Just Jackie (45 page)

She had always lived through men—her father, JFK, Bobby, Onassis. Now she was trying to break the habit of a lifetime, and define herself. She was not certain where she was going, or how she was going to get there, but she was determined not to travel in the old grooves of the past.

After Dallas, she had tried to recapture a life of power and glory, but her marriage to Onassis had turned into a disaster. Now she was beginning to wonder if the key to her happiness might lie somewhere else—in the simple pleasures of family, friendship, and work.

“What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families,” she said. “There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the window-pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised?

“Of course women should work if they want to,” she went on. “You have to do something you enjoy. That is the definition of happiness: ‘complete use of one’s faculties along the lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.’ ”

Since her days in the White House, Jackie had always had a great influence on the way women looked at themselves. Because she was such a private person, and allowed the public to know so little about her, she acted as a kind of tabula rasa on which women could project their fantasies.

In the 1980s, not many women were sure that they wanted to emulate Gloria Steinem and other politicized feminists, who were often portrayed by the media as man-hating, childless fanatics. By contrast, Jackie seemed to have it all. Not only was she lovely, stylish, and clearly attractive to men; she was also smart, capable, and a very good mother. Women who wanted to have a measure of independence and a profession of their own, without sacrificing the benefits of womanhood, looked to Jackie’s
example. They thought to themselves: If Jackie can do it, so can I.

“Jackie was tradition and modernity, the old femininity and the new womanhood, seemingly sustained in a perfect suspension,” wrote the feminist author Susan J. Douglas. “Jackie had these traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities—she was smart and loved intellectual pursuits, she was knowledgeable about history and the arts, she wore pants, and she had big feet—yet she was still completely feminine, a princess, a queen.”

“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.”

O
ne 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?”

THE TIME OF
HER LIFE