Athina Roussel: The Onassis girl

She does not bear the same name, speak the same language or own as many ships as her late grandfather. She has hardly visited the country where he was born, or the idyllic island where her mother and uncle are buried. But later this month, on her 18th birthday, Athina Roussel will inherit the fortune founded by the Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis.

Athina is an Aquarius, and an astrologer recently urged that the New Year's resolution of people born under this sign should be to "make money". She will certainly do that this year, inheriting assets from her grandfather conservatively valued at just over £1bn. (Some estimates put them as high as £5bn.) In three years' time, when she is 21, she will also become the head of the Onassis Foundation, inheriting another fortune.

Some of her grandfather's ageing merchant fleet has been sold. But a partial inventory of the assets that will be at Athina's disposal includes shares covering a third of the Onassis empire; companies in Argentina and Uruguay; an airline in Latin America; a significant investment in a baby-food factory in Brazil; cash deposits in 217 banks; a Japanese electronics company; an Iranian chemical company; two Greek islands; the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue; an apartment on the avenue Foch in Paris; the Métropole Palace hotel in Monte Carlo; two homes in Athens; and hundreds of works of art.

While Athina's family grapples with the problem of what to give the girl who has everything, her story has just taken a bizarre twist. In a plot-line worthy of a Latin American soap opera, the heiress to a Greek fortune who does not speak Greek has already found a playboy boyfriend, a Brazilian showjumping champion who shares her passion for horses.

Alvaro Alfonso de Miranda Neto is 12 years older than his 17-year-old girlfriend. Known as Doda, he boasts not just a bronze medal from the Sydney Olympics, where he was a member of the Brazilian showjumping team, but a furious ex-wife. Sibele Dorsa, mother of his two-year-old daughter Viviane, has taken to giving interviews from her apartment in São Paulo, accusing her husband of taking up with Athina for her fortune.

"He is attracted by her money," she declared last month. "I feel sorry for Athina because she is very young, just a child really, and I am sure she believes whatever Doda is telling her." Her former husband, she says, is much better at spending money than making it. "His all-consuming passion is for expensive horses. He lives mostly off his father and sponsors... Many times, the money would run out."

That should no longer be a problem for Doda, as long as he is with Athina. But observers of the three-generation Onassis saga have not been slow to suggest that history is repeating itself. Athina's mother Christina, Aristotle Onassis's only daughter, and sole heir after her brother Alexander died in a plane crash, married four times and was credited with many other lovers.

Athina's father, the French playboy Thierry Roussel, was her fourth husband. Christina is said to have been so keen to marry him that she paid him $30m to compensate him for moving from France to Switzerland. The marriage lasted three years, and after Christina's mysterious death at the age of 37 in a bath in Buenos Aires – variously attributed to too many diet pills or heart failure, not to mention a completely baseless accusation involving poison – Roussel took on the three-year-old Athina and raised her in Switzerland.

The man once cruelly labelled "the most successful gigolo in the world" reputedly received £1.4m a year in Christina's will to bring up Athina, on top of £1m a year for himself for the rest of his life. Although it has been acknowledged that he has tried to bring his daughter up as normally as possible, there is genuine surprise that Roussel is so relaxed about his daughter's relationship with an older man. The couple are reported to be living in Belgium, and the relationship has inevitably prompted fears that Athina may be embarking on the kind of destructive course followed by her mother. It also raises the question of whether the Onassis story can ever transcend a script peopled by predatory men and women who alternate between the roles of trophy and victim.

Aristotle Onassis famously arrived on the docks of Buenos Aires with only $60 in his pocket. It is one of those rags-to-riches stories that fascinates because it demonstrates that money, even in the obscene quantities amassed by Onassis, cannot buy happiness. And if schadenfreude is a universal, if somewhat repellent, feature of human nature, the family's history has provided ample opportunities over the years for the exercise of it.

It all started well. The Golden Greek, as Onassis was known, built up a fleet of tankers and married Tina (Athina) Livanos, daughter of a fellow-Greek shipping magnate. But the marriage ended explosively when Tina discovered her husband having sex, in the saloon of the yacht that bore her name, with the opera singer Maria Callas.

The outraged wife reputedly revealed all to Callas's husband, in an attempt to end the affair, but Callas seems to have been more amused than upset. Onassis divorced Tina, leaving their children – Christina was nine, her brother Alexander, 11 – with an abiding hatred of the Greek-born singer. (Alexander's attempts at revenge included revving his motorboat under the porthole of the cabin where Callas was resting before a performance.) But the singer was devastated when she was jilted for Jackie Kennedy, the widow of the assassinated US president, John F Kennedy, after nine years as the tycoon's companion. Jackie O, as she became known, was an even more iconic figure than Callas, travelling the world in her trademark dark glasses. Like her predecessor in Onassis's affections, she was also deeply unpopular with his children.

After her parents' divorce, Christina barely saw her father. Meanwhile, her embittered mother made a point of bewailing the fact that her daughter had inherited Onassis's dark features and clumsy shape, which she contrasted unfavourably with her own slender body and blonde hair. Tina eventually married her ex-husband's arch-rival, Stavros Niarchos, and committed suicide in 1974. Throughout her life, Christina was to display the low self-esteem, expressed in constant weight problems, which might be expected from a woman with such self-obsessed parents.

At the age of 16, she had cosmetic surgery on her nose. Four years later, aged 20, she embarked on her first marriage, to a 48-year-old millionaire estate agent – and obvious father substitute – who lived in LA. It lasted less than a year and Christina departed with a flippant remark: "I'm too Greek, and you're too Beverly Hills."

She was 23 when her brother died unexpectedly, and her father finally began giving her the attention she had always craved. But Onassis himself did not have long to live, and Christina was already embarked on a course of serial marriages and crash diets, partly in response to cruel nicknames such as the Greek Tanker and Thunder Thighs. At one point, she is said to have hired a former lover to keep her company for $1,000 a day.

Before she married Roussel in 1984, he insensitively instructed her to "go to Marbella and lose some weight". She did, but at one point during their short marriage, Roussel was involved with three other women, including Gaby Landhage, the Swedish model who is now his wife; the last straw was when Christina discovered that Gaby had secretly given birth to two children. They divorced in 1987, but not before Christina had lavished preposterous gifts, including a $10,000 toy Ferrari and a miniature zoo, on Athina. To his credit, Roussel put a stop to all that after Christina's death. "I want her to know that money is not everything," he has said, "that it is not a gold statue that you must venerate." He tried his best to normalise his daughter's upbringing, sending her to a local school, although the risk of kidnapping meant she always had bodyguards.

Even so, Athina Roussel is already being spoken of as the latest in a long line of poor little rich girls. One of the most frequently told stories about her – which probably says more about the emergence of another Onassis myth than the girl herself – is that her favourite toy as a child was a cheap ragdoll called Molly. Some observers have claimed to detect "a tinge of sadness" in her eyes, reflecting the popular notion that the Onassis blood is cursed.

The original poor little rich girl, the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, notched up no less than seven marriages, three of them to gay men. One of her husbands, the playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, departed with £2.5m, a private plane, polo ponies and a plantation in the Dominican Republic after a marriage in 1953 that lasted only 53 days. Hutton's only son died in a plane crash, and she spent her final years struggling with her addiction to drugs. Another candidate for the title, Gloria Vanderbilt, was so depressed after her second divorce that she went to see a psychiatrist, who promptly defrauded her of several million dollars.

What these heiresses and two generations of Onassis women have in common is bad luck, or very bad judgement, when it comes to men. It is undeniable that wealthy women attract fortune-hunters, and that even men who genuinely love them find themselves perpetually under suspicion. Yet heiresses are far from unique in suffering as a consequence of their wealth and status. There are plenty of men who have inherited fortunes, only to squander them on drugs and other chaotic behaviour. The fabulously wealthy 7th Marquess of Bristol, half-brother of Lady Victoria Hervey, for example, was a notorious drug addict, selling off the family silver to pay for his habit before his untimely death; and the Marquess of Blandford, heir to the present Duke of Marlborough, has been cut off without a penny, after a long history of drug problems.

What is clear is that inherited wealth is associated, in some cases, with spectacularly self-destructive behaviour. If women are more prone than men to involve themselves with wastrels, that may simply reflect a wider female tendency to seek compensation for a lonely childhood, in romance. Men are more likely to turn to toys – private jets, fast cars, yachts and a rapid turnover of beautiful women.

But the common factor is childhood damage, inflicted by parents for whom wealth has removed all the usual social restraints. Rich men, especially self-made ones such as Aristotle Onassis, can do what they like. They make disastrous husbands and lovers but they are also catastrophic fathers, and it is that sense of damage being handed down from generation to generation that makes the Onassis family resemble the characters in Greek tragedy.

In a dynasty founded by a predator, the next generation has no model of stable family life, and it is this factor, rather than wealth alone, that sets in motion the disasters that are to come. After her parents' divorce, Christina Onassis experienced the deracinated lifestyle of the super-rich, never wanting for material assets but singularly lacking in affection and attention.

It is a striking feature of the lives of very wealthy people that they are so frequently homeless in an emotional sense, restlessly moving from one fashionable location to another. But while men such as Onassis may be in flight, they are at least fleeing from something – poverty, hardship, a small-town mentality. Their children, endlessly commuting between New York, Paris, Monte Carlo, Athens and Buenos Aires, run the risk of feeling merely rootless.

It is hardly surprising that Christina Onassis was unable to provide, for herself or her child, something that she had never experienced. And that is where the contrast with the upbringing of her daughter could not be more poignant. Athina has grown up with her father, three half-siblings and an affectionate stepmother in a relatively modest five-bedroom home in Switzerland.

It may even be Roussel's desire to protect her that has brought about her estrangement from Greece. When she was 13, Athina remarked that she "hated everything Greek", a slight on the language and culture that shocked many Greeks, for whom she is as fascinating as the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Yet it could also be explained as a revulsion against the patriarch whose treatment of her mother and grandmother involved such public cruelty.

"I want to forget the name Onassis," she told the Italian magazine Oggi at the same time. "It's the cause of all the problems." It is hard to know whether these sentiments were authentic, or whether Athina was merely repeating the views of her non-Onassis relatives. But she has in the past toyed with the idea of giving much of her wealth away, not to men but to good causes, which suggests an awareness of the risks associated with a vast inheritance.

It is true that her involvement with an older man with expensive habits, at an age when she has barely completed her education, does not bode well. Yet teenage girls often fall in love with men who resemble their fathers, and this particular heiress, with her relatively stable background, may prove more resilient than her mother.

Over the next few years, as her every move is documented by the tabloids, her inheritance – mythic as well as financial – will not be easy to shake off. But it is certainly not a foregone conclusion that the latest chapter in the Onassis saga will turn out to be another Greek tragedy.

What To Do If You Inherit A Billion...

Hamish McRae, The Independent's chief economics commentator

Ask first what you really want to do. This is enough for you and your family to live very well for the rest of your lives – even if the funds are fairly badly invested there should still be enough. But there are plenty of other people in the world who have more, in some cases much more – so if you get into the conspicuous consumption game you will lose. Still, money buys freedom – use it. So, rule one: set aside enough, say half, to secure your family's comfort (and fun) for ever. And rule two: use the rest to establish a charitable foundation to do whatever you really want to achieve in the world.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, 'It' girl

I used to know Athina a little, and she is grounded. She has been well advised: when she was a child she probably had the best of everything, but was very unspoilt. She won't flaunt it. If I inherited a billion tomorrow, I would take over the whole Le Saint Géran hotel in Mauritius, and take all my friends out there in a converted Boeing 757. In the long term, I would obviously give a percentage to charity and use it to support in a very impacting way. I'd also buy a magnificent house and collect art and antiques. I'd make a wonderful place to live. If you're comfortable at night, and like your house when you're there, that's important. In some way, I think Athina's inheritance is a terrible shame: she is, of course, entitled to it, but I feel overwhelmed and sad for her.

Stephen Bayley, Design consultant

A definition of the financial independence we all crave is to be able to live off the interest of the interest, so this would mean putting aside £100m or so for selfish purposes (which in my context would include a small, but discriminating, collection of early Netherlandish art, a wine estate in Languedoc, an apartment on the rue Jacob, a house in Cheyne Walk and a Eurocopter to connect them, so that's maybe another £100m). With the £800m or so remaining, I'd do two things to save the capital. I'd start with reforestation. The excellent Trees for London tells me that about £350 buys and pays for the planting of a semi-mature silver birch, London plane or wild cherry. So £300m would get us 850,000 new trees... enough to make a significant impact on the townscape. Then I would endow a new Institute for Taste and Good Manners to teach politicians how to behave. And, with the arrogance of wealth, install myself as Director for Life.

Mhairi Hearle, Head of Oxfam in Scotland

With that amount of money, I'd like to see a trust that took risks. It's hard to get money for good causes that are risky and innovative and have no track record. Things like single parents who are entrepreneurs but can't get a leg up. There are also lots of former communist nations in eastern Europe in a state of collapse, without a health service or all the things we take for granted: it wouldn't take a huge investment to let these people start to take control of their lives and rebuild civil society. It would be money well spent.