The Press: Throne-Prone

The Chicago Tribune, which long viewed the British monarchy with the beady-eyed vigilance of Paul Revere, was as throne-prone last week as the rest of the U.S. press. Washington Correspondent Walter Trohan summoned an echo of the late Colonel Bertie McCormick when he tut-tutted that the last British royal visit in 1939 “did help promote America’s entry” into World War II. But the Tribune ran a front-page color cartoon showing a whiskered Uncle Sam smiling (regulars could not recall when Sam last smiled for the Trib) as he presented a bouquet to the Queen under the caption: “To a Charming Little Lady.” Editorially, the Trib clucked in dismay over the bad taste displayed in restaging Lord Cornwallis’ surrender during the royal visit.

In its affectionate welcome, some of the press ranged from gooey valentines to hearty backslaps that gave the Cornwallis ritual at least the virtue of dignity. The Louisville Courier-Journal gushed that Elizabeth looked like an English rose “with a little of the morning dew still on the petals.” Perhaps the deepest curtsy came from the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose greeting used “Her Majesty” seven times and “the Queen” only twice−a ratio of respect unmatched by the London Times itself. Long Island’s Newsday burbled: WE LOVE THE QUEEN.

To the Denver Post, and also to reporters with such fine Gaelic names as Scripps-Howard’s Andrew Tully and the Chicago Daily News’s William McGaffin, the Queen was “a doll, a living” doll.” The Post also, thought shewas “a honey.” Manhattan tabloid headlines called her Liz, and the Chicago Daily News’s Robert E. Hoyt paid the ultimate democratic compliment: “But for the graceof God, she’d be plain Lizzie Battenberg.”

“Royal Soap Opera.” Timed for the visit, major articles reflecting British criticism of the monarchy broke in the Satevepost (“Does England Really Need a Queen?”) and Look (a tired rehash called “Queen Elizabeth . . . Her Poor Public Relations”). The Satevepost (that “notoriously conformist family magazine,” pouted London’s New Statesman) stirred up a stew in the British press, notably for its author, former Punch Editor Malcolm Muggeridge, who got the assignment long before the Queen’s visit was planned. He described the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace as characters in “a royal soap opera,” urged that the institution be refurbished to keep up with changing times. This “shocking attack,” as London’s Sunday Express called it, prompted the BBC to schedule, then cancel, an appearance by Muggeridge, who is a TV favorite; threw some doubt on the renewal of his TV contract, and also led the SundayDispatch to cancel a weekly Muggeridge series that it had just announced.

Though logistics were so complex that press cards for the New York visit had to be issued in red, blue and green for different functions, the arrangements for coverage ran surprisingly smoothly. Reporters twitted each other about drawing for places in a pool of “pantry peepers” who peeked at the royal dinner in Ottawa’s Government House. But for the first time in Canada a reigning British monarch held a reception for the press, and when Elizabeth and Philip held another in Washington, British newsmen skulking unhappily in the corners wondered whether it could ever happen in London.

27 Handshakes a Minute. At the Washington reception the Queen shook almost 1,000 hands, sometimes at the rate of 27 a minute. Each handshake, accompanied by a “How do you do?” and sometimes a “Who are you with?”, triggered hundreds of words of copy. The Queen praised the “vigor and vigilance of the American reporter,” won a laugh by observing: “I am well aware that this visit has probably given you a lot of extra work.”

The reporters assigned to the tour−1,350 accredited by the U.S. alone−did not mind the extra work so much as the fact that, as the Washington Post and Times Herald’s Edward T. Folliard put it, “this isn’t a story, it’s just a storybook.” Everything happened according to schedule, putting, a heavy strain on the same old adjectives. Complained Hearst’s Dorothy Kilgallen: “The only thing you can say for ‘this story is that nobody can get scooped. I simply can’t write ‘radiant’ or ”beaming’ or ‘sumptuous’ one other” time.” One day when the Queen looked exhausted, Reporter Kilgallen reached all the way to “fatigued incandescence.” Prince Philip himself summed up the problem sympathetically in a chat with a knot of newsmen at the British embassy garden party. The reporters in the royal wake, he noted, “press and press and work all day and then, when they sit down to write it, find they have nothing .to write about.” But with the vigor that Elizabeth admired, they wrote it just the same, and wrote it, and wrote it again.