What Really Happened When Maria Callas Visited Aristotle Onassis on His Deathbed (Exclusive)
Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, then Onassis’ personal secretary, recalls arranging the secret meeting
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Aristotle Onassis and Maria Callas on June 24, 1959Not long before his death on March 15, 1975, Aristotle Onassis had a secret visit from Maria Callas in his private room at the American Hospital in Paris.
According to Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, then Onassis’ personal secretary, it was devastating for the famed opera diva. “She knew because she had spoken to the doctor that there was no hope — that he was almost dead, finished,” says Moutsatsos, “and Maria had no hope that they would ever be together again.”
It’s a moment dramatized in the new biopic, Maria, directed by Pablo Larraín and starring Angelina Jolie as the tempestuous opera singer.
At the time of his death, Onassis was still married to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to whom he’d grown more and more estranged, and still involved with his longtime lover Callas, the American-born Greek soprano whom he’d first met in 1957.
Moutsatsos, now 75, helped to arrange the visit, as she had done for many of their secret rendezvous over the years. “We tried to know exactly when his daughter, Christina or when Jackie would visit him in order to tell Maria that she could go and visit Aristo,” says Moutsatsos, using her favorite name for Onassis.
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Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis“I informed Maria because I knew if Christina would be in Athens and if Jackie was in the United States and I knew which day they were supposed to return, I said to Maria this is the correct day that you can visit him without any fear.”
Not long afterward, the Greek shipping tycoon died at age 69, from respiratory failure due to complications from myasthenia gravis.
“They were like twins,” Moutsatsos recalls. “They thought they were born for each other — that they would never be separated.”
In her memoir The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account (now the basis for a new series being developed by Heidi Lauren Duke) Moutsatsos details how Onassis and Callas continued their love affair throughout his marriage while still continuing to see other women. “He liked to have next to him beautiful women, and Maria was very jealous,” she recalls. “She was always fighting with him.”
Still, she adds, “He couldn't live without her. She was a piece of his body, a piece of his soul, a piece of his brain. They never stopped seeing each other.”
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“After Aristo's death, Maria was desperate,” she says. “She didn’t want to live anymore. They kind of suffered the same fate, because Mr. Onassis, after his son died, he didn’t want to live anymore.”
Two years earlier, on Jan. 23, 1973, Onassis’ son Alexander died in a small plane accident at an airport in Athens, killing him at age 24. Onassis, she says, never recovered.
After Onassis' death in 1975, Moutsatsos recalls, “Maria was living in her own world. She didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to go out, she didn’t want to speak with friends. She lost her appetite to live.”
Two years later, on Sept. 16, 1977, she died of a heart attack at age 53.
Maria is now streaming on Netflix.
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