Just Jackie (41 page)

From time to time, Tempelsman interrupted to ask a question. He had exquisite European-style manners, and there was not a misplaced word in what he said. But it was clear from the way he cut to the heart of things that he was made of stern stuff, and was not someone to be trifled with.

Forger concluded his presentation by saying that he, Starr, and Streisand were confident that the tax shelter made eminent sense for Jackie. They had drawn up all the necessary papers, but of course they could not proceed without the approval of Tempelsman, who had known Jackie for some twenty years, and was closer to her than any of the other men in the room. Indeed, at Jackie’s request, the documents for the deal were titled “Maurice Tempelsman in Trust for Jacqueline Onassis.”

Tempelsman was not involved in the actual hands-on management of Jackie’s money. He left that task to others. But since Onassis’s death, Tempelsman had taken complete control of Jackie’s finances, and had become the chief strategist behind all her investments.

He had already made brilliant use of Jackie’s millions. When inflation was at a low ebb, and the 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.

N
ot 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 Jackie. His father, who owned flour mills and traded commodities, spoke Galician Yiddish at home. He fled from the Nazis with his family, and eventually became a diamond broker in New York.

“His father was a trader in industrial diamonds, an unsophisticated man, very hardworking, somewhat on the crude side,” said an old-timer in the diamond business. “Maurice’s mother was a traditional Jewish mother. Maurice himself had enormous drive. From an early age, he sought to fulfill himself and his destiny. He was simply determined.”

Maurice’s father worked for several important diamond merchants in America, including the renowned Sydney Lamon. An elegant, well-educated Dutchman who decorated the lobby of his office with Mogul paintings, Lamon left a lasting impression on Maurice, who sought to emulate Lamon’s refinement and understated style.

When Maurice was sixteen, he dropped out of school and went into the business. A couple of years later, he traveled alone to South Africa, and managed to wangle a private meeting with Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, then the uncrowned king of the Central Selling Organization, the secretive De Beers diamond empire. Sir Ernest was duly impressed and christened him “the boy wonder,” and from then on, Tempelsman enjoyed a direct pipeline to the world’s chief source of diamonds.

“Maurice never bought or sold a diamond himself as a trader,” said a knowledgeable source in the business. “That wasn’t his forte, to be a diamond dealer. He was a diamond
thinker!”

Though Tempelsman was never as rich or famous as Onassis, the two men had much in common. Both had a compelling desire to break with their fathers and their pasts, to better themselves, and to be accepted by people
of quality. And both had a psychological need to prove themselves by making huge deals.

“The Tempelsmans are a trading family,” said someone who worked with Maurice. “They understand the art of the deal better than most businesspeople. What’s more, they can see opportunity, and go after it.”

In the mid 1950s, while Tempelsman was still in his twenties and a budding millionaire, he retained Adlai Stevenson as his lawyer. The former Democratic presidential candidate was viewed sympathetically in the soon-to-be-liberated colonies of black Africa, and Tempelsman asked him to accompany him on a get-acquainted tour of the Dark Continent.

“We visited several countries,” said someone who was on the trip, “and stayed on in Ghana, trying to get a diamond license for Mr. Tempelsman. I finally hired a local lawyer, and we got the license.”

By then, various heads of state were indebted to Tempelsman, who had better connections in black Africa than most of their ambassadors. In addition, Tempelsman was a heavy hitter among Democratic Party contributors, and in the late 1950s another one of his lawyers, Ted Sorensen, arranged a meeting with the skinny presidential hopeful John Kennedy, who wanted to get to know Sir Ernest Oppenheimer. Tempelsman set up the meeting, and Kennedy brought along his exotic-looking wife, Jacqueline. She was the personification of everything that Tempelsman had always dreamed of.

Building on his special relationships with Oppenheimer and Kennedy, Tempelsman devised a daring commodities scheme. This required some heavy lobbying in Washington to get a bill passed by Congress, for it involved the barter of several hundred million dollars’ worth of American surplus wheat and other agricultural produce for industrial diamonds, cobalt, and uranium to replenish the strategic materials stockpiled by the United States in case of emergency.

“Maurice stood to make in the neighborhood of $50 million on the deal,” said a member of the Kennedy Administration who dealt with him. “He went to Jackie, and Jackie went to Jack and said, in effect, ‘Here’s a guy you ought to see.’ JFK asked me to see him, and Maurice met me in my office.

“I said, ‘We’ll never get your scheme past Congress. There are thirty-five members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which is headed by Senator Anderson of New Mexico.’

“Maurice said, ‘Who’s going to raise objections?’

“I said, ‘Every member of the committee.’

“He said, ‘Let me talk to them.’

“I said, ‘I can’t prevent you from doing that. You can talk to anyone you want.’

“He went to every member of the committee, and somehow managed to get their approval, and then he came back to me.

“And I told him, ‘Well, you’ve taken care of one problem, but there’s still the press. They’re not going to like it.’

“Maurice said, ‘What would it take for the press to like it?’

“I said, ‘If you’d cut your fee, then no one would object.’

“Maurice said, ‘I might be willing to do that, but I’ve worked on this for two years, and I think I deserve something.’

“I said, ‘I guess one percent or half of one percent would not be objectionable to anybody in view of all the time and money and travel you’ve spent on it.’

“And he agreed to cut his fee from $50 million to under $5 million. We approved the deal, and it went through Congress, and it was done.”

Tempelsman’s plane touched down at the airport in Gbadolite. The runway had been carved out of the bush to accommodate Mobutu’s private Concorde, which Zaire
leased from Air France to ferry the president and his family to shopping sprees in Europe. Gbadolite had once been a modest market town on the banks of the Ubangi River. But Mobutu had transformed it into a thriving jungle city with its own Coca-Cola bottling plant, modern telephone system, luxury hotel, and presidential palace.

This gaudy white marble retreat was often called “the Versailles of the Jungle,” though in fact it was modeled after the Belgian royal family’s Laeken Palace. It had its own casino, and it was surrounded by lawns where lions and elephants roamed freely. There was also a moat, which Mobutu had stocked with crocodiles.

The funeral took place in a crypt of white marble that evoked the royal crypt of Laeken. A priest bid the mourners bow their heads in prayerful silence in memory of Mama Mobutu (whose husband, after mistreating her during her lifetime, was now eager to see her beatified).

One of those mourners, Maurice Tempelsman, was described in secret State Department cables as a key intermediary between the Oppenheimers and President Mobutu. Although Tempelsman always denied the charge that he functioned as an Oppenheimer agent, he was regarded by his business competitors—who referred to him by his initials M.T.—as an important “link man” in black Africa for the De Beers cartel.