Elizabeth the Queen (48 page)

Everyone flew back to Long Beach for dinner on
Britannia
. Mike Deaver played the piano for an after-dinner sing-along, and Nancy Reagan stayed overnight. “We talked at length,” she recalled. “It was not the Queen and first lady but two mothers and wives talking about their lives, mostly our children. She was beginning to be concerned about Diana.”

Rough seas prevented the royal couple from sailing to San Francisco, so with thirty staff and officials in tow, they flew instead on Air Force Two. As they made their approach, the pilot flew low over the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Queen excitedly joined the group on one side of the airplane to catch her first glimpse of the fabled span. The presidential and royal parties took over forty-six rooms on four floors at the St. Francis Hotel. The Queen and Philip stayed in the $1,200 a night Presidential Suite, which Nancy Reagan’s interior designer Ted Graber hurriedly dressed up with paintings and objects from local art museums.

On the spur of the moment, the Anglo-American group decided to have dinner in the Trafalgar Room at Trader Vic’s. The Queen at first resisted, but her husband persuaded her. “I learned that night that she listened to him, and it wasn’t completely ‘my way or no way,’ ” said Carolyn Deaver. “I got the feeling he was a little more adventurous, and he wanted her to be too.” Elizabeth II told the Deavers she hadn’t dined in a restaurant in more than fifteen years, but when she got there, she laughed and tried the exotic rum punches. At the end of the meal, she cracked open her fortune cookie, read the fortune, showed it to Philip, and tucked it into her handbag.

On Thursday, March 3, the Queen and Philip were honored at a black-tie dinner at the de Young Memorial Museum. When Mike Deaver asked Philip Moore why the monarch took so long to prepare for the evening, the private secretary replied, “The Queen needs her tiara time!” Moore explained that she has a kit with tools that she uses to decorate certain diamond tiaras by hooking on pearl or gemstone drops, a pastime she much enjoys, according to former Crown Jeweler David Thomas.

For the banquet she chose pearls, but she detracted from the tiara, with its matching necklace and large drop earrings, by wearing an overdone evening gown of champagne-colored taffeta with “puff sleeves decorated with ‘ruched’ bands of lace edged with gold” and large bows on her shoulders. Peering through her reading glasses, she addressed the 260 guests in the vaulted Hearst Court: “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.” As she deadpanned, Reagan threw his head back with a mighty guffaw, inadvertently creating a hilarious juxtaposition with the sober and bespectacled queen in her ruffles and jewels.

The weather finally lived up to California’s reputation on Friday when the royal couple flew to Sacramento for the day. The Queen’s final dinner on
Britannia
honored the Reagans’ thirty-first wedding anniversary. “I know I promised Nancy a lot when we were married,” said the president, “but how can I ever top
this
?” Reagan expressed his fondness for the Queen by giving her a $24,000 Hewlett-Packard 250 business computer system. In no time she had it installed in Buckingham Palace to track her horse breeding, training, and racing activities.

T
HE
Q
UEEN AND
the Reagans had developed a genuine friendship that included other members of her family—Charles most prominently, but Princess Margaret as well. On October 1, 1983, the president and first lady entertained Margaret and a group of her friends at a dinner upstairs at the White House. She thanked the Reagans effusively for a “sparkling” evening and proclaimed her “abiding love for your country.”

At age fifty-three, the Queen’s sister was difficult to please: unattached, often unhappy, smoking heavily and drinking so much that she had to be hospitalized once for alcoholic hepatitis. She and Tony had divorced in July 1978, followed within months by his remarriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Roddy Llewellyn stayed in the picture for a while, although the Queen drew the line at inviting him to Margaret’s fiftieth birthday party at the Ritz in August 1980.

The next year Llewellyn married fashion designer Tania Soskin, and Margaret wisely remained on good terms with her former lover and his new wife, who maintained a discreet silence about their royal friend. The princess continued to do the minimum of royal duties, but was more often photographed on her holidays in Mustique, or on the arm of a passing love interest. She was an attentive mother, however, ensuring that her son, David, and daughter, Sarah, grew up out of the limelight, and encouraging their artistic talents. “It is a curious irony that Margaret had such a messy life but produced two normal and nice children,” said one of the Queen’s former private secretaries.

Only weeks after Margaret’s red-carpet treatment by the president, Reagan managed to profoundly offend the Queen when he ordered the invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada by American forces. The island was a member of the Commonwealth and recognized the Queen as its head of state, but had been ruled by a Marxist dictator since 1979. In mid-October a more radical leftist group murdered the prime minister, Maurice Bishop, and a junta took power. Reagan believed the violent coup would destabilize the region and possibly endanger a group of American medical students on the island, so he responded sympathetically when other Caribbean nations asked for help from the United States. The president told Margaret Thatcher he was considering an invasion, and she warned him against such a measure. But without further consulting his most reliable ally, he ordered a military operation on October 25 and informed Thatcher only after the leaders of the coup had been captured and the safety of the American students secured.

Both the prime minister and the Queen were furious that Reagan had been so cavalier about intervening in the internal affairs of a Commonwealth nation, not to mention keeping them both in the dark. Elizabeth II was particularly indignant that her American friend had violated her role as the island’s head of state. Yet the anger soon subsided, and at the Commonwealth leaders’ conference in New Delhi that November, the emphasis was less on “debating about the past,” as Thatcher put it, and more about doing “everything we can between us to help Grenada come to democracy.” The following June, Reagan was in Europe to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of D-Day and attend a summit meeting in London. At a black-tie dinner at Buckingham Palace, he had the place of honor between the Queen and the Queen Mother.

E
LIZABETH
II’
S
1984 foreign travel called for a state visit to Jordan in the spring, and two weeks in the western provinces of Canada in the autumn. As part of the second tour, she decided to have her first private holiday in the United States: five days in the legendary bluegrass horse country of Kentucky, followed by three days in Wyoming at a ranch owned by Henry and Jean Porchester. On the final weekend of their West Coast trip the previous year, Elizabeth II and Philip had explored the majestic mountains and pine forests of Yosemite National Park, which whetted her appetite to see more of the American West. A visit to the Porchesters’ Canyon Ranch below the rugged Big Horn Mountains offered the perfect opportunity. Philip had already stayed at the ranch for five days of hunting and fishing in 1969 and had little interest in visiting stud farms, so after accompanying his wife to Canada, he planned to fly to the Middle East.

The Queen’s trip reflected her equine interests as well as her close relationship with the United States. Over six decades on the throne, she would visit America eleven times, five of those for private holidays—the most vacation time in any one place except Balmoral and Sandringham. By contrast, she would travel to Australia, one of her major realms, sixteen times.

While technically private, the visit to Kentucky was arranged with the same minute-by-minute precision as a state visit. The Queen wanted to take in the beauty of Kentucky, but her first priority was to visit the stud farms where her mares had boarded for nearly two decades, and to inspect more than sixty stallions for possible mating. To take advantage of the superior American breeding stock, she and Henry Porchester planned to send as many as five of her twenty-three broodmares to Kentucky in 1985.

At the suggestion of thoroughbred breeder Paul Mellon, Elizabeth II arranged to stay with forty-five-year-old William Stamps Farish III and his wife, Sarah, at their 1,400-acre Lane’s End Farm near Lexington. Mellon had been a trusted and generous friend of the Queen. He gave her a nomination every year to Mill Reef, the champion sire that he kept at the National Stud at Newmarket, waiving the usual stud fee of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Queen had met Will Farish only fleetingly in 1973 during a polo match at Smith’s Lawn, but Mellon assured her that the Kentucky couple were low-key, unpretentious, and completely discreet. Their early-nineteenth-century brick home was beautifully appointed and architecturally distinctive—a long house only one room deep, with a row of arches and columns at the front entrance. Yet the interiors were becomingly modest, with a country kitchen under oak beams, an airy yellow sitting room lined with bookshelves, and a painting of jockeys by George Munnings on the dining room wall.

Will Farish was a multimillionaire from Houston who inherited family fortunes from Humble Oil (later Exxon) and Sears Roebuck, and Sarah was a du Pont heiress. For more than two decades, they had also been close friends of George H. W. and Barbara Bush, and Farish managed the vice president’s blind trust during his time in office. Farish began breeding horses in Kentucky in 1963 and by 1984 had built Lane’s End into one of the country’s top thoroughbred operations.

When Elizabeth II landed in Lexington on Sunday, October 7, a woman from customs and immigration would not admit her without a passport. Catherine Murdock, a State Department protocol officer assigned to the Queen, explained that the sovereign doesn’t carry one, but the official resisted until a call to Washington provided the necessary clearance. Arriving at Lane’s End, the Queen immediately changed into her brogues, put on her raincoat and head scarf, and headed out for a walk in the wet grass. At teatime the Farishes brought out their new puppy, who promptly defecated in front of the Queen. “It put everyone totally at ease,” said Catherine Murdock. “She has so many dogs she knows what to expect, but that was her introduction to the Farish household.”

Each day the Queen moved in a caravan of cars from one storied farm to the next. At every stop, stable boys would lead out the stallions as trainers and breeders briefed the Queen and her advisers, who commented on the fine points of conformation and discussed bloodlines. The parade of champion horseflesh included Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Secretariat, whose spirited antics delighted the Queen. At John Galbreath’s Darby Dan Farm she visited Round Tower, her only broodmare then boarding in Kentucky. Having recently produced a foal, the mare was already expecting another.

Several owners entertained Elizabeth II at lunch and tea, but the pace allowed for little downtime. She attended the races at Keeneland, where she presented the winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Challenge cup for three-year-old fillies with a Georgian-style silver trophy that she had commissioned from a London jeweler. At Bloodstock Research Information Services, Henry Porchester’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harry Herbert, showed her how to search for mating combinations within ten seconds on state-of-the-art computers, a program she intended to use on her recently installed computer system at Buckingham Palace. The directors of Keeneland also staged a mock auction in the large wood-paneled pavilion, re-creating the record-breaking sales of recent years as an equine quiz show in which the spectators had to guess the identity of the yearlings based on the description of their pedigrees.

Each night the Farishes had dinner parties for ten, where Elizabeth II unwound to an extent her advisers had not seen before. The guests were all from the horse world, many of whom the Queen already knew, and the conversation rarely strayed from thoroughbred topics. “She felt very much at home in Kentucky,” said a courtier. “I saw an atmosphere of informality and gaiety that I never saw in England. No one was calling her Ma’am or Your Majesty. She was laughing and joking and having fun. She has a great soft spot for the United States.”

S
HORTLY BEFORE HER
departure on Friday, October 12, the Queen learned that a powerful IRA bomb had exploded during the Conservative Party conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Margaret Thatcher, the prime target of the terror attack, had escaped injury, but five died and thirty-four were injured, including two of the prime minister’s valued colleagues, Norman Tebbit and government chief whip John Wakeham. Thatcher had taken a hard line against prison hunger strikes in Northern Ireland four years earlier, and after the Conservatives increased their majority in the June 1983 general election, she had redoubled her resistance to the political demands of the IRA. The morning after the attack, she convened the conference at 9:30
A.M.
as scheduled and gave a defiant speech announcing that “all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”

Elizabeth II immediately sent a message of “sympathy and deep concern” to the prime minister, and Palace press secretary Michael Shea denounced the bombing as a “dreadful outrage.” When she arrived in Wyoming, she called Thatcher, whose first words were, “Are you having a lovely time?” Elizabeth II’s support “boosted one’s morale,” Thatcher recalled. The Queen then called Ronald Reagan, who shared his “deep regret,” a sentiment underlined by the earlier attempt on his own life.

Despite the shadow of events in England, her weekend in Wyoming gave the Queen her first total relaxation in nearly a month as she settled into the Porchesters’ two-story stone-and-clapboard house with dramatic views of the aspenglow, the golden foliage of autumn aspens on the slopes of the Big Horn Mountains. Her only annoyance was the proliferation of Secret Service agents, who scared off the elk and deer. But she took five-mile walks on the four-thousand-acre property, had several picnics along Little Goose Creek, and joined a morning shooting party, watching with the dogs as the guns brought down pheasants, partridges, and grouse. Meals were simple American fare such as rainbow trout, chicken pot pie, apple pie, ice cream, and cookies.