Charm Read online

  Quite possibly many of the figures we took fifty or more years ago to be charming, under the closer inspection of our day would have shown themselves to be far from it. Clark Gable, in his day a model of masculine savoir faire, we now learn was a masher, a heavy boozer, the father of an illegitimate child with Loretta Young (whom he is said to have date raped), and a man who wore false teeth and had questionable breath. Humphrey Bogart, everyone’s ideal notion of urban suavity and hence big-city charm, turns out to have been a difficult character in every way: an unpleasant wise guy with a wet palette who wore a hairpiece. The director Billy Wilder in an interview with Cameron Crowe recounts working with Bogart on Sabrina. In the interview he asserts that Bogart was touchy and envious and spat when he spoke. “He was a shit,” Wilder says, though later he allows that Bogart was brave in the face of his death by cancer. Read that and the famous Bogart charm leaks away.

  My friend Hilton Kramer told me that, when he was the art critic for the New York Times, he was at the Los Angeles County Art Museum to write up a current show. Before he set out on his tour of the works he was to write about, the director of the museum informed him that Edward G. Robinson, himself a notable collector of old masters, was in the museum, and would like nothing better than to accompany Hilton as he walked through the building. Hilton said that he greatly admired the movies of Edward G. Robinson, that Robinson was easily his favorite Hollywood actor, and few things would give him more pleasure than to have the great movie star join him on his tour. “Within ten minutes,” Hilton said, “I had only one question: How can I get rid of this guy, who felt the need to rehearse every platitude about visual art known to man.” More of a sad than a comic story, this, I think.

  One cannot go poking around in the private lives of public figures and expect many to survive the investigation altogether intact. Cary Grant would be on everyone’s short list of great charmers. And so he was—as Cary Grant the Hollywood star. Not long ago the actor Frank Langella published a memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women, in which he reports Tony Curtis remarking of Grant—whose screen presence Curtis originally hugely admired—that he “was a fucking bore, who sucked the air out of any room he was in.” Other people soon chimed in. Mel Brooks, on television, told the story of how thrilling it was when he first arrived in Hollywood to find himself in a studio office next to Cary Grant’s. The thrill increased when Grant invited him to lunch. The lunch didn’t go off very well, but Brooks blamed himself. After a second lunch, he realized that the fault wasn’t his. When Grant called a third time for lunch, Brooks instructed his secretary to tell the great star that he wasn’t in.

  The other degrading Cary Grant story has to do with his at one point sharing a house with Randolph Scott. Long before there had been rumors that Scott was gay—for what it’s worth, he probably wasn’t—and so suddenly the rumors about homosexuality extended to Cary Grant. They were only squelched when another person came forth to remark that homosexuality had nothing to do with the two men living together. They lived together to save money; both Scott and Grant were said to be among the cheapest men in Hollywood. Cheap, whatever else it is, isn’t charming.

  None of these stories would have been told to begin with if the breakdown of decorum didn’t, as it now obviously does, extend into the past. Of Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks’ deceased wife, Langella tells stories about her astonishing narcissism, once being enraptured by the image of a woman seen in a department-store mirror who turned out to be herself. In our time, one sad miscue, or serious mistake, can on the instant of its revelation, divast forever a person of his reputation for charm or even virtue. The magazine Vanity Fair ran an article about Arthur Miller, who always carried himself as a pillar of high integrity and keen sensitivity, and a great lover of humanity, in which it was revealed that, with his second wife, the Swedish photographer Inge Morath, he had a son with Down syndrome who, soon after his birth, he clapped into an institution and never saw again. Poof! The pillar of integrity turns into a pillar of salt. Not even the dead, including the most sacred idols among the dead, are safe from diminishment in an indecorous age.

  Nor does the therapeutic spirit behind investigations into the lives of public figures conduce to the retention of charm. Sadder still, many celebrities may be said almost to specialize in revealing their own hang-ups, weaknesses, mental and physical malfunctions, abuses suffered in childhood. The journalist Tina Brown, formerly editor of The Tatler, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, makes this same point: “Celebrity culture has been out of control for a long time, and the more media there is, the more short-lived their staying power. When Vanity Fair began, it was enough to have a movie star on the cover, but Oprah made some psychic scar de rigueur for exposure to get any traction. Now you can’t get on a talk show unless you can brag about being a victim of pedophilia or anorexia. It’s such a bore, all the whining.”

  Politicians may seem charming, but ultimately they cannot be so, if only because, by the nature of their profession, they are divisive. The people who don’t agree with their views are unlikely to find them charming—quite the reverse. The divisiveness of politicians drains them of their charm. Many people feel Barack Obama is charming, but quite as many think any charm he might possess is negated by his political ideas. Whether or not he is charming depends on the filter of political beliefs and prejudices one happens to be wearing. The same was true earlier of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though in a charm election he would probably have had a larger plurality than Barack Obama—less than half the nation loathed him. Winston Churchill may have been the last charming politician, along with having been an authentically great man; his charm of course derived from his wit. (“Politics,” he said, “is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.”) Conservatives found Ronald Reagan utterly charming; liberals thought him a dolt with a bad hair-dye job.

  Many people found and continue to find Bill Clinton charming, despite all the scandal that has attended his career. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a politician whom many (I among them) found charming, had a low view of the Clintons; he thought them interested finally only in getting themselves elected and ultimately more concerned about looking good than doing good. Yet, upon Moynihan’s retirement, he was called upon to endorse Hillary Clinton as the candidate for his seat in the US Senate, which had to be an unappetizing chore. As a good party man, Moynihan had no choice, so he did it. While doing so, Moynihan was never less charming.

  As for Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal, some may have found it amusing, a fraternity-boy-like prank, even if taken place in the Oval Office of the President of the United States, a setting, one might have thought, of the greatest seriousness. When Clinton did his best to elude the charges against him, nobody believed him, but nobody could blame him for attempting to do so. Despite what the television reporter Cokie Roberts called the incident’s “yuk factor,” one need not necessarily despise Bill Clinton for this egregious lapse. I didn’t—that is, until I learned that, as the evidence began to pile up against him, Clinton suggested to his White House confidants that they spread the story that the twenty-three-year-old Monica was “stalking” him. With this the screw-off fraternity boy instantly disappeared and the creep came to the fore. Not charming, no, not in the least.

  In any list of charming politicians, most people would put forth the name of John F. Kennedy. Since his death, too much has become known about Kennedy, and what is known divests him of much of the charm he might once have been thought to possess. He was a philanderer of a very high power—so high as to rank as a sexual predator—while selling himself as a family man and loving father. Story after story of his activity in this line has come out since his death. The most recent, written by a former White House intern named Mimi Alford, is perhaps the most cringe-making of all. She recounts, with very little apparent malice in the telling, of Kennedy’s all but r
aping her in the White House when she was nineteen. He subsequently took her along on some of his political travels, a portable concubine, a sexual treadmill of sorts, leaving her awaiting him in hotel rooms while he expatiated on virtue in the public arena.

  Some people might find this forgivable—emperors and kings have done no less—but Mimi Alford tells of “Mr. President,” as she always called him, also requesting that she provide relief for one of his aids in the form of fellatio, which she agreed to do, and “relaxation” for his brother Teddy, which she chose not to do. “Ask what you can do for your country,” the JFK inaugural speech needs to be rewritten after Ms. Alford’s memoir, “while I’ll be upstairs in the White House bonking a teenager.” Not charming.

  Celebrities and especially movie stars who might otherwise be charming put a serious dent in their charm once they declare their politics. George Clooney, who many people think charming, and who is an actor in the male line of Cary Grant and Gig Young, lost much of his cachet because of too regularly making known his strong liberal views; at any rate he figures to have lost it in the view of those who oppose such views. The same might be said on the other side for Clint Eastwood’s declarations of his conservatism. Jane Fonda lost much ground through her political protests during the Vietnam War, becoming Hanoi Jane, the Vietnam War’s version of Tokyo Rose. Jane Fonda has always been an excellent actress, but her politics lost her, too, a good part of her audience. Movie stars always had politics, but the old studio system cautioned them against announcing their politics too blatantly, if at all. In so highly politicized a country as America has become, once one does so, one loses roughly half one’s potential audience. Or as the basketball player Michael Jordan, who kept his politics to himself, once put it, “Even Republicans buy gym shoes.”

  If I were to have asked people not to name five charming people in public life but five who overrate their charm, most would hesitate to stop at a mere five. Start with Keith Olbermann and Rush Limbaugh, on opposite sides of the political fence, but together in thinking themselves charming when they are the reverse. Let us add Regis Philbin, so pathetically mistaken in his assumption that he has a winning personality. Toss in Bill Moyers, so certain of his virtue, and Bill Maher, whose idea of wit is to call someone whose politics he contemns an “asshole.” Donald Trump’s is a name that scarcely required saying, and was italicized during his run for the presidency and has not in the least diminished since he has attained that high office. The two retired tennis champions Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe easily make the list. Barbra Streisand is certainly on it, as are those former professional television hosts Phil Donahue and Larry King. Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters are decidedly uncharming; much of the cast of the morning television show called The View also qualify nicely. The list could be greatly extended.

  From 1950 through 1967 a television program called What’s My Line? ran on Sunday nights in America. For those too young to remember the program, the idea behind it was for a panel of supposedly sophisticated Manhattanites to guess the strange jobs of guests and, after being blindfolded, to guess the name of a mystery guest, who was him- or herself a celebrity of one sort or another. The women wore what were then called cocktail dresses, the men were in black tie. Among the sometimes-alternating regular four panelists were the actresses Arlene Francis and Kitty Carlisle, the newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, the actors Martin Gable and Hans Conried, the comedian Steve Allen, the publisher Bennett Cerf, and George S. Kaufman, a deeply neurotic playwright and theater critic who claimed to have left psychotherapy because his therapist asked too many God-damned personal questions. The host of the show was a former newspaper executive named John Daly, whose only obvious talent or qualification for the job was a distinctly upper-class accent.

  The presupposition of What’s My Line? was its charm. We, its viewers, were, in effect, being allowed the privilege of witnessing a parlor game played by charming New Yorkers. Charmed with one another they may have been, but their collective unreality; their assumption that everyone was, like them, vastly wealthy, moderately famous, and happily urbane; their certainty of their cleverness; their clammy clubbiness, was appalling. They made one wish for a brief revolution, just long enough to see their heads roll. The show stayed on television for seventeen years. Might it have done so because it gave its viewers a fine release at the close of the week, a way to discharge distaste and even hatred, by pouring it onto these unattractive people who, mistake of mistakes, were so utterly and mistakenly confident of their charm?

  Earlier, in setting out names of people who overestimate their charm, I thought about adding that of David Letterman. My guess is that the world was divided into three when it comes to David Letterman: those who adored him, those who deplored him, and those who could not care less about him. I tend to fall into the third category, but I cannot help comparing him to his predecessor, Johnny Carson, who was charming enough to last fully thirty years as the so-called host of The Tonight Show.

  Part of Carson’s charm was in his talent at selflessness and at self-abasement. Watching him on television over the years, one felt a certain generosity of spirit in him in his being pleased when other comedians succeeded on his show, a pleasure that one gathers is far from standard behavior in show business. Carson never seemed to push himself forward, and only talked about himself in a joking, self-degrading way. He joked about his drinking during his bachelor days, or he mocked his own infelicity at marriage, having been a many-times divorced man. If he had political views, which one assumes he did, he kept them to himself.

  Since Johnny Carson’s death, it has been revealed, through an HBO special about him, that he had a mother, whom, however great his success, he could never please, which couldn’t have been easy on him. His failed marriages, about which he joked on television, in life turned out to be, predictably, sad. But a charming man or woman would never bring such things up in company, let alone on national television, whereas a person who overestimates his charm—and also his importance—leads with them. Whatever the problems of his personal life, Johnny Carson was too charming ever to do that.

  If there is anything like a single indisputable rule about charm, it is this: If you think you are charming, there is an excellent chance that you probably aren’t. Most of the men and women I have mentioned in this chapter are cases in point.

  Chapter V

  Am I Charming?

  Full in the face of my one rule about charm, that if one thinks one is charming one probably isn’t, I wish now to say I do believe I am charming: mildly charming, and, alas, resistibly, highly resistibly, so, but still somewhat charming, I do believe, nonetheless. Mine is at best a secondary charm. (Charm, unlike pregnancy and the quality of uniqueness, admits of qualification and gradations.) I have never charmed exotic women into my bed or charmed my way into theirs. So far as I know I have never gained a job or vast sums of money or advancement of any serious kind through such charm as I may possess. The best that my charm may have brought me is a few new friends—people who, after a brief while in my company, may have noted to themselves that I seem a person of possible interest, someone mildly amusing or clever, with no obvious side to him, and is, who knows, perhaps worth knowing a little better.

  I cannot recall ever having been called charming. The only evidence I have of my charm are the smiles and the laughter of family and friends and acquaintances, when I have been able to evoke them. The closest I have come in recent years to have an open avowal of my charm was made by a publisher who invited me to a very expensive dinner at a now-defunct Chicago restaurant called Charlie Trotter’s. The morning after our dinner, he sent me an e-mail saying that he was miffed by the fact that our conversation was so enjoyable that he couldn’t remember any of the wonderful food he had eaten the night before. A charming compliment, this, and one that suggests, now that I think about it, the publisher may well be more charming than I.

  Some people are content to be charmed;
others among us feel we must impose our charm, such as it is. I write “us,” for I have most of my life been among those who feel it incumbent upon themselves to assert what they believe is their charm, however minor it might be, in however circumspect a manner. Why do I feel it incumbent at all? I was not a boy that girls found especially appealing. I was a respectable but less than terrific athlete. As a student, I may be said not to have existed, finishing just above the lower quarter of my high-school class. As a field of successful endeavor that left charm, or what, in my high-school days, passed for charm.

  I may have picked up the notion that I was under an obligation to charm from my father, who was a salesman. “You have to sell yourself,” my father used to say, and this must have been what he did in his successful career selling things he didn’t know all that much about: at first linens and handkerchiefs, later costume jewelry, novelties, athletic trophies.

  I doubtless picked up from my father the notion that one should make the effort to sell oneself. This entailed demonstrating, never too aggressively, that one was one of the boys, without malice or meanness, in short, in the high accolade of my youth, a good guy. “No one expects you to be an angel,” my father instructed me, “but that doesn’t give you a warrant to be an s.o.b.” In a further anti-s.o.b. instruction, he said: “Never be an s.o.b., for you can never tell when you might need the help of someone lower down whom you passed on the way up.” My father wasn’t as calculating as I seem to be making him out to be here—he was a genuinely generous and good-hearted man—but I subconsciously took up his credo, that of being a bit of a salesman of oneself, one whose only product was charm.