This week, Athina Onassis, the granddaugher of Aristotle Onassis, turned 18 and inherited a vast fortune. Róisín Ingle profiles the wealthiest teenager in the world.
Turning 18 is a rich experience for any young girl. Your relatives make a show of themselves on the dance floor and your parents deliver embarrassing speeches as they pass around the baby photos. On the plus side you get to drink legally for the first time and while ordering a round for your mates in the nightclub later, you feel well and truly grown up. Still, your party funds are likely to have run out by the time you get home - something that will never be an issue for Athina Onassis, formerly Roussel, who turned 18 on Wednesday in a style so incredible it reads like something out of a capitalist fairytale. On that morning the granddaughter of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and the only child of his late daughter Christina, came into the first half of her fortune, signing documents that entitled her to $2.5 billion. When she is 21, she will receive almost the same sum again and take control over the entire Onassis empire.
"I want to see all there is," she told a family friend before her big day. "I want to hold the share certificates. I want the deposit boxes opened." Presumably she also wants to cast her eyes over the fabulously rare artworks she now owns, take the lift up to her new Fifth Avenue skyscraper in Manhattan, and trail a finger over one million ounces of gold.
To truly examine her legacy, she would have to travel to the boardrooms of 87 major companies and offshore tax havens. And visit homes in Paris, Acapulco and London. Not forgetting the island of Scorpios in Greece which belonged to her mother who died when she was just three years old.
Taking possession of this first half of her fortune, Athina legally changed her name from her father's surname Roussel to the more loaded - literally and historically - Onassis. During a rare interview in 1998 she acknowledged the weight of the family name which while always associated with fabulous wealth, has been tinged with equal amounts of sadness and tragedy. "The name is the cause of all the problems," she said.
Her grandfather built his wealth from nothing, marrying a Greek beauty, Athina Livanos. Both parents favoured their son Alexander to Christina who spent most of her life battling weight problems and seeking her parents' approval. Alexander died in his early twenties. Aristotle, having broken the heart of opera singer Maria Callas and taken a trophy wife in Jackie Kennedy during his lifetime, died a year later still mourning his son and preferred heir to his vast fortune. No man, he told his daughter who he viewed as unattractive and dumpy, would ever want her for anything but her money. Indeed, Thierry Roussel, since named the most successful gigolo in the world, was to be Christina's fourth husband. He had fathered another child by his Swedish mistress by the time Athina was four months old. The marriage was over within three years. Christina died shortly afterwards at 37 from a cocktail of diet and sleeping pills. Her body was found in the bath in her Buenos Aires home.
The most poignant and most public image of Athina is from that time. A little girl with sad eyes in a tiny frock coat, with a nursery filled with dolls wearing dresses designed by Christian Dior. When she began reciting Baa Baa Black Sheep, Christina bought her a flock of sheep complete with yodeling shepherd. Instead of a pram she got a miniature Mercedes. Roussel, who was given more than a million dollars a year to look after his own daughter, insisted she would not be spoiled and by all accounts Athina has developed into a relatively normal teenager despite a life lived in the shadow of security guards and kidnap threats.
Despite her father's early playboy reputation, he provided a stable home life in Switzerland with his Swedish wife, Gaby Landhage, and their two children. Athina went to a state school and grew up in a modest five-bedroom villa. She is a horse-mad teenager whose main ambition is to secure a place in the Greek Olympic showjumping team for 2004. Slightly introverted, she has been brought up to believe, says Roussel, that money is not everything and in her early teens was said to be plotting how best to give away her impending wealth to charitable causes. She is multi-lingual, speaking French, Swedish and German, but has only the most tenuous links with her Greek heritage, a fact which has incensed the associates of Onassis charged as trustees of her inheritance. For much of her life she has been in the middle of a legal war between these associates, known as greybeards, and her father who they distrust and blame for the death of Christina. Control over the fortune was later passed to independent trustees.
Whether she likes it or not, as her public profile is raised with planned interviews and television programmes, Athina is set to become a Diana-type figure in the years to come. They already think of her as royalty in her ancestral home of Greece where they call her the Golden Girl, and observers are intrigued with the prospect of her coming into contact with the world's most eligible bachelor, Prince William.
At the moment, any such royal romantic encounter seems a remote possibility. For the past year Athina has been going out with Brazilian showjumper Alvaro Alfonzo de Miranda Neto, known as Doda. Twelve years older than Athina and with a wife and child, the horseman is deemed an unsuitable match for the teenager. Observers say it's a match as potentially destructive as her own mother and father's union. Doda's wife Sibele, an actress and model, says that when her husband first met Athina he made fun about her weight, calling her an elephant and laughing about the fact that she was practically throwing herself at him. "We were happy together until he met her," she has said. "Our only problem was money and Doda is useless with money. What he earns he spends. He is a charismatic, persuasive man. She will hang on his every word but she will learn, as I have."
Rumour had it this week he was planning to propose to Athina Onassis when she turned 18 and became the wealthiest teenager in the world. Whether this is the beginning of another Greek tragedy or a Happy Ever After, only time will tell.