Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch

frowned her disapproval,” according to the Daily Express, although she made no complaint to U.S. officials, and poor Cleaton was mortified. As they walked along a retaining wall, Philip suffered his own indignity when a seal jumped up and splashed him. The Queen burst out laughing, but the duke was not amused.

Philip played his consort role expertly, with occasional bursts of political incorrectness and pique over what he considered overzealous security. “Are you expecting trouble?” he barked at Pete Metzger, Reagan’s military attache, who was assigned to shadow him during their tour of the USS Ranger aircraft carrier. “No, sir,” replied Metzger. “Then back off!” said Philip. After shaking hands with five women from an official delegation in San Francisco, he asked, “Aren’t there any male supervisors? This is a nanny city!” When he and Lucky Roosevelt were driving back to Britannia, he snapped at the Secret Service agents who asked him to turn off the light in the limousine, which they said made him a target. “Damned if I’ll turn off the light,” he said. “People came to see us.” On arriving at the pier, he jumped out of the car and slammed the heavy armored door in the protocol chief’s face. Halfway to the yacht, he realized what he had done, turned around, walked back, kissed Lucky Roosevelt’s hand and said, “I am very sorry.”

On Sunday after church, the Queen and Philip flew to Palm Springs for a luncheon at Sunnylands, the gated 208-acre estate of Walter and Lee Annenberg, where the table was set with a stunning array of Flora Danica china. “The Annenbergs have more than the Queen!” muttered one of the ladies-in-waiting. It was even raining in the desert, so after lunch Lee Annenberg took the group on a series of tours around the vast house (covering nearly an acre), which was filled with their collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces—a private museum including van Goghs, Manets, Monets, Vuillards, and Corots. The Queen insisted on braving the elements to tour the grounds and the nine-hole golf course as well, so Mike Deaver rounded up five golf carts. They sped off under umbrellas, with the Queen and the ambassador in the maintenance cart filled with brooms and mops.

In the evening the Queen and Philip were honored at a dinner on Sound Stage 9 at 20th Century Fox for five hundred guests including such British and American film stars as Julie Andrews, Dudley Moore, Fred Astaire, and Bette Davis, with entertainment by George Burns, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como and a menu that featured Ronald Reagan’s favorite chicken pot pie from Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood.

The unrelenting downpour forced the royal party to travel to Santa Barbara on Tuesday by Air Force Two rather than Britannia for the long-promised trip to the Reagan ranch. They had to abandon their limousines at the base of the mountain and transfer to a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles. “There was a lot of talk at the time about whether we should try going up that road to the ranch,” said Lucky Roosevelt, “but the Queen was game.” “She said, ‘If we can get there, let’s go,’ ” recalled Charles Anson, the press attache at the British embassy. Wearing black rubber boots, Elizabeth II clambered into a jeep, with Josephine Louis wedged beside her. “I don’t know how happy she was being squeezed like that,” said the ambassadress. “It was hard not to touch her and lean on her. I offered to put her purse aside. ‘Oh no!’ she said, and held it tightly.”

Even on the clearest day, the 2,400-foot ascent on the intermittently paved seven miles of hairpin turns up Refugio Road is a terrifying prospect, intensified by sheer drops and a scarcity of guardrails. For the Queen’s journey, the road was cut in a half dozen places by torrents, and there was nearly zero visibility. She said little during the dangerous climb, but she appeared unfazed.

The ranch was shrouded in fog, causing the Reagans to apologize profusely that the weather had not only washed out the ride on horseback but obliterated the panoramic views. “Don’t be silly,” replied the Queen. “This is an adventure!” The foursome dined on Tex-Mex fare including tacos, enchiladas, and refried beans. “Mr. Deaver,” the Queen said afterward. “That was so enjoyable, especially the used beans.” As the royal couple and their entourage drove back down the mountain, the sun came out. “Damn it,” said Reagan. “I told them it was going to clear.”

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.

THE QUEEN 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