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The charisma of these unbridled mavericks may not be accidental. Many psychologists contend that superior personhood demands psychic elbow room and a defiance of established norms. A woman in quest of alpha genes may do better with a restless rebel than a company yes-man.

Then again, archaic history plays in. Ancient deities like Shiva, Osiris, the Norse Freyr, and the Celtic Dagda defied conventions and traveled the earth dispensing fertility. The phallic Hermes was “God of the Roads.” Perpetual wanderer Dionysus mocked institutions and social custom and “freed his worshippers from every law.”

Free-range ladykillers have particular charms for women. “Libertines” hold out the seductive promise of escape from the traditional feminine fate of domestic stasis and conformity. The “eccentric” rover of Knut Hamsun’s nineteenth-century
Mysteries
arrives among a group of restive women at just the right time. Over the course of the summer, he beguiles the entire female population of a Norwegian seaport with his mystic promise of freedom and revolt. Even the exemplar of feminine domesticity surrenders, crying, “You upset my equilibrium!”

One of the staples of popular romance is the solitary hero unburdened by sidekicks who disdains social dictates— roving renegades like Robert Kincaid of
The Bridges of Madison County
. In
The Ground beneath Her Feet
, Salman Rushdie takes the convention and transmutes it into great literature. “Bombay Casanova” Ormus Cama is a prismatic musical genius who renounces orthodox culture, slips the traces, and “step[s] off the map” into pure possibility.

Not every great lover bucks the establishment and goes his own way. But those who do exude an edgy excitement. Casanova was his “own master”—oblivious to regulations and in love with the open road—and no one could restrain pianist Franz Liszt, a vagabond spirit too overscale for civilized confinement. They’re among a fleet of freewheeling originals: ladies’ men such as Sir Walter Raleigh, Jack London, and H. G. Wells.

This footloose, anarchic spirit can be cerebral and work just as forcefully. Twentieth-century philosopher and
tombeur
Albert Camus was physically curtailed by tuberculosis, but inwardly was a dedicated maverick and roamer. Nonconformity and freedom were the watchwords of his “Absurdist” doctrine. “I rebel,” he wrote, “therefore we exist.”

Don Juan was one of his existential heroes, an enlightened lover who seduced women not to score but to spread amorous joy. “It’s his way of giving and vivifying” before the axe falls. A romantic adventurer, Camus was as good as his word. Women found him drop-dead attractive—a French Humphrey Bogart—and he loved them “without bounds.” The year before he died in a car crash, at forty-six, he was balancing three women in his life, plus a devoted wife. And he “managed to keep them all happy.”

Had Camus known, he could have found his Don Juan across the channel: Denys Finch Hatton. Fabled lover, iconoclast, daredevil, and “eternal wanderer,” Finch Hatton was immortalized as Isak Dinesen’s überlover in
Out of Africa
. But Danish author Dinesen no more captured Finch Hatton in her idealized portrait than she did in real life. He eluded any attempt to pin him down. A born dissenter, he refused to be curbed by Edwardian social sanctions, raised Cain in school, and at age twenty-four fled to the wilds of East Africa for adventure and breathing room.

Women were mad for him. Six foot three and beautiful, he had enormous charisma, a valence that drew people to him “like a centripetal force.” At one point “at least eight women were in love with him,” and he chose fastidiously—strong, glamorous, bohemian individualists.

Dinesen, nom de plume of Karen Blixen, was his longest amour. They met in 1918 on her Kenyan coffee plantation, where she lived with her faithless husband, Bror, and entertained a revolving crew of tourists and big-game hunters. Their affair lasted until his death in a plane crash in 1931. She lived and breathed for his sporadic visits, catered to his whims, thought him a god, and hoped desperately to marry him.

But Finch Hatton “belonged to the wild nomadic world and he never intended to marry anyone.” At the end, he paired up with the adventurous aviator Beryl Markham, who said, “As for charm, I suspect Denys invented it.” The invention wasn’t original; it was the “absolute magic” of the charismatic, unchained love god. He was “like a meteor,” said a female friend. “He arrived only to go off again . . . he wanted the wild.”

Flawed Manhood

The flaw that punctuates perfection

—H
ILLARY
J
OHNSON
,
Los Angeles Times

Every woman at the University of Virginia in the 1970s was a little bit (or a lot) in love with this professor. He had strut and movie-star looks—a trim red beard and safari outfits with biker boots and bush shirts. That day in class, he was talking about guilt in a Kafka story. “Say a policeman knocked on the door,” he asked. “How many would think he’d come for you? Me? I’d know for sure.”

He might have been right. Douglas Day was notorious: fast cars, exploits south of the border (in his own plane), and women everywhere. Married five times, he had window-rattling sex appeal, charisma that took your breath and heart away. More than his beauty and brilliance, it was his walk. He had a mysterious gimp leg, and when he limped down Cabell Hall, women dissolved.

Pop psychologists and coaches who tout ironclad confidence as the key to sexual charisma may need a reality check. A hairline crack in a man’s aplomb, a hint of vulnerability—either physical or psychological—can turn a woman inside out. Joseph Roach traces this to the nature of charisma itself, the necessary flux of vulnerability and strength. To psychoanalyst Irvine Schiffer, minor defects, which he calls “straddling characteristics,” create the highest sexual amperage; they encourage approachability and generate “instant glamour.”

Women find a soupçon of fallibility in a man especially erotic. “The things I find most endearing” about lovers, says Erica Jong, “are their small imperfections.” Perhaps maternal impulses are at work or an attempt to equalize the power imbalance between the sexes. Psychiatrist Michael Bader probes deeper; the female yen for injured manhood, he hypothesizes, stems from an impulse to neutralize fears of rejection and male violence. Author Hillary Johnson goes for the intimacy explanation. Scars and flaws, she writes, suggest “a way to get inside” masculine armor.

There’s a mythic kicker too. Wounded men inherit some of the star shine of the earliest fertility gods. Adonis was gored in the groin by a wild boar, and like the maimed Osiris, Dionysus, and Freyr, he was healed and restored to life each spring. Just as shamans incur a “disease of God” during initiation to access the power source of creation, heroes acquire a permanent scar (similar to the tell-tale gash in Odysseus’s thigh) in the archetypal male journey to maturity.

The trope lives on in hundreds of love stories, from the gouged Guigemar in Marie de France’s story to the crippled and blinded Mr. Rochester in
Jane Eyre
. The emotionally or physically damaged man, says novelist Mary Jo Putney, is a hero of “incredible potency.” Readers can find injured ladykillers for every taste on romance sites: a dyslexic duke, a Dominic with a deformed hip, and a psychologically impaired Lord Evelyn.

The sexiest man to enter a fictional bedroom is the one-armed biker Lefty, of Rebecca Silver’s story “Fearful Symmetry.” He caresses her nipples with the “delicate prongs” of his steel hook, then flings off his prosthesis, props himself on his stump, and flips her out of her senses on the futon. Women from one end of Texas to the other covet Hardy Cates, Lisa Kleypas’s troubled “blue-eyed devil” who has been traumatized by a violent, alcoholic father in a seedy trailer park.

Great lovers with a “divine defect” are surprisingly numerous. Aldous Huxley and Potemkin were nearly blind, and Charlemagne, Talleyrand, and Gary Cooper limped. Lord Byron, with his club foot and bruised sensibilities, devastated women, just as Jack London’s and Richard Burton’s tortured souls played havoc with female hearts.

A grand prix identity that harbors a psychic wound can be an incendiary mix. “Great seducer” Jack Nicholson is a powerful presence with the strong ego of a talented actor and three-time Oscar winner. But what melts women is the fissure of hurt beneath the “King of Hollywood” persona, the insecurity intercut with confidence. Illegitimate, he was raised by a grandmother who masqueraded as his mother, and was so fat as a boy that he was excluded from sports and nicknamed “Chubs.”

He’s open about the scars and therapy, and his lovers are both protective and committed, with Anjelica Huston staying with him for seventeen years. Although he cheated openly on model-actress Cynthia Basinet, she explained why she couldn’t leave him: “I saw such a wonderful vulnerable person . . . I vowed never to hurt him.” It was, she said, part of “his spell,” the “old Jack Magic.”

The more extreme the flaws, the greater the need for compensatory attractions. Russian writer Ivan Turgenev may be one of the least heroic yet most lovable ladies’ men of the nineteenth century. Author of such masterpieces as
Fathers and Sons
and
A Month in the Country
, he was plagued with neuroses, having been brutalized by a sadistic mother who faked death scenes to get her way. He was a weak-kneed, nervous “gentle giant,” prone to hypochondria, hallucinations, and melancholy.

Nor did he strike a bold figure. Tall and stoop-shoulded, he had grayish eyes that gazed dreamily out of a “round, mild, handsome,” somewhat feminine face. But he possessed surprising reserves of strength and an audacious, trailblazing genius. Ignoring his mother’s curses, he expatriated, broke rank, and became a major “innovator” of Russian literature.

His weak/strong alloy, among other charms, made him a heart-stopper. Seduced by a chambermaid at age fifteen, Turgenev was avalanched by women, among them a Berlin mother of four, an aristocrat who called him her “Christ,” and quintessentially, mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot. She was besieged by suitors, but he scattered them all with his gifts and white-lightning compound of frailty and personal force. Viardot took him home to France, where she lived with him and her husband in a lifelong ménage à trois.

Despite the propaganda, bulletproof self-esteem and a perfect package aren’t the ticket. It’s an “enigmatic tang” of injury, a pinch of flaw in the confidence brew that fells women every time.

Charisma: Refining the Definition

Women can just
feel
a ladies’ man on the premises. Suddenly the room is charged with ions and thrumming with sexual tension and promise. He doesn’t need every charisma attribute:
joie de vivre
, intensity, creativity, titanic libido, tear-away originality, fondness for women, or manly self-esteem tinged with androgyny and fallibility. A great lover can throw sparks with just a few choice allures; they are that potent.

Erotic charisma, though, isn’t easily coded and formulated. Mysteries remain. Why, for example, are men like Al Gore, Bill Gates, and comedian Robin Williams non-sizzlers when they fit the criteria? Why don’t the standard recipes—big self-belief, expressivity, rapport, and communication skills—work? And what about the evolutionary psychologists’ precepts, such as status, wealth, and stability?

The topic, as James M. Donovan highlights in the
Journal of Scientific Exploration
, is largely unexplored. Charisma, he writes, is “much more bizarre than commonly assumed,” and bears little relation to any special personality type. Scholars agree: it’s been relegated, they say, “to the back burner of research,” and confusion reigns—even about the definition of the word. We can tease out traits, float theories, but we can’t demystify that magic radiance—yet.

What we can say for sure, though, is that we know charisma when we see it, and are bespelled. When women encounter a magnetic man, they imbue him (similar to transference in psychotherapy) with their “forbidden impulses and secret wishes,” investing him with what they crave and aren’t getting. As such, the ladies’ man is a valuable resource, a Rorschach of women’s deepest, unmet desires.

Can men en masse acquire charisma, or is it an innate “gift” as the ancients believed? I ask Rick the fire captain, and he says he knows only one thing: you can’t fake it. Biologist Amotz Zahavi and others have confirmed this in studies, and maintain that top lovers are authentic because women have always seen through false sexual advertisement.

“The feeling has to be real,” Rick continues. And beyond that? Rick takes a sip of port, waits a beat, and sighs. “All I know is, life is good, I invent stuff, I travel. I never follow the crowd. And I
do
love women. Ever tell you about the time Vivien Leigh invited me up? She told me three times, ‘If there were ever a real Rhett Butler, it would be you.’ ”

CHAPTER 2

Character:

THE GOODS

–

Character alone is worthy of the crown of love.

—A
NDREAS
C
APELLANUS
,
The Art of Courtly Love

H
is friends call him “The King”—the man who’s invincible with women. When I meet Brian for lunch, I know what they mean when they say, “He could get the dogs off the meat truck.” He greets me with a sunburst smile, looking more like a young Matthew Broderick at his First Communion than a twenty-six-year-old banker in a success suit and Hermès tie. But charisma, I soon learn, is only half of his allure. The rest comes down to character—qualities he has consciously cultivated.

“Oh sure,” he begins, “there’s the intrinsic stuff, loving women and
joie de vivre
. But I can shed some light on a few more things that work for me. I mean, you definitely have to be interesting.”

In what way?

“Well,” he quirks an eyebrow, “I’m incredibly active. I try to be all things at once. I read, keep up, I follow controversial topics—religion, politics, art. It’s very important, too,” he taps a sugar packet against the coffee cup for emphasis, “to deal socially with others, to have the ability to smile and charm. I like to keep in touch—all the lines open.”

Open they are. Brian has “thirty or forty girlfriends” in his address book whom he contacts regularly, some for quick catch-ups at Starbucks, others for trysts throughout Europe. At the mention of the word
playboy
, though, he bridles. “Absolutely not! I count women among my closest friends. There are guys who are bad guys, but hey, I’m a good person. I don’t mean any ill will. I try to be genuine and true to who I am.”

His friends bear him out. Ladykiller that he is, Brian is a far cry from the stock lothario who lacks a mature identity or moral compass. Although base philanderers and scalp-hunters abound, real Casanovas are men of character who possess core traits that persist through time and cultures. Not that they are consistent or “right stuff” material; we have to expand the boundaries a bit. Instead, they are self-created originals with a unique mix of qualities designed to maximize life and love, and to fascinate.

Morality/Virtue

Good moral character is sexually attractive and romantically inspiring.

—G
EOFFREY
M
ILLER
,
The Mating Mind

Claude Adrien Helvétius was “the dread of husbands” in eighteenth-century France—the most desired, most sensual, and fickle of men. He was so handsome, with a cleft chin and ice-blue eyes, that Voltaire called him “Apollo.” Every morning his valet brought his first bedmate, and every afternoon and evening he romanced the
ton
of Paris—the comtesse d’Autre, the duchesse de Chaulnes, among others—ending with the beautiful actress Mademoiselle Gaussin. Once when a rich suitor offered the actress six hundred livres for the night, she gestured toward Helvétius and said, “Look like this man, monsieur, and I will give you 1,200 livres.”

Wealthy, witty, even a gifted dancer, he would seem to be a walking
ancient régime
cliché—a hard-boiled roué. Except he wasn’t; he was also the soul of benevolence. No one, said contemporaries, “joined more delicacy to more kindness.” When he met the right woman, he married, moved to the countryside, and devoted the rest of his life to good works. There he wrote
De l’esprit
(
On Mind
) and became one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, advocating natural equality and the “greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

Although some women
do
fancy wild and wicked reprobates (especially for flings), a bigger turn-on are men who scramble the good/bad categories and are nice with spice. Unalloyed virtue—or the appearance of it—has zero allure. Ladies’ men stir it up. Morally mixed and inclined to bend rules, they are fundamentally decent and know the secret to the oldest conundrum: how to make goodness charming.

Virtue has long been entwined with romantic love. In the fourth-century BC, Plato defined eros as a love of goodness that led up a transcendental ladder to the spheres. Medieval amorists put moral excellence back into romance with courtly love, where it has remained in various degrees ever since. “Honesty [and] virtue” are “great enticers”; “No love without goodness”: these rubrics still resonate today. Philosopher Robert Solomon believes ethical worth is a linchpin in love; partners must reflect and magnify our own virtues.

In studies, women seem to be of two minds about virtuous partners. On the one hand, say researchers, they want a nice guy, with “that old-fashioned quality: integrity”; on the other they want a fun, bold, bad boy. The problem is in the polarized choice, writes Edward Horgan in a Harvard University paper; after reviewing the literature, he concludes that women desire a combination of both—niceness commingled with deviltry, and served up seductively.

Seduction, in fact, may have been one of morality’s earliest functions. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller speculates that prehistoric man deployed morality as a “sexual ornament,” designed to intrigue and enchant women with the delights of fair play, generosity, decency, and concern for others. “You enjoy helping those who help you,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker. “That’s also why men and women fall in love.” Particularly if the lover isn’t too perfect.

The ancient love gods were the sexiest of all nice guys. A variegated species with their share of faults, they were glamorous deities who made virtue voluptuous. The volatile Dionysus was also kind and compassionate, and dispensed his benevolence through song, dance, and joyous celebration. Although a tricky customer, the phallic Hermes was the “giver of good things”—a luck-bringer, protector, and silver-tongued seducer. And the “too reckless” Cuchulain of Gaelic myth endeared Irish women young and old with his “pleasing” rectitude and “kindness” to everyone.

Female readers always rate Mr. Darcy of
Pride and Prejudice
as a romantic favorite because he is so deliciously decent. Fitzwilliam Darcy is both an odious snob and a man of honor who saves the Bennets from calamity and charms Elizabeth with his eloquent mea culpa: “You showed me,” he says, “how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

Mass-market romances are supposed to be black-and-white morality fables, but the “nice” male protagonists in these novels are ethical crossbreeds. Harry, the straight-arrow accountant of
The Nerd Who Loved Me
, has an inner wild child. He’s a covert Vegas buff who flirts with the Mob, beats a snoop to a pulp, and wins the heroine by advertising his good deeds through a series of seductive adventures.

Ladies’ men are notorious admixtures. Casanova was not incapable of skullduggery; he exaggerated his exploits for profit and conned the wealthy dowager marquise d’Urfé out of a fortune by faking occult powers and staging a “rebirth” that entailed sex three times in a tub. But he brimmed “with kindness” and performed numerous charitable acts—a gallant visit to a dying inamorata and an impromptu gift of shoe buckles for a little girl.

Poet Alfred de Musset also misbehaved (as when he went on a brothel-bender in Venice while George Sand lay ill), yet he had a “sweetness of character that made him absolutely irresistible.” So, too, Warren Beatty: at times a vain rascal and simultaneously, an “extraordinary, good person.”

Rarely do you hear the terms
rock star
and
virtue
in the same breath. Unless, that is, you’re talking about Sam Cooke. The rhythm-and-blues sensation of the 1950s and 60s who popularized such classics as “You Send Me” and “Wonderful World,” Cooke doesn’t look exemplary at first glance. He did jail time—brief stints for distributing a dirty book in high school and for “fornication and bastardy” in his twenties. He was stubborn, quick-tempered, conceited, and all hell with women. A “woman’s man,” he indulged in countless affairs, fathered four known illegitimate children, and was once discovered in bed with five women.

But the top note in his hybrid character was decency. Said friends, he conveyed “genuineness,” generosity, and “instinctive kindness in every fiber of his being.” Although a gospel singer in his early career and son of a Chicago Baptist preacher, he was not a by-the-Good-Book man; he lived by his own moral lights.

Cooke seemed born for women. He had erotic crackle even as a teenager—energy, charm, vitality, and a way of talking to girls with “warmth, [and] kindness,” as though each were the only person on the planet. Forthright and honest, he refused to game them, and so enamored Barbara Campbell, a neighbor four years his junior, that she had his daughter out of wedlock at eighteen and waited in the wings for him for seven years.

In the interim, Sam Cooke crossed over from gospel to mainstream rock and roll and became a celebrity with his sweet soaring voice. Women literally fainted when he sang, and stormed him backstage. He was “never crass, never vulgar” about it, but he capitalized on stardom: he fathered two more illegitimate children and married lounge singer Delores Mohawk. After that marriage ended, his high school sweetheart, Barbara Campbell, reappeared. They married and had two children, but he couldn’t stay on the porch. Women mobbed him, mesmerized by his charisma and naughty/nice mélange.

Flawed, faithless, good-hearted, and an easy touch: he was each of these things—to his undoing. At thirty-five in December 1964, he hooked up with a party girl after a few too many martinis and took her to a cheap motel, where she changed her mind and bolted with his clothes and money. Enraged and dressed only in a jacket and shoes, he confronted the manager, Bertha Franklin, about the theft, and a scuffle ensued. In the process, Franklin pulled a gun on Cooke and killed him. As the bullet tore through him, he said with combined shock and disbelief, “Lady, you shot me.” He died as he lived, “a real gentleman,” who beneath the faults—anger, promiscuity, and more—was “a sweet, innocent young guy.”

The ingénue of
Primrose
, an old musical, sings that her dream man “needn’t be such a saint.” Despite the imprecations of Platonists and love philosophers, women will never be persuaded to take perfect moral purity to their hearts. To be seductive, goodness needs sauce—joy, sweetness, and eloquence spiked with frailties. Better, though, to err on the side of the angels: kindness, Ovid reminded men, “will tame even the lions and tigers.”

Courage

All true desire is dangerous

—R
OBERT
B
LY
,
Iron John

The story is as old as time. The princess lies comatose in a haunted palace under an evil spell. Men perish in the attempt to rescue her, until one day two princes come along with their younger brother “Simpleton.” At the palace they find a gray dwarf who tells them they must perform three impossible tasks to break the spell. As his two craven brothers fail and turn to stone, Simpleton boldly sets off into the forest. With the aid of the beasts he befriends, he collects a thousand pearls, dives to the bottom of the lake, finds the key to the princess’s bedroom, and picks the “right” princess out of a choice of three. Simpleton isn’t simple; he knows a cardinal ladykiller truth: only the good
and
brave deserve the fair.

Women, in a recent study, said they valued bravery even more than kindness in men. Moralists have long placed courage at the head of the virtues because without it none of the others would be possible. For centuries, valor and boldness of spirit have been seen as the latchkey to female affections. Ladies’ men, however, do courage as unconventionally as everything else. They combine risk, perseverance, brains, starch, and inner mettle with decency and a distaste for gratuitous violence. They need not be physically brave—broncobusters or smoke jumpers—but they have the right hearts and souls of steel.

They wouldn’t, though, be great lovers without spine. Eros is dangerous terrain; intimacy is land-mined with threats. Women can be transported over the moon, but they can also be abandoned, engulfed, and driven mad by passion. Men, too, have special terrors of their own—performance anxieties and a witch’s brew of other fears. In love, women want a man who’s up to a challenge. As the Romans said, “Venus favors the bold,” and god help the lover who recoils from the romantic fray and runs for cover.