Christina Corso, Compass

How Aristotle Onassis Designed the World's First Superyacht

"Before the Christina O, the superyacht as we know it wasn’t a thing. But in 1954, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis happened upon a slender, elegantly shaped anti-submarine frigate that had served at the D-Day landings, and paid its scrap value of $34,000. What happened next was typical of the Golden Greek: Naming the boat after his daughter, he spent almost $4 million creating the original floating pleasure palace, adding revolutionary touches like a helipad and the mosaic-tiled bottom of the seawater pool that would rise to become a dance floor at the touch of a button. Soon Frank Sinatra was playing the Steinway or flirting with Marilyn Monroe on barstools made of whale foreskins at Ari’s Bar—where Winston Churchill is said to have thought that a young John F. Kennedy was a waiter when they first met in the mid-1950s. For all that went down on the 325-foot Christina O, the ship itself was influential, providing a blueprint for both design and hedonism to a generation of superyachts, especially those of fledgling boat designer Jon Bannenberg, whose interior design of Talitha G for the Getty family owed a debt to this original. After Onassis’s death, in 1975, Christina Onassis (shown above, at age 3, on board) donated her namesake to the Greek government, and the ship was allowed to decay until a 2001 overhaul, followed by another restoration 15 years later. Now it’s available to rent—if only those Spanish-galleon-timber walls could talk."