Aristotle Onassis

Editorial Review - Kirkus ReviewsHe lived and he died, and nothing in this massive dossier compiled by a London Sunday Times team gives force or meaning to Onassis' life but an occasional quote: ""One of the most tragic things,"" a friend observed towards the end, ""was to see this most enchanting and fascinating of men become a bore."" The rebellious Smyrna child caught the popular imagination by his pranks; the buccaneering tanker-man led the flight from costly British or US regulation to the ""flags of convenience""; the solicitous host raised spoonfuls of caviar to the aging Churchill's lips. Intensity of attention to persons, intensity of application to business--and daring: these, one concludes from this and every other account, set Onassis apart and formed the basis of both his legend and his fortune. He had otherwise no accomplishments--no land-based investment as a monument, no innovation or masterstroke that was not a financial manipulation, temporal and transient. What Fraser and his fellow-researchers have done is to disprove some of Onassis' claims and disclose additional details that, in some cases, make provisional judgments final. Thus, it appears from an unreleased report that ""the aileron controls had indeed been reversed"" on the plane whose crash ted to son Alexander's death. It also appears that the long post-mortem owes more to the authors' possession of privileged information than to what it adds to an appreciation of Onassis' grief. This is wall-to-wall journalism, as if everything said and done were still important, with the result that the aborted Omega-project negotiations take on the dimensions of a Constitutional Convention. The telling is toneless, mirthless, and virtually emotionless. About Jackie, one hears the same Onassis-originated innuendos that surfaced just before and after his death; she and her intimates haven't talked. But there's lots here, for the reader to make of it what the authors haven't.