AN AMERICAN WOMAN’S VIEW OF LONDON.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3345, 11 October 1911, Page 7

AN AMERICAN WOMAN’S VIEW OF LONDON.

Miss Eva Tanguay, America’s leading music hall actress, has just returned from a ten days’ visit to London and Paris with some startling views on those two cities. Miss Tanguay’s salary, which is half as much again as 4 that of the President of the United States (£20,000), gives her the right, according to Amerian ideas, to make known her opinions about Europe. “I must say I don’t think much of Europe,” she told an interviewer. “Take London. Everything is so horribly old and dingy. Why, there is Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen live. It is black and grimy and dilapidated, instead of being beautiful white marble, the way you would suppose it ought to be. Honestly, it is a sight, and New York would never stand it. - Over there, we do not let buildings get old; we tear them down before they have been up ten years, and put up nicer ones. “I suppose there are people in London who have money, but it is the dingiest, dirtiest, most crowded together, poverty-stricken place I ever saw. And you might as well try to buy a diamond as a piece of ice. , We could not get anything cold. We would order beer, and say: ‘We do not care how much we pay for- it, but we want-it' iced.’ Then they would bring us something that was the temperature of hot water. “Paris is more like New York. The women are better looking, than English women, only they make up too much. Fancy, one sees women in the street m the morning with dark blue streaks on their eyelids and their mouths covered with lip rouge, and actually wearing pendant diamond ear-rings! “We know more about clothes in New York than y Paris ever dreamed of. I did not buy one thing while I was away, and certainly if any one is on the look out for novelties I’m it. But I did not see a thing worth getting. The French men have a silly way of walking along the streets with their arms around the women’s waists. It is conspicuous and ill-bred in my opinion. And everywhere one sees people doing acrobatic ‘stunts’ on the. street corners whom the New York police would arrest as public nuisances (Miss Tanguay was in Paris on 14th July, and evidently mistook the celebrations on that day _ for the normal condition of Parisian life). “The Bois de Boulogne simply is not in it with Fifth Avenue. Their parks are such messy things. They leave the grass long and last year’s leaves on the ground, and they do not have pretty flower beds and shrubs as we do. There is not a street tram car in the place, and the omnibuses are so high and bumpy. To digest the cooking one needs the stomach of an ostrich. Tlhe young women smoke in all "the publie places—another thing do not. do in New York. The men are silly little dudes, absolutely impracticable. And there is not a building in Paris that is over four storeys in height. The best way to become a good American is to go abroad.”