Celebrity Émigrés at London Are Losing Their Glam — and Signify a Closing of the Mind

It’s long been a more unattractive aspect of a certain sort of snooty Brit to quote the statistic that only 10 percent of Americans possess passports. This may have been true in the 20th century, but the proportion is now around half the population; slightly less than the U.K. and slightly more than France.One can see why Americans chose to stay at home all that time, though, while Britons were forever sailing off to faraway places with strange-sounding names. We are a small island, with regions roughly alike in climate (Wales wetter, Scotland colder, southern England smug about being slightly more sunny) with a scattering of beautiful beaches, a few dozen high mountains, and a small area of wilderness; you contain multitudes.Americans have grizzly bears searching through suburban dustbins; we quarrel for decades about reintroducing beavers into nature reserves. If I’d been born into a country with such vastness and contrast as the USA, I’m not sure I’d be that keen to pay good money in order to toddle off into a world that seems to blame my nation for everything.Nevertheless, Americans have shown an admirable interest in travel throughout their short time as a people. Henry James was a great chronicler of Americans abroad on the “vast, vague and dazzling” old continent; in modern times, one thinks of the 20,000 American students a year in the 1950s who enjoyed “broadening” trips to Europe, wherein for around a thousand dollars a long vacation could be combined with, say, a course in art appreciation.American youth could also be dispatched to the shadows of the Old World if their behavior did not quite match up to the sunlit standards of the New; the Ripley books, beginning in the 1950s, chronicle the lives of un-Americans in Europe, in imitation of their similarly shady creator Patricia Highsmith, who lived most of her adult life in France and Switzerland.With the growth of cheaper international travel, Europe became accessible to an ever-wider swathe of Americans; the 1969 film “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” featured a cast of comedians careering through nine European countries in 18 days. The Swinging Sixties, with their spiritual home in London, tipped the balance of American desire from Paris; my second set of in-laws read about Free Love, sold their St. Louis nightclub, and came straight to London without knowing anyone.Paris has always had a strong pull on the American imagination, perhaps to do with old ideas of French licentiousness and American puritanism. “When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” Oscar Wilde said in “The Picture Of Dorian Gray”; would “Emily In London” have the same appeal as “Emily In Paris”?Our common language will always be a draw; after a few months in the French capital, Henry James wrote to his brother, “I desire only to feed on English life and the contact of English minds — I wish greatly I knew some.” A year later he had been a dinner guest in more than a hundred English homes, alongside luminaries from Gladstone to Tennyson; London was already “the place in the world in which I feel most at home.”Then there’s the romantic angle; for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, a British accent coming out of a man’s mouth can cover a multitude of sins when it comes to English teeth and other uglinesses, from “Dollar Princess” heiresses coming over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to bag an aristo (it was claimed that wealthy American girls “married more than a third of the House of Lords”) to the scene in “Love, Actually,” where the English nerd becomes the object of desire of a trio of American sirens in a bar. Now the standard has dropped considerably, finding the ghastly Lena Dunham both living and working here, her new television show, the London-set “Too Much,” recently debuting on Netflix.In Ms. Dunham we see both the personal and political reasons why modern Americans come to Blighty; yes, she followed a man here (bad feminist) but she also came here as a protest against the first election of Trump (good feminist) initially threatening to move to Canada before declaring: “I can survive staying in my country, to fight and love and use my embarrassment of blessings to do what’s right.”Unfortunately, she ended up here in Britain instead, like quite a few of her ilk: The BBC reports how a 22-year-old student from Maryland, Morgan Grant, got her first passport this month. For her, it was a political decision. “I feel like I need an option to get out … if this man [President Trump] is going to keep on tweeting at Kim Jong-un about his nuclear button, I need an option to leave.”Whatever. It’s fair to say that while celebrity émigrés to these islands used to be glam legends (from Ava Gardner to Chrissie Hynde) they’re now grotty leftovers (from Ellen de Generes to Rosie O’Donnell). Once Americans in London represented “a willingness of the heart,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in a wider context — now they signify a closing of the mind. We far prefer our regular American tourists; they may block up the streets a bit, but they don’t bore us all witless with utterly cliched declamations of fealty — soon to be pivoted on, no doubt, come the next Democratic president, whenever that may be.

Celebrity Émigrés at London Are Losing Their Glam — and Signify a Closing of the Mind

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