Charm Read online

  For all his cool distance, Byron prided himself on his desirability. He courted adoration through the well-lubricated instrument of his charm. “He was endowed with a seductive charm,” as Frederic Raphael notes, and he enjoyed exercising it. He apparently had no close friends but lots of jolly companions. The biggest mistake women could make was to attempt sustained intimacy with him, leading to a permanent connection. He never saw the point of repaying pleasure in the coin of loyalty.

  Nor—no surprise here—was he without vanity. He worried about running to fat, and went on near-starvation diets, swam vast distances, including on one occasion the Hellespont. He dressed all in black. A receding hairline was another worry. He was exceptionally conscious of youth passing away. He went in for costumes, and one of his best is on display in the famous portrait Thomas Phillips painted of him in Greek headdress. When he went to Greece, near the end of his life, to help the Greeks liberate themselves from the Turks, he acquired a helmet modeled on fifth-century Greek battle gear. He was always playing to an audience, and the role he played was that of Lord Byron.

  The one time he stepped out of character, he did so to marry Annabella Milbanke, the niece of Lady Melbourne and herself heiress to a large fortune. He claimed to yearn for routine and respectability, a yearning that turned out to be little more than a passing whim. He was dreadful in the role of husband, impatient, disappointing, naturally unfaithful. He already had a daughter with his half-sister Augusta—a subject of great scandal in the drawing rooms of London—and soon he had another with his wife. He made pregnant a third young woman, Clair Clairmont, who had the impertinence to follow him to Italy, wanting to be in his company. All three of his children were daughters—seducers, in cosmic retribution, are often the fathers of multiple daughters—none would know his affection for extended periods.

  Between his whoring and roistering, his travel and lavish spending—on coaches, foreign villas and palazzos, on small ships, and more—the wonder is that he got as much work done as he did. According to Edward Trelawny, he thought up rhymes for his poetry during afternoon horseback rides, and, after his usual social round, set them to paper late into the night. Don Juan, the poem for which he is best remembered, added to the éclat of his delicious scandalousness. When the wife of the radical journalist Leigh Hunt was asked about Byron’s morals, she said that this was the first she had heard of them.

  Perhaps the best way to know Byron is through his letters, though nearly everything he wrote was touched by autobiography. His memoirs were destroyed by his publisher John Murray on the grounds that they were too salacious—an act itself comprising one of the great literary losses and publishing scandals of all time. He is remembered as a poet, though he now seems less than a first-class one—the Romantic who really wasn’t a Romantic and who himself had no taste for the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Keats. Byron’s life overshadowed his poetry; always did, always will. He preferred not to be treated as a writer, Trelawny reports, but instead as a lord and man of fashion.

  He died young, as befits an Adonis, at thirty-four, in Greece, at Missolonghi. He didn’t die fighting for Greek independence, as he had hoped, but owing to illness. The cause of death was supposedly urima, but the killer was in fact that famous serial killer, nineteenth-century medicine, for in the attempt to lower his fever Byron was bled and purged by physicians until weakened to the point of death and then beyond. His heart is buried in Greece, his body in England, though not in Westminster Abbey, with the great English poets, for he was thought too scandalous to qualify for official enshrinement, which seems only fitting for the most charming rogue of the nineteenth century.

  Vastly less well-known than Alcibiades, Casanova, or Lord Byron, another figure in the charming rogue’s gallery, perhaps one off in one of its quieter rooms, was Morton Fullerton, a man whose slight fame resides in the fact that he apparently gave sexual satisfaction to the novelist Edith Wharton, though she appears not to have done the same for him. Fullerton was what, in another time, was called a ladies man. Born a New Englander in 1865, a contemporary of George Santayana’s at Harvard, as a young man Fullerton expatriated himself and landed a job as the second correspondent in Paris for the London Times. He became a friend to Henry James, whom some say used Fullerton as a model for the character Merton Denscher, the journalist who, with his lover Kate Croy, attempts to do Milly Theale out of her fortune in James’ novel The Wings of the Dove. Edith Wharton put a Fullerton-like character in her novel The Reef, though she chose not to mention him in her memoir A Backward Glance. Fullerton thought himself the attractive young man Santayana called Mario in The Last Puritan, though he was mistaken in this.

  A smallish man, five feet six inches, with blue eyes and a serious mustache, well turned out, Morton Fullerton was attractive to women. His biographer, Marion Mainwaring, writes of him: “He had a strong heart, serviceable lungs in spite of lifelong smoking, a tricky gallbladder, an agile, catholic penis; he had a soft voice and charm.” About the precision of Miss Mainwaring’s two adjectives before the word penis, one is left uncertain, but of Fullerton’s charm everyone seems to have agreed. Henry James wrote to him: “You bear I won’t say a charmed but certainly a charming life.”

  Fullerton was, like Alcibiades and Lord Byron, happily bisexual. (Truly charming rogues apparently want to seduce everyone.) His susceptibility to male beauty is said to have been as great as that to feminine beauty. He proposed marriage to several women; he had an illegitimate daughter. One of his many lady friends blackmailed him. He no sooner moved a woman into his lodgings, or moved into hers, than he was on the hunt for another. At one point between the wars he kept a room at the Elysee Hotel used exclusively for trysts, with men and with women.

  Yet for all his charm—or might it be because of his great charm—Morton Fullerton was not, as the world reckons it, a success. He never rose to be the Times’ first correspondent in Paris, a job of great importance, nearly, in its potential influence, on the level of the English ambassador. As a journalist, the judgment against him was that he was unexceptional. He wrote a book called Problems of Power that attracted the praise of Theodore Roosevelt, and allowed him to set up for a time as an expert in European politics. He had a column in Le Figaro, which gave him a certain voice in French affairs. In the end, though, it all came to nothing.

  The near full-time distractions of Fullerton’s sexual life worked against the smooth ascent of a successful career. Was he what today in a more therapeutic-minded time we should call a sex addict? His biographer claimed that “his easy enjoyment of pleasure and obvious talent for giving pleasure, undifferentiated as to men or women, were less about love, or even sex, than about control.” And yet his sexual prowess, combined with his charm, got him a long way further than his innate talent alone figured to have done.

  “As an unusually beautiful youth he found that he could exert influence over older, well-to-do important men who took him to Europe, took him to Greece and Egypt, found him a professional position beyond his qualifications,” Marion Mainwaring writes. Fullerton’s charm opened many doors, and subsequently turned back many sheets, but he couldn’t bring to fruition the opportunities his charm presented to him. In a letter to Edith Wharton, Henry James wrote that news of Fullerton’s being down on his luck caused him “quite a hideous little pang, leaving one afresh as it does, bang up against that exquisite art in him of not bringing it off to which his treasure of experience and intelligence, of accomplishment, talent, ambition, charm, everything, so inimitably contributes.”

  Fullerton was an operator with no power of calculation. He alienated his employers on the Times through his presumption. He could doubtless have married the wealthy Edith Wharton, who was besotted with him, after her divorce from her husband Teddy, which would have put an end to all his financial troubles, but chose not to do so. When he did marry, the marriage lasted a year. He always went either too far or not far enough.

  Charming ro
gues do best, perhaps, to die young. Morton Fullerton lived too long, nearly to the age of eighty-seven. He remained in Paris through the Nazi occupation during World War Two, with a woman, of course, a Mme Pouget, on short rations and insufficient fuel. Strongly anti-German during World War One, in World War Two he befriended Frenchmen friendly toward Hitler, which made his existence after the liberation of Paris precarious. With age he grew shabby. Leon Edel, doing research for his biography of Henry James, called on Fullerton, and was given “something of a shock to see this still handsome old man who had always been . . . a fashion plate, dressed in shabby clothes, and those fine mustaches now ragged and unkempt, his eyes bleary. . . But he was charming and melancholy; the charm was always there . . . .” Shabbiness and all, according to his cousin Hugh Fullerton, “even to the last he had charm for women.”

  Charm of Fullerton’s kind wears thin. Seductions are not medals, lovers achievements. Men and women living on charm alone are soon enough forgotten. Not long before his death in 1952, poor Morton Fullerton learned with chagrin that his old college classmate George Santayana had left him out of his memoirs.

  Continuing in diminuendo mode in this gallery of charming rogues, we come to Bruce Chatwin. To be in Chatwin’s company was apparently to come instantly under his spell. “He was amazing to look at,” wrote Susan Sontag. “There are few people in this world who have the kind of looks which enchant and enthrall. Your stomach just drops to your knees, your heart skips a beat, you’re not prepared for it. I saw it in Jack Kennedy. And Bruce had it. It isn’t just beauty, it’s a glow, something in the eyes. And it works on both sexes.” The writer Gregor von Rezzori called Bruce Chatwin “the Golden Boy.”

  The testimonials to the magic of his looks and personality pile up. Many are captured in Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin. “His style was to be the beautiful soft child-boy who’s not quite real, like a boy in an English school whom others have a crush on,” noted the movie director James Ivory. “He was like that and he stayed like that. He was a Rupert Brooke.” Salman Rushdie claimed that Chatwin was “so colossally funny you’d be on the floor with pain. When his stories hit their stroke, they could simply destroy you.” A woman named Nin Dutton with whom over four days Chatwin drove across Australia reports that he “never stopped talking, and he was never boring ever, ever.” The English journalist Shirley Conran compared Chatwin’s charm on first meeting to being overcome by perfume, “a wonderful cloud of Miss Dior. I reeled away, drunk on it.”

  The son of a provincial lawyer, Bruce Chatwin as a child was the family entertainer. As mimic, storyteller, boy comedian, he early knew how to command attention. The only thing at school that much interested him was acting. He was throughout his life attracted to the exotic: in objects, in travel, in people. He became more than a bit of an exotic himself. Because he was undecided on a career, his father discouraged his applying to Oxford. With his easy charm and devastating good looks—blond, six foot tall, long-limbed, with perfect features, and with a dazzling smile—he didn’t require diplomas and degrees to make his way through the world.

  At eighteen, Chatwin talked his way into a job in London at Sotheby’s, the auctioneers of artworks and antiquities. He began at a lowly place in the Furniture in the Works of Art Department, but soon rose up from there to be one of the company’s key figures, especially when it came to convincing the rich to turn their collections over to Sotheby’s for resale by auction. Some said his good looks were a lure to bring in the business of wealthy homosexual collectors. A colleague at Sotheby’s named David Nash claimed that the auction house was the central experience in Chatwin’s life. His work there provided him with an aesthetic education, allowed him foreign travel in search of antiquities, and introduced him to a circle of rich young people, among them his wife Elizabeth Chanler, an American with serious money on both sides of her family.

  Elizabeth Chatwin knew her husband had had homosexual affairs, but didn’t let it stop her from marrying the immensely attractive young Bruce Chatwin. None of his friends thought Bruce would ever marry. Elizabeth’s family money gave him room to negotiate his life without the immediate compulsion of having to earn a living. Once married he took time off to study archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, to travel (often without his wife), to search out antiquities and objects d’art in Afghanistan, and cultivate his interest in exotic tribes in Africa and elsewhere.

  Wherever Bruce Chatwin went, his charm was his passport. “Think of the word ‘charming,’” said Miranda Rothschild, the sister of the banker Jacob Rothschild. “Think of the word ‘seduction.’ Think of seduction as a driving force to conquer society . . . [Bruce’s] out to seduce everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.” Miranda Rothschild was in a position to know, for Chatwin had seduced her, or perhaps she him; it’s a bit unclear. He was, she claimed, a disappointing lover. Others, men and women, claimed similar disappointment in his prowess in this line. Might it be that the great narcissists, of whom Bruce Chatwin appears to have been one, finally love only themselves?

  Shirley Conran held:

  A lot of people were in love with Bruce, and I’m sorry for all of them. I saw the misery it brought. We have all loved people and left them, but when Bruce danced on to the next he had the ability to leave them feeling empty and bereft in a way I doubt they ever recovered from . . . [Chatwin was the reverse, in this respect, of Casanova and Balanchine.] He did not know himself and did not care to know himself too closely. He was like Ariel; in this world but not of it.

  Charming his way across four continents, Chatwin turned himself into a travel writer in the mode of Robert Byron, author of The Road to Oxiana. He wrote books about Patagonia, the slave trade in West Africa, aboriginal Australians, and two novels. Once he determined on the writing life, he charmed his way into the good graces of the most prominent English editor and publisher then in business, Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape. “At present,” he wrote to his friend Edith Welch, “I am focusing my attention and blandishments on Mr. Maschler.” Like just about everyone else, Tom Maschler could not resist those blandishments. “I do remember being pretty taken with this young man,” he recalled. “He had an extraordinary assurance and an integrity. I was sure I was dealing with someone very special.” The books were all critically praised and did well commercially.

  Kevin Volans, the South African composer, who was planning to write a musical score for Chatwin’s book Songlines, met Chatwin to discuss it and was blown away by his charm. “I sat there like Scheherazade at the foot of his bed while he told me stories. There was literally nothing I wouldn’t have done. I adored him. He was one of those people who did have the key to the world.” Volans, too, became one of his lovers.

  All the efforts of Bruce Chatwin’s charm and talent had begun to pay off handsomely—fame, big money, the good opinion of peers—when he contracted AIDS. He fought off the knowledge of the disease for as long as he could, for he had so much to live for, and AIDS seemed so drastic a disappointment. But death, as is well-known, is wont to come when least wanted. Not even Bruce Chatwin could charm it away. He perished at the age of forty-nine.

  Alcibiades, Casanova, Lord Byron, Morton Fullerton, Bruce Chatwin are only five names in the vast gallery of charming rogues. Some might wish to add Talleyrand, Frank Sinatra, Bill Clinton; others to argue that some among these men are more roguish than charming. (If there are or have been female rogue charmers, I do not know of them.) The main point is that roguishness is one of the forms that charm can take. Charm, the lives of the roguish charmers teach, has its dangers, sometimes to those upon whom it casts its spell, sometimes quite as much and even more to those who possess it.

  Chapter VIII

  Woman Charmers

  The charm of women is different from that of men, wider ranging, subtler, operating under different constraints and with a different sort of freedom. Men can be charming and sexy in roug
hly equal parts—Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, to name three movie stars, each different in the quality of his charmingness but all clearly thought sexy. Unclear whether women can in the same way be equally charming and sexy. In Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Rita Hayworth, the sexiness predominates over the charm, though in the instances of Barbara Stanwyck, Katherine Hepburn, and Myrna Loy, charm and sexiness are more equally distributed, in all three latter cases favoring charm over sexiness.

  Unsexy men can, let us hope, also be charming. Sometimes, if I may speak for myself and my less-than-god-like confreres, it is all we have going for us. So, too, of course, can unsexy women be charming: the comedy writer Selma Diamond, the comedian Carol Burnett, the essayist Fran Lebowitz come to my unchivalrous mind. Julia Child could be charming with raw liver in her hands. With women, though, sex often obtrudes, blocking out charm. Men, being brutes, tend to give precedence to the erotic element over the element of charm in their assessment of women. Truly sexy women, for example, have little chance to become comedians; and if they attempt to do so, they must camouflage their natural sexual attractiveness behind the masks of their stage persona. Consider the careers of Lucille Ball, Irene Dunne, Tina Fey. Physically attractive women comedians have reported that, in the middle of their acts, men in the audience have been known to shout, “Take it off.” Brutes, men, we’re all brutes, as when she was young I never tired of instructing my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle.

  A too-witty woman might also be a threat to a man. Wit, so often part of a man’s charm, is less often considered charming in a woman. For some men, wit in a woman can be hazardous. Too witty a woman might be thought to laugh at a man at all the wrong times and in embarrassing places. From Pericles lover Aspasia through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu through Mesdames du Deffand, de Stael, and d’Épinay in eighteenth-century France through Margot Asquith, the Stephens sisters (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell), and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, brilliant and subtle women have sometimes been center stage. Were they also charming? Some were, some weren’t, but then more often than not a woman’s charm has been more beckoning than witty, supporting than aggressive, alluring than challenging.