to his elder brother to devote himself to his principal interest: shooting. He had a château in the Sologne, France's shooting country, and a ranch in Kenya's Masai territory.

Thierry went to one of the best schools in France, L'École des Roches, where other pupils included the sons of the French nobility, of great industrial families like the Citroens and the Renaults, of the Danish royal house, and of the Congolese politician Moise Tshombe, and the grandsons of the Mexican socialist painter Siqueiros, not to mention "Baby Doc" Duvalier. "Thierry was quite liked at school," remembers a schoolfellow, "but he was a bit of a show-off. He was the first to have a rabbit-fur coat." Apart from this he is remembered mostly for his "predilection for boxing."

Roussel grew up into a self-assured young-man-about-town, intensely ambitious in business. He was a keen falconer and, like his father, an outstanding gun. And it may say something about the nature of his ambitions that he bred a stag until it reached prizewinning size, and then shot it. "Thierry wanted a gold medal," a Frenchman told me dryly. "Unfortunately, they wouldn't give it to him." As for his business affairs, he did some work for the family firm, Roussel-Uclaf—in publicity, for instance—but made no spectacular killings. Until Christina Onassis.

The word in Paris is that it was Roussel père who encountered Christina and contrived to rekindle the romance with his son. Again Christina found Thierry devastating. He came from just the sort of background she felt most at home with, neither alien like the Los Angeleno or the Muscovite nor suffocatingly macho like the Greek, but rich, pleasure-seeking, and European. Added to this is a reputation for great sensual fortitude. "The Roussels can make it with a wall," a European noblewoman told me. At last, it seemed, Christina had found a "good match." On a New York visit, she proudly showed Thierry off to her former stepmother. (Jackie, like Callas, had been forgiven.)

Christina and Thierry were married on March 17, 1984, with a reception at Maxim's. Fearful of how the ravages she had visited on her physique might affect childbearing, she had consulted various fertility specialists. She duly became pregnant. She bought Gunther Sachs's château at Gingins, near Lake Geneva, cleaned it up, and equipped it with more security than the Pentagon. Old neuroses whooshed to the surface. Antonia de Portago, who went to dinner in the Avenue Foch apartment, remembers Christina refusing to come downstairs because she was "too fat."

"But that is normal," de Portago told her. She still wouldn't come.

A baby girl was born by cesarean section, prematurely, with jaundice, on January 28, 1985, and named Athina after her grandmother. Christina was ecstatic. "Athina became the center of her life," says her childhood friend Atalanta. "The baby really calmed her down," says a St. Moritz friend. She was mellow. Lady Henrietta Gelber, who was seeing her again after a lull of some years, found she loved to reminisce. She had girlish memories of the gardener, the undergardener, the nanny, and said she hoped to spend more time in England.

Claude Roland, a close Paris friend, was among those who went to Skorpios to celebrate the first wedding anniversary. "We had a big dinner," he says, "and they made a big festival, with folkloric dances from every part of Greece." An error, this. "She was so bored," Roland says. "She kept asking, When is it going to end?" This apart, Christina loved Skorpios as much as ever, and assumed she would return every summer.

Thierry Roussel, the "good match," had other plans.

It was a danger sign, perhaps, that even before they married Roussel had reportedly accepted a $120,000 Ferrari after having a sperm test. There was worse. For ten years Roussel had been keeping company with a Swedish woman, Gaby Landhage, a striking blonde ex-model, and his marriage didn't stand between them. Seven months after Athina's birth, Gaby bore Thierry a son, Erik, in Malmö, Sweden.

According to one story, it was Christina's uncle George Livanos who went to see her at Avenue Foch and broke the news of her husband's double life. Gaby and her baby, it seemed, were a twenty-minute walk away in Thierry's old apartment.

Christina forgave her husband, and determined to hold on to him, using her family's usual weapon: money. He had received millions upon the birth of Athina; now he began getting millions more for his investments. These included business with Algeria, a huge timber deal with Equatorial Guinea, and, closer to home, and rather an odd plaything for an already erring husband, a model agency, called First. His manager was an old friend, Paul Hagnauer, who brought in Marisa Berenson "for special events" and the fledgling supermodel Princess Stephanie of Monaco.

A friend quoted Christina as saying, "I'm like an Arab woman now. I have to share my husband with a concubine." In a more upbeat mood, she would credit Thierry with cutting back on her pill use and, above all, with giving her Athina. Both the baby girl and her dolls were dressed by Dior. Carefully selected children, like the great-grandchildren of General Franco, and the child of Willy and Dominique Rizzo, who had replaced Basualdo as courtiers, were brought to play. She had a nanny, Monique, and two British former commandos as bodyguards. Christina seemed to be making sure her daughter's childhood was as unlike her own as possible.

Her own life, meantime, was narrowing. "Thierry stopped her seeing all her old friends," says Lady Henrietta Gelber. "It was so frustrating going to see her on Skorpios. All those hangers-on. She was very generous, and she never knew when she was being taken."

Then Roussel weaned her from Skorpios itself. "Thierry didn't like it there, because he was not in control," says Florence Grinda. "There he was Mr. Christina Onassis. He made her go to the South of France after that. She said she was afraid kidnappers would go after her child, but that was nonsense. It was Thierry."

The Roussel clan itself had not been immune from tragedy. Thierry's uncle, Jean-Claude, had perished in a helicopter crash in 1972. Then, four years ago, Jean-Claude's son, Alain, also died in the same way. President Mitterrand, moreover, nationalized 40 percent of Roussel-Uclaf, just as Karamanlis had nationalized Professor Andreadis's banks. But Thierry's father, Henry, prospered with property deals. He sold a house in Marbella to Adnan Khashoggi, his Paris house to Baron Thyssen, and the Kenya ranch to one of the Wildensteins. Thierry was not faring so well, and he now had a pressing need for assets. The model agency was faltering. "The problem is that the atmosphere was dinners and parties," says Gerome Bonnouvrier, of the Paris agency Glamour. Roussel sold out, taking a loss according to Bonnouvrier of "three to four million dollars." But this was a trifle compared with the losses sustained on the African deal, which were reportedly in the tens of millions. Oddly, Thierry Roussel's setbacks seem to have emboldened him. "He was not happy just to get money anymore," says an intimate of Christina's. "He said he wanted control. This scared people."

Among those it scared was Arietta Livanos. The normally taciturn matriarch went so far as to telephone the journalist Peter Evans, who says, "She complained that Christina couldn't separate her money from her emotions." Never one of Arietta's problems. "She said she wanted to talk to me," says Evans, who was then at work on his Aristotle Onassis biography. "But she died on me." Evans called George Livanos, who assured him that things were under control.

But, according to an intimate of Christina's, Thierry Roussel's grab scared Christina most of all. A friend says that she thought again of Barbara Hutton. She divorced Thierry Roussel in the late summer of 1986. He is said to have profited from the union by something well in excess of $50 million. Christina binged, and threw herself into a frenzy of child care. Athina's third-birthday presents included a flock of sheep.

The Thierry-Christina union, remarkably thinly disguised, was the subject in part of a novel, La Grecque, by two former Paris Match reporters, which sold briskly in France that summer, apparently to Thierry Roussel's mortification. But the divorce was even worse than the marriage. Two months after the split, Thierry had another child with Gaby Landhage, a girl, Sandrine. Desperate to keep close to Thierry, by whatever means, Christina began to befriend Gaby. She invited the children to the South of France, and bought them presents. "It's kind of nice to see them all playing together," she told a friend wistfully.

It was now that Christina was rumored to be paying Thierry for any time he spent in her company. The continuing exploitation infuriated her family and friends. One St. Moritz evening in King's, the nightclub in the Palace hotel, Constantine Niarchos, Stavros's youngest son, asked his cousin Christina to dance, saying pointedly that it wouldn't cost her several million. Thierry Roussel, the school boxer, punched him. He was not seen as having the best of it, though.

Christina, however, was unstoppable. Last August she threw a party for a couple of hundred guests at the Trianon, her rented château at Cap Ferrat. It was a jolly affair, and Christina danced all night long, but there were undercurrents. "You have a most beautiful island, Christina," said Claude Roland. "What are you doing here on the Côte d'Azur?" The napkins were inscribed CHRISTINA AND THIERRY. "They were going to remarry," says Anne Lyon, a guest. "That was understood."

That fall, Christina went to a Swiss clinic to get in shape for her new life, and lost a remarkable forty pounds. "I want to lose another twenty," she told friends. On October 20, she flew to Buenos Aires to see her friends Marina and Alberto Dodero, the son of her father's early mentor. Thierry remained in Paris, and Athina was at Gingins. Christina was accompanied by Eleni, her faithful maid, who had formerly worked for Callas, and by Atalanta de Castellane, née Politis, now married and a decorator whose principal client was Christina Onassis.

In Buenos Aires, as always, she took a suite in the Alvear Palace, partly out of solicitude for her hosts, because Christina was as addicted to the telephone as she was to Coca-Cola, and could tie up the lines for hours daily. On Friday, October 21, she attended a party at Le Club, formerly Régine's. There were fifty guests, most attended by at least one bodyguard, and the party was for Marina Dodero's fortieth birthday, but Christina Onassis was clearly the star. ''A Greek band was playing 'Zorba. ' She was the center of attention," says a guest. The way that she affectionately hugged her old friend Jorge Tchomlekdjoglou, Marina's brother, set the rumor mill spinning. "Everybody was whispering," says the guest, "Jorge was el nuevo. . .the fifth. . ."

Christina flew back to Paris on the twenty-fourth, having already decided to return to Buenos Aires. What transpired between her and Thierry is not known. Florence Grinda says that Christina had, at some stage, become aware that Thierry Roussel now had another woman in his life, and not just a femme d' occasion, but a fully fledged mistress. "That was the final blow," she says. Christina returned to B.A. on November 9. "I made some business and I solved some family problems," she told a friend.

It seems that Christina had truly been looking for a more tranquil place to bring up her daughter. The idea of a return to England had been set aside, but she spoke variously of buying a finca in Portugal or a beach house in California. Now she made up her mind. "I feel good here," she told an Argentinean friend. She would buy property in the country where her father, something of a national hero, who held an Argentinean passport to the day of his death, had made the shadowy beginnings of his fortune. She spoke of buying an estancia, and began actively looking for a Buenos Aires apartment.

Christina called her daughter four or five times a day, and spoke as frequently to Thierry Roussel. At night there were, of course, parties. Every weekend she would go with the Doderos to Tortuguitas, a country club in which they had a major interest, twenty miles northeast of B.A. There was polo at the club, and tennis, and nightly barbecues.

On Friday, November 18, Christina telephoned, among others, Dominique Rizzo, and tried to persuade her to join her. She said that she had decided, for once, not to spend Christmas in St. Moritz, but would stay in Argentina. In due course, she would join up with Athina at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where two bungalows had already been booked. "She spoke of Thierry constantly, constantly, constantly," says Willy Rizzo, "too much." Dominique, pregnant, regretted that she couldn't make the trip.

That evening, there was another barbecue. Christina left at half past one in the morning, early for her. She had told the Doderos she would see them at breakfast at nine. When she was still not there at ten, Marina went to Christina's room. She wasn't in bed, so Marina went into the bathroom. What she saw there sent her screaming for a doctor.

It was an error to have the body driven to the Clínica del Sol, because the doctors there quite properly, as Christina hadn't died on their premises, refused to sign the death certificate. This meant that a magistrate was necessarily appointed to examine the death, and rumors began to swirl around.

Pills had been found on the floor, for instance, and there was immediate speculation that Christina had, after so many false tries, succeeded in giving herself an overdose. Another theory, popular with B.A. gossips, was that she had been making enthusiastic love and had been overstimulated by amyl nitrite—"poppers"— which in that set would scarcely be considered a "drug." The coroner's report, though, ruled out any sex play, and Christina's friends are unanimous that her state of mind was not that of a suicide.

There is another intriguing factor. Jorge Tchomlekdjoglou, who is firm that he was no more than a close friend, has said that Christina was reconciled to the fact that it was finis between her and Thierry Roussel. "Christina had discovered that happiness can only be found in the simple things of life," he says. There is speculation that she was on the verge of totally restructuring her fortune, presumably not in Thierry's favor, so this, too, seems to militate against the theory that she took her own life.

Most believe that she died like her mother, naturally. There had been too many pills, too many drastic weight changes, and altogether too much tearing stress. Add another brutal diet and a hot bath. Add also Thierry Roussel. "Christina died of chagrin d'amour," Willy Rizzo says, simply. A broken heart.

The restless, ill-fated voyage of Christina Onassis is over, but the story, of course, continues. Joseph Bolker died of leukemia. Alexander Andreadis remarried. Sergei Kauzov is living in London, next door to Harrods, enjoying a multimillionaire's life in the company of the ravishing twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a Massachusetts dairy tycoon. Stavros Niarchos, who reportedly told a New York dinner party that he "wasn't surprised" by Christina's death, is still a welcome guest of his double brother-in-law, George Livanos. And little Athina Roussel inherits a fortune estimated at half a billion, some in cash and properties, most in shipping. Her floating inheritance currently consists of some three dozen vessels, and this at a time when the tanker business is yet again doing tremendously well.

Thierry Roussel, who was very much on parade at Christina's funerals—both the public one in Athens, where he dramatically kissed her coffin, and the private ceremony on Skorpios—took control of Athina immediately after his ex-wife's death. Her first stay was in Bonneville, the Roussel château near the Loire. She was also taken to Sweden—the little girl adores flying—to be with her half-siblings. She is still watched over by the two former commandos, Archie and Peter, and by nanny Monique, whom she is said to dote on. She spent Christmas and New Year's in Marbella with them and her father, and was said by one source not to know yet that her mother was dead.

"Gaby is with Thierry," says Gunnar Larsen, a Paris-based Danish fashion photographer who has known the former model for seventeen years. He says the marriage with Christina was just "business," and adds that Gaby would make Athina "a fine stepmother."

Thierry Roussel—who was left $1.4 million a year in Christina's will, written in English in her own hand eight days before she flew to B.A. in October—is listed first on a five-man board to manage Athina's fortune until her nineteenth birthday. The congenial George Livanos is not a member. "Thierry squeezed him out," Florence Grinda says. "He won." Christina Onassis once expressed a wish that her daughter might have a happier life than hers. Let us hope so. History does not always repeat itself, but the tabloids unfortunately do, and they are among the Furies that Athina will have to contend with all too soon.