Authors: Betsy Prioleau
Level One
How other men regard Hugh Jackman, the Wolverine of the
X-Men
franchise, and “one of the sexiest men alive,” can only be guessed. He may be a Hollywood fabrication, but he could set an agenda for a student ladykiller. A self-proclaimed romantic who actively courts his wife of sixteen years with tango nights, anniversary surprises (three hundred roses tied to a hundred helium balloons), and public tributes, he’s both a nice guy and polysided fascinator. Women love him “for his selves,” wrote theater critic Ben Brantley of his one-man show. “He contains, if not multitudes, then a teeming crowd of twos.” He’s bi-everything: he-man and song-and-dance man; roughneck and gentleman; best boyfriend and best girlfriend.
It’s as a romancer, though, that he reduces women to “puddle[s] of desire.” In movies like
Kate & Leopold
and in interviews, he’s a passionate suitor who deploys the seducer’s full complement of physical and psychological charms. He looks and moves like an Adonis, and woos women with dance, music, praise, intimacy, and attentive conversation on “all kinds of topics.”
Asked about his MO, he says it’s a learned process. He cites the manners and chivalry he acquired at home, his gym workouts, dramatic training, and serendipitously, etiquette lessons. During his preparation for
Leopold
, a tutor drilled him twice a day in the bygone discipline of pleasing: graceful gestures and social poise—“truly listening,” being “present and intelligent,” and doing it all with honesty and sincerity.
Sociologist Marlene Powell, a student of contemporary sexuality, believes Jackman’s method may be a first step for would-be ladies’ men. Etiquette, she writes in an email, can foster seductive charm. She lists chapter titles from a 1901 etiquette book—“Courtship and Its Demands,” “Anniversaries and How to Celebrate Them,” and “The Language of the Hand”—and concludes that “at least some of the people in the past learned and practiced the art of seduction and romance.” We can “reinstate some of this,” she suggests, the same way.
But as the flute master in the Japanese folktale tells his pupil who has spent years in technical instruction, “Something missing.” That’s the
whoosh
of charisma. (When I saw Hugh Jackman on Broadway, I found no
aaah
there; only a perfect assembly-line ladies’ man.) Can we
teach
“the charge, the bolt, the buzz” of the great seducer?
Trina, the independent filmmaker at my soiree, insists you can’t: “Disney scouts used to go to playgrounds,” she says, “and they’d always pick out the one boy with ‘it.’ ” Psychologist Jack Harris agrees. “Look,” he says, “you line up a kindergarten class, and
bam
!” he claps. “You know the kid with charisma. This stuff is innate, I’m sorry.” Powell is of another opinion: “Erotic charisma,” she argues, can be acquired with systematic positive reinforcement, confidence building, and impression management.
Level Two
Kurt, the German photographer and woman-charmer I had met before, has another take on sexual charisma altogether, one that recalls Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey or the shaman’s internal ordeal where he acquires “psychological voltage” and reemerges with “irresistible magnetic mana.”
“It isn’t something you can learn, only unlearn,” Kurt says gnomically.
We’re in a Village tapas bar after the opening of his new exhibit, a multimedia installation attended by an arty mob and four generations of his girlfriends. He spears a
chopito
and elucidates. “It’s about letting go of the ego, all those old stories about yourself, and plugging into a higher power, a force, whatever you want to call it. And this,” he adds with a low chuckle, “is very,
very
sexy.”
“How does this work exactly?”
“Okay,” he puts down his fork, takes a swig of Rioja, and rakes his fingers through his tousled bangs. “The story about myself isn’t pretty. Until my twenties,” he says, “I was rejected by every girl. I felt ugly, horrible really. Then I came to New York and began my spiritual development.
“It was extremely intense. For eight years, I worked with a therapist and finally reached the source of my pain; my mother was awful, she . . . Anyway, I broke down in tears. I had to let go of that past, that illusory self.”
“Then,” he resumes after we dispatch the mini-paellas and frittatas, “my therapist turned to me and said, ‘Kurt, you have to see that women are really attracted to you.’ And that was the big change. Now with women I sort of follow an inner voice that tells me what to do. And it’s always the right thing. I’m just myself,” he shrugs.
“All right,” he concedes, flicking me a puckish look. “I understand women; I’m a gay man in a straight man’s body,” he grins. “I’m very passionate; I love to see a girl have a good time; I’m probably the funniest German I know. And dancing is almost better than sex. But every man is a ladies’ man; we simply lose connection with that side of us. Charisma is being yourself. Not doubting who you are. You have to work at it, though.”
Kurt’s way of working at it isn’t for everyone. Perhaps there
is
no single route to becoming a ladies’ man. A great lover’s signature is his singularity, his “ineffable specialness.” Standardized instruction may not be for Casanovas, after all. To over-think him is to produce Stepford seducers. Roland Barthes’s advice on erotic education may still be the best: “Just leave it alone,” he writes, “like those obliging natures who show you the path, but don’t insist on accompanying you on your way.”
Future Prospects
Nobody is forecasting a resurgence of ladies’ men anytime soon. Jack Harris reminds me that great seducers may “always be a minority, an extreme typology.” But so were female marines and African American surgeons a century ago; you can never tell. What women want in love, they sometimes get. As biobehavorist Mary Batten explains, women are the natural choosers in mating, unless subverted by deceit or usurped by force; it’s just a matter of recouping their lost powers of choice and seduction. Even doctrinaire evolutionist David Buss admits, “When women start preferring to have sex with men who walked on their hands, in a very short time half the human race would be upsidedown.” Geoffrey Miller imagines a future where women will prefer something more ambitious: men who “deliver the greatest rapture.”
On a birthday visit to Paris I run into one of those female-designed rapture artists and get a glimpse of tomorrow. Meandering through the Left Bank, I duck into a costume-jewelry store the size of a walk-in closet. There’s a glass display counter and two walls festooned with art-piece necklaces—bright Lucite chokers, tulle-and-turquoise rivières, chains, beads, and mobile-inspired pendants. As I survey earrings in the case, I hear a custardy voice directed to me from behind. “Ah, this is it! Formidable.”
I turn around, and it’s as though I’ve touched a live socket. Everyone says that when they meet him, even when he wasn’t famous. Gérard Depardieu, his motorcycle helmet under one arm and his girlfriend Clémentine Igou beside him, is giving me his celebrated half smile and a sparkling eye-lock.
France’s most illustrious actor and film star (of
Cyrano de Bergerac, The Count of Monte Christo
, and over 150 other movies), Depardieu is the reverse image of a classic French lover. Bearish and rough-hewn with a boxer’s crooked nose, he looks more like a bouncer at a lowlife bar than a
tombeur
—a renowned ladykiller. He has had six celebrity relationships with the most glamorous, talented women of his generation, including Chanel icon Carole Bouquet (an eight-year affair), and has been accused of “almost indecent magnetism.”
Right now, he’s training it on me. As delicately as though he were handling lace coral, he holds up a metal medallion composed of four dissymmetric ovals ending in a small, skewed zero. At first, he speaks in French: “It’s exquisite, you see. Unusual, off-beat.”
Then when I try to reply, he switches to English and asks where I’m from. “Yes, I adore New York!” Suddenly he’s laughing and gesticulating, and I understand why he once said “joie de vivre” was his “something special.”
“I lived at what?” he recounts, “Seventy-Sixth and Madison [this was during the filming of
Green Card
], and above me there was—Oh, a famous painter! He was mad, crazy, fabulous!”
With a balletic sweep of an arm, he includes Clémentine in the conversation, who talks about her two years on Tenth Street. At the end, we shake hands and I tell him, “You are a great artist.” To my surprise, he colors and fixes me with a look of infinite sweetness. “Thank you,” he says simply, and heads out the door after praising the collection to the shop owners. (Yes, I bought the necklace.)
French actress Miou-Miou isn’t the only one to observe that “Gérard knows how to seduce women.” But few know how he became so “lovable” (to quote costar Andie MacDowell) and charismatic. He wasn’t born to it. Depardieu is the product of good fortune, innate élan, and a succession of female mentors.
He grew up in a poverty-stricken, taciturn family in the drab town of Châteauroux, with a mother who told him she tried to abort him and thought him a dunce. He had a severe speech impediment and obstreperous temperament. At thirteen, he dropped out of school and seemed headed for a career of petty crime. He hung out with toughs, fenced stolen goods, and lived a bare-knuckled life of cheap thrills and street violence. Although so timid he could hardly speak to girls, he was befriended in his teens by two prostitutes who became his “sexual tutors.”
His fate as a small-town scofflaw might have been sealed had he not visited a friend in Paris one weekend. He sat in on an acting class and became hooked. Under an inspired teacher, he learned to free his impacted emotions, access his inner “delicacy and sensibility,” and to speak fluently through an experimental course in audio-psychotherapy. He acquired a “whole new language of music, poetry, intuition, and the emotions.”
But he still couldn’t talk to women. A fellow acting student, Elisabeth Guignot, a psychologist and cultured
femme du monde
, changed all that. They fell in love, and in a reverse Pygmalion story, she taught him the elements of charm, conversation, intimacy, style, culture, and taste. During their twenty-five-year marriage, she “guided him into the language and sensibilities of women.”
She was only the first in a long line of female guides who instructed him in everything from generosity and courage to authenticity—such notables as filmmaker Agnès Varda, author Marguerite Duras, and actors Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve. “I always turned toward these women,” he said, “who could lead me, step by step.”
After
Green Card
in 1991 and a
Time
interview in which he allegedly confessed to a rape at age nine, women at large denounced him as a macho thug. Feminist film critic Molly Haskell went to France to investigate and came away with a different view. She concluded that he had been manipulated by press agents and misunderstood in the translation process, and sat in on one of his movie sets to see the man for herself. “He was all there, playful, grinning; there were no barriers between us. He grinned at me,” she wrote, “and I grinned back. Possibly I blushed . . . Depardieu is the new world, regeneration, hope, attraction, Eros.”
The eighteenth-century Erasmus Darwin called “Eros the masterpiece of creation,” and his grandson Charles thought the lover at least equal to the warrior: “The power to charm the female,” he wrote, “is in some cases, more important than the power to conquer other males in battle.” Yet the ladies’ man has been largely ignored by mainstream historians and thrown to the wolves of popular stereotypes and prejudice.
Scholars who have taken him seriously side with the Darwins. The great seducer, they say, is a potent phenotype, rooted in eons of myth and fable and lodged in the deepest recesses of women’s fantasies. He’s what Ortega y Gasset termed “the interesting man,” an erotic superspecies who radiates fascination and enraptures women—many women—for a lifetime. His arts, advised two amorist authorities, shouldn’t be the province of a clique of roving ladykillers. Van de Velde and Havelock Ellis urged men to harvest the ladykiller’s parts for the sake of ordinary unions. Every man, they wrote, should be “Don Juan to his wife over and over again”; “the adulterer’s art should be the husband’s art.”
Few may be called to be Casanovas. The ladies’ man, though, shouldn’t bring more pressure to bear on distressed men, more impossible sexual standards to meet, more stage fright. Instead, the great seducer and his arts can be a male liberation movement, a release from the stranglehold of games, bogies, inertia, and ignorance, and a recovery of erotic empowerment, passion, and joy. The parameters are wide, exclude money and beauty, and permit a man to flaunt his strengths within a broad spectrum of love charms.
The gender standoff and sexual blight may persist for a host of reasons and exceed the ladykiller’s best efforts, even if his ranks increase. But he’s a privileged window onto women’s profoundest erotic desires. Therapists and scientists can’t tell us how to orchestrate ardor or perpetuate it. Yet what could be more coveted throughout time than passionate love? For many, it’s “the culmination of life,” “the supreme thing in the world.” Whatever their flaws, great seducers are the
primo uomos
of romantic passion; they glom onto women’s erotic wishes and fulfill and surpass them.
The dying patriarch in the movie
Meet Joe Black
tells his daughter to hold out for one of these men, a passion artist who sweeps her off her feet and makes her “sing with rapture.” “Expect the lightning,” he says.
Five months after my Casanova roundtable, I get an email from Zoe, the young art dealer determined to wait for a ladykiller who would blow her socks off: “OMG, I found him!” she writes. “Blaise loves me and from the beginning he told me that I was smart and beautiful and how lucky he was to have me. He made me laugh. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. Plus, he’s adorable. :)”
No online algorithms, no sensible considerations, no promises of rank, riches, compatibility, or safety can make a woman fall madly in love with a man. He can’t bribe, bully, or talk her into it. As French philosopher Georges Bataille makes clear, “The seductive, the marvelous, the ravishing wins every time.” And cracks Bette Midler, “If you know what women want, you can rule.”