I’ve booked  tickets to see the new West End play Onassis starring Robert Lindsay. But I am perturbed that the storyline is based on a book which essentially claims that the Greek shipping magnate arranged the murder of  Bobby Kennedy which has never been proven. But then neither has the writer Peter Evans been gagged from making these astonishing allegations in his book Nemesis, published in 2004.

The play is based on this book, and it is going to be hard to know which parts of the story are true, and which parts are based on unproven beliefs. However, it will naturally make the audience believe that it really happened, and I wonder if this will rewrite history as we know it?

I read about this background to the play in The Sunday Times as journalist Bryan Appleyard shares the same fascination with me about this Greek dynasty (my interest is based on the fact that I am half-Greek and my mother’s family knew the Onassis family when they both lived in Smryna).  Jackie and Onassis married in October 1968 – four months after her brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy was gunned down by a Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan.  Jackie and Bobby were very close to each other and Onassis knew that Bobby was trying to stop him marrying her, so plotted to have the rival for his affections killed, says Evans. At the time, Onassis was paying the PLO to stop his Olympic airlines from being bombed, and so he hatched a murderous plan with them to have Bobby killed.

This is the stuff of a real Greek tragedy. The biggest tragedy is that Onassis and Jackie ever married in the first place as Jackie was simply his ultimate prized possession as the widow of an American president.

And then there was the tragedy of the broken hearted opera star Maria Callas who continued to love him to her dying day….