Just Jackie (42 page)

“M.T. always tried to be an intermediary to the rulers in black Africa,” said one competitor. “After he succeeded in setting up the connection, he would go to De Beers and say, I’ve done this thing. Now, what’s my cut?’ ”

In particular, the farsighted Tempelsman established personal ties with the “Binza Boys,” the powerful, informal caucus of high-ranking officials who lived in the exclusive Binza residential area of Kinshasa and dominated politics in Zaire. As his man in Kinshasa, Tempelsman hired Larry Devlin, a former CIA station chief, whose office had been implicated in the plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister,
and who helped install President Mobutu Sese Seko, who was one of the most rapacious and bloodthirsty dictators in Africa.

“This is a chapter in M.T.’s life that is a big question mark,” said a major player in the international diamond business, who agreed to speak to the author on condition of anonymity. “The CIA wanted to have an invisible presence in Kinshasa, and that presence, as far as most of us could tell, was M.T.’s office. It was supposed to be a diamond buying and export office, but during those years not one diamond was bought or sold. It was entirely a front.”

It was a well-established fact that the CIA made payments to Mobutu, who had created a cult of personality called Mobutisme, and that the size of those payments depended on the level of his activity against the Russian presence in central Africa. Less well known was the exact nature of Tempelsman’s arrangements with Mobutu on behalf of De Beers. Each month, the Zairian government’s mine sold diamonds to De Beers, and it was thought that Mobutu received an overriding commission, and that Tempelsman got a percentage as well for handling the Mobutu account.

“In any case,” said the anonymous source, “M.T.’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse in the 1970s. I was summoned by Mobutu out of the blue. I flew to Kinshasa, and was taken in one of Mobutu’s private planes to Gbadolite. There, I was shown to my room in the palace. Eventually I was called into Mobutu’s presence.

“He received me in a large state room, very gaudy, all marble and gilt brought from Italy, phony trappings. We spoke French.

“ ‘I’m fed up with my arrangement with De Beers,’ Mobutu told me. ‘I’ll take the diamond business away from De Beers and give one third of the shares to each of three people, one of whom will be you.’

“‘To what do I owe this honor?’ I asked.

“‘We have a mutual friend,’ said Mobutu. ‘And his name is Kebe.’

“Kebe was Mobutu’s witch doctor, a religious leader from Senegal, who was a trustee of lots of Mobutu’s assets. Mobutu trusted him implicitly. I knew Kebe through my past activities in Sierra Leone and Guinea. I accepted Mobutu’s offer.

“It was a terrible embarrassment to De Beers, whose shares plummeted. De Beers summoned M.T. and told him that he had to go and negotiate with Mobutu, and get the concession back. And that is exactly what he did. It is my understanding that, on behalf of De Beers, he offered Mobutu $5 million for starters, plus $1 million a month. Mobutu asked me if I could match the offer, and I said no, it didn’t make any economic sense. I dropped out. And that was how M.T. got back into business with Mobutu.”
*

Even by black Africa’s standards, the extent of Mobutu’s corruption was breathtaking. He shamelessly looted his country and amassed a personal fortune that was estimated at $5 billion. But although Tempelsman was the foreigner who knew the Zairian dictator best, he always denied any firsthand knowledge of Mobutu’s venality.

In fact, Tempelsman did everything he could to distance himself from the rough-and-ready world of the diamond business. As a man who had admired the elegant Sydney Lamon, Tempelsman preferred to think of himself as a lofty financier rather than a lowly trader.

He held luncheons in his office, and invited politicians, artists, editorialists, and academicians as his guests. They sat around his mahogany table and enjoyed the excellent food prepared by his private chef. While they ate, Tempelsman
held forth, impressing everyone with the breadth and scope of his knowledge.

“The very qualities that caused us to rave about Maurice are the qualities that made him valuable to De Beers in Africa,” said Brendan Gill. “The charm, the attractiveness, the many languages, the suavity—all this made him indispensable. When it comes to Maurice’s relationship with some of the worst dictators in black Africa, I think we’re treading on the territory of Balzac. I mean,
The Human Condition
. There’s a huge novel about good and evil in Maurice’s story.”

T
empelsman’s relationship with Jackie was complicated by the fact that he already had a wife. Back in the late 1940s, when he was barely out of his teens, he had married a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Lilly Bucholz. She was an observant Jew of Polish extraction, and, like Maurice, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe. Her father, like Maurice’s, had dealt in diamonds in Antwerp before the war; he was a minor player in the diamond business in America.

Maurice and Lilly were the products of the close-knit Jewish immigrant community that flourished after the war in Washington Heights on New York’s Upper West Side. It was a culture that made Lilly feel comfortable 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.

SINGLE
WORKING
WOMAN

April 1979–Fall 1985

M
aurice 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 much about it, and I didn’t want to pry.”