the Baltimore-born wife of Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland, noticed that during drinks before dinner amid the lurching seas, the Queen looked “philosophical, almost merry, twenty yards of chiffon scarf flung over one shoulder.” Naval officer Philip, however, was “ashen and drawn,” much as he had looked in 1951 when he had been seasick during their stormy voyage across the North Atlantic. Now, as then, the Queen was the only one to resist the nausea.
After coffee in the drawing room, the Queen grabbed the handle of a sliding door when a swell heaved the ship. As the door slid shut, the Queen exclaimed “Wheeeeee!” her chiffon scarf flying. The door slid open with another pitch of the waves, and again she cried, “Wheeeeee!” before turning to say “Good night.” The next morning at breakfast she announced, “I have
A crowd of five thousand greeeted the Queen as
At Independence National Park, she presented the six-and-one-half-ton commemorative Bicentennial Bell manufactured by London’s Whitechapel Foundry, which had cast the original Liberty Bell in 1752. “I speak to you as the direct descendant of King George III,” she said, noting that the Fourth of July “should be celebrated as much in Britain as in America … in sincere gratitude to the Founding Fathers … for having taught Britain a very valuable lesson. We lost the American colonies because we lacked that statesmanship ‘to know the right time, and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.’ … We learned to respect the right of others to govern themselves in their own ways.… Without that great act in the cause of liberty, performed in Independence Hall 200 years ago, we could never have transformed an empire into a commonwealth.”
That evening she endured the casual protocol violations of Frank Rizzo, the beefy mayor of Philadelphia and former policeman who had campaigned on the slogan “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” During an elegant dinner for four hundred at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rizzo left her side to cruise the other tables and “press the flesh.” “What a fascinating man he is,” the Queen deadpanned. She escaped to the ladies’ room— euphemistically known in royal circles as an “opportunity to tidy” or a “health break”—before a reception for yet another six hundred guests.
The temperature in Washington pushed one hundred degrees, but the Queen “never faltered in the day’s walk-about under a remorseless sun,” wrote Susan Crosland, who politely declined a revivifying pinch of snuff from Martin Charteris. After a welcoming ceremony on the White House South Lawn, President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, threw a white-tie dinner for 224 under a big tent in the Rose Garden hung with Japanese lanterns. Public television broadcast the banquet live, prohibited only from showing the Queen eating or dancing. In her yellow organza gown, diamond tiara, necklace, and earrings, Elizabeth II did not disappoint.
Henry Kissinger’s wife, Nancy, smoked through the entire meal, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s wife, Happy, asked Philip about his German background. He retorted that he was Danish, prompting Happy to tell Tony Crosland, “Prince Philip is renouncing his German origins!” The East Room entertainment featured Bob Hope, followed by pop stars the Captain & Tennille, who sang their hit single “Muskrat Love” about a pair of rodents romancing by candlelight. Afterward, the Queen and Gerald Ford danced to “The Lady Is a Tramp,” the iconic Rodgers and Hart tune popularized by Frank Sinatra. The Queen and Philip didn’t leave for their quarters at Blair House until shortly before 1 A.M.
After another nonstop day of appearances, Elizabeth II reciprocated the next evening with her own white-tie, four-course dinner for eighty-four at the British embassy, preceded by a reception for 1,600 on the lawn, where she was trailed by television teams carrying high-powered lights. Suddenly the cameras and lights disappeared. Elizabeth Taylor had arrived “to make her grand entrance,” recalled Michael Shea, then director of the British Information Services in New York. British ambassador Sir Peter Ramsbotham was fuming, but the Queen “was merely amused, seeing, for once, someone else at the center of media attention.”
As she had in 1957, the Queen reached Manhattan by water, this time on the air-conditioned Royal Barge from
She again met with the Pilgrims and the English-Speaking Union, this time over luncheon at the Waldorf- Astoria. As the Queen and Philip were driven uptown in an open car to visit the eighteenth-century Morris-Jumel mansion in Harlem—Manhattan’s oldest house—she spotted a friend on the corner of Park Avenue and 61st Street. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “There’s John Andrew!” The Anglican cleric waved and shouted back, “Hello, hello. I’ll see you tonight.” After she passed by, he thought to himself, “What a bloody fool. What a thing to say to the Queen.”
The high point of her packed schedule that day was a visit to Bloomingdale’s, which was highly orchestrated, unlike her stop at a supermarket nineteen years earlier. This time store officials swept her from one exhibition to another on three floors. She saw reproduction Chippendale chairs, noting that the seats were wider than in Britain, and she marveled at the Calvin Klein models wearing trendy tweed midi-skirts. “Gracious, do you really wear skirts
The royal couple hosted a small dinner for three dozen guests on
Following the dinner, there was a reception for two hundred more guests, one of whom was Canon John Andrew. He was escorting Sharman Douglas, who had been a friend of the Queen since the late 1940s when Sharman’s father, Lewis Douglas, served as U.S. ambassador to Britain. As soon as Elizabeth II saw Andrew, she threw back her head and laughed: “You looked so funny standing all alone on the corner of the street!” After she and Sharman Douglas had kissed hello, Philip came over, the lapel of his dinner jacket sporting one of the “Big Apple” cloth stickers featured in a popular promotional campaign for New York City. “What the hell is that?” asked John Andrew. The duke removed it and stuck it on the cleric’s forehead. “There!” he said, which started the Queen laughing again.
Over the next two days, Elizabeth II traveled up and down the East Coast, first to visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, then to Newport, Rhode Island, where she entertained the Fords at a dinner on
The Queen continued at the same pace for another two weeks in Canada, where she opened the Olympic Games in Montreal and watched her daughter compete as a member of the British equestrian team. During the cross-country event, Anne’s horse hit a fence and threw her to the ground as the Queen stared intently, biting her nails and squinting with anxiety. Very much her mother’s daughter, Anne climbed back on and continued the race, even after suffering bruises and a mild concussion that erased her memory of the competition.
The Queen’s endurance, as always, was striking. Some years earlier, while she was touring Saskatchewan, Alvin Hamilton, then Canada’s minister of northern affairs and national resources, had said to the Queen’s private secretary, “I noticed, we’ve been going all day, and Her Majesty never requested even a health break.” “You need not worry,” the private secretary replied. “Her Majesty is trained for eight hours.”
Whatever the setting, Elizabeth II appeared relaxed while carrying out her public duties. Onlookers were taken aback a few months later after a dinner during a royal tour in Luxembourg when the high-spirited Queen took to playing the drums, “keeping the rhythm and shaking her head.” During a benefit for the Venice in Peril Fund featuring a screening of Luchino Visconti’s
