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
