GREECE: One of the Last Tycoons

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Belly Dancers. After the honeymoon, the marriage was filled with what one intimate of Ari's called "the nights of long silences." Jackie loved concerts, ballet and theater; Onassis preferred raucous bouzouki music, belly dancers and at times the company of roistering Greek businessmen. Much of the time they lived separate lives; Jackie had visited her husband, who had been in the hospital for five weeks, a few days earlier but was in New York City last week at the time of his death. When they were both in Manhattan, she resided with her children Caroline and John Jr. at her 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment, while Ari stayed in a suite at the Hotel Pierre. Nonetheless, intimates insist, there was much mutual affection and consideration in the marriage.

Life changed dramatically for Onassis two years ago, when his son Alexander, then 24, was killed in a plane crash. "He aged overnight," observed a close associate. "He suddenly became an old man." In business negotiations he was uncharacteristically absentminded, irrational and petulant.

In his last public appearances, the lingering effects of myasthenia gravis were apparent: his eyelids were taped open because his muscles had become too weak to hold them up. With Onassis' death, the world lost one of its most extraordinary entrepreneurs. However, he left little legacy—no monuments, no great acts of philanthropy, no record of achievement other than a succession of business deals. All that remains is the memory of a vital, tough, self-made millionaire who clearly believed that living well was the best revenge and, more than most mortals, could exact and enact it.