Life’s Little Luxury

When I batted down some of these candidates for the golden circle, a discussion of the definition of charm often followed. A surprising number of the people I talked with conflated charm with “charisma,” though their definitions of that vogue word generally turned out to be far from clear. Charisma is one of those words that most people use to mean whatever they want it to mean. (“When I use a word,” says Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”) For the people at Avon, Charisma is the name of a perfume. It is the first name of an actress in a television series about vampires. What charisma really means, as set out by the German social scientist Max Weber, is authority “resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character of an individual” that shows up not in pleasing conversation but on the world stage. Jesus had charisma; so, too, did Napoleon, Gandhi, and a very few others, not including Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy, who, each in his own way, had great charm, but no charisma whatsoever.

Some people I talked with thought charm was synonymous with “cool.” In fact, the two, charm and cool, are all but opposed. Cool aims for detachment, distance; charm is social, bordering on the intimate. Cool is icy; charm warm. Cool is costive; charm often ebullient. Cool doesn’t require approval; charm hopes to win it. Cool began life in jazz under the great saxophonist Lester Young, who first used the term, but it soon descended to the argot of drugs. Cool gave way to hip and hep. In Dave Frishberg’s song “I’m Hip,” the singer proclaims that he watches “arty French flicks with [his] shades on” and is so hip “I call my girlfriend ‘Man.’ ” Miles Davis was cool, Louis Armstrong charming.

Nor is charm the same as style. Many charming people have distinctive styles, but there is no one style that marks the charming. Style, V. S. Naipaul thought, was ultimately a way of looking at the world, which suggests the immense variety of available styles: dark, complex, cheerful. Some styles are, of course, more winning, richer, grander, more interesting than others, and to the extent that they are so the more likely they are to contribute to a person’s charm. Some styles are charming; some charm is stylish. Nevertheless the two remain distinct.

Personal elegance is sometimes thought to be charming, but it isn’t—at least when not backed up by other traits. Elegance can even be off-putting. Think of old-line movie actors like Adolphe Menjou, George Sanders, and George Macready, who used elegance—of dress, of diction, of general manner—to be off-putting in villainous roles in the movies. Elegant manners are meant to lubricate social life, but they can also chill it. I think here of the writer Lucius Beebe, who was said to be “menacingly groomed.” When elegance seems natural, it can supplement charm, but it is not essential to it. Many inelegant, even deliberately vulgar, people can be charming.

Most charming people are likable, but charm is more than the ability to make oneself liked. One can like all sorts of uncharming people: for their candor, their loyalty, their seriousness, their simple decency. Neither are puppies, kittens, and small children charming. Cute they may very well be, but charm implies a certain urbanity, experience, worldliness that is not available to puppies, kittens, or children.

The standard dictionary definition of charm holds that it is “the power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration.” Which is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Lots of things, after all, give delight (a birthday cake, for example), and not a few arouse admiration (athletic prowess), without being notably charming. “Though defining be thought the proper way to make known the proper signification of words,” wrote John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “yet there are some words that will not be defined.” Well before Locke, Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics noted that different subjects allow for differing levels of clarity and that “precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts.” Later in the same paragraph, Aristotle added: “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.” Charm, given its elusive and sometimes widely various nature, turns out to be one of those subjects for which precision of definition isn’t finally available. Joining love, happiness, justice, and beauty in being among these less than easily defined conceptions, charm is, as charm by its nature always hopes to be, in good company.

Easier, of course, to determine what charm isn’t. Had I asked friends and acquaintances to list the five least charming people in contemporary public life tongues would have come untied, and names would have flowed. Everyone, I suspect, has his or her own list of the uncharming. Mine is comprised chiefly of people who badly overrate their charm, and includes Barbara Walters, Bill Clinton, a Fox News host named Greg Gutfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Larry King . . . I could go on. What unites this otherwise disparate group is that, in their too great confidence, they overrate their charm. The one rule I have devised about charm is that if you think you are charming, you probably are not.

People who are opinionated tend not to be charming. So, too, people who are argumentative. Too great, too obvious a competitiveness is rarely charming. Flattery may work, but however artfully applied, its charms are too specific (namely, on the person flattered) to qualify as charming. Obvious vanity does not charm; neither does name-dropping. A taste for gossip, carefully kept in bounds, may charm, but shown in the least excess it does not. Charm laid on too heavily can prove overdone, tiresome, uncharming.

Can charm be learned, or is it a gift of God or, if you prefer, of the gods? Charm can’t be taught, but it can, to get a bit Zen koanish about it, be learned, though not by everyone. The place most people of a certain age learned about charm was at the movies. Those of us who from a fairly early age went every Saturday afternoon to a double-feature at our neighborhood theater learned, boys and girls alike, if only by osmosis, how to dress, smoke, kiss, open car doors, deal with headwaiters, and a good deal more. Charm, being individual, has many models, and the movies turned up a large number of them: the taciturn charm of Gary Cooper, the elegant charm of Cary Grant, the masculine charm of Clark Gable, the urbane charm of Humphrey Bogart, the British charm of Herbert Marshall, the comic charm of Marcello Mastroianni, and many other variants, both male and female.

Whatever the variant, charm was considered highly desirable, and to possess it was if not one of the goals certainly among the pleasures of adult life. One didn’t so much copy any of these cinematic ideals of charm as try to assimilate parts of them—a bit here, a bit there—in the hope that one day these parts would come together to form a charm of one’s own, unlike any other but pleasing in its own way.

Movies with charm at their center are no longer being made. The directors able to make them or even interested in doing so—the Leo McCareys, the Preston Sturgeses, the Billy Wilders, the George Cukors, the Blake Edwardses, the Stanley Donens—are long gone. Nora Ephron attempted with some success to make such movies, in the spirit of our time, but she has had no followers. Quite possibly charm is no longer marketable. With fewer and fewer models of it available, it may go the way of chivalry, good manners, and unmotivated kindness.

If one cannot define charm with real precision, how, then, does one recognize it? One recognizes it, as one does its compatriots in inexact definability, pretty much case by case, instance by instance. One recognizes charm when one feels it, sees it. Charming is the song we don’t want to stop playing, the painting that won’t leave our minds, the piece of writing we don’t want to end, the man or woman we wish never to leave the room. Charm, when present, enlivens and lights up a room, makes the world seem a more enticing place. Not quite true that charm, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, for there are levels of sophistication in the realm of charm. Some charm is subtler than others; some more obvious. Not everyone is likely to be charmed by Noël Coward; most people are likely to be charmed by the Marx Brothers.

Not the least impressive thing about charm is the richness of its variety. Along with traditionally charming people of the kind that one used to meet fairly regularly in the movies, there have been through history rogue charmers, gay charmers, yes, even vulgar charmers, and this scarcely, as the philosophers say, exhausts all cases. Famous charmers have included figures as varied as Alcibiades, Casanova, Louis Armstrong, Tallulah Bankhead, Lord Byron, Mme de Sévigné, Duke Ellington, and scores more.

Consider people so different as scarcely to seem to inhabit the same planet, yet each in his or her own way notably charming: Mel Brooks and Audrey Hepburn. Brooks falls under my category of vulgar charmer. Vulgar he is but what is notable about his vulgarity, his unabashed coarseness, is that it is deliberate and, somehow, fails to leave the dreary stain vulgarity usually leaves.

I remember many years ago watching Mel Brooks being interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. It went something like this: In answer to Wallace’s first earnest question, Brooks pushed back the cuff of Wallace’s sleeve and asked him where he got his wristwatch and what he paid for it. Wallace posed a second question, and Brooks leaned in, rubbed the lapel of Wallace’s suitcoat and muttered, “Nice material. What’s a jacket like this set you back?” Wallace broke up in laughter. What Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky) was doing, of course, was playing the vulgar Jew, playing it for laughs and getting away with it. Just as he played perhaps the ultimate vulgarities—flatulence jokes, racism—in his movie Blazing Saddles and got away with it there. Who but Mel Brooks could have made a comedic movie, later an immensely successful Broadway musical, about Adolf Hitler—and, yet again, get away with it? How did he—how does he still in his 90s—do it?

Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic / Getty

Gene Wilder, who played in several of Brooks’s movies, remarked: “Sometimes he’s vulgar and unbalanced, but . . . I know that little maniac is a genius. A loud kind of Jewish genius—maybe that’s as close as you can get to defining him. As for his vulgarity, which cannot be argued away, it is indubitably a healthy vulgarity.” Brooks can be raucous, but he is never mean. One senses no putdown, no one-upmanship, not the least malice in him. If he can be wild, his is a controlled wildness. However bumpy the comedic flights he takes us on, we, his audience, can be certain that he will land the plane safely. Vulgar he may be, but his has been a healthy vulgarity, one that flies under the flag of charm.

To be seated at a dinner party, Mel Brooks on one’s left, Audrey Hepburn on one’s right, would make for a most interesting, if perhaps somewhat dizzying, evening. The two represent the boundaries of charm, charm in its masculine coarseness and its feminine refinement. Perhaps alone among movie stars, Audrey Hepburn was admired equally by men and women. She combined fragility and sprightliness in a unique and immensely attractive way. As women wished to look like her, wear clothes as she did, speak as she spoke, most men wanted to protect her. Careful casting set her in movies against attractive, older leading men: Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, William Holden, Fred Astaire, Rex Harrison. Their maturity suggested they could protect her, and her youthful sweetness seemed to give them a second chance in life with a virginally fresh woman.

Gamine, elfin, sprightly, fey: No one has been able to nail Audrey Hepburn’s precise physical quality. But everyone seems to have been taken by it. Sex wasn’t at the heart of it. Aud Johansen, a woman who danced in a chorus line on the London stage with the young Audrey Hepburn, remarked, “I have the biggest tits on stage, but everyone looks at the girl who has none at all.” What Hepburn had was charm, which wears better and longer than sexiness.

The lives of movie stars of the great studio era are best not looked into too closely. One too often finds boorishness, drunkenness, domestic tumult, crushing sadness, and a wild disparity between on- and off-screen personality. But Audrey Hepburn seems to have had the same lovely qualities on-screen and off. Fred Zinnemann, who directed her in The Nun’s Story, said of her: “I have never seen anyone more disciplined, more gracious, or more dedicated to her work than Audrey. There was no ego; no asking for extra favors; there was the greatest consideration for her co-workers.” Stanley Donen, who directed her in Charade, Funny Face, and Two for the Road, said “her magnetism was so extraordinary that everyone wanted to be close to her. It was as if she placed a glass barrier between herself and the world. You couldn’t get behind it easily. It made her remarkably attractive.” Billy Wilder, who didn’t in the least mind knocking actors with whom he had worked, said, “Audrey was known for something which has disappeared, and that is elegance, grace, and manners. . . . God kissed her on the cheek, and there she was.” Alfred Lunt said that “she has authentic charm. Most people simply have nice manners.”

Everything that is known about Audrey Hepburn supports the picture of her as naturally refined, generous, goodhearted. When her agent suggested she ought to ask a royalty of Hubert de Givenchy for his using her name in connection with his perfume L’Interdit, she refused, saying that Givenchy was her friend, and she wouldn’t think of doing such a thing. For the last five years of her life Hepburn worked seven or eight months of the year for UNICEF’s project on behalf of starving children. Always a nervous public speaker, she nevertheless gave countless speeches to arouse interest and raise money on behalf of UNICEF—speeches said to have been extraordinarily effective. While working for UNICEF she eschewed all the perks normally expected by the high-level celebrity she was: She flew coach, rode in trucks, ate the same food as everyone else working for the organization. A good heart on display, such as Hepburn possessed, one free of all falsity and fakery, might itself stand in as one strong definition of charm.

Charm is that lighthearted element that is in such sad short supply in contemporary life. How we lost charm is a story about changes in our culture, changes so considerable as to qualify as revolutionary. A cultural revolution is never so clearly marked an event as a political revolution. When we think of revolutions we think of 1776, 1789, or 1917, but there are no precise dates for cultural revolutions, which, when they occur, usually establish themselves with wider pervasiveness and, ultimately, greater efficacy than political ones. Revolutions in our culture—radical changes in what we find permissible or admirable or detestable, and in how these affect our everyday living—are less murderous than political revolutions but in some ways more profound. Recent revolutions in our culture have, alas, made charm if not quite irrelevant then nearly obsolete, which is to say, to use the dictionary’s words, “no longer produced or used; out of date.”

The first of these revolutions has been in the nature of contemporary political life. One of the rules for anyone setting out to be charming is to avoid politics, for like as not as soon as one brings up the subject of politics one will lose half the room. In asking friends for five charming people, a few mentioned the name Barack Obama and one mentioned his wife, Michelle. But then I recalled that at no time in his presidency did Barack Obama have an approval rating much above 50 percent, and his approval was often well below that. There have been politicians noted for their charm—Benjamin Disraeli, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill—but Disraeli, it turns out, exerted most of his charm on Queen Victoria; Roosevelt was loathed by Republicans like no other politician in the 20th century; and Churchill, after no less an accomplishment than saving Western civilization from Hitler, was voted out of office.

With its inherent contentiousness, politics has never been an arena in which charm flourished. It cuts too close to the bone to allow for charm. Politics, after all, isn’t about politics alone. For most of us our politics are tied up with our sense of our own virtue. If one is liberal, one wants to think oneself a strong advocate for the underdog and for social justice generally; if one is conservative, one is likely to think liberty and the development of character the first order of business in any society. Liberal versus conservative is only partially about conflicting ideas about governing; the two represent dueling virtues. Which is why arguments about politics can get to the shouting stage faster than arguments about nearly any other subject. Which is why, too, politics is always dangerous ground, seeded with landmines, for anyone who would like to establish him- or herself as charming.

So divisive has politics in America become that movie stars, athletes, and television personalities do well to steer clear of it, though fewer and fewer of them seem able to do so. Hollywood has always been political, but under the old studio system, the stars were constrained from publicly announcing their political views. They were so lest an actor’s politics affect his box-office appeal. In our time, with the studio system gone, movie stars have less and less hesitation in lining up for political causes, usually with sadder effects on their careers than helpful effects for the cause. Jane Fonda is a case in point. A beautiful woman, a fine actress, Fonda’s strong stand against American involvement in the Vietnam war—Hanoi Jane she was called, like Tokyo Rose, the woman who gave anti-American broadcasts during World War II—crippled her career, making fewer movie parts available to her and keeping a large portion of the audience away from those movies in which she did play. Bob Hope, once universally considered charming, lost much of the cachet of his charm when he sided with Richard Nixon during the years of the Vietnam war. Closer to our own time, something similar may be happening to the career of George Clooney, who too closely identifies himself with every passing left-wing cause. In sports, Tom Brady, possibly the best quarterback in the history of professional football, is disliked by a great many fans because he is thought to be a friend to Donald Trump. Michael Jordan, when asked why he never took strong political stands, is said to have answered, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Charm is about consensus, politics about division. The ever more divisive field of politics is the last place for charmers to work their magic. That the current age happens to be as dominated by politics and is as politically divisive as any on record is one of the reasons charm in our day is onto lean times. So many people who might otherwise be thought charming have allowed their political interests to diminish their charm. Politics is a popular spot for charm to go to die.

A revolution affecting charm deeper than politics is that entailed in what the social scientist Philip Rieff called, in a book of that title, the “triumph of the therapeutic.” The underlying beliefs of the culture of therapy—that the great enemy of human beings is repression, that relief is to be had through the widest possible confession, and that the great goals in life are self-gratification and self-esteem—are deadly for charm.

The doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Wilhelm Reich may have lost much of their credibility, but the spirit of the therapeutic has nonetheless thoroughly permeated American life. The notion of changing one’s personality is central to the culture of the therapeutic. The 1960s set out as a goal that of doing one’s own thing; the 1970s—Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade”—advanced this to a deepening concern with the self. In our day, the therapeutic has swept the boards, exercising a subtle but genuine tyranny over contemporary culture. Under the culture of therapy the concentration is exclusively on the individual, the emphases falling on self-regard and authenticity. The charming person asks, “How may I please?” The therapeutic personality wants to know how he can please himself. Warfare has never been openly declared, but the two, charm and therapy, are nonetheless implacably opposed.

Michael Ochs Archives / Getty

Owing to the triumph of the therapeutic, actors in our day feel perfectly at ease going on talk shows to discuss their mistreatment by sexually perverse fathers, alcoholic mothers, or brutish husbands. Men speak openly about their sex addictions, in interviews women recount their battles with drugs. Why hold back? Repression, remember, is the enemy; confession good, if not for the soul, certainly for the psyche.

The sobbing memoir is among the leading literary genres of our time. Novelists, poets, critics, journalists, learning they are going to die or having lost a child or husband or wife, see in the event a rich possibility for a book. Others must be content with exposing their parents or former husbands or wives, retailing the heavy mental tortures visited upon them. Reticence and tact, two arrows in the quiver of charm, have no standing in the therapeutic culture. Decorum, another significant element in charm, is diminished, if not destroyed. Sex columnists openly consider the merits of non-monogamous sex, of cross-dressing, of choking during sex. Why not? Why hold back?

Vast is the pain that psychotherapy, greatly aided in recent decades by pharmacology, has relieved, making life livable for schizophrenics, those suffering bipolar disease, and others born with genetic miswiring. It has also been useful in propping up those depressed and otherwise defeated by the misfortunes life has visited upon them. Much can be said about the value of psychotherapy generally, but its toll on charm has been heavy.

In a 2013 essay in the Atlantic on “The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men,” Benjamin Schwarz noted that “only the self-aware can have charm; it’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, or at least worldliness.” Schwarz goes on to say that charm cannot “exist in the undeveloped personality. It’s an attribute foreign to many men because most are, for better or worse, childlike. These days, it’s far more common among men over 70—probably owing to the era in which they reached maturity rather than to the mere fact of their advanced years.”

Schwarz’s claim is that men—but, of course, women, too—who grew up when models of charm were both omnipresent and strong are likely to have attained a maturity of a kind unavailable to those who came after them. He is also arguing that to be charming one has to be adult, and to be fully adult one has to have grown up before the cult of youth took root and spread through contemporary life. This phenomenon, the closing down of adulthood, has been well underway since the 1960s. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” it will be recalled, was one of the reigning shibboleths of the protest movement of those years. Those who shouted it are now in their 70s and appear still to believe it.

Youth, once understood to be a transient stage in life, has become its goal. Two of the greatest compliments in American life are “You’re so thin” and “You don’t at all look your age.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Crack-Up, anticipating our own time, called growing up “a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.” Many years later Tom Wolfe remarked that in our time one goes from juvenility to senility with no stops in between. So pervasive does the cult of youth sometimes seem that, as difficult as naming five charming people may be, no less difficult would it seem to name five adults.

Two of the most popular sitcoms in recent decades, Seinfeld and Friends, were about the refusal of their characters to grow up. The characters on both shows were funny but far from charming. The continuing theme on Seinfeld was the selfishness of people refusing to be adults. No one on Friends had a serious job or seemed likely to acquire one soon. The characters on both shows were somewhere roughly between their late 20s and early 30s. Adulthood was for none of them anywhere in sight.

If Ponce de León were alive today, viewing older billionaires with oxblood-colored hair, aging actresses with skin drawn so tight by cosmetic surgery they cannot close their eyes at night, old men whose jogging pace resembles nothing so much as that of infants just beginning to walk, former student radicals now sporting gray ponytails or topknots, no doubt the Spanish explorer would give up his legendary search for the fountain of youth and resign himself to aging as gracefully as possible. George Santayana thought it a great sin, the greatest, to set out to strangle human nature. The attempt to stay perpetually young is the most common attempt to do so in our day. It is also among the most effective ways to divest oneself of charm.

Charm will not feed the hungry, help end wars, or fight evil. I’m not sure that it qualifies as a virtue, and, as is well known, it can be used for devious ends. Yet charm does provide, among other things, a form of necessary relief from the doldrums, the drabness of everyday life. Sydney Smith, the 18th-century clergyman and himself an immensely charming man, wrote that “man could direct his ways by plain reason and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavour, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes to enliven the days of man’s pilgrimage and to charm his pained steps over the burning marle.” If your vocabulary is as limited as mine, you will have to look up marle, which turns out to be “unconsolidated sedimentary rock or soil consisting of clay and lime, formerly used as fertilizer.” What Sydney Smith was too charming to say straight out is that charm helps us to get over the crap in life, which, as anyone who has lived a respectable number of years knows, can be abundant.

In his Notebooks, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott posited what he thought an ideal character. This, he held, was composed of integrity, the inheritance of civilization known as culture, and charm, the three joined together by piety, by which Oakeshott meant reverence for life. “Charm,” he wrote, “compensates for the lack of everything else: charm that comes from a sincere and generous spirit. Those who ignore charm & fix their appreciation upon what they consider more solid virtues are, in fact, ignoring mortality.” Since we all die, all are merely guests briefly here on earth, we have an obligation to get the most of our limited time, or so Oakeshott believed. In his reading, then, those who ignore charm are ignoring one of life’s genuine pleasures.

In an age with a paucity of charm, those of us who hunger for it fall back on the past: on the movies of Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges; the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; the comedy of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy; the traditional ballets of George Balanchine. Toss in the songs of the brothers Gershwin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Harold Arlen, and Jerome Kern; the trumpet of Louis Armstrong, the saxophone of Lester Young, the clarinet of Artie Shaw; the singing of Alberta Hunter, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Blossom Dearie; the big bands of Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Jimmy Dorsey. The essays of Charles Lamb and Max Beerbohm, the novels of P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, the poetry of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin all provide charm in its literary division. If all this seems rather light fare, that is because light, in its most approbative sense, is what charm indubitably is.

Charm elevates the spirit, widens our lens on life, heightens its color, intensifies and sweetens it. Life holds out the rewards of achievement, acquisition, love of family and friends, but without the infusion of charm the enterprise is, somehow, a touch flat, less than complete. Charm is one of life’s lovely luxuries. No one truly needs it, but how sad to live without it.