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  D’Annunzio utilized another potent scenic spell: nature. Dancer Isadora Duncan recalled a rendezvous with him in the forest that—perhaps evoking Dionysian rites in the wild—lifted her spirit “from this earth to the divine region.” D. H. Lawrence, no stranger to sexual myth, has Lady Chatterley experience her erotic awakening with Milord in the woods where everything is “alive and still.”

  One of America’s most noted architects and ladykillers put this erotic charge of nature to spectacular amorous ends. A short elfin man with neither looks nor wealth, Frank Lloyd Wright married three times and had numerous affairs. Women found him irresistibly magnetic, and none, writes his biographer, “ever wanted to let him go.”

  Although gallant and charming, his chief attraction was his revolutionary-design genius. Deliberately invoking the numinous aspect of setting, he brought the natural world within. In his pioneering structures he opened a room to the outside so that it resembled a “woodland chapel.”

  His female clients who saw these “artful, enchanted” places were entranced—and often with the creator himself. Mamah Cheney, a cultured Chicagoan, went further and abandoned her children and husband, running off with Wright (then married with six children) to Europe. They returned a year later, and he built a sanctuary for Cheney on two hundred acres of Wisconsin wilderness called Taliesin, named after the Welsh bard and fertility god.

  When a crazed servant burned Taliesin to the ground three years later, killing Cheney, her two children, and four workers, women flocked to console Wright. Miriam Noel, a glamorous aesthete with a monocle, led the pack. Finding Wright “unprepossessing” at first, she changed her mind after she saw one of his houses—“as lovely as a miniature Palace of Baghdad.” They married, and for seven years thereafter she alternately “kissed his feet” and tore his eyes out in jealous rages until they divorced in 1928. Wright then married a third time, a young Russian who consecrated herself to the “master” and his architectural vision for the rest of his long life.

  Setting isn’t everything; a real romance, as the song goes, doesn’t need a designer “hideaway” or “blue lagoon.” Some ladykillers such as Jimi Hendrix, Warren Beatty, and Picasso operated out of distinctly unsavory settings in their early years. Picasso’s Bateau Lavoir studio in Paris was a squalid, cold-water dump littered with garbage and half-squeezed paint tubes. A true ladies’ man upstages any stage set—regardless of the trappings.

  Nevertheless, as anthropologists say, “space speaks.” And when it functions erotically, it doesn’t need to follow formulas—deluxe spreads with expensive toys or couples’ retreats with beachfront villas and travertine soaking tubs. Instead, settings that seduce are the work of artists of ambiance—charmed sanctums designed to ravish women and raise the roof.

  Music

  A sweet voice and music are powerful enticers.

  —ROBERT BURTON, The Anatomy of Melancholy

  In the late 1950s a Massachusetts resort town had the envied reputation as a safe haven for teenagers; they sailed, danced to society bandleader Lester Lanin, and had good clean fun. Mothers used to say—justifiably—there was no sex at The Point. That is, until Bordy appeared. A Harvard freshman and poor relation of an old family, he had been given a fisherman’s shack on a cousin’s private beach for the summer. He arrived on a Vespa dressed in sandals and jeans, with bed hair, a baby face, and most lethally, a guitar on his back.

  Suddenly there were beach parties, with Bordy playing licks on his Gibson and leading the group in “Bye Bye Love” in his cashmere baritone. Nice girls clustered around and began to behave not so nicely with him behind the dunes. The yacht club lost its luster. The place to be was Bordy’s shack, listening to his walking bass versions of “Crawlin’ King Snake,” and “doing it” for the first time. He didn’t make it through Labor Day. A jealous Miss Porter’s senior made trouble, and Bordy was sent packing to the Cape to continue his sing-along seductions elsewhere.

  Music assaults the mind and torches the libido like nothing else. It’s “the most ecstatic of the arts” and inseparable from love and sex. Although a ladies’ man can manage without music, he’s passing up a prime aphrodisiac. Women have a keener, more refined sense of hearing—a subtler ear for higher tones and auditory nuances—and have been serenaded into bed since the dawn of culture. In studies they rank men sexier after listening to rock anthems. Music is “the food of love”—an entrée laced with deep elixirs.

  The fourth-century author of the Indian Kāma Sūtra was insistent on the subject. “It’s a matter of experience,” he preached, “that music reaches the center of female sexuality.” For that reason, men must prepare themselves accordingly—learn to sing, play string and percussion instruments, and master the “science of sounds.” One medieval caliph was so alarmed by the female weakness for music that he tried to ban it from the land: it loosened “self-control,” incited lust, and led to “unacceptable practices.”

  Why music churns up such an erotic tumult is still uncertain. A melody or cadenza, for instance, can “rattle” us “to the core,” “raise gooseflesh,” and render us “almost defenseless.” One explanation is music’s ability to express the inexpressible emotional life; another is its whole-brain engagement and precision punch to the limbic nodes where we experience sex and cocaine highs.

  Darwin proposed an evolutionary answer; music, he conjectured, originated to charm the opposite sex. Male rutting calls pervade the animal kingdom: whales sing to females miles away, frogs croak, cats caterwaul, crickets whirr, and fruit flies vibrate their wings like scrapers in a jug band. Very likely, Pleistocene men followed the same courtship strategy, staging drum, whistle, and clapstick jamborees to seduce women.

  Music’s erotic force may also derive from the sacred. At the earliest rites, worshippers channeled cosmic sexual energy through concerts of bone flutes, rattles, tom-toms, and bull roarers. If we’re all alloys of our ancestral past, we may still hear subliminal echoes of the sex gods’ pipes and drums—Krishna’s flute that seduced nine hundred thousand cowgirls or Dionysus’s haunting aulos and tambourines. Orpheus, an avatar of Dionysus, charmed stones, beasts, and the beautiful Eurydice through the strains of his lyre.

  The sorcery persists. Salman Rushdie’s Orpheus, Ormus Cama in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, maddens women and makes sidewalks sway with his music. An opera’s “diabolic” force drives the librettist of Doris Lessing’s Love, Again into a passion for two men, one half her age. And the “Kreutzer Sonata” of Tolstoy’s novella so enraptures a wife when she plays it with her violin teacher that her husband kills her in a jealous rage.

  Music can be just as ecstatic in a mellower mode; a slow, steady womb-beat rhythm is intensely seductive. The fairy-tale Beast soothes Beauty with soft airs over dinner, and Nicholas woos the rich miller’s wife in The Canterbury Tales by playing a dulcet “Angelus” on his harp. Tea Cake’s largo blues piano lulls Janie into his arms in Their Eyes Were Watching God. However they do it—whether through easy-listening music or tempestuous pulse-racers—ladykillers bewitch women through their ears; one romance novel even comes with a CD by the “hero.”

  Lovers have always been wise to the effect of music on women. During the reign of courtly love and throughout the Renaissance, a man was expected to be musically proficient to earn a woman’s regard. Men who can play anything—the violin like Casanova or the saxophone like Bill Clinton—hold a strong charm card. When Warren Beatty was a bit actor with acne, he won Hollywood beauty Joan Collins by improvising at a baby grand during a party.

  Franz Liszt was one of the great musical seducers, a pianist and composer who touched off a “Lisztmania” throughout nineteenth-century Europe. At his concerts, this bravura showman performed with such soul-sizzling passion that women went wild. “Trembling like poor little larks,” they stalked him, fought over his discarded orange rinds, tucked his cigar butts in their cleavages, and swamped him with love letters. Too kind-hearted to decline, he took droves of lovers, two of whom left
their husbands for him and forgave his many transgressions. In old age, women were still “perfectly crazy over him,” twice threatening him with loaded pistols to regain his favors.

  His closest twentieth-century counterpart was conductor Leopold Stokowski. Tall, blond, and as handsome as a central-casting Viking, “Stoki” combined titanic musical gifts with torrid sex appeal. His prospects were not promising when he first appeared in New York City in 1905 as a poor organist at St. Bartholomew’s Church with just four years’ training at the Royal College of Music in London. He had only three assets: tremendous talent; a dramatic, virtuoso delivery; and a flair for women.

  Within a year, he had conquered the famous concert pianist Olga Samaroff, who married him and gave up her career to foster his. He went on to become conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra—as well as a high-profile ladies’ man. His caprices were so numerous that the Curtis Institute of Music (where he taught part-time) was called the “Coitus Institute.” Eventually his wife left him. By then, he was the toast of the music world, a celebrity known for his iconoclastic innovations such as freehand conducting and fortissimo finales, which were compared to “twenty-two minute orgasms.”

  His love life matched his music. At forty-four he dropped a nineteen-year-old debutante to enter into an open marriage with maverick aviator and spiritualist Evangeline Johnson, heiress of the Johnson & Johnson fortune. Convinced that Stoki required affairs to fuel his music, she looked the other way for eleven years. Then came the screen siren Greta Garbo, who saw Stokowski conduct and was electrified. Their much-publicized romance was too much even for Evangeline, and she divorced him in 1937. His third marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt lasted seventeen years, after which he retired to England in the company of two handmaidens from the “Coitus Institute.” He continued, “glamorous to the end,” enamoring women and making spectacular music until he died at ninety-five.

  There are other ways to make spectacular music. The male voice in song can be as seductive as an orchestra in full Wagnerian flight. The root meaning of enchant, incantare, is to bewitch through singing. In ancient Rome a young patrician heard a suitor sing to her and decompensated: “I am undone,” she cried to her sister. “Oh how sweetly he sings! I die for his sake.” Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss is overtaken by the “inexorable power” of a gallant’s “fine bass voice,” and never recovers.

  Frank Sinatra, a songmeister and seducer of the first order, should have been a Darwinian discard. Skinny and jug-eared with a “dese-dose” accent and Hoboken address, Sinatra began his career with a string of failed employment attempts and an empty wallet. But as soon as he stood up and sang in those early dives, “broads swarmed over him.” He “wasn’t the best singer in the world,” but he had “dick in [his] voice,”—a lush, intimate lyricism—and used the microphone “like a girl waiting to be kissed.”

  Women were insane for him. They snatched his handkerchiefs, begged barbers for his hair clippings, bared their bras for autographs, and threw themselves in front of his car. Although a difficult man by any gauge—subject to temper tantrums, mood swings, and capricious no-shows—he was a love pasha. To seduce a woman, he would tilt back in a chair, hot-eye her, and sing, “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren, and Marlene Dietrich adored him. His second of four wives, Ava Gardner, hyperventilated: “Oh god, it was magic. And god almighty things did happen.”

  Smart lovers envelop girlfriends and wives in a sonic bath of sensual melody and song. “Sing,” Ovid exhorted, “if you have any voice.” As the sign in a St. Thomas music store says, “No matter how ugly you are, if you play the guitar, you’ll have a way with women.” “Love,” wrote Elizabethan amorist Robert Burton, “teacheth music.”

  Kinetic Voodoo: Body Language and Dance

  You got to let your body talk.

  —DADDY DJ

  Psychologist and ladies’ man Jack Harris doesn’t simply walk into a room; he glides. He settles on the sofa, pulls a leg under him, stretches an arm over the back cushion, and pins you with his eyes. Reminiscing about his romantic life, he begins, “It sort of exploded in my thirties, and I’ll tell you what it was: dancing.” It happened, he says, by accident. During a teaching stint in San Antonio he wandered into a bar and discovered Tejano, a South Texas couples’ dance that involves complex spins and fancy footwork. One of his students offered to teach him. “It was amazing,” he recalls, “when you dance it’s like turning on a light. If you’re a good dancer—and I am a good dancer—women want to dance with you, and the attraction ensues from that.”

  Body Language

  Bodily movements may appeal to the eye quite as much as bodily proportions.

  —THEODOOR HENDRIK VAN DE VELDE, Ideal Marriage

  Ladies’ men are kinesthetic shamans, masters of body movement and (usually) dance. “Besides spoken language,” proclaims the Kāma Sūtra, “there is also a language of parts of the body.” Gifted lovers are fluent in this idiom. As well they should be: women have an enhanced ability to decipher gesture, posture, and facial expressions, and psychologists estimate that 50 to 90 percent of our communication, especially in romantic relationships, is nonverbal. Ovid understated when he told trainees, “You can say a lot with gesture and eye.”

  Our faces do most of the talking. In the first three or four seconds of meeting a man, a woman will subject him to a face scan, spending 75 percent of the time on his mouth and eyes. Within five minutes she will have sized him up. And it’s curtains if he gives her a frozen poker face. Women like features that are plastic, expressive, and vibrant.

  Eyes are heavy artillery, “the purest form of seduction.” Ancient cultures such as classical Greece thought they possessed occult powers and could infect the unwary with an airborne “bacillus eroticus.” Kama, the Hindu god of love, directed his gaze at victims and they swooned with desire, while Dionysus radiated the light of Aphrodite from his eyes.

  Some men just know how to look at a woman. They create a “lustline”—they gaze a fraction longer and tight focus as if she’s the only person in sight. Love giants like Aly Khan, actor Richard Burton, and reggae singer Bill Marley were renowned for their “eye sex.” Lord Byron’s trademark was his infamous “underlook”—his upper lids lowered at a woman as though he were in the throes of sexual excitement. Women, significantly, rank men’s eyes as their favorite feature.

  At the same time, women watch men’s mouths with “close attention.” If a man is interested, his lips will part slightly, redden, and engorge. Nineteenth-century female fans loved poet Alfred de Musset’s full “vermillion lips,” and modern romance readers demand descriptions of a hero’s mouth. Dallas Beaudine’s looks like it belongs “on a two-hundred-dollar whore” in Fancy Pants, and the heroine can “barely breathe” when he smiles.

  A smile is a female sweet spot. The genuine “Duchenne” kind, where cheeks lift, teeth flash, and eyes crinkle, is a “powerful courtship cue.” Brian, the New York banker, says he is a compulsive smiler; instinctively, he insists, it sets up an attraction and a smile-back reflex. Warren Beatty, like so many darlings of women, gives “the best smile in the whole world.”

  Herbert Beerbohm Tree owed much of his romantic (and professional) success to his mastery of facial expression. Founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and His Majesty’s Theater, he was a luminary in Edwardian England, both as a manager and character actor and as a world-class Casanova. In his youth, he pored over Darwin’s Expressions of the Emotions, and soon became fabled in the theater for his protean impersonations. Seducers were Tree’s specialty.

  Off stage, he practiced what he played. He had a preternatural ability to fascinate and draw women. Although he was nothing to look at—a tall, rawboned man with red hair and sand-colored skin—his eyes were extraordinarily “expressive and alert,” and were said to have “transfixed” his wife, actress Helen Maud Holt, into marrying him.

  He used them to the same ero
tic effect on mistresses, including leading ladies and a secret second wife who bore six of his ten children. One inamorata said he seduced her at a spa simply by gazing at her like a “true artist”—with “deep admiration.” At close quarters even great actors can’t fake this; involuntary micro-expressions give us away. Tree genuinely loved women.

  In seduction, the entire body gets in on the act. Gestures have to work in sync and send the same message. Every courtship move—open palms, subtle shrugs, posture mirroring, taut carriage—has to match the love language of the face. And to enrapture, it should be done with grace and feeling. Tree finessed this art as well, captivating women through his eloquent hands, “cat-footed” stride, and regal carriage.

  The male animal in motion has a primal hold on the female libido, harking back to the remote past when men strutted on sexual parade grounds to procure women. In studies, women show distinct preferences in men’s gait; they favor a long, light step, swaying torso, and assertive arm swing. Rhett Butler rivets Scarlet with his “lithe, Indian-like” walk, and the young officer of A Hero of Our Time has a “careless, lazy” stroll that captivates belles at a Caucasus resort. Writer Katherine Mansfield recalled being spellbound by a stranger’s walk: “I watched the complete rhythmic movement, the absolute self-confidence, the beauty of his body, and [felt] that excitement which is everlasting.”

  Zsa Zsa Gabor claimed that Porfirio Rubirosa snagged her just by the “primitive” way he sauntered across the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel with an “intriguing spring” in his step. It was no accident. Rubi cultivated the art of movement. From adolescence, he studied every sport—boxing, fencing, swimming, and horsemanship—and kept limber with yoga.