Closet Kings

Has Uncle Sam become a fawning courtier?

AMERICANS arc closet royalists. Our street gangs are Dukes, our marauding businessmen are barons, the favorite headline word in women’s publications is milady, and the itch to crown someone, if only an Okra Queen, pervades our populist heartland.

Our television talk shows resemble court levees. We invade the privacy of public figures like fawners crowding into the bedchamber of Louis XIV while he sat on the royal pot. We have made People magazine our Debrett's Peerage, and the celebrity-look-alike craze has all the earmarks of the changeling myth. Complex marriage contracts fit for the margravine of Hesse-Darmstadt have replaced the hope chest in the hearts and minds of America’s brides. The historical novel is back, more Sir-stuffed and Lord-laden than ever, and we have fallen so in love with the ancient aristocratic ideal of heroism that we attribute it to absolutely anyone: the housewife with cancer of the feet who enters the New York City Marathon is received as Boudicca.

Our president is the only elected head of state in the world who has his own anthem, with lyrics by that foremost champion of heraldic pageantry. Sir Walter Scott. “Hail to the Chief” is from Canto II of The Lady of the Lake.

We call the president's wife by the centuries-old title of First Lady. Borrowed from British royal etiquette, it designates the wife of the eldest royal duke as the first lady in processions when the king is unmarried and there is no queen dowager or princess royal.

The accession of the Kennedys brought references to Camelot, presents for Teddy engraved “And the last shall be the first," and that blunt boast of entailment from Old Joe: “ I paid a lot for that Senate scat, and it belongs in the family.” Among the words bandied shamelessly about by Americans in the Kennedy era were dynasty, reign, heir apparent, and crown prince, but the most startling addition to the national vocabulary accrued to Vice President Johnson: suddenly, a large Texas ranch became known as a “fief.

In the early 1970s we acquired an ‘ ‘energy czar’ ’ and became Upstairs, Downstairs junkies.

Guilt over our love affair with Belle Epoque television fare made us elect Jimmy Carter, but our gesture of atonement backfired. The House of Hookworm turned into a royalist's nightmare with something from every court. Jimmy and Rosalynn served up a Nicholas-and-Alexandra marriage; holy woman Ruth supplied a further Romanov touch; First Brother Billy posed as Philippe Egalite; Gloria’s star-crossed son, languishing in prison, took on a Stuart air; a First Cousin emerged Froissart-like to write the family chronicle; and through it all skipped a horse-faced infanta.

The Carters were a turning point in our closet royalism; at long last we admitted that God had made too many common people. Shortly after the Carters' departure, the royal wedding intensified our democratic discontents, and the birth of Prince William dramatized our craving for stability and orderly transition.

Now that we are tired, poor, huddled, and here, what are the chances of a monarchy of our own? The big stumbling block is our fear of an established church. Which religion would conduct our coronation? It would be necessary to hold an ecumenical coronation involving all faiths, and there is no telling where it would end, or if it would ever end, except in tragedy. Some Southern Baptist preacher would hold our exhausted king underwater too long and we would find that we had once again snatched self-defeat from the jaws of compromise.

Nonetheless, hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America:

1. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people. Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We cannot go on depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage crisis to “bring us together,” and importing a descendant of one of the European lines would end the nativist Wasp hegemony that has alienated nearly everybody and give us a polyglot prince with an inborn ability to travel well. If we had a Stuart on the throne, ethnic Catholics, lost-cause Southerners, and readers of When Bad Things Happen to Good People could all identify with him.

2. Monarchy would put an end to the politics of Good Guyism. Richard Nixon’s royal counterpart, Louis XI of France, was known as “the Spider King” both for his potbelly and spindly legs and for his habit of lurking motionlessly in windows to spy on people. When he was bom, no doubt the wet nurse refused to suckle him, saying, “There’s something about that baby I don’t like.” Louis had only one thing going for him: a brilliant mind. Unhampered by the exhausting job of making himself pleasant to voters, he was able to concentrate his vast mental gifts on the task of government. Today he is acknowledged as one of France’s best kings and one of the great administrative geniuses of all time. Eavesdropping, list-making, misanthropic paranoid insomniacs always do things right if they are let alone.

3. Monarchy would usher in a new era of colorful diseases. Late-night public-service announcements would push satyriasis and Capet foreskin, and Jerry Lewis would be so busy doing telethons for the Hapsburg lip that we would never again have to look at a cute crippled kid.

4. Kings and queens make better patrons of the arts than Joan Mondale.

5. Only a noble heart can truly love the American masses.

6. Bloody Mary never said “Well...” —

Florence King