Jay Coupe, who died Wednesday at 65, was a long-serving, large-living spokesman for America’s Armed Forces who was present at several historically critical events of recent decades — and an opera buff who committed what was once called the greatest act of chutzpah in history.

Words spoken during the day made him a familiar figure to newspaper readers, but Italian arias sung by night with mirthful companions helped make him larger-than-life to friends.

When one went to visit Can Tho in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta “you got not just a briefing with Lieutenant Coupe, but also an invitation to his trailer where he cooked up a great Italian meal and sang arias,” the chairman of Dow Jones & Co., Peter Kann, a former war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, said.

In early 1973, as the Vietnam War was winding down and the North began releasing Americans it held prisoner, Coupe made six trips to Hanoi to ferry home the captives. Photos ran in newspapers across the nation of a gaunt fighter pilot named John McCain walking to freedom alongside a beaming Coupe.

Coupe was in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968. In subsequent years, he was stationed all around the globe – in the Philippines, the Republic of China, Germany, and Naples, where for eight years he was attached to NATO southern command.

Italy seemed to stoke his already large appetite for Italian food and wine, and also a love of opera that manifested itself in a prank once described by a friend as “the greatest piece of chutzpah he’d ever seen in his life.” Others claimed that it was the greatest act of chutzpah in history.

At a September 1979 auction to benefit the Washington Opera Society, Coup paid $800 for the privilege of dining with Luciano Pavarotti. Most opera buffs would have cajoled the great tenor into singing a few bars for his supper, but Coupe dreamed of more — he wanted Mr. Pavarotti to listen to him.

The following February, Coupe hosted Pavarotti and a party of eight at New York’s Romeo Salta restaurant. The contented but hungry Mr. Pavarotti, already dieting and having ordered broiled fish, sampled pasta off everyone else’s plate, and riffled through Coupe’s dog-eared Neapolitan songbook. Seeing his quarry thus disarmed, Coupe struck.

Sanford Teller, a friend of Coupe’s whom Coupe had stationed at a nearby table, affected surprise at seeing him at Romeo Salta, shook Mr. Pavarotti’s hand, and mentioned that, by the way, his old friend was a gifted tenor. At Mr. Pavarotti’s urging, Coupe launched into “Na Serra Maggio,” an old Neapolitan standard.

The performance evidently pleased Mr. Pavarotti — as well as the rest of the diners who by some accounts gave Coupe a standing ovation — and the evening wound cheerfully down, as Mr. Pavarotti headed home to rest up for a Metropolitan Opera performance of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” the following evening.

The event was written up in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and picked up by newswires nationwide. “I felt like a choir boy going up in front of the Pope, Coupe later told the Post.

It was far from his only public performance.

While he was in charge of coordinating the activities of sailors from 95 countries during the International Naval Review of 1976 (it ran concurrently with the tall ships of Operation Sail) Coupe lived in an apartment on East 59th Street that overlooked the Roosevelt Island tram.

Friends recalled that he had an early VCR, a Betamax in fact, that was always on and playing a tape loop of a Coupe appearance on a Taiwanese variety show, singing “Danny Boy,” which he sang in an extraordinarily sweet and tender rendition that became a regular request of his friends.

One asserted yesterday that it was unlikely the song has ever been sung better that by Coupe.

Coupe was involved in handling press relations during the shootdown of an Iran Air flight in the Persian Gulf, and the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut. He retired from the Navy in 1988 as a captain, after capping his career as special assistant and spokesman to Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He married Patrisha Davis, and entered a particularly happy phase of his life, hosting each Christmas an elegant party at their home in McLean, Va., at which Coupe sported another of his trademarks, a monocle.

He stayed in Washington, and opened an international consultancy, Jay Coupe Associates, which specialized in international security matters.

In the wake of the embassy bombings in East Africa, he led a State Department inquiry that concluded that American embassies around the world were vulnerable to terrorist attack.

He saw to it that his international consultancy brought him frequently to Italy, and was a member of the Washington branch of L’Accademia Italiana della Cucina, a select band of gastronomes including Richard Perle. L’Accademia liked to host special guests like Justice Scalia at its opulent repasts, where diners tried culinary arcane like deep-fried basil leaves, and rated chefs severely.

Coupe was also a member, along with talk show ringmaster John McLaughlin and TV comic Mark Russell, of a select drinking club known respectfully as the Cogswell Society — its namesake was a 19th-century San Francisco dentist and temperance advocate who set up stone wells around the country to extol the virtues of pure water.

A few weeks ago, Coupe sent friends a CD of him singing his favorite arias as a kind of goodbye and token of remembrance. His wife’s wish is that he be interred at Arlington National Cemetery, and when his friends gather to remember him, one predicted the assembly will be brought to a tearful hush that will be remembered for years, as a recording is played of Coupe singing “Danny Boy.”

Jay Coupe
Born October 18,1940; attended Central High School in Philadelphia and graduated from Princeton in 1962; joined Navy in 1962; retired,1978; died of liver cancer September 14 at a care facility in Potomac, Md. Survived by his wife, Patrisha Davis.