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  What we can say for sure, though, is that we know charisma when we see it, and are bespelled. When women encounter a magnetic man, they imbue him (similar to transference in psychotherapy) with their “forbidden impulses and secret wishes,” investing him with what they crave and aren’t getting. As such, the ladies’ man is a valuable resource, a Rorschach of women’s deepest, unmet desires.

  Can men en masse acquire charisma, or is it an innate “gift” as the ancients believed? I ask Rick the fire captain, and he says he knows only one thing: you can’t fake it. Biologist Amotz Zahavi and others have confirmed this in studies, and maintain that top lovers are authentic because women have always seen through false sexual advertisement.

  “The feeling has to be real,” Rick continues. And beyond that? Rick takes a sip of port, waits a beat, and sighs. “All I know is, life is good, I invent stuff, I travel. I never follow the crowd. And I do love women. Ever tell you about the time Vivien Leigh invited me up? She told me three times, ‘If there were ever a real Rhett Butler, it would be you.’ ”

  CHAPTER 2

  Character:

  THE GOODS

  –

  Character alone is worthy of the crown of love.

  —ANDREAS CAPELLANUS, The Art of Courtly Love

  His friends call him “The King”—the man who’s invincible with women. When I meet Brian for lunch, I know what they mean when they say, “He could get the dogs off the meat truck.” He greets me with a sunburst smile, looking more like a young Matthew Broderick at his First Communion than a twenty-six-year-old banker in a success suit and Hermès tie. But charisma, I soon learn, is only half of his allure. The rest comes down to character—qualities he has consciously cultivated.

  “Oh sure,” he begins, “there’s the intrinsic stuff, loving women and joie de vivre. But I can shed some light on a few more things that work for me. I mean, you definitely have to be interesting.”

  In what way?

  “Well,” he quirks an eyebrow, “I’m incredibly active. I try to be all things at once. I read, keep up, I follow controversial topics—religion, politics, art. It’s very important, too,” he taps a sugar packet against the coffee cup for emphasis, “to deal socially with others, to have the ability to smile and charm. I like to keep in touch—all the lines open.”

  Open they are. Brian has “thirty or forty girlfriends” in his address book whom he contacts regularly, some for quick catch-ups at Starbucks, others for trysts throughout Europe. At the mention of the word playboy, though, he bridles. “Absolutely not! I count women among my closest friends. There are guys who are bad guys, but hey, I’m a good person. I don’t mean any ill will. I try to be genuine and true to who I am.”

  His friends bear him out. Ladykiller that he is, Brian is a far cry from the stock lothario who lacks a mature identity or moral compass. Although base philanderers and scalp-hunters abound, real Casanovas are men of character who possess core traits that persist through time and cultures. Not that they are consistent or “right stuff” material; we have to expand the boundaries a bit. Instead, they are self-created originals with a unique mix of qualities designed to maximize life and love, and to fascinate.

  Morality/Virtue

  Good moral character is sexually attractive and romantically inspiring.

  —GEOFFREY MILLER, The Mating Mind

  Claude Adrien Helvétius was “the dread of husbands” in eighteenth-century France—the most desired, most sensual, and fickle of men. He was so handsome, with a cleft chin and ice-blue eyes, that Voltaire called him “Apollo.” Every morning his valet brought his first bedmate, and every afternoon and evening he romanced the ton of Paris—the comtesse d’Autre, the duchesse de Chaulnes, among others—ending with the beautiful actress Mademoiselle Gaussin. Once when a rich suitor offered the actress six hundred livres for the night, she gestured toward Helvétius and said, “Look like this man, monsieur, and I will give you 1,200 livres.”

  Wealthy, witty, even a gifted dancer, he would seem to be a walking ancient régime cliché—a hard-boiled roué. Except he wasn’t; he was also the soul of benevolence. No one, said contemporaries, “joined more delicacy to more kindness.” When he met the right woman, he married, moved to the countryside, and devoted the rest of his life to good works. There he wrote De l’esprit (On Mind) and became one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, advocating natural equality and the “greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

  Although some women do fancy wild and wicked reprobates (especially for flings), a bigger turn-on are men who scramble the good/bad categories and are nice with spice. Unalloyed virtue—or the appearance of it—has zero allure. Ladies’ men stir it up. Morally mixed and inclined to bend rules, they are fundamentally decent and know the secret to the oldest conundrum: how to make goodness charming.

  Virtue has long been entwined with romantic love. In the fourth-century BC, Plato defined eros as a love of goodness that led up a transcendental ladder to the spheres. Medieval amorists put moral excellence back into romance with courtly love, where it has remained in various degrees ever since. “Honesty [and] virtue” are “great enticers”; “No love without goodness”: these rubrics still resonate today. Philosopher Robert Solomon believes ethical worth is a linchpin in love; partners must reflect and magnify our own virtues.

  In studies, women seem to be of two minds about virtuous partners. On the one hand, say researchers, they want a nice guy, with “that old-fashioned quality: integrity”; on the other they want a fun, bold, bad boy. The problem is in the polarized choice, writes Edward Horgan in a Harvard University paper; after reviewing the literature, he concludes that women desire a combination of both—niceness commingled with deviltry, and served up seductively.

  Seduction, in fact, may have been one of morality’s earliest functions. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller speculates that prehistoric man deployed morality as a “sexual ornament,” designed to intrigue and enchant women with the delights of fair play, generosity, decency, and concern for others. “You enjoy helping those who help you,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker. “That’s also why men and women fall in love.” Particularly if the lover isn’t too perfect.

  The ancient love gods were the sexiest of all nice guys. A variegated species with their share of faults, they were glamorous deities who made virtue voluptuous. The volatile Dionysus was also kind and compassionate, and dispensed his benevolence through song, dance, and joyous celebration. Although a tricky customer, the phallic Hermes was the “giver of good things”—a luck-bringer, protector, and silver-tongued seducer. And the “too reckless” Cuchulain of Gaelic myth endeared Irish women young and old with his “pleasing” rectitude and “kindness” to everyone.

  Female readers always rate Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice as a romantic favorite because he is so deliciously decent. Fitzwilliam Darcy is both an odious snob and a man of honor who saves the Bennets from calamity and charms Elizabeth with his eloquent mea culpa: “You showed me,” he says, “how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

  Mass-market romances are supposed to be black-and-white morality fables, but the “nice” male protagonists in these novels are ethical crossbreeds. Harry, the straight-arrow accountant of The Nerd Who Loved Me, has an inner wild child. He’s a covert Vegas buff who flirts with the Mob, beats a snoop to a pulp, and wins the heroine by advertising his good deeds through a series of seductive adventures.

  Ladies’ men are notorious admixtures. Casanova was not incapable of skullduggery; he exaggerated his exploits for profit and conned the wealthy dowager marquise d’Urfé out of a fortune by faking occult powers and staging a “rebirth” that entailed sex three times in a tub. But he brimmed “with kindness” and performed numerous charitable acts—a gallant visit to a dying inamorata and an impromptu gift of shoe buckles for a little girl.

  Poet Alfred de Musset also misbehaved (as when he went on a brothel-bender in Venice while George Sand l
ay ill), yet he had a “sweetness of character that made him absolutely irresistible.” So, too, Warren Beatty: at times a vain rascal and simultaneously, an “extraordinary, good person.”

  Rarely do you hear the terms rock star and virtue in the same breath. Unless, that is, you’re talking about Sam Cooke. The rhythm-and-blues sensation of the 1950s and 60s who popularized such classics as “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” Cooke doesn’t look exemplary at first glance. He did jail time—brief stints for distributing a dirty book in high school and for “fornication and bastardy” in his twenties. He was stubborn, quick-tempered, conceited, and all hell with women. A “woman’s man,” he indulged in countless affairs, fathered four known illegitimate children, and was once discovered in bed with five women.

  But the top note in his hybrid character was decency. Said friends, he conveyed “genuineness,” generosity, and “instinctive kindness in every fiber of his being.” Although a gospel singer in his early career and son of a Chicago Baptist preacher, he was not a by-the-Good-Book man; he lived by his own moral lights.

  Cooke seemed born for women. He had erotic crackle even as a teenager—energy, charm, vitality, and a way of talking to girls with “warmth, [and] kindness,” as though each were the only person on the planet. Forthright and honest, he refused to game them, and so enamored Barbara Campbell, a neighbor four years his junior, that she had his daughter out of wedlock at eighteen and waited in the wings for him for seven years.

  In the interim, Sam Cooke crossed over from gospel to mainstream rock and roll and became a celebrity with his sweet soaring voice. Women literally fainted when he sang, and stormed him backstage. He was “never crass, never vulgar” about it, but he capitalized on stardom: he fathered two more illegitimate children and married lounge singer Delores Mohawk. After that marriage ended, his high school sweetheart, Barbara Campbell, reappeared. They married and had two children, but he couldn’t stay on the porch. Women mobbed him, mesmerized by his charisma and naughty/nice mélange.

  Flawed, faithless, good-hearted, and an easy touch: he was each of these things—to his undoing. At thirty-five in December 1964, he hooked up with a party girl after a few too many martinis and took her to a cheap motel, where she changed her mind and bolted with his clothes and money. Enraged and dressed only in a jacket and shoes, he confronted the manager, Bertha Franklin, about the theft, and a scuffle ensued. In the process, Franklin pulled a gun on Cooke and killed him. As the bullet tore through him, he said with combined shock and disbelief, “Lady, you shot me.” He died as he lived, “a real gentleman,” who beneath the faults—anger, promiscuity, and more—was “a sweet, innocent young guy.”

  The ingénue of Primrose, an old musical, sings that her dream man “needn’t be such a saint.” Despite the imprecations of Platonists and love philosophers, women will never be persuaded to take perfect moral purity to their hearts. To be seductive, goodness needs sauce—joy, sweetness, and eloquence spiked with frailties. Better, though, to err on the side of the angels: kindness, Ovid reminded men, “will tame even the lions and tigers.”

  Courage

  All true desire is dangerous

  —ROBERT BLY, Iron John

  The story is as old as time. The princess lies comatose in a haunted palace under an evil spell. Men perish in the attempt to rescue her, until one day two princes come along with their younger brother “Simpleton.” At the palace they find a gray dwarf who tells them they must perform three impossible tasks to break the spell. As his two craven brothers fail and turn to stone, Simpleton boldly sets off into the forest. With the aid of the beasts he befriends, he collects a thousand pearls, dives to the bottom of the lake, finds the key to the princess’s bedroom, and picks the “right” princess out of a choice of three. Simpleton isn’t simple; he knows a cardinal ladykiller truth: only the good and brave deserve the fair.

  Women, in a recent study, said they valued bravery even more than kindness in men. Moralists have long placed courage at the head of the virtues because without it none of the others would be possible. For centuries, valor and boldness of spirit have been seen as the latchkey to female affections. Ladies’ men, however, do courage as unconventionally as everything else. They combine risk, perseverance, brains, starch, and inner mettle with decency and a distaste for gratuitous violence. They need not be physically brave—broncobusters or smoke jumpers—but they have the right hearts and souls of steel.

  They wouldn’t, though, be great lovers without spine. Eros is dangerous terrain; intimacy is land-mined with threats. Women can be transported over the moon, but they can also be abandoned, engulfed, and driven mad by passion. Men, too, have special terrors of their own—performance anxieties and a witch’s brew of other fears. In love, women want a man who’s up to a challenge. As the Romans said, “Venus favors the bold,” and god help the lover who recoils from the romantic fray and runs for cover.

  Evolutionary psychologists argue that the female fondness for male mettle goes back to a physical need for provisions, protection, and status. Prehistoric women sought brave defenders to survive and prosper. Another explanation is more erotic: A woman may have been excited by exhibitions of courage in man-to-man combats because it thrilled her to think she was worth fighting for. Rather than a servile drudge, she became a prize for whom men risked their lives.

  There may be a mythic tug on women too. Fertility gods were a staunch lot. The Sumerian “Fearless One,” Dumuzi, descended to the horrors of the underworld and took the “ultimate adventure of the Lover,” seducing the great love goddess Inanna. By nature unwarlike, Dionysus was intrepid in battle and routed the giants with his unholy uproar. He bravely came to Ariadne’s rescue and stood his ground when King Pentheus imprisoned him. “How bold this bacchant is!” marveled the guards at his cool defiance of the king.

  Women accord premier status to bold lovers in their fantasies. Romance novels teem with commandos, highland warriors, secret agents, and dukes who duel at ten paces, but their feats of derring-do are paired with psychological fortitude and moral sensitivity. Dr. Zhivago, a top romantic pick for women, is a portrait in courage—physical, psychological, and erotic. He braves the war zone, loves dangerously, and politically defies the Soviet state in the face of crushing odds.

  Casanova, whatever his defects, strode out boldly. When the Inquisitorial police arrested him in Venice on trumped-up charges, he dressed in plumes and satin as if for a ball, then managed a daring escape from the impregnable Leads prison over a year later. He was equally valiant in his amours. At twenty, he fell hopelessly in love with a talented beauty of the wrong gender, the castrato singer Bellino. “He” had warded off every suitor, but Casanova persevered and discovered what he suspected: Bellino was a woman named Teresa equipped with a leather six-inch penis. He promptly declared himself, and asked her to marry him. “I am not afraid of misfortune,” he explained to her; he counted courage and a sense of honor among his best qualities.

  Though uniformly courageous, ladies’ men range in degrees of physical and psychological valor. Fascinators, like air ace Denys Finch Hatton and bullfighter Juan Belmonte, fall on the action end of the spectrum. Belmonte, Hemingway’s model for the matador-lover in The Sun Also Rises, was small, ugly, crippled, and tortured with fear, but he became a master in the bullring and in the bedroom. “The same energy that went into his conquering a bull also went into conquering a woman,” said an unnamed famous actress, “and he was the greatest lover I ever had.” More typical are ladykillers of moral fiber: Enlightenment intellectual Denis Diderot, who challenged the censors, and Albert Camus, whose credo was “courage” and whose underground Resistance work in World War II almost cost him his life.

  Robert Louis Stevenson is the last person you might choose for a courage hall of fame. But he’s a prime candidate, in both word and deed, and a man beloved by women. Skeletal, eccentric, and sickly, he is remembered as the avuncular author of the classic novels Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But h
e was a paladin in full-tilt revolt against Victorian respectability, and a “fanatical lover of women.” Despite poverty, “tatterdemalion” clothes, and a scarecrow appearance, he had enormous warmth, goodness, and charm, and bound “women to him with silken cords.” He racked up scores of inamoratas: an Edinburgh belle; a “dark lady” named Claire; a noted European beauty; sundry mistresses and French charmeuses; and finally his wife, Fanny Osbourne.

  In his courtship of Fanny, he displayed the high courage that marked everything he did. He was resolute against danger, whether scaling treacherous mountains or combating authority. “Keep your fears to yourself,” he quipped, “but share your courage with others.” He was not blind to the perils of passionate love. We are “unhorsed” by it, he wrote, cast into a hazardous zone which we explore like children “venturing together into a dark room.” And Fanny was not the safest choice. Married with two children and ten years his senior, she suffered from depression and had to leave him mid-affair to settle accounts with her husband in America.

  When he got her cable from California, he set sail, steerage class. By the time he reached her in San Francisco, he was penniless and ill, fluctuating between life and death. Fanny divorced her husband in 1880, and she and Stevenson married, after which he produced his best-loved works, Kidnapped among others. In deteriorating health, he remained an adventurer, ending up in Samoa, where he wrote, protested colonial injustices, and became revered by the Samoans. His friends envisioned him as “sly Hermes,” the mythic seducer and spirit of fearlessness who stole Apollo’s cattle and Aphrodite’s girdle. “Love,” wrote Stendhal, “is an exquisite flower, but it needs courage to pluck it on the bank of a dreadful precipice.”