Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  “When she was alone again after Onassis’s death,” said Gloria Steinem, “the speculation about her future plans only seemed to split in two. Would she become a Kennedy again (that is, more political, American, and serious) or remain an Onassis (more social, international, and simply rich)? What no one predicted was her return to the publishing world she had entered briefly after college—to the kind of job she could have had years ago, completely on her own. And that’s exactly what she did….

  “Her example poses interesting questions for each of us,” Steinem continued. “Given the options of using Kennedy power or living the international lifestyle of an Onassis, how many of us would have chosen to return to our own talents, and less spectacular careers? In the long run, her insistence on work that was her own [was] more helpful to other women than any use of the conventional power she declined.”

  THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE

  One day in the fall of 1985, Jackie was in her office, employing her irresistible powers of persuasion on some helpless celebrity, when the Doubleday operator interrupted the phone call. Maurice Tempelsman’s doctor was holding on the other line.

  “Yes, Doctor, what is it?” Jackie asked.

  “I’ve just admitted Maurice to the coronary care unit of Lenox Hill Hospital,” the doctor said. “He’s complaining of chest pains.”

  As Jackie later told friends, the instant she heard the word “hospital,” everything went blank. It was the same old nightmare: Jack and Parkland Memorial Hospital, Ari and the American Hospital in Paris. Now it was Maurice and Lenox Hill Hospital. The most important man in her life was seriously hurt, and had been rushed to the hospital.

  She ran out into the street in front of the Doubleday building, hailed a taxi, and told the driver to step on it. As the cab sped off in the direction of the hospital on the Upper East Side, Jackie recalled that she was filled with a sense of dread. Was Maurice dying? Would she get there in time? Was she about to lose a third husband, which Maurice had become in all but name?

  For the first few years after he left Lilly, Tempelsman had maintained his suite at the Pierre Hotel, even though he began spending one, then two, then three nights a week at Jackie’s apartment. In 1982, he and Jackie decided it was pointless for them to maintain separate residences. His children were all grown up, and hers were out of the house: Caroline was twenty-five and married; John was twenty-two and a senior at Brown University.

  Tempelsman moved out of his hotel and into 1040 Fifth Avenue. He gave out one of Jackie’s phone numbers to his business associates. Messengers came and went with important documents for him. The doorman at 1040 accepted Tempelsman’s drugstore prescriptions and dry cleaning, and delivered them to Jackie’s apartment. The penthouse apartment was Tempelsman’s home, and would remain that for the next twelve years, until Jackie succumbed to cancer.

  They made no attempt to disguise their living arrangements, though visitors noticed that Tempelsman occupied the guest room, not Jackie’s bedroom, leading them to wonder whether he and Jackie cohabited as lovers or were merely cozy companions. In either case, people thought it was courageous of Jackie to take up with Tempelsman, and a triumph of public relations how she managed to avoid being criticized in the press for living with a married man.

  But it was not so much courage or public relations as it was Jackie’s shrewd instincts that led her to make Tempelsman her spouse. She always had a natural feel for the Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time, the “in” thing of the moment. And she apparently sensed that the culture in America had become so permissive that people did not even blink when famous couples lived together without benefit of a marriage license.

  Whenever Jackie gave a dinner party for ten or twelve people in her red-lacquered library, Tempelsman not only presided at the head of the table, but he stayed back when everyone else left for home.

  “I noticed that Jackie deferred to Maurice ail the time,” said a dinner guest who sat next to him. “I mean, he didn’t try to dominate her; she does it to herself. She’d say to him across the table, sotto voce, ‘Maurice, don’t you think it’s time for them to remove the dishes?’ She could have had a bell or a buzzer to summon the butler herself. ‘Maurice,’ she’d say, ‘should we have coffee here or in the living room?’ Those kinds of things, and he would answer assertively in a loud voice, ‘We’ll have coffee here.’

  “There’s no doubt about it,” the woman added, “Maurice was absolutely crazy about her. He seemed to relish looking after her. I remembered an article that appeared ages ago, I think in The Saturday Evening Post, in which Jackie complained that President Kennedy wouldn’t help her decide what dress to wear. Well, you just knew that Maurice would pick out the dress for her every time she asked.”

  “She found security with Maurice,” explained Hélène Arpels, who had known Jackie when she was married both to Kennedy and to Onassis. “She had finally found a man who, she believed, was not running around with other women. True or not, that’s what she believed. Maurice wasn’t a famous public figure like Kennedy or Onassis. Jackie could be herself with him. He was a gently domineering figure. Jackie might be the queen, but Maurice was the power behind the throne.”

  At the hospital, Jackie went directly to the coronary-care unit and found Maurice’s doctor, who told her that Maurice had suffered a mild heart attack.

  She was devastated. She should have known something like this was going to happen. It was her fault. She had been trying to get Maurice to do something about his weight, but she had not tried hard enough. She had not been able to persuade him to go on a diet, or to take up a regimen of regular exercise.

  What could be done for Maurice now, she asked the doctor.

  Maurice’s coronary arteries were clogged, the doctor told her. There were only two alternatives: open-heart surgery and a bypass, or a PTCA.

  A PTCA? What was that?

  A percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty, the doctor explained. Otherwise known as balloon angioplasty. During the procedure, a long, flexible tube, or catheter, was inserted into the artery in the upper thigh and snaked to the aorta. From the aorta, the catheter was threaded into the opening of a coronary artery that was narrowed or blocked by cholesterol plaque. The goal in angioplasty was to open the artery with a tiny balloon at the end of the catheter by squashing the plaque against the artery’s wall.

  Was it safe, Jackie asked.

  It had been used on only about three thousand patients in the United States since it was first performed in 1976, and was still in the trial stage. It had yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But Maurice would remain awake throughout the procedure, which was a lot safer than open-heart surgery.

  Jackie gave the doctor permission to go ahead.

  For three days following the angioplasty, Jackie did not leave Tempelsman’s side.

  “She moved into the hospital to be with him,” said one of Tempelsman’s oldest friends. “I was there, and saw how she behaved. She was very much in love with Maurice. And he with her. You could tell by the way they talked to each other, and looked at each other, and deferred to each other. In all respects, you could see the love. It really was a great love affair. They were two mature people with a lot of experience, and they felt lucky they had found each other.”

  Yet most of Jackie’s friends did not see it that way. They knew that Tempelsman doted on Jackie, and attended to her in an almost obsequious manner. But they still failed to understand Jackie’s fascination with him. As one of these friends said:

  “He was not like John Kennedy or like Ari, a bad-boy archetype, the man who always got away, the black pirate. There seemed to be just enough in Maurice to keep her interested. He was a pillar of stability, a financial and personal adviser. But I had a hard time stringing together Maurice’s syntax. He indulged in linguistic gymnastics, and inserted German terms in the middle of his sentences.

  “And he wasn’t around that much,” this friend continued. “He was always traveling to
Africa on business. What business? Don’t ask me. ‘Maurice is going to Botswana,’ Jackie would say, ‘so let’s go to the movies!’ It was like she was let out of jail.”

  “I think she found him an amusing conversationalist,” said another friend. “He helped with investments. Their relationship was just cozy. It was predictable and not demanding on her. She’d talk about what pleased her—friends, work. But Maurice wasn’t singled out. She’d say, ‘I love my work, my writing, my editing, my grandkids’—when they finally came along—all the things that she had to be grateful for. But she did not mention Maurice.”

  Nonetheless, while Tempelsman was recovering from his angioplasty, he and Jackie discussed the idea of getting married. Tempelsman gave Jackie a gold eternity ring encrusted with emeralds and sapphires. The inscription inside was in French. It was addressed to “Jacks,” the nickname that Black Jack Bouvier had given Jackie as a child. She wore it along with the wedding ring that had been given to her by Jack Kennedy.

  “It was the only time they came close to getting married,” said a Tempelsman intimate. “And it was Jackie who raised the idea of marriage.”

  For years, stories had persisted that Tempelsman was prevented from marrying Jackie by his wife Lilly. According to these tales, the strictly Orthodox Lilly refused to grant her husband a “get,” or Jewish divorce. Her position, if true, seemed to present an almost insurmountable obstacle, since according to Jewish tradition, only a rabbinical court could overrule her wish to stay married.

  “But I never believed any of those stories,” said a diamond dealer who knew both Maurice and Lilly well. “He might have needed Lilly’s consent to obtain a religiously sanctioned divorce, but he certainly didn’t need her approval to get a civil divorce. You can’t keep someone a prisoner in a marriage if he doesn’t want to stay in it. In my view, it was convenient for Maurice to have the protection of being a married man. He was not ready for another marriage.”

  Others had a different interpretation of why Jackie and Maurice never married.

  “There were simply too many things in the way of their getting married,” said one of his friends. “The children were not a problem. His kids and hers saw each other and liked each other. But they had different religions. And a legal bond would have made things very complicated financially for both of them, and for their heirs. What’s more—and this point cannot be stressed too strongly—Jackie had come to like her independence. She was no longer the woman she had been before. She did not need or want to be married. She was happy the way things were. Why change it?”

  FIFTEEN

  THE TIME OF

  HER LIFE

  Spring 1989–Fall 1993

  THE BEST DISGUISE

  One day in the spring of 1989, John Loring, who was working on yet another Tiffany lifestyle book for Jackie, called her and said, “Where do you want to meet? Your office floor or my office floor?”

  “Oh, could we just go to a restaurant?” Jackie said. “Couldn’t we just go out?”

  “You’re joking,” Loring said. “You don’t really want to do that.”

  “Yes, I really want to do that,” Jackie said. “Could we just go out and have lunch?”

  “Where are we going to go?” Loring said. “I’ve got an idea. How about Le Cirque? It’s the only safe place to go.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sirio [Maccioni, the owner of Le Cirque] knows how to handle these things. This is perfect! That’s exactly where we are going to go. You get there well ahead of time, and get it all organized so I know when I come in where to go.”

  “I already know where you’re going,” Loring said. “You’re going to a table in the corner by the door, so you don’t even have to walk more than three paces into the restaurant before you’re sitting down.”

  “Great,” said Jackie. “I’ll be there.”

  Just as they planned, Loring was waiting when Jackie came through the door of Le Cirque, the fashionable eatery in the East Sixties. Three waiters rushed forward to create a human shield and escort Jackie to a chair facing Loring, who was seated on the banquette at the corner table. Before anyone in the restaurant had noticed, Jackie was leaning toward Loring, her hand slightly up to her face.

  “It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be seen by the people in the room,” Loring explained, “It was so she didn’t have to see the people in the room staring at her.”

  After a while, Sirio Maccioni came over to their table. He had known Jackie since the 1950s, when he was the maitre d’ at the Colony Club, and she dropped in with Senator John Kennedy. Sirio asked if he could bring his three sons over to meet her.

  “Oh, yes, please send the boys over,” Jackie said.

  By a great coincidence, the columnist Liz Smith happened to be having lunch at Le Cirque that day. She devoted half her column the next day to the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had lunched at Le Cirque, and had paid rapt attention to the man she was having lunch with.

  “Well, Jackie’s rapt attention to the person she was having lunch with,” explained Loring, “was to avoid seeing everyone else in the room whispering to each other and doing things that would make her uncomfortable. But once she decided to eat lunch out, she loved going to Le Cirque for what she began calling her festive lunches.”

  Loring always arrived well in advance. One time, before Jackie made her appearance, Ivana Trump came over to ask Loring if he would introduce her to Jackie after she was seated.

  “Let me ask her first,” Loring said.

  During lunch, Loring turned to Jackie and said, “Ivana would really like to meet you. She’s a very sweet person.”

  “Okay,” said Jackie, “tell her it’s fine.”

  Loring got up and went over to Ivana’s table, and brought her back.

  “Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Ivana gushed.

  They chatted for a while, and Ivana left.

  “She’s really very sweet,” Jackie said.

  “Yes, Jackie, she is,” said Loring. “She is nothing like what the press says about her. I think we all know a thing or two about that, don’t we?”

  “She changed a great deal over the years,” said Loring. “In the beginning, she still seemed very haunted by things. She still seemed to be pursued by her own demons. And if anyone in the world had a right to be, she did. On occasion, she seemed very upset and troubled. But all that changed as the years went on, and one can suspect a lot had to do with Maurice Tempelsman, and finally having a very satisfying and good relationship with someone who was a very strong and very brilliant and quiet and charming and companionable person to be with. That undoubtedly was a tremendous influence on bringing her back to the happy person again.

  “And the great change that was wonderful to me was that she became a very happy camper. She was very happy with everything. I think also she was delighted with her children, that as they grew up she was beginning to be so proud of them and so happy with them, and everything to do with them made her happy. And her enthusiasm was boundless all the time.

  “And so all those haunted looks completely disappeared. It was like a scene change from one period, when we were hiding in her office, sitting on the floor, eating junk out of a paper bag, to, ‘No, I’m a perfectly normal person and I can get all dressed up and go to Le Cirque for lunch and have a good time.’

  “And it was astonishing. I mean that change just came like that. Bingo! At one point she was very much into trench coats and a scarf over her head and large sunglasses and things. Then suddenly, there she was, no trench coat, no scarf, just herself, walking straight down Fifth Avenue, leaving me at Tiffany and walking on down to Doubleday.

  “It was amazing watching the passersby’s faces. There was this look of astonishment, and then there was a look of total denial, and you could see them saying to themselves, ‘Oh, it couldn’t possibly be….’ And so, the best disguise in the world was to walk straight through the crowds on Fifth Avenue, because nobody believed it. They would sort of get a jo
lt, and then they would think, ‘Oh, I’m crazy, that can’t possibly be Jackie Onassis walking down the street.’ So they’d pay no attention, and she learned that a disguise was not necessary, and that she could do whatever she wanted to.”

  SACRED GROUND

  The sun was rising over Martha’s Vineyard, burning off the fog that had blanketed the island during the night. As Jackie pedaled her bike through Gay Head, a damp chill clung to the morning air. The town had three ramshackle buildings—the town hall, the library, and the fire station—and none of the understated glitz of neighboring Chilmark, where barefoot New Yorkers in selfconsciously aging Volvos lunched on designer pizza at the country store owned by James Taylor’s brother Hugh.

  Jackie had spent her adolescence in the tony resort of Newport just a few miles away across Massachusetts Bay. But in its simplicity and unpretentiousness, Gay Head was about as far from Newport as she could get.

  On this particular summer morning, she was dressed in her usual Gay Head getup—a pair of jeans, a windbreaker, and a scarf over her ponytail. She rode west on South Road, passing tumbledown fieldstone walls and wild, low-lying bayberry bushes, scrub oak, beach plum, roses, and poison ivy. Beyond these knotty masses, she could glimpse moors, beach grass, and the Atlantic Ocean. On the right in some places were small, sheltered inlets, and at one scenic turnout, a spectacular view of Menemsha Harbor, where Maurice Templesman kept his thirty-seven-foot schooner, the Relemar.

  Moshup Trail was the last turn before the Gay Head cliffs and the end of the island. The first driveway on the left was Red Gate Farm, which belonged to Jackie. The rustic wooden gate was open, but her caretaker, Albert Fischer, had posted a NO TRESPASSING sign to keep out intruders. If anyone happened to wander in, Tempelsman usually took care of them himself, without bothering to tell Jackie.