First Child of Heiress : Christina Onassis Gives Birth to a Girl

Greek shipping heiress Christina Onassis-Roussel gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in the American Hospital in Paris early today.

Hospital spokesman Bruce Redor said Onassis, 34, had a girl “during the night, and mother and baby are in satisfactory condition.”

Onassis married French businessman Thierry Roussel, her fourth husband, last March 17.

Asked if the birth was premature because of reports that the baby was due in March, Ioannis Georgakis, head of the Alexander Onassis Foundation in Athens, said “not at all; it might have come a few days earlier than expected.”

Onassis is the only surviving child of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who died in 1975. Her only brother, Alexander, died in a plane crash in 1975. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, from whom Christina is estranged, was her stepmother for a time.

Onassis’ three previous marriages ended in divorce. The first, in 1971, was to a Los Angeles real estate broker Joseph Bolker, then nearly twice her age, and ended after nine months. The second, to Alexander Andreadis, the heir of another Greek shipping fortune, ended in 1976.

Her third marriage was in 1978, in Moscow to a Soviet civil servant, Sergei Kauzov. They were divorced less than two years later.

Christina told a French magazine that she fell in love with Roussel when she was 21 and they vacationed together on the Onassis family island of Skorpios.