Eminentoes/ Clinton' s Expats
Reid, Stuart
London There is nothing the English like more than to beat the Americans at their own game, especially now that we can't beat anyone at our own game, cricket. You (and I) may not be greatly excited...
...As a group, they were by far the most intelligent people in Hollywood...
...There are roughly 150,000 men and women of American birth living here, among them the usual suspects: drug dealers, rock singers, New Agers, Klansmen, failed disc-jockeys, failed spies, and academics...
...They are often as much ex-patriots as expatriates, but, almost in spite of themselves, they remain incorrigibly, even obsessively, American...
...He had pieces written for him by Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold, and Arthur Benjamin...
...He is a truly gifted musician...
...Merck to come out...
...A key element of the final dispute at Time Out was that management wanted to pay some staff more than others, on the old-fashioned principle that some staff are worth more than others, while Merck & Co...
...Ruby Wax arrived here in 1972 when she was 19, and signed up with the Glasgow School of Music and Drama, where she worked tirelessly and unavailingly on her vowels...
...He has worked hard on his accent since arriving here from Massachusetts in 1972, with the result, as a wag noted recently, that he now suffers from irritable vowel syndrome...
...She proved her toughness when she joined the radical events magazine Time Out in the seventies and, as "Mother of the Chapel," helped organize a series of strikes that ended in 1981 when the entire staff was sacked...
...Adler, from Baltimore, is a household name in Britain, loved and reviled in equal measure...
...Buckley wrote in the university paper that a lawyer, who would defend Adler and Draper wasn't fit to represent Yale...
...Adler dropped names, drops names...
...I never stopped working so that I would never have to go home again," she told Lynn Barber of the Independent on Sunday...
...For years he's been bragging about the time Charlie Chaplin asked him to make up a foursome at tennis with Greta Garbo and Salvador Dali...
...Merck said last year: "Bill was the first boy I ever 'came out' to...
...Embassy and frighten the police horses...
...Just because a chap was blacklisted doesn't mean he never suffered an injustice...
...That accolade must go to Ruby Wax, a street-smart, thrice-married 40-year-old television comedian from Chicago...
...In February, the feminist publishing house Virago put out a collection of Ms...
...Plus some jolly decent types...
...However,his politics were once every bit as radical as hers...
...She started as a writer, and in the mid-eighties was given her own show...
...In the days when there was a penalty if you were, I wouldn't answer the question...
...Buckley who, unusual for a right-winger, has wit, but I'd love to know if he still stands by his anti-Voltaire opinion...
...He is, he lets it be known, on good terms with Prince Philip, though apparently not with the Queen...
...One wonders what Clinton might have done to persuade Ms...
...She has two children, Madeleine and Max...
...She reassures British people about how awful they think Americans are...
...oyd [sic] Grossman is not homeL sick...
...I was never attracted to the Communist Party...
...but none of them can be accused of peddling trash, scandal, or glitz...
...Not that she'd want to live in the United States, you understand...
...On reflection, maybe that's not funny...
...The critic Mark Lawson has part of the answer: "She is a caricature American—pushy, brash, shouting in the shops, wearing very loud outfits...
...In fact, he was just about the first person outside my circle I ever felt I could tell I was a lesbian...
...In his memoirs (published in London in 1984), Adler writes: "I've never met Mr...
...Ho, ho, ho...
...The proximate cause of Adler's flight was a court case'(not his last...
...You (and I) may not be greatly excited by Emma Thompson and her little red ribbon and her excursions into the higher banality ("You know, when you read Jane Austen, you don't actually naturally think of the slave colonies of the West Indies—but you should...
...The Britpack consists of those Brits who have landed on your teeming shore over the past ten years and now occupy positions of power and influence in journalism and publishing...
...He has the manner, bearing, and delivery of Prince Charles as played by Woody Allen...
...The law firm retained by Adler and Draper was Wiggin and Dana, of New Hampshire, which also represented Yale...
...As Ms...
...Their presence has aroused resentment, we read, though it seems to be stronger in New York than in Peoria...
...They were sometimes the most highly principled...
...W hat's more, traffic across the Atlantic goes both ways, as the saying has it...
...Times by one Hester McCullough...
...Merck's essays under the promising title, Perversions: Deviant Readings...
...In April she was in Los Angeles, working on an...
...Often I agreed with them, often I worked with them, often I found that the Communists were the only ones saying anything worth saying...
...Theirs was not a sexual relationship...
...Merck is now a visiting professor in feminist ontology, or some such...
...McCullough's favor...
...Americans are so terribly insecure . . ." Now you understand why Robin Leach has made his career in American television...
...More recently, Ms...
...My favorite workplace," she says, "is the lobby of the Hilton Hotel, which smells like America and has terrific club sandwiches...
...HBO special...
...But some American expats see themselves asrefugees from a base and unjust society and have a cloying reverence for what they see as English values, i.e., for the Welfare State and (though they are invariably liberal) for the class system...
...He has been dining out on his victim status for forty years...
...She did not shine as a classical actress—though she made a convincing wench, and still does—but discovered a talent for comedy...
...in America, she is ridiculed...
...Tina Brown, British editor of the New Yorker, and Anna "Nuclear" Wintour, British editor of American Vogue, may yield occasionally to glitz, but hardly to trash...
...What is less well.known is that among Clinton's close friends at Oxford was a fellow American, Mandy Merck, who became an archetypal professional expat and a minor success in such journals as the New Statesman and Marxism Today...
...His name was taken off the credits when it was released in America, an injustice that understandably still rankles, especially since the score was nominated for an Oscar...
...McCullough, swearing in a preliminary affidavit that they were not, and never had been, Communists...
...It is their right and I would do nothing to damage that right...
...Mind you, she is happy to risk ridicule...
...He composed the score for the 1954 hit movie Genevieve...
...The dream," she told Lynn Barber, "is to take the one-woman show to America and invite all those bitches to sit in the front row and then bring out the machine-guns—you know, the girls with the million-dollar skin and flat stomachs and the men...
...I had friends, I still have friends, who were or are Communists...
...In Britain, she says, "an eccentric is prized...
...Obviously the girl's homesick...
...In 1948 he and his partner, the dancer Paul Draper, both of whom had supported Henry Wallace, were denounced as pro-Communists in a letter to the Greenwich (Conn...
...Since in those happy and enlightened times it was not de rigueur for entertainers to be pro-Communist, Adler and Draper sued Mrs...
...To be sure, all four men, being civilized, like a bit of gossip...
...Merck has produced gay and lesbian programs for boththe BBC and Channel Four...
...Grossman likes to mock others for their lack of taste...
...It's rich on the outside," as Ruby puts it, "but they're corpses on the inside...
...So why was he not attracted to the Communist Party, given that he often worked with its members (at the height of Stalin's power) and found them intelligent and principled...
...Last year London was gloating over the success of the "Britpack...
...It would be impossible to do 'Through the Keyhole' in America," he says...
...How come she is so big here...
...Voltaire may have had his faults, but he was not stupid...
...In England, Adler cultivated the great and the good and the titled...
...Later she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company...
...The case came to the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., at that time applying his mind to God, Man, and Yale...
...Whatever, Ms...
...Remind you of anyone...
...She was, he says, "undisputably the prime mover in all our troubles, a classic case of a dilettante radical—bright and manipulative...
...She clearly thinks that, by American standards, this is both original and daring...
...L arty Adler is not the best-known American living here...
...Thus Mad Wax and Max Wax...
...With the help of a loan of £80,000 from the Greater London Council, then run by "Red" Ken Livingstone, the ex-staffers started a rival (and even more radical) events magazine, City Limits, which earlier this year went into liquidation...
...That seems a bit hard on John O'Sullivan, British editor of National Review, and on Andrew Sullivan, British editor of the New Republic, and on Alexander Chancellor, British editor of the New Yorker's Talk of the Town, and on Christopher Hitchens, British star of the Nation and Vanity Fair...
...Tony Elliott, who owns Time Out, now talks of "bloody Mandy Merck...
...Merck...
...He settled in Blighty in 1949, after fleeing Truman's anti-Communist terror...
...that there might also be an element of trash, scandal, glitz, and gossip to it...
...In the mid-sixties, a lot of Americans came over to help us riot outside the U.S...
...Adler writes in his memoirs: A large, too large, part of my life revolves around the question: Was I or was I not a Communist...
...Merck was not a woman to mess with...
...He likes to boast that some years ago he presented the Queen Mother with a mouth organ and she said: "Nobody will believe me when I tell them I have held Larry Adler's organ...
...The result of the action was a hung jury: eight to four in Mrs...
...Still, you can't argue with an Oscar, and Emma's triumph in Tinseltown was greeted here as just about our greatest achievement since Tom Jones made his first live appearance at Caesar's Palace in 1969...
...It's not just our movie stars...
...He had been a minor Hollywood figure and had been blacklisted...
...At first sight, Larry Adler would seem to have little in common with Ms...
...Then again, she's funny, after a fashion, a Roseanne Barr with nice legs and a pert, chipmunk face...
...Before he went into food TV, he had a series called "Through the Keyhole," in which he took viewers on bitchy (and often quite entertaining) tours of famous people's homes...
...What she wants is revenge...
...Pity the kids at Cornell, where Ms...
...insisted that all staff should be paid the same wage...
...Only the other day, at a seminar at Columbia University, Suzanne Braun Levine, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, raised the possibility that there was more than "class, style and elegance" to British journalism...
...Her trick is to interview and mock other show-biz stars and accost strangers in the street and ridicule them...
...Trouble is, America is so unappreciative...
...The United States may not be her cup of tea, but that is where she craves success...
...In fact, Voltaire would probably have stood by Buckley...
...He is 79, plays the harmonica, and is straight...
...That Bill Clinton was among the temporary expats is well known...
...He is a restaurant critic and host of a TV program called "Masterchef," and could pass for an Englishman—in Jersey City...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
