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On board the aircraft carrier Ranger, she talked to the pilot of a one-passenger A-7 Corsair ("So you are all on your own in there?" said she. "Yes ma'am," said he) and met a sailor called Groucho Marx. The Queen (who is Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom) and Prince Philip, turned out in his Admiral of the Fleet's dress blues, had a wardroom lunch with 50 Ranger officers. The menu included lobster, despite Her Majesty's widely supposed aversion to eating shellfish abroad,* and wine, thanks to a Washington waiver of the rule against shipboard drinking.
Red carpets came in all sizes. At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, the Queen stood on a soggy, bath-size red mat and watched, a bit warily, as an attendant coaxed a sea lion called Ushi over the edge of its tank. Scripps Director William Nierenberg, sounding more accusatory than he probably meant, declared, "You don't have sea lions in Britain." "And you very nearly didn't either," shot back Prince Philip, alluding to decades of unchecked hunting.
Following church on Sunday, an Episcopal service at which Prince Philip read from I Corinthians 3 for 600 fellow congregants, they flew on Air Force Two to Palm Springs for an idyl with Publisher Walter Annenberg. The royals' limousine wheeled into the driveway just past the intersection of Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Drive, beyond the 30-ft-tall reproduction Mayan column and within view of the three flags: Old Glory, the Union Jack and Annenberg's personal banner, a yellow Mayan rune against a white background. Annenberg, 74, spent 5½ years as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Sunnylands is a modernist San Simeon on 208 acres. Built in 1964 at a cost of $5 million, the mansion alone covers nearly an acre. Inside is a major collection of impressionist (Renoir, Monet) and postimpressionist (Gauguin, Van Gogh) paintings.
Aside from the official Anglo-American retinue, only Gerald and Betty Ford came to lunch. Annenberg had joked that for every gadabout he invited to lunch with his royal pals, he made ten or 25 enemies. (Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, expecting even more ill will from his big civic lunch the next day, said he thus "made 350 friends and 3 million enemies," in all "enough to make some of us hope it never happens again.") After lunch, as the Annenbergs' staff of 50 cleared away the maple-soufflé dishes and champagne (1970 Dom Perignon) glasses, the party motored around the perfectly green grounds — Walter driving the Queen, his wife Lee chauffeuring the Prince — in Annenberg's fleet of electric golf carts.
The Queen had wanted to see a Hollywood studio. The finest oldtime studio lot still operating is 20th Century-Fox, and the First Lady invited 500 over for dinner on sound stage No. 9, a vast space where the M*A*S*H series had been filmed. For this occasion, the olive drab was replaced by gay Hollywood eclectic: Ficus trees draped with fairy lights, fiber glass and plaster statues (including one of Bacchus) standing on yards of artificial turf, a 24-ft.-high fountain (from Hello Dolly), painted pastoral backdrops (used in From the Terrace) and Chinese paper lanterns.