You Can Go Home Just Ask Stars Like Jessica Lange, Who Have Decided To Return To Their Roots

Jessica Lange, religiously private, has always warmed to inquisitors familiar with Main Street in her tiny hometown of Cloquet, Minn. Indeed, days before she won her second Oscar in April, she told The Minneapolis Star Tribune that she would soon be moving back to Minnesota for good.

Though she refused to say whether she’d be returning with her longtime companion, Sam Shepard, reporters ferreted out that the actress had just spent $415,000 for a four-bedroom, four-bath farmhouse in Stillwater, population 13,800, located on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.

Lange evinced the enthusiasm of a homecoming queen as she spoke of bringing her three children to native soil from the madding crowd. “Most of my extended family still lives back there,” she said, adding that moving home “is something I’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time.”

Ever since William Faulkner returned with his typewriter and bottle to Oxford, Miss., it has been a status symbol for established artists to move back to their childhood stomping grounds.

When stars returned home after conquering New York or Hollywood, it meant they were so successful they could afford to live closer to their mothers than to their managers.

Now, thanks in part to the declining quality of life in virtually every metropolis to which ambitious young adults still migrate, an everincreasing number of 30- and 40-something expatriates are replanting themselves in home turf.

Increasingly, anecdotal evidence in the nation’s major cities suggests a new phenomenon that social scientists have termed “return migration.”

“We don’t have the studies yet to show precisely why this is happening right now,” said Diane Crispell, the executive editor of American Demographics, a magazine that reports consumer trends. “My sense is that many more adults are coming home now because so many baby boomers left in the first place than previous generations.”

Dr. Daniel Ernsberger, 35, a clinical psychologist in Queens, New York City, has noticed an upswing in the number of adults yearning to go home and said he himself would someday like to return to his native Austin, Texas.

“Between the ages of 30 and 40 is when many ambitious professionals who’ve come to New York, Los Angeles or Washington first realize that they are not heir to infinite possibilities,” Ernsberger said. “Oftentimes they’ve sacrificed their roots to get where they are, and even if they make it to the top, they realize something is missing. They want to go home, to reconnect to their family and pasts, before it’s too late.”

Mark Bolender left Seattle in 1977 for Yale University, then went to New York University Law School and eventually to work as an in-house lawyer for Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

“To a kid from Seattle,” he said, “New York was always the place where the evening news and ‘Saturday Night Live’ come from, where I always knew I could get sophisticated work.”

Still, he insisted on wearing his Seattle Mariners hat to every Rolls-Royce company picnic. “Then last year a cataclysmic event happened,” Bolender said.

“I fell in love with a woman who lived in Seattle, and we decided to get married. I looked around at my life, at how much energy I was spending to just get through the average New York day, and realized that it made sense for me to quit my job and come back.”

Bolender quickly found he could still play in the majors as a corporate litigator with a small Seattle law firm. “I have not found a lack of professional challenges,” he said.

“Our firm represents Jimi Hendrix’s father in a lawsuit to reclaim rights to the music that he inherited from his son in 1970. Jimi was a Seattle kid, too, you know! He’s buried a few miles away.”

Tim Appelo’s epiphany that it was time to exit New York after nine years and return to the Pacific Northwest, to a town 10 miles from where he grew up, came while he was beating up a Union Square subway turnstile several months ago.

Appelo, 39, at the time a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, was stomping the machine that had just eaten his token.

“After years of stepping over winos and being threatened on the subway, I just broke,” he said. “I had a friend with me visiting from out west, and he said, ‘Tim, maybe you should go back to the woods.’ He was right.” Appelo accepted a new job as the film critic at The Portland Oregonian.

He recalled that as a child he was obsessed with New York as represented by Time magazine. “I’d read about all these movies that never made it out here,” he said. What he found when he returned home for good two months ago was a new cosmopolitan Portland. He pointed out that movies open in Portland on the same weekend they do in New York. “Popular culture is much more portable than it used to be,” he said.

Repatriates are often euphoric when they first return home, especially when it comes to money. “In New York,” Appelo said, “you work like the Japanese for a lifestyle like the Russians’.”

The disorienting feeling that they’ve moved back to Our Town is part of the rush. “After living in New York, the Twin Cities feels like Mayberry,” Leslie Ball, a 40-year-old singer, said from her noonday perch in Pizza Luce, the Minneapolis cafe where she is den mother to the art crowd. “I’m definitely a bigger fish here at home.”

Growing up, Ball fantasized about one day singing at Carnegie Hall. She hit the road right after high school, recorded a couple of albums with her band, Rue Nouveau, and settled in Manhattan’s East Village.

Then, in 1991, she returned to Minneapolis for six weeks to serve as the host of an Ed Sullivan-style variety show for the avant-garde. Soon afterward, she moved home to start “Balls,” a weekly revue that has spurred the careers of several cutting-edge Midwestern performance artists.

Her latest album, “Loring Park,” is named for the Minneapolis park where Mary Tyler Moore fed the ducks in the opening sequence of her old television show.

But don’t Ball’s friends back at the very hip Knitting Factory think she’s nuts for living in Flyoverland? “I find that laughable and sort of endearing when people in New York or L.A. think they’re the center of the universe,” she said. “It’s happening wherever you happen to be - even Mayberry.”

But Mayberry isn’t for everyone. Even Barney Fife left home for the big city. Eleanor Mondale, the daughter of Walter Mondale, the ambassador to Japan, moved back to her native Minneapolis in 1989, after her marriage to Keith Van Horne of the Chicago Bears broke up.

She hadn’t lived there since 1976, when her father, then a senator from Minnesota, was elected vice president.

“Minnesota always felt warm and welcoming, a place where you could be yourself,” she said. But within months, she said, she felt she was living in “a prison made out of windows,” adding, “Gossip can be all over town in 15 minutes.”

Branded “Wild Child” on the cover of Mpls. St. Paul magazine, she left her job as a reporter at the Twin Cities CBS-TV affiliate and moved back to Los Angeles, where she is now the host of “Q & E” on the E! cable channel. “Minneapolis still kind of gives me the creeps,” she said. “What I love about L.A. is that I can be invisible.”

But for a lot of baby boomers, “Home represents safety, and people who will protect you because they know you,” Ernsberger, the psychologist, said.

Amens to that are coming from unlikely sources. Even Bruce Springsteen, the composer of “Born to Run,” the classic anthem for escaping one’s hometown, has come to a midlife reinterpretation of his song.

“This is a song about people trying to find their way home,” he told a concert crowd in Los Angeles shortly before he divorced his glamorous wife, the model and Hollywood actress Julianne Phillips, and married the singer Patti Scialfa, the patron saint of dues-paying Jersey girls everywhere.

Back in Minnesota, Jessica Lange will most likely be protected. Mike Marsnik, the editor of The Stillwater Evening Gazette, said he’ll be happy to be a good neighbor and leave their village’s most famous citizen alone when she arrives.

“I’m not much of a celebrity watcher,” Marsnik said. “I don’t get out of the office much.”