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In the last dozen years, Carolina Herrera, who designed Caroline's wedding dress, was Onassis' favorite designer. "Once," says Herrera, "she was in my showroom, and I had some buyers from Neiman Marcus. She was trying on a suit. She came out and she saw all these people sitting there and she turned to them and said, 'Don't you think this is lovely?' And they almost fainted when they saw who was modeling." Says Herrera: "We used to laugh about it a lot."
In the last 10 years of her life, Onassis kept company with a married financier and diamond merchant, Maurice Tempelsman, who reportedly multiplied his companion's wealth. (One source says that in 1991 her holdings included $1.5 million in cash, property -- including her $3.5 million apartment -- amounting to nearly $8 million, and $15 million to $20 million in stock.) An acquaintance of Jack Kennedy's, the Belgian-born Tempelsman, 64, eventually moved into her Fifth Avenue flat and shared her life at her $2 million summer spread in Martha's Vineyard.
Her children are now grown. In 1986, Caroline, a lawyer and author, married Edwin Schlossberg, an artist and entrepreneur, and is now the mother of three: Rose, 5, Tatiana, 4, and John, 1.
John Jr., who has dated the actress Darryl Hannah on and off for more than five years, is also a lawyer, and spent four years working as an assistant district attorney in New York district attorney Robert Morgenthau's office before quitting last summer. His current projects include looking into starting a nonpartisan magazine about politics. "He was very excited to introduce people at the office to his mom," says a former colleague at the Manhattan D.A.'s office. "He was like, 'This is my mom!' It was cute. I got the impression that he talked to her about things that were going on at the office, things that were going on in his life. This was not a distant relationship."
With close relations to her children and grandchildren, a history of good health, a job she loved and a congenial companion, she had seemed set for a happy old age. She summered on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where she had three traditional saltbox houses side by side set on 350 beachfront acres, with two large ponds and a bird sanctuary. There she would quietly entertain old friends like the author William Styron and the influential Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan and Lady Bird Johnson. Each Labor Day weekend, Onassis would have all the Kennedys from Hyannis Port over for a picnic. "It was like the old days at Camelot," says one who was there. Did Onassis still feel like a Kennedy? Michael Kennedy, the son of Robert, simply says, "She was always open to our family."