Charm Read online

  Everyone who knew her attested that Lillian Hellman was fun to be with. A friend of mine reported that once, when Arthur Schlesinger entered a restaurant with his much taller wife, Lillian wondered aloud to my friend “whether he went up on her.” She was a member of the editorial board of a magazine I edited, and, though I never saw her in comic mode, she could be penetrating in her observations. She once told me that there were two Edmund Wilsons: the one for men was the intellectual equivalent of the playground bully, who had to best other men by showing that he knew more than they no matter what the subject; then there was the Edmund Wilson for women, who could be seductive, avuncular, sweet.

  Lillian was never beautiful, though through her liveliness she attracted many lovers. When I met her she was in her late sixties, and had lost such feminine attractiveness as she might once have possessed. With her rigidly permanented white hair and bony face, she looked like nothing so much as a figure in one of those paintings of the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence. Still, one wanted her approval; as a younger man, I at least did. I recall feeling pleased when she complimented me on something I had written.

  When Lillian Hellman began publishing her memoirs in 1969, reviewers lined up to praise her. Although it was before I met her, I, in The New Republic, was among them. I then wrote that her first volume of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, was “the work of a woman at once knowing yet without cynicism, tough yet generous, honest yet reticent.” I was wrong, as it turned out, on all counts. Further on in her publication of her memoirs, in the volume called Pentimento, she told a story about helping defeat the Nazis through smuggling $50,000 to an anti-Nazi spy whom she calls Julia. The story was made into a movie, with Jane Fonda playing the Lillian Hellman part. Later the woman who was in fact the anti-Nazi spy wrote a book in which she made it clear that Lillian Hellman had done nothing of the kind she described in her memoir. She had made it up; she, who stood for truth unvarnished, was a bit of a fraud. The bad press she derived from this was redoubled when she sued the writer Mary McCarthy for calling her a liar; McCarthy said that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman sued, not a thing one writer is supposed to do to another, especially a writer of liberal reputation, and the stock of her reputation fell even further.

  Lillian had always been very political, but in her last years her politics tended to push aside her charm entirely. Too many of her sentences were festooned with the paranoid initials CIA and FBI. I recall walking with her one day to a restaurant in Washington, DC, after an editorial board meeting of the magazine mentioned earlier. Another member, Paul Freund, the legal scholar, a learned and quietly subtle man, joined us. When Lillian asked Paul what his plans were for the summer, he said that he was going to spend part of it at the Strasbourg Institute. “Oh,” said Lillian, “is that still run by the CIA?” Without losing a step or breaking a smile, Paul Freund said, “I don’t think so, Lillian. The food’s not very good.”

  My last, still vivid picture of Lillian Hellman occurred that evening, sitting at the end of a large table in a French restaurant, picking at her food, a lit cigarette in hand, in an alcoholic haze, lonely in a crowd, another sad case of young charmers devolving into old bores.

  Many women have of course been charming, but unless they wrote or were filmed or appear in other people’s memoirs, we cannot know about the nature and extent of their charm. Everyone spoke kindly about Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), the founder of the Boston Museum named after her; George Santayana claimed she was the only person he ever met who never gossiped. But how charming, precisely, she was cannot be known.

  My friend, writer Midge Decter, has always seemed to me to qualify as charming. Midge is one of those women who one feels can see through any sham, not least one’s own, which tends to put one, in her company, on one’s best intellectual behavior. Her specialty is in saying the important obvious thing when everyone else seems to have forgotten it. In the early days of the second wave of feminism, when feminists argued that they were tired of women being treated as “sexual objects,” Midge remarked to me, “Sexual objects, hell, I never slept with any man I didn’t wish to sleep with.” On another occasion, at a conference about the family, I watched her get up to say that her own family of late had given her much to worry about. Her elderly parents and in-laws were not well settled and had lots of medical problems; she had various disagreements with her children; she wasn’t altogether pleased with the way some of her grandchildren were being raised. “No,” she said, “the family is fraught with every kind of complication and worry, and I’ve just about had it with the family. But when I see who is attacking the family, I am determined to defend the damn thing.” A perfect Midge Decter performance.

  Other women have had reputations for wit. Wit can add to charm but in itself is not necessarily charming. No one was wittier than Oscar Wilde, yet Noël Coward called him “a tiresome affected sod,” adding, “what a silly, conceited, inadequate creature he was and what a dreadful self-deceiver. It is odd that such brilliant wit should be allied to no humour at all.” Dorothy Parker was witty, perhaps the wittiest American woman of the past century. Much of her wit, though, was cruel, in the nature of put-downs. She was also a serious boozer, and it is impossible to be drunk and charming, at least seriously drunk, which a good part of the time Parker was.

  A successful Hollywood agent named Sue Mengers was notable for saying amusing things. She once entered a large party in Los Angeles and categorized the crowd there as “Schindler’s B-List.” She claimed her greatest achievement was not having any children. But, as Gertrude Stein once told Hemingway that “remarks are not literature,” neither are remarks charm. Something different, something deeper is entailed.

  The last, and most recent, candidate for charming woman in our day is Nora Ephron, the screenwriter, director, and essayist. In her movies—When Harry Met Sally, which she wrote, and Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Julie and Julia, which she wrote and directed, Nora Ephron attempted to revive, by bringing up-to-date, the great romantic comedies of an earlier era, comedies whose staple was charm. She was herself immensely attracted to charm, charming people, charming food and furniture and clothes, the charming life.

  For those who didn’t know her, Nora Ephron has left a record of her personality in her essays, which are almost entirely autobiographical. Her breakthrough essay “A Few Words about Breasts” (1972), appearing in Esquire, set the tone for the kind of writing that, after working five years as a reporter for the New York Post, brought her renown. The point of this essay is that Nora Ephron had small breasts as a girl and young woman, and it bothered her terribly. In tonally perfect anecdotes—about buying bras, petting with boys in high school, worrying about being found sexually inadequate for a husband—she makes plain, with comic touches added, how troubling not having large breasts was, especially in the 1950s when she came of age, the time of the amply bosomed Jane Russell, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor. The penultimate paragraph of her essay takes up the inconvenience of having large breasts about which women who have them sometimes complain. The final paragraph reads: “I have thought about their remarks, tried to put myself in their place, considered their point of view. I think they are full of shit.”

  Candor was at the center of Nora Ephron’s charm. She attempted to undercut standard morality and conventional wisdom, received opinions by a strong dose of confessional truth. Or, if her own actions turned out to be conventional, such as dying her hair to ward off the appearance of aging, or being addicted to e-mail, or being naturally greedy at the prospect of an inheritance, she found clever ways of undercutting her own conventionality by highlighting it through comic self-deprecation. “Everything is copy,” her mother once told her, and Nora Ephron seems to have lived her life with that as a motto.

  Nora Ephron came of age as a writer in the early 1970s. Esquire, in which she had a colu
mn and was the magazine’s only notable woman writer, was the hot magazine of the day. Although brought up in Los Angeles, where both her parents wrote for the movies, she became a New Yorker, the most fervent kind of New Yorker, not the born but the naturalized version. She lived for a time in Washington, DC, when she was married to her second husband (of three) Carl Bernstein, the investigative reporter who, with Bob Woodward, helped unveil the Watergate scandal. When she discovered that Bernstein was cheating on her with the wife of the then English ambassador, she divorced him and afterward wrote a novel about it called Heartburn, later made into a movie with Meryl Streep as Nora and Jack Nicholson as Carl Bernstein. “Everything,” like her mother said, “is copy.”

  Beginning in the 1960s, a woman named Erma Bombeck wrote a popular column, mostly run in small-town newspapers, about the trials of being a woman, mother, and wife in suburban America. She would not have liked to hear it, but Nora Ephron became an Erma Bombeck for the hip upper-middle class, with talent added. These would be the people who live in Manhattan and Los Angeles and San Francisco, perhaps in Portland and Seattle. They care enormously about food. Many of them at one time or another were probably in psychotherapy. A good address means a lot to them. So, too, do clothes and hairdos. They are nervous about child-rearing, about sex, especially about seeming in any way out of it.

  Erma Bombeck was cute, Nora Ephron clever, but in the end it came to pretty much the same thing: Both women mocked that which they were going to continue doing anyhow. The note of self-deprecation is the reigning one in much of Nora Ephron’s writing. “Sometimes I think not having to worry about your hair is the upside of death,” she wrote. “So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting.” Once in one of these beauty shops she “picked up a copy of Vogue while having my hair done, and it cost me twenty thousand dollars. But you should see my teeth.”

  She mentions the admirable manner in which a male friend died, but before dying arranging to send back love letters sent to him by women in his youth. She then notes that if she were to do the same, the men would be mystified. “I haven’t heard from any of these men for years, and on the evidence, they all seem to have done an extremely good job of getting over me.” Sometimes, though, the comedy lapses into the sadness of the rich, with-it life, and she touches on its truth. She writes about the deep pleasure in being in her (second) Long Island home on the Fourth of July with her third and final husband, Nick Pileggi, and their children. “There were fireworks at the beach, and we would pack a picnic, dig a hole in the sand, build a fire, sing songs—in short, experience a night when we felt like a conventional American family (instead of the divorced patched-together, psychoanalyzed, oh-so-modern family we were).”

  Nora Ephron was not beautiful—with her $20,000 teeth and the rest of her expensive grooming, she looked instead New York upper-east East Side high-maintenance—but she was talented. She wrote and directed movies, no easy task, and they are movies that people greatly enjoyed. Her essays were best-seller pleasing, though rarely touched the profound (as in the quotation above about life on Long Island on the Fourth of July). She left an estate estimated at $15 million. When she died, in 2012, in her seventy-first year, the feeling of loss among people who knew her, professionally and personally, seemed entirely genuine. She would have adored being thought charming, for in her movies and her writing attempting to charm is what she set out to do. In the contemporary world, though, it may not be easy for a woman to be charming. So many things have changed that now stand in the way.

  When Audrey Hepburn retired from making movies she did so because she sensed that roles for women of the kind she did best—roles emphasizing refinement, elegance, delicate beauty—were no longer available, or perhaps even believable. Something had happened, to the society, to the culture, that made the distance required for female charm to make itself felt no longer quite possible. A strong component of female charm was the reticence and careful distancing that allowed for mystery, specifically female mystery. In our day, reticence has been replaced by candor, distancing by unwanted intimacy, and the loser has been that element of mystery that has always been absolutely essential to womanly charm.

  Chapter IX

  Vulgar Charmers

  One tends to think of the charming as suave, urbane, refined, elegant, worthy not only of admiration but, the perhaps far-fetched hope is, of emulation. Not all charmers fit this description. Some approximate near the reverse, and yet are still charming, though not of course to everyone. Such is the multifacetedness of charm that a small number of people who could not care less about being charming, set out even to be the reverse of charming, nevertheless turn out to be so.

  These are the vulgar charmers. What makes them vulgar is their lack of interest in good taste. Taste itself, the very idea of it, would seem not to exist for them. I write “would seem,” but of course it just doesn’t, flat-out. Good taste exists for them only to travesty, to violate, to outrage. If traditionally charming people can be counted upon to exhibit good taste, the vulgar charmers can equally be counted on to mock and execrate it.

  Good taste, after all, is a construct, and far from a permanent one. Anyone who thinks it is permanent should be reminded that at Versailles, at the court of Louis XIV, the great Sun King defecated behind a screen with his courtiers standing about, certain among them designated to hold his bowl, others to clean him up afterward. Acceptable good taste, in other words, can change radically, has its limits, and is sometimes worth debunking if done in an amusing way. Making bad taste amusing is one of the things the vulgar charmers do. The pleasure they provide derives from watching standard good conduct ignored, decorum trashed. Not, this, to be sure, everybody’s idea of a good time, but for many of us somehow charming nonetheless.

  The first vulgar charmer, a character not from real life but from literature, is Falstaff, fat, sensual, a drinking man, bawdy, a small-time swindler, cowardly, witty, and withal winning. So irresistible is he that Shakespeare used him in three different plays, and Verdi brought him front and center from supporting actor to be the main and eponymous subject of his opera Falstaff. In Shakespeare, when Prince Hal ascends to be king, it is understood he must reject Falstaff, putting him aside, as Corinthians instructs when we grow older we ought to put aside childish things, but not without regrets. No one in real life would want to be Falstaff, but so long as he is on stage, neither, such is his charm, does anyone wish him to leave.

  Returning from literature and from the seventeenth century to today, consider the comedian and movie director Mel Brooks, whose immensely successful career has been built on cleverly exhibiting bad taste. Brooks has made comic movies joking about the Nazis (The Producers), hunchbacks (Young Frankenstein), flatulent and racists cowboys (Blazing Saddles), bird-droppings (High Anxiety), and gay men in Sherwood Forest (Men in Tights). He has operated as if etiquette were of no concern, political correctness did not exist, good taste laughable—and got away with it. He makes wretched jokes such as the one about the peacoat that would never have caught on if the man who invented it hadn’t changed its original name from that of the urine coat. And people adore him for such stuff.

  Interviewed on 60 Minutes by the abrasive Mike Wallace, whom no one ever accused of being charming, Mel Brooks, instead of answering Wallace’s opening question, asked him instead where he got his watch and how much he paid for it. In response to Wallace’s second question, Brooks leaned over, rubbed Wallace’s lapel, and exclaimed upon what a fine fabric it was, and asked what he paid for a jacket like that. What Brooks was doing, of course, was his interpretation of the crass Jew. The result was to crack up Wallace, born Myron Leon Wallik and himself Jewish. Brooks, Brooklyn-born, was originally Melvin Kaminsky.

  Always brandishing his Jewishness, with a face more Jewish than a dill pickle, Mel Brooks ought to be embarrassing, especially to the Jews. But, somehow, he isn’t
. He is also someone who doesn’t seem to mind bringing up bodily functions—belching and below—that no conventionally charming person would ever do. This, too, in his goofy presentation doesn’t seem to offend. A standard Mel Brooks anecdotal joke is the one he tells about informing his traditionally Jewish mother that he was going to marry the actress Anne Bancroft, a Catholic, and her response being, “That’s fine. I’ll be in the kitchen; my head’ll be in the oven.”

  Deliberately coarse and crude, Brooks was never salacious. In his movies he left this to the comedienne Madeline Kahn, who was able to take the heat out of sexuality through comedy. He also has an odd courtliness. He is raucous but never mean. One senses no put-down, no one-upmanship, no malice in him. He can be wild, but he is not vicious nor in the least dangerous. However rocky the comedic flight he takes his audiences out on, they may be fairly certain that he will bring them back and will land the plane safely.

  The comic actor Gene Wilder, who was featured in The Producers and in Blazing Saddles, said that Mel Brooks told him “never to be afraid of offending. It’s when you worry about offending people that you get in trouble.” Both in his movies and in his interviews—and no one gives more charming interviews than he—Brooks is always gambling. What he says and has done on screen can cause people either to cringe or to roar with laughter—falling off the couch laughter, dangerous laughter, the kind with the threat of heart attack in it. Wilder said of his friend Brooks: “Sometimes he’s vulgar and unbalanced, but . . . I know that little maniac is a genius. A loud kind of Jewish genius—maybe that’s as close as you can get to defining him. As for his vulgarity, which cannot be argued away, it is indubitably a healthy vulgarity.”