Charm Read online

  Charm in the days of my adolescence took the form of being witty, good at repartee, having the ability to tell a story well. I think I passed with respectable grades at all these exercises. Perhaps the most charming thing I did as a boy, though, was listen to others. I was a sedulous listener, and genuine listening can of course contribute a good deal to the notion that one is charming. (“‘Tell me,’” Max Beerbohm declared, “are the two most beautiful words in the English language.”) I specialized in those days in insinuating myself with people, or at least those among them I thought worth exerting my charms upon. I wanted to be liked, I knew how to go about it, and I usually succeeded. I was, yes, a good guy, a damn good guy.

  Apart from adding a few layers of sophistication and a touch or two of learning into the mix, I am not sure that such charm as I possess today is in any way different than it was in my high-school days. Such arrows as I carry in my charm quiver include what I hope are a number of interesting anecdotes, an ample fund of jokes, a certain ability to manipulate language for comic effect, occasional flashes of wit, and an amused outlook on life.

  I am not the life of the party; never have been, nor yearned to be. I haven’t ever had the least wish to dominate socially. At its most ambitious my charm goal has been to be one of the people who made the party a bit more pleasant by saying a few amusing things. “I met a nice man named Joe Epstein at Posey Fisher’s last night,” I imagine someone saying, “who did an uncanny imitation of Jackie Mason, recounted a touching story about T. S. Eliot, and told a good joke about a Soviet painter asked to do a portrait of Lenin in Warsaw.”

  The older one gets the greater one’s chance for exercising such charm as one possesses. Men of a certain age, of whom I have for a good while been one, are no longer on the front lines in the sex wars, and can therefore say things to young women that they never could when themselves young, lest they be taken for mashers. I find myself doing it with young female bank tellers, supermarket check-out women, waitresses, and others. “That new short haircut looks marvelous on you,” I might say. Or: “Very exotic that nail polish you’re wearing.” Or: “Those company clothes the bank makes you wear—on you they look good.” Or, taking things a step further: “Ah, if I were only forty years younger, I should pursue you with all the savage cunning now at my command. Maybe I better make that fifty years younger.” I say these things not merely to be nice, or to be selling, but invariably because I mean them.

  Such charm as I possess is not regularly exercised on a wide social circle. I lunch with friends, and sometimes meet others for afternoon coffee. I go to few dinner parties. Cocktail parties are my notion of punishment. I am not in the least shy; am undaunted by the rich, the famous, or the powerful; and in the company of strangers do not mind establishing my bona fides as a man of the world. One of the pleasures of encountering strangers is of course that they haven’t heard my stories and jokes before. On this score, my wife of more than forty years, who has heard all of both doubtless too many times, easily qualifies as long-suffering.

  In any social setting in which I find myself, I suppose I tend to do my share of the talking. Sometimes I walk away worried that I have done more than my share, have slipped over from being a contributor to the conversation to having orchestrated and conducted it. Being easily bored, I greatly fear boring others. I can easily bear to have my politics despised, my opinions refuted, my taste mocked, but being thought a bore would sting terribly.

  We all know too many people who overestimate their charm. They remind one of the man who, when his wife asked upon his return from a party how things went, answered: “If it weren’t for me, I’d have been bored to death.” They are certain of the fascination they feel they are exerting, of how compelling they are, of how absolutely indispensable to the festivities at hand, when in fact one feels that one has heard everything they have to say or would prefer never to have heard it in the first place. To be told I am one of those people would be a serious, a withering, perhaps the greatest insult.

  Anyone who has been in the company of heavy-breathing professional charmers knows that it is possible to be too charming. These are the (mostly) men who have an anecdote for every subject that arises, a joke that covers every case, lumpish bits of gossip, heavy name-dropping to spice the conversational pudding when they (mis)judge that it’s needed. They are altogether too well equipped in the charm arsenal.

  I wonder if my own charm, such as it is, doesn’t come across better on the page than in person. In person, one can overdo charm so easily by going on too long, by getting the punch line of a story slightly askew, by misconstruing the interest of the people to whom one is talking. But writing, owing to the blessed act of revision, permits nearly endless dress rehearsal, which allows at least the possibility of getting it right, the words, the timing, the length of one’s discourse. The spontaneity, which is often a substantial part of charm, may be missing, but in exchange one has the hope of achieving polish and getting nearer perfection.

  Charmers can of course be manipulative, with motives and agendas of their own. Having searched my own conscience on this point, I find that my only motive as a would-be charmer is the simple—I leave it to you to judge if it is also pathetic—desire to be liked. As a writer, I’ve made my share of enemies, some of whom I’m proud to have as enemies, but I still prefer to think that when I wish I can make people I like like me.

  “Gad,” as the charming Charles Lamb wrote, “how we like to be liked.”

  Part Two

  Chapter VI

  Charmed Lives

  Some people appear to have charmed lives. They are born to wealth, are dazzlingly good-looking, highly intelligent, with a natural joy in life. Everything seems to be going for them, everything appears to come easily to them; nothing lies out of their reach; all their desires are readily satisfied. The number of such people may be minuscule, but when one comes upon any of them, one cannot help but yearn, at least a little, to be in their place. Envy admixes with admiration in our reaction to them.

  Movie stars once seemed to live such charmed lives, with their beauty and vast salaries and their mansions and Malibu beach settings. But now, when exposé journalism and sad confession work against them, less and less so. Today a small number of athletes seem, at least from the middle distance, to lead charmed lives. Roger Federer, Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, such men seem the gifted of the gods: hugely rewarded in fame and fortune for doing exceedingly well what they love to do anyway and in front of vast admiring crowds.

  Some charmed lives have sometimes had much too early endings. One thinks first of all of Mozart, a genius from the very beginning but dead at thirty-five. Or the movie producer Irving Thalberg, the only man, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, to have grasped “the whole equation” of making successful movies, who died at thirty-seven. (Fitzgerald himself died at forty-four.) Or George Gershwin, one of America’s few authenic musical geniuses, who pegged out at thirty-eight. All lived full-out, under the radiant sun of their very different talents. Owing to these various talents, all had, or at least appeared to have, charmed if abbreviated lives. But, then, for the ancient Greeks, in their myths and also among their living heroes, the most splendid creatures die young. See Adonis, Achilles, Alcibiades, Greek literature passim.

  In Charmed, A Family Romance, his book about his father and his father’s brothers, Michael Korda begins by describing the most successful of these brothers, his Uncle Alex, the Hungarian-born movie producer, by describing his traveling arrangements.

  When my Uncle Alex traveled, he was driven straight to the steps of the airplane in his black Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow after all the other passengers had boarded. If he was late the airplane was held until he arrived; ships and trains waited for him, customs and passport formalities were arranged to suit his convenience, officials rushed to make his arrivals and departures effortless and pleasant, swiftly chalking a customs mark on his white calfski
n Revelation luggage and on the brass-bound morocco traveling humidor with a dovetailed sliding lid and his initials “A.K.” stamped in the fragrant leather.

  Whether this is truly charming, or merely evidence of a privileged life, is less than clear, but for Michael Korda, a man always much impressed by power and status, it is irrefutable evidence of a charmed life.

  People with charmed lives tend to travel in charmed circles. Membership in the circle in itself usually confers the aura of charm. The Algonquin Circle, that gathering of writers, editors, and critics who kept a regular table at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, is generally thought to have been charming. And so it was, but only if viewed from the middle distance. Much of its charm derived from the witty remarks fired off at these lunches, many of the better ones by Dorothy Parker. (Example: “Age before beauty,” said Claire Booth Luce, opening a door for Miss Parker. Passing through Miss Parker retorted, “Pearls before swine.”) Dorothy Parker said many amusing things, but her life, alas, was far from amusing, and even further from charming. She had a penchant for linking up with worthless men. (“I require three things in a man,” she said. “He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid.”) She several times attempted suicide, she lived with small dogs in hotel rooms that she soon made squalid. She died in one of these, and, though small, had to be stood up vertically on a stretcher in the narrow elevator of one of those hotels thence to be transported to a funeral home. Not, no, distinctly not, charming. George S. Kaufman more than matched Dorothy Parker for neurotic behavior. A steady philanderer, impotent only with his wife, he told Irving Berlin he would much prefer if he retitled his song “Always” as “Thursdays.” Harold Ross of the New Yorker, though a great editor, was a philistine. And so on. To find the Algonquin Circle charming, my guess is, it is better to read about it than to have witnessed it or to know too much about the personal lives of its members.

  Other times what seem like charmed lives only mask what are sad, even tragic lives. Among Americans, no couple seemed to fit the formula of charmed lives more snuggly than Gerald (1888–1964) and Sara Murphy (1883–1975). Gerald’s father, Patrick, was a partner in Mark Cross, the elegant leather goods manufacturer and retailer. Sara’s father was Frank Wiborg, of Cincinnati, an immensely successful manufacturer of ink and varnish. The Wiborgs lived part of the year at the Gotham Hotel in New York and part in East Hampton on their estate on Long Island, where the Murphys also kept a summer place.

  This was the period of the WASP ascendancy in America, and while neither the Murphys nor the Wiborgs were, strictly speaking, WASPs, they, like the Kennedys in later years, those other non-WASPs who took the WASP model for their own, lived in the highest WASP style. Sara and her two sisters went through the torture of debutante coming out. Gerald, never a good student, struggled to get into Yale. The two families were in the same social circle on East Hampton.

  Sara Wiborg was five years older than Gerald Murphy, and during their early acquaintance looked upon him as a younger brother. He seems to have adored her from the very first. Attractive, bright, adventurous, Sara Wiborg was not, in the marital line, a closer; men were attracted to her but none offered marriage. She was thirty-two, he twenty-seven, when she and Gerald married. Neither of their families approved of the marriage. In the best arriviste tradition, each family thought its child could have done better. Sara’s photograph announcing their engagement was nonetheless on the cover of Town and Country.

  Gerald Murphy was earning $3,000 a year at Mark Cross in 1917 when he married Sara Wiborg, which was the equivalent of $50,000 in our day. Her father, Frank Wiborg, was certain that his extravagant daughter could not live on so paltry a sum, so he gave her an annual allowance of $15,000, or five times her husband’s salary and the equivalent of $250,000 today. They rented a house in Greenwich Village owned by Patrick Murphy, which Frank Wiborg bought from his daughter’s father-in-law, presenting the deed to the newly married couple. From the very beginning of their marriage, they kept a full-time cook and a maid.

  Gerald enlisted in the army in 1918, and was sent, as an officer, to the School of Aeronautics. He was eager to get into action, but, as was the case with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the First World War ended before he was able to join in the fighting. Sara, meanwhile, had in fairly quick succession three children, a daughter (Honoria), a son (Baoth), and another son (Patrick).

  Feeling himself a flop at Mark Cross, where his father cut him very little slack, Gerald enrolled in a course of landscape architecture at Harvard, which he would drop out of before completing. (He and Sara shared a love for the visual arts.) Sara and the children followed him to Cambridge. Their social set in Cambridge-Boston included the poet Amy Lowell, the art collector Mrs. Isabella Gardner, the son and daughter-in-law of the philosopher William James, and the painter John Singer Sargent. Wherever they might find themselves, the Murphys were part of the in-crowd. “I would like to know those people,” the then-young poet Archibald MacLeish said of them long before he became their friend. “They look so well laundered.”

  Gerald and Sara Murphy were, by instinct, avant-garde, socially and artistically. They were well in advance of their time on the subject of race, taking an early interest in black folk music and jazz. They welcomed the ultramodern in art and literature. This openness to the new made them feel that their own country was too restrictive for their tastes; the passing of Prohibition in 1919 certified for them the retrograde social condition of America. They began to think about leaving the country, which would have the added bonus of escaping their respective difficult families. They could only afford to think seriously about this, however, because Frank Wiborg had decided to share his fortune among his three daughters before he died.

  Gerald and Sara first went to England, and thence to Paris, where it didn’t take them long to realize they had found a home. “Paris,” Gerald said after being there a short while, “is bound to make a man either more or less American.” The city seems to have made him both. With their charm as an entrée card, before long the Murphys were in the center of the artistic haut monde. Gerald devoted himself to painting, and soon he and Sara worked on painting the sets for the Ballets Russes version of Stravinsky’s Les Noces.

  “The Murphys were among the first Americans I ever met,” Stravinsky would later say, “and they gave me the most agreeable impression of the United States.” Picasso, sighting Gerald at the Opera of Paris, remarked: “There is American elegance.” Picasso and his then-wife Olga became friends with the Murphys, and there was a rumor that Sara and Picasso had a brief love affair, the chief corroboration of which is Picasso’s painting of a Sara-like figure naked but for the string of pearls Sarah herself habitually wore, even to the beach at their villa at Antibes.

  The standard view of the Murphys is that they were an attractive couple who had little but their wealth as a calling card for their place among the avant-garde painters, writers, and musicians in Paris. In fact, they contributed to the efflorescence of the art of the twenties in a serious way. Gerald wrote the book and designed the sets for Within the Quota, a ballet produced by the Les Ballets Suédois for which Cole Porter, his friend from Yale, wrote the music, and Sara designed many of the costumes. Gerald’s billboard-size painting, “Boatdeck,” dominated the Salon des Independents show of 1922 and was a great succès de scandal.

  Through their connection with the Ballets Russes, and through the early success of Gerald’s paintings—both Leger and Picasso praised the latter—the Murphys also become great party-givers to the avant-garde. Excepting only James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, all the great names at one time or another showed up at the Murphys’ parties: Diaghilev, Misia Sert, Leger, Darius Milhaud, Léonide Massine, Winnaretta de Polignac, Ernest Ansermet, Scofield Thayer, Tristan Tzara, Blaise Cendrars, Gilbert Seldes, Jean Cocteau, and many others. Man Ray photographed the Murphys at Étienne de Beaumont’s automotive ball, and, as Sylvia Beach noted, this “meant you were someone.”

 
The Murphys’ fame today derives chiefly from their connection with the American writers Archibald MacLeish, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Harry Crosby, Robert McAlmon, John Dos Passos, and, above all, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. All these people befriended and at one time or another stayed with them. Fitzgerald and Hemingway put them, much modified, in their fiction. More than that, though, because of these two novelists, both so closely identified with the expatriate wing of the American Jazz Age, the Murphys are thought if not major, then certainly significant players in that most exhilarating of times.

  Not long after buying and remodeling a stucco Moroccan-style villa in Antibes that they renamed Villa America, the Murphys took in Hemingway and Fitzgerald in times of crisis in each of their lives. When he first encountered the Murphys’ lives, through the auspices of John Dos Passos and Donald Ogden Stewart, Hemingway was about to shed Hadley, his first wife. When Fitzgerald first met the Murphys, though his best writing was still ahead of him—The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night—he already had a drinking problem and his wife Zelda was well advanced on her way to the mental illness that afflicted her through the remainder of her life.

  Both writers, according to the Murphys’ excellent biographer Amanda Vaill, were at one point in love with Sara and envious of Gerald’s marriage to her. Hemingway also suspected Gerald might be homosexual and wrote about the Murphys in A Moveable Feast, referring to them as “the rich,” and treated them cruelly in that malicious book. He read parts of The Sun Also Rises to them, and, apropos of their praising the novel, noted: “If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?” Fitzgerald used Gerald and Sara in distorted form for his characters Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. (The Murphys, it needs to be said, were never anything but kind and generous to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but such is the well-known ingratitude of novelists.) Philip Barry used them as characters in a play. Archibald MacLeish would also model characters in his play J.B. on them. Having writers for friends, obviously, is a perilous business.