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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 agerespectable 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
