Lighting up the unfriendly skies of California
The New World was still too new and too far for England's first Queen Elizabeth to make it over for a visit, but by any 16th century standard she was peripatetic. Elizabeth I would set out from London on "royal progresses" through the countryside, prompting an extravagant social frenzy everywhere she stopped. On a typical 1560s tour of Suffolk, one witness wrote, the Queen's hosts laid on "such sumptuous feastings and banquets as seldom in any part of the world hath been seen before." The provincials' Elizabethan party clothes were to die for. "All the velvets and silks that might be laid hands on were taken up and bought for any money," which made for "a comely troop and a noble sight to behold."
How tines haven't changed. Queen Elizabeth II was in the Western U.S. last week for a ten-day visit, before heading up to British Columbia and, this Friday, back home. Sumptuous feastings? There was everything from maple soufflé and rack of lamb (and 1966 Château Lafite-Rothschild) to a hot heap of chiles rellenos and refried beans. Banquets? In Los Angeles, the Queen ate papaya and heard George Burns tell jokes about octogenarian sex; at an official dinner in Golden Gate Park, goose-liver quenelles in pheasant broth were followed by the San Francisco Opera and Symphony performing a bit of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. A run on velvets and silks? For just one movie-studio dinner, velvet and silk and chiffon were turned into half a million dollars' worth of dresses; custom-made hats (at up to $500 each) and long white kid gloves ($150 a pair) were de rigueur much of the week.
In California, where celebrity and gauzy illusion are manufactured wholesale, a kind of fantasy come to life — the Queen of England! — was everywhere, walking on red carpets. No one cared that she looked unhip in her blue matron's outfits. Fame, especially enduring fame, is the California dream, and she is transcendently famous without even trying, the embodiment of an institution as old and grand as a giant sequoia. Los Angeles Electrician Raymond Pratt, 32, waited three hours to glimpse the Queen briefly. "She is one of the few things in life that is still sacred," he said. Her presence Stateside, in any event, is special: no reigning British monarch had been to the U.S. at all until 1939, when George VI, the current Queen's father, popped over. Although Elizabeth II, 56, has visited the U.S. four times before (once as princess), no English King or Queen has ever before taken a meeting on the Coast. California, in short, was royally agog.