Elizabeth the Queen (47 page)

Several hours later, Reagan praised Britain’s Falklands campaign during a televised speech before both houses of Parliament, the first American president given that privilege. The Queen busied herself at Windsor with her boxes in her private sitting room. Carolyn Deaver spent the afternoon touring the castle, wandering along the Grand Corridor and marveling at the Canalettos. “Are you enjoying yourself?” piped a familiar voice from one of the doorways. “These paintings are just beautiful,” the wide-eyed guest replied. “Take your time,” said the Queen. “I’m glad you are enjoying it.”

Carolyn Deaver was equally transfixed by the exacting day-long preparations in St. George’s Hall for the evening’s white-tie banquet. The 175-foot-long mahogany table was so wide (eight feet) that under-butlers strapped pillowlike dusters to their feet as they walked down the middle to set up the silver gilt candelabra and put flower arrangements in gold bowls.

At the banquet for 158 guests, the Queen told Reagan she was “much impressed by the way in which you coped so professionally with a strange horse and a saddle that must have seemed even stranger,” adding in a more serious vein, “the conflict on the Falkland islands was thrust on us by naked aggression.… Throughout the crisis we have drawn comfort from the understanding of our position shown by the American people. We have admired the honesty, patience and skill with which you have performed your dual roles as ally and intermediary.”

After dinner the Reagans and the royal couple walked down an aisle between the table and the chairs that footmen had pulled away, led by the sixty-six-year-old Lord Chamberlain, Lord Charles “Chips” Maclean, 27th chief of Clan Maclean, who walked backward. With growing alarm, Reagan glanced toward the Queen for reassurance about one of the monarchy’s time-honored rituals. “I suddenly saw this tiny figure beside me walking along waving her hand,” the president recalled. The Queen was steering Maclean, as she explained to Reagan, because “you know, we don’t get those chairs even, and he could fall over one and hurt himself.”

Diana had felt too ill to attend the banquet, but two weeks later she did her duty in providing a male heir, giving birth on June 21 to William Arthur Philip Louis. “It was a great relief because it was all peaceful again,” she later recalled. “And I was well for a time.” The Queen was among the first to visit St. Mary’s Hospital and see the newborn prince, now second in line to the throne.

S
CARCELY A YEAR
after she had been targeted by Marcus Sarjeant, Elizabeth II had an even more unnerving jolt when she was awakened at 7:15 on the morning of Friday, July 9, by the slam of a door, something her staff never did. She knew Philip had left the Palace at 6
A.M.
for an engagement outside the city. When she looked up, she saw a barefoot stranger in a T-shirt and jeans opening her curtains, then sitting at the foot of her bed with a shard of glass from a shattered ashtray, blood dripping from his right thumb onto her bedclothes.

In an egregious breach of security, thirty-one-year-old Michael Fagan had climbed over a fourteen-foot wall, entered the Palace through an open window, and walked freely along the corridors until he slipped undetected into the Queen’s bedroom suite. It turned out he was an experienced Palace intruder, having broken in previously on June 7, when he amused himself by consuming a half bottle of wine.

“Get out of here at once!” the Queen said, but Fagan ignored her and started to pour out his personal troubles. Once she realized he meant no harm, she shifted gears quickly. For ten minutes, she listened patiently, finding common ground in talking about their children and interjecting sympathetic comments even as she tried several times to summon help by pushing her emergency button and twice calling the Palace switchboard. Fagan later commented that she had shown no sign of nerves. The situation uncannily recalled an incident at Windsor Castle in February 1941 when a mentally disturbed man emerged from behind the curtains of her mother’s bedroom and grabbed her ankles. The Queen Mother refrained from screaming, saying instead, “Tell me about it,” which he did as she eased across the room to sound the alarm bell.

Elizabeth II reacted similarly to Fagan, in part, she told friends, because “I am used to talking to people on street corners.” But her preternaturally calm demeanor came into play as well, along with her physical courage and common sense. She seized an opening when he asked for a cigarette, and she directed him to a nearby pantry, which had a supply.

Out in the corridor they encountered chambermaid Elizabeth Andrew, who exclaimed, “Bloody ’ell, Ma’am, what’s ’e doing ’ere?” (a reaction the Queen later recounted to friends with perfect mimicry of the girl’s Yorkshire accent). Paul Whybrew, a six-foot-four-inch senior footman, arrived with the Queen’s pack of corgis that he had been walking in the garden. As the dogs barked furiously, the footman gave Fagan a drink to steady him. Moments later, a contingent of police finally arrived. “Oh come on, get a bloody move on,” said the Queen as one officer paused to straighten his tie.

“I wasn’t scared,” she later told her mother’s equerry, Colin Burgess. “The whole thing was so surreal. He just came in, we chatted and then he went without incident, and that was that.” Her response, according to one of her relatives, was “mostly shock and disbelief.” The Queen appeared as scheduled at an 11
A.M.
investiture and asked her advisers to keep the incident quiet while the government investigated the security failure. But the
Express
broke the story the following Monday with the headline “INTRUDER AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE.” That evening Margaret Thatcher came to her weekly audience a day early to apologize, and her home secretary, William Whitelaw, faced a barrage of questions in the House of Commons and offered to resign.

A week later, the IRA savagely bombed two groups of soldiers in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, killing eight members of the Household Cavalry and musicians of the Royal Green Jackets and injuring forty-seven others—a tragedy in the heart of London and a sobering reminder of the mayhem a terrorist could have caused inside the Palace. At public events the Queen’s demeanor seemed subdued, and her doctors advised her to take some time off. Fagan was charged with stealing her wine but acquitted by a jury in September. Although he was confined to a mental hospital for five months, he effectively avoided any penalty and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity.

One happy interlude during these fraught times was the christening of Prince William on August 4, the Queen Mother’s eighty-second birthday. The Queen yielded center stage to the youngest and oldest members of the royal family, allowing her mother to hold the baby in her stead. Diana put on a good show that day, but in fact she had sunk into postnatal depression that she later called her “dark ages.” She had also resumed her secret bulimic bingeing and purging, and intensified her accusations about Camilla, refusing to believe that her husband had in fact broken off their affair. In September, while Diana and Charles were staying at Craigowan, a cottage on the Balmoral estate, she tried to cut herself with sharp objects, an alarming escalation of her erratic behavior that Charles did not share with his parents. Again he took Diana to London, where she underwent therapy with two different professionals before giving up after three months.

Her range of symptoms—depression, fear of rejection and abandonment, volatile moods, impulsive and self-destructive acts, and persistent feelings of loneliness and emptiness—suggested that she could have been suffering from borderline personality disorder, which is notoriously difficult to treat. But aside from the occasional glimpse—Diana arriving late to the royal box at Albert Hall in November 1982 for the annual Festival of Remembrance, her demeanor tense and flustered after she and Charles had fought in front of their family—the public remained unaware of Diana’s emotional turmoil and the misery of the Wales marriage.

That autumn Andrew returned from the Falklands on HMS
Invincible
after more than five months away. The Queen, Prince Philip, and Princess Anne flew to Portsmouth from Balmoral to be on hand for the homecoming. As cheering crowds along the shore held banners and waved flags, Elizabeth II appeared to wipe tears from her eyes. “It was actually very emotional,” recalled Andrew, who lightened the atmosphere by greeting his mother with a red rose between his teeth.

I
N
F
EBRUARY
1983 the Queen realized her decades-long dream of visiting the West Coast of the United States, a trip that had been cut “for reasons of time and protocol” from her itinerary back in 1957. She had raised the matter with Nicholas Henderson before he took his post in Washington in 1979, so she was thrilled when Ronald and Nancy Reagan invited her during their visit to Windsor Castle. “What better time,” she said, “than when the President is a Californian!” She expressly asked if she could see the Reagans’ Rancho del Cielo on a mountaintop near Santa Barbara, where the president promised a Western-style ride on horseback.

The ten-day trip was planned to follow several weeks of state visits to Caribbean countries on
Britannia
, and the royal couple looked forward to a mixture of official events and sightseeing in the fabled California sunshine. But they arrived on Saturday, February 26, in a downpour that followed them up the coast—the worst weather in two decades—and all the Queen’s colorful silk day dresses went unseen as she donned her daily uniform of Burberry mackintosh and black boots. At one point Princess Margaret called from England to suggest her sister buy a new coat.

The roads in San Diego, their first stop, were so flooded that the royal couple had to be transported in a big U.S. Navy bus—a development that astonished the pack of London reporters traveling with the royal entourage. “We said, ‘But she’s
never
been on a bus!’ ” recalled Peter McKay of the
Daily Mail
.

“They sat on the first two seats, and I thought they looked like two kids on an adventure,” said Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, Reagan’s chief of protocol. San Diego’s acting mayor, William Cleaton, committed the ultimate faux pas during the Queen’s harbor tour by guiding her with his palm on her back. “The Queen was visibly bothered and 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 attaché, 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 attaché 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.”