“The Party Cabinet” by Eric Konigsberg, was originally published in the March 1997 issue of Vogue.
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When Kim Cubine was in college, politics meant running her best friend s campaign for homecoming queen. But that was years ago. Around 7:45 on inauguration night, Cubine, every inch a daughter of the South in a pair of satin elbow-length gloves, emerged from the Inaugural Committee sedan that had carried her to the Tennessee Ball. She had a hard time getting out of the car because of her beaded black gown. "The beads are so heavy and the slit and the plunging back and all," she explained. "You have to learn to sit down and stand up without bending your knees."
A salty woman with a thick drawl and shoulder-length hair the color of a banana peel, Cubine flourished her reversible gold-and- black cape (she d worn it black-side-out the night before at the presidential musical gala) and marched through the VIP entrance of Washington s Union Station. Tennessee was the second most popular of the fourteen inaugural balls this year, on account of it being the vice president s state. There were nearly 5,000 inside, clogging the main hall. But Cubine, who at 33 is the inauguration s director of ticketing, was there because the headlining entertainment was Hootie The Blowfish, who she not only thinks are about the greatest band on earth but who are also old friends of hers.
The guys in the band went to the University of South Carolina with Cubine, back when she was working on homecoming-queen campaigns. "It occurred to me that winning was simply a matter of being the best known," she recalled, "and so I figured out the most highly trafficked areas on campus and put up signs."
Did her friend win?
Cubine rolled her eyes. "Hell, yes."
This weekend, the stakes are higher. Cubine is responsible for the welfare of more than 100,000 who have descended upon the capital for the inauguration. Over the past three weeks, she has pulled six all-nighters. She missed most of the black-tie gala at the USAir arena last night, and Lauren Hutton almost took her seat. She is supposed to show up at "five or six" i balls in the next five hours and make sure things are running smoothly.
Suddenly, they re not. Now, at the Tennessee Ball, Cubine s assistant runs up to tell her that a guy from the D.C. fire marshal s office wants to speak to her; there are too many people crowding the stage. Cubine quickly redistributes the throng to other parts of the hall, but the fire marshal shuts the ball down. Waiting outside in the 21-degree cold are a couple of hundred would-be guests, including ambassadors from Sweden, Germany, and Italy, and Miss America, who reportedly led the chilly crowd in singing "One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall."
But soon the evening returns to full swing, and Cubine hooks up with her friend Laura Hartigan, a statuesque redhead in black satin Badgley Mischka, and the two women head backstage to hang out with the guys from Hootie. Hartigan, 30, is deputy to Clinton s campaign-finance cochairman Terry McAuliffe. "She knows heads of state, senators, movie stars," Cubine says. "But I ve never seen her so excited as getting to meet Hootie."
As the band performs an encore, Hartigan kicks off her satin Donna Karan pumps with the four-inch heels and the girls dance.
"Cue," she says to Cubine. "This is really cool."
Just ten days earlier, the mood hadn t been so unabashedly upbeat. On the sixth floor at the Inaugural Committee s makeshift headquarters, the former home of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Laura Hartigan was heading into her first all-nighter, dedicated to the excruciatingly sensitive task of arranging seating for the $3,000-a-ticket VIPs at the inaugural musical gala. Over in Ticketing, Kim Cubine was trying to make sure that there wasn t another bottleneck disaster like the one at the 1993 inauguration—where 40,000 people showed up to pick up their tickets on the same day.
Then there was the crucial issue of pre-party spin control: This year s hosts went to great lengths to emphasize that the inauguration was open to the public. There was about this the ring of embarrassment, an attempt by the Clinton people to extricate themselves from the celebrity worship and general lavishness that characterized the last inaugural (and, some would say, Clinton s first term). Last time around, the $34 million lovefest came with the bus ride from Monticello, the 30-by-60-foot fireworks silhouette of Clinton playing a saxophone, the MTV ball, Barbra Streisand in the Lincoln Bedroom, Maya Angelou s poem, and Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, and Uma Thurman.
"We got a little carried away," explained Inauguration Committee cochair Ann Jordan, who is, of course, married to the Washington lawyer and quintessential FOB Vernon Jordan. "We hadn t had a Democrat in the White House for twelve years. We were so excited we didn t know how to handle it. This one will be different—and understated."
The week before the inauguration, Jordan s office was the lone oasis of calm within the maelstrom. Around her, staffers flurried about, trying to organize the biggest party since before Zoe Baird was a household name. The last great Washington bash of the millennium. This is the time, every four years, when the Style section of The Washington Post asks designers like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, and others how they would dress the Clintons on January 20. (For the First Lady, Armani came up with a printed shirt jack- et, to be worn over floral-print pants. Added the Post: "Mrs. Clinton, pants. Please, just think about them.")
As it turned out, the First Lady s golden Oscar de la Renta gown was a smash. Same for the coral suit she wore to her husband s swearing-in. (She, too, it appears, learned some lessons from four years ago.) Chelsea, at sixteen, seemed better able to appreciate all the festivities this time. When MTV and Condé Nast rented the Corcoran Gallery for a party, the First Daughter held court with a few dozen friends in a private gallery room upstairs and talked Conan O Brien s ear off.
On the night of the balls guests dressed to the nines didn t seem to mind the airline-style food in plastic boxes or the ubiquitous souvenir stands (MOMMY AND DADDY WENT TO THE BALL AND THIS WAS ALL I GOT T-shirts). For most people, it was enough to see the Clintons dancing close to "Unforgettable," or to hear Al Gore repeatedly use the word party as a verb. Over at the California Ball, Ann Jordan beamed with contentment in a long, black sheath. While her husband piloted her briskly from cluster to cluster of people, saying his hellos with firm resolve, she seemed to want to she was enjoying herself, drinking in the payoff of all her behind-the-scenes work.
There is no one more qualified to captain an event of this magnitude than Jordan. Over the years she has been on the giving end of hundreds of dinners and benefits. She has helped plan the Kennedy Center s annual honors ceremony six times. She is that rare woman in Washington who does not shrink from the term hostess, or even socialite. "This is like any family celebration, only much bigger," she told me the week before the big day. "I know. I ve done three weddings for my three daughters."
After leaving Mrs. Jordan on my inaugural pregame tour, I stopped by the office of Laura Hartigan, whose indefatigability seemed due at least in part to her recent engagement. As one might expect from a woman who spent the past year as the finance director of the Clinton campaign, Hartigan met her fiancé under the guise of fundraising. Two years ago, her boss asked his old friend Jeff Jenkins—a Republican—to contribute to Clinton s war chest. "He said he d only do so if Terry set him up with the redhead in his office," Hartigan recalled. "That meant me. So when I was out in L.A., he took me to dinner. I came home with a $ 1,000 check." After the election, Hartigan said, she decided to move to L.A. to be with Jenkins and sat down with the president to say that she would be leaving his employment. "I told him I was worried," she said. "I was moving out to California with no job, no ring. And the president said he was really proud of me. He told me how Hillary had moved to Arkansas for his career and how much that had meant to him. Then, when Jeff proposed over New Year s, the president called my hotel from the Virgin Islands to congratulate me. He said, I told you it d work out. "
If only the inauguration were that easy. On the day I visited, Hartigan was trying to come up with 150 more seats at the musical gala. Each ticket—ranging from $100 to $3,000 (with no freebies this time)— would be crucial. "We have to pay for the whole thing with sales this year," Hartigan said.
Ticket sales would not be enough, the Clintonites reasoned, so they brought in a hired gun to guide them through the unfamiliar wilds of low-end capitalism. Ann Jordan called upon business consultant Argelia Rodriguez. The committee s "deputy marketing director," Rodriguez is a businesslike woman with long burgundy nails that match her suit. Her primary charge has been to generate money through the sale of officially licensed inauguration merchandise—coffee mugs, desk sets, and the like. "The people want to own a piece of history," Rodriguez told me. "The information age makes all of America our target market now, so we decided that home shopping was the way to go." That s why you may have caught members of the inaugural committee on the QVC network, where the entire line of 1997 products went on sale in January. In response to complaints that merchandising the inaugural this way might make it seem more gaudily commercial than ever, Rodriguez said, "Gaudy? I don t think it s gaudy. QVC is upscale; it presents values we are comfortable with. Now, some of those other home-shopping networks I don t know about."
Even when it came to selecting which goods were "presidential" enough to include" in Rodriguez s portfolio, discretion was used. This meant no to the famous " gay" Clinton and Gore T-shirt, in which the running mates faces have been superimposed atop the bodies of two muscular and nearly naked men, and also no to a humidor embossed with the inaugural seal ("The administration discourages smoking"). With such meticulous attention being paid to the matter of image, the commemorative inauguration 1997 coin comes as a real disappointment: It is not an especially flattering picture of Clinton, and he appears overweight. "We showed the president several, and that was the one he chose," Rodriguez said with a shrug.
While inaugurations of the past were typically handled by the hospitality industry—caterers and florists and people with amusing accents—this one was staffed by 440 full-time bureaucrats, most of them erstwhile political operatives and recovering campaign workers ("440 people looking for a job with the administration," in the words of one). They all carried beepers (which were used even within the building). They had an enormous press office, which included Andy, a rather earnest fellow whose job it was to squire me around the building, sit in on any interview I conducted, and observe my every observation. "It s just like at the White House," Andy explained.
I accompanied Kristin Bunce, a 28-year-old in the media office, to a press conference at a local food bank. The Inauguration Committee was announcing that it would require each attendee to the American gala to donate a can of food (some actually did). About fifteen members of the press office attended, escorted by the U.S. military.
What most of the inaugural planning amounts to is constituent work. "We sat down and compiled a list of 65,000 people—friends, contributors, anyone we thought should be invited," said Ertharin Cousin, a former White House liaison to the State Department whose title at the Inauguration Committee is "director of outreach." Underneath Cousin s watch there are more than 30 "desks." There is a Native American outreach desk, one for Hispanics, African Americans, gays and lesbians, small-business owners, rural Americans, and many more. There is also a "VIP shop" at the Inaugural Committee, set up to ensure that celebrities and friends of the First Family are well looked after. I asked if I could observe the activity in the VIP wing. "The staff in that room haven t been briefed for a media visit," Andy, the press agent, said solemnly. He asked about my last name and told me the "Jewish American outreach desk is one of our biggest. We have a lot of Jewish people coming into town for this." When they were printed, the tickets to the inaugural events were secured in a safe in Kim Cubine s office. Just as I dropped in on Cubine, she received a request from an inaugural press secretary. "NBC News wants to know if they can film the tickets for a visual," he said. Cubine shook her head. "Tell them security risk, " she said.
In the end, every ticket to all fourteen balls was sold. The Clintons, of course, stopped in at each one for a dance, then moved quickly on. There were some notable absences. James Carville was seen dining at The Palm with 20 or so other big hitters who were avoiding the balls, which had underwhelmed them the last time. And there were a few glitches—like the coatroom melee at the Omni Shoreham (the mid-Atlantic ball), where 5,000 coats had been piled on random tables and the police were brought in during the wee hours to calm the panicking, coatless mob. For the women of the Inauguration Committee, it was a relief just to have made it this far. Kim Cubine and Laura Hartigan got separated at the Tennessee Ball. Kim went on to the Arkansas Ball, Laura to three others. As the night wound down, Hartigan stumbled into the inaugural staffs after-hours party at the old Woodward and Lothrop department store. Little Feat were playing, and Laura found Kim sitting at a table with her date. Champagne was procured, and, happily exhausted, they toasted to this being the last party of the inauguration and the first party they weren t working. Laura Hartigan was looking forward to a break—at least, that is, until it was time to start planning her October wedding. But after the grueling party planathon of the past six weeks, she said, that was sure to be a snap.