During their brief relationship, Madonna stunned John one day with her admission that she would sometimes call photographers to tell them where she and her husband, Sean Penn, would be so that the media could photograph them there, thereby generating publicity for herself. (And, yes, she was married to Penn while dating Kennedy.) She said that when Penn found out about it, he was upset with her. “Why in the world would you do such a thing?” John wanted to know, according to two of John’s friends who had witnessed the conversation, which took place in his apartment. “Why else? To get my picture in the papers,” Madonna answered matter-of-factly. This was certainly a surprise to a person like John who had spent pretty much his entire life dodging photographers. “But Madonna,” he said, “you’re so much better than that.” He reminded her that she had talent, she was intelligent, focused, driven, a real artist. “Don’t you see that by inviting photographers into your life that way, you’re setting yourself up for future misery?” he asked her. According to the witnesses, Madonna just looked at him blankly. “In other words,” he continued, “you may think it’s cool to put yourself out there like that, but I guarantee you there’ll be consequences to it one day.” In John’s view—and he had made it clear many times to friends and associates—when a celebrity invites photographers to take pictures of what might be considered a private moment in public, such as an intimate dinner in a cozy restaurant with a loved one, it suggests that the celebrity doesn’t value his privacy. The implication is that there are no boundaries, that every moment in that celebrity’s life is open to public scrutiny. “Your whole life becomes public property,” he once explained, “and you can’t reverse that perception once you’ve established it.” In trying to explain his theory to Madonna, though, he might as well have been speaking in a foreign tongue. “But I want fame, John,” Madonna insisted. “Fame means power. And I want power.” John said that perhaps this was a valid thought, especially coming from a woman in a male-dominated show business world. “But if you were really famous, why would you have to call photographers to come and take your picture?” he reasoned. At that, Madonna just glared at him. “Exactly what is it you are trying to say, John?” she asked. He shook his head as if to indicate that he was done with the subject. “You know what they say,” he concluded. “What price fame, Madonna? What price fame?” She mulled it over, but it didn’t take her long to come up with an answer. “Any price,” she said.
In the end, John Kennedy Jr. decided that because he and Madonna had such different sets of values, there was no way it could ever work out for them. She was invested in building a certain iconography, not in trying to find ways to control it. She was more than happy to cast herself as a public person. Luckily, Madonna had great talent and ambition to go along with her hunger for attention, and her star would continue to ascend. His time with her wasn’t a lost cause, though, as far as John was concerned. “John always thought it valuable to see a different perspective of any issue he found important, especially as it related to media,” said one of his friends. “He stayed friendly with Madonna. ‘Her life works for her,’ he told me. ‘Who am I to judge her?’ ”
One more telling story about John and Madonna:
In the summer of 1988, Madonna was jogging with John and one of John’s closest friends in Central Park when, again, the subject of fame and celebrity came up between them. As they kept a rapid pace together, Madonna turned to John and asked, “Do you know how big a star you could be if you only acted like a real Kennedy instead of just some ordinary guy? I mean, my God! You could be huge.” John seemed bemused. “But I haven’t done anything to merit that kind of acclamation,” he said. “I’m just a guy.” According to the witness, Madonna stopped running to look at John. “I don’t get you,” she said. “You’re not ‘just a guy,’ you’re a Kennedy. That sets you apart, John. You are a historical person. Don’t you see that?” John paused and then, while running in place, said, “You can be the star in this family. How’s that?” Then, flashing his winning smile at her, he sprinted off. As he ran off, Madonna stared at John’s friend for a moment and shook her head in dismay. “He is just so odd, isn’t he?” she asked before running after him.
Career Girl
By the middle of 1985, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was, much to the surprise of a lot of people, working at Doubleday and Company. She had taken the job a few years earlier, in 1981. She would come into the office three days a week—Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—and work as an editor, not only assisting authors in the development of their books but also shepherding their beloved projects through the complicated maze of publishing, from book proposal to actual publication.
Jackie had worked in the early fifties for the Washington Times-Herald as a reporter—the “Inquiring Photographer”—interviewing random people on the issues of the day as she roved the streets, snapping their pictures and folding their answers into a daily column. It became so popular that she would go on to interview Richard Nixon for the column and was assigned to interview Dwight D. Eisenhower and covered the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Decades later, after meeting several writers in New York with whom she became friendly, she decided she wanted nothing more than to work as a book editor. She started at Viking Press in 1975. But in 1978, the company published Jeffrey Archer’s novel Shall We Tell the President? Set in a future fictional presidency, it was presumably modeled after Ted Kennedy and described an assassination plot against him. When the New York Times gave it a scathing review and suggested that she was irresponsible for allowing its publication, Jackie resigned from Viking the next day. Eventually she found herself working at Doubleday.
To some, it certainly seemed strange: Jackie Kennedy Onassis—former First Lady and internationally known socialite and fashion icon—working in New York as a book editor. She obviously didn’t need the money; her affluence was well known. But it didn’t seem strange to her at all. She loved the job, got along famously with her colleagues, and felt she was doing something with her life that truly mattered, something she knew she was good at, and, most importantly, something that made her abundantly happy.
As mentioned earlier, this author first met Jackie in 1983 at Doubleday, where we had a lively discussion about celebrity culture in her small, cluttered office that featured just one window. Her desk looked like organized chaos: heaps of magazines in neat piles, large manila envelopes in stacks, other kinds of mail sorted in a specific way perhaps known only to her. There were two empty foam coffee cups in one corner, and two unfinished pastries as well. A square glass container held a jumble of pencils, all different colors, each one with a sharpened point. There was an ashtray filled with cigarette butts. No pictures of any Kennedys anywhere—just a poster of a ballerina on the wall. “Oh my, I do adore Diana Ross,” she said, mentioning the subject of my first book for Doubleday. “She is so… I don’t know… what’s the word I’m looking for?” We stared at each other for a moment before it came to her: “… enigmatic. That’s it.” She nodded her head. “Say, can I ask you a question?” “Of course,” I replied. “Speaking of enigmas, do you know Michael Jackson? Because I also find him absolutely fascinating.” I did, in fact, know Michael Jackson. “Really!” she exclaimed. “Well, we should talk about him one day. I love people in the public eye who I sense have an inner life that is somewhat…” She paused. Then, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, she finished the sentence: “… secretive. I guess you could say I love people who have secrets,” she added, laughing. “Isn’t that just awful? But, really, what would be the point of writing about a celebrity if you weren’t going to reveal his or her secrets?” she asked. “I mean, that’s what makes a book a juicy and fun read, isn’t it?”*
Maurice Tempelsman
Ever since Maurice moved in, I feel out of sorts.”
It was the spring of 1985 and Jackie Kennedy Onassis was dining with her old friend Roswell Gilpatric at an upscale restaurant in New York City. The two were speaking about her present companion, Maurice Tempelsm
an. “Well, you two get along, don’t you?” Roswell asked. “Oh, of course we do,” Jackie said. “But I’m just so set in my ways. I had such a routine,” she said with a soft, barely concealed chuckle. She added that her days used to unfold like clockwork. She always knew what she was going to do and when, in a very structured manner. “But now I can’t make heads or tails of anything,” she said, seeming exasperated. “The phone is always ringing for Maurice. There are visitors all day, people coming and going. Why, it’s like Grand Central Station at my apartment!” Roswell, according to his memory of the conversation, couldn’t help but laugh. He told her that this kind of change was probably good for her. “It’s nice to shake things up a bit,” he said. Jackie had to agree.
Jackie told Roswell that after Aristotle Onassis died, she never imagined being in another relationship. “And I certainly never thought I would live with another man,” she said. “Why, I’m fifty-five,” she exclaimed. “I’m old, Ros,” she added. The two friends laughed again. “And I’m so stubborn. I like things done my way. You know me. I’m quite fussy, aren’t I?” Rather than answer the question and state the obvious, Roswell just smiled at her and told her that these were her best years, that it’s fun to throw caution to the wind at her age. “But must I do it for another man who smokes cigars?” Jackie asked, laughing.
By 1985, Jackie had become fully committed to her latest romantic relationship, one quite different from those she’d enjoyed in the past. His name was Maurice Tempelsman, someone very familiar to those in Jackie’s circle but not necessarily to the public that remained fascinated by the former First Lady or, at least, to the media that kept constant tabs on her every move. Tempelsman was born on August 26, 1929, the same year as Jackie, to the Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish Leon and Helene Tempelsman in Antwerp, Belgium. When he was about eleven, he and his parents and only sister moved to the United States to escape the Nazis’ invasion of their homeland during World War II. They settled on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a refugee community. At sixteen, he began working for his father, who was a diamond merchant, while also attending New York University, where he took night classes. Though Tempelsman never graduated from college, Rachel Gotlieb, a childhood friend, remembers a teenage Maurice as being scholarly and “on the timid side.” It wasn’t long before he joined his father in the diamond merchant business—Leon Tempelsman and Son, Inc. “I had an inner conflict abut whether I really liked the business,” he would say in 1982, “and part of me still wonders.” Soon, though, he began making his own fortune.
Late in 1949, Maurice, then twenty, married Lilly Bucholz, two years his senior, who had also fled Antwerp with her family. Her father was also in the diamond mining business, though not as successful at it as Maurice’s father. They would have three children—Rena, Leon, and Marcy—but by the 1970s their marriage was on the rocks and the couple was just staying together for the sake of their children.
“In 1979, Jackie’s financial adviser André Meyer died,” Roswell Gilpatric recalled. “I attended the funeral with her and walked home with her afterward. She was very upset about it. She knew he cared about her very much, and even though it wasn’t romantic for her, she felt protected.
“She’d already been seeing Maurice, but after André died her relationship with Maurice really took hold. She would tell me in that lovely, breathy voice of hers, ‘He’s a smart man, and tough, too.’ In the 1950s, she told me, he went into business with the U.S. government stockpiling African diamonds for industrial and military purposes. He had a lot of ties in Africa, and became a major power there in his field. Because he also had strong ties to the Democratic Party, he was well known to the Kennedy family. Jackie first met Maurice when JFK was a senator. I believe it was Ted Sorensen who introduced them. The senator wanted to meet Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, the diamond and gold mining entrepreneur who was a friend of Maurice’s, so Maurice arranged the meeting and Jackie went along. She told me she very vaguely remembered meeting Maurice at that time. However, the two continued seeing each other on a social basis whenever Jackie was in New York, all the way through her marriage to Onassis. Then, when Onassis died, Maurice made it his intention to win Jackie over, which is what he ultimately did.”
Maurice Tempelsman had some commonalities with Aristotle Onassis. First, they shared some physical traits: He was short in stature—barely five feet eight inches—a little overweight, and balding. He had a long and swooping nose and wasn’t the most attractive man in the world. When it came to choosing men, though, Jackie had always looked beyond the exterior attributes of the opposite sex and was intensely attracted by a man’s wit, his curiosity, his intelligence, his sense of humor, and, it would be safe to say, his financial resources. “He enjoyed the arts, was a collector of Roman and Greek antiques, was well-read and -traveled, fluent in French, like Jackie, and had a wonderful sense of humor,” said Tempelsman’s cousin Rose Schreiber. He was also affluent—owned his own yacht, which couldn’t compare to Onassis’s but was impressive just the same—and was socially well-connected. He was distinguished in many ways, not the least of which was the fact that he was—is—one of just a handful of site holders permitted to make, ten times a year, direct purchases of diamonds from the De Beers diamond cartel, the internationally based diamond mining and trading company that has controlled the flow of diamonds in the U.S. marketplace for decades.
Tempelsman was also an astute businessman and financier, like Onassis. He was running a multimillion-dollar diamond trading business, and doing so very successfully. Over a period of years, Tempelsman would take complete control of Jackie’s finances and build her $25.5 million settlement from Onassis into a fortune that would be estimated at between $100 and $200 million.
It could be said that the biggest difference between Tempelsman and Onassis was his temperament. Tempelsman was easygoing and affable, never volatile. He would gladly acquiesce to Jackie’s desires just to see her smile, and he wouldn’t have dreamt of being combative with her. “Why should I try to fight her on anything?” he once asked, privately. “She’s smart. She knows what she likes, who she is, what she wants. Who am I to come into the picture and try to dictate to her?” Attorney Samuel Pisar, a friend of Maurice and Jackie’s, put it best: “With Maurice, everything slowed down. She was at peace with him.”
Also like Onassis—and to a certain extent like JFK—Tempelsman was somewhat paternal where Jackie was concerned. She was a woman who liked being taken care of—and he did his part of the bargain well for her. It could be said that the only problem Jackie had with Maurice Tempelsman wasn’t his fault: His wife, Lilly, refused to give him a divorce. An Orthodox Jew who was apparently more devoted to her faith than Maurice was, she simply refused to do so, even after he left her in 1982. Her refusal kept him tied to her pretty much for the rest of their lives, but once he was with Jackie—he moved into her home in 1984—it was Jackie who had his heart, not Lilly.
Early in their relationship, Jackie considered ending it rather than continuing with a man who was married. But she had to wonder if that was a reductive way of looking at the relationship with Maurice. After all, divorce was not an option due only to the religious convictions of his wife, not because the marriage was still viable. He was a good and decent man, Jackie knew, and she didn’t want to let him go. Plus, she sensed that he would be faithful to her, and considering what she’d experienced in her lifetime, this was a refreshing turn of events. Still, why was he living with his wife? Just as Jackie was trying to figure out what to do, Maurice’s wife made the decision for her. By this time, ironically, Lilly had become a marriage counselor at the Jewish Board of Guardians. She was tired, she said at the time, of seeing photos of her husband and Jackie all over New York and on Martha’s Vineyard—where Jackie had an estate—and she wanted him to move out. Therefore, in November 1982 he left their home and moved into a hotel. Then in 1984 he moved in with Jackie, taking the bedroom (next to hers) that had once belonged to Aristotle—the one in which she kept h
er exercise equipment when Onassis wasn’t in residence.
“He was quiet. He was discreet. He kept her secrets,” says R. Couri Hay, a publicist who is also a friend of the Kennedy family’s. “Jackie liked having strong men around like him. If you look at JFK, Onassis, and Tempelsman, they seem very different, but really they’re not. They were all strong father figures, in a sense. She felt very safe with each of them. She felt protected.”
Former congressman Tony Coelho, a Tempelsman friend, says, “The more you talk to him, the more you like him. He is a person who can be a natural confidant. They were natural together. Most people put her up on a pedestal, but with Maurice it was different. He didn’t regard her as a trophy.”
“He was a man of honor,” adds Stanley Gottwig, also a Manhattan investor at the time who worked closely with Tempelsman. “Once committed to someone, he was totally committed. I had many meetings with Jackie and Maurice and I saw the mutual admiration they had for one another, and also the respect they shared. After one such meeting, she pulled me aside and said, ‘Have you ever known anyone sharper than Maurice?’ She was quite charmed by him.”
Stanley Gottwig recalls a particular meeting with Maurice and Jackie in March 1986 during which they discussed the structuring of her complex finances and the building of certain annuities for her children. Jackie was about to announce the engagement of her daughter, Caroline, to her beau, Ed Schlossberg. Certain financial matters needed to be addressed in light of the upcoming nuptials. The three were in Tempelsman’s New York office, which was filled with antiques and hundreds of books. They were seated at a long mahogany conference room table sipping hot coffee. “I can’t believe my little girl is getting married,” Jackie said. “It seems like just yesterday when I held her in my arms.” Then, with a laugh, she added, “Oh my, that is so trite, isn’t it? But it’s true!”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 38
