Jackie Kennedy reportedly told her former lover that marrying Aristotle Onassis was the biggest mistake of her life, according to a posthumously published memoir by architect John Carl “Jack” Warnecke.
Warnecke, who dated the former first lady between 1964 and 1966, wrote that she expressed frustration at having limited control over her home after marrying the Greek shipping magnate.
“She unhesitatingly expressed frustration that this one room was all she was allowed to decorate [and] told me she believed that her marriage to Onassis was the biggest mistake she had ever made,” he wrote.
The account appears in Camelot’s Architect: The Untold Story of Jackie Kennedy, Lafayette Square and a Secret Romance, which is due to be published on November 10. Warnecke died in 2010.
He said he and Kennedy remained friends over the years and became close again after Onassis’s death. Warnecke also described their relationship as an “exciting secret affair”, while making clear that “nothing physical” was taking place between them.
“She delighted in advising me in what she perceived to be my serious relationships with other women. Or possibly, she was testing me,” he wrote.
Kennedy and Onassis remained married until his death in 1975. Kennedy died from cancer in 1994.
