It was an offer they couldn’t refuse. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made one of their last high-profile appearances together on Sunday when big names from The Godfather films and other celebrities descended on Washington.
The president and vice-president received a standing ovation and prolonged cheers at the 47th Kennedy Center Honors. Biden punched the air three times and blew a kiss to the Marine Corps band after it played the national anthem.
“President Biden, we thank you for your 50 years of service to our country,” said David Rubenstein, the chair of the Kennedy Center. “In this country, in the last 200 and nearly 50 years, we’ve had 49 men serve as vice-president of the United States. We now have had a woman serve as vice-president.”
The crowd erupted in whoops and applause for Harris, who smiled and waved from the red velvet box in the Kennedy Center’s opera house. There was also wistfulness in the air. Harris faces an uncertain political future after her defeat by Donald Trump in last month’s presidential election.
There was no mention of Trump, who snubbed the Honors in his first term and whose imminent return unsettles many in the artistic community. But in an interview on the red carpet, Rubenstein said the president-elect would be welcome to attend next year. “We’re always hopeful he will come,” he told the Guardian. “Every president’s invited and we hope every president will show up and we hope he will show up.”
This year’s recipients of the lifetime achievement award for artistic accomplishment were the director Francis Ford Coppola, the rock band the Grateful Dead, the jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, the singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt and Harlem’s storied Apollo Theater – the first time a cultural institution has been honoured.
There were tributes to Coppola from stars of The Godfather, including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Talia Shire (Coppola’s sister), as well as from the actors Laurence Fishburne, Jason Schwartzman (his nephew) and Grace VanderWaal and his fellow directors George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Gia Coppola (his granddaughter),
Coppola, 85, has won five Oscars. De Niro, 81, told the audience: “His movies can be challenging and then in the blink of an eye they’re acknowledged as classics. Without Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather Part II, I don’t have this career.”
Pacino, 84, recalled how Coppola had fought for him to play Michael Corleone in The Godfather and for other cast members who came to feel like a family. “What distinguishes his movies is they’re not just museum pieces with artistic merits; they’re also pretty darn entertaining. I honour you, Francis. My hero, my friend and my godfather.”
Lucas, 80, best known as the creator of Star Wars, said: “Francis called me his little brother and nothing could be better than that.”
He added: “Francis is often described as an ambitious dreamer, a risk taker, a man of action. These are all nice ways of saying he’s crazy.”
What Coppola does creatively is jump off cliffs, Lucas said, but “somehow always lands on his feet”.
Raitt has won 13 Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. “It’s her old soul that just grips us,” said the actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus before a performance by Dave Matthews and Emmylou Harris of Raitt’s classic Angel from Montgomery and I Can’t Make You Love Me,, sung by Brandi Carlile with a piano accompaniment by Sheryl Crow.
Next came a tribute to Sandoval, a jazz trumpeter, pianist and composer who grew up in Cuba before defecting, and who was described as “the trumpet master” by the musician Chris Botti, before a performance of Smile.
For the 90-year-old Apollo Theater, where black performers such as Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Gladys Knight launched their careers, the actor and comedian Dave Chappelle regaled the audience with a story about his debut there as a 15-year-old.
“Everybody started booing,” Chappelle recalled. “It was like I was outside my body watching.” Eventually he was rushed off the stage by the theatre’s infamous “Sandman” but he credited the experience with helping him overcome his fear of failure. “The Apollo Theater was a church where we could talk like ourselves, to ourselves.”
The show concluded with a tribute to the Grateful Dead by performers including Dave Matthews, Maggie Rogers and Derek Trucks. The comedian David Letterman joked about the Kennedy Center trying to fit as many honours ceremonies in as possible before inauguration day.
Queen Latifah, the actor and singer, commented that the closing track Not Fade Away could not be more fitting for this moment. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, danced to the song, as did the secretary of state Antony Blinken, but Biden remained as still as a statue as his final Kennedy Center Honors drew to a close.
The ceremony offers a rare intersection of America’s cultural and political worlds. Entertainers and performers rubbed shoulders with the House of Representatives speaker, Mike Johnson; the attorney general, Merrick Garland; the chief justice, John Roberts; the Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin; the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre; and a host of senators and representatives.
The former speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would like to see Trump, who upended many Washington norms, attend the ceremony next year. She told the Guardian: “I think he would enjoy it. I think that people would love to see him come here but that’s his decision.”
Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland, agreed: “This is a wonderful celebration of a genius of all forms. I know that I was excited to receive the invitation to come and honour folks like the Apollo and I would hope that anybody who receives an invitation to see such a special night would take it seriously.”
The ceremony will be broadcast on the CBS network on 22 December.
