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Some city officials thought it wrong to spend $2 million for two days of royal frolic. Seven out of eleven city supervisors thus declined to come to Symphony Hall and missed meeting the Queen at the private reception. Prince Philip, after shaking the hands of five female officials in a row, proved not quite a modern man. "Aren't there any male supervisors?" he wondered. "This is a nanny city."
And a highly demonstrative one. Some 7,000 San Franciscans, as many angry about U.S. aid to El Salvador as about British "occupation" of Northern Ireland, gathered Thursday evening in Golden Gate Park. The bitterest complaints were about Reagan, not the powerless royals, and about putting on the ritz during a recession. "It is sickening," said Teacher Ardys Delu, 33. "All this luxury and wealth when people don't even have a place to eat or sleep."
The protesters chanted toward the De Young Memorial Museum, site of the week's official dinner, which was not, technically, a state dinner. The semantics of Government protocol seemed not to concern the Reagans and their 260 guests, for whom the black-tie affair had the giddy buzz of an ultimate diplomatic gala. The Queen, at last, was wearing a crown, or anyway a big diamond tiara that could pass. The feast was an unerringly handsome affair, 25 tables surrounded by medieval Belgian tapestries (and a painting of Windsor Castle) in the specially spruced-up museum's vaulted, mock-Moorish Hearst Court.
Three Hearsts were there — Patty's parents and stepmother — along with Northern California's leading corporate capitalists, local politicians and mandarins, high-tech youth stars (Star Wars Director George Lucas, Apple Computer Founder Steven Jobs) and eight journalists (Brits five, Yanks three). In the receiving line, Reagan whispered to the Queen about a certain old Yankee who had just passed; the jolted Queen told her husband, and Prince Philip called back Joe DiMaggio for a chat.
The Reagan Administration's main Californians were in the museum: the President, Presidential Aides Michael Deaver and Edwin Meese, National Security Adviser William Clark, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz. After dinner the Queen claimed that she had always wanted to visit the state. "What better time," she added, half-jokingly, "than when the President is a Californian."
The just-so cuisine, according to the chef, was Californian too, by way of nouvelle France. Not a taco in sight, but a puréed seafood mélange, balls of local goat cheese and a multicolored dessert grandiosely named Aurora Pacifica. The main course, veal loin stuffed with an indecent quantity of morel mushrooms, was trucked in with its own police escort. Said one oilman's wife: "This is the greatest thing since the Super Bowl." Near by, '49ers Quarterback Joe Montana dug into his endive-wrapped asparagus.