Will Leia Rose be curse with the wealth?
Gambar Akikah Anak Marion Caunter & SM Nasaruddin
Marion Caunter dan suami tercintanya, SM Nasaruddin telah mengadakan majlis cukur jambul atau akikah bagi anak perempuan sulung mereka, Leia Rose pada hari Ahad yang lalu. Majlis ini dihadiri oleh sanak saudara terdekat dan juga sahabat-sahabat kedua-dua pasangan. Gambar diambil dari Twitter Marion Caunter.
Dipetik dari: www.izyan.com
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Christina Onassis at 24
Aristotle Onassis' Daughter was Born to a World of Privilege with Unlimited Wealth, but Sorrows to Match
From PEOPLE MagazineClick to enlarge
"It's your home," he answered. "It's yours. She is named after you. Her name is Christina, too."
And so it was. Life aboard the $6 million Christina must have seemed like a voyage on the Good Ship Lollipop to the tiny child. A Gauguin, a Pissarro and two El Grecos hung on the bulkheads, and the murals in Christina's nursery were by Ludwig Bemelmans. The swimming pool could be emptied, raised and converted magically into a ballroom floor. Her father spoiled Christina with endless presents, even cooked Greek food for her himself. (She had an American nurse and preferred cheeseburgers.)
Christina's fellow passengers as she was growing up on the floating palace and in Onassis's other homes—luxurious apartments in Paris, London and New York, a chateau on the Riviera and the private fiefdom on the Greek island of Skorpios—were the world's rich, famous and beautiful people. Winston Churchill praised her childish paintings. She was fussed over by Greta Garbo and Gregory Peck. They all came to pay court to her father, one of the world's wealthiest men, with an empire that was anchored in his $500 million merchant fleet. At one time or another it has also included a Manhattan skyscraper, an airline and the casino at Monte Carlo. Her mother, Athina (Tina) Livanos, was a blue-blooded international beauty and a Greek shipping heiress in her own right. For Christina early childhood meant adoring parents and everything money could buy. But by last week, with her father gravely ill and a series of sudden deaths and sorrows only recently behind her, her life had become a Greek tragedy.
Now a sad-eyed young woman of 24, Christina still inhabits a privileged world, but with little joy. She regularly migrates from her Sutton Place mansion in New York to the family's opulent apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris. She skis in Gstaad and water-skis in the Aegean. She is always immaculately groomed, often in dark colors. (As a teenager she would insist on changing her clothes immediately if they became wrinkled or spotted.) She washes her own hair. "Fashions and hairdos do not interest her," says a close friend. Her escorts at the big European balls and occasional nightclubs have been titled playboys and heirs of great fortunes. Her most frequent companion now is Peter Goulandris, scion of another great Greek shipping family and a friend since childhood. Most of her friends expect them to marry eventually—for dynastic, but not burningly romantic reasons. "My most fervent wish," she has said, "is that I shall meet a man who loves me for myself and not my money."
Christina's first language is English (she was born in New York and is a U.S. citizen), and she is fluent in French, Greek and Italian. "She is not a particularly intelligent girl," says a friend. "She is bright without being clever." Recently she has taken an interest in her father's empire—seeking his continued approval, friends say—working long hours on the management of the Olympic Tower in New York and in his Monte Carlo offices.
From the time she was a small child, it was apparent that Christina would be overshadowed by the beauty and style of her mother and her mother's sister, Eugenia. Christina's dark Levantine features favored her father's side of the family. Plastic surgery improved her nose and dieting slimmed her hips, but Christina remained a shy girl drawn to her father, who affectionately called her "chryso mou—my gold."
When she was 8, the first note of sadness crept into Christina's world. It began on a Mediterranean cruise with guests Sir Winston and Lady Churchill and Maria Callas, then at the height of her operatic career, and her husband, Giovanni Meneghini. Ari was instantly smitten with the diva, and they danced the nights away while Tina Onassis smoldered. When the Christina docked at Monte Carlo, the Meneghinis left for Italy—with Ari in pursuit, to begin his long and notorious affair with Callas. Christina remembers her mother waking her and her brother, Alexander, and packing them off the yacht in a hurry. "That night was confused—Daddy wasn't there," she told a friend. "I imagined that I was losing something important. I didn't know what. Mother only said we had to leave, and she was sure we were not coming back." The following summer (1960) Tina obtained an Alabama divorce, and a year later she married the Marquess of Blandford. Christina did not like Callas, and when the child visited her father the singer was never in sight. By 1968 Christina, then 17, confided to friends that she knew Onassis was hopelessly in love with Jacqueline Kennedy—and she felt it was a mistake. At their wedding reception aboard Christina, Alexander and Christina cried—not for happiness, it was said—and both slipped away when the toasts began. In 1970 tragedy began to intrude upon Christina's life. Her aunt Eugenia, married to Ari's archrival, Stavros Niarchos, was found dead—of an overdose of pills authorities decided, but only after an ugly investigation. Before Christina turned 21 she herself made a move that devastated her family.
Onassis had planned to give his daughter 21 ships as a coming-of-age present. But shortly before her birthday, in a three-minute Las Vegas civil ceremony, Christina married Joe Bolker, a divorced Los Angeles Realtor. He was 27 years her senior, with a penchant for heiresses. Onassis was furious and threatened to cut off the estimated $75 million trust fund she was to claim on her 21st birthday. (An equal fund had been established for her brother.) Onassis is said to have screamed at her over the telephone: "It is the only bad thing you have done, ever! I cannot forgive you." At one point, the unhappy Christina was hospitalized because of a reported suicide attempt, denied by the family. After nine months, in May 1972, they were divorced. "Listen," Bolker explained later, "when a billion dollars leans on you, you can feel it."
Christina reconciled with her father, but both were due for more shocks. Tina, who had divorced Blandford, announced that she was taking a third husband—none other than archrival Niarchos. Then, in 1973, brother Alexander, 24, died in Athens from injuries suffered in a plane crash. It was a crushing blow that suddenly turned the dashing Onassis into an old man. Some say the tragedy brought father and daughter closer together and improved relations between Jackie Onassis and her stepdaughter. Others are not so sure: to them, Onassis in his grief over his dead son seemed to resent the surviving Christina.
In October of last year, at 45, Tina Niarchos died suddenly in Paris of a lung ailment, and Stavros Niarchos became the widower of Christina's aunt and her mother. When she arrived at the Niarchos apartment, according to one of her friends, Christina "found Niarchos sitting down to dinner with 18 people. Her mother's body was in another room. The entire ensemble—candles on the table, silver, wine—shocked her. She took a stiff drink of Cognac, went into the room where her mother's body lay, said her prayers and left." After Christina demanded an autopsy, Niarchos's office struck back with a statement that Christina had attempted suicide a second time, in London, two months earlier—implying that afterwards her mother was emotionally and physically exhausted. The Onassis family again denied the report.
The deaths in her family make Christina arguably the richest single woman on earth. Her brother's trust fund reverted to her, and her mother's estate will bring her more millions. When she inherits the bulk of her father's estate—reckoned at close to $800 million—her wealth will rival that of the oil sheikhs. But it will mean little to the star-crossed heiress.
"Happiness," Christina said a few weeks ago when her father first became ill, "is not based on money. And the best proof of this is our family."
Athina Onassis: Love me, love my billions
Today, the only scion of the fabled Greek shipping dynasty will walk down the aisle. But can Athina Onassis shake off the family jinx and finally find happiness?
When Athina Onassis was a little girl, she had her own zoo, her dolls were dressed by Chanel and her first pram was a miniature Ferrari Testarossa. At 13, she was centre of an alleged kidnapping plot, involving mysterious men with links to the Israeli security services tailing her car through Swiss mountain resorts. Before she was allowed to go to sleep, bodyguards would check beneath her bed.
"I have tried to give her as ordinary a childhood as I can," her father, the Swiss pharmaceutical heir Thierry Roussel, has said. Even given Athina's position as heir to the Onassis billions, it is not an entirely convincing claim. And when she gets married at the £40,000-a-day Luisa and Oscar Americano charitable foundation in Sao Paolo today, it will be no ordinary wedding.
Little has been said about the nuptials officially. Yet Brazil's gossip magazines have filled the silence. Jennifer Lopez reportedly has been hired to sing at a cost of $1m (£577,000). There will be more than one security guard for every two guests (a ratio of 450 to 750), and 1,000 bottles of vintage champagne are on ice. The bride will wear a £40,000 pearl, lace and satin creation by Valentino - the designer who outfitted Jackie Kennedy for her wedding to Athina's grandfather, Aristotle Onassis.
But the most intriguing aspect of the event may turn out to be not the conspicuous consumption but the absence of her father. Roussel, it is said, refused to sign the invitations before they went out, and a friend close to the family claimed this week that neither he nor his Swedish wife, the former model Gaby Landhage, had been invited.
The so-called society wedding of the century risks being overshadowed by a feud that seems all too familiar to those who have followed the family's fortunes. For the third generation running, the words "gold-digger", "Onassis" and "marriage" are being whispered by some.
Nor is it just her choice of groom - an Olympic medal-winning Brazilian showjumper, Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto - that is causing ructions. Athina is already rich beyond belief: on her 18th birthday, she inherited a fortune estimated at £2.5bn, including the Aegean island of Skorpios, the Metro-pole Hotel in Monte Carlo, 217 bank accounts, the Onassis shipping fleet and enough blue chip shares to float (or sink) a stock exchange.
On her 21st birthday next month, however, she stands to gain control of the other half of her mother's bequest, the charity fund named after her uncle Alexander. Such a prospect appears to have horrified the aged Greek trustees who control the fund in Athens.
These "greybeards", as they are nicknamed, have vowed never to hand over power to someone who - like Athina - does not speak Greek. Not for the first time, an essentially family drama is likely to be played out in front of a judge. So labyrinthine are the disputes that they make the legal convolutions in Bleak House look like a half-hour episode of The People's Court.
How did it happen? As good a place as any to begin is 20 October 1968. On that day, on Skorpios, Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis - uniting Greek wealth and the nearest thing America had to aristocracy.
The omens were not good for a long-term love match. Onassis had a reputation as a philanderer: his first wife had divorced the shipping magnate after finding him in bed with the opera singer Maria Callas. Sections of the press sniffed at his reputation as a businessman while simultaneously suggesting that Kennedy was in it for the money. A £1.5m diamond engagement ring added fuel to the fire.
None of this might have mattered to Jackie. Fears for the safety of her children made moving to a deserted Greek island appealing. The reality, however, proved less comforting. Onassis detested his wife's extravagance. When his son, Alexander, died in a plane crash he became depressed and contemplated divorce before he died of cancer in 1975.
Perhaps if Alexander had been around to share, things would have been different. But Aristotle's daughter, Christina, seemed singularly unsuited to carrying the Onassis flame alone. In 1984,she married her fourth husband, Roussel, which led to more accusations of gold-digging. Roussel's reputation as a playboy preceded him and he seemed to mesmerise the vulnerable Christina.
She paid him a £22m dowry, yet he taunted her about her weight (her nickname was "thunder thighs" or the "the Greek tanker"). He also encouraged her to buy a bigger private jet and spent a fortune on property.
Athina was born in January 1985. Yet during his three-year marriage to Christina, Roussel refused to give up his three mistresses, fathering two children by Landhage, whom he would later marry. When Thierry and Christina divorced in 1987, he walked away with a £73m settlement. She even tried to offer him a further £10m if he would give his sperm to provide her with another child.
It never happened. Christina died in 1988 - a heart attack in the bath in Buenos Aires following a liposuction operation, which may have been drug-induced. Once again the family wealth devolved on a single person: three-year-old Athina.
It was left to Roussel and his new wife, Landhage, to bring Athina up in Switzerland - a duty for which he was paid more than a million a year. Under the terms of Christina's will, however, the money was controlled by a panel of mainly Greek trustees.
As the years went by, conflict was almost inevitable. The Greek trustees were critical of the way Roussel handled parts of their fortune that he had been allowed to invest, claiming that he had lost millions in unwise speculation. Claim followed counter-claim: there have been at least 95 legal actions between Roussel and the trustees.
At one point, he went to court to claim control over the money, insisting that the Greek "greybeards" were attempting to kidnap his daughter. More plausibly (as much as anything in this twisted tale is truly plausible), they claimed they were simply monitoring her to confirm that she was satisfying the terms of a life-insurance policy.
Later, the 13-year-old Athina appeared in court to claim that she had "great abhorrence for everything that is Greek" and that she wished to break with the trustees. Roussel could claim a victory of sort when the courts eventually appointed the accounting firm KPMG to administer the inheritance.
But at what emotional cost? The moniker "poor little rich girl" stuck to Athina like a barnacle on one of her grandfather's tankers. As a teenager, she even considered giving all the money away when she inherited: "If I burn the money, there will be no problem. No money, no problem." The relationship between father and daughter seems to have been permanently damaged, too. Last year, he finally renounced all claim to managing the Onassis fortune: but only after he received a settlement of £53m.
This, then, is the kindling that has helped make today's wedding such a potentially combustible event. The spark that may light it, however, is the groom. Athina met Miranda at the Nelson Pessoa riding academy in 2002. Horse-mad since childhood, Athina was trying to reach the standard required to ride in the 2006 Olympics. Mirandawas her instructor when their affair began. Shortly afterwards, she left school.
There is no one more moral than a rake who becomes a father to a daughter: Thierry Roussel was said to have been apoplectic, dismayed by his daughter's refusal to go to university and disapproving of the fact that Miranda was 12 years older than her and a divorcé with a six-year-old daughter by his ex-wife, the former model Sibele Dorsa.
You do not have to be Dr Anthony Clare to wonder whether there isn't a pattern. Miranda's motives - love, money or a mixture of the two? - have been questioned just as Thierry's were. But the disturbing parallels do not stop there. Since beginning her relationship with the rider, there have been reports that Athina has had breast and buttock implants at her fiancé's request and that she has become blonder.
Some observers have wondered whether it is not just a morality tale about money that is being played out across the generations, but a self-destructive psychological drama.
"Athina is the third generation of Onassis woman to marry young, and to an older man," Alexis Mantheakis, a former spokesman for the family told one interviewer.
Others have pointed out that Athina seems genuinely happy in her relationship and the relative normality it offers. She is said to like simple Brazilian barbecues, eating Japanese food, watching DVDs and shopping amongst the hoi polloi - all ordinary pleasures but worth their weight in gold to a poor little rich girl. Since she met Miranda, she has also found some kind of accommodation with her Greek ancestry. Not only has she renewed her Greek passport, but she has joined an Athenian riding school and stated her wish to ride for the country of her grandfather's birth at the Olympics, although whether that will be enough to satisfy the "greybeards" is another matter.
Perhaps in January, when Athina reaches her maturity and takes complete control of her own financial destiny, things will become clearer. But somehow you doubt it. In the meantime, in this most imponderable of weddings. at least one thing is simple. The couple don't want presents, suggesting instead donations to charity. "We did this," says Miranda, "to show people there is a better place for their money. Besides which, it's so much classier than a toaster or a set of fish knives."
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I know Tun's son is curse, so will Leia Rose join the rank?
This year there will be preview of the curse where wealth were stolen and not sweated upon.
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