The bride arrived 45 minutes late for her wedding, but that was the only time wasted in the speedy romance between Greek Shipping Heiress Christina Onassis, 24, and Banking Heir Alexander Andreadis, 30. After a one-month acquaintance and a week-long engagement, the couple had come to be wed in the Greek seaside town of Glyphada. While a score of family members —including Stepmother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her son John —crowded together in the tiny chapel of Aiksonis, an exquisite recreation of a Byzantine monastery, Christina and Alexander repeated the vows of the Greek Orthodox Church, made the traditional three trips around the altar, and were pronounced man and wife. Said John afterward: “Gosh, it was hot in there.”
The fast-order nuptials left both friends and relatives of the newlyweds slightly stunned. “I was still on my honeymoon when I got the call to come home,” revealed the groom’s older brother George, who had been married in the same chapel just twelve days earlier. “Yes, it did catch me by surprise,” confessed Alexander’s father, Stratis Andreadis. “But then that’s life. It’s filled with surprises.”
To some, the hasty marriage looked suspiciously like a well-planned merger. Christina, who inherited a large part of a multimillion-dollar shipping empire after the death of Aristotle Onassis last March, had been dating Greek Shipping Heir Peter Goulandris, 27, until just three weeks before her wedding. Andreadis, whose own family holdings include three Greek banks, two shipyards, real estate, a fertilizer and canning factory, had been romancing Denise Sioris, 24, the daughter of a U.S. foreign service officer, for the past two years. “There was none of this falling madly in love at first sight,” said one close friend of the groom’s. “You can say this is an arranged marriage. They are both practical people.”
Christina, whose 1971 marriage to Los Angeles Realtor Joseph Bolker, now 51, enraged Papa Ari and ended in divorce after nine months, did have some matrimonial guidance this time around.
In the time-honored Greek tradition of mixing business with bloodlines, overseers of the Onassis empire had selected Andreadis as a good prospect, say friends of the family. Artemis Garofalidou, Ari’s sister and Christina’s closest confidante, set up the first meeting between the two—a chat over coffee at the Athens Hilton, a hotel owned by the Andreadis family. “The girls in my past? They were young things,” pronounced Alexander four weeks later. “Christina is a woman, a serious woman. Ours is a serious marriage.”
Alexander seemed a good catch for many reasons. His maternal grandfather, Alexander Koryzis, was Premier of Greece when the Nazis invaded in 1941. His father is not only a self-made millionaire in the buccaneer Onassis mold, but also a former professor of law at the Athens Graduate School of Economics and Business Science. Alexander, an avid collector of antique Rolls-Royces, is a shrewd businessman who graduated from Zurich University with an honors degree in mechanical engineering. Regarded as a forceful, ambitious pragmatist by his business associates, he developed his family’s ultramodern shipbuilding facilities at Eleusis. “Christina wanted a hardboiled, tough decision maker,” said one of her friends last week, “and that is what she got.”
Moreover, Alexander’s conservative, family-oriented life-style may seem especially appealing to the long unsettled heiress. After her mother, Tina Livanos, divorced Ari in 1960 because of his affair with Opera Singer Maria Callas, Christina quickly grew into a child of the jetset. “She was given far too much money—a bad mistake. All she had to do was spend,” observes Baron Arnaud de Rosnay, who has known Christina since she was eleven. “She has one of the strongest personalities I have encountered in a woman. She wanted to be someone on her own and couldn’t. She is very intelligent, very sharp, but all is spoiled because there is no drive, no continuity. She can change her mind in a second.”
Beginning in 1970, a series of personal tragedies began to overshadow Christina’s playgirl path. First her maternal aunt, Eugenie Niarchos, wife of Ari’s longtime shipping rival, Stavros Niarchos, died from an overdose of sleeping pills. The following year Christina suffered through her own first marriage, divorce and a brief stay at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Rumors of an attempted suicide began to circulate, but were vehemently denied by her family.
In 1973 Christina’s only brother, Alexander Onassis, was killed in a plane crash at Athens airport. One year later, Christina’s mother, who had followed her sister’s example by marrying Stavros Niarchos, died mysteriously of pulmonary edema. Finally, Ari himself succumbed to bronchial pneumonia in Paris earlier this year. “I think she wanted to make a complete break with the past,” says Baron de Rosnay of Christina’s unexpected wedding.
“That takes courage, and I think she showed it.”
At a time when Onassis enterprises are suffering from an overstock of tankers and a decline in oil shipments, Christina has acted quickly to enlist help at the helm. Even before her marriage, she had taken steps to challenge her late father’s will, which left her 49% of the Onassis empire. She deposited the document for probate in Greece, though the family’s financial headquarters are located elsewhere. Her goal: to gain the 50% of the estate usually awarded by Greek law to a sole surviving child.
Last week, however, the newlyweds seemed more intent on enjoying a short honeymoon before Andreadis, a belated draftee into the Greek army, was called back to his part-time duty. “I so love that child, and I am happy that she has found him,” declared Jackie Onassis as the couple prepared to leave for Athens. “At last I can see happy days ahead for her.”
ncG1vNJzZmismaKyb6%2FOpmaaqpOdtrexjm9vbW9hZ39wvMSop6WdXam1pnnMrqOtoZ2eua21zqdknaecoa6zecyaq5ygXw%3D%3D