Just Jackie (40 page)

Shortly thereafter, Christina flew to New York and confronted Jackie in a face-to-face meeting.

“How much money do you want in return for giving up all further claims to my father’s estate?” Christina asked.

When Jackie refused to be pinned down, Christina threatened her with the public humiliation of a lawsuit.

Jackie responded with a not-so-veiled threat of her own. She told Christina that her attorney, Simon Rifkind, a distinguished former federal judge, doubted that Onassis’s will was legally binding. If it came to a lawsuit, Jackie said, she was prepared to challenge the validity of the will.

Under Greek law, a last will and testament had to be composed “in a single sitting in a single location.” But according to Onassis’s own handwriting, he had written his will on an airplane as it winged its way over international borders from Mexico to America. If Rifkind could prove that Onassis had died intestate, or without an enforceable will, Jackie would be entitled to receive 12.5 percent of his estate, or more than $60 million. That was a whopping three hundred times more than Onassis had bequeathed her (and was the equivalent of about $300 million in today’s dollars).

Money aside, Jackie also wanted to keep her 25 percent share in the
Christina
and Skorpios, as well as her seat on the board of directors of the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation. In a letter, she asked Niki Goulandris to act as her proxy on the board of the foundation because of her fear that the other members of the board would give away money to any hospital or orphanage coming along.

She wrote, “Ari’s thought was beautiful—but he didn’t
have time to complete his gesture—If we could complete it for him—in a way that will truly do good….”

But Jackie was deluding herself if she believed that Christina would allow her to continue to participate in the affairs of the Onassis family. As always, Christina’s attitude was reflected—and considerably exaggerated—by Costa Gratsos, who was interviewed by Kitty Kelley for her book
Jackie Oh!

“Please don’t talk to me about that woman,” Gratsos told Kelley about Jackie. “She’s despicable. I can’t bring myself to even think about her. If it was something else I’d try to help you, but on this I can’t. And don’t even try to see Christina, because she can’t bear the thought of that woman. She will turn you down flat. She never wants to see her again, or even hear her name.”

“I represented Christina, assisted by Nicolas Cokkinis, the first managing director of the Onassis companies, in negotiations with Jackie,” said Papadimitriou. “She was represented by Alexander Forger of the American law firm Millbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy. The negotiations took place at the Olympic Maritime headquarters in Monte Carlo.

“We met several times,” Papadimitriou continued. “Christina was angry as hell. She thought that Jackie was behaving badly by asking for a bigger share of the estate. Costa Gratsos was egging Christina on, urging her to resist Jackie’s demands. But I thought Jackie was entitled to a piece of the cake, and that she was being reasonable about what she asked for. I had to fight very hard with Christina, who wanted to give Jackie nothing.

“We finally settled on a reasonable cash figure, which was a fraction of what Jackie would have obtained by application of the forced heirship provisions of Greek law before the amendment of the law, but much more than what Onassis had contemplated under his will pursuant
to the application of the amendment of the law. We thought that Jackie, as the widow of Aristotle Onassis, was entitled to a comfortable life to the end.”

Jackie received $25.5 million, of which $6 million went for estate taxes, and $500,000 was for Jackie’s lawyers. That left Jackie with $19 million. In addition, she received an annuity of $150,000 for the remainder of her life. John and Caroline received yearly payments of $50,000 apiece until they reached the age of twenty-one, after which their payments went to Jackie. All of the payments were tied to the inflation rate.

“In return for this, Jackie agreed to give up Skorpios, the
Christina
, and her position on the board of the foundation,” said Papadimitriou. “She would have been entitled to one fifteenth of two percent of the profits of the foundation, as I was, plus a reasonable retirement plan, and medical expenses. If you deduct all the benefits that she renounced, Jackie ended up with a comfortable amount considering her status as the widow of a wealthy person.”

A
ll through the long and bitter struggle with Christina over Aristotle Onassis’s money, Jackie continued to be friends with Ari’s sister Artemis. The two women talked on the phone two or three times a week. And when Jackie was in Greece, she made it a point to visit Artemis in Glyfada.

The spacious seaside villa was full of memories for
Jackie of her early days in Greece, when life seemed to be full of light, and there was an endless supply of laughter. She and Artemis took long walks before dinner. They reminisced about Ari and the old days, before the death of Alexander changed everything. The stories made them sad, and they often fell silent as they strolled through Glyfada’s streets that ran down to the sea.

Artemis knew that it was not only the memories of former gaiety that haunted Jackie. In the months following Onassis’s death, Jackie suffered one humiliating public blow after another. In August 1975,
Hustler
magazine ran a five-page picture spread of Jackie sunbathing nude on Skorpios. In September, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Operations, chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, subpoenaed Judith Campbell Exner, who testified that she had a close personal relationship with President Kennedy and with Sam Giancana, the Chicago crime boss, who had been hired by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. In December, Judith Campbell Exner appeared at a press conference in San Diego. Her tanned face partly hidden behind saucer-shaped sunglasses, she said that she had visited Kennedy twenty-three times in the White House, lunched with him in his office, joined him on road trips, and phoned in frequently—at least seventy times, according to official logs.

Caroline was eighteen, John fifteen, when the heroic legend of their father began to sink into the sludge of gossip and innuendo. The towers of Camelot, so painstakingly constructed by Jackie in her famous interview with Teddy White, were beginning to fall into ruins.

Desperate, Jackie tried to fight the campaign of de-sanctification by inviting friends who had worked closely with Kennedy to come to her home and speak to her children about their father. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Theodore Sorensen, and Robert McNamara were among those she invited to give Caroline and John informal private seminars on the authentic legacy of President Kennedy. But
the damage had been done, and the lights seemed to go out on the one brief shining moment that was Camelot.

Artemis invited Jackie’s old friends to dinner in an effort to cheer her up. One evening, when all the guests had departed, Jackie turned to Artemis, and said:

“I am feeling so fragile. Sometimes I think that I am responsible for my misfortune. My first husband died in my arms. I was always telling him that he should be protected, but he would not listen to me. Before my second husband died, I was always telling him to take care of himself, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wouldn’t visit the doctor. He could have [died] at any moment during our marriage. No matter what I did, I couldn’t save either one of the two men I loved.”

As Jackie wept, Artemis put a comforting arm around her shoulders.

“That was God’s will,” Artemis told Jackie. “Now you have to take care of your children, and make a new life for yourself. Jackie, you are so young and beautiful. Now you need to find a man who will give you some happiness.”

THE MYSTERIOUS
M.T.

Winter 1977–Fall 1978

M
aurice Tempelsman came out of his office and waved a long Dunhill cigar at the three men waiting in his all-beige anteroom.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “forgive me for having kept you like this. Please, come in.”

He led the way into his inner sanctum. It was filled with maps, heavy tomes on international relations and Oriental religions, a photograph or two, and some mementos. His desk was on one side, a long mahogany conference table on the other. The room looked more like the study of a university don than the office of a CEO who ran a multimillion-dollar diamond-trading corporation.

Tempelsman was as plain as his office; five feet eight inches tall, baldish, with a long, sharp nose, and a potbelly that bulged beneath his dark, double-breasted suit. When he smiled, his moon-shaped face became suffused with a radiant glow, giving him the look of a picturesque character in a Dickens novel.

His outward appearance gave no hint of the extraordinary man within. He was, to begin with, one of only one hundred and sixty “sightholders” throughout the world, which allowed him to make direct purchases of diamonds from the De Beers cartel. He was also a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in the Democratic Party, a mover in the world of Jewish philanthropy, an important collector of museum-quality Roman and Greek antiquities, an active
New York clubman (Century, Council on Foreign Relations, African-American Institute), a legendary wheeler-dealer throughout black Africa, and, it had been long rumored, an elusive player at the fringes of the American intelligence community.

He took a seat at the head of the conference table and, using his cigar as a baton, orchestrated the seating arrangements of his guests. On his right he placed Alexander Forger, Jackie’s patrician private attorney.

Once seated, Forger introduced Ken Starr, a man who was as outgoing and hearty as Forger was stiff and formal. Starr was New York’s preeminent tax accountant. His roster of clients included famous show-business personalities, Morgan Guaranty banking executives, and Paul and Bunny Mellon.

Starr, in turn, said a few words about the man sitting next to him, Sheldon Streisand. The older brother of Bar-bra Streisand, Shelly (as he was known to all) was a successful real-estate entrepreneur who specialized in tax shelters for rich people.

“If I may begin,” Forger said.

“By all means,” Tempelsman said.

As everyone in the room agreed, said Forger, Jacqueline Onassis faced a new set of opportunities as well as new challenges now that she was in possession of her Onassis inheritance. The task of her advisers was to help her conserve her wealth, and at the same time, make her money grow.

Shelly Streisand had put together an interesting real-estate deal, which sounded like just the thing for Jackie. She would take the entire limited partnership in the deal, which included the net leases on three Safeway stores in western Utah and two in North Carolina. Her part of the investment would come to under $1 million—say somewhere between $700,000 and $800,000—which represented less than 5 percent of the money she had inherited
from Aristotle Onassis. She would get a very big loss, which would function for years as a profitable tax shelter.