Charm

by Joseph Epstein

  Although thought a popular politician, popular in spite of his Jewishness in an overwhelmingly Christian country, Disraeli was removed from office in 1880 in an election that saw his conservative party trounced. Which goes to show that in politics charm may take a person quite far, but it won’t keep him in office.

  Winston Churchill, easily the most decisive British, if not Western, political figure in the twentieth century, was never short on charm. Endless are the amusing quotations attributed to him, most got off at sumptuous dinner parties at which he supplied not only the fare but the wit. “I have in my life,” he said, “concentrated more on self-expression than on self-denial.” He declared himself “a man of simple tastes—I am quite easily satisfied with the best of everything.” His amusing sayings on booze alone would fill a handsome chapbook. “I could not live without champagne,” he said. “In victory I deserve it. In defeat I need it.” And: “When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.” He wasn’t bad at repartee either. Nancy Astor told him that if she were married to him she would put poison in his coffee, to which he retorted, “If I were married to you, I’d drink it.” On more worldly matters he announced that “there are a terrible lot of lies going round the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.” He held that “we are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.”

  Glow with charm Churchill did, triumphantly, steadfastly through a long career with many up and downs. His greatest triumph, for which the world owes him an unpayable debt, was the steadfastness he showed in holding the line and leading his country against the hideous depredations of Adolf Hitler, and thereby contributing as much as any single figure to saving the West from the thousand-year nightmare of the Third Reich. In gratitude, such is politics, despite the courage or charm of this greatest of politicians, Winston Churchill’s countrymen voted him out of power in 1945 shortly after the end of World War Two.

  No American politicians demonstrated charm comparable to Disraeli or Churchill’s. Perhaps the most charming American politician in the post–World War Two era, Adlai Stevenson, was twice defeated for the presidency. John F. Kennedy was thought charming, yet he seems to have said nothing notable that wasn’t written for him. Apart from those utterly bewitched by the Kennedy myth, his sexual predatoriness—described earlier—detracts greatly from his reputation for charm. His father’s ugly social views—an anti-Semite, a friend to Hitler’s Germany—he, the son, never properly repudiated. John F. Kennedy’s putative charm in the end seems less real than a product of his administration’s brilliant public relations effort—Camelot and all that—and not something in which the discerning believe.

  In his public persona Lyndon Johnson seemed the very reverse of charming—stiff and false (“Muh fella Amuricans . . .”). The reason may well have been that the real Lyndon Johnson was too raw for public consumption. This is the Lyndon Johnson who one evening during his presidency, at a cocktail party, pointed to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, across the room, and remarked, “See that old boy? I’ve got his pecker in my pocket”; referred to his wife as “best piece I’ve ever had”; and called C. Douglas Dillon, his Secretary of the Treasury, into the bathroom to discuss monetary policy while he, LBJ, sat there defecating. Possibly amusing, if one has a taste for humiliating one’s employees, but a long way from charming, though some might wish to argue that Johnson qualifies as one of my vulgar charmers.

  Many people, the journalist Tina Brown among others, spoke of the charm of Bill Clinton—she remarked of the tremendous radiance he gave off upon meeting him—but this was before the Monica Lewinsky scandal that quickly let the air out of that good old boy’s charm. Charm does not reside easily beside squalor.

  No one ever called either of the Bushes, pére ou fils, charming, though I was once, for all of thirty minutes, in the oval office of the White House, where I heard a woman named Edith Kurzweil, an émigré from Germany, upon receiving an award, say to George W. Bush, “I never believed I would be in this room,” to which he replied, “Neither did I.” Forgive me if I confess to finding that charming.

  The charm, or even memorably charming moments, of a small number of politicians is one thing, the loss of charm by otherwise possibly charming people by taking up political positions is quite another. Movie stars, athletes, singers have had their politics, but the wiser among them chose to keep them to themselves. The career of San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback Colin Kaepernick went down the tubes when for political reasons he refused to stand for the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before games. Most people prefer their athletes to remain on the field and out of the political arena.

  Hollywood has always been political. In the 1930s and ’40s it was said that Stalinists in Hollywood were far from a minority, even though the great studio bosses were extremely nervous about tipping their own political mitts or allowing politics to intrude in their movies lest they adversely affect the box office. These same studio bosses—Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, and others—were able to keep the lid tightly down on their actors’ political views, or at least on their not allowing them to be known. But politics, being as natural to men and women as appetite, were not everywhere publicly repressed. Hollywood was roughly divided between liberals and conservatives. Frank Sinatra was in earlier days in the liberal camp, and so was Gene Kelly, whose wife Betsy Drake was thought to be a fellow traveler if not a member of the American Communist Party. (During the House on UnAmerican Affairs Committee hearings, Kelly and his wife felt the need to leave the country for Europe for a few years, lest her politics be exposed, a move that is said to have slowed her husband’s career.) On the other side, James Stewart was a stalwart conservative; Fred Astaire, who kept his politics to himself, voted Republican; and during the Vietnam War John Wayne carried a Zippo lighter on which were engraved the words “Fuck Communism.” But all this, on both sides, was sub-rosa, literally hidden under the roses, figuratively meaning not on any account to be revealed.

  The ban on political expression for movie stars ended with the simultaneous student protest movement against the Vietnam War and the end of the studio system in Hollywood. With no studio executives bearing down on them, actors could declare their political views openly. Some thought this brave; others thought bravery had little to do with it, and in doing so they were instead engaging in what today is called virtue-signalling, which is to say, displaying their own goodness in public.

  From Marlon Brando’s boycotting the Oscars in protest of the treatment of American Indians in movies to Meryl Streep’s upbraiding Donald Trump for mocking a handicapped journalist, Hollywood actors have, so to say, tried on the role of moral leaders. The role calls for what they are doing to seem both passionate and brave. Since the political culture of Hollywood has been preponderantly progressive for decades now, an actor publicly announcing him- or herself in favor of a liberal cause or opposed to a conservative politician is, however true his or her feeling for the cause, essentially joining the herd of independent minds. As for bravery in the realm of political opinion, I am reminded that many years ago my friend, the social scientist Edward Shils, after giving a government-sponsored Jefferson Lecture about the coarsening effect of the federal government on academic life, was greeted at the lectern by an admirer, who told him how brave he thought his lecture was. “Thank you,” Edward said, “but it wasn’t in the least brave. Brave is living in South Africa and speaking out against apartheid, brave is publishing dissenting works in the Soviet Union. Brave is when there is a severe penalty likely to follow from your actions. Far from this being the case with my lecture, I was paid a $10,000 fee for it by the same federal government I attacked.”

  In the public realm one cannot charm some of the people some of the time. To qualify as charming one must charm most of the people most of the time. Charm requires consensus. When a public figure declares his politics
, along with losing a large portion of his audience, he gives up any hope of establishing that consensus about his own charm. The divisive field of politics is the last place for charmers to work their magic. That the current age happens to be as politically divisive as any on recent record is one of the principal reasons charm is itself onto lean times in our day. Athlete, movie star, actor, singer, private person, if any among them wish to establish themselves as charming, all do best to steer well clear of politics.

  Chapter XV

  The New Shabby Chic

  In a loose use of the word, a young child might be called charming, so, too a kitten, or a doll. In these instances not charming but cute would likely be the more precise word. Inanimate objects can be charming: a painting, a poem, or an eighteenth-century clock; so, too, can an artistic creation, a poem, a building, a song be charming. But charm as the power to delight, elevate, and render the world a place full of possibilities is restricted to human beings, and all but exclusively to adults of the species. Charm is an adult phenomenon, skill, art. Charm is worldly, a quality available only to those who have a considerable and considered experience of the wider world.

  In an essay in the Atlantic (June 2013), Benjamin Schwarz writes:

  [Charm] simultaneously demands detachment and engagement. Only the self-aware can have charm: it’s bound up with a sensibility that at best approaches wisdom, or at least worldliness, and at worst goes well beyond cynicism. It can’t exist in the undeveloped personality. It’s an attribute foreign to many men because most are, for better or worse, child-like. 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.

  In other words, to be charming one has to be adult, and to be fully adult one might just have to have grown up before the cultural reign of the 1960s set in.

  Among the enemies of charm thus far considered—psychotherapy for encouraging confession and discouraging useful repression and thoughtful reticence, politics for its inherent divisiveness—must be added the closing down of adulthood, a phenomenon that has been on the move in the United States and much of Europe since the 1960s. The notion of “the closing down of adulthood” might strike some as hyperbole. I don’t believe it hyperbolic in the least; I believe that adulthood is no longer an admired condition or state; I believe that for most people the longer it can be put off, including nearly forever, the better. Most people, males especially, would seem to prefer to live a life of perpetual adolescence.

  As for how this came about, one might begin with the discovery in the late 1950s and early 1960s on the part of advertising agencies and retailers of the emergence of the young—specifically of teenagers—as a separate and profitable market for goods and entertainment. Suddenly the young were catered to in a way they never quite were before: Social arrangements changed to make way for them, special clothes were made for them, television shows devised with them in mind, music composed and recorded for them alone. Before the discovery of youth as a specifically marketed target, the United States had a unified culture in which three generations of a family might sit before the television set to watch the same shows—Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, say, or The Carol Burnett Show—afterward the country was divided between the young and the not young.

  The reverence for youth or the young, even for the prenatal, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Plato thought we were at our wisest when still in the womb. Wordsworth, in his poem “Intimations of Immortality,” held that we are born with great wisdom that life through the agency of a corrupting society causes us to forget. In writing about the Jazz Age, the period between the end of World War One and the beginning of the Depression, F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked upon the older generation catching up with the younger. In his essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” he wrote:

  Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths, when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste . . . The sequel was rather like a children’s party taken over by the elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback.

  In 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. The upsurge in youth adoration perhaps begins here, with the young Jack Kennedy, leader of the world’s most powerful country who does not wear an adult hat and is often photographed playing touch football or sailing. (He also golfed, but the press agreed not to photograph him doing so, for President Eisenhower’s golfing, considered a great time-waster, had gotten bad press.) The accent in the Kennedy administration on youthfulness initiated the new hunger to stay young.

  In the middle 1960s, the age known with chronological inexactitude as the Sixties, the student protest movement, kicked in. “The establishment” was the name given to the enemies of the students in their protests, but the real enemies were their elders, if not adulthood generally. “Never trust anyone over thirty” was one of the movement’s leading shibboleths. What was really meant was never trust anyone who seems staid, respectable, middle-class—in short, never trust grown-ups.

  Although the student protest movement eventually subsided and seemed to have disappeared, it was perhaps more victorious, in the cultural than the political realm, than its many followers and enemies know. As I mentioned earlier, cultural revolution is always more efficacious than political revolution. Before long people over thirty themselves no longer trusted anyone over thirty. In fifteen or twenty years many of the students who led or signed up for the protests were themselves professors in the same universities they once found so oppressive, and not long after their youthful views began to prevail through their teaching of oncoming generations.

  One could tell the academic troops from the 1960s by the way they dressed (jean-clad and bearded), spoke to students (without formality, even intimately), and taught their subjects (with an eye to the reform and ultimate enlightenment of humankind, at least as they construed enlightenment, by emphasizing the centrality of race, class, and gender in humanistic and social scientific studies). Soon enough the Zeitgeist, the time-spirit, had changed, decisively, in favor of youthfulness, no matter how old its old advocates grew.

  The Sixties generation eschewed elegance for naturalness. The notion of ugliness was replaced by oldliness as the repulsive condition. “It grows harder to write,” noted F. Scott Fitzgerald many decades before, “because there is much less weather than when I was a boy, and practically no men and women at all.” The loss of an adult population that Fitzgerald bemoaned has since thinned out much further, well beyond his by-no-means imperceptive imagining.

  Youth was once understood to be a transient state through which one passed after childhood and on the way to adulthood. Then, in the middle and late 1960s, it became a social class—and an aggrieved and angry one, whose enemies were its elders but also the middle class and its way of life at large. Then, when the tumult of the 1960s died down—Vietnam ignominiously ended, student and graduate-student days done—the need to get into the main flow of life beckoning, youth became neither a transient state nor a social class but a desideratum, a goal, an ideal. Two of the greatest compliments in America in our day are: “You look thin” and “You don’t at all look your age.” “Grow up,” wrote Fitzgerald, anticipating our own time, “that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.” And that, in many respects, is what our contemporary culture appears not merely to have encouraged but to have done.

  Nature of course has other ideas. As one advances through life it wrinkles the skin, grays or removes the hair, alters posture, hands out funny walks and imperishable blemish
es, diminishes pleasurable appetites. To combat these depredations there are cosmetic surgery, hair dyes (“He paints his head,” said the Romans in derision of those who wished to hide their gray hair), wigs, gymnasiums and personal trainers and spas, erection-inducing pills. Juan Ponce de Leon thou shouldst be alive at this hour.

  Yet, if Ponce de Leon were alive now, viewing older billionaires with oxblood-colored hair, aging actresses with skin made so tight by cosmetic surgery they cannot close their eyes at night, old men whose jogging pace resembles infants just beginning to walk, former 1960s student radicals sporting sad gray ponytails or topknots, perhaps the Spanish explorer would have given up his (legendary) search for the Fountain of Youth, and resigned himself to aging as gracefully as possible. “Obviously,” wrote W. H. Auden, himself a youngest son, “it is normal to think oneself younger than one is, but fatal to want to be younger.”

  Not merely the people who can afford to get “work” done, as cosmetic surgery is euphemistically denoted, or those dedicated to the rigors of the gym when their bodies are long beyond help, are afflicted with what I think of as the youth virus. Something more in the nature of a pandemic is entailed, and it is the triumph of the youth culture over an entire society. Earlier in this book I mentioned asking friends and acquaintances to name five people in public life who are charming. An only slightly less difficult question today might be to ask them to name five people who are adults.

  Think of the current crop of aging movie stars. Robert Redford, for example, though now in his eighties, goes about bejeaned, dressed as a boy, with deeply tanned yet wrinkled skin and dyed hair. Jim Carrey, whose career has faded, played chiefly comic-book characters in his movies, and now in his middle fifties seems himself a comic-book character. Women movie stars are not allowed to age, and so, with a few notable exceptions—Meryl Streep chief among them—they simply fade away. No graceful closing down of careers, such as was allowed Katherine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis, is permitted. Youth may be, as Shaw had it, wasted on the young, but perhaps it’s not wasted after all if one refuses to grow older.