The Queen Makes A Royal Splash

By KURT ANDERSEN

Lighting up the unfriendly skies of California

The New World was still too new and too far for England's first Queen Elizabeth to make it over for a visit, but by any 16th century standard she was peripatetic. Elizabeth I would set out from London on "royal progresses" through the countryside, prompting an extravagant social frenzy everywhere she stopped. On a typical 1560s tour of Suffolk, one witness wrote, the Queen's hosts laid on "such sumptuous feastings and banquets as seldom in any part of the world hath been seen before." The provincials' Elizabethan party clothes were to die for. "All the velvets and silks that might be laid hands on were taken up and bought for any money," which made for "a comely troop and a noble sight to behold."

How tines haven't changed. Queen Elizabeth II was in the Western U.S. last week for a ten-day visit, before heading up to British Columbia and, this Friday, back home. Sumptuous feastings? There was everything from maple souffle and rack of lamb (and 1966 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild) to a hot heap of chiles rellenos and refried beans. Banquets? In Los Angeles, the Queen ate papaya and heard George Burns tell jokes about octogenarian sex; at an official dinner in Golden Gate Park, goose-liver quenelles in pheasant broth were followed by the San Francisco Opera and Symphony performing a bit of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. A run on velvets and silks? For just one movie-studio dinner, velvet and silk and chiffon were turned into half a million dollars' worth of dresses; custom-made hats (at up to $500 each) and long white kid gloves ($150 a pair) were de rigueur much of the week.

In California, where celebrity and gauzy illusion are manufactured wholesale, a kind of fantasy come to life -- the Queen of England! -- was everywhere, walking on red carpets. No one cared that she looked unhip in her blue matron's outfits. Fame, especially enduring fame, is the California dream, and she is transcendently famous without even trying, the embodiment of an institution as old and grand as a giant sequoia. Los Angeles Electrician Raymond Pratt, 32, waited three hours to glimpse the Queen briefly. "She is one of the few things in life that is still sacred," he said. Her presence Stateside, in any event, is special: no reigning British monarch had been to the U.S. at all until 1939, when George VI, the current Queen's father, popped over. Although Elizabeth II, 56, has visited the U.S. four times before (once as princess), no English King or Queen has ever before taken a meeting on the Coast. California, in short, was royally agog.

It was also awash in the winter's worst Pacific storms, with rains, gales and even a tornado that were catastrophic for some residents but merely inconvenient for the Queen. There was an umbrella almost perpetually over Her Majesty's head. Split-second schedules, worked out over the past nine months, had to be adjusted and at the last minute readjusted, the royal yacht Britannia 's midweek sailing plans scrubbed in deference to 16-ft. seas, four floors of a hotel suddenly commandeered. At a dinner in her honor in San Francisco, the Queen made light of the drenching conditions. "I knew before we came that we have exported many of our traditions to the United States," she said. "But I had not realized before that weather was one of them."

When she was out in the drizzle, however, Her Majesty's smile grew wanner and wanner, and sometimes disappeared. Her frustration was plain when, emerging from President Reagan's mountaintop Rancho del Cielo (Ranch in the Sky), she took a spritz of rain in the face. Recounted Brian Vine, the monocled correspondent of the London Daily Express: "She looked like she had backed a loser at the Newmarket races." Despite such signs of royal pique, her press secretary, Michael Shea, insisted that the Queen was unfazed by the weather. "She loves it," he declared. Then Shea got downright fulsome in finding silver linings: "The Queen's life is so planned to the second that it is a pleasing change for her to have things go awry every so often."

The Queen, according to one biographer, "is a poor sailor," easily made queasy. Even so, the royals had intended to spend most of their time on board her yacht Britannia, the world's largest (412 ft. long), best staffed (a crew of 254) and most expensive (more than $5 million a year to maintain). But even in the balmy Mexican Pacific, the Queen fretted about the rough California seas ahead. The gray, foreboding skies settled in just before Britannia slid up to San Diego's Broadway Pier a week ago last Saturday.

Her brimming itinerary called for 20 public appearances before a weekend respite with Prince Philip at Yosemite National Park. "The Queen," said Shea, "wanted there to be a good balance between work and recreation." With a monarch, it is not always easy to know which is which. More than 6,000 San Diego citizens (and transplanted subjects) cheered and sang onshore at her arrival, but the visitor got on with business straightaway. She walked among 200 reporters (a fraction of those covering her) who had been invited aboard the comfortably staid Britannia to drink brandy and warm whisky. Mid-mingle, she had one American describe for her Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, in which a servant is cursed for manhandling the disguised English monarch.

As it turned out, the synopsis was unhappily apt. As the Queen found her footing in the course of a harbor tour, acting San Diego Mayor William Cleator, trying to be helpful, put his palm lightly, briefly on her back. Some San Diegans were scandalized by the mayor's familiarity, and sensation-hungry Fleet Street reporters pounced. "The Queen was visibly bothered," the Daily Express huffed, "and frowned her disapproval."

On board the aircraft carrier Ranger, she talked to the pilot of a one-passenger A-7 Corsair ("So you are all on your own in there?" said she. "Yes ma'am," said he) and met a sailor called Groucho Marx. The Queen (who is Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom) and Prince Philip, turned out in his Admiral of the Fleet's dress blues, had a wardroom lunch with 50 Ranger officers. The menu included lobster, despite Her Majesty's widely supposed aversion to eating shellfish abroad,* and wine, thanks to a Washington waiver of the rule against shipboard drinking.

Red carpets came in all sizes. At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, the Queen stood on a soggy, bath-size red mat and watched, a bit warily, as an attendant coaxed a sea lion called Ushi over the edge of its tank. Scripps Director William Nierenberg, sounding more accusatory than he probably meant, declared, "You don't have sea lions in Britain." "And you very nearly didn't either," shot back Prince Philip, alluding to decades of unchecked hunting.

Following church on Sunday, an Episcopal service at which Prince Philip read from I Corinthians 3 for 600 fellow congregants, they flew on Air Force Two to Palm Springs for an idyl with Publisher Walter Annenberg. The royals' limousine wheeled into the driveway just past the intersection of Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Drive, beyond the 30-ft-tall reproduction Mayan column and within view of the three flags: Old Glory, the Union Jack and Annenberg's personal banner, a yellow Mayan rune against a white background. Annenberg, 74, spent 5 1/2 years as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Sunnylands is a modernist San Simeon on 208 acres. Built in 1964 at a cost of $5 million, the mansion alone covers nearly an acre. Inside is a major collection of impressionist (Renoir, Monet) and postimpressionist (Gauguin, Van Gogh) paintings.

Aside from the official Anglo-American retinue, only Gerald and Betty Ford came to lunch. Annenberg had joked that for every gadabout he invited to lunch with his royal pals, he made ten or 25 enemies. (Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, expecting even more ill will from his big civic lunch the next day, said he thus "made 350 friends and 3 million enemies," in all "enough to make some of us hope it never happens again.") After lunch, as the Annenbergs' staff of 50 cleared away the maple-souffle dishes and champagne (1970 Dom Perignon) glasses, the party motored around the perfectly green grounds -- Walter driving the Queen, his wife Lee chauffeuring the Prince -- in Annenberg's fleet of electric golf carts.

The Queen had wanted to see a Hollywood studio. The finest oldtime studio lot still operating is 20th Century-Fox, and the First Lady invited 500 over for dinner on sound stage No. 9, a vast space where the M*A*S*H series had been filmed. For this occasion, the olive drab was replaced by gay Hollywood eclectic: Ficus trees draped with fairy lights, fiber glass and plaster statues (including one of Bacchus) standing on yards of artificial turf, a 24-ft.-high fountain (from Hello Dolly), painted pastoral backdrops (used in From the Terrace) and Chinese paper lanterns.

"Hey, Mrs. Reagan!" somebody yelled outside. "Why a royal party on a movie set?" Said she, smiling: "Why not?" Especially when the place was lent by Fox Owner Marvin Davis, a Reagan contributor, and the dinner was underwritten by eight conservative California tycoons, including Reagan Patron Holmes Tuttle and Union Bank Chairman John Heidt. "We're doing it," said Heidt, "because we want it to be a private-enterprise situation." The menu was Reagan's favorite food from his favorite Los Angeles restaurant: Chasen's chicken pot pie and "snowballs," ice cream rolled in toasted coconut and covered with chocolate sauce.

Most of the guests were celebrated and fell into four categories: vintage movie actors (Roy Rogers, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Fred MacMurray, Loretta Young, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis), British-born stars (James Mason, Roddy McDowall, Julie Andrews, Dudley Moore, Rod Stewart, Elton John), movers and shakers (Henry Kissinger, Armand Hammer) and the special-interest famous (Henry Winkler, Mort Sahl). British reporters were nonplussed by M.C. Ed McMahon but mostly liked George Burns' aging-rake jokes, while the Queen, looking unamused, seemed to scrutinize more than enjoy the pop medley sung by Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. In all, said Britain's Guardian, "not exactly an exhilarating performance." When the Queen left promptly at 11, some of the famous Americans disobeyed orders and stood up, craning, to gawk.

Outside the studio were two dozen demonstrators, a group roughly the size and temper that showed up at most of the stops. There were Latins ("Malvinas, Malvinas belong to Argentina!") angry about the Falklands war, but most were Irish Americans urging independence for Northern Ireland. Their placards outside Fox's gates: BRITS OUT OF IRELAND and, more immediately, BRITS OUT OF AMERICA. A small anti-anti-British crowd gathered too. "I wasn't planning to watch for the Queen," said British Transplant Lesley Heathcote, 25, who wore a BRITAIN is GREAT T shirt and had a pet chow in a Union Jack bandanna. "But when I saw all these demonstrators, I decided to come back and give her a bit of support."

Both camps were gone by the time the wet sidewalk was jammed with a Hollywood pantheon of the Reagan generation, full of wine and weariness and all wanting their cars (CHUCK'S PARKING -- PLEASE STOP HERE read the sign out front). "Bloody undignified," grumped a silver-haired BBC man, "standing in the rain in an alley in Los Angeles at my age."

A harder rain fell Monday. At Rockwell International's plant in Downey, Queen and consort each stepped into the cockpit of a space shuttle simulator and played astronaut, making a video landing. The Queen was on automatic pilot; the Prince, who has piloted R.A.F. jets, grabbed the joystick and "flew" freely.

By motorcade, they raced to Los Angeles city hall, where the Queen made her only formal address. Fans swarmed outside, including one group dressed in Elizabethan doublets and capes. "Come on, pedestrians!" ordered a policeman over a bullhorn. "Heads up, pedestrians!"

Inside, the Queen reminded the 400 Americans that Britannia was essentially retracing a stretch of Sir Francis Drake's 1579 route up the Pacific Coast. He "claimed this territory as 'Nova Albion' for the first Queen Elizabeth," she said, "and 'for the Queen's successors forever.' " Smile. Pause. "I am happy, though, to give you an immediate assurance that I have not come here today to press that claim." (She failed to deliver the kicker that the Nova Albion/California natives at the time, utterly wowed by their godlike English visitor, lavished Drake with gifts and all conceivable hospitality.)

But seriously, the Queen continued, turning to the matter of the Falklands war, "The support of your Government and of the American people touched us deeply and demonstrated to the world that our close relationship is based on our shared commitments to the same values." The Queen ordinarily avoids public statements that smack at all of politics. Expressing gratitude to an old ally suddenly seemed a major purpose of her visit.

There were other constituencies to tend to as well. At the British Home in Sierra Madre, a retirement camp for expatriates, the Queen tramped from stucco bungalow to bungalow, pleasing the 38 residents almost unbearably. The oldest, Sybil Jones-Bateman, 97, gave Her Majesty a homemade tea cozy and a collectively sewn quilt for the infant Prince William.

Fifteen minutes away at the City of Hope National Medical Center was a pediatric research center, endowed by a British couple, for the Queen to dedicate and tour. Outside, she stooped to talk with young patients, all seriously ill, some with limbs amputated. When she reached to shake one boy's hand, for a terrible moment it seemed as if it had come off; the limb turned out to be a china toy, and the imperturbable Queen passed it to one of her ladies in waiting and continued chatting.

In London, the Queen meets on Tuesdays with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Last Tuesday, set aside for a presidential howdy, was the day the storms turned vicious and the schedules became a muddle. One of the intended high points of the week, the horseback ride of the President and the Queen around the ranch, was scratched. Then, with the twisting, barely paved, 1 1/2-lane, 7-mile road up to the ranch flooded out in half a dozen spots, the visit was almost canceled altogether. No, wait, it was definitely on. But British reporters could not come. "This will not do!" bellowed Paul Callan of the Daily Mirror at a White House aide. 'The British press will storm the ranch!" All right already, you can come.

Reagan, whose invitation to the Queen last June at Windsor Castle had been specifically to his ranch, was determined that the show go on, as was Nancy. "You read the President's mind," one of his aides speculated, "and it seems to be saying, 'Gee, just think, the Queen came to lunch at my house.' "

In any case, Reagan flew to an air base near Santa Barbara and by helicopter to the local airport, then made the tricky drive up the mountain. Next day he went back down Refugio Road in a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles (airlifted from Washington) to meet the Queen, who had taken a Navy bus to Long Beach airport and caught Air Force Two to Santa Barbara. Warned that the Queen's plane was late, the presidential motorcade stopped in its tracks for 19 minutes under a highway overpass. The President's advisers reckoned this was preferable to hanging about an airplane hangar. Reagan got out to stretch.

At last it was on to the Santa Barbara hangar to welcome the Queen on another red carpet, and back up Refugio Road, past somebody's hand-lettered WELCOME LIZ AND PHIL sign, to the Ranch in the Sky. En route Her Majesty put on rubber boots and a Burberry mackintosh; the President changed into cowboy boots, denim jacket and Western string tie. The hours of tough (and maybe gratuitously risky) travel were all for the sake of a Tex-Mex feast: tacos, enchiladas, stuffed chilies, guacamole, refried beans. Just after the Queen and Philip took off back down the mountain, the fog lifted and the splendid views were suddenly unshrouded. "Damn it," the President said, "I told them it was going to clear." Like other Golden State boosters, Reagan was rankled that the royal visitors had not been able to see California as it is supposed to be: bright and languid, metaphysically sunny. An aide was ordered,in vain, to radio the royals and bring them back.

On Wednesday Britannia finally left Long Beach without its passengers. The royals and their household, 30 servants and aides in all, went ahead to San Francisco by jet and checked into the Westin St. Francis Hotel's $1,200-a-night Presidential Suite. (The U.S. Government picked up the tab.) Nancy Reagan, in turn, got the London Suite (the irony was accidental). The trio and their courtiers later hooked up at the Trafalgar Room (also happenstance) in Trader Vic's restaurant.

Next day in Silicon Valley, there was a 45-minute royal tour of a Hewlett Packard microchip factory. The Queen is to get, courtesy of the Government, the company's $24,000 HP 250 business computer system. It will be installed at Buckingham Palace, presumably to help manage the breeding and feeding of her dozens of Thoroughbreds.

In San Francisco's big homosexual community, GOD SAVE THIS QUEEN buttons were popular, and on Thursday night at Kimo's Bar, a gang of happy transvestites held a Queen Elizabeth II look-alike contest. "It's a tribute to her," said Lee Raymond, whose dress, pearls and handbag were well chosen.

Not a bit lighthearted, however, were the pamphlets and broadsides delivered by the local Irish Republican Committee encouraging anti-British protesters to confront the Queen. At the Davies Symphony Hall's morning entertainment (which included, `a la campy Carmen Miranda, two women with hats bearing huge models of downtown London and San Francisco), an Ulster emigre named Seamus Gibney screamed, "Stop the torture!" He was hauled out, Mary Martin calmly finished singing Getting to Know You, and the Queen's press secretary said he thought Gibney had only coughed.

Some city officials thought it wrong to spend $2 million for two days of royal frolic. Seven out of eleven city supervisors thus declined to come to Symphony Hall and missed meeting the Queen at the private reception. Prince Philip, after shaking the hands of five female officials in a row, proved not quite a modern man. "Aren't there any male supervisors?" he wondered. "This is a nanny city."

And a highly demonstrative one. Some 7,000 San Franciscans, as many angry about U.S. aid to El Salvador as about British "occupation" of Northern Ireland, gathered Thursday evening in Golden Gate Park. The bitterest complaints were about Reagan, not the powerless royals, and about putting on the ritz during a recession. "It is sickening," said Teacher Ardys Delu, 33. "All this luxury and wealth when people don't even have a place to eat or sleep."

The protesters chanted toward the De Young Memorial Museum, site of the week's official dinner, which was not, technically, a state dinner. The semantics of Government protocol seemed not to concern the Reagans and their 260 guests, for whom the black-tie affair had the giddy buzz of an ultimate diplomatic gala. The Queen, at last, was wearing a crown, or anyway a big diamond tiara that could pass. The feast was an unerringly handsome affair, 25 tables surrounded by medieval Belgian tapestries (and a painting of Windsor Castle) in the specially spruced-up museum's vaulted, mock-Moorish Hearst Court.

Three Hearsts were there -- Patty's parents and stepmother -- along with Northern California's leading corporate capitalists, local politicians and mandarins, high-tech youth stars (Star Wars Director George Lucas, Apple Computer Founder Steven Jobs) and eight journalists (Brits five, Yanks three). In the receiving line, Reagan whispered to the Queen about a certain old Yankee who had just passed; the jolted Queen told her husband, and Prince Philip called back Joe DiMaggio for a chat.

The Reagan Administration's main Californians were in the museum: the President, Presidential Aides Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese, National Security Adviser William Clark, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz. After dinner the Queen claimed that she had always wanted to visit the state. "What better time," she added, half-jokingly, "than when the President is a Californian."

The just-so cuisine, according to the chef, was Californian too, by way of nouvelle France. Not a taco in sight, but a pureed seafood melange, balls of local goat cheese and a multicolored dessert grandiosely named Aurora Pacifica. The main course, veal loin stuffed with an indecent quantity of morel mushrooms, was trucked in with its own police escort. Said one oilman's wife: "This is the greatest thing since the Super Bowl." Near by, '49ers Quarterback Joe Montana dug into his endive-wrapped asparagus.

Nancy Reagan, who seemed especially wide-eyed and gushy all week, had slept overnight on Britannia Tuesday, and marveled to an aide, "It was so clean you could have eaten off the engine room's floor." And so, she added, "What more can you ask than to spend your anniversary having dinner with the Queen aboard the royal yacht?" Friday was the 31st wedding anniversary, and it was decided to commemorate it quietly with a farewell Britannia dinner. The yacht's presidential flag flew upside down, but the Reagans beamed fondly; over champagne the President joked with the Queen that his 32nd anniversary efforts would pale in comparison.

The dreamy good spirits were sadly interrupted Saturday morning. In the rainy Sierra Nevada foothills northwest of Yosemite, a pack of three Secret Service cars was about 25 min. ahead of the royal party's limousines. An oncoming Mariposa County deputy sheriffs car drifted into the middle of the twisting road, striking the second car headon. Three agents, who had been close to the royal couple all week, were killed.

The Queen and Prince Philip spent the weekend, as planned, deep in the rugged Yosemite Valley. Amid 200-ft. Ponderosa pines and Ansel Adams mountain views, they had the luxury of the entire 121-room Ahwahnee Hotel, all native granite and stained glass.

Alone, more or less, at last, they could have contemplated their boxes of sweet, homely American gifts: a space shuttle model, some Indians' "holy sage," a porcelain quail, a prayer book, too many plaques and countless crumpled bouquets. Maybe over tea (5 p.m. daily at the Ahwahnee) they smiled together about the parade of eager California swells who marched past last week. Or perhaps the Queen and Prince Philip sat alone up in the Sierras for two days, resting in the hush. Maybe, after all the commotion, they just mellowed out.

-- By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with the President, Mary Cronin with the Queen and Alessandra Stanley/ Los Angeles

* Later in the trip she had scallops, shrimp and crab. Salmon was even more popular, served to the Queen six times in six days.

With reporting by Laurence I.Barrett, Mary Cronin, Queen, Alessandra Stanley This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.