ONASSIS: ARISTOTLE AND CHRISTINA
L.J. Davis
St. Martin's Press, 1986
$16.95
Biographies of great tycoons are difficult to write and nearly impossible to read. Caught in a maze of dry and ostensibly unimpeachable yet in reality often distorted and tendentious business information, writers can rarely find the literary fulcrum they need to turn the didactic world of Horatio Alger into a truth as entertaining as F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction. A highly readable specimen of this genre should command our attention, and L.J. Davis' new biography of Aristotle Onassis does just that.
Onassis: Aristotle and Christina is the story of a business empire built by one man whose autocratic management style and misplaced dynastic ideal would be the undoing of both his enterprise and his family. The setting for this drama is literally the world's stage. The spectacle is provides is fascinating.
"These ceremonies and shows," wrote an observer, "may be condemned by philosophy and ridiculed by comedy…. Yet the common sense of mankind has never adopted the rigid decrees of the former, nor ever sincerely laughed with the latter." The writer here is not L.J. Davis but John Adams, describing in his Autobiography his visit to Versailles in 1778. His words epitomize the Onassis story. Perhaps this is so because the very language we use to describe someone's great success - replete with unconscious metaphors such as "empire," "dynastic," "spectacle" - seems to have absorbed the salient concepts of absolutism. The incongruous existence of such metaphors in an environment of economic and political freedom may be partially the cause and partially the effect of the tycoon mentality exhibited so perfectly by Aristotle Onassis. In his successes as well as his failures, Onassis invariably reminds the reader of the subject of another Davis book, Louis XIV, the Sun King, whose Versailles, some sixty years after his death, made such an impression on John Adams. In the West, the ghost of Onassis promises every businessman: "you can be king." That may be so, Davis replies judiciously. But is it good business?
Scholars agree that at the beginning of Louis XIV's reign his court was small and mobile, in the tradition of his Capetian ancestors who had moved about for centuries looking after their lands. So, too, it was with the Sun King of L.J. Davis' story. "As a Greek, I belong to the West," he once told Fortune.
As a shipowner, I belong to capitalism. Business objectives dictate the details of my operations. My favorite country is the one that grants maximum immunity from taxes, trade restrictions, and unreasonable regulation. It is under that country's flag that I prefer to concentrate my profitable activities. I call this business sense.
Indeed, early in his career Onassis put his venture capital where his libertarian mouth was. On his yacht, Christina, "a three-hundred-and-twenty-five-foot hull of dazzling indifference to the outside world," he always found time for his grand illusions. He had the stools of its bar "upholstered with the scrotums of whales" and the fireplace in the smoking room "inlaid with lapis lazuli." It was personal and corporate mobility, not a public-relations image, that he pursued aboard
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