Charm Read online

  Raymond Chandler described charm as “a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets.” Chandler was writing here about the prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who could be so charming on the page and often so uncharming in his life. Even though one would like to think otherwise, perhaps no one is wholly charming, or charming full-time, and the best in this realm one can hope for is partial charm. For this reason, at least in the modern era, so many of the models we have for charm come from the movies, where life’s rich complexities have never been the first order of business. In the movies Irene Dunne was charming, and so were Jean Arthur and Myrna Loy. In a radically different way, Mae West qualified as charming. The Hepburns, Katherine and Audrey, surely made the cut, the first for her aristocratic brashness, the second for her refinement and elegance. Barbara Stanwyck’s ebullience radiated charm.

  Male movie stars exhibit not necessarily more but a wider range of charm: from the suavity of Cary Grant in North by Northwest to the taciturnity of Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon to the hilarity of Donald O’Connor in Singing in the Rain to the virile charm of James Garner in just about everything. Fred Astaire provided a charm that was largely physical, and all the more astonishing for the fact that, physically, he was far from prepossessing; the way he moved and spoke and dressed made him charming. Laurel and Hardy, and particularly Stan Laurel, could be charming, and of course Charlie Chaplin was about nothing but charm: If you aren’t charmed by Chaplin’s dance of the bread rolls in Gold Rush, intensive psychotherapy is indicated.

  If one wants to take the shortest of short courses in charm, one cannot do better than watch the Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy, where two charming people play off each other to maximum charming effect. The story is always the same. Powell and Loy are Mr. and Mrs. Nick Charles; he is a former detective, she an heiress; and together they live in plush and (in his case) boozy comfort on her money. He drinks all day and she wears beautiful clothes at night. Although in some of the later movies they have a child (played by Dean Stockwell), in the earlier ones their only dependent is the wire-haired terrier named Asta, himself damned charming.

  William Powell has rather a weak chin, not especially good teeth, and he doesn’t move all that smoothly. The charm, you might say, is in his accoutrements. He is always elegantly turned out, in beautifully tailored suits and splendid rain- and overcoats; his pajamas and dressing gowns aren’t bad, either. Cocktails, delicately mixed and carefully shaken and imbibed at all hours, are his great passion. When a secondary character in one of the Thin Man movies turns down an early morning drink, Powell replies, “That’s a mistake.”

  So charming is William Powell in these movies that some of the crooks he sent to prison, upon their return, don’t hold his foiling them against him. He has an antipathy to his own talent for sleuthing, and Myrna Loy, hungering for a little action, is always encouraging him to take up the latest murder case that conveniently lands at the door of their beautifully appointed apartments in plush hotels where efficient room service is available round the clock. “Oh, Nicky,” she says, “why not take the case? You are so good at it, darling.”

  They play their marriage, like nearly everything else in these movies, for laughs and charm. They sleep in single beds, as the Hollywood censorship codes of the day required, but they rarely get much sleep, and are regularly disturbed at all hours by various mugs and thugs knocking on their door seeking Nick’s help and resulting in his taking on another case. All this, though furnishing the action for their movies, is viewed as so much distraction by Powell, who wishes only to get back to his drinking. Besides, detection isn’t really what the Thin Man movies are about; charm is.

  In many of his movies, Cary Grant does William Powell with good looks—not to speak of the world’s most perfect perennial tan—and a British accent added. If Powell was pure charm, Grant’s was a more mixed proposition. Did women, watching him in his various movies, fantasize making love with him? Grant was sexy in a way that Powell never was. Is sex a part of charm, or something distinct from it? In some of her movies, Marilyn Monroe could be charming, yet no one was sexier, or at least thought sexier, than she. Sexy can be charming chiefly if it is played for laughs. Sexy played steamily, bordering onto the pornographic, is in another category. In The Seven-Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe reports to her downstairs neighbor Tom Ewell, who invites her for a drink, that she’ll be right down as soon as she takes her underwear out of the refrigerator; on hot nights, she tells him, all disarmingly, she prefers cool underwear. Now that is sexy but also a joke of sorts on sex, and as such charming.

  Sexy can be charming, but charming is not necessarily or even usually sexy. In its purest form, charm is devoid of sexiness. One is charming not to seduce but for charm’s own sweet sake. Certainly, good looks can be charming, in and of themselves, and so, too, can interesting, even odd, looks. Fred Astaire, who rarely kissed his leading ladies on camera, is a case in point: a smallish man with a large head, big ears, a too-wide forehead, wearing a toupee—and yet taken all together, somehow, immensely charming.

  Many are the stories of female actresses who, self-conscious of what they deem a defect in their looks, have plastic surgery and lose their charm. The actress Jennifer Grey, who was lovely in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off and Dirty Dancing, had rhinoplasty and lost the charming look of vulnerability that her less-than-perfect nose lent her, and she seems to have worked very little in movies afterward. Face-lifts, false or capped teeth, and other cosmetic changes, all meant to improve beauty, can divest a face of its natural charm.

  Charm can also be homely, if homely in an unmenacing way. Consider the long bland face of Stan Laurel, with the thatch of standing hair atop it. The Marx Brothers, no great beauties to begin with, made themselves homlier even than nature had intended through makeup and odd costumes. Buster Keaton’s wide-eyed innocence radiated charm. Ed Wynn’s face fluttered with it. Even W. C. Field’s red nose—distinctly not acquired through regular participation in winter sports—had its odd charm.

  Most of us have encountered charm among friends and acquaintances. Some of us may have had charming parents, or a charming aunt or uncle or cousin, but most people’s first encounter with charm was on the movie screen. Without Hollywood movies, few among us are likely to have clear, if any, notions of charm: of what constitutes it, how it works, and above all, what it looks like. For those among us who in their childhoods in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s went to the movies regularly, Hollywood provided an education as strong, possibly stronger, than any on offer in the classroom. Without the movies, who would have known how to kiss a member of the opposite sex, smoke a cigarette (when smoking was still considered a cosmopolitan and not an antisocial, possibly a suicidal, act), deal with a head waiter, attempt sophisticated conversation, or wear elegant clothes? About urbanity, suavity, worldliness, and other components of charm the movies clued us in.

  Today if one asks anyone for a model of charm, he or she is likely to come up first with a movie star, usually not a contemporary one. Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Fred Astaire, Myrna Loy are on the list of usual charming suspects. The names of a rich strain of English film actors—Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Errol Flynn, James Mason, David Niven, Herbert Marshall, Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, and up to but not quite including Michael Caine, Albert Finney, and Dirk Bogarde—also come up. In France the great charmers were Jean-Pierre Aumont, Maurice Chevalier, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Louis Jourdan. Italy provided Vittorio De Sica, Marcello Mastroianni; Germany, Maximilian Schell and Oskar Werner.

  Where did Hollywood get its notions of charm? Some of its directors—Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, George Cukor—esteemed charm, and recognized the value of reproducing it for a mass audience. Romantic comedies, in which these men specialized, were often little more than exhibitions of charm in action. Some of these men were themselves cha
rming. (Billy Wilder, whose charm was of the coarse Viennese kind, once claimed that Oscars and other prizes were rather like hemorrhoids, elucidating the remark by adding: “Every asshole has one.”) The success of the movies these men made reverberated, and other, often lesser directors began to aim for charm in their movies. Charm, along with gangsters and cowboys, is one of the things the movies do best, or at least once did best.

  The movies produced charm in a buffet of types. Among male actors on offer these included the charm of the ultra-masculine Clark Gable, the roguish Errol Flynn, the sensitive Montgomery Clift, the craggy Humphrey Bogart, the gawky James Stewart, the insouciant William Powell; the dazzlingly good-looking Tyrone Power, the sweet Laurel & Hardy, the chaotic Marx Brothers, the innocent Buster Keaton, and many more. Among women there was the charm of the refined Deborah Kerr, the neurotically energized Rosalind Russell, the peppy Ginger Rogers, the spunky Barbara Stanwyck, the wholesome Jeannie Crain, the sophisticated Irene Dunne, the elegant Olivia de Haviland, the beautiful Rita Hayworth, the silken Lauren Bacall, and many more. The movies offered a velvet-lined sample case of charm.

  Whether all these actors were charming in life we shall never know. Many, we have come to know, were not. Since their deaths, stories have begun to leak out about the foibles of many of them: the alcoholism of this one, the dullness of that, the sexual predatoriness of another, the reactionary or communist politics of still others. While they were alive, none of this was public knowledge. The powerful Hollywood studios for which they worked understood that these actors were their most valuable property, and as such they protected them, even from themselves, by not allowing any but their well-varnished selves to be on display.

  The two main Hollywood gossip columnists, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, were hostage to the great studios, who fed them a careful diet of what they, the studios, wanted the world to know. The questions asked of movie stars in radio interviews were not so much softballs as cream puffs. Talk shows had not come into existence, and movie stars could not yet appear on them revealing how foolish, insipid, politically naive, psychologically tortured, vain, or stupid many of them were.

  Certainly they did not, while in the midst of their careers, write memoirs about how their fathers had sexually abused them or their mothers’ drinking crushed their spirits, or how they defeated their drug or alcohol problems, or screwed everyone on the set during the movie for which they narrowly missed winning an Oscar. Only their good deeds, their putatively happy family lives, their charitable works, their heroics during the war were revealed. The studios kept them tightly wrapped not in cotton, but in cashmere.

  Still, actors of that era—the 1930s through the 1950s—were able to do charm in a way that has not been duplicated in our own. Julia Roberts is no replacement for Audrey Hepburn, George Clooney for Cary Grant. As immensely talented as Meryl Streep may be—she, surely, is the actor of the current age, male or female—she cannot bring off the charm of natural refinement that Deborah Kerr was able to do in movie after movie. Nor does one any longer hear, as one heard from Ronald Colman, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness, and David Niven, the charming sonorities of upper-class English accents. As for Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Arthur, and William Holden, movie parts featuring charm of the kind they displayed are no longer being written. Might it be that no one today is alive with a firm enough grasp of charm to write them? So strong were these models of charm provided by the movies, so compelling in performance, that in later years the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus was pleased to be thought to look and be like Humphrey Bogart and went about in a trench coat, a Bogartian cigarette dangling from his lips, while Jean-Paul Sartre fantasized being Gary Cooper—a stretch if ever there was one—his almost precise opposite physically and mentally. These compelling models of charm are no longer available, except via Turner Classic Movies.

  What we were offered was pure charm unbesmirched by public scandal or personal turmoil. Not that scandalous or dreadful behavior didn’t go on. How could it not? The combination of fame and vast sums of money that a successful movie career brought made egregious behavior more likely than not. Clark Gable is said to have had an illegitimate child; Myrna Loy had four marriages; Humphrey Bogart, according to Billy Wilder, was an anti-Semite even though married to a Jewish woman (Lauren Bacall, née Betty Persky) and a man with a wet palate who spat when he spoke. Most uncharming, all of this, but who knew? Who wanted to know?

  What does it mean that the charm seen in the movies was not available to the actors who imitated it so charmingly on the screen? Does it disqualify charm itself as a fake, a fraud? I don’t think so. One might wish that Errol Flynn were as charming a rogue off-camera as on (off-camera, he turns out to have been a bit of a creep), or that Lauren Bacall was as witty and satinly sophisticated in real as in movie life (in interviews in her later years she came across as complaining, slightly contemptuous, irritating even), but, somehow, that does not disqualify the ideals of charm, male and female, that each represented in the movies. That most of the actors who so flawlessly exhibited charm on screen were less than perfectly charming off-camera is a touch sad but not altogether shocking.

  In life, charm can be a quick, a fleeting thing—represented by the perfect bit of repartee, the touch of elegant manners, the generous gesture—but in the movies charm is sustained by repetition and careful presentation. One went to the movies in search of charm—also in search of action, romance, thrills, and laughter—and more times than not found it, locking in our notions of what is charming for life.

  The Hollywood definition of charm survives in the minds of most people. By this definition charm is urbane, suave, sophisticated, amusing, adult. Yet the movie stars who set this definition attained their greatest fame from the 1930s through the 1950s. Charm in the movies seemed to end sometime in the 1960s—as it tended to do in America and perhaps Western societies generally. The 1960s tended to be iconoclastic, and traditional charm was among the icons it smashed. Romantic comedy, the major vehicle for charm in the movies, all but disappeared. Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, George Clooney, Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, Goldie Hawn played in movies, many of them written and directed by Nora Ephron, that were meant to carry on this tradition, but these movies didn’t quite carry the same payload of charm that the earlier movies did. Something was missing. Might it have been the belief in charm itself?

  Chapter II

  The Standard for Charm

  Of course there was charm long before the movies. Different historical ages have had different conceptions of what is charming. What charmed in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles would not have charmed at the Lyndon Johnson White House. What charms in Manhattan isn’t likely to charm in Duluth, Minnesota. What charms at a cocktail party at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, doesn’t figure to do so at a similar party at the Heritage Foundation in the same town. Different ages, different places in the same age, will have distinctly different notions of what constitutes charm.

  Yet perhaps at all times a baseline has existed even to begin to qualify as charming. A charming person is never affected; nor is he crudely indiscreet (subtly indiscreet is a different matter); he takes into consideration to whom and where and under what circumstances he is displaying his charm; he does not, out of ambition or vanity, push himself forward, extolling his own talent or ability or recounting his accomplishments or triumphs. He has tact; he is only tactless on those rare occasions when tactlessness is called for. A charming person, at a minimum, has strong notions of decency and is endowed with good judgment, at least in the social realm.

  In an online posting I not long ago came across, the answer to the question of what constitutes charm is set out in simple terms. “What is charm?” the posting asks. “It’s that special appeal some people exude. Even those who are not particularly attractive or sexy, but have loads of charm, seem to radiate something so special that others are drawn to them. Think Tom Ha
nks, Oprah Winfrey and Diane Sawyer. How do they do it?”

  Some among us think Tom Hanks or Oprah Winfrey and Diane Sawyer not especially charming at all. We think Tom Hanks, in his movie roles at least, likeable at best. The all but nationwide attraction of Oprah is for us one of the great mysteries of the Western world; and Diane Sawyer, dripping as she generally is with empathy, is rather heavy-going in her attempt to come across—as in a charmless age one is permitted to say—as altogether too fucking sensitive.

  The online posting goes on to offer five qualities or traits that, cumulatively, constitute charm. These are 1. A sense of humor, 2. Insight and passion (an odd coupling), 3. Effortless social grace, 4. An interest in others, and 5. Curiosity about the world. The terms, as noted, are indeed simple. But are they also convincing?

  Think now of Oscar Levant, who was considered one of the charming men of his day, between the 1930s and 1960s, a habitué of talk shows and television panels with a television show of his own in Los Angeles. Levant had only the first of these qualities and perhaps a dab of the second. He made himself charming by featuring his neuroses and his outrageousness. “I knew Doris Day when she was still a virgin,” he said. “Schizophrenia beats dining alone,” he said. “Underneath this flabby exterior,” he said, “is an enormous lack of character.” He also said: “I have no trouble with my enemies. It’s my goddamn friends that keep me walking the floors at night.” And: “Once I’ve made up my mind, I’m full of indecision.”

  Known for his quick wit and wildly imaginative put-downs, Oscar Levant was also astonishingly unpredictable—in conversation he cheated expectations, one of the marks of charm not generally noted—and could say anything at any time. He was, then, charming without passion, effortless social grace, an interest in others, and curiosity about the world. (“I have given up reading books,” he said. “I find it takes my mind off myself.”) If he had all these four qualities, who can say, Oscar Levant might have been a bore.