Spain’s Low-Budget Monarchs : Modest King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia on New World Tour of Former Spanish Outposts

The obliging motorcyclist had stopped to pick up a forlorn young hitchhiker, stranded alongside a Spanish highway when his car ran out of gasoline. At his destination, the young man got a look at his Samaritan. If the face under the helmet was familiar, it should have been: it was stamped on the coins in the young man’s pocket.

The motorcyclist of the story is Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, a descendant of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Louis XIV and of Queen Victoria. Today, the 6-foot-3, dark-blond sovereign with the French Bourbon nose and Windsor-blue eyes arrives for a 48-hour visit to Los Angeles, a town whose charter was issued in 1781 by his ancestor, Carlos III.

With him is his Greek-born queen, Sofia, and together they are enjoying an almost-leisurely eight-day swing through Texas, New Mexico and California, outposts of the empire once ruled by the king’s forebears.

Monarchy Restored

In the last 70 years, the world has jettisoned monarchs like excess cargo in a typhoon. A dozen European dynasties have been dethroned and overthrown. But Spain, which last chased out a king in 1931 and has had eight constitutions, two republics and three civil wars in 170 years, actually restored its monarchy in 1975 in the person of the unprepossessing motorcyclist, Juan Carlos.

Unlike his counterparts in Britain, whose every hangnail seems to make headlines in supermarket tabloids, Juan Carlos I remains something of an unknown in the United States, where nearly a third of high school students sampled recently didn’t even know when Columbus landed.

This seventh U.S. visit by the Spanish monarch (not counting his 1962 honeymoon) is an exercise in diplomacy and discreet Hispanic-American wooing. It is also a New World glimpse at the 49-year-old man whose prestige, personality and workhorse role as head of state have come to symbolize stability in a country long riven by factionalism.

Although Juan Carlos and Sofia’s regal credentials are impeccable (he is descended from Queen Victoria’s youngest granddaughter, Princess Victoria Eugenia; she from Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson, the strutting German Kaiser Wilhelm II), the Spanish Bourbons make a modest show.

Their low-overhead monarchy is one of Europe’s poorest ruling houses, costing Spain around $3 million a year, which is about half of the estimated bill for maintaining the British royal yacht, Britannia. Juan Carlos, a trophy-winning sailor who pores over videotapes of the America’s Cup races, has a yacht of his own, Fortuna, but it is dwarfed by the vessels of mere millionaires.

“They don’t have a cent,” a Spanish official said, in succinct if inflated metaphor.

The scion of Spain sometimes zips about in a thrifty Spanish-made Ford Fiesta. His queen, who studied pediatrics and hefted her own textbooks to class, prefers boutique shopping to couturier houses. When she was shown a jeweled necklace with a six-figure price tag, her husband teased her, “That’s for millionaires!”

Spain’s own crown jewels would barely fill a shoe box, much less a Jewel Room like the Tower of London’s. The display-only crown made for Juan Carlos’ accession in 1975 is supposedly not even real gold.

For 25 years, Juan Carlos’ home has been the modest brick Zarzuela Palace, a 17th-Century hunting lodge. There are more imposing castles in Spain--there are even more imposing houses in Houston, sniffed one organizer--but the Zarzuela is “cozy,” a word of praise the Spanish advance team used when sizing up American hotel-suite prospects.

Just Plain Folks

As for Juan Carlos, his staff loves to recite his “just-folks” style. He is a speed-demon motorcyclist who prefers sweaters to suits when he can get away with it, romps with the family’s 34 dogs, would usually rather be called Senor than Majestad, delights in plunging impulsively among the suitably astonished hoi polloi to shake hands, sends his wife and security men into nervous swivets by piloting planes and helicopters, waits patiently in ski lift lines and, according to the Wall Street Journal, once kidded President Reagan, “You call this a democracy and you can’t even drive your own car?”

Unlike his high-handed, thin-skinned Bourbon forebears, of whom Talleyrand said: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” Juan Carlos has learned well indeed. “He is not an invented king” but “a column” of government, a Spanish official said.

In Spain’s tilt-a-whirl politics, it may not be enough for Juan Carlos just to make himself useful: he must make himself necessary.

Juan Carlos’ father, Don Juan, son of the deposed King Alfonso XIII, became de facto heir after one brother was born a deaf-mute and the other two eventually died of hemophilia, the incurable blood ailment that Queen Victoria’s offspring carried to Europe’s royal houses. A visiting Russian Grand Duke said the Spanish princes played in a park where tree trunks were padded to keep the boys from hurting themselves.

In the next generation, Juan Carlos’ sister was born blind. And in 1956, his younger brother was accidentally killed as the two youths played with a gun--a trauma not mentioned in Juan Carlos’ official press biography, and one which had the prince briefly insisting he wanted to go into a monastery.

Born in exile in Rome, Juan Carlos did not set foot on Spanish soil until he was 10, under an agreement worked out between his father and Spanish dictator Francisco, who loathed each other’s politics but met on a yacht off the Iberian coast to settle the boy’s future.

In exchange for the chance of Juan Carlos’ succeeding Franco, Don Juan allowed Franco to oversee the boy’s education: a strict military one that made him the only Spaniard holding commissions in all three branches of service.

“Juan el Breve” was his derisive nickname, Juan the Brief; he would last, some said, three months. The country was ready for change. The sicker Franco got in 1975, the higher the Spanish stock market climbed.

Surprised Everyone

Juan Carlos I--”the first” is an implicit pledge that more sovereigns will reign in Spain beyond his son and heir, Felipe, Prince of Asturias, who may end up at an American university in a year or two--took to the throne and surprised everyone. Within 18 months, he had built up a head of steam, firing Franco’s prime minister while still courting the army, gingerly dismantling the Franco apparatus, approving elections for a new constitution that would reduce his vast powers.

He remains powerful--”more than the Queen of England but less than the King of Morocco,” is how one Spanish official put it.

Since his accession, Spain has been a debutante nation, reintroduced to the world after internal turmoil that had isolated it almost consistently since World War I. Now a Common Market and North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, Spain will host this fall’s world chess championships, the 1992 Olympics, Expo 1992 and all the hubbub for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America.

But it took a near-coup to test the king’s mettle and vault his image from that of an inconsequential royal dullard to the savior of Spanish democracy. Domestic turmoil that forced him to cancel his 1981 trip here culminated in the entire Spanish Parliament and Cabinet’s being seized by powerful right-wing Army officers opposed to Spain’s liberal draft.

With every other major government figure held at gunpoint, the man his family calls “Juanito” faced down the insurrection with a combination of boot-camp tough-talk from his military-school days, televised chutzpah and the canny Hapsburg politics of his ancestors.

Juan Carlos’ relief from his tense balancing act at the summit of such fractious politics is sport: squash, riding, swimming, fast driving and sailing, but he evidently sails without the queen as crew. “It leads to arguments,” she once said. “When we got engaged, we went in the boat--and I don’t know why we ever got married.”

But there is the bravura of sport, and there is bravery. Probably every vegetable grown in Spanish soil has been hurled at Juan Carlos at one time or another. As he and his wife sat grim-faced in the Basque assembly chamber in 1981, wrangling deputies threw roundhouse punches at their feet. “Over my dead body” was the phrase that he supposedly flung at rebellious officers holding Parliament and Cabinet hostage.

In Spain, that is no careless metaphor, and some have sought to take up the challenge. In 1977, a kilogram of explosives was found triggered to an overpass the king was soon to cross. “Operation Cervantes,” a 1982 plot to seize the king, was foiled when a plotter left a copy of the 600-page scheme lying unattended in his car.

Sheila Rushlow was trotting around Houston with the king’s advance planners around 4 p.m. one day, when she realized that everyone but the Americans was gone. The Spaniards had adjourned to the bar for the afternoon tipple.

“They were very easygoing--’Oh, sure, sure, that’s fine,’ ” recounted Rushlow, who had heard stories of the finicky, spit-and-polish punctilio that preceded visits by British royals. “In comparison, the Spanish were so laid back.”

The king, like many Spaniards, usually lunches around 2 p.m., afterward watching television or listening to music, including modern music, “which undoubtedly has its value,” he allowed graciously. So when Americans proposed noon-to-1:30 official lunches, “they thought: ‘Barbarians!’ ” said Rushlow. “They wanted lunch from 1:30 to 3:30 and here, everybody’s got 2 o’clock appointments.”

The hosts prevailed. Instead of stately four-course luncheons and simple broiled-fish suppers, the Spanish sovereigns were to lunch in haste and dine at leisure.

One banquet has been canceled, but not because of the royal digestion. A mere week before the San Francisco dinner, someone on Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s staff realized the mayor could not possibly host a banquet on Yom Kippur, and so the 100-guest sit-down gala hastily became a 300-guest stand-up reception. One planner blamed her appointment book, a gift from the South Koreans, which notes, naturally, Korean holidays.

Guest lists provoked a minor stir in New Mexico, where the king had asked to meet with Hispanics. The state attorney general ruled that while a cat may look at a king, a king may not look at an exclusively Hispanic crowd--not at a government function, in any case. So anyone got to send in lottery entries and from the almost 6,000 names, high school students randomly chose several hundred from a barrel.

In Los Angeles, they will visit the original city plaza to unveil a statue of Carlos III that Spain sent more than 11 years ago, tour the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, dine successively at the new Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and stop by a Sephardic synagogue, 495 years after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain.

By the time they leave the Bay Area next Saturday, the king and queen will have seen the new faces of the New World. Of the seven Western cities they will have visited, the mayors of two are women, one is black, one Latino and one is Clint Eastwood.

They will have dallied at the Alamo, heard Mass at a mission church, stopped by the 377-year-old Spanish governors’ palace in Santa Fe, toured the famous Houston medical complex that has treated Captain Kangaroo and the Shah of Iran, given new carved staffs of authority to 19 Pueblo Indian leaders, like those given to their forebears by Spanish hidalgos.

accent,on And probably ignited the New World with their warmth. In San Antonio on Sunday, as crowds shouted “ Viva Espana! “ Juan Carlos waved--but sagely did not wear--a gray felt cowboy hat and declared: “It is with great satisfaction that we visit three states in the United States where the footprints of Spain are so prominent.”

This Spanish monarch’s stately walkabouts have catapulted him to popularity in other countries where the centuries have apparently bound up the wounds of Spain’s early black-mark conquests. In Latin America as a whole, said a Spanish official whose bias must be factored in, the king is acclaimed “like Michael Jackson.”

Visited Mexico

When the sovereigns visited Mexico in 1978--a country which cut off all diplomatic ties to the Franco regime--the crowds were enormous. During a royal trip to Argentina, the wife of the leader of an ultra-right organization was so besotted with the royal aura that she offered to take the queen’s cape for her. She did. Right from the dinner reception to her closet at home, where police tracking down the missing cloak found it that night.

The only former Spanish-empire nations the king has not visited are Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile and Paraguay. So good is the king’s PR value, said a Spanish official, that Fidel Castro once telephoned to ask plaintively: “Majesty, when are you going to visit the last jewel in your crown? In Cuba we are waiting for you.”