Voyage of the Southern Breeze

Frank Sinatra cannot help it. His protests notwithstanding, he does things the noticeable way. Tired after a recent concert tour, Frank announced that he needed a month-long vacation and chartered the Southern Breeze, a 168-ft. yacht owned by Houston Businessman C. W. Edwards, for a reported $2,000 a day. Mostly he asked people his own age--respectable Hollywood matrons such as Claudette Colbert, Merle Oberon, Rosalind Russell, and their husbands. He also invited Mia Farrow, 20-year-old daughter of Actress Maureen O'Sullivan and the late Director John Farrow. The ensuing voyage was probably the most closely watched since Cleopatra floated down the Nile to meet Mark Antony. Frank had been seeing Mia steadily for six months, and on the tip of every Hollywood tongue was the question: Was he or wasn't he? Married, that is. Mother O'Sullivan was positively snippy about it. "If Mr. Sinatra is going to marry anyone, he ought to marry me," she said. In the circumstances, Sinatra might reasonably have opted for some remote, potentially private area, but instead he chose the vacationer-clogged coast of New England. When the Southern Breeze anchored off Newport on the first night, reporters were swarming. "Are you married? Do you plan to get married?" Sinatra and Mia said nothing. At Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, the same questions got the same silence. On Sinatra sailed, pursued by jokes and quips like a moving cloud of midges. Mia does not smoke or drink, explained Jack E. Leonard in Las Vegas, Nev., "she's still teething." A columnist recalled that Frankie had said: "I'm pushing 50, but what the hell. Let's say I've got five good years left. Why don't I enjoy them?" And Henny Youngman was asking if any one had heard that "Dean Martin sent a telegram to Frank saying, 'I've got Scotch older than she is.' " For the weekend, the Southern Breeze dropped anchor off the Kennedy compound near Hyannis Port. Frank had been there before and, as befitted the courtesies due one clan chieftain from another, his first move was to pay a courtesy call on old Joe Kennedy. They spent an hour together, and etiquette naturally suggested a return call. Boston Globe Photographer Edward Jenner got an urgent tip that Jackie Kennedy herself would board the Southern Breeze for dinner. Jenner and three other Boston newsmen rented a small launch and staked out the Sinatra yacht. The water was choppy, the light was fading, and the mist was rising when a launch approached the Southern Breeze. As it swung alongside and hove to, the newsmen caught a glimpse of a woman in a black sweater and light slacks who looked like Jackie going up the Southern Breeze's companionway. All four photographers began shooting. "It was like working down at the Boston Garden," said the A.P.'s J. Walter Green. "You're so damn busy, you don't see the fight." After the visitors were aboard, the newsmen squinted through binoculars. "I looked right in her face," declares Green, "and I thought it was Jackie." Fast Denial. The picture certainly looked like Jackie, and newspapers printed it in good faith. Headlines flared: JACKIE VISITS SINATRA (Cleveland Plain Dealer); JACKIE SEES FRANKIE AND HIS DREAMBOAT (New York Daily News). Jackie had visited Sinatra when the Kennedy Administration was young and gay, but since then, there had been the assassination. At millions of breakfast tables, there was a shocked reaction to the image of Jack Kennedy's widow lending her presence to Sinatra's loveboat. Nobody was more aware of the impact than the politically conscious Kennedys. They quietly revealed that Jackie had dined with Teddy that evening. Jackie's secretary, Pamela Turnure, told reporters that the visit had never taken place. Bobby called the A.P. and asked for a correction. The A.P. obliged. But if Jackie had not gone aboard the Southern Breeze, who was the lady in the black sweater? Neither Bobby, nor Teddy, nor Frankie was willing to say. But Roz Russell was: "It was Pat Lawford," she said, speaking as someone who was there. Subsequent pictures, published belatedly, made fuzzily clear that she was right. Last Launch. So far it had all been fun and games. And then real life and real death intruded. Lingering over late-night coffee too long in Martha's Vineyard, the Southern Breeze's Third Mate Robert Goldfarb, 23, and Steward Jim Grimes missed the last launch back. Two pretty young waitresses, anxious for a closer look at the yacht, volunteered to row them out in a dinghy. Four hundred feet offshore it capsized, and Goldfarb gave the only life preserver to Grimes, who could not swim. By the time rescue launches arrived, Goldfarb had been washed away. With spirits dampened, Sinatra headed back to New York. Somehow it no longer seemed such a lark, and the balding star even answered a hallooing newsman, told him: "You're right. I am not married." Next morning Frank did not appear to express condolences to Goldfarb's widow and parents, who came aboard to collect his personal effects. The idyl was disintegrating. That afternoon Mia and Frank took launches to opposite sides of the Hudson. He was presumably visiting his parents in New Jersey, while Mia met her mother in Manhattan. After a lunch at the Plaza, Mother O'Sullivan set out to set the record straight. "Mia has been ill and was in the hospital for three days. Rest and relaxation was what she need ed. That was the reason she went for the cruise." Then she had an added thought. "The one thing that has been overlooked here, I think," said Maureen, "is that she was perfectly chaperoned during this whole thing. And by dear friends of mine. I was in touch with them at all times."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.