The Queen Makes A Royal Splash

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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."

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