Dropped Names (2 page)

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Y
ellow pants. The President of the United States was wearing yellow pants. And I was standing before him clutching the waistband of a wet bathing suit, three sizes too big for me, with one hand, while shaking his with the other.

How I came to be shivering in front of him, soaking wet, partially blinded by my thick matted dark hair and barefoot on a lawn in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, at twenty-four years of age, is happenstance at its most unpredictable. Meeting a president is no small matter. Meeting him wet and half naked cements the occurrence profoundly and preserves its place of honor on my mental mantel.

He would be dead a scant twenty-seven months later, at forty-six years of age. But on this ordinary day in his life and a seminal one in mine, there he was: a handsome, smiling, charming young man out for a good time with his wife and friends.

I
t was the summer of 1961. There is a theatre in Dennis, Massachusetts, called the Cape Playhouse. Still there, still thriving. I was a member of a troupe of young actors performing children's plays in the afternoon, taking classes, and helping to build sets for the Equity productions performing at night. One of our troupe would become a lifelong friend until she herself died tragically young.

But on this glorious summer day my friend was deliciously alive and quite happy with the trick she'd played on me. Her name was Eliza Lloyd. Not yet twenty years old and an incorrigible prankster. One day she said, “My mother and stepfather are having some friends over for lunch on Sunday. Would you like to come?” I'd met and liked her mother. “Sure,” I said, happy for any free meal I could get. She wrote out the directions on a piece of brown wrapping paper and I stuffed them into my madras shorts.

I started out about 11 a.m. on Sunday and found the place much quicker than I had anticipated. When I pulled into the gravel driveway in my hand-me-down Ford station wagon in front of a beautiful gray and white house, I entered a world I had never before experienced. It was as if the matching gray and white pebbles had been arranged on the ground one-by-one and the house had been freshly painted that morning. Even the colors of the flowers seemed brighter and their shapes more perfect than any of the forsythia bushes growing wild around my little house in Bayonne, New Jersey. This was Osterville, Cape Cod, a paradise for the privileged, but a strange and magical mystery to me.

Dressed in khakis and an open shirt, my hair long and unkempt, pre-Beatles-style, I sat in the car not certain what to do next. But the front door opened and standing there was a figure the likes of whom I had never seen before, who quickly solved my dilemma.

I got out and walked over to him. “Hi. Liza asked me to lunch. Am I very early?” He stood there with a countenance that displayed neither warmth nor disdain but an enigmatic stare that instantly made me want him to like me. He was a black man of indeterminate age, dressed in a white jacket, black pants, black shiny shoes, and white gloves. He did not answer my question. “Please come in, Mr. Langella. Miss Eliza is not down yet but she left word that when you arrived you might like to have a swim.” “Oh, I didn't bring a suit.” “I'm sure you'll find some hanging on hooks down by the beach house. Help yourself.”

He walked me through the spacious, understatedly elegant house, to a large patio, and down a stone path set into a beautifully manicured lawn, toward a tiny little blue and white house with sculpted white birds dotting its roof and a wooden dock meandering toward the water's edge. “May I bring you something to drink, sir?” “No, thank you,” I said. And he left.

At that time I doubt I weighed more than 160 pounds with a waist under thirty inches. None of the suits I found fit me so I did the best I could with one at least three sizes too big, by pulling its tie very tight and twisting the waistband into a bulky knot that immediately came undone once I jumped into the water and splashed around in the open sea.

Seemingly out of nowhere came the sound of a helicopter overhead and I continued to float about, assuming it would pass by, although to where I couldn't imagine. It soon became astonishingly clear that it wasn't going anywhere but down toward the lawn of this house, and as it grew louder and came closer, I emerged from the water, clutching my suit with one hand and shielding my eyes from the sun with the other. Nearsighted from birth, I could just make out two figures waving at me from inside the chopper. It came to rest on the lawn just as Liza's mother appeared from the house, her hand firmly atop her blue hat, followed by the black gentleman in the white gloves, whose name I would later learn was Buds. The blades began their slowdown and a door opened. The pilot jumped out, turned to extend his hand, and it was taken by the single most famous female hand in the world at that moment, Jackie Kennedy, dressed in a simple top and pants with two cameras slung around her neck. A moment later she was followed by the President, gingerly stepping out, smiling, and greeting Liza's mom. “Hello, Jack,” she said, offering her cheek. “Isn't it a lovely day?” She and Jackie kissed and hugged and the President turned in my direction. I had been slowly moving up the lawn, completely unaware that I was having an out-of-body experience. All I could focus on was those yellow pants.

“Who's this?” the President said with a big beaming smile.

“This is Liza's friend from the Playhouse,” said her mom. “Frank, this is the President and Mrs. Kennedy.”

Liza and her stepfather had just reached the group as the President and Jackie shook my one free hand and Liza said, “Hello, Mr. President. We didn't tell Frank you were the luncheon guests. We wanted to surprise him.” And amid the indulgent laughter Jackie said her first words to me after “hello,” in that world-famous whisper, “We'll have to plot your revenge, won't we?” As the group climbed up the lawn to the house, the President turned back and said, “Frank, I hope you're going to change for lunch.”

“I didn't want to tell you,” Liza said as we headed back to the beach house, “because I thought you'd be too scared to come.” I changed back into my clothes, then sat on a blue and white chaise, as Liza stood behind me towel-drying my hair. “So, who are your parents?” “Mummy's name is Rachel Lloyd, her nickname is Bunny, and after she divorced my father she married Paul Mellon. Jackie and Mummy are best friends and Jackie wanted to meet somebody so Mummy arranged a little lunch for them.” Why
Mummy
wasn't pronounced
Mommy,
my New Jersey boy ears could not fathom.

“Meet who?” I said.

“Surprise.”

“Just tell me.”

“Nope.”

We walked up the lawn, my hair still damp and my heart beating slightly faster than usual. But the sight of the man I saw through the French windows standing inside the house stopped me cold. Regaling the President with a story that had him hysterical, standing taller than I had expected, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was Noel Coward. “Noel, this is Liza's friend Frank from the Playhouse,” said the President. “How do you do,” said Sir Noel, “My, what a lot of hair.” The room exploded in laughter, not for the words but for the way in which he said them, dry as the Sahara.

Riding the laugh, as if on cue, a hugely confident, brassy woman strode into the room. “Am I late?” she said. “Yes,” said the President. “Hello, Jack. Noelie, darling!” “Come here,” Coward said, “and give us a kiss.”

“Who?” I said to Liza.

“Adele Astaire,” she whispered back, “sister of Fred.”

“How do you do, young man?” she said, shooting out her hand. “I'm Dellie.”

So our little band was complete: Noel Coward, Adele Astaire, Paul Mellon, Bunny Mellon, Jacqueline Kennedy, Eliza Lloyd, me, and of course, the President of the United States. Lunch for eight, or as this rarefied set would call it: luncheon!

I'll tell you more about the others elsewhere in this book. The President has the lead in this chapter.

He stood in the middle of the living room, at ease and in high spirits, with no circle of people around him. The others flopped on chairs or leaned against doorways chatting. Frozen to my spot I turned around, forced to face the fact that I, like the President, was standing alone with no one else to talk to. Dynamite could not have dislodged me from my place, which I'm sure the President knew, so, graciously, he came to me.

“Are you enjoying your summer?”

“Yes, sir.”

Looking at me with total concentration, as if I were the only person in the room, he asked:

“Are you going to make the theatre a career?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I can't do anything else.”

Paul came over to us. “Frank, would you get the President a fresh drink? He's having a Bloody Mary.”
What
, I wondered
was that?
The President handed me a drained glass with a celery stick standing alone among red-stained ice cubes. “The bar is down the hall,” said Paul.

I walked toward it thinking, “How could they trust me with this glass? I could be a Mafia prince or a modern-day John Wilkes Booth with a pinky ring full of arsenic.” It was then that I saw the blank faces of the Secret Service guys stationed quietly behind doorways.

When I handed the President back his drink he was deep in discussion with Paul, but he took it, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Good luck with your acting, Frank.” “Thank you, sir,” I said.

There were gales of laughter in another part of the living room caused by something I wished I'd been there to hear Noel Coward utter. And laughter is what came to dominate the rest of the afternoon. Not just occasional or sporadic. Full-belly laughs coming so fast and furiously I thought the President was going to have a heart attack. Buds came in and quietly announced lunch. Excuse me—lunch
eon
.

We were seated at a rectangular table in a modest dining room facing the sea. The President in the center with Coward directly across from him. It was set with blue and white china on a blue and white tablecloth, three glasses to a setting: water, red wine, white wine, and at least six utensils divided on either side and across the top of our plates. At each place setting was a small bouquet of freshly cut flowers set in a tiny straw basket; and on each plate a large linen napkin folded in a way I had never before seen. All the visuals of that table, as I remember them, were completely new to me, as was the meal we were served. A cold soup, lobster salad, steamed vegetables, and some kind of thick white pudding.

As the afternoon progressed our napkins would grow increasingly damp with tears of laughter as Noel Coward reached into his bottomless hamper of stories, jokes, one-liners, and character assassinations. And the sight of my President pounding on the table with one hand and holding the other out, palm up, to Coward, begging him to wait while he caught his breath, has never left my memory. To see the leader of the free world so hopelessly convulsed with laughter, wiping his eyes continuously, and to watch his wife genuinely delighted to see him so happy, made a profound impression on me. How glorious it must have been for him. Not a single subject of importance discussed all afternoon. No current affairs, political views, or social commentary. Add to that the fact that Coward's stories became increasingly vulgar with the liberal use of the words
cunt
and
prick
, and the beautifully pronounced, in his trademark clipped staccato,
cocksucker
and
motherfucker
.

We retired to a sunroom, directly off the dining room, for coffee and dessert. It was three steps down into a cozy and bright space, also facing the sea. There was a couch under a large window, directly across from which sat a baby grand piano and several small armchairs scattered about. The President flopped down on the couch, Adele next to him. Bunny and Paul took an armchair each and Liza curled up on the floor at her mother's feet. Jackie and I ended up sitting on the steps, shoulder to shoulder. “Isn't this fun?” she whispered as Sir Noel took his place at the piano. It was then she explained to me the purpose of the afternoon. Coward was in Boston trying out a new musical entitled
Sail Away
, and Jackie asked Bunny if she could, through Adele, invite Mr. Coward down to the Cape in order, as she put it, “to give Jack a good time.”

Act 2 was a triumph for Coward as he tirelessly sang one signature song after another: “Mad About the Boy,” “If Love Were All,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and as the last note of each song left his lips, Jackie would request another and another, and sing every lyric along with him. At one point we all sang “I'll See You Again.” Like all the others, she knew it by heart, and following her lead, the President sang along just a beat behind.

“Okay now,” said Adele in a loud forthright voice, “let's get this show on the road. Come on, Jack.” She grabbed the President with one hand, swept the magazines off the coffee table in front of them with the other, and said, “Noelie, give us ‘A Room with a View.' Hit it.” He did, and for the next ten minutes I watched the President in his yellow pants, just two feet away from me, attempting to follow Adele Astaire in a soft-shoe dance that had the rest of us singing to the music and Jackie up and snapping away. His face was blissfully silly as he feigned a nightclub entertainer and tried to mirror Adele's moves: hands out in front of him, feet shifting in small kicks, body turning in circles one way and then the other, and slapping his hands and thighs in the tried-and-true vaudeville style.