18 Rms, No Royal Vu

By ROBERT HUGHES/LONDON

The opening of Buckingham Palace to paying tourists this month at 8 pounds ($12) a head hasn't quite lived up to its advance publicity; what does, these days? The mere possession of a ticket, raved the New York Times last June, "will have the magical properties of fairy gold . . . ((It)) will turn frog into prince and frump into Circe." This frog joined the queue for tickets in Pall Mall last week.

8 a.m. Already about 400 other frogs (many of them English ones, heavily reinforced with Japanese and Americans) are in the queue; the earliest ones, real frogs from France, had been here since 7. Dress: sneakers, blousons, & rucksacks, jeans. A suit or two. We are a long way from the days when a minister, arriving at Buckingham Palace in trousers rather than knee breeches, was asked why he had joined the retinue of the American ambassador.

8:30 a.m. Fidget and wait. Conversation in this part of the line turns on why the Queen is opening Buck House (as its staff calls it) at all, even if it's only for two months. Main text and official reason: she needs money to restore the part of Windsor Castle that was ruined in a fire last year. Subtext: p.r. to make up for the behavior of her offspring and their spouses -- Di the bulimic fairy princess, fat Fergie and her toe-sucking Texan "financial adviser," Charles' ambition to become Camilla Parker-Bowles' Tampax. Will a trot through the state rooms of Buckingham Palace raise our minds from these mundane affairs? Don't bet on it.

8:45 a.m. There is movement; we inch toward the ticket booth.

9:25 a.m. I fork out 8 pounds and receive a ticket that will let me in between 9:45 and 10 a.m. A semidignified rush to the back of the palace, where yet another queue, slower than the first, has formed. We are filtered through security -- real security, not the flimsy check you get at airports.

10:10 a.m. Now a third queue, inside the courtyard of the palace. We are standing on, or somewhere near, a failed silkworm farm, which was how the place began. In 1623 the Earl of Middlesex leased the land from James I to grow mulberry trees to feed the worms. Alas, the earl planted the wrong trees, and the worms did not spin. Eighty years later, it was leased again by the Duke of Buckingham, who built a house there. Then George III bought the house, which was enormously enlarged by his son George IV: it was his special folly. His son William IV pronounced it "hideous" and suggested turning it into a barracks. His daughter Victoria thought it was too small, but put up with it all the same.

10:25 a.m. The queue jerks forward again. Up the steps and in, after nearly 2 1/2 hours of waiting. How did tourists manage before there were sneakers? We go up the Grand Staircase, which is not so grand compared with other royal stairs -- Versailles, the Winter Palace. Much of its decor is covered in plastic sheets to save it from the friction of hoi polloi.

Since the palace opened on Aug. 7 to less-than-capacity crowds -- 7,000 to 8,000 initially expected, yet actually drawing only 4,500 a day -- the English press has been quoting disappointed Americans and Japanese who felt entitled to a look at the Queen: at least Mickey Mouse, one kid complained, was always present in his Magic Kingdom of Disneyland. You can't expect her to pop out like a cuckoo on a clock, but there isn't even a painting of her on view -- only her ancestors. The burden falls on Queen Victoria, whose portrait en famille by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (who was to her and Prince Albert what Edwin Landseer was to their many dogs) must be the single most sentimental piece of kitsch in the palace and accordingly gets more attention from the visitor stream than any Rubens or Rembrandt. Now and again some palace functionary, neatly tailored and with a face like a silver teapot, glides through the crowd; and police murmur discreetly into cellular intercoms. But otherwise it's like being shepherded, en masse, through an empty stage set. Nobody here but us tourists. What you see is what you get. The only domestic trace is a mysterious table in the anteroom to the Ministers' Staircase, on which sit a bottle of Malvern water (unopened) and two glasses (turned upside down). What is the meaning of this Magrittean still life?

There are 600 rooms in Buckingham Palace, of which 18 are now open to the public. Quite enough. No tourists will see the royal bedrooms, and nobody but a sociologist would want to visit whatever remains of the tiny attic chambers where the housemaids -- whose salary Prince Albert, shortly after marrying Victoria, cut from about 45 pounds to 12 pounds a year -- used to sleep, and perhaps still do. What you get for your 8 pounds is a walk through the main formal rooms: the Throne Room, the Picture Gallery, the Green, Blue and White drawing rooms, the best of which were designed by George IV's architect John Nash, and the worst by his pupil, Edward Blore. "Blore the bore," as he came to be known, took over the decoration of Buckingham Palace after Nash was dismissed by George IV's successor, William IV, for his "inexcusable irregularity and great negligence." Blore was a beacon of probity, but not of talent. His lack of it is why the east front of the palace -- the backdrop to the Changing of the Guard -- looks like a bank that got too big for its boots. He specialized in bland, thick architectural effects coupled with the sort of mingy "good taste" decoration later imitated in Edwardian hotels.

He is the reason why the Throne Room, the red chamber where knights are dubbed beneath a plaster frieze of roly-poly figures enacting scenes from the Wars of the Roses, is so curiously ungrand. Not all of that is Blore's fault -- the squat thrones themselves, one with EIIR embroidered on it and the other with P for Philip, were done in 1953 and look Hollywood-Ruritanian, if not suburban. You can't help reflecting on the amount of lobbying from aspirant title seekers that has focused on this red room over the past century.

The best thing in the Throne Room is its ceiling by Nash. In fact the best thing about the whole palace, architecturally speaking, is Nash's ceilings. This is just as well, since the floors are unspeakable. The Aubusson carpets have been rolled up and put away -- you can't have twice 5,000 feet shuffling across those every day for two months. In their place are hundreds of yards of new Axminster in industrial-strength reds, which clash strenuously with the green or blue silk on the walls; it looks as though the House of Windsor got a discount deal on something left over from Jean Bedel Bokassa's coronation. Don't look down; look up. Nash may have been a spendthrift with his sovereign's sovereigns, but he certainly knew about stucco, and could bring it to incredible heights of airiness, complexity and rich detail. Even the gold leaf on every inch of the coffering and diaper work fails to make these vaults seem congested.

In between the floors and the ceiling, what? Walls and pictures, and some furniture. Much of the furniture has been moved out for the sake of traffic flow -- there is no dining table in the State Dining Room, for instance, which seems a pity. Things that go along the walls, like sofas and a few exquisite desks and console tables by two 18th century French ebenistes, Riesener and Weisweiler, remain; in furniture, the tastes of George IV and William IV ran more to Paris than to London. There are also some 1960s vintage electric heaters sitting in the fireplaces, just as they do in every bed-sitter in the realm, a homely touch that suggests both the impossibility of heating Buck House and EIIR's bond with her subjects.

The state rooms contain only a tiny fraction of the immense Royal Collection (10,000 pictures, they say, with 30,000 drawings and half a million prints), better sampled in the galleries outside the palace that are always open to the public and have no queues. Buckingham Palace does contain some great pictures though. Most are from the Netherlands: Rembrandt's ship $ builder, with his sketches of hull sections before him, being handed a note by his stout wife; top-flight Rubenses; and Van Dyck's two portraits of Charles I, especially the "greate peece," which depicts him with his consort and children -- the mobile thin face, shadowed with melancholy, amid the grand, vaporous profusion of light on silk and marble. No later court painter -- at least not in England -- would rival Van Dyck's poetic conception of kingship. From there it is downhill to Winterhalter, though Americans will be interested to see their very own Benjamin West, the wunderkind from the colonies and George III's favorite artist, doing a full length of the monarch with Redcoats in the background in 1779. No Yankee rebel, he. The main lesson here about British royal taste is how fast it died after 1830. It would have done better with Mad King Ludwig than with Good Prince Albert.

11:45 a.m. The last of Blore's rooms leads into bright August light on the bright green lawn where, in more intimate moments, royal corgis romp and snarl. It must be a relief for them to get out too. A shortish crunch down a gravel walk leads to the palace exit, with the souvenir shop off to one side. Its catalog promises all manner of delights: not, it is true, replicas of the lemon knife with which Princess Di allegedly lacerated herself or of the Tampax that Prince Charles supposedly wanted to become, but of other household objects, no less useful in their way. There is a cardboard desk-tidy in the form of the east front of Buckingham Palace (45 pounds); a smallish crystal bowl with a foot, whose wispy swag decoration "echoes a detail from the ceiling of the State Dining Room" (75 pounds). A rosette from the same ceiling, much reduced and done in silver gilt, has become a brooch (50 pounds); half the same rosette, with chain and a small fake pearl, is a necklace (55 pounds). A bit pallid; more shopping channel than Faberge.

But for three quid there are the Buckingham Palace Fine Mint Chocolates, the design taken, the label says, "from a gilded wood pedestal in the White Drawing Room." Yummy. And the white china mug with BUCKINGHAM PALACE written on it in gold script (10 pounds) looks promising. I decide to get one for a relative who is deeply involved with the Republican Movement in Australia. He can stick his toothbrush in it.

"Two mugs and a couple of mints," I say to the saleswoman.

"Sorry, we're all out of mugs."

"Then I'll take two pillboxes."

"The pillboxes are out too."

"Oh well, just the mints."

She puts the mints in a small white shopping bag, which has BUCKINGHAM PALACE printed on it in gold.

"You'll have to write in for the mugs."

"Can you tell me the shipping cost to America?"

"Oh, I wouldn't really be sure. I'd have to ask the supervisor."

The supervisor? Black Rod? The Garter Whatsit of Arms? The Yeoman of the Gold and Silver Pantry?

"Never mind," I say, and leave with my mints. Will they taste as good as M&M's? Better, even, than Fergie's toe? Who can say?