Queen Bee : After 17 Years, L.A.’s Chief of Protocol Loves the Pomp, Pageantry

When Bee Canterbury Lavery took over as the city’s chief of protocol 17 years ago, Los Angeles was, diplomatically speaking, just coming out of the Dark Ages. It was still a rough-at-the-edges movie town, where “international relations” meant the torrid, ocean-hopping affairs that people like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton used to conduct.

Nobody was paying much attention to the niceties of diplomacy, says Lavery, a gregarious woman with a taste for brightly colored blazers. “My first assignment was to entertain Felix Houphouet-Boigny, the president of the Ivory Coast,” she says. “At a dinner at a hotel which shall remain nameless, the president’s wife asked a waiter for a glass of wine. The waiter said, ‘Fine, that’ll be $1.35.’ ”

It was then that Lavery and newly elected Mayor Tom Bradley decided that Los Angeles was going to need a little more polish in its dealings with all of the foreign dignitaries who would soon start traipsing through the city.

Bradley was getting ready to pitch Los Angeles as host for the 1984 Olympics, and trade with Far Eastern countries was picking up (“ Pacific Rim was becoming a buzzword,” says Lavery). It wouldn’t do to have visiting royalty and pin-stripers treated incorrectly.

So, a few months after Bradley was sworn in, Lavery went off to Washington for a week to learn everything she could about protocol from the Department of State.

Lavery, who talks in the measured tones of someone accustomed to communicating with people with limited understanding of English, talks about “doing” foreign dignitaries, as in: “We’re doing the mayor of Berlin in October.”

Since she refined her skills, Lavery has “done” (apparently it’s the only verb that’s adequate to the breadth of her job) European royalty, the emperor of Japan, presidents, prime ministers, a military strongman or two and political heavyweights almost always with elegance and rectitude, according to those who work with her.

“A lot of people think protocol is just arranging the forks and the dishes,” says Douglas J. Rosenstein, head of security in Los Angeles for the Department of State and one of Lavery’s admirers. “But it’s a lot of hard work.”

Most recently, Lavery (pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with have not cave ) helped to ease Nelson Mandela through the last leg of an exhausting eight-city tour in June and July. An unobtrusive presence at the downtown ceremonies, Lavery greeted Mandela at Los Angeles International Airport, acted as a gentle nudzh to keep his entourage moving through a delayed schedule and accompanied him to City Hall. Because of his frail health and the emotions he arouses, he represented a kind of protocol mine field.

“Everybody was afraid he was going to ask to go to the hotel to rest, when we had tens of thousands of people waiting in 106-degree heat,” she says. “But right away he said, ‘We should go right to City Hall.’ ”

When Mandela walked onto the podium at City Hall, it was as if all the rules had suddenly been flung aside, like a pack of cards scattered across the floor. “I had been warned that when he made his entrance, everybody would go crazy,” Lavery says.

And they did. “People who you’d think would have all of this decorum totally broke ranks,” she recounts. “Everybody on the platform jumped up and crowded around him. (Councilman) Zev Yaroslavsky was running around with a video camera, poking me aside so he could get better shots.”

But Lavery, who earns $58,338 a year, isn’t puritanical when it comes to observing all the niggling little rules. “Protocol is there to make people comfortable,” she insists. The rules are to facilitate commerce, not to restrain it.

Born in Los Angeles, Lavery comes from a Quaker family with a tradition of public service, she says. She was the daughter of an auto parts salesman and the Whittier deputy city clerk (all she’ll say about her age is that she was a classmate at USC of columnist Art Buchwald and the late Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, which would put her in her mid-60s) and she’s a distant cousin of former Secretary of State George Shultz, as well as a descendant of Presidents William Henry Harrison and Benjamin Harrison.

“At one time I was thinking seriously about going into international relations,” she says.

Instead she went into public relations. She worked as press representative for NBC, where she met her first husband, television executive Frederic William Wile Jr., who died in 1960. After 20 years of marriage, she was divorced from her second husband, Paramount executive Emmet G. Lavery.

In 1969, Lavery was a member of the Encino Property Owners Assn., which was protesting a plan to land commercial jets at the Van Nuys Airport. “It would have knocked out the valley,” she says.

The group found an especially sympathetic listener in Councilman Tom Bradley--”even though we weren’t his constituents,” Lavery says. When Bradley announced that he was running for mayor that year, “I immediately signed up for the campaign,” she says. He won four years later, and Lavery was one of the first people he brought into his administration.

After 17 years, Lavery can still get swept up in the wonder of it all.

Most of the time, however, she sees the office of protocol as key political outpost: It is, she said, “the mayor’s State Department,” with a direct link to the city’s 71 foreign consulates. It greases the way for the big events like the Olympics, she says, and it helps scare up business for Los Angeles Harbor, which recently surpassed New York as the port with the highest volume of containerized freight.

“People think that these royal visits are public relations tours,” said Lavery, who has acquired an impressive store of arcane information on the proper behavior in sitting down with Thai royalty (don’t cross your legs), Tibetans’ taste in dairy products (offer them yogurt, not cheese) and the like. “But any time (kings and queens) come here, they leave a lot of business interaction in their wake. . . . The jobs of a lot of people are dependent on these visits.”

A hard worker who unhesitatingly gives up weekends to escort dignitaries around, Lavery runs the office with a staff of two--assistant Jennifer Kim and aide Cheryl Crume--and with an unswerving allegiance to Tom Bradley.

There’s no question in Lavery’s mind as to why Los Angeles has achieved primacy as an “international city.”

“Tom Bradley really understood, in a way that no other mayor in the U.S. did, about international relations,” she says.

It’s a constant theme with her, along with frequent plugs for Los Angeles as the destination of choice for foreign businessmen. “We’re a commercial city,” Lavery says. “We’re not letting anybody forget it. We’re looking for business.”

Her boosterism can apparently grate on the competition. “It shouldn’t be a competition,” says Sandra Ausman, chief of protocol for Los Angeles County, determined not to criticize. But sometimes it’s hard for county officials not to criticize. The county opened its own protocol office in 1983 after a perceived snub by the mayor and his protocol officer. The occasion was a visit by Queen Elizabeth II. With the help of Lavery’s careful planning, Bradley was whisked from one photo-opportunity to another at the queen’s side, followed by a luncheon in the queen’s honor at county-run Music Center. The only problem was that none of the members of the County Board of Supervisors was invited to the luncheon.

The board “made such a fuss about it,” Lavery sniffed at the time, that the supervisors were finally issued invitations, even though it was supposed to be a private luncheon hosted by Bradley.

Lavery took some heat from the Taiwanese community 10 years ago, over the “two flags” flap, when Lavery issued orders to have the flag of the People’s Republic of China flown exclusively in ceremonies at City Hall. “There was some controversy at the time over the mayor’s closeness to the People’s Republic of China,” says Councilman Michael Woo, who has ties to the Taiwanese community. “I think Bee Lavery was carrying out the mayor’s wishes.” Yaroslavsky, one of Bradley’s principal political rivals, is a little more blunt. Lavery, who has visited China eight times since 1979, has been “a big booster of the People’s Republic of China, at almost any cost,” says Yaroslavsky. “She toed the State Department line zealously.”

It wasn’t zeal, says Lavery, but an acknowledgment of the State Department’s precedence in foreign policy. “As a chief of protocol, I’m neutral,” she says. “But only the U.S. government can conduct foreign policy.”

She took some more heat in 1983, when Prince Charles noted during a City Hall ceremony that the British flag had been hung upside down. “We must have Irishmen working in the flag room,” Lavery remarked.

But even her critics acknowledges Lavery’s customary professionalism. “Why don’t dignitaries go to the state capital as often or to Beverly Hills?” Yaroslavsky asks. “They come to City Hall because they know they’ll get handled properly.”

The etiquette of receiving and entertaining chiefs of state and heads of government is largely spelled out in Lavery’s “bible,” a book by Mary Jane McCaffree and Pauline Innis titled “Protocol.” The book, a standard for most protocol offices in the country, gives the correct forms of address (“Your Majesty” for a king, “Your Highness” for a sultan), proper table seating arrangements, the correct forms for official invitations and the answers to dozens of nitty questions about diplomacy.

The book gets a lot of use, Lavery says. But she and her staff are called upon to handle endless little protocol tasks for which there are no written rules.

“In some situations you just wing it,” she says, “hoping that you have enough good taste to make everyone comfortable.”

They must ensure that a guest of honor exiting from a car isn’t stepping into on-coming traffic. They must see to it that autograph-seekers are kept away from royalty, and that the City Hall red carpet (there’s 300 yards of it, enough to stretch from the Spring Street curb to the City Council president’s desk) is rolled out on time.

Two months ago, there was the small matter of keeping the prime minister of Japan aloft over LAX, until President Bush’s plane could take off, thus avoiding a lot of obligatory ceremony. “You can’t have two heads of state in the same airport without a meeting,” she explains. “It would have been impolite.”

But that’s the cut-and-dry part of the job, Lavery says. The interesting part is seeing those dazzling personages up-close-and-personal.

She has scared up a plumber to retrieve a diamond hatpin that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands dropped down a sink drain. She has arranged a specially requested luncheon for Prince Charles with the cast of “Charlie’s Angels” (“That was before Di came along”). She has rounded up John Wayne and Iron Eyes Cody to meet Hirohito (though Peter Falk, “Columbo,” wasn’t available) and gotten Los Lobos to play for Prince Andrew and Fergie.

Sure, it’s a glamorous life, says Lavery, who has been decorated five times by royalty, including medals from Queen Beatrix for the Order of Orange Nassau and King Juan Carlos of Spain for the Lazo de Dama of the Expressed Order of Isabel the Catholic.

But it doesn’t leave much time for a private life. “Lots of times I’d like to go home and spend some time with my (23-year-old) daughter or with friends,” she says. “But I have to say, ‘Gee, I can’t go to that because I have to work.’ That’s the unpleasant part of the job.”

Lavery shakes her head and smiles, as if she wouldn’t have it any other way. “But everybody in politics complains about that,” she says.

Words of Experience From Bee C. Lavery

* Americans never curtsy. We fought a Revolutionary War over that one. A simple handshake is always appropriate.

* Be flexible about the changing mores of human relationships. Nowadays, you may have to make room at the table for a “significant other.”

* Don’t give a departing motorcade the fast good-by. Stand at curbside until the cars are out of sight.

* Never make knowing glances or gestures suggesting annoyance. Even the crassest military dictator must be treated with dignity and respect.

* Be strict about gate-crashers. Don’t let them through the gate, no matter who they are.

* When in doubt, follow your instincts about making people comfortable.