Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

price of gold had sunk to about $100 an ounce, Tempelsman had ordered Jackie’s money managers to invest a substantial portion of her funds in gold futures. And when inflation took off like a rocket, just as Tempelsman had anticipated, and the price of gold soared to more than $800 an ounce, he had told the money managers to sell Jackie’s options. Overnight, Jackie’s nice little inheritance had grown into an impressive fortune.

Tempelsman got up from the table, signaling to the three men that the meeting was over. They rose from their chairs, and looked at him.

He waved his cigar one last time, and said, “Let’s do it.”

And Jackie had her first tax shelter.

A CLANDESTINE LIFE

Not long after this meeting, Tempelsman boarded a plane for Belgium. There, he was scheduled to make a connecting flight to Zaire, the former Belgian Congo, which was the biggest producer of diamonds in the world. He had been invited to attend the funeral of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s wife, Marie Antoinette, who was known to her adoring countrymen as Mama Mobutu.

There were rumors that Mama Mobutu had been the victim of her husband’s wrath. It was said that she had been brutally beaten by his secret police while she was pregnant, and that she had been sent for medical treatment to Switzerland, where she died in a private clinic. The official cause of death was given as a heart attack.

Whatever the truth, Mama Mobutu had become a national heroine since her death, a kind of Congolese Eva Perón. As a friend of her husband, the man who controlled the world’s chief source of diamonds, Tempelsman did not think it would be wise to skip her funeral.

It was not a convenient time for him to leave Jackie. His involvement in her financial life had required that the two of them be in touch on a daily basis. Little by little since Onassis’s death, she had come to depend on Tempelsman for more than financial advice. He had become her chief confidant, friend, companion, escort, and traveling companion. When Prince Stanislas Radziwill, now divorced from Lee, died suddenly of a heart attack, Tempelsman accompanied Jackie, Caroline, and Lee to London for the funeral, which was held at St. Anna’s Chapel, a church that Stas had built and donated in memory of his mother. Tempelsman did not leave Jackie’s side during the entire time they were in London.

At first, they were hardly ever seen together in public in New York. However, Tempelsman was a frequent visitor to Jackie’s apartment, where they spent hours conversing in French about poetry, literature, and Mediterranean and Mideastern history.

Jackie and Tempelsman struck many people as an unlikely pair. She was a living legend, athletic, outdoorsy, fun-loving, a Roman Catholic who had been reared in aristocratic surroundings. He was an obscure diamond merchant, overweight, physically unfit, intellectual, a Jew who had grown up in modest circumstances. Her friends found it hard to grasp how someone from Jackie’s class, with its ferocious anti-Semitism and hatred of the lower orders, could embrace a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Europe as her significant other. They found it even harder to imagine that she slept with him.

“My gut tells me they were not intimate,” said one of her closest friends.

What these friends failed to appreciate, however, was that in many ways Jackie had risen above her narrow-minded class. What was more, she had always been attracted to men like Tempelsman, paternal figures who fulfilled her emotional needs. She needed a man to lean on, or as William Manchester had once put it, a man to do the driving.

“I think Maurice certainly represented an ideal father figure for her,” the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, a friend of Jackie’s, said in an interview shortly before his death. “The search for the father goes on forever, whoever you are. Women suffer more in the search for a father because they expose themselves to disappointing men so often while seeking a father. This may have been especially true in the case of Jackie.”

After she was widowed for the second time, Jackie grew aware of her tendency to abdicate power over her life to men. This discovery—that all her adult life she had been a willing pawn in the hands of men—came as a humiliating shock to her. She was almost fifty years old, an age at which most women want to direct, guide, and plan their own lives. She wondered if it was too late for her to change.

Strangely enough, however, it was Tempelsman’s secret business dealings in Africa that gave him his special allure to Jackie. Throughout her life, Jackie had always had a fascination with pirates, and had chosen two of them for husbands. Like John Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, Maurice Tempelsman possessed that distinctive aura that surrounds men who conduct clandestine lives. It required a man with a certain kind of nervy courage to deal in diamonds in the darkest corners of Africa.

Tempelsman was met at the airport in Kinshasa, the steamy capital of Zaire, by a limousine sent by President Mobutu. He was whisked off to the presidential guest house, where he was served a sumptuous French meal that had been flown in that same day from Paris. Before he turned in for the night, he was told to be ready the next morning for the long flight to Gbadolite, Mobutu’s ancestral village.

Seven hundred miles of impenetrable rain forest lay between Kinshasa and Gbadolite. The flight took Tempelsman over the equator and the Congo River basin, where some of the trees rose to a height of 180 feet. Except for Mbandaka, the chief town of Équateur Province, there was nothing but forests of oak, mahogany, red cedar, and walnut. The only living creatures were leopards, elephants, and chimpanzees.

Tempelsman had been coming to Africa since he was little more than a boy. He had been born in the Belgian port city of Antwerp in August 1929, which made him one month younger than