Jackie and Maria: A Novel of Jackie Kennedy & Maria Callas
Jackie and Maria: A Novel of Jackie Kennedy & Maria Callas (retitled The Second Marriage in the UK) is Gill Paul’s latest novel that came out last year. Gill Paul is not an unknown author, as she is the internationally best-selling author of the historical fiction book The Secret Wife. The author indeed played it safe, as is apparent from the title of her newest book. Jackie and Maria is an eloquent novel about two famous women whose lives were full of tragedy, scandal and happy moments. We are presented the events that shaped the lives of Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy and given an insight into their interesting backstories. And if the stories of the two ladies happen to belong in a book owing to their love for the same man, Aristotle Onassis, all the better.
Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis
The author must have done a great amount of research that has gone into the fiction novel based on historical facts, as can be seen from the bits and pieces of history throughout the book.
Alternating chapters between Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas, the narrative is divided into two parts. The story starts off in 1957 when Maria Callas is 33 years old, approaching the pinnacle of her career and unhappily married to her husband who is also her manager. She has achieved international success as an opera singer, but the one thing in the world she wants is to have a baby. Meanwhile Jackie’s story opens in 1956, a year earlier, when she is expecting her first child, but we go on to read a few pages later that her daughter is stillborn. Her husband ‘vacationing’ in Europe with Swedish models during the childbirth makes her feel all the more sad. Melancholy spreads throughout the atmosphere of the story.
The story of the book is based on, and tries to be faithful to, actual events as they unfolded in real life but also touches on the childhood of the main characters, Maria and Jackie, as well as on their husbands’ personalities. The book explores the questions as to why Jackie put up with her husband even after his extramarital affairs did not stay private and how she might have felt when Marilyn Monroe seduced Senator Kennedy.
We are presented with ‘Ari’ Onassis’ life in the second part of the book, who is carrying on an affair with Callas, his long-time lover.
But what was most intriguing to me is why Onassis married the widowed Jackie Kennedy instead of Maria Callas who had been his lover for nine years. The completely fascinating book also tries to answer that question. While I was reading the book, I often felt prompted to google more information on the characters to confirm if the major events chronicled in the book are historical facts. Could anyone be as tragic as Jackie who buried her two-day-old son and her husband in four short months, or as Christina, Onassis’ daughter, who lost her brother, mother and father in two years? And if so, what led up to the terrible tragedies?
The book is a historical fiction, which, as Gill Paul acknowledges in her afterword, is very much a fictional reimagining, meaning that the conversations, feelings and emotions described in the novel are the product of the writer’s imagination. There really is no way of truly knowing the characters’ innermost thoughts and what conversations really took place between them, but I think the author did a great job making everything feel plausible and making the characters realistic. If you love reading about the lives of Maria Callas and Jackie Kennedy, as well as the historic events of the 1950s and 1960s, then I highly recommend reading this book.