When Ellington walked the streets of New York, strangers were delighted to greet him. As Armstrong called everyone Pops, Ellington called most people Babe. He was one of those men on whom all clothes looked good. He put together surprising but always effective color combinations. All his suits, shirts, shoes, hats, even his male cologne were custom made. “Ellington dresses sleekly, but without dandaism,” Kenneth Tynan noted. Even in work clothes—uncreased trousers, loose sweaters—his natural elegance shone through. The heavy bags under his eyes—genuine two-suiters—a sign of aging on anyone else on him seemed a nice touch. Late in life he took to wearing a pigtail, and may have been the only man in the twentieth century who could bring it off without looking a schmuck. He didn’t have to be mindful of fashion; he was one of those people who set fashion. In clothes as in music and just about everything else, he was his own man, as are all men and women of genuine charm.
Ellington was a florid flatterer of women, though he didn’t require it, for women adored him even without the flattery. He remained married to the same woman all his days, but was, as was Louis Armstrong, a player. On the road, up on the bandstand, the cynosure of everyone in the room, it would have been difficult not to be. Rex Stewart, for many years the cornetist in the Ellington band, remarked: “Many of the lovely ladies upon whom Duke cast an approving eye, and then heaped exquisite compliments have succumbed. The number of [his] conquests is uncountable.” An old joke has it that the toughest thing for basketball players in the NBA is not smiling when kissing one’s wife good-bye before going off on a road trip. Ellington would have got the joke.
Yet women never seemed at the center of Duke Ellington’s life. His complex musical life took up most of his available oxygen. Ellington composed through his orchestra. Other composers, classical and jazz, might compose on their piano and on notepads, but Ellington began with melodies rattling round in his head that he tried out on the magnificent musicians in his orchestra; not infrequently, he picked up the melody in something one or another of his all-star cast of musicians did during a riff. “My band is my instrument,” he said. These musicians—some of the most famous among them over the years were Johnny Hodges, Sonny Greer, Cootie Williams, Sidney Bechet, Clark Terry, Shorty Baker, and Paul Gonsalves—could be quite as eccentric as Ellington; no small part of his charm was spent in manipulating them to do musically exactly as he wished. “He knew how to get whatever he wanted,” the bassist Aaron Bell said, “and he always knew what he wanted.” In Billy Strayhorn he found a perfect complement to his own talent for composition and arranging.
John Hammond, the musical producer and talent scout, called Duke Ellington “one of the most completely charming [men] I have ever come across. His disposition is without rival among artists, for he has never been known to lose his temper or do conscious ill to anyone.” Such was his charm that he even turned ostensible setbacks into occasions for quiet wit. When he was denied a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1965 after having been nominated for it by the prize committee, he said: “Fate is being kind to me. Fates doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.” (He was then sixty-six years old.) The prizes and awards came later, and in abundance. Not that he needed them. He always had the greatest—the only serious prize—admiration of his peers: Percy Grainger and Leopold Stokowski thought well of his music, and Igor Stravinsky often went to the Cotton Club in Harlem when Ellington and his band played there.
In a brief essay called “Homage to Duke Ellington,” Ralph Ellison, who in Invisible Man wrote the subtlest of all African-American novels, best put the effect of Duke Ellington’s charm, both personal and musical.
To how many thousands has he brought definitions of what it should mean to be young and alive and American? Yes, and to how many has he given a sense of personal elegance and personal style? A sense of possibility? And who, seeing and hearing Ellington and his marvelous band, hasn’t been moved to wonder at the mysterious, unanalyzed character of the Negro American—and at the white American’s inescapable Negro-ness.
Ellington and the musicians in his band, Ellison went on to say, provided the grandest of masculine figures for young black men to identify with. “Where, in the white community, in any white community, could there have been found images, examples such as these? Who were so worldly, who so elegant, who so mockingly creative? Who so skilled at their given trade, and who treated the social limitations placed in their paths with greater disdain?”
By “social limitations placed in their paths” Ralph Ellison of course meant the strict legal and social prejudice against blacks in the early and middle years of Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s careers. Ellington did the best he could to avert the uglier aspects of racial segregation. He and his band traveled in their own railroad cars, in which they slept and took their meals. “We never let ourselves be put in a position of disrespect,” he said.
Louis Armstrong was less well situated in this regard, and stayed in third-class black accommodations in the South and usually traveled hard miles by bus. Of Jim Crow, Ellington said: “You have to try not to think about it, or you’ll knock yourself out.” Louis Armstrong took to heart the advice he received from Joe “King” Oliver, which was “to learn never to wear the trouble on your face.”
In later years both Ellington and Armstrong were criticized by angry young blacks for being insufficiently political. James Baldwin, Miles Davis, the young Dizzy Gillespie, and Sammy Davis Jr. accused Armstrong, in being willing to play before Southern audiences, of being the entertainment version of an Uncle Tom. A bum rap, this. In fact, Louis Armstrong helped opened up both radio and movies for black entertainers. When President Eisenhower at first refused to send federal troops to help integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, Armstrong publicly called Eisenhower “two-faced” and “gutless.” He threatened to cancel his State Department tour of Europe on the grounds that his own country, in its treatment of black children in the South, was an embarrassment that he couldn’t be expected to defend while abroad.
Ellington felt straight-out protest against Jim Crow laws beside the point, and thought economic pressure more effective in bringing about social change. (He turned out to be half right about this; it was a combination of the two that was needed.) Work not politics was Ellington’s first order of business, and no one was more emphatic about the origins and meaning and ultimately political content of his life’s work than Duke Ellington. “Naturally,” he said, “my own race is closest to my own heart, and it is in the musical idiom of that race that I find my most natural expression. Just now we’re calling it swing . . . but it all adds up to a lot of satisfaction at sharing in the achievement of the Negro race.”
At the same time, Ellington and Armstrong were both critical of their own race, Armstrong more openly than Ellington. Mercer Ellington, Duke’s son, claimed that his father’s early composition “Black, Brown and Beige” was written in subtle protest against prejudice within African-American society, which placed a higher valuation on lighter skin. “As a whole,” Mercer Ellington said, “the race wanted recognition and equal rights, and yet within themselves they restricted each other.”
In one of his autobiographies, Armstrong took after the blacks for being envious and rivalrous within themselves. He compared them unfavorably with the Jews—based in part on his firsthand experience with the Karnofsky family in New Orleans—who supported one another, and always aided the downtrodden and defeated among their co-religionists. Armstrong’s own manager, Joe Glaser, a thuggish character with Mafia connections in Chicago, was also Jewish.
Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong admired each other immensely. Ellington said Armstrong “is also a great personality, we say also great, not because he is lesser, but because we cannot think of further terms. Unless possibly to say he is the heroic-size standard in trumpet. He is also a brilliant comedian.” At Louis Armstrong’s funeral, Ellington said of him: “He was born poor, died rich, and never hurt
anyone along the way.”
Armstrong felt singing and playing with the Ellington orchestra inspiring, and some of his best performances were done with Ellington, singing and playing music that Duke had composed. When they worked together, there was no conflict between them, no clash of temperament or authority, but just two great professionals working in tandem. Some of the best evidence of this is available on a CD called Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, The Great Summit, in which Louis Armstrong sings several of Duke Ellington’s greatest songs and plays trumpet along with the orchestra. Great, splendid, magnificent stuff, it also happens to be, at no extra charge, utterly charming.
Chapter XII
Now for Someone Completely Charming
In his History of Greek Culture, Jacob Burkhardt, discussing the complex relationship between Athens and Syracuse, takes up the story of Dion (408–354 BCE), friend of Plato and brother-in-law and chief adviser of the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius I. Burckhardt writes: “At the suggestion of Plato, he [Dion] associated with Plato’s nephew Speusippus and deliberately cultivated charm and a pleasing character.” What caught my attention, of course, was the phrase “deliberately cultivated charm.” I believe I know how to cultivate the rudiments of pleasing, but about charm I am much less certain.
In his book Youth Leo Tolstoy writes that in his late adolescence he strove for “a general perfection”—“a desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but a desire to be better in the eyes of other men . . . a desire to be stronger than others, that is to say, more famous, more important, richer.” He wished above all to be comme il faut. The ways to become stronger, famous, important, rich, comme il faut are, if not easy, nonetheless fairly clear. The way to become charming is not. At the court of Louis XIV, a school was founded for the daughters of impoverished noblemen called Saint-Cyr-l’École, which was the first of the charm schools. In it young women’s personalities were shaped and polished, readying them to perform in aristocratic society and thereby to capture admirable husbands. In the middle of the past century, there were finishing, or charm, schools, instructing young women on poise, conversation, posture—young women walking with books balanced atop their heads was in those days a standard charm-school photo and symbol—manners, and makeup. This, though, is scarcely charm in the sense most people understand the word.
Imagine a person—a man in this instance—without fame or great wealth, who decides he wishes to acquire charm. How might he go about it? To begin with, he would need to be imbued with certain fundamental skills. He would require an elementary sense of those he was talking to, and what is likely to appeal to them. Can this be learned? Or is this an instinctive skill, which one either has or can never acquire? Bores obviously don’t have it, and boors don’t care about it. The person setting out to charm the company he finds himself in must know what interests these people, what they are likely to find amusing, what is both within and beyond the bounds of their sense of decorum. This sense of decorum can of course vary widely, from people who find the least profanity objectionable to others who aren’t put off by a raucous joke with fellatio as its subject.
Sensing one’s company is the first step, setting out to please without dominating it is the more difficult second step on the path to charm. And to what degree to please them—from mildly amusing to absolutely delighting them—is yet another question. This of course supposing that one has the skill, talent, social ammunition to amuse (however mildly), let alone to delight. What might this include? Fascinating anecdotes, clever puns, perfectly told jokes, dazzling repartee, delicately applied name-dropping? All this, and more, but none of it seeming forced or in any way crudely, obviously meant to charm.
In a life of any modest length, anecdotes build up, one has had experiences worth recounting, observations worth making, favorite jokes one has stored up. The charming person knows how to deploy such material, to serve it, so to say, in a pleasing presentation. In the realm of charm, presentation is crucial. The great mistake is to force the anecdote or the joke into conversation, however inherently interesting or amusing it might be. Part of the subtlety entailed in charming is not to seem to want to charm, but instead merely, casually, simply to be charming. To seem to want to charm is to have lost all hope of being charming. No show of strain, of preparation, of neediness, of longing for acceptance must emerge. A strong element of the casual is part of the equipage of charm: Charm must always seem unforced, natural, free, and easy.
Charm must also be integrated into the charming person’s personality. One can, I suppose, be charming sometimes, or even part-time. But charm is pretty much a full-time job. This sounds onerous. Yet it may well be that the truly charming person doesn’t have to think of any of the attributes of charm or how best to display them. He already knows, and he knows because, mirabile dictu, he is charming, normally, naturally, invariably charming. He can’t be uncharming even if he tried.
If one isn’t by nature such a person, how can one go about turning oneself, cultivating oneself, à la Dion of Syracuse, into one? No one, after all, is born with charm. Some people, though, seem to attain it effortlessly, while for others, most others, it is unattainable. Did the charming at some point note their potential and work at developing it—testing, through trial and observation, what worked and what didn’t? Did they, like boy athletes, find models in professionals whose style they copied, if not wholly at least in part, taking this from one model and other things from others, finally forging a unique charm of their own? Is not all fully formed charm a potpourri of a similar kind, formed from models discovered in the movies, from books, from admirably charming persons one has encountered in one’s own social experiences?
Perhaps the first thing a person who sets out to be charming needs to keep in mind is the distinctions between being charming and being flattering and between charming and being amusing merely. Flattery, in a base definition, is telling a person what he wants to hear. This may make one seem charming to the person being flattered but to everyone else it is less charming than sycophantic and hence ignoble. Flattery, no doubt, is an art form of its own, with quite as many modes and variations as are possible on the clarinet, but it has nothing to do with charm, except perhaps that subtle charm can flatter the intelligence of its audience.
A charming person is often amusing, but amusement is only a minor aspect of charm. The comedian Henny Youngman was amusing, so, too, were Rodney Dangerfield and Jackie Mason, but none of them qualifies as charming. True, a charming person is unlikely to be humorless, but he need not be notably funny. There is the charm of suavity, of elegant language, of beautiful manners subtly displayed. The main point of charm, I have come to believe, is to bring delight. An odd word, delight, suggesting lighting things up, making them brighter.
I suspect that the only way to acquire charm is to study with some care models of charm one has encountered in life, literature, or anywhere else. I should like to pause here, then, to describe a person I’ve never met but whom over the years I’ve read and read about and whom I consider a superior model of charm. That person is the English writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm (1872–1956). Not a household name, Max Beerbohm’s, I realize, but most people who have read his essays, or viewed his caricatures, or knew him while he lived would, there can be little doubt, have deemed him charming.
If you haven’t before now heard of Max Beerbohm, not to worry, he would have been neither surprised nor much concerned about your not knowing of him. Quite the reverse; it might even have pleased him. Early in S. N. Behrman’s book Portrait of Max, he, Beerbohm, brings out a royalty statement from his American publishers showing how few copies of his books were sold. I write “how few,” but the royalty statement showed, Behrman reports, “an unbroken column of zeros. ‘Not one copy!’ crowed Max in triumph. ‘Not One.’ It was an understandable paean from a man who cherishes privacy.”
Max Beerbohm wrote essays, a fantasy novel about a dazzlingly beautiful girl at O
xford (Zuleika Dobson), a single book of short stories (Seven Men and Two Others), and drama criticism. He also drew scores of caricatures of contemporary writers, artists, and politicians. All this work had his inimitable touch; all could only have been written or drawn by him. Oscar Wilde noted that Beerbohm had a style “like a silver dagger.” His personality was marked in all he produced, all he said. “In every art,” Max Beerbohm wrote, apropos of the music-hall performer Dan Leno, “personality is the paramount thing, and without it artistry goes for little.” The hallmark of his own personality was a subtle intimacy that never became cloying, never lapsed into bad taste.
To dine with Max, said Edith Wharton, “was like suddenly growing wings.” Utterly unselfish in conversation, with other people his watchword was “tell me.” His dear friend Will Rothstein said that Max, “who charms everyone, found everyone charming. And how quickly he discovers the essence of each personality.” Max himself said that “with a little good will one can always find something impressive in anybody.”
During World War Two, Max returned to England from his home in Rapallo, in Italy, and gave BBC broadcasts that had a wide, even a vast, audience. “It is odd that one of the least popular writers in the world should have become, next to Winston Churchill, the most popular broadcaster in England during the most critical moment in its history,” Behrman wrote. When listening to Max Beerbohm’s wartime broadcasts, Rebecca West recalled feeling “that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth.”
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