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Copyright
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the United States as Jackie and Maria by William Morrow, HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
This ebook edition published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Gill Paul 2020
Cover design © Claire Ward, HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Cover illustration © Cristian Todea/Arcangel Images (woman),
Jean-Claude Deutsch/Paris Match Archive/Getty Images (yacht),
Shutterstock.com (all other images)
Gill Paul asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008366254
Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008366261
Version: 2020-07-28
Praise for The Second Marriage:
‘Glamorous and highly seductive, this compelling story explores the lives of two complex, powerful women complete with all their talents and flaws. I loved it.’
Dinah Jefferies, author of The Tuscan Contessa
‘Heart-breaking. Brilliant. Powerful. I guarantee that this fascinating love-triangle story will have you enthralled.’
Kate Furnivall, author of The Guardian of Lies
‘I can’t rave highly enough about this book – brilliantly researched, compellingly told and completely fascinating. I just loved it.’
Tracy Rees, author of Amy Snow
‘A compelling and fascinating story. I enjoyed it immensely.’
Rosanna Ley, author of The Lemon Tree Hotel
‘An utter treat from beginning to end – I’m sure that readers far and wide will fall under its spell.’
Jenny Ashcroft, author of Beneath a Burning Sky
‘A truly compelling story […] This is the best of historical fiction – leaving you wanting more.’
Liz Trenow, author of The Forgotten Seamstress
‘Evokes the world of the jet-set, rich and famous of the 1960s so well I felt I was living it all alongside them.’
Kathleen McGurl, author of The Daughters of Red Hill Hall
‘Addictive and so well-researched. I read it in a day.’
Kate Riordan, author of The Girl in the Photograph
‘This dishy and delectable novel is sure to please readers with its famous cast of characters, its taut pacing, and a truly absorbing story.’
Heather Webb, co-author of Meet Me in Monaco
‘Surprising and devastating […] This is perfect historical fiction.’
Hazel Gaynor, co-author of Meet Me in Monaco
‘Beautiful, tender and humane storytelling.’
Kate Thompson, author of Secrets of the Homefront Girls
‘Such fascinating women and such wonderful storytelling. A fantastic read.’
Joanna Courtney, author of The Chosen Queen
‘A fabulous book.’
Eve Chase, author of Black Rabbit Hall
‘A stunning novel about two beautiful, famous women in love with one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men. Gill Paul’s depth of research is exceptional. I simply adored it!’
Renée Rosen, author of Park Avenue Summer
‘An intoxicating mix of glamour, scandal and fascinating insight into the lives of two of the twentieth century’s most iconic women – and the man they both loved.’
Tammy Cohen, author of Stop at Nothing
‘Simply stunning. I lived and breathed it for days, and I really can’t stop thinking about these two women now. This will be HUGE!’
Louise Beech, author of Call Me Star Girl
‘A deep dive into glitz, glamour and heartbreak. Gill Paul’s emotionally turbulent, amazing novels never disappoint.’
Karen Harper, author of The Queen’s Secret
‘A delectable novel about the lives and romantic rivalry of two female icons—such a juicy page-turner!’
Kris Waldherr, author of The Lost History of Dreams
‘Gill Paul brings to vivid life two iconic women of the twentieth century and their intertwined destinies. Sumptuous and spellbinding.’
Louisa Treger, author of The Lodger
Dedication
For Barbara Douka, who gave me the idea for this novel
Epigraph
Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.
—EURIPIDES, MEDEA, 431 B.C.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for The Second Marriage
Dedication
Epigraph
Act I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Act II
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Act III
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Act IV
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Act V
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgments
Historical Afterword
About the Author
Also by Gill Paul
About the Publisher
Act I
Chapter 1
Hotel Danieli; Venice, Italy September 3, 1957
“Come with me.” Maria felt her elbow being tugged by the party’s hostess, so insistently that she almost toppled sideways. “I want to introduce you to your fellow Greeks: Aristotle and Tina Onassis. Here they are.” Arm outswept, the hostess announced, “This is Maria Callas.”
Years later, Maria would look back on the seeming ordinariness of the moment. When you meet someone who is going to turn your world upside down and shake it up so violently that nothing will ever be the same again, there should be a warning sign, she thought. In Greek mythology there would be a thunderclap, an earthquake, an eclipse of the sun. Here there was no such thing. Just the murmur of polite conversation, a string quartet playing Schubert, and the clink of champagne glasses under crystal chandeliers.
Of course Maria had heard of Onassis before. Depending upon which paper you read, he was either the world’s richest man and a charming host on his yacht, the Christina, or a crook and a pirate of the high seas. She was surprised to find that he was shorter than her, because in photographs he had the aura of a tall man, but straightaway she liked the amusement she detected in his eyes, the way he held her hand firmly and bent to touch it with his lips.
“I’m honored to meet the world’s greatest soprano,” he said, his first-ever words to her.
“One of the greatest perhaps …” Hyperbole always embarrassed her.
“You must be the only person in this room who plays down her achievements,” he said, with a tip of his head toward the assembled company. There were actors and socialites, some royals, and a sprinkling of politicians, but few from the world of opera, Maria’s usual milieu. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were holding court, wearing crowns as if to mock the one he gave up when he abdicated the British throne; Princess Grace of Monaco wandered around with a sweet smile pinned to her face despite the conspicuous absence of Prince Rainier less than a year into their marriage; and Elizabeth Taylor was flirting at the bar with a swarthy man who was definitely not her husband.
Maria laughed. “I was assured these were ‘Europe’s finest,’” she said, mimicking the Midwest accent of their hostess, a gossip columnist who relished bringing celebrities together.
“Of course, one should always believe the word of journalists,” Aristotle retorted with a grin, and Maria warmed to him.
“Are you Maria’s father?” she heard Tina Onassis asking her husband, Battista, who had been hovering behind her. People often thought that because of the thirty-year age difference between them.
“Suo marito,” he replied with a hint of exasperation. He didn’t speak much English, only Italian, so Tina switched to that language to chat with him, while Aristotle continued addressing Maria in Greek.
“I’m ashamed to say I’ve never heard you sing. I’m not a fan of opera. It always sounds to me like a pair of Italian chefs screaming risotto recipes at each other.”
Maria laughed. “I don’t think I’ve heard that one. Can you remember what it’s called?”
“No idea,” he admitted with a grin. “But when Tina took me to an opera in Athens I dozed off in the box. At least they had comfortable seats.”
“I think you’ll find that operas are as varied as …” She searched for an appropriate simile. “You are in shipping, are you not? As varied as shipping routes.”
He pulled a face. “But more artistic, I hope. Despite my tin ear, I would love to hear the voice that all the critics rave about.”
She gave a modest shrug. “They don’t all rave, I’m afraid. They ran out of superlatives long ago and now they come to my performances searching for things to criticize. I don’t want to make their job easy, so the pressure each time I perform is immense.”
“That old story: they build you up only to knock you down again.”
“Perhaps you have experienced something similar?” She knew that three years earlier he had been arrested in America on some technicality involving his shipping empire, and grainy photographs of him being fingerprinted had appeared in the press. It must have been humiliating.
He leaned closer, and she could smell a sweet hay scent that was probably explained by the cigar protruding from his top pocket. “There’s a world of difference between us. To get where I am took nothing more than pigheadedness. But you—you clearly have a gift from the gods.”
“I work quite hard too, Mr. Onassis.” That was an understatement. Maria memorized libretti, practiced all afternoon, and, if she didn’t have a performance in the evening, she read opera scores in bed till the early hours. Music was her life. Attending parties like these was a rarity.
“Call me Aristotle. Please.” He touched her arm, just above the elbow, where her glove stopped and bare flesh was exposed. “So, when will I come to hear you sing? You be my guide.”
She smiled. “I’ll let you know when I am singing in a concert hall with particularly comfortable seats. Maybe you should bring your own pillow.”
“It’s a deal,” he said, his hand still resting on her arm.
He was flirting, with her husband just inches away. Maria usually had no time for the directors and fellow performers who made advances, but this was innocent fun and she was enjoying herself. “How can I believe you?” she teased. “Don’t they say you should never trust a sailor?”
“My friends can trust me with their lives, my enemies can trust that I have a Greek appetite for revenge—so I suppose that makes me trustworthy.” His eyes were flecked with gold, she noticed. Shrewd eyes.
“And I? Do you think I should trust you?” she asked.
“If I make you a promise, I will always keep it,” he told her, serious now. “You can trust in that.”
Those words stuck in her head long afterward.
Chapter 2
Venice September 4, 1957
The morning after Elsa’s party, Maria awoke to find a note slipped under the door of their suite asking if she and Battista would join Aristotle and Tina Onassis for lunch in Harry’s Bar at one o’clock. She stretched and looked at the ormolu clock on the mantel: it was almost twelve. She generally preferred to ease herself into the day with a scented bath followed by a leisurely breakfast, but something about Aristotle had piqued her curiosity. She’d expected the world’s richest man to be serious and money obsessed, but instead he seemed fun.
“Battista!” she called. Her husband was reading a newspaper on a sunny balcony that overlooked the Grand Canal. “We’re going for lunch in an hour.”
Harry’s Bar was a short walk away along the waterfront and they arrived only slightly late. A maître d’ in white jacket and black bow tie led them through the restaurant, past the long, polished-wood bar to a table at the back, where the Onassises were poring over menus. Aristotle leapt to his feet.
“I’m delighted you could come,” he declared in Italian, kissing Maria’s hand, shaking Battista’s, then clapping him on the back. “Please, sit. Bellinis all round? It seems fitting, when they are named after the great opera composer.”
Tall glasses of the bar’s trademark cocktail appeared: white peach juice mixed with Prosecco, so light and aromatic, it seemed impossible it was alcoholic.
Maria sat on a banquette next to Tina Onassis, a pretty woman with bleached blond hair and dark eyebrows who on closer scrutiny seemed scarcely out of her teens; there was clearly a substantial age gap in their marriage, as in hers.
“I’m honored you could join us,” she said to Maria. “I’m one of your biggest fans. Did Aristo tell you? I first heard you singing Aida at La Scala back in 1950, and since then I’ve flown to Milan for all your premières.”
“Really?” Maria was touched. “That’s very flattering. Do you live in Athens?”
“We have homes all over the place: Athens, Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Montevideo …” She gave a quick eye roll, mocking the length of the list. “But Aristo is usually to be found on the Christina. He gets crotchety if he has to spend too long on dry land.”
Battista was telling Aristotle about the funds he was trying to raise to make a film of Maria singing Medea. She hoped their host didn’t feel he was being pressured to contribute.
“How long have you two been married?” she asked Tina, looking from one to the other.
“Forever!” Tina cried. “Eleven years. I was just seventeen at our wedding and Ari was forty, so I’m sure I seemed terribly childish. But then we had children and they make you grow up fast.”
She pulled one of those faces that Maria had often noticed mothers make: it was meant to be long-suffering but was really a look of pride. She would rather have joined Aristotle and Battista’s conversation about the film business but knew Tina was waiting for her to ask about the children, so she did.
“What ages are they now?”
Tina began to describe them, and Maria’s attention wandered. Everyone assumed that she hadn’t wanted children because of her devotion to her career, but it wasn’t true. She yearned for a baby, ached for one, and it simply hadn’t happened. A specialist had told her she had a malformation of the womb that would make it difficult, but not impossible, for her to get pregnant. She was thirty-three years old and all too aware that time was running out.
She blinked, realizing Tina had asked her a question.
“How did you and Battista meet?” she repeated.
Maria smiled. “He saved me from a life typing businessmen’s letters and got me where I am today.” As she told her story, Aristotle and Battista paused to listen.
IT HAD BEEN hard for Maria to get her break in opera, because her voice was too strong, too mature, for the chorus, and it had an unusual timbre. She needed directors who were prepared to risk giving her lead roles, but most were risk averse—unsurprisingly, given the astronomic cost of staging opera. She had trained in Athens, where she spent the war years living with her mother and sister, then moved to New York, where her father’s pharmacy business was based. After more than a year of disheartening auditions, she at last won a lead role, singing La Gioconda in Verona, and sailed to Italy alone at the age of twenty-three.
“It was a difficult time,” she told the Onassises. “There was resentment toward this young interloper who didn’t even speak fluent Italian yet had somehow landed the lead. The cast pushed past me backstage without saying buon giorno, and I went home alone most nights.”
She didn’t add that she was a whale of a girl in those days, over two hundred pounds of blotchy, dimpled flesh, with a nose that was too big for her face, and thick, black-rimmed glasses, without which she was near blind. Her appearance made her shy and awkward, another reason it was hard to make friends.
“I had a guardian angel, though.” She turned to Battista with a smile. “I met this man at a dinner party on my first evening in Verona and he took me under his wing. He was an opera aficionado and we bonded over our shared love of music.”
Battista took up the story: “When Maria’s contract at Verona ended, her father wanted her to return to New York and work as a secretary. To me, that would have been a criminal waste of talent. I offered to subsidize her for another six months while I introduced her to the directors I knew and tried to get her career off the ground.”
“What a clever investment!” Aristotle exclaimed. “You gained a beautiful wife and the world gained a magnificent talent.”
Battista grinned. “We had luck on our side. One evening, when we were strolling after dinner, we bumped into my friend Nino Catozzo, the director at La Fenice. A soprano had let him down at the eleventh hour. His production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde had been advertised, tickets sold, and suddenly he had no Isolde—so I suggested Maria for the role.”
She interrupted. “You have no idea how terrifying it was. Battista pretended I already knew the part, which is one of the most difficult in opera. I had to audition a week later, sight-reading for Tullio Serafin, the great guru who had conducted me in La Gioconda. Fortunately he thought I was capable of the role and arranged two months of intensive coaching to get me ready.”
She would never forget the blind panic of that time: the technical difficulties of the part of Isolde, the wild, passionate Irish princess; the immense pressure of stepping out onto the glittering stage where Rossini’s and Bellini’s works had premièred; the grandeur of La Fenice, with its rows of golden boxes, the ceiling mural of flying Graces, the ornate putti, the plush red-velvet seats. All of it combined to make her feel unworthy.
On opening night Tullio had given her a gift of a Madonna icon—a pretty one in jewel tones with a gilt frame. She remembered trembling as she prayed to the compassionate face of the Holy Mother that she would not let everyone down.
The prayer must have worked, because the production was an astounding success. She couldn’t see beyond the proscenium arch without her glasses but could hear that many were getting to their feet, cheering and whistling as well as clapping, and she was called back to the stage a dozen times before she could finally retreat to her dressing room. It felt like a dream.
“You should have seen the reviews.” Battista beamed. “I’ve never read anything like it. The critics were unanimous that a new star had appeared in the firmament. After that, every director in Italy wanted to work with her, and Tullio became her cheerleader.”
They had told this story before, and she smiled at him as she delivered the punch line. “Battista waited till the third night after the opening, when he was sure his investment had paid off, before asking me to marry him.”
They all laughed. In fact, Maria had been stunned by his proposal. She had so little confidence in those years that she couldn’t believe anyone would want her for anything other than her voice. How could he think of making love to a woman so large that no chairs were big enough for her? A woman with thighs the circumference of the average woman’s waist? She had been reluctant to remove her tent of a nightgown on their wedding night, but Battista seduced her slowly, awakening sensations she adored. Right from the start, she loved sex, couldn’t get enough of it. She loved him too; he was the first person ever to make her feel cherished.
Waiters interrupted them with plates of pink carpaccio, the house specialty that Aristotle insisted they try. Maria was glad he had ordered for them. She couldn’t have read the menu without her glasses, and she was too vain to wear them in public. The thinly sliced raw beef was succulent, tender, sublime. When that was gone, he ordered prawns, freshly caught in the Lagoon that morning and grilled with garlic butter. All afternoon, they drank frothy Bellinis and nibbled delicacies, while getting acquainted. Maria felt uncharacteristically light-headed, and more relaxed than she had in many a month.