In the summer of 1971, on the private Greek island of Skorpios, Settimio Garritano took a set of photographs that changed perceptions of the most debated woman in the world. The images also provoked controversy. They were the catalyst for myth-making subterfuge – titillating, amusing stuff, but nonsense; it was legend still being parroted authoritatively this summer, 38 years on from when these pictures were taken.

Nestling his tiny boat, with its flaking yellow paint, in some vegetation on the edge of the shoreline, the accomplished Garritano set up his two Pentax cameras to photograph Jackie Onassis relaxing. The discreet vantage point had been carefully calculated over many months, and he’d photographed her here many times before.

Yet, this time, as she strolled across his viewfinder, she was naked. At 43, she looked in excellent shape. Her posture was good – shoulders back, stride straight, the refined deportment demanded at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, topped up by her early adopter’s passion for yoga.

His camera captured everything: her toned backside, limbs, breasts. Garritano was hot and bothered, but not in a schoolboy way. Had he really photographed the wife of one of the richest, most powerful men in the world and the widow of America’s assassinated 35th President in the buff? Mrs Onassis, totally naked?

He had. The evidence stared up at him from the trays of developed film in the Athens photo lab he had driven too fast to get to. He studied the dozen images as if he were seeing the end of a long rainbow. But was it a pot of fool’s gold? The ever vigilant Settimio Garritano had pursued the former First Lady since her marriage to Aristotle Onassis on October 20, 1968, on the very island on which he took this landmark set of pictures. The wedding transformed the widow of John F. Kennedy into Jackie O, the paparazzi’s holy grail.

Onassis brought incredible wealth but also infamy – a ruthless business style and a torrid, recent affair with Maria Callas – to the ceremony. His bride brought a dowry of history. Many people believed that JFK’s widow, for some years one of the most applauded and admired women in the world for her dignity and style, had renounced her halo. She had become a conundrum; the world didn’t know whether to love her or loathe her. And such emotion had raised her celebrity currency to astonishing levels.

The charismatic Onassis, a tycoon with varying shades of social and commercial complexities, bought Skorpios as his private kingdom in 1963. It is a brief, sometimes turbulent, ten-minute boat trip from Nidri, which sits on the east of Lefkas – another island, but linked to the Greek mainland by road. A heliport and the main villa are high on a hill, retreated into the landscape; on the far side of Skorpios were moorings for Onassis’s yacht, Christina, and his seaplane.

Yet the only decent beach on the island is close to where Garritano had purposely landed. Onassis had built a simple house on it to store beach furniture, cushions, towels, goggles, fins and other gear, and there was a shower room and a kitchenette to prepare snacks to accompany the apéritifs that took the edge off the day.

It was where Jackie relaxed. She’d read and snooze, do yoga and swim, eat and smoke – her heavy cigarette habit something she’d taken elaborate precautions to hide during her 1,000 days as America’s First Lady. She even asked author William Manchester to remove from his book The Death of a President that she had cigarettes in her handbag on November 22, 1963.

But that was Mrs Kennedy. As Jackie O, who arrived in the Seventies from the Sixties in a first-class cabin, she smoked openly on trips to Capri. On the romantic Italian island – “Apart from Skorpios, this is the island of seduction,” insisted Onassis – she radiated a freedom rarely witnessed in America.

On marriage to Onassis, she’d given up her Secret Service protection. It was only when her children, Caroline and John Jr, were with her that large men in suits appeared. She would inhabit the outdoor cafés and trattorias on the streets of Capri, indulging her sweet tooth with ice cream and lemon granita. She would shop – 30 pairs of Capri pants bought in one store in half an hour – and promoted the flat sandals (the spider’s web of fine leather straps called ragni, similar to this year’s popular gladiator style) made on the island.

Settimio Garritano, then 38 and a seasoned professional, photographed her everywhere she went in what he calls her “Happy Jackie” time. It kept the smile on his face, too, for newspapers and magazines worldwide published his work. So, when Jackie cheerfully asked as they wandered one of Capri’s narrow streets if he ever got bored with photographing her, the answer was honest: he would follow her anywhere.

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