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

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 mark. 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