Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot by J. Randy Taraborrelli Read Free Book Online

mentioned that he and Jackie should buy Sinatra a gift to thank him for his work on the campaign, Jackie would suggest a book of etiquette—“not that he would ever actually read such a thing.”
    However, this was such an important night—the kickoff to what would be her career as First Lady—that Jackie tran- scended her dislike for Sinatra. While flashbulbs popped all around her, the glamorous Mrs. Kennedy just smiled broadly as the handsome crooner led her to the raised presi- dential box.
    Sinatra’s friend Jim Whiting, who was a part of the singer’s circle for years, recalls that “Sinatra once told me that when he was escorting her to the box, she may have been all smiles, but she was very tense. She was gripping his hand so tightly he didn’t know whether she was angry at him or just nervous.”
    According to Whiting, when Sinatra whispered words of comfort in Jackie’s ear, she poked him in the ribs with her elbow and, still maintaining a happy face for the photogra- phers, hissed at him under her breath, “Look, Frank. Just smile. That’s all you have to do, okay? Just smile.”
    “Frank said that she was very rude,” recalled Whiting. “He said she was pissed off, at the weather, at him, and who knows at what else. Frank was annoyed at her as well, be- cause as he said, ‘If it wasn’t for me, the whole goddamn event wouldn’t have taken place.’ He set it all up, every sec- ond of the entertainment, anyway.”
    During the show, Sinatra sang a special rendition of “That Old Black Magic” (changing the lyrics to “That old Jack magic has me in its spell”), while a white spotlight fell on the President and First Lady, bathing them in an ethereal glow. Later Sinatra sang the title song from his 1945 Oscar-awarded short film on racial tolerance, “The House I Live In,” which re- duced even the chilly Jackie to sentimental tears. “She was dabbing at her eyes like some little bobbysoxer,” Whiting said. “In the end, I guess even she couldn’t resist him.”
    The next day, January 20, was a bitterly cold Inauguration Day, but the always distinctive Jackie would be the only woman on the President’s platform not covered in mink. Her refusal to wear a fur coat had inspired Cassini to design a simple, fawn-colored suit with a trim of sable and a match- ing muff. On her head she wore what would soon become a trademark of hers—a pillbox hat—this time in matching beige, by Halston.
    At twelve o’clock, Jackie stood in the freezing cold be- tween Mamie Eisenhower and Lady Bird Johnson in the stands and watched the historic moment as her husband was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States, taking his oath on the Bible that had belonged to his mater- nal grandfather, “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. Along with her sense of style and fashion, Jackie’s other touches were al- ready imprinting a sense of culture and beauty on the Kennedy administration. It was she who had suggested that Robert Frost recite a poem at the ceremony. The eighty-six- year-old poet, blinded by the sun and continually interrupted by the fierce winds blowing at his pages, gave up trying to read what he had written especially for the occasion and in- stead recited a poem from memory. It was Jackie’s idea also for black opera singer Marian Anderson to sing “The Star- Spangled Banner,” making a statement about civil rights right from the beginning of her husband’s administration.
    Ethel, Joan, and the other Kennedy women—the sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, and mother, Rose—watched with misty-eyed reverence. “We all knew that Jack had reached a new plateau,” Ethel would later recall, “and that nothing would ever again be the same, for any of us.”
    Probably because so much attention was focused on Jackie, there was some discussion among reporters about the
    fact that her relationship with Jack seemed remote, even on this important day. For instance, after the swearing-in cere- mony, he