Eminentoes /Hugh Embarrassment
Steyn, Mark
Hugh Embarrassment by Mark Steyn H ugh Grant's sin was a simple one: he acted "out of character." Or as David Letterman put it: "If Tom Arnold and Hugh Grant were making a movie and afterwards one...
...Hugh Grant now has Michael Jackson's lawyer...
...that prompted Grant and Defense Minister Lord Lambton and Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Allan Green to seek the company of whores...
...and that sent Arts Council chairman the Earl of Gowrie to Camden Town massage parlors in his lunchtimes...
...In both of them, Grant gives exactly the same performance as in Four Weddings, but with one difference: he's the designated dork, just another 38 The American Spectator September 1995 repressed English sexual incompetent who can't satisfy his wife...
...Arnold could get away with patronizing hookers, just as his ex-wife Roseanne got away with being a hooker, recycling her prostitution experiences through a bestselling memoir and a zillion talk-show confessionals...
...What happened with Four Weddings was that, opposite an American leading lady, Grant suddenly became the repository of an absurd romantic idealization of Englishness by jaded American moviegoing females...
...Twenty-three minutes after his arrest, a fax from the LAPD publicity department (a mind-boggling concept) detailing his "lewdconduct" arrived at the London Times...
...He was supposed to be as wholesome as Doris Day, and Doris doesn't go cruising for midnight cowboys...
...it's entirely consistent with the role Grant played in Four Weddings...
...My life was so much better before all this...
...Last year, when Moore's latest starlet fiancée called the Malibu cops over an incident of pre-spousal abuse, it was seen in Britain as the logical summation of Dud's appalling wannabe-Hollywood ambition...
...This side of Grant isn't "out of character...
...On the other hand, the British were amazed when the Americans gave an Oscar to Emma Thompson, an object of routine derision in her native land...
...In Britain, they scoffed, "God, can you believe Hugh Grant's a star in America...
...None of it is worth it...
...He was a member of the Piers Gaveston Society, named after King Edward II's sodomite boyfriend...
...and he is under pressure to formalize his problem and submit to redemption-by-talk-show...
...we send you our jokes and you treat them as celebrities...
...Indeed, though Grant was a natural, he'll never be allowed to be again...
...privately, he knew it was a huge joke...
...The last British actor to find fame as a Hollywood leading man, Dudley Moore, earned only the contempt of his friends...
...But the British could have warned them beforehand...
...I suppose," said his old partner Peter Cook, sympathetically, "if you're a lower-middle-class midget from Dagenham with a club foot, being a Hollywood star must seem quite a good deal...
...And I'd like to think that when he pulled up on the strip and counted out his 60 bucks he was indulging in a quintessentially British act of parody celebrity, that he was thinking, "Golly, I'm in Hollywood...
...The underside of that self-deprecating charm is the stunted sexuality that leads so many well-bred Englishmen to separate their social partnerships from their sexual ones...
...Every star persona is a concoction, but Grant's, uniquely, was invented by his American public, and imposed on him from seven thousand miles away...
...Now his female admirers have discovered that, when it comes to sexual relations with women, the endearing Brit prefers the same detached, unfelt, transitory exchanges as Rob Lowe, Charlie Sheen, Chuck Robb, President Clinton, and all the other celebrity clods with four-alarm fires in their trousers...
...In England, where every man is gay or feels obliged to pretend to be, this is all perfectly normal...
...Nobody knew or cared about me," he moaned to a British friend after his arrest...
...Invited to weigh a ten-minute quickie with Miss Brown against what's happened since, his countrymen would have no problem deciding which conduct is the lewder...
...there are pictures of him in lip gloss and fishnet stockings, and some rather more active snaps rumored to be in the safekeeping of Lord Moyne's son...
...Bruce Willis doesn't do fishnets...
...In Britain, there is only parody celebrity, and heaven help anyone who doesn't treat it assuch...
...I don't mean that he has penetrative sex with other men...
...In an age when most leading men are muscle-bound bozos with the sexual charisma of Timothy McVeigh, Grant was sweet, Mark Steyn hosts this summer's Glyndebourne Opera broadcasts on Channel 4 in Britain...
...Just a year or so ago he had a minor part in a BBC radio serial, earning little more per episode than the 60 bucks he allegedly paid Miss Devine Brown for their brief encounter on Sunset Boulevard...
...But after the spin-doctors have completed their exhaustive campaign of image retrieval, I'll bet his sense of self-loathing is even greater...
...I knew him at Oxford and he was such a prat...
...Not surprisingly, America's womanhood is feeling suckered...
...He soon wised up, of course...
...but that off-screen he pouts and flounces and queens and camps and minces and limp-wrists his way around the room calling himself "Hughie-poos" and everybody else "sweetie...
...Look at his previous films, the Australian Sirens and Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon...
...self-deprecating, droll, sensitive., The screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the film that brought the floppy-fringed English charmer to stateside stardom, says that of all the rules for making a successful British movie, the only one that counts is to put Hugh Grant in it, because every moviegoing female in America wants to sleep with him...
...But it backfired in ways he could never have imagined...
...Hughie Goes To Hollywood" provides an instructive lesson both in American attitudes to British sex and British attitudes to American celebrity...
...But Hugh Grant...
...he has anonymous gagmen providing him with cringe-making, labored lines to shoehorn into appearances on "The Tonight Show...
...I bet this is what Rob Lowe would do...
...Or as David Letterman put it: "If Tom Arnold and Hugh Grant were making a movie and afterwards one of them was arrested with a hooker, I think we'd all assume it was my first guest . . . Tom Arnold...
...Like most public schoolboys who drift into acting, Grant's socially homosexual...
...In Hugh Grant, those uniquely virulent strains of dysfunctionalism ancient and modern—traditionally repressed English upbringing, American celebrity excess—have combined in fatal congress...
...But it is not the stuff of Hollywood stardom...
...S o it was with Grant: at American dinner parties, women cooed, "Isn't Hugh Grant so sexy...
...that enticed the Duchess of York's father to the dubious pleasures of the Wigmore Club...
...He's being managed and massaged back to respectability, closeted away with guys it must turn his stomach to be in the same room with...
...When damage limitation experts urge Grant to announce a sequel to Four Weddings, they're missing the point: that little stopover on Sunset is the sequel—and all too predictable...
...And, as he's being pimped around the talk-show circuit, the awful truth must surely dawn on him—he is the prostitute now...
...he has Richard Lovett, a Hollywood legend in the racket of "career re-positioning...
...It was the London tabloids that transformed Michael Jackson into Wacko Jacko and blew open the child abuse allegations, tracking down any embittered 12-year old with a story to sell...
...Indeed, the Anglo-American cultural relationship as a whole could be put this way: you send usyour celebrities and we treat them as jokes...
...CI The American Spectator September 1995 39...
...G rant was larky enough to avoid the Dud trap...
...It doesn't matter back home...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
