Charm Read online

  Most of us have never met a Sydney Smith, or anyone in the least comparable, nor been able to attend charmed circles of the kind established by the salonnieres of the ancien regime, or been in the presence of overpowering charm. What we have all experienced, however, is the simulacrum of charm as presented in the movies. These are models, of course, as I have noted, at a second, sometimes a third remove from reality. But vivid models they were. Not long ago on television, I heard an older woman, married five times, regret that she had never really found the man for whom in her imagination she had longed. “I guess I never met anyone who treats you like Cary Grant,” she said, “who talks likes James Mason, who wears clothes like Tyrone Power.”

  Nor is she likely to do so today, when men sit in quite good restaurants wearing baseball caps, waiters tell you their first names and that you have ordered very intelligently, children call recently met grown-ups by their first names, everyone refers to everyone else as “guys.” Things as a result may be a lot more comfortable, no doubt, easygoing perhaps; but distinctly not charming, no, very far from charming.

  The old standard for charm, as set by Baldassare Castiglione (never to “produce tedium or satiety . . . continually give pleasure”) and John Henry Cardinal Newman (“tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd”) still exists, but begins to appear dimmer and dimmer as it recedes into the past.

  Chapter III

  What Is and Isn’t Charming

  “You know what charm is,” Albert Camus writes in The Fall. “A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” This subtle formulation suggests that there is always an element of con in charm. Behind such a definition lurks the notion that charm is itself inherently manipulative, carries an ulterior motive, is perhaps devious. Camus’ notion of charm holds that, far from giving simple pleasure, charm is something to be on the alert against. In this interpretation, the answer to “why is this person so charming?” may come down to little more than asking, “What is he or she trying to get from me?” The charmer, as Camus had it, wants our “Yes,” but yes to what? To anything from selling us a car to landing us in his or her bed, and a great deal else in between. As Carl von Clausewitz is supposed to have said, “War is diplomacy by other means,” so can charm seem—and sometimes, alas, be—a con game by other means, little more.

  Charm, for Camus, and for many others, was a major weapon in the arsenal of seduction, and not sexual seduction alone. The root meaning of seduction is to lead someone astray, to do something he or she either doesn’t want or ought not to do. Other seductive weapons, to be sure, are available, many of them long before implanted in those of us ready to be seduced: among them appeals to greed, vanity, excessive credulity. This makes life easier for the charmer-seducer, who need know only how to turn these weaknesses to his or her own advantage.

  Charm in this sense, as seduction with an ulterior motive, is obviously always to be guarded against. Easier, of course, said than done. For seductive charmers, if they are any good, specialize in hiding their motives. One only knows one has been charmed after the trap is closed, the deal signed, one’s clothes are off, the cow has been removed from the barn and you are left with only a few seeds for a beanstalk in your hand.

  Others have gone even further in their criticism of charm. Toward the end of Evelyn Waugh’s (immensely charming) novel Brideshead Revisited, the character Anthony Blanche, said to be modeled on the aesthete Harold Acton, warns the novel’s narrator Charles Ryder about the evils of charm. “I took you out to dinner to warn you about charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail about the Flyte family [the occupants and owners of the grand mansion Brideshead]. Charm is the great English blight . . . It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.” At the same dinner Blanche tells Charles that he is an artist (a painter, readers of the novel will recall) and as such not exquisite, for true artists are not, in his view, charming. He adds: “Of course those that have charm don’t really need brains.” They get by, after all, on their charm. The worst that can be said against charm—and Anthony Blanche, not at all by the way, one of Evelyn Waugh’s most charming characters, says it—is that it can be empty, ignorant, and destructive of more serious things.

  Charm need not be either a con or be superficial. Nor ought it to be confused with the notion of cool. Cool has a linguistic history that makes evident its difference from charm, and it doesn’t come near covering the richer, more complicated case of charm. The origin of the word cool in its approbative sense is attributed to Lester Young, the tenor saxophonist; its context was the dignified performance of African-American jazz musicians in the face of crude racialist laws. The use of cool, too, has been subject to wrenching changes. Cool once attached to the easy elegance of Duke Ellington or Lena Horne. In the 1960s and ’70s, though, cool often meant being against authority, otherwise known as “the system”; or having the blind courage to experiment with LSD. Cool meant Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or James Dean mumbling inchoately—cool, yes, perhaps, but distinctly not charming. Cool always meant being in control, if not of anything in the external world, then certainly of oneself. The cool person, as they used to say, “had it all together,” with the meaning of the antecedentless “it” always more than a touch less than clear.

  Charm is social; cool tends to be, if not antisocial then above any interest in winning approval. Cool in its more recent sense is above all detached. In the 1950s, James Dean was cool; in the 1960s Steve McQueen was cool; Patti Smith was cool in the 1970s, and for many still is today; Kurt Cobain and Madonna were cool in the ’80s and ’90s. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were thought cool through more than a single decade, as was Paul Newman. All of these people had about them the implied notion that they were not to be trifled with or otherwise put upon; some even suggested an element of danger if one were to attempt to get too close to them. The jazz trumpeter Miles Davis is perhaps the best example of this last kind of cool, cool with an edge to it of potential cruelty, possibly danger. Very far, all this, from charming.

  Elegance is another quality sometimes confused with charm. Charming people are often elegant, though today standards in elegance are themselves highly uncertain. Elegance can sometimes be as off-putting as it can be in-gathering. Of a snobbish writer of the 1920s and ’30s named Lucius Beebe a journalist once noted that he “was menacingly well dressed.” Of Beebe’s formal manners, a woman friend remarked, when he went into the hospital for surgery, “I do hope the surgeon has the common decency to open Lucius at room temperature,” a story that is more charming than the man who was its subject. Elegant manners, invented to lubricate sociability, can also be used to chill it. Yet elegance, when made to seem natural, can, and often does, aid or supplement charm. Too many not especially elegant people, and some who have been deliberately inelegant—see my chapter on Vulgar Charmers—have been charming for elegance to be one of charm’s hallmarks.

  Amusing is another word that is often tossed up in searching for a definition of charm. Most people who are charming are also often amusing but not all amusing people are charming. In our day the comedians Sarah Silverman and Louis CK can be amusing but are not especially charming; in fact they are sometimes, quite purposefully, vile. Monkeys can be amusing, but one would scarcely think to call them charming. Charm has a larger circumference than amusement; and rightly so, for much more goes on within the circle of charm.

  Charm is sometimes thought sexy, which it can be, and it can of course lead on to sex, which it sometimes does. But sexy, in itself, isn’t especially charming. Glands and hormones and private parts do not register charm. Has anyone ever written charming pornography? Philip Roth attempted comic pornography, and with some success. Henry Miller also intermittently succeeded in this line. I recall from the halcyon days of literary censorship when as a college kid I read in one of Miller’s banned no
vels, in their Olympia Press plain green covers, a scene in which Miller describes making love to a woman standing up in a hallway, in the midst of which he wrote, as I remember, something like, “Her purse fell to the floor. A coin dropped out. I made a mental note to pick it up later.” Such comic touches, though, were washed away by scores of pages given over to Miller’s boringly earnest pornography.

  One can begin to build up a negative definition of charm by specifying various human qualities that get in the way of, if they not positively prevent, charm. People who are argumentative are not charming. People who too obviously show their vanity cannot be charming. Neither can those who name-drop egregiously. Legion are the numbers of people who overestimate their charm, and doing so is perhaps among the most common of all social errors.

  True charm does have an element of irresistibility. People are drawn to it. In Sunset and Twilight, his final diary volume, Bernard Berenson speaks of a cousin who he thinks of “as a partner in the wide-flung firm of ‘Charm Incorporated.’” This cousin is also a favorite “in ultra-smart society,” who knows wealthy Greeks (Onassis, Niarchos, and so on) and central figures in the Eisenhower administration. He is offered jobs, is everywhere welcome. Berenson mentions another of his acquaintances who is a member of Charm Incorporated, Georges Salles, a Jew who is the grandson of Gustave Eiffel, the Alsatian who designed and constructed the Eiffel Tower, and a man welcomed everywhere he goes, and among those “who no doubt have capacities, and even merits, but nothing like (equal to) the rewards they garner.” Salles held several high-level curatorial jobs in France and was, Berenson reports, “a sugarplum for hungry but beautiful women his life long, and still so, I dare say. What a successful career!” And all built on charm.

  Men and women have always existed who get by on their charm. Sometimes they have talent and skill and character to go with it, sometimes not. The trick the charming person can sometimes turn is to make himself seeming winning, whether he truly is or not. How does he or she do it? Various, as I hope to show, are the ways.

  The charming person is not opinionated, at least not openly so. In conversation he is often more interested, or at least shows himself more interested, in hearing your opinions than in expressing his own. He never pushes nor advertises himself, certainly not in any aggressive or obvious way. He often has the gift of intimacy, of making you feel that the two of you are close, tight, members under the skin of that select little club E. M. Forster called “the aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky.”

  If the charming person is neither argumentative nor opinionated, this means that he is probably not very political. Like everyone else, he may have his political views, but they are not central to his personality—not, at least, if he wishes to remain charming. Certainly he does not consider his political views the source of his virtue. For him virtue lies elsewhere: in kindness, generosity, graciousness, considerateness. Instead of opinions, he not so much professes as exhibits, gently, always understatedly, a point of view, which provides a complex, interesting outlook on the world.

  William Bolitho (1890–1930), a now forgotten essayist, is said to have been a spellbinding conversationalist. Walter Lippmann remembered him as “seizing command of the discussion and transporting it quickly to regions where even the most debilitating bore was too uncertain of himself to do anything but listen.” Lippmann explains why so conversationally dominant a man wasn’t himself a bore: “Because he was so instantly aware of all who were present, seeing them not as silhouettes but in the round and often clairvoyantly, he made them all share the excitement which he has in exploring his own thoughts. They would go home feeling not only that they had heard a brilliant performance, but that they had been rather uncommonly brilliant themselves.” Yet one wonders if Bolitho wasn’t too brilliant—one wonders if dazzling, as he seems to have been, is quite the same as charming.

  How many evenings with the enchanting Mr. Biltho could one take? The charming person, true enough, often does make everyone around him feel, depending on the nature of his charm, more brilliant, amusing, lively, ultimately charming himself. And yet those charmers who dominate any room they inhabit are in danger of themselves becoming tiring and ultimately tiresome. One can, after all, become overcharmed.

  The charming person may be entertaining, but never that full-time thing, an entertainer, with the latter’s need for constant attention and approval. Which is perhaps why Oscar Wilde, who said so many amusing things, always playing to the gallery—“Bernard,” Wilde told Bernard Berenson, “you forget that in every way I want to imitate my Maker, and like him I want nothing but praise”—was probably not finally charming. With his endless epigrams, ripostes, paradoxes, the old boy called attention to himself no matter where he was. (“I have nothing to declare but my genius,” he is said to have told the customs officials upon his arrival in 1892 for a lecture tour of the United States.) Doubtless he was entertaining; but doubtless, too, he must have used up all the oxygen in the room, every room, he entered where there was company to impress.

  Suavity, urbanity, sophistication can be constituent parts of charm, yes; pushing oneself forward as the ego urges, clearly not. “Look at me” can never be the banner under which the charmer travels. (“What would be the use of culture,” Goethe remarks, “if we did not try to control our natural tendencies.”) The charming person wishes to please without any suggestion of showing off. He does so without ever falling into unctuousness, flattery, ingratiation. While charm isn’t about mere agreeableness, the charming person, though he may when required beg to differ, is never truly disagreeable.

  Charm often carries an amiable, an admirable detachment. The charming person seems to have an amused—and amusing—coin de vantage, or angle on things. A glass of wine in his hand, a touch aloof, but never off-puttingly so, he steps in to make a casual but telling observation, offers a witty remark, formulates rather better than anyone else what is really on everyone else’s mind. If a short definition of charm is wanted, charm is that person, man or woman, whom you never want to leave the room.

  Let’s recollect our fundamental, our Oxford English Dictionary, definition of charm, which is “providing delight . . . arousing approval.” Stare at this definition long enough and one begins to see not merely a definition but implicit in it an interpretation of charm. Does the charming person provide delight, the definition ever so faintly suggests, chiefly to arouse approval? And this approval, once aroused and won, to what uses might it be put? Those suspicious of charm would say none worth admiring.

  I suspect that the truly charming person does not think of approval as his primary goal. He charms because he cannot help himself. He charms because it gives him pleasure to please. He can no more turn off the charm than the boorish man can turn it on. Charm, like goodness, becomes ingrained. When it works, there is no defense against it. Nor, when it is motiveless, need there be. When one is lucky enough to encounter charm, in a friend, a new acquaintance, a movie, a writer, a singer, a song, the best response is merely to take it in, to enjoy it. Charming—the word itself has a lovely soothing ring; and the quality itself, when it turns up to the right power, can be, more than soothing, enchanting.

  Chapter IV

  Who Isn’t Charming?

  I have asked a number of friends and acquaintances to name five persons in public life in the contemporary world whom they think charming. No one has been able to do it. Names are brought up—Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Vince Scully, Steve Martin, Bill Murray—but none gets anything like a consensus of agreement. Fifty years ago, names would have issued easily from anyone asked the same question: Yogi Berra, Duke Ellington, Jackie Gleason, Walter Pidgeon, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Armstrong, Jack Benny, Dorothy Parker, and on and on. What has happened to bring about this obvious shortage of charming people?

  A number of possibilities here. The first is that public figures in our day are overexposed, when notably charming figures of other times
weren’t exposed at all. We know too much about them—often too much of the tumult and sadness stirring beneath the burnished veneer of their outward charm. In an earlier day, before the advent of the talk show and the celebrity interview article, the private lives of public figures were allowed to remain just that, private. A movie star might be interviewed on the radio, but the subject was usually his or her current or next movie. A scandalous item might get into the gossip columns, but usually it didn’t too greatly dim the brightness the studio had sedulously backlit for the star. The magazine celebrity profile, usually written for fan magazines, was controlled by the celebrity or by his or her studio or agent.

  A different order of decorum was in place then than now. As personal example of the extent to which things have changed, in 1976 I wrote an article in Chicago magazine mocking a then locally famous gossip columnist named Irv Kupcinet. In a faux naïve manner, I inquired how a man of so little talent was able to rise so high in his line of work. In writing the article it would not have occurred to me to bring Kupcinet’s family, and hence private life, to the fore. His career was fair game, but the game stopped at his private life. Thirty or so years later a journalist in the same magazine writing about the same man speculated that his wife may have been ultimately responsible for the suicide of their daughter by pushing her too hard to advance her sputtering career as an actress.

  Today it is open season on movie stars, politicians, entertainers, athletes, musicians, writers. The word icon, generally and sloppily denoting an extremely well-known public figure, seems to have been invented in part to remind us of the root meaning of the word iconoclast, a smasher of icons. In such a journalistic atmosphere, the one in which we have for a long while now been living, it isn’t easy for a public figure to retain his or her dignity, let alone the high gloss of his or her (often studio or public-relations created) charm.