Female Speaker: From the Library
of Congress in Washington,
D.C. Frances Sellers: Hello.
Good afternoon and
it's very nice to see
such a wonderful crowd
here this afternoon.
I'm Frances Stead Sellers, I'm
the editor of the Style section
of The Washington Post, and of
course the Post has been one
of the long time sponsors
of this wonderful event.
So it's with a combination of
enormous admiration and affection
that I'm here to introduce Sally
Bedell Smith, an old friend
and also a local author, she lives
here in Washington with her husband,
Steve Smith, who's the editor
of the Washington Examiner.
When I tried to reach Sally
last week to talk about today,
we exchanged several emails before I
was able to catch her in her office.
That was between an
afternoon speaking engagement
and an evening talk, the
next day she was heading off
to Virginia Beach for
a luncheon discussion,
and then back to Washington in
time for a reception and a dinner.
She told me she was embarking on
a seven-city tour of the states
under the auspices of
the Royal Oak Foundation,
and that's the organization
that works
for the British National Trust.
All of which made me realize
that Sally probably has more
formal engagements these days
than Her Majesty herself,
and without of course,
an entourage of ladies in waiting.
There is no waiting in
Sally's schedule and that's
because of the enormous
interest people have shown
in her latest biography,
"Elizabeth the Queen:
The Life of a Modern Monarch."
What Sally has done in this book is
to get past the hype and speculation
to discover Elizabeth Windsor
and how her position has evolved
during her 60 years on the throne,
as she balances her public and
private lives, her good works,
and her celebrity status.
Who would've imagined two decades
ago that the Queen would be starring
with James Bond in a skit that ended
with her doppelganger parachuting
into the London Olympics?
Well, read "Elizabeth the
Queen" and it all makes sense.
Through Sally, we learn about
a woman who is funny, humane,
and politically shrewd; with
surprising sparkle and vivacity
as well as the resilience to
survive when things at the houses
of Windsor are not
exactly hunky dory.
Sally devoted two years
to researching this book
and then another year to weaving
together the various narratives,
and tell the Queen's life.
She met the Queen three
times in private settings,
first here in Washington,
D.C. at the British Embassy.
She got access to an
enormous number of people
who know the Queen intimately,
including the British artist
Howard Morgan who told Sally,
"She talks like an Italian.
She waves her hands about!"
So Sally delved into archives,
poured through diaries,
read notes about the birth of Prince
Charles, she even had a private tour
of the Queen's stud at Sandringham.
She can tell you what it's
like when the Queen laughs.
The best-selling award-winning
author of five other biographies,
Sally has taken us inside of the
Clinton and Kennedy White Houses,
she's written about Diana
the Princess of Wales,
about Pamela Harriman
and William Paley.
Please join me in welcoming
Sally Bedell Smith,
and perhaps we can begin by asking
her the most perplexing question:
What does the Queen
carry in her handbag?
Welcome, Sally.
[applause] Sally Smith:
Thank you so much, Frances,
for that generous introduction.
I have to tell you that I'm
especially honored to be introduced
by Frances today because
our friendship goes back
to the mid-1990s when my husband
Steven was the founding editor
of Civilization, the wonderful
magazine of the Library of Congress,
and Frances was his highly
capable deputy editor.
The magazine unfortunately
fell victim to the first wave
of infatuation with the
Internet and lost its funding,
but Frances has gone on to be a
top editor at The Washington Post.
As I've been traveling
around the country talking
about Queen Elizabeth II,
the one consistent question
that I have heard is, "What did
you learn that surprised you?"
Well the answer is that it seemed
like there was something unexpected
around almost every corner.
In the course of my research
I made numerous discoveries
about the way the Queen goes
about her job, and about aspects
of her character and personality
that people either don't know about
or don't fully appreciate.
One of my main goals in writing
"Elizabeth the Queen" was
to part the curtain and tell what
she's really like, taking the reader
as close as possible to Elizabeth,
the human being, the wife,
and the mother, and
the friend as well
as the highly respected
world leader.
I also wanted to do what none
of her other biographers,
all of them English, had done,
which is to explain her strong
connection to the United States.
Not only has she been to
this country five times --
or 11 times, excuse me -- five
of them on private holidays,
the most vacation time she has ever
spent anywhere outside her private
estates, some of her closest friends
are Americans, which may be one
of the biggest surprises.
She has also known every president
from Harry Truman to Barack Obama,
with the exception
of Lyndon Johnson,
who tried but failed to meet her.
I remember being impressed when an
official at the American Embassy
in London told me that
during the memorial service,
at St. Paul's Cathedral
after the 9/11 attacks,
the Queen sang every single word
of the American national anthem,
and I would bet that there
aren't any presidents
who can sing all the words
to "God Save the Queen."
Since we are here today
on the National Mall I thought I
would focus on the Queen's fondness
for this country and its people,
both little-known and well-known,
and in so doing illuminate
corners of her life
that can help you understand
her better.
Her relationships with American
presidents have most often played
out against state visits
here and in Britain.
When Elizabeth first came
to Washington in 1951,
she was a 25-year-old princess only
months away from becoming Queen.
Harry Truman was completely
smitten, announcing that,
"When everyone becomes acquainted
with you they immediately
fall in love with you."
Like those who followed him, Truman
was surprised that Elizabeth was
so much more approachable than
she seemed in her public image.
Dwight Eisenhower has the advantage
of having known Princess Elizabeth
during World War II when he was
in London as Supreme
Allied Commander.
He had what he called a devoted
friendship with her parents,
King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
And he entertained the
teenaged princess at dinner
in his London apartment where
he served her prime ribs
of beef cooked, according to
Ike's instructions, nice and rare.
Her state visit to this country as
Queen in 1957 was given short shrift
by her other biographers, but
through contemporary accounts,
archival research and an interview
with the only remaining witness
with an intimate view of the visit,
I discovered what a
ground-breaking moment it was
for the 31-year-old Queen.
Ruth Buchanan, who was the widow
of Eisenhower's chief of protocol,
was with the royal couple throughout
their six days in the United States,
which began in Jamestown
and Williamsburg,
ended in New York City, and
included an impromptu visit
to a supermarket in
suburban Maryland.
Ruth gave me an impromptu -- an
invaluable, personal perspective
on Elizabeth's conduct as
Queen and her relationship
with her husband, Prince Philip.
One of my favorite
descriptions was of a moment
on the president's airplane
when Philip was immersed
in the sports section
of the newspaper
and ignoring his wife's questions
as she wrote postcards
to their children.
When she pressed him,
he got flustered.
It was so like what an
ordinary wife would do
when her husband wasn't paying
attention to her, Ruth told me.
She also noted that Elizabeth was
very certain and very comfortable
in her role and very
much in control.
Yet, once when Ruth was waiting
at the White House for her husband
to escort the Queen to a limousine,
Ruth heard her roaring with laughter
at the protocol chief's jokes.
You didn't realize that she had that
kind of a hearty laugh, Ruth said,
but the minute she
rounded the corner
and saw me, she straightened up.
And this combination
of public dignity
and private merriment
exists to this day.
The 1957 visit was remarkable for
its informality and spontaneity,
and the number of unguarded glimpses
of the Queen seen by the public.
She had specifically asked
to see what she called an American
football match, and before the game
between University of Maryland
and University of North Carolina,
she went down on the field
and chatted with the players.
The governor of Maryland
explained to her the history
of football going all the way
back to the Greeks and Romans,
and the president of the University
of Maryland even showed her
how to throw a forward pass.
She watched the game intently,
but she did seem perturbed
whenever the players threw blocks.
On the way to the stadium she
had spotted a supermarket,
which was a phenomenon that
was then unknown in Britain,
and she asked if she could see
how American women went shopping.
Well, a visit was hastily
arranged after the game,
startling hundreds of shoppers.
Wearing a full-length mink coat,
she and Prince Philip explored
the supermarket like a pair
of anthropologists
in a foreign culture.
They wandered the isles
chatting with customers,
inspecting the children's
seats in the shopping carts,
and marveling at the quantity
and range of products.
The Queen was particularly intrigued
by the frozen chicken potpies,
and she quizzed the store's manager
about refrigeration techniques
and how the checkout
counters worked.
At her insistence, they arrived
at their next stop, New York City,
by water, which is a vista she had
been dreaming about since childhood.
She squealed with delight.
"Wee," she said when she first
caught sight of the skyline
of lower Manhattan, which she
compared to a row of great jewels.
That evening during a white tie
dinner at the Waldorf Astoria,
guests were treated to a
closed circuit television image
of her eating a three-course meal,
which was a highly unusual sight,
since she was never supposed to
be filmed while she was eating.
When the royal couple left for
the airport after midnight,
their limousine was lit up so crowds
lining the street could see her
in her glittering evening
gown and her diamond tiara.
Many of the women in the -- along
the streets were wearing bathrobes
and they had curlers in their hair.
"Look at all those people
in their nightclothes!"
Elizabeth said to Philip,
"I certainly wouldn't come
out in my nightclothes to see anyone
drive by no matter who they were."
The British people felt left out
as they read in their newspapers
about the Queen's spur-of-the-moment
walkabouts and relaxed style
that they had never seen.
To them she was still
a distant presence,
and it would be several
decades before mingling
with ordinary people would
become standard procedure.
"Why did she have to cross
the Atlantic to become real?"
wondered one daily newspaper in
London after she returned home.
With the exception of 14 hours
in Chicago for the opening
of the St. Lawrence Seaway in
1959, the Queen would not return
to the United States for
nearly another two decades,
but she did entertain
American presidents in Britain.
Eisenhower -- [coughs] excuse me --
made a memorable visit to Balmoral,
her estate in the Scottish
highlands, where she invited him
to a picnic and cooked dropped
scones on a griddle for him.
He was so impressed that he asked
her for the recipe, which she wrote
out in long hand, apologizing that
the quantity was for 16 and adding
that the mixture needed
a great deal of beating.
She gave Jack and Jackie Kennedy
a dinner at Buckingham Palace,
which was the first time that
a president had dined there
since 1918, when Woodrow
Wilson was entertained
by the Queen's grandfather,
King George V. Yet,
the 31-year-old first lady was
surprisingly critical afterward,
telling photographer Cecil
Beaton that she was not impressed
by the flowers or the
furnishings in Buckingham Palace,
or by the 35-year-old
Queen's evening gown
and what she described
as her "flat hairstyle."
Jackie also said that when she
complained about the pressure
of being on tour, the Queen gave her
a conspiratorial glance and advised,
"One gets crafty after a while
about how to save oneself."
Elizabeth never again
saw Jack Kennedy.
When he was assassinated on
November 22, 1963 she was pregnant
with her fourth child and
prevented by her doctors
from attending the memorial
service at St. Paul's Cathedral,
yet she insisted on having
her own memorial service
at St. George's Chapel Windsor, and
she invited 400 American servicemen
to attend the service and to have a
tour of Windsor Castle afterwards.
When Winston Churchill
died in January 1965,
the Queen gave him the supreme
honor of a full state funeral.
Lyndon Johnson desperately wanted to
be there to represent his country,
but he was in the hospital
with acute bronchitis.
For three days Johnson pressed
for special accommodations,
including bringing his own chair
to the funeral, arranging shelter
from the rain, and being allowed
to sit while others were standing.
The Queen granted all
of his requests
and thoughtfully invited
him to a private audience
at Buckingham Palace
after the funeral.
Unfortunately, Johnson's doctors
forbade him from making the trip,
denying him his only
chance to meet the Queen.
Richard Nixon had been very
eager to please the Queen
since their first meeting in 1957,
when he gave her a book titled,
"The Art of Readable
Writing" in an effort
to improve her public speaking,
which had been criticized
in the British press.
Nixon also hosted a stag dinner for
Prince Philip in the White House,
which prompted Barbara
Walters to scold him
for not including any women.
Nixon entertained the Queen's two
older children, Prince Charles
and Princess Anne, for two days
in Washington, even trying to fix
up Charles with his daughter Tricia.
Nixon had lunch with the
Queen once at Chequers,
the Prime Minister's residence in
the country, but he never managed
to get the Queen over
here for a state visit.
His successor, Gerald Ford,
was her host for her ambitious tour
during the bicentennial celebrations
in 1976.
He famously danced with the
Queen at the White House
to the unfortunate choice of the
"Lady is a Tramp" -- [laughter] --
which those who know her said that
she probably found very funny.
Both the Queen and
Prince Philip enjoy it
when planning goes somewhat awry,
as it did at the British
Ambassador's reception
for 1,600 people during the
Washington leg of their tour.
Elizabeth was being
trailed by TV cameramen
with very big bright lights, when
suddenly the cameramen disappeared
and ran for the front door
of the ambassador's residence
because Elizabeth Taylor was
making her grand entrance.
Well the ambassador was furious,
but the Queen was merely amused,
her press secretary told me,
because for once somebody else
was the center of media attention.
In private during that trip,
she also demonstrated the secret
of her sturdy stance that allows her
to endure long hours on her feet.
Lifting her evening gown above
her ankles, she told the wife
of her foreign secretary, "One
plants one's feet apart like this.
Always keep them parallel.
Make sure your weight
is evenly distributed
and that is all there is to it."
The Queen was accompanied
on the tour
by her good friend Ginny Airlie, who
was her first and only American lady
in waiting, who grew up in New
York and Newport, Rhode Island.
As the wife of one of the
Queen's friends since childhood,
the 13th Earl of Airlie, she
had been entertained frequently
at the Queen's homes of
Balmoral and Sandringham,
but when the Queen asked her
in 1973 to join her household,
Ginny had at first declined,
suggesting she should get
someone more steeped in it all.
But the Queen insisted
and Ginny became one
of her longest-serving attendants.
The temperature during her long
days of engagements and walkabouts
on the bicentennial
tour pushed 100 degrees,
but the Queen never faltered.
"Luckily, I don't mind the
heat," she said, while surrounded
by a sweltering crowd in Manhattan.
It was yet another example of
what a number of people told me
about the Queen, that she
does not perspire even
in the hottest temperatures.
This is something I actually
witnessed when I was on tour
in the tropics with the Queen
and her face remained
throughout remarkably dry.
One of the Queen's cousins, Lady
Pamela Hicks, explained to me
in her own inimitable way, that the
Queen's skin does not run water.
And that while it may look good, and
helps keep her clothing uncreased,
it actually does make
her uncomfortable.
The Queen had only
a fleeting encounter
with Jimmy Carter during his very
first trip outside the United
States, when he attended a black tie
dinner at Buckingham Palace in 1977,
but he managed to offend her mother
by enthusiastically
kissing her on the lips.
"I took a sharp step backwards,"
the Queen Mother recalled,
"not quite far enough."
She later said that she had not
been kissed that way since the death
of her husband 25 years earlier.
The friendship between the
royal family and Ronald
and Nancy Reagan was the closest
of all the American presidents.
The Reagans had first met
Prince Charles when he was
in California while serving with
the Royal Navy in the early 1970s,
and they had an equally fond
relationship with the Queen
and Prince Philip as well as
her sister Princess Margaret,
the Queen Mother and her
cousin, Princess Alexandra.
They kept an extensive
personal correspondence
that I was given permission to
read at the Presidential Library
out in California,
the Reagan Library.
And their letters tell a story
of affection and thoughtfulness
on both sides over more than
three decades of correspondence
that continues to this
day with Nancy Reagan.
In June 1982, when the
Reagans were in Europe
for summit meetings the
Queen invited them to stay
at Windsor Castle, which was the
first such personal invitation
for an American presidential couple.
Not only did she arrange for
a dedicated telephone line,
she had the first shower installed
in the more than 900-year-old castle
because she was told that's
what the president needed.
There was a family
dinner on the first night
and the following morning the Queen
invited the Reagans to breakfast.
"It was surprisingly
informal," Nancy Reagan told me,
"we had to walk through
their bedroom and lined
up on a table were boxes of cereal.
I said to Prince Charles,
'What do I do?'
and he said, 'Just help yourself.'
It wasn't anything like
I imagined," she said.
The most famous part of that
visit was the ride on horseback
by Ronald Reagan and the Queen,
which was a photo opportunity
that had taken months
of orchestration
by White House officials
and British diplomats.
Reagan told reporters afterwards
that the Queen was charming and down
to earth, and he observed that she
was really in charge of that animal.
Reagans returned the favor
the following February
when they invited the royal couple
on a 10-day visit to California,
fulfilling the Queen's
long held dream
of seeing the West Coast
of the United States.
But instead of the fabled
California sunshine,
it poured from San
Diego to San Francisco.
It even rained out in the desert
in Palm Springs during the luncheon
at the home of former British
Ambassador Walter Annenberg.
When the Queen insisted on braving
the elements to tour the grounds
of his 208-acre estate, she
hopped into the maintenance car
that was filled with
mops and brooms.
Reagan had promised the Queen a
western style ride on horseback
at his Rancho del Cielo on a
mountaintop near Santa Barbara.
The relentless downpour
forced the host
to arrange four-wheel drive
vehicles to climb the seven miles
of hairpin turns up the mountain.
Despite concerns about the
dangers, the Queen was eager
to take the treacherous route.
Wearing black rubber boots
and a Mackintosh, she said,
"If we can get there let's go."
The ride on horseback
had to be cancelled
and a thick fog blocked the view
but the two couples had a lunch
of tacos, enchiladas
and refried beans.
"Mr. Deaver," the Queen said to
Reagan's deputy chief of staff
on the ride back down the
mountain, "that was so enjoyable.
Especially the used beans."
[laughter] In San Francisco there
was a black tie dinner in honor
of the Queen and Prince Philip
at the de Young Memorial Museum.
Watching the clock, Mike Deaver
asked the Queen's private secretary,
Sir Philip Moore, why she was
taking so long to get ready.
"The Queen needs her tiara
time," Moore replied.
He then explained that she has
a kit with tools that she uses
to decorate certain tiaras by
hooking on pearls, or rubies,
or sapphires, or emeralds
depending on what she's wearing.
When I asked the crown jeweler,
David Thomas, about this he said
that it is in fact a past time
that she very much enjoys.
The Queen and Prince Philip
had an easy camaraderie
with George H. W. Bush
and his wife Barbara,
in part because they were
all close contemporaries.
Philip and the 41st president had
also both seen action in the Pacific
in World War II, which
gave them a common bond.
"The Queen is rather
formal," Bush told me,
"but I never found her
reserved, standoffish.
It's hard to explain really, but
she is very, very easy to be with.
Conversation comes easily."
That ease was evident after the
White House welcoming ceremony
for her third state visit in 1991,
when presidential aides forgot
to provide a step for the
podium that had been designed
for the considerably
taller president.
While making her remarks,
the cluster of microphones obscured
the Queen's face offering TV viewers
what appeared to be a talking
broad-brimmed purple-and-white
striped hat.
[laughter] The Queen
laughed afterward
at another moment slightly
gone wrong.
"Her humor made it all seem
fine," George Bush said.
He also marveled at
her stamina at age 65.
At the state dinner he observed
that her fast pace had left
even the Secret Service panting.
One of the Queen's private
secretaries once said
that she has two great assets: first
of all that she sleeps very well
and secondly, she's
got very good legs.
"She is," he said,
"as tough as a yak."
I got another insight from a
woman named Benedicte Valentiner,
who for many years oversaw Blair
House, which is where the Queen
and Prince Philip were
staying during that visit.
And she happened to see Elizabeth
one morning before she set off
on a half dozen engagements,
and she recalled for me
that the Queen was standing
completely by herself.
"It was as if she was looking
inward, getting set," she said,
"this was how she wound
up her batteries."
There was no chit-chat, but
standing absolutely still
and waiting, resting within herself.
It was a remarkable
coping mechanism.
Bill and Hillary Clinton had a warm
relationship with the Queen as well.
Like other presidents, Clinton was
impressed with what he described
as the clever manner with which
she discussed public issues,
"Probing me for information and
insights without venturing too far
into expressing her
own political views."
He observed, but for the
circumstance of her birth,
she might have been a
successful politician or diplomat.
"As it was," he said,
"she had to be both
but without quite seeming
to be either."
George W. Bush got off on
the right foot, literally,
with the Queen during
her 1991 visit.
The president's 44-year-old eldest
son was wearing custom-made cowboy
boots to his parents'
private luncheon upstairs
at the White House,
and he told the Queen
that they were usually
printed with Texas Rangers.
"Is that on those boots?"
the Queen asked.
"No ma'am," young George
joked, "God save the Queen."
She laughed and she asked, "Are
you the black sheep in the family?"
"I guess so," he said.
When the Queen replied,
"All families have them."
He asked, "Who's yours?"
"Don't answer that,"
said his mother,
which let the Queen escape
from the conversation.
The 43rd president noticed
the Queen's twinkle,
which he told me he took as
a sign of an easy spirit.
George and Laura Bush were not
only honored by a state visit
at Buckingham Palace in 2003,
they hosted her for a state visit
at the White House four years later.
Laura couldn't help noticing one
of the Queen's habits at the end
of a meal that some people find
surprising, she opens her hand bag,
pulls out a compact and
reapplies her lipstick.
Sometime later, Laura made a similar
cosmetic fix during a Washington
ladies' luncheon and
cheerfully said,
"The Queen told me it was
all right to do this."
Before arriving at the White
House in 2007, the Queen
and Philip had attended the
Kentucky Derby for the first time
and Laura made certain to
invite the winning jockey,
Calvin Borel, to the state dinner.
And when the jockey and the
Queen met in the receiving line,
Borel wrapped an arm around
her and the first lady.
The Queen had become --
by then become accustomed
to American familiarity
and she didn't mind at all
that he had breached
protocol by touching her.
A similar encounter led to
headlines in the British tabloids,
where Barack and Michelle
Obama visited Buckingham Palace
for the first time in March 2009.
At a reception for heads of
state attending the G20 summit,
the Queen circulated informally
through the crowd of
high-powered guests.
As Michelle and the Queen were
talking, they turned toward one
of her ladies in waiting to
show their difference in height.
The Queen is about
5'3" or 5'4", Michelle,
as you know, is nearly 6 feet.
The first lady put her
arm around the Queen,
who responded by lightly
encircling Michelle's waist.
The palace videographer who
recorded the encounter told me
that they were totally
spontaneous gestures,
but the tabloids made a fuss
about what they called an
unthinkable protocol violation
by the American first lady.
In fact, the Queen
was completely relaxed
about what her top
advisors called a display
of affection and appreciation.
Elizabeth's day at the Kentucky
Derby was arranged by one
of her closest American friends,
Will Farish, a former ambassador
to Britain and a fellow
thoroughbred breeder,
during her fifth private holiday
on his horse farm in Kentucky.
Her first vacation there had been
in 1984 and it was such a novelty
that when she landed at
Lexington, a woman from customs
and immigration would not admit her
to this country without a passport.
The State Department
protocol officer
who was accompanying the
Queen tried to explain
that the Queen does
not have a passport,
which is one of the oddities
of her unusual status.
But the official resisted
until a call
to Washington gave
the Queen clearance.
The pattern of her stay in the
bluegrass horse country held for all
of her subsequent holidays
visits to stud farms
to see prospective stallions
to mate with her mares,
outings to local racetracks,
lunches and dinners
with friends from the horse world.
One of her senior advisors told
me that he saw "an atmosphere
of informality and gaiety
that I never saw in England.
No one was calling her
ma'am or your majesty.
She was laughing and
joking and having fun."
In 1984, she also stayed for a
weekend in Wyoming at a ranch
on the slopes of the
Big Horn Mountains.
Her hosts were her long-time
racing manager, Lord Porchester
and his wife Jean, another American
friend in the Queen's inner circle.
When they first met in London
in 1955, Jean was struck
by what she described as
the Queen's steadiness.
"She is difficult to know," Jean
told me, "but it is worth the wait.
You sort of become friends.
It takes a long time to know her."
In Wyoming the Queen was
able to relax completely,
taking five-mile walks on
the 4,000-acre property,
and joining shooting parties as
the guns brought down pheasants,
and partridges, and grouse.
She hosted a dinner at
the Maverick Supper Club,
where she was quite perplexed
at the prospect of ordering
from a restaurant menu,
which she hadn't done before.
When offered various sizes
of fillet mignon she asked --
now here's a surprise --
for a Queen-sized fillet cut with
hashed brown potatoes and onions,
she said, "because I've
never tasted them before."
On her departure, she wrote a letter
to Ronald Reagan describing
the time she had spent
in America doing what
she liked best:
looking at beautiful
thoroughbreds and walking
in the wide-open spaces
by the mountains.
The American West had long held a
fascination for the Queen and one
of her most intriguing American
friends has been Monty Roberts,
a California cowboy who is
known as a horse whisperer
for his humane techniques to
train horses in a circular pen.
She was so impressed
by what she had read
about his approach she invited
him to demonstrate his techniques
at Windsor Castle in 1989.
"Come show me this lion's
cage of yours," she said.
"Do I need a whip and a chain?"
As Monty recalled to me, she
said it not only with a twinkle,
but that her method
of addressing him,
clearly her talent, put him at ease.
His demonstration was a
big success, and the Queen
and the cowboy struck
up a fast friendship.
Over lunch in the castle gardens
she asked him numerous questions,
"I saw a mind open up," he recalled.
When he told her something
that she didn't know,
she would sit on the edge
of her chair, he said,
"with the humility
of a first grader."
She also gave him advice on
how to present his concepts
to a skeptical group
of English trainers.
"You need to ease up," he said,
"so you don't appear
to be too competitive."
The Queen encouraged him to write
his memoirs, critiqued his draft,
and even found him a publisher.
They remain in contact by phone
and he visits her at Windsor
and Sandringham several times a
year; 2011, she awarded Roberts
by making him an honorary member
of the Royal Victorian Order.
And when her oldest Corgi, Monty,
died several weeks ago at age 13,
it was revealed that he had
been named after Monty Roberts.
Her last visit to the United States
was in July 2010 to lay a wreath
at Ground Zero in New York City,
and she spent nearly a half hour
in record-shattering
heat of 100 degrees --
103 degrees, greeting
families of those
who had lost their lives on 9/11.
Debbie Palmer [spelled
phonetically],
the widow of a firefighter who died
in 9/11, echoed the observations
of others when she told me,
"we were all pouring sweat,
but she didn't have a
bead of sweat on her.
I thought 'this is what it's
like to be royal.'" Well,
the Queen has shown us over
the years how to be royal
in so many ways: her sense of
duty and her professionalism,
as well as her wisdom
and her good judgment,
which has endeared her not
only to her subjects but to
so many people in this country.
On her first state visit in 1957,
she emphasized the common language
and the heritage of history
between Britain and America,
and she praised the
enlightened and skilled statesmen
who founded the American republic.
She has repeated her pledge
of friendship between --
many, many times over the years
with her words and her actions
and her clear affections
for America's traditions,
its people, and its leaders.
The Queen has helped in ways
beyond measure to ensure
that the special relationship
between Britain
and the United States transcends
political differences wherever they
may arise.
Thank you and I'd be
delighted to take questions.
[applause] Male Speaker: Hi, I'm
curious if you could tell us what's
in her handbag, as was alluded to.
Sally Smith: Yes.
Male Speaker: And two, under
their legal system is Queen
or king is the gender as
the head of state changes,
is that the most important
political title
under their system, or
is it something else?
I've asked the British Embassy
and haven't gotten a reply.
Sally Smith: Well, first
of all, the handbag.
I had three eyewitnesses, and the
most amusing one was the manager
of the football team in Hull who
sat next to her at a luncheon
and I talked to him
afterwards and he said
that she had opened her handbag
and he'd gotten a very good look,
and he said it's just like
kind of anybody's handbag.
A coin purse, probably
didn't have any coins in it,
but it had her makeup, it had
some sweetener for her coffee,
it had a comb, it had lipstick.
I spoke to one of her ladies in
waiting and she said, you know,
you have to understand that
the Queen is very practical.
She carries things that she
needs, so she has a handkerchief,
she often carries lozenges,
it's up to the lady in waiting
to carry things like extra
pairs of gloves, needles
and thread, things like that.
But she just, she's
practical and she wants
to have these things close at hand.
There's one more thing that a friend
told me about that she had seen
when she went to dinner at the
Queen's cousin's some years ago,
and she watched, she was
sitting very close to her,
she watched as the Queen opened her
handbag and pulled out a suction cup
and proceeded to spit
into the suction cup,
attached to the suction cup
was a hook and she took it
and she plopped it
underneath the table
so she could hang her handbag on it.
That's the essence of practicality.
As far as the most important title,
I mean obviously the monarchy
goes back a thousand years,
it's often said that the power
and the glory are kept separate
and the power is obviously
invested in the prime minister,
who is the leader of the party
that wins in a general election.
The Queen, has specific powers under
the constitution to be consulted
and to encourage and to warn,
and she does that in all
of her private audiences,
with the prime ministers
and many other government
officials, members of the clergy,
and members of the
judiciary who come to her
for completely confidential
audiences,
which are extremely
important to them.
Male Speaker: [inaudible]
Sally Smith: Excuse me?
Male Speaker: So citizen is not
the most important political title
like it is under our system?
Sally Smith: Well, it's --
the British constitution
is so different from ours.
It's unwritten.
It's an accumulation
of laws and traditions
and common laws over the years.
They are subjects of the Queen.
That is what the term of art is.
Female Speaker: I need to ask
that we cease asking
questions, but just temporarily.
Please stick around for more
questions from the audience.
C-SPAN will be here
shortly to continue.
They'll be taking questions
here from the history
and biography pavilion and also
from national callers,
so please stay with us.
We'd love to have you continue, and
if you have questions we'll be back
with you in slightly
less than 10 minutes.
Thanks so much for your
patience, please stay with us,
and please thank our
author Sally Bedell Smith.
That was wonderful.
[music playing] Female Speaker:
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