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It was even jazzier the next night, when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran and his 23-year-old Empress Farah arrived at the White House for a magnificent dinner at the beginning of a state visit to the U.S. As their motorcade drove through the White House's main gates. 100 uniformed, white-gloved Marines snapped to attention, their bayonets gleaming in the rainy night. And when the royal Iranians stepped out on the North Portico to greet the President and First Lady, the society reporters murmured audibly. The Shah was resplendent in a swirling cloak and a looping crescent of medals and decorations across his formal dress, but his sloe-eyed wife stunned the onlookers. "It was a matter of groping frantically for adjectives superlative enough to describe her gown and her jewels—the most blindingly impressive ever beheld in Washington." reported Maxine Cheshire in the Washington Post.
"Hot Pink." What blinded was a dark gold silk ball gown, encrusted to the knees with sparkling jewels and gold sequins. Farah's sleek black hair was piled high in a bun and held in place with a tiara blazing with diamonds and six lime-sized emeralds from the Iranian crown jewels. Other multi-carat emeralds and diamonds adorned a collar at her throat—and Jeweler Harry Winston, who had recently restyled her jewels especially for the party, described them as priceless. Jackie Kennedy, never one to be overshadowed, wore a chic Chez Ninon ball gown with a sleek white silk top and a "hot pink" silk skirt. Diamonds glistened in her ears and her hair, which had been whipped into a new coiffure known as "Brioche" and resembling a classical Japanese hairdo more than a French pastry. Before dinner, the two heads of state and their ladies visited young Caroline Kennedy and her baby brother in the White House nursery, and John Jr., 17 months old and apparently an admirer of beauty, burst into tears when they left.
After the state dinner (guinea hen), the royal guests repaired to the East Room where a troupe of 15 dancers in sneakers, sweatshirts and black tights performed five Jerome Robbins modern jazz ballets and a modern version of Afternoon of a Faun, in the first full-scale ballet perform ance in White House history.— (The dancers had been hastily rehearsing all day, under the direction of choreographer Robbins and the approving eye of the First Lady, who graciously allowed them to use the Green Room as a temporary dressing room.) Glancing at one of the muscular male dancers. Vice President Lyndon Johnson whispered to Jackie that "they make me feel flabby."
Something in Common. Later in the week, the President and the Shah got down to serious business, and when the Shah addressed a joint session of Congress, in an appeal for continued U.S. aid for his country, he won a prolonged ovation with a quiet remark: "However you decide, the people of Iran have not maintained their freedom for 2,500 years in order to now surrender.'' Most thoughts of the cold war were dispelled, though, by the parties, and especially by Jackie Kennedy and Empress Farah.