Magnificent Obsession

VANITY FAIR

Magnificent Obsession

By James Reginato

Photographer Jonathan Becker

May 24, 2011

In 1961, Sunny wed Athina “Tina” Onassis, née Livanos. The daughter of Greek shipping magnate Stavros Livanos, she had just ended her 14-year marriage to Aristotle Onassis, with whom she had two children, Alexander and Christina. (In 1971, following her divorce from Sunny, she would marry Onassis’s arch-rival, Stavros Niarchos—her sister Eugenie’s widower. She died in 1974.)

The new blended family settled into Lee Place, a handsome Georgian country house about five miles from Blenheim. As Henrietta wrote in her memoir, Blenheim and the Churchill Family: A Personal Portrait, the early years of the marriage were happy for everyone, especially Christina: “For the first time, she was having a relatively normal childhood—attending a local school, riding her horse Cobweb, and enjoying sport and pets as opposed to the high social life [She] adored my nanny, who, unlike anyone else, treated her like one of us, disciplining and punishing her and thus earning her respect.”

While Henrietta “hero-worshipped” her elder stepsister, there were already portents of the troubled days ahead: “She had quite an obsessive character, often playing the same song over and over…. She was also addicted to Coca-Cola and Mars Bars.”