Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

Vice President Richard Nixon treated the royal couple to a luncheon with ninety-six guests in the orchid- bedecked old Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol. It was their first encounter with the incisive but socially awkward vice president. Perhaps taking note of the recent criticism of the Queen, Nixon talked to her about speaking techniques. The next day he even sent her a book with some “rather startling ideas” that he thought could be helpful: The Art of Readable Writing, by noted language expert Dr. Rudolf Flesch, an advocate of “plain talk.”

On the third day the Queen indulged in some unusual departures from the normal run of activities. She had specifically asked to see an American football “match,” as she put it, so the White House arranged for her to sit in a “royal box” at the fifty yard line at the University of Maryland’s Byrd Stadium for a game against the University of North Carolina. On the way she spotted a Giant supermarket and asked if a visit might be arranged so she “could see how American housewives shop for food.”

To the cheers of 43,000 spectators, the Queen walked onto the field to chat with two opposing players, both strapping lads in crew cuts. Dressed in a $15,000 mink coat given to her by Mutation Mink Breeders Association, a group of American fur farmers, she watched the game intently but seemed “perturbed” whenever the players threw blocks. It was a quintessential American display: cheerleaders doing cartwheels, high-stepping drum majorettes, marching bands, and North Carolina girls costumed in large cigarette packs covering their heads and torsos, dancing as an announcer boasted about their state’s “parade of industries.”

While the royal pair was being entertained at halftime, security men raced back to the supermarket to arrange for a visit on the fly. After Maryland’s 21–7 victory, the motorcade arrived at the Queenstown Shopping Center at 5 P.M., to the amazement of hundreds of shoppers. Elizabeth II and Philip had never before seen a supermarket, a phenomenon then unknown in Britain, and their visit was noteworthy for its spontaneity and novelty.

With the curiosity of anthropologists and an informality they had not displayed publicly in Britain, they spent fifteen minutes shaking hands, quizzing customers, and inspecting the contents of shopping carts. “How nice that you can bring your children along,” said Elizabeth II, nodding toward the little seat in one housewife’s cart. Queen and consort were amazed not only at the quantities of food but the range of products—clothing, stationery, toiletries, even Halloween costumes. She took a particular interest in frozen chicken pot pies, while he nibbled on sample crackers with cheese and joked, “Good for mice!” They both heard about refrigeration techniques and were particularly intrigued by the checkout counters, which cashier David Ferris explained as the monarch walked through the lane. “Thank you for the tour,” the Queen said to supermarket manager Donald D’Avanzo. “I enjoyed it very much.” D’Avanzo announced afterward that he had been “amazed and scared.… It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

On their final day in Washington, the Queen and Philip made their only private visit of the entire tour, a sunny drive out to Virginia so she could inspect eighteen yearlings at the Middleburg Training Track. She spent nearly an hour looking at the horses and talking to the owners and their trainers. Elizabeth II’s host was the sportsman and philanthropist Paul Mellon, a friend and fellow thoroughbred breeder, who entertained her at tea that afternoon at his four-thousand-acre estate in nearby Upperville.

A far more exuberant welcome awaited Elizabeth II and Philip in New York City the next morning. The Queen had asked specifically to see Manhattan “as it should be approached” from the water, a vista she had been dreaming about since childhood. “Wheeeee!” she exclaimed as she caught her first glimpse of the glistening lower Manhattan skyline from the deck of a U.S. Army ferryboat. The sight reminded her, she said, of “a row of great jewels.”

A crowd of 1.25 million lined the streets from Battery Park to City Hall and northward to the Waldorf-Astoria, waving British and American flags and cheering her motorcade with shouts of “Hi Liz” and “Hooray for Prince Phil,” along with spontaneous bursts of “God Save the Queen.” Driving along Wall Street in Eisenhower’s bubble-top limousine, she and Philip passed through a blizzard of ticker tape, confetti, and torn-up phone books. As she looked up at the canyon of skyscrapers, she exclaimed, “I never realized they were so close together!”

She had only fifteen hours in the city—“a teaser,” she admitted—to fulfill her wish list and shake some three thousand hands. Wearing a dark blue satin cocktail dress and close-fitting pink velvet hat, she addressed the representatives of eighty-two countries in the United Nations General Assembly. At the conclusion of her six-minute speech praising the organization’s laudable ideals and urging all its member nations to persevere in the pursuit of peace, the audience of two thousand responded with “a thunderous standing ovation.” Afterward, she had an hour- long tour of the five-year-old U.N. headquarters, asking at one point how the thirty-nine-story glass Secretariat building “kept standing up.” During a reception with delegates, Philip talked to Soviet ambassador Andrei Gromyko about the recently launched Sputnik satellite that his wife had mentioned in her letter to Anthony Eden.

The royal couple used a Louis XV–style suite on the twenty-eighth floor of the Waldorf Towers as their temporary headquarters, and they were feted at two meals in the legendary hotel: a luncheon for 1,700 hosted by Mayor Robert Wagner, and a dinner for 4,500 given by the English-Speaking Union and the Pilgrims of the United States, both groups committed to Anglo-American amity. In between, the Queen took in the “tremendous” view from the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building at twilight—another specific request—when “the evening sky was purple and the offices were still blazing, and the whole midtown skyline is composed of vast hanging sheets of exquisite lace,” in the words of British writer Alistair Cooke.

As the white-tie banquet began in the grand ballroom, the punishing schedule was beginning to take its toll, even on an energetic thirty-one-year-old Queen. A closed-circuit television set up for the six adjoining banquet rooms gave guests an unusual view of Elizabeth II in her three-inch-high diamond tiara and evening gown glittering with pastel paillettes. She was never supposed to be filmed in the act of eating, but there she was, on the TV screens, fork in left hand, eating striped bass with champagne sauce, filet of beef with truffle sauce, beignet potatoes, string beans almandine, and Waldorf savarin au rhum. Guests could watch her follow strict mealtime protocol, talking for the first two courses to her partner on the left, former U.S. ambassador to Britain Lewis Douglas, then turning to the right at the main course to converse with Pilgrims president Hugh Bullock.

The New York Times noted that her speech was the “one time during the program … when the fatigue showed through.… She made no effort to force a smile … and although she stumbled over her text only once, her voice plainly showed it.” Despite her somber demeanor, she warmly praised the dinner’s two sponsors for their emphasis on the “common language and the heritage of history” between Britain and America, as well as their “conscious effort” to ensure that the two nations did not “take each other for granted.”

She had one more stop that night, a Royal Commonwealth ball for another 4,500 guests at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue. Protocol chief Wiley Buchanan marveled that despite her fatigue, she sat on the dais “straight as a ruler, not even touching the back of her chair.” As the Queen and Philip made their way to a waiting limousine well after midnight, she stopped frequently to speak to war veterans. One aviator blinded in World War I tried to get up from his wheelchair to greet her. “She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and told him that he should not rise,” recalled Buchanan. “She spoke to him for several moments, then moved on.”

Buchanan had arranged for a light to be placed on the floor of the royal couple’s car that was switched on for their drive to Idlewild Airport, illuminating the Queen’s dress and tiara for the throngs of spectators lining the streets of Manhattan and Queens. Many of the women wore bathrobes and had curlers in their hair. “Philip,” said Elizabeth II, “look at all those people in their nightclothes. I certainly wouldn’t come out in my nightclothes to see anyone drive by, no matter who it was!”

By 2 A.M. the Queen and Philip were on board the Seven Seas, a BOAC DC-7, for their nearly fourteen-hour flight home. “You both have captivated the people of our country by your charm and graciousness,” Eisenhower wrote in his farewell letter to the royal couple.

American and British papers pronounced the visit “extraordinarily successful” and a “tremendous American triumph.” No one was more pleased than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who was due to follow his sovereign to Washington the next week for a round of meetings with Eisenhower. The Queen, Macmillan wrote in his diary, “has buried George III for good and all.” But the British people felt left out as they read about her impromptu forays, not to mention the extensive television coverage she had permitted. “Why did she have to cross the Atlantic to become real?” wondered the London Daily Herald.

THE QUEEN’S NEW reliance on television was no accident, and her husband had much to do with the change. Given Philip’s fascination with technology, it was only natural that he would see the potential of broadcasting for the monarchy. As early as November 1952 he had predicted that radio and television had “gone beyond the stage of