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  Creativity

  Creative types have increased sex appeal.

  —RUSTY ROCKETS, Science a GoGo

  Adam Levy, a painter of dark, surreal canvases in the movie Love & Sex, looks like a date-challenged dork: he wears camp shirts over baggy cargo pants and has the face of an overfed hamster. But women engulf him, and he snaps up the smartest and prettiest of the pack. “That’s why I started painting,” he explains, “to get the girls in high school.”

  What is it about artists, those “unfit” creative guys who have all the luck with women? They may lack the right biomarkers—money, looks, and solidity—but they have sexual charisma to burn. As poet Rainer Rilke observed, art lies “incredibly close” to sex. Creativity is a knockout aphrodisiac, seductive at a gut level. Professional artists and poets, studies report, “have more sex appeal than other people and twice as many sexual partners.”

  Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller chalks it up to sexual selection. Art, he theorizes, originated as a courtship display. More than fitness and status, early womankind sought mental excellence, says Miller, creative intelligence in particular. The suitor who produced the best creations and delivered the greatest aesthetic pleasure won the prize females. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has located the center responsible for this artistic ability, the angular gyrus, and thinks prehistoric men may have wooed mates by advertising musical, poetic, and drawing talents as a “visible signature of a giant brain.”

  Primitive mythological and religious figures may factor in too. The shaman, “an archaic prototype of the artist,” beamed with sexual charisma. It was his job to draw down the sex force of creation through magical song, drama, dance, and visual art. The cave paintings are thought to have been his handiwork, his inseminations “in the womb of the earth.” The business of the sex gods was creation—new shapes and forms ad infinitum. Greek god Dionysus founded tragedy and comedy, choreographed dances, and composed “the songs of the night.”

  Artist-lovers seem always to have haunted the romantic imagination. Like the legendary Greek Orpheus, who charmed man, woman, and beast with his lyre, Chaucer’s “Nicholas the Gallant” of “The Miller’s Tale” seduces maidens by singing and playing his harp. Bob Hampton, the painter of The Handyman, barely has time to clean his brushes amid the pile-on of lust-crazed housewives. Creative heartthrobs fill movies, from Titanic sketch-artist Jack to the dishy novelist in Purple Violets, to Bleek the trombone-playing ladykiller of Mo’ Better Blues.

  A disproportionate number of ladykillers trade on the sexual charisma of creativity. History is chocked with poets, musicians, painters, dancers, actors, and “creatives” who prospered with women. A quick once-over reveals a list of banner names: Lord Byron, Alfred de Musset, Franz Liszt, Gustav Klimt, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Casanova owed no small amount of his luster to his artistic achievements as a violinist, inventor, and author of poems, plays, and books.

  Rock star “Mick the Magic Jagger” has made spectacular capital on this appeal. A throwback to the total theater of shamanistic rites, he admits that sex is at the center of his Rolling Stones’ performances. He puts a sock in his crotch to simulate an erection, undulates like a “strip-tease[r],” and chants and rocks the audience to “mass orgasm.”

  He’s an all-caps ladies’ man, impossibly magnetic, lovable, and unleavable. Despite his nonstellar looks (the raddled features of a very old chimp), he has been bathed in adoration by a long line of superior women, including his wife, Bianca, Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Carly Simon, Jerry Hall, Carla Bruni, and his current girlfriend of eight years, designer L’Wren Scott. He’s neither mature, sober, nor faithful, and he would catch hell from a relationship counselor. But he has hundred-proof charisma on his side; as Marianne Faithfull put it, she felt as if she had “her very own Dionysus.”

  Artist Lucian Freud’s draw, like Jagger’s, was primeval. Poet Stephen Spender compared him to the “male opposite [of a] witch,” and Freud himself equated his creativity with “phallic energy.” Dubbed “the greatest living realist painter,” by New York Times art critic John Russell, Freud did not paint canvases for calm contemplation. Warts-and-all portraits of nudes from odd angles, they are designed to “astonish, disturb, [and] seduce.”

  Seduction he knew. The British Freud, who died in 2011 at eighty-nine, had the career of a supernova lover. Married twice (once to siren Caroline Blackwood), he fathered at least nine children and was passionately involved with “umpteen” women. At seventy-nine, he shocked the nation by taking up with a waifish twenty-nine-year-old and later moving on to Alexandra Williams-Wynn, fifty years his junior. In a 2005 painting, The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, she sits nude at his feet clutching his leg and caressing his thigh.

  Every woman cited the same allure: his “intense sexual charisma.” Being with him, said a lover, is like “being wired up to the national grid.” Freud was an amorous master. He quoted poetry to his models, served champagne and delicacies between sittings, and gave “the best hugs.” He was also an elegant figure, with a fine, hawk-like profile, a cockade of gray hair, and a rakish scarf looped around his neck. But it was Freud the artist who slayed women; it was his work, they said, that was the “potent aphrodisiac.” To sit for him, said a girlfriend, “felt like being an apple in the Garden of Eden. When it was over, [she] felt as if [she] had been cast out of paradise.” This was the work of an ur-artist, the sexual sorcerer with “the most primitive form of charisma.”

  Quicksilver Man

  Don’t Fence Me In.

  —COLE PORTER

  Kurt is a thirtyish German photographer and downtown Casanova who looks like a dancer in an avant-garde ballet troupe. He’s a study in fluidity, with his loose jeans, ruffled dark bob, and feline stride. Asked about the charisma for which he’s famous, he throws up his hands: “It’s just part of you and you radiate that in a certain way.”

  What he’s radiating is the foxfire of free, unbound manhood. Like many ladykillers, Kurt is a mover and quester, indifferent to social constraints. At twenty-five, he gave up a banking career, left home, built a photography career on pioneer techniques, and now goes where the wind blows him. “I’m a boat-rocker,” he laughs.

  Charismatic men are laws unto themselves, renegade souls who give the raspberry to the rule book. A zing of transgression defines charisma. People with that “irresistible magnetic mana” flout authority and live on their own terms, unfettered in mind and body. There’s an intangible “apartness” about them. Women, to official dismay, don’t necessarily fall for providers and staid nest-builders; they’re often swept off their feet by free-souled nonconformists.

  The charisma of these unbridled mavericks may not be accidental. Many psychologists contend that superior personhood demands psychic elbow room and a defiance of established norms. A woman in quest of alpha genes may do better with a restless rebel than a company yes-man.

  Then again, archaic history plays in. Ancient deities like Shiva, Osiris, the Norse Freyr, and the Celtic Dagda defied conventions and traveled the earth dispensing fertility. The phallic Hermes was “God of the Roads.” Perpetual wanderer Dionysus mocked institutions and social custom and “freed his worshippers from every law.”

  Free-range ladykillers have particular charms for women. “Libertines” hold out the seductive promise of escape from the traditional feminine fate of domestic stasis and conformity. The “eccentric” rover of Knut Hamsun’s nineteenth-century Mysteries arrives among a group of restive women at just the right time. Over the course of the summer, he beguiles the entire female population of a Norwegian seaport with his mystic promise of freedom and revolt. Even the exemplar of feminine domesticity surrenders, crying, “You upset my equilibrium!”

  One of the staples of popular romance is the solitary hero unburdened by sidekicks who disdains social dictates— roving renegades like Robert Kincaid of The Bridges of Madison County. In The Ground beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie takes the convention
and transmutes it into great literature. “Bombay Casanova” Ormus Cama is a prismatic musical genius who renounces orthodox culture, slips the traces, and “step[s] off the map” into pure possibility.

  Not every great lover bucks the establishment and goes his own way. But those who do exude an edgy excitement. Casanova was his “own master”—oblivious to regulations and in love with the open road—and no one could restrain pianist Franz Liszt, a vagabond spirit too overscale for civilized confinement. They’re among a fleet of freewheeling originals: ladies’ men such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Jack London, and H. G. Wells.

  This footloose, anarchic spirit can be cerebral and work just as forcefully. Twentieth-century philosopher and tombeur Albert Camus was physically curtailed by tuberculosis, but inwardly was a dedicated maverick and roamer. Nonconformity and freedom were the watchwords of his “Absurdist” doctrine. “I rebel,” he wrote, “therefore we exist.”

  Don Juan was one of his existential heroes, an enlightened lover who seduced women not to score but to spread amorous joy. “It’s his way of giving and vivifying” before the axe falls. A romantic adventurer, Camus was as good as his word. Women found him drop-dead attractive—a French Humphrey Bogart—and he loved them “without bounds.” The year before he died in a car crash, at forty-six, he was balancing three women in his life, plus a devoted wife. And he “managed to keep them all happy.”

  Had Camus known, he could have found his Don Juan across the channel: Denys Finch Hatton. Fabled lover, iconoclast, daredevil, and “eternal wanderer,” Finch Hatton was immortalized as Isak Dinesen’s überlover in Out of Africa. But Danish author Dinesen no more captured Finch Hatton in her idealized portrait than she did in real life. He eluded any attempt to pin him down. A born dissenter, he refused to be curbed by Edwardian social sanctions, raised Cain in school, and at age twenty-four fled to the wilds of East Africa for adventure and breathing room.

  Women were mad for him. Six foot three and beautiful, he had enormous charisma, a valence that drew people to him “like a centripetal force.” At one point “at least eight women were in love with him,” and he chose fastidiously—strong, glamorous, bohemian individualists.

  Dinesen, nom de plume of Karen Blixen, was his longest amour. They met in 1918 on her Kenyan coffee plantation, where she lived with her faithless husband, Bror, and entertained a revolving crew of tourists and big-game hunters. Their affair lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1931. She lived and breathed for his sporadic visits, catered to his whims, thought him a god, and hoped desperately to marry him.

  But Finch Hatton “belonged to the wild nomadic world and he never intended to marry anyone.” At the end, he paired up with the adventurous aviator Beryl Markham, who said, “As for charm, I suspect Denys invented it.” The invention wasn’t original; it was the “absolute magic” of the charismatic, unchained love god. He was “like a meteor,” said a female friend. “He arrived only to go off again . . . he wanted the wild.”

  Flawed Manhood

  The flaw that punctuates perfection

  —HILLARY JOHNSON, Los Angeles Times

  Every woman at the University of Virginia in the 1970s was a little bit (or a lot) in love with this professor. He had strut and movie-star looks—a trim red beard and safari outfits with biker boots and bush shirts. That day in class, he was talking about guilt in a Kafka story. “Say a policeman knocked on the door,” he asked. “How many would think he’d come for you? Me? I’d know for sure.”

  He might have been right. Douglas Day was notorious: fast cars, exploits south of the border (in his own plane), and women everywhere. Married five times, he had window-rattling sex appeal, charisma that took your breath and heart away. More than his beauty and brilliance, it was his walk. He had a mysterious gimp leg, and when he limped down Cabell Hall, women dissolved.

  Pop psychologists and coaches who tout ironclad confidence as the key to sexual charisma may need a reality check. A hairline crack in a man’s aplomb, a hint of vulnerability—either physical or psychological—can turn a woman inside out. Joseph Roach traces this to the nature of charisma itself, the necessary flux of vulnerability and strength. To psychoanalyst Irvine Schiffer, minor defects, which he calls “straddling characteristics,” create the highest sexual amperage; they encourage approachability and generate “instant glamour.”

  Women find a soupçon of fallibility in a man especially erotic. “The things I find most endearing” about lovers, says Erica Jong, “are their small imperfections.” Perhaps maternal impulses are at work or an attempt to equalize the power imbalance between the sexes. Psychiatrist Michael Bader probes deeper; the female yen for injured manhood, he hypothesizes, stems from an impulse to neutralize fears of rejection and male violence. Author Hillary Johnson goes for the intimacy explanation. Scars and flaws, she writes, suggest “a way to get inside” masculine armor.

  There’s a mythic kicker too. Wounded men inherit some of the star shine of the earliest fertility gods. Adonis was gored in the groin by a wild boar, and like the maimed Osiris, Dionysus, and Freyr, he was healed and restored to life each spring. Just as shamans incur a “disease of God” during initiation to access the power source of creation, heroes acquire a permanent scar (similar to the tell-tale gash in Odysseus’s thigh) in the archetypal male journey to maturity.

  The trope lives on in hundreds of love stories, from the gouged Guigemar in Marie de France’s story to the crippled and blinded Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. The emotionally or physically damaged man, says novelist Mary Jo Putney, is a hero of “incredible potency.” Readers can find injured ladykillers for every taste on romance sites: a dyslexic duke, a Dominic with a deformed hip, and a psychologically impaired Lord Evelyn.

  The sexiest man to enter a fictional bedroom is the one-armed biker Lefty, of Rebecca Silver’s story “Fearful Symmetry.” He caresses her nipples with the “delicate prongs” of his steel hook, then flings off his prosthesis, props himself on his stump, and flips her out of her senses on the futon. Women from one end of Texas to the other covet Hardy Cates, Lisa Kleypas’s troubled “blue-eyed devil” who has been traumatized by a violent, alcoholic father in a seedy trailer park.

  Great lovers with a “divine defect” are surprisingly numerous. Aldous Huxley and Potemkin were nearly blind, and Charlemagne, Talleyrand, and Gary Cooper limped. Lord Byron, with his club foot and bruised sensibilities, devastated women, just as Jack London’s and Richard Burton’s tortured souls played havoc with female hearts.

  A grand prix identity that harbors a psychic wound can be an incendiary mix. “Great seducer” Jack Nicholson is a powerful presence with the strong ego of a talented actor and three-time Oscar winner. But what melts women is the fissure of hurt beneath the “King of Hollywood” persona, the insecurity intercut with confidence. Illegitimate, he was raised by a grandmother who masqueraded as his mother, and was so fat as a boy that he was excluded from sports and nicknamed “Chubs.”

  He’s open about the scars and therapy, and his lovers are both protective and committed, with Anjelica Huston staying with him for seventeen years. Although he cheated openly on model-actress Cynthia Basinet, she explained why she couldn’t leave him: “I saw such a wonderful vulnerable person . . . I vowed never to hurt him.” It was, she said, part of “his spell,” the “old Jack Magic.”

  The more extreme the flaws, the greater the need for compensatory attractions. Russian writer Ivan Turgenev may be one of the least heroic yet most lovable ladies’ men of the nineteenth century. Author of such masterpieces as Fathers and Sons and A Month in the Country, he was plagued with neuroses, having been brutalized by a sadistic mother who faked death scenes to get her way. He was a weak-kneed, nervous “gentle giant,” prone to hypochondria, hallucinations, and melancholy.

  Nor did he strike a bold figure. Tall and stoop-shoulded, he had grayish eyes that gazed dreamily out of a “round, mild, handsome,” somewhat feminine face. But he possessed surprising reserves of strength and an audacio
us, trailblazing genius. Ignoring his mother’s curses, he expatriated, broke rank, and became a major “innovator” of Russian literature.

  His weak/strong alloy, among other charms, made him a heart-stopper. Seduced by a chambermaid at age fifteen, Turgenev was avalanched by women, among them a Berlin mother of four, an aristocrat who called him her “Christ,” and quintessentially, mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot. She was besieged by suitors, but he scattered them all with his gifts and white-lightning compound of frailty and personal force. Viardot took him home to France, where she lived with him and her husband in a lifelong ménage à trois.

  Despite the propaganda, bulletproof self-esteem and a perfect package aren’t the ticket. It’s an “enigmatic tang” of injury, a pinch of flaw in the confidence brew that fells women every time.

  Charisma: Refining the Definition

  Women can just feel a ladies’ man on the premises. Suddenly the room is charged with ions and thrumming with sexual tension and promise. He doesn’t need every charisma attribute: joie de vivre, intensity, creativity, titanic libido, tear-away originality, fondness for women, or manly self-esteem tinged with androgyny and fallibility. A great lover can throw sparks with just a few choice allures; they are that potent.

  Erotic charisma, though, isn’t easily coded and formulated. Mysteries remain. Why, for example, are men like Al Gore, Bill Gates, and comedian Robin Williams non-sizzlers when they fit the criteria? Why don’t the standard recipes—big self-belief, expressivity, rapport, and communication skills—work? And what about the evolutionary psychologists’ precepts, such as status, wealth, and stability?

  The topic, as James M. Donovan highlights in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, is largely unexplored. Charisma, he writes, is “much more bizarre than commonly assumed,” and bears little relation to any special personality type. Scholars agree: it’s been relegated, they say, “to the back burner of research,” and confusion reigns—even about the definition of the word. We can tease out traits, float theories, but we can’t demystify that magic radiance—yet.