UCLA Gives the Duke, Duchess a Royal Send-Off
At ease, Los Angeles. They’re gone.
The Duke and Duchess of York helicoptered off to Palm Springs Friday, after a rollicking UCLA send-off that included a musical-chairs luncheon where new guests moved up to the head table for each of the three courses--and the duchess laughingly correcting her husband, saying, “It’s not I , it’s we .”
A boisterous crowd of perhaps 4,000 students was by far the largest group to greet the pair, who finish their duties today at an Indio charity polo match raising money to help rebuild the original Globe theatre.
On campus, the couple watched students making a science-fiction film on a painted plywood, high-tech spaceship set, and they looked “very professional,” the duchess told producer-director Kevin Proulx.
Stretches Protocol
Both the visitors laughed when Sarah asked actress Lisa Darr if she watched the many soap operas Darr had acted in. “I don’t even watch the credits,” Darr told her. “I don’t watch that crap,” she said, unwittingly stretching royal protocol.
“You might send us a copy when you’re done,” Andrew called to the crew.
UCLA’s crowd also offered the first audible heckler of the visit: art student Jason Heath, 19, who was jeered by people around him when he shouted “Get a real job!” and “We want Koo Stark!” (Andrew’s one-time girlfriend, who acted in a soft-porn movie). Heath said the couple “represent almost everything I hate about Western society, and I wish they’d leave my campus.”
Not three feet from him, freshman Lisa Osteraas, 19, who has collected royal ephemera “my whole life,” shouted her approval of the royal couple. “I just think it’s really nice that there’s still a place like England that has royalty. . . . We can sort of live vicariously through them.”
“Andy, I love you!” one woman shrieked as Andrew stepped to a microphone in front of the two-ton bronze sculpture of the “Bruin bear,” as his wife divested herself of several bouquets and a bobbing pink balloon.
They are “future parents,” said Andrew, and “I’ve not yet made a choice where to send” their coming child for an education.
Sarah took a step forward and told him, “It’s not I , it’s we ,” and Andrew added, deadpanning, “I understand there are one or two other universities around here. . . , “ to the boos of the crowd.
The duchess wore a navy suit and a brown satin toque, a hat straight out of pictures of the prince’s grandmother, Queen Mary--fitting, because they were given a videotape of old newsreel footage from UCLA archives, showing the royal family back to the 1920s, and including Andrew’s first Buckingham Palace balcony appearance at age 4.
Both admired the collection of paintings and lithographs during a visit earlier Friday with industrialist Armand Hammer. But at UCLA, the duchess was nonplussed by “Off the Beaten Track,” a consumerist satire by Scottish-born artist David Mach: a two-ton cargo bin atop the outstretched arms of 600 Ken and Barbie dolls.
What It Is Is Art
“What is it?” Sarah asked incredulously. A moment later she said: “Oh, art.”
Their departure for Britain early Sunday means an end to the two- and three-layer security that has surrounded them, involving as many as 10 agencies, from U.S. State Department security to Culver City police to state campus police at UCLA, besides the couple’s two personal policemen.
No one offered a dollar figure on what the visit cost for law enforcement, but British reporters who regularly cover the royal family were astonished at the amount of security, from “high-ground” rooftop sharpshooters to bomb-sniffing dogs.
State Department and other federal agents were supplemented primarily by Los Angeles police, who provided the motorcycle escort (cars in rainy weather) and the helicopter that hovered over the motorcade at the dozens of visits, as well as, for example, Metro squad officers and SWAT team members standing by at the mayor’s lunch for the couple.
Cmdr. George A. Morrison, of the bureau in charge of dignitary protection, said that although he could not give specific manpower or cost figures, the standard dignitary-protection drill was in order.
“State Department and protocol had a little more concern than we did. . . . Our community for the most part is pretty well behaved. We don’t have an IRA threat problem here; we had the Queen of England here during the height of the Falklands (war). . . , “ he said.
A team of about 10 sheriff’s deputies and police officers did uniformed and “high-ground” duty at county sites on the visit, according to Lt. Mike Nelson, of the special enforcement bureau. “It’s not anything special; we would do that for anybody who is at risk,” as they did for the Pope, Nelson said.
Naval Investigative Services officers and regular Navy security kept the royal yacht Britannia secure.
