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  A fight with Byron, though, was a bad idea. There was no hearing the other side, no dousing the flames with the balm of understanding and sober restraint. He once handled a spat with his wife by hurling a clock to the floor and smashing it to bits with a poker. Lady Caroline Lamb was driven to such desperation by his silent treatment in a quarrel that she threatened him with a dinner knife at a London ball, then stabbed her hand and dashed bleeding from the room.

  He may not have always been a sexual standout either. Stories abound of his exploits and of the women unable to stay out of his bed, like Mary Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who begged to spend the night with him, succeeded, and followed him to Italy for more. But he treated his wife on occasion with a lack of finesse—deflowering her without ceremony on the sofa before the wedding and taking her a tergo by surprise one night.

  Despite all this—his therapeutically incorrect behavior and complex, uncooperative nature—Byron was a “loveable man,” swamped by women and cherished by them. His wife rolled hysterically on the floor in an “agony of regret” when they parted; Caroline Lamb never fully recovered and grew ill after he died at thirty-six. His last mistress of five years, Countess Teresa Guiccioli, made a pilgrimage to pray at his grave, and as a Parisian hostess in her fifties she placed a portrait of Byron in her salon before which she said to anyone who would listen, “How beautiful he was! Heavens, how beautiful!”

  Ladies’ men rarely meet relationship doctors’ standards. They are off the therapeutic drawing board. Modernist painter Willem de Kooning, for example, was uncommunicative and wrapped up in himself and his work—a “little boy” who required a succession of female nurturers. Yet he was a sex-meteor of the art scene, a delicious lover who “let women come to him.”

  Many Casanovas flunk the fight test too. Frank Sinatra had a short fuse and an anger-management problem. He raved, broke the furniture, and once in a fury, fired a gun into the mattress. But nothing stopped the female stampede. Said Ava Gardner, his second wife, “I wanted to punch him, but forgave him in about twenty-five seconds.”

  Nor are great seducers by the book in bed. Casanova tailored each tryst to the lady’s taste and brought raw, unscripted lust to the bedroom. The “amazing lover” Jack Nicholson focused less on technique than creative whoopee in the rack: whole-hog fun, nude gambols in the kitchen, and dedication to a woman’s “total pleasure.”

  Relationship counselors concede that they can’t manufacture passion. Their goal is companionate accord, grown-up, workable, peaceful coupledom. Their ladies’ man is a careful-what-you-wish-for artifact—a sexless android programmed for a stressed, overtaxed female population. The therapy model has also been constructed in the absence of evidence—actual Casanovas, the real hot hands with women.

  Counterfeit Ladies’ Men

  Besides the overt stereotypes—the satanic seducer, Darwinian stud, player, and couples’ therapy heartthrob—there is a subtler, more ubiquitous distortion of the ladies’ man: the media-spun love god so often mistaken for the genuine article. People magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” issue with its cover men and breathless captions (“Star Leaves Women Saying ‘Oh . . . My . . . God!”) may be good public relations, but it’s an unreliable guide to ladykillers. Who knows if George Clooney or Matthew McConaughey is a great lover? Both are sleekly packaged products of the studio system, mirage men designed to sell movies and TV series. In fact, Valentino was a dud as a lover, and Cary Grant, who lived for years with Randolph Scott, was probably gay. John F. Kennedy, on inspection, bombed in bed, objectified women, and preferred the company of men.

  Some so-called ladies’ men, like matinee idol Errol Flynn, were twisted beyond romantic redemption. His epic dissipations effectively canceled out his beauty, sexual prowess, and allure. He not only had dark dealings with Nazi criminals and the New Guinea slave trade, he treated women (and boys) like “bog paper,” preyed on underage girls, and engaged in such pranks as masturbating into an omelet he was preparing for guests.

  Other famed “seducers” of history fail the grade for the same reason. The boorish seventeenth-century Lord Rochester died at thirty-three of drink, debauch, and syphilis; the marquis de Sade glutted his jaded appetite with near-death flagellations of destitute poules; and painter Modigliani battered and abused women, tearing a lover’s dress apart in public, throwing another through a closed window, and boasting to the concierge that he was just “beating [his] mistress like a gentleman.”

  Real Ladies’ Men

  With so many false images of the ladies’ man obscuring the picture, it’s no wonder we can’t see him straight. Once we clear away the accumulated myths and cultural baggage, we can get a truer look at this great seducer. Women love him for a reason: he adores them and their society and knows what they yearn for and rarely get. Although hardly an Eagle Scout, he’s not close to his stereotypes, negative or otherwise. He transcends easy generalizations and defeats categories—the angel/devil, wuss/he-man polarities—and personifies complexity.

  Ladykillers run the gamut. They include every conceivable breed and condition of man. Spanning the social spectrum, they range from blue-collar Romeos with pinkie rings to polo-playing plutocrats. In personality they can be flamboyant extroverts like twentieth-century conductor Leopold Stokowski or bookish introverts like Aldous Huxley. Age has little bearing: Casanova and pianist Franz Liszt were as devastating to the female sex at age sixty as they were at sixteen. And no profession, from diplomats, generals, and financiers to freelancers of all stripes—artists, actors, cab drivers, and flâneurs—is exempt.

  Heartbreakers encircle the globe and extend throughout history. They go back at least as far as King Gilgamesh of Sumer in 4000 BC (so ravishing, the sex goddess tried to bribe him into bed), and continue until the present. Seemingly a universal archetype, they turn up everywhere: east, west, on the steppes of Russia, and in the south side of Chicago.

  Preferences do fluctuate. The Romantic era, for example, favored melodrama in its ladies’ men—tears, duels, operatic declarations, and histrionics—while the 1990s fancied irony and sophistication. A woman’s proclivities may change too over a lifetime, with a penchant for authority and experience in youth and all-stops-out frolics later on.

  Yet despite these fluctuations of erotic taste and the wide variety of men, Casanovas share an unusual cluster of similarities, both in personality and amorous artistry. Again and again, the same qualities resurface, whether at the court of Louis XV or a twenty-first-century singles’ bar. They’re not bulleted in any ladykiller literature; they’re one of the best-kept secrets among men who bewitch women.

  With a few tools and clues, we can try to crack these secrets. We’ll find some specimens—ladies’ men past and present—and subject them to scrutiny. We’ll anatomize the man, his charisma and character. What exactly is his seemingly innate shazam, and those acquired traits women find so irresistible? In the second part we’ll home in on the way it’s done, how the great lovers heart-hook women, from the charms of the senses to the more sophisticated arts of perpetual passion. Here we’re in unfamiliar territory, beyond conventional love manuals into little-known erotic artistry of an advanced order.

  At the end, we’ll take stock, survey the contemporary culture, and see where and if ladies’ men fit in. A roundtable of today’s savviest women will join the debate. What would a Casanova of tomorrow look like? To begin, though, we have to restore the original. It’s just a question of scouring off the detritus of fallacies, canards, and caricatures. Let’s bring him into the light, and feast our eyes.

  PART ONE

  —

  Anatomy

  OF THE

  Great Seducers

  CHAPTER 1

  Charisma:

  LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE

  –

  He had like a halo around his head of stars.

  —MISS MARYLAND ABOUT FRANK SINATRA, Vancouver Sun

  Father “Jake” was a priest without borders. He had
seen and done it all: served prisoners and gangsters, worked in slums, heard confessions in bars, run a nonprofit restaurant, and counseled Kennedys, royalty, and superstars. If anyone knew men, he did. But he was at a loss about Rick the fire captain. “I don’t know . . . ,” he told me on the phone. “Rick has something. What? I have no idea. I mean, we used to have coffee at this little place on MacDougal Street, and the women! They sort of appeared and were all over him.”

  A month later, Rick arrives at my door and boom-ting: there’s that certain “something.” He’s perhaps in his late sixties, with a square cartoon-cop’s face, and eyes that sparkle like black mica. He’s a powerful presence, a man who gives off licks of electricity. Over a glass of port (his present), I finally ask, What is it about him that sets off women?

  He’s not much help. He leans back, cracks a smile, and reminisces. Years ago, he recalls, he got lost in a maze of back streets in Dublin when a young blonde approached and asked if she could help. He invited her to lunch, and two hours later they were in his hotel room and “naked in three minutes.” “But here’s the thing,” he says, “every time I go to Dublin to this day, I see her. She’s just a lovely person.”

  Maybe he knows and isn’t telling, or maybe he’s just as baffled as everybody else about charisma, that je ne sais quoi some people radiate. Within seconds, we feel it; we’re fascinated and strangely elated. Normally associated with politicians and media personalities, charisma has been studied, lab-tested, and reduced to a familiar formula: self-confidence, an aura of authority, and communicative brilliance.

  Many experts, however, caution that the spell cast by people is “a very complex one,” especially in charismatic ladies’ men. As psychoanalyst Irvine Schiffer observes, sexual spellbinders are a subtle species—less cocksure than diffident, unassured, and enigmatic. Yale professor Joseph Roach thinks contradiction is at the core of “It,” a play of opposite personality traits that transfixes us. Mythologists stress the impact of early deities and the primordial shaman, “the charismatic figure par excellence.” These priest-magicians who engineered ecstasy and channeled cosmic sexual energy, they claim, still have a powerful hold on the collective unconscious.

  There is no agreement on any front. Charisma, notes The Social Science Encyclopedia with studied understatement, is “one of the more contentious” issues. But you can’t mistake men with that wow factor. They crackle, they phosphoresce, they create a whirlpool of sexual allure that sucks up every woman in sight. Why, we may never know for sure. We can, though, mine the available knowledge on the subject and gain some hints. We can analyze the ladies’ men’s allure and zero in on the mystery—the tidal pull to that man across a crowded room.

  Élan

  If you can’t live with gusto, find another guy.

  —ADAGE

  The man was poor, semi-employed, and lived in the seediest part of Venice Beach. Patti Stanger of The Millionaire Matchmaker would have kicked him to the curb. By all rights, Marisa Belger wouldn’t have looked at him either; she was a bookish freelance writer and international traveler from a world of privilege. But Paul blew her away with his surging élan and “firecracker sense of humor.” He boogied like James Brown, played guitar, and made her laugh so hard she ached. She had never met a family like his, a large Irish clan who whooped, made music, and danced on tabletops. The most alive man in the room, Paul infected everyone with his vitality. When he asked her to marry him, she said, “Yes, yes, yes. I would be honored and humbled to spend my life with you.”

  Joie de vivre packs huge sexual charisma. As Mae West quipped, “It’s not the men in my life; it’s the life in my men.” German nineteenth-century sociologist Max Weber identified charisma with the life force, “the thrust of the sap of the tree and the blood in the veins.” Exuberance and eros are cross-wired in our brains. When we’re passionately in love, we’re flooded with euphoria; it’s like an adrenaline hit, say scientists, that induces a giddy, near-manic high. Philosopher José Ortega y Gasset even defines love as a “splendid triggering of human vitality.”

  As an aphrodisiac, gusto can’t be beat. “Exuberance is seductive,” claims Nobel laureate Carleton Gajdusek, and can “engender devotion and love.” Mythology may account for part of this élan allure. If we’re turned on by a seducer’s brio, say cultural anthropologists, we have only to look at the fertility gods. These charismatic deities, which flourished throughout culture, personified phallic energy, the generative force of existence. The Greek Dionysus, a Western prototype of the ladykiller, incarnated zöe, the spirit of “infinite life.” A gorgeous heartthrob, he wandered the earth distributing enjoyment, followed by a band of besotted women. His names were “the exultant god” and “the joyful one.”

  Dionysus cast the mold for fictional ladies’ men to come. “In no love story,” remarks Roland Barthes, “is a character ever tired.” Chaucer’s Wife of Bath ranks Solomon as history’s supreme lover because “he was so much alive,” and women are bewitched against their will in Mozart’s opera by Don Giovanni’s “exuberant joy of life.” Effi Briest, the heroine of Theodor Fontane’s German version of Madame Bovary, betrays a perfect husband for an “animated and high-spirited” roué. Heroes of women’s popular romances (a window onto female fantasies) come prepackaged with vim and masculine vigor.

  Real ladies’ men pulse with ebullience. Nineteenth-century French Romantic poet Alfred de Musset won the hearts of half of the Parisian female population with his “delicious verve.” A vivacious dandy, he bounded into drawing rooms in tight sky-blue trousers, bubbling over with bon mots. The actress Rachel doted on him, and a duchess, princess, and leading belle rushed to his bedside when he fell ill. His greatest coup, though, was his conquest of literary celebrity George Sand. Deploying an élan assault, he paraded his vitality before her like a “peacock before a demure, quiet little peahen.” Victorian Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, aka “Lord Cupid,” put his “puckish high spirits” to the same erotic ends, as did such master lovers as twentieth-century David Niven and Kingsley Amis.

  American composer George Gershwin was as effervescent as his music—foot-tapping classics like “I Got Rhythm,” “Things Are Looking Up,” and “’S Wonderful.” He was “exactly like his work,” said a girlfriend; he took “a joyous delight” in everything he did. What he did, besides produce some of the nation’s finest music, from songbook standards to Porgy and Bess, was enthrall women. He was a stellar ladies’ man, adored by a cast of hundreds.

  Gershwin lacked the requisite matinee-idol looks. Of medium height and dark complexion, he had a broad hook nose, thinning black hair, and a prognathic chin. But when he walked into a room, women sat up. Each mentioned the same aphrodisiac: “his exuberant vitality,” “gaiety,” and “many-sided zest for life.”

  The ladies in his life were legion. A fancier of smart, attractive women, he romanced the glitterati of the social, show business, and musical worlds. His more serious amours included French actress Simone Simon and Hollywood star Ginger Rogers, who told reporters, “I was crazy about George Gershwin,” and “so was everyone who knew him.”

  Kitty Carlisle, then a rising ingénue in film, recalled how seductively he flirted; he would sing at the piano at parties and insert her name in love songs. He never married, but he sustained a ten-year relationship with musician Kay Swift, his collaborator, muse, and “utterly devoted factotum.”

  Biographers have long speculated that he found the woman in his life in 1936, the just-married actress Paulette Goddard. He wrote the ballad “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” for her, and urged her to leave her spouse, Charlie Chaplin, for him. But Gershwin died a year later, at thirty-eight, of a brain tumor.

  The loss to music was incalculable. But the greater loss, said those who knew and loved him, was his ebullience. “He loved every aspect of life, and made every aspect of life loveable,” said lovers and friends. “People thought they would never sense that special joy again.” It’s no coincidence that charisma is re
lated to the Greek chaírein, “to rejoice.”

  Intensity

  All love begins with an impact.

  —ANDRÉ MAUROIS, “The Art of Loving”

  If you see Vance behind the counter of his Manhattan gourmet store, you may get the wrong idea. Dressed in khaki pants and docksiders, he looks like a midlife version of Charles Lindbergh from a staid suburban enclave. But in two minutes, you feel that zoop!, that sexual voltage. When I ask about his reputation as a ladies’ man about town (before his conversion to monogamy), his cobalt-blue eyes blaze.

  “Believe me,” he says, over a glass of 2005 Margaux in his office, “it was a wonderful time. And very easy. I must say, I was sought after. Oh, there must have been dozens.” “Why?” he reflects. “In simple terms: passion within, passion, passion.” A man of keen interests who raced cars and gambled, he was never laid back with women. Once, he tells me, he saw a stunning blonde on the sidewalk, swung a U-turn, knocked on office doors until he found her, and said, “Let’s get out of here.” “I’m very aggressive, firm, but sincere,” he explains. “I loved that gal. I’d fly to LA just to have dinner with her.”

  Ladies’ men aren’t slow-pulsed, impassive islands of calm and Zen indifference. They fire on all cylinders. “Emotional intensity,” exceptional personal force, is one of the hallmarks of charisma. It also defines erotic passion. Casanova credited his conquests to his sheer ardor: “I turned the heads of some hundreds of women,” he wrote, “because I was neither tender nor gallant nor pathetic. I was passionate.”

  Romantic love is one of the most extreme human experiences. As philosophers say, love is “strong stuff.” Under a functional magnetic resonance imaging scan, passionate love looks like a lightning strike; centers deep in the midbrain flare up and release a torrent of dopamine and norepinephrine. It’s so close to what happens when we’re angry or afraid that psychologists believe any intense feeling, in a “spillover effect,” can ignite desire.