Living Like a Queen - 18 January 2002

There used to be a morning television show - very popular, the surveys showed, among retired old ladies who didn't have much else to do in mid morning.

It was called Queen for a Day.

I suppose there were state and regional trials, as there are for all the national and international beauty contests. I've often wondered how many planets are involved in the run-up rounds to the Miss Universe pageant.

Well, as its name makes clear, Queen for a Day was the final of a competition in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pretty girls entered, lured by the marvellous vision of spending one whole day enacting the role and enjoying the privileges of being a queen.

Plainly the creators of the show had only one monarchy in mind - that of Great Britain - though they added one or two debutante touches with Princess Grace of Monaco in mind, just to show what a nice wholesome American girl, like Miss Kelly from Philadelphia, might come to if she tried hard enough.

I imagine the various scenes or passages of the day had been taped so that the whole gaudy experience could be compressed into one glorious hour of television.

She was seen receiving her breakfast from a squadron of stewards, butlers, waiters, pretty formally got up, though not, I must say, with silk knee breeches or powdered wigs.

And pretty soon her majesty was off for a morning's drive to smile on her subjects in one of the alleged royal parks - they had no trouble faking that, lots of lush landscape and splendid gardens in Southern California.

Indeed the drive through the park, or wherever, was the central attraction and what it imitated more accurately than any royal procession that I'd ever seen was one of those city parades that are held - the Rose Parade, the Magnolia Parade - in cities from New Orleans to Pasadena.

The show always ended with an interview with the winner, now rid of her regal robes, which she wore all day long - indoors and out - in which she was always asked why did she have an ambition to be a queen?

And the answer was always the same - a frank confession that what was most appealing about a queen's life was her freedom to do exactly what she wants, her freedom to command, in a nice democratic way of course, and unlike Marie Antoinette to see that her subjects were given plenty to eat apart from cake.

The implication was there at the beginning and strengthened at the end: The most enviable thing about a queen's life was the freedom to go where she chose and live in luxury and leisure.

I never got to meet any television queens but I well remember after seeing the show I was very soon on a holiday in London and I spent a day among the recent files of a newspaper that printed, as I think two at least still do, the court circular.

Thanks to the invention of microfilm and the assistance of a young man who could flip through the daily image with the speed of a card sharp, I was able, before day was done, to note and roughly count the Queen's official appointments throughout one year.

There was the assumption at the beginning, without any public notice, of her being in touch with the government by way of a daily examination of the boxes and such necessities as considering various appointments, from a new bishop to a new privy councillor.

But now, the paper reported, how often in a week she would travel to open a hospital, to celebrate the anniversary of a regiment, a college - an uninterrupted run of tedious obligations which only the ever-mourning Queen Victoria dared ignore.

The evenings: The Queen had official dinners of state, government, public institutions. I counted about 300 evenings taken up with such duties.

All in all I discovered that for two weeks in every year, in Scotland, the Queen had the evenings to herself - and even then there was an assumed obligation to pay the annual howdy dos to the local lairds and ladies.

Our television programme Queen for a Day eventually came to an end but not from any discovery by the producers that being queen, even for a day, requires a woman who has an iron constitution and an extraordinary, even a consuming, sense of duty.

Just now there's a popular dramatic series in the form of a situation comedy drama about the presidency.

And from this we gather that the president is bothered by a political problem, a small crisis - foreign or domestic - once every week.

And it is the aim, and the achievement, of the series to compress the arrival of the puzzle and the ordeal of its solution into one hour.

"It gives," wrote one newspaper critic, " a vivid picture of what the daily life of the president must be like." I wonder.

Let us look back to the diary or memoir of a man who lived and served nine presidents over 42 years, one Ike Hoover, the White House steward.

Alas while he's very amusing and instructive about the eating and sleeping habits of presidents, he was writing about a time, the last quarter of the 19th Century and the first quarter of the 20th, when the United States had only just emerged as a world power.

Consequently the daily pressure of work is scarcely mentioned.

One indelible memory I brought away from that steward's book: It was a revelation about the reedy little Yankee lawyer - Calvin Coolidge - who presided, or shall we say observed with pleasure and relief, a period of roaring, never-ending prosperity.

The Roaring 20s they came to be called.

They didn't roar for Coolidge. He delegated most of his duties to helpers, aides, cabinet members. He yawned in his study and most of the time decided to stretch out.

He was in bed every night at 10 and got up 10 or 11 hours later.

After lunch he took to his couch again, going off at 1.30 and returning to consciousness usually at 5.

In simpler words President Calvin Coolidge slept on principle between 11 and 15 hours a day.

Not much help about the professional working routine from the delightful Ike Hoover.

Years later, in fact some 26 years ago - August 1975 - I was up in the Rockies revisiting the government's atomic energy centre and the people who, a year or two before, had been so helpful to me when I covered the making of the bomb for a television history of the United States.

A little further to the north in Colorado I heard President Ford was staying. Thought I might do a little boning up or digging to get a rough idea of his daily routine.

I was told that President Ford was vacationing and that all the news allowed for publication was that he cooked his own breakfast every morning and the rest of the day played golf.

And who deserved a fortnight's rest more than President Ford who'd been in the White House a bare year, a modest placid congressman who had managed to heal the country after the fever of the Nixon abdication.

Still it might be interesting to see how much the present world intruded on a president on his vacation.

From what they call reliable sources I discovered that when breakfast was hardly over the special switchboard installed in his mountain cabin began to light up.

Dr Kissinger wanted to transmit the terms Cairo will feed to Jerusalem.

An urgent call from the secretary of commerce: Two cities urgently need $300m for public transportation since their railroad link has gone bust.

Before evening and the precious cocktail hour with Mrs Ford, the closed circuit teleprinters were chattering away about a civil war in Angola, bringing word, if any, from the FBI about the vanished labour leader, there is serious, out-of-control fighting between the Afghans and the Pakistanis - this is 1975 - and a report of Japanese public opinion about their premier's visit to the White House.

One or other of a pack of secretaries, housed with the secret service in neighbouring cabins, bursts in to urge a birthday salute to a Scandinavian prince and an exiled Buddhist priest.

And the president must dictate replies to a raft of invitations from the Camellia Society of Alabama, the annual convention of the Associated Plumbers of America, the Boy Scouts, the chairman of the Republican National Committee who'd just put in an urgent call. And this was a president on his vacation.

So imagine President Bush's day, last Sunday for example.

President Bush is a God-fearing man, but unlike his creator he cannot take a day off.

Nevertheless last Sunday afternoon he'd had his fill of telephone calls all day, from all the officials who on weekdays would have seen him in the Oval Office.

At 5.30pm the president sat down to watch a football game.

By his side, a bowl of pretzels, which Webster defines as "a salted cracker in the shape of a knot, eaten by Germans" - they should have added, eaten religiously by American men watching a Sunday football game.

And who had a better right on Sunday afternoon to indulge this American ritual?

If you consider a little further and simply give names to the countries whose terrorist connections had composed a landslide on the head of George W Bush in the past four months you'll be calling off Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, India, Kashmir, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq and now Yemen, Singapore, the Philippines and the different messes in Zimbabwe, Colombia, Argentina.

All had been talked about or reported on or talked over by 5.30 last Sunday afternoon.

So the president heaved a sigh, sat down, picked up a pretzel - and fainted. Who had a better right?

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