by Edward Klein
It was a well-established fact that the CIA made payments to Mobutu, who had created a cult of personality called Mobutisme, and that the size of those payments depended on the level of his activity against the Russian presence in central Africa. Less well known was the exact nature of Tempelsman’s arrangements with Mobutu on behalf of De Beers. Each month, the Zairian government’s mine sold diamonds to De Beers, and it was thought that Mobutu received an overriding commission, and that Tempelsman got a percentage as well for handling the Mobutu account.
“In any case,” said the anonymous source, “M.T.’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse in the 1970s. I was summoned by Mobutu out of the blue. I flew to Kinshasa, and was taken in one of Mobutu’s private planes to Gbadolite. There, I was shown to my room in the palace. Eventually I was called into Mobutu’s presence.
“He received me in a large state room, very gaudy, all marble and gilt brought from Italy, phony trappings. We spoke French.
“ ‘I’m fed up with my arrangement with De Beers,’ Mobutu told me. ‘I’ll take the diamond business away from De Beers and give one third of the shares to each of three people, one of whom will be you.’
“‘To what do I owe this honor?’ I asked.
“‘We have a mutual friend,’ said Mobutu. ‘And his name is Kebe.’
“Kebe was Mobutu’s witch doctor, a religious leader from Senegal, who was a trustee of lots of Mobutu’s assets. Mobutu trusted him implicitly. I knew Kebe through my past activities in Sierra Leone and Guinea. I accepted Mobutu’s offer.
“It was a terrible embarrassment to De Beers, whose shares plummeted. De Beers summoned M.T. and told him that he had to go and negotiate with Mobutu, and get the concession back. And that is exactly what he did. It is my understanding that, on behalf of De Beers, he offered Mobutu $5 million for starters, plus $1 million a month. Mobutu asked me if I could match the offer, and I said no, it didn’t make any economic sense. I dropped out. And that was how M.T. got back into business with Mobutu.”*
Even by black Africa’s standards, the extent of Mobutu’s corruption was breathtaking. He shamelessly looted his country and amassed a personal fortune that was estimated at $5 billion. But although Tempelsman was the foreigner who knew the Zairian dictator best, he always denied any firsthand knowledge of Mobutu’s venality.
In fact, Tempelsman did everything he could to distance himself from the rough-and-ready world of the diamond business. As a man who had admired the elegant Sydney Lamon, Tempelsman preferred to think of himself as a lofty financier rather than a lowly trader.
He held luncheons in his office, and invited politicians, artists, editorialists, and academicians as his guests. They sat around his mahogany table and enjoyed the excellent food prepared by his private chef. While they ate, Tempelsman held forth, impressing everyone with the breadth and scope of his knowledge.
“The very qualities that caused us to rave about Maurice are the qualities that made him valuable to De Beers in Africa,” said Brendan Gill. “The charm, the attractiveness, the many languages, the suavity—all this made him indispensable. When it comes to Maurice’s relationship with some of the worst dictators in black Africa, I think we’re treading on the territory of Balzac. I mean, The Human Condition. There’s a huge novel about good and evil in Maurice’s story.”
* In a letter to the author, Maurice Tempelsman declined to participate in the research for this book, or to comment on any matter relating to his business or his relationship with Jacqueline Onassis.
ON THE STREET WHERE SHE LIVED
Tempelsman’s relationship with Jackie was complicated by the fact that he already had a wife. Back in the late 1940s, when he was barely out of his teens, he had married a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Lilly Bucholz. She was an observant Jew of Polish extraction, and, like Maurice, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe. Her father, like Maurice’s, had dealt in diamonds in Antwerp before the war; he was a minor player in the diamond business in America.
Maurice and Lilly were the products of the close-knit Jewish immigrant community that flourished after the war in Washington Heights on New York’s Upper West Side. It was a culture that made Lilly feel comfortable and secure. But it was one which Tempelsman was increasingly eager to leave behind.
Over the years, while he traveled around the world on business, expanding his horizons, Lilly stayed at home, close to her roots. She gave birth to three children—Rena, Leon, and Marcy—and the family moved into a fourteen-room apartment in the Normandy, a prewar building at Eighty-sixth Street and Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Though the marriage soon soured, Maurice and Lilly agreed to stay together while the children grew up.
“My wife and I traveled with Maurice and his wife to Israel after the Six Day War,” said a close Tempelsman friend. “This was 1967, and Maurice and Lilly weren’t showing any signs of affection for each other even back then. I was surprised that Lilly just picked up one day, and went off to France all by herself. Later, when I visited them at their apartment, I could tell that they didn’t have a marriage made in heaven.”
“Maurice was very young when he married,” said another acquaintance, “and probably somewhat naive. He simply outgrew his wife. He had immense success early in life when he met Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, and when he was accepted into that level of society, he was confronted with the problem of what on earth to do with his wife. He could not bring her along.”
Trapped in a sterile marriage, Tempelsman began looking around for female companionship. He was attracted to well-groomed, well-spoken, well-off women who moved gracefully in the highest levels of society. When it came to winning women, Tempelsman was not the equal of John Kennedy or Aristotle Onassis, but according to the testimony of several of his conquests, his old-world charm worked wonders.
“He was doing it in the sixties, and he continued to do it right through the seventies and eighties,” said one woman who spoke from personal experience. “It is simply part of Maurice’s nature to run after women.”
Jackie was the most desirable woman in the world, and Tempelsman made it a point to see a good deal of her when she was First Lady. During her White House years, she frequently made private, unannounced trips to New York to be with Adlai Stevenson, who was America’s ambassador to the United Nations. Whenever Tempels-man heard that she was coming to town, he called up his former lawyer, and asked if he could come along when Adlai took Jackie out to dinner.
“Jackie was not a Kennedy,” said Stevenson’s son, Adlai Jr. “She didn’t play touch football. She was a wonderful, sensitive woman who needed to escape. Maurice was an elegant, cultivated, sophisticated worldly type, very gentle, in some respects like my father. And I think Jackie really needed company to go to the theater and other cultural events, to escape the Kennedy tribe.”
Tempelsman continued to see Jackie as a friend during the years she was married to Onassis. His sympathetic nature was stirred by Jackie’s tales of marital woe. After Onassis died, and Jackie returned to New York, Tempelsman decided the time was ripe to leave Lilly, who, ironically enough, had become a marriage counselor with the Jewish Board of Family and Child Services. He moved out of his family’s sprawling Normandy apartment on the West Side, and into a suite at the Pierre Hotel on Jackie’s side of town. He was on the street where she lived.
FOURTEEN
SINGLE
WORKING
WOMAN
April 1979–Fall 1985
“AN UNHEALTHY BOND”
Maurice Tempelsman made Jackie a rich woman.
During the decade of the 1980s, the Dow-Jones industrial average saw a fivefold increase in value, but under Tempelsman’s expert guidance, Jackie’s investments easily outperformed the Dow, and rose eight- to tenfold. This meant that her original $19 million inheritance from Onassis grew to at least $150 million, not including the $35 million to $40 million that she had in jewelry, art, antiques, and real estate. All this put Jackie’s fortune at very close to the $200 million ma
rk. Just as she began to lose her craving for material things, she stopped having to worry about money.
“People have this mania of interest about Jackie and money,” said a friend. “But her real concern was not for herself; it was always for her family, for Caroline and John. The money evened out their place in the Kennedy family. They were not the poor relations anymore.”
The dramatic change in Jackie’s financial circumstances also had a direct bearing on her relationship with Lee Radziwill, who always seemed to be scrambling to catch up with her older sister. In April 1979, Lee told Jackie that she planned to marry Newton Cope, a carefree, easygoing San Francisco millionaire who owned restaurants, vineyards, and hotels in northern California.
Jackie professed to be both surprised and relieved by the news, since in recent months her sister had seemed desperately unhappy. Following the death of Stas Radziwill, Lee had taken up with Peter Tufo, a handsome, ambitious, tightly wound New York attorney. Their affair had flared brightly, then just as quickly petered out, and Lee had gone back to heavy drinking. Her alcoholism became progressively worse; it started to consume her life and the lives of those around her. She became so difficult to live with that her daughter Tina left home and took refuge with her aunt Jackie at 1040 Fifth Avenue.
“Lee grew bitterly resentful toward Jackie, and told her that whatever had happened, she had no right to usurp her position and steal her daughter away like that,” wrote Diana DuBois in her biography of Lee. “And for a time they even stopped speaking.”
“They must have had quite a row,” Newton Cope told DuBois. “Lee said to me, Tina and I aren’t getting along and she is staying over at Jackie’s.” And every time I saw or spoke with her after that, she’d say, Tina is still over at Jackie’s. “It must have cooled things off between them for a while, because Lee never mentioned much about Jackie after that. I think she was hurt. She didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to pry.”
As the time for Lee’s wedding approached, the sisters began speaking again, and Jackie gave a dinner party in honor of the couple at her apartment.
“Why the hell are you so afraid of your sister?” Newton asked Lee as they walked back to her apartment after the party.
“I told her I sat there all night at dinner and I saw it,” Newton said. “Her reaction every time Jackie spoke was like her mother was about to spank her. It was as if Jackie controlled her. I could feel the tension, the vibes going between them—it was Lee, not Jackie. It was quite obvious that Jackie intimidated her. It’s too bad Lee couldn’t get away from that sister of hers. Being just a few blocks away, it was like an unhealthy bond she couldn’t escape from—like Devil’s Island or something. When she was out in California, she seemed to be happy. Back in New York, she tightened up.”
Before Newton left New York for his wedding in California, he received a call from Alexander Forger, Jackie’s attorney.
“He told me that Jackie had asked him to look in on her sister because Lee did not have an attorney, and he asked me if I would sign a prenuptial agreement,” said Newton. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ But when he came over to my hotel, he asked me what kind of deal I was going to make for Lee.
“I told him, ‘I am not making any deal.’
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how much are you going to give her each month?’
“I told him, ‘That’s none of your business.’
“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think we should have something in writing of how much maintenance a month. What would happen if you die?’
“I said, ‘I’ll put it in my will that she gets a million bucks, how’s that?’
“ ‘Well, I think we should have it in writing how much Lee gets a month.’
“I told him, ‘I am not buying a cow or a celebrity the way Onassis did! I am in love with this woman!’
“And then he started apologizing. ‘Now don’t be upset,’ he said, ‘because I don’t want to interfere in your love life, but why don’t you just put it in writing that Lee will get $15,000 a month?’
“I said to him, ‘Would you sign something like that?’
“He said, ‘No.’
“Finally, I told him, ‘Sorry, no deal,’ and we parted company.”
On the day of the wedding, Newton received a call from Lee, who was staying at the San Francisco hotel where they were to get married.
“I just got a call from Alexander Forger, and he said that you didn’t sign anything,” Lee said to Newton. “What’s this all about?”
“Tell him to call my lawyer,” said Newton.
But the lawyers could not reach agreement, and with less than an hour to go before the ceremony, Newton phoned Stanley Bass, the Supreme Court justice who planned to marry them, and called off the wedding. It was a devastating blow to Lee, who blamed Jackie for having once again meddled ruinously in her life. The breach between the sisters was now so great that it never completely healed.
LIFE IN THE CITY
“Jackie’s relationship with the Municipal Art Society began when we were trying to save Grand Central Station from having the Marcel Breuer building put on top of it,” said the writer Brendan Gill. “I was president of the Municipal Art Society at the time, and Jackie phoned us. She was exercised by what she had read in the paper: Grand Central was in jeopardy, and was going to be altered.
“Jackie said she would do anything she could to help us in the fight. So she became our great symbol of the struggle, and by far the most powerful person. She was joined on the ramparts by Philip Johnson, who was also very important, because he was a modernist architect, who nevertheless wanted to save the past, which is what we were dealing with. We had everybody with us.
“But Jackie was ‘It.’ And she went down with us to Washington on a chartered train called the Landmark Express to lobby the Supreme Court to uphold the landmarks preservation law. Hundreds of people got on the train, and Jackie went through the cars and shook hands with every single person.”
“This kind of thing kept coming up over and over,” Brendan Gill continued. “Take, for example, the question of St. Bartholomew’s Church. The idea that just because the church had the good fortune to have a garden on Park Avenue, which it wanted to sell for $50 million tax free so some developer could build a skyscraper on it—that was a scandal. So Jackie was out there on the vigil. And the rector of the church, the Reverend Thomas Bowers, denounced Jackie and me from his pulpit as ‘architectural idolaters.’
“In our fight against St. Bartholomew’s, if we were able to tell the media that Jackie was going to come at eight o’clock in the morning or whatever hour, the media would gush, and a couple of local politicians would even dare to kiss her for the cameras. She subjected herself to that kind of soiling and abuse for our sake.”
“Within a year of her involvement, I invited Jackie to join the board of the Municipal Art Society,” Gill went on. “I told her, ‘If you miss more than two consecutive meetings, it will be taken as a resignation, and you will automatically have resigned.’ Well, of course, that was the most idle threat that was ever made in history. Jackie was not going to go to every meeting of the Municipal Art Society. She had her own life out in the world. She wasn’t going to keep any regular hours for anybody.
“But she was desperately important to us, and she did come to meetings, and she did make friends, and she did gain a total understanding of what it was that the landmarks preservation law meant in terms of the emotional quality of life in the city. It was, in a way, the coming-out of Jacqueline Onassis in New York.
“She had some understanding of this, of course, from her days of refurbishing the White House. Moreover, way back, one of the greatest influences on her life was her grandfather, her mother’s father, who was a builder here in New York, and who actually was a partner of Raol Fleischmann, the owner of The New Yorker magazine.
“His name was Lee, but he was thought to have changed his name, and to be Jewish. There was a very nice painting of him at 25 West Forty-thir
d Street, in the lunette over the Forty-first Street door, until they remodeled the building a few years ago. In the painting, Mr. Lee was portrayed as a white-haired, nice-looking man, with all the blueprints spread out on his desk. He was quite a good builder, and he was a very important influence on Jackie’s life. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she imbibed some notion of this idea of building, what it meant, even as an adolescent.”
“At almost all our Municipal Art Society benefits, we would be in the reception line,” Gill recalled. “She was our star, and I was the old cannon they brought forward for that purpose. And of course the reception line was always entertaining to me from a novelistic point of view. I enjoyed watching all the people getting ready to come up there just to shake hands with Jackie.
“I would have to say, over and over, This is Mrs. Onassis,’ to somebody who had been waiting an hour in line for this woman, who had no need to be identified by me. But that was the protocol. But, boy, could she pass them on! Again, I think this was her White House training. The Trumps and people like that would come, and she would get them through the line.
“We had an entertaining time at those things, in part because she had a perfectly lively sense of the degree to which she was being used. And she was prepared to consent to be made use of.”
“The only time Jackie was ever angry with me was when I did an expose of Joseph Campbell [author of The Power of Myth] in The New York Review of Books” Gill said. “This man was like a monster, whom Jackie had admired very much.
