Come back Aristotle Onassis – all is forgiven

Back in the very early Sixties there was an uninhabited islet off the west coast of Greece by the name of Skorpios. It was wild, with neglected olive groves, and its asking price was around $60,000. Step forward Aristotle Socrates Onassis, who snapped it up and for good measure put some pocket change up for the even tinier island of Sparti next door. One can swim to Skorpios from the large Ionian island of Lefkas in less than an hour — wearing flippers, that is.

Onassis was a much misunderstood character. He had great charm, spoke many languages and was very streetwise, but his looks were against him. His propensity to wear dark-blue double-breasted suits, white shirts and dark, wraparound sunglasses added to the Mafioso aura. The gomina slicked-down mane did not help and his inclination to date very famous women landed him in the wrong kind of gossip columns of the time. When he married Jackie Kennedy, the most famous woman in the world in 1968, the Onassis name became known even among Amazon tribes who had never seen a white man.

I thought of Onassis recently when a Swiss friend went to stay with the Russian oligarch whose daughter bought Skorpios last year. The oligarch is the king of shit, a manure tycoon whose wife was awarded something like four billion greenbacks in their rather unfriendly divorce (that doesn’t mean, of course, that she will collect such an amount). All I can tell you is that it’s a long social drop from the Onassis days to the present — in fact, it’s like falling out of an airplane flying at 55,000 feet. Onassis invested $3 million to turn a wild, uninhabited isle into a flower-decked gem with six miles of roads through the olive groves, a beautiful harbour for the Christina (then the biggest and most glamorous gin palace in the world), a villa that blended perfectly with the architecture of the Ionian isles, and a dozen guest houses to boot.