Memories From the Fantail

The Queen Mary appears to be dying. If you’ve never gone to see her, go now. The end may come soon.

Two weeks ago the Walt Disney Co. announced it was terminating its lease to operate the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose. The two freakish giants of the sea and the air managed to lose $8 million in 1991, the company said. So Disney was pulling out.

In Long Beach, the city fathers promised to search for someone, or some way, to save the two. Actually, the Spruce Goose might attract some suitors. After all, it can be transported to a new city.

But the Queen Mary? Nah. Unmovable, unmarketable, a nightmare of maintenance costs, the Queen has few prospects. Her long life as a bizarre transplant from the Old World, a symbol of something--did we ever know just what?--has reached its sad conclusion.

Maybe, in the end, they will come with cutting torches and hack her into big chunks for scrap. Then they will pile the scrap on barges, tow the whole thing to Korea and melt it down to razor blades. So one day, in your bathroom, you may find yourself shaving with a tiny remnant of the Queen Mary.

Back in 1967, of course, no one believed the end would come this way. The Queen Mary was supposed to “save” Long Beach. The idea that a 31-year-old, shopworn ocean liner could save an American city from urban decay may now seem odd. But at the time, everyone believed.

When the Queen Mary arrived here after a celebratory voyage from Southampton, the Long Beach mayor said: “She will rival Disneyland.” The city had paid Cunard, the steamship company, $3.4 million for its nascent theme park.

If the mayor had talked to the passengers aboard that last cruise, he might have tempered his predictions. Almost nothing worked properly on the ship. Vast armies of cockroaches prowled the decks. No air conditioning cooled the staterooms. A dysentery epidemic broke out somewhere in equatorial waters. Finally, some passengers, exhausted by the heat and disease, abandoned the ship in Rio de Janeiro.

Once arrived in Long Beach, the Queen Mary soon began to reveal her brutal financial truths. I won’t bore you with the details but let’s say the city encountered some cost overruns. Long Beach had estimated that conversion of the Queen to a floating hotel and museum would cost $4 million. The final tab came to $42 million.

Even with these millions, the Queen Mary never came close to rivaling Disneyland. It just sat there in the harbor, attracting the curious in dribs and drabs. A long string of operators came and went. The paint began to peel.

But slowly, the Queen Mary did, indeed, come to represent Long Beach. When you drove into downtown, you looked for it. Idiotic and dignified at the same time, the ship offered a kind of comfort. It never moved and never changed. You came into Long Beach, you looked, and there it was: the boring, stupid, charming, beautiful, bankrupt Queen Mary.

Personally speaking, I wish it could remain forever. Long ago I went to a wedding that was held there. The concessionaire had converted one of the ship’s worship rooms into a wedding chapel and we sat on hard, wooden pews that might have previously held Hemingway, or Churchill, or Edward R. Murrow.

Afterward, we collected ourselves on the fantail--is it the fantail?--and sipped margaritas in the sunshine. There we sat, Americans guzzling a Mexican drink on a defunct British ocean liner converted to part-time wedding chapel. You couldn’t ask for anything better.

Still, the final outcome was predictable enough. Disney arrived in Long Beach wanting all or nothing. It had come to the city with big plans. The company wanted to build the kind of theme park here that has occupied the city’s dreams for decades.

That park would have incorporated the ship into the grand scheme. But in the end, Disney decided to go elsewhere. Last year it announced that the new theme park will be built in Anaheim, not Long Beach.

A pity. Without the theme park, the Queen Mary was doomed. Oh, someone may yet give it another try. They will persuade the city to pony up a few million for a new concept. More conventions, perhaps. Or kiddie rides with nautical themes.

But it won’t work.

And one day you will drive into downtown Long Beach, glance out toward the harbor, and realize that the city has faced the sad truth. The men with the cutting torches will have done their work. The RMS Queen Mary, empress of the seas, savior of Long Beach, wedding chapel to all, will finally be gone.