It was an immense and immediate success. In his memoirs, Igor’s brother Oleg likes to take much of the credit for the
place, but it was Igor who put up the money. Nevertheless, Oleg enjoyed holding court there: “Every night seemed
memorable, an adventure fueled (sic) by the music, which, in the hands of a skilful disc jockey, would increase in
tempo and intensity as the night wore on. I loved to watch the crowd on the dance floor, a fashion assemblage unlike
any that had ever been seen in the world before. Members could show up in leather jackets without ties, coming as
they were from a weekend of skiing or whatever. There were people wearing furs, leathers, dungarees, black tie,
diamonds, and turtlenecks (a form of dress that was unacceptable in the better restaurants at the time).” For the
jet set it was a meeting spot unlike any other. It had the exclusivity of a select members’ club, but without the
tedious protocols. It was a place where to be chic did not mean wearing formal evening dress; it was assumed that if
you were a member of Le Club you had been brought up knowing the rules, but you did not have to stick to them. It
was deliciously intoxicating.
Andy Warhol was mesmerised. “I sat at Le Club one night staring at Jackie Kennedy, who was there in a black chiffon
dress down to the floor, with her hair done by Kenneth, thinking how great it was that hairdressers were now going
to dinners at the White House.”
By the time that J.F.K. won the 1960 election, Ghighi was married to the daughter of one of his biggest campaign
supporters. He had also become a golf partner of the president, and he knew “about all the girls he had smuggled in
by his palace guards”. And, while he was on the golf course with the president, Oleg was in the fitting room with
the First Lady.
During the presidential election campaign of 1960 much had been made of the fact that Jackie Kennedy was an important
client of a number of leading Paris couture houses, including, so it was said, Givenchy, Chanel, Cardin and
Balenciaga. As First Lady it was made known she would be wearing clothes by an American designer — Women’s Wear
Daily said so on the front page of its November 23 issue: “When Jacqueline Kennedy moves into the White House she
will wear only American clothes, and she is looking forward to it.”
Cassini may have been working as a fashion designer since the 1930s, first in Italy and then in Hollywood before
moving to New York, but according to John Fairchild, “none of the fashion intellectuals had considered him an
important designer”. However ,the qualities of the ‘suave man of the world’ that had so dismayed the Kellys and the
Tierneys suited Jackie Kennedy just fine. Oleg, the veteran flatterer and seducer, knew just what he was doing when
he was selling himself and his designs to Jackie Kennedy. Instead of complimenting her on her looks, he appealed to
her intellectual vanity. “You have an opportunity here,” he told her, “for an American Versailles.” He added: “She
understood completely what I was trying to communicate: she began to talk excitedly about the need to create an
entirely new atmosphere at the White House. She wanted it to become the social and intellectual capital of the
nation. She would bring the great writers, artists and musicians there.”
In the best traditions of classical tragedy, as the reputation of the Cassinis reached its zenith, disaster struck,
as the fates, or rather Bobby Kennedy as attorney (and witchfinder) general, intervened. In 1961 Ghighi had been
part of a “very hush-hush secret exploratory mission” to establish closer links between the U.S. and the Dominican
Republic, which was under the brutal rule of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. However, on May 30 of the same year, Trujillo
suffered a nasty bout of lead poisoning when his car was shot up by a group of assassins. Ghighi’s mission was
exposed in the press. That in itself did not pose any immediate problems, but it did not reflect well on the
Kennedys that they used a gossip columnist as an instrument of diplomacy, and it focused attention on Cassini.
Quite early in his career he had come to the notice of the White House, and on one occasion he found himself invited
to Cuba by the dictator Fulgencio Batista, only for the American government to put pressure on the Batista
administration to have Cassini effectively deported. Untroubled by links to dictatorial regimes, Cassini had wanted
to do some public relations for the Dominican Republic with the P.R. firm he had founded, using his friend, the
playboy Rubirosa, who had once been married to Trujillo’s daughter, as the middle man. Insert a crusading senator
outraged at the fees paid to lobbyists — as well as the fact that after Japan and the USSR, the Dominican Republic
retained the largest number of lobbyists in the U.S. — and it became evident that a scapegoat was required to clear
the air around the president. In February 1963 Cassini was indicted by a federal grand jury on four counts relating
to his failure to register as the agent of a foreign power. It was a technicality but opinion turned against Ghighi,
and his own hubris did the rest. “Had I been less sure that I was untouchable and led a charmed life ... had I gone
personally to Washington to ’fess up to Bobby Kennedy ... ” These were the thoughts that would pass through his mind
for the rest of his life.
Too late he realised that the Kennedys would do anything to protect J.F.K.’s presidency, and if it meant sacrificing
a P.R. man, newspaper columnist and golfing buddy who had outlived his usefulness, the Kennedys could live with
that. Ghighi’s wife, Charlene, even wrote to the president pleading on her husband’s behalf. Her letter went
unanswered, and a few days later she committed suicide. Ghighi was distraught. He had been minded to plead not
guilty but he later changed to no contest, to avoid, so he said, damaging Oleg’s relationship with the White House.
In January 1964 Cassini received a $10,000 fine and was put on probation for six months. The feared jail term that
had pushed his wife to suicide never materialised, but Ghighi was finished. His P.R. firm lost most of its clients
and he had resigned his column. He still had Le Club, and he tried his hand at starting a magazine, which limped on
for a few years, but never again was he to scale the heights. The Cassinis had had a good run, but with J.F.K.’s
assassination Oleg was no longer dressing the First Lady, and although his position as Camelot’s couturier set him
up for life, he seemed to fulfil Fairchild’s verdict of him as a creative mediocrity, and he settled for a lucrative
career of licensed products, gallivanting around the world with the likes of Agnelli and Bernie Cornfeld and
cementing his reputation as the grand old man of American fashion, even if he was never to repeat his 1960s
success.“After the Kennedy years, Mr. Cassini turned his attention to other ventures, introducing men’s pink
undershorts and dress shirts the color of raspberries. As he got into his seventies he began to slow and his work
did not command the attention it once did,” read his obituary in The New York Times in 2006. “But he enjoyed
something of a resurgence in the fall of 2001, when he introduced Oleg Cassini Sport, a collection of silk warm-up
suits, satin-lined hooded tops and abbreviated dresses.” By then the Cassinis’ time had passed; the world of
warm-upsuits and hooded tops was no place for a Cassini. Ghighi died a year after the launch of Oleg Cassini Sport.
Oleg gamely continued to play the elegant man of the world, appearing at a fashion gala with a woman almost 50 years
his junior a few weeks before he died. But the world of restaurants and nightclubs over which they had ruled as
young (and not so young )rakes had disappeared, and the idyll of the Kennedy White House had become a tarnished
memory of sleaze and the triumph of style over substance. However, as they looked back on their long lives from the
beginning of our century, it must have seemed to the fraternal duo of moustachioed seducers that they had packed
more living than most into their long and varied lives. As such, perhaps the best epitaph they can have was supplied
by Igor,when he gave his 1977 memoirs the title I’d Do It All Over Again.
This article originally appeared in Issue 39 of The Rake.