Most people have dreams in their youth that get shattered or worn down with age. They find themselves disappointed by people, events, reality, which cannot match their youthful ideals. Ideal Lovers thrive on people’s broken dreams, which become lifelong fantasies. You long for romance? Adventure? Lofty spiritual communion? The

Ideal Lover reflects your fantasy. He or she is an artist in creating the illusion you require, idealizing your portrait. In a world of disenchantment and baseness, there is limitless seductive power in following the path of the Ideal Lover.

The Romantic Ideal

One evening around 1760, at the opera in the city of Cologne, a beautiful young woman sat in her box, watching the audience. Beside her was her husband, the town burgomaster—a middle-aged man and amiable enough, but dull. Through her opera glasses the young woman noticed a handsome man wearing a stunning outfit. Evidently her stare was noticed, for after the opera the man introduced himself: his name was Giovanni Giacomo Casanova.

If at first sight a girl does not make such a deep

impression on a person that she awakens the ideal, then ordinarily the actuality is not especially desirable; but if she does, then no matter how experienced a person is he usually is rather overwhelmed.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE SEDUCER’S DIARY, TRANSLATED BY HOWARD V. HONC;

AND EDNA H. HONG

A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges him on: “Come, my friend, it’s getting light. You don’t want anyone to find you here. He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly

long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers. Instead

he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be

fastening his sash. • Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the side door while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he slips away.

The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories. – • Indeed, one’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-

taking. When he Jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser sash, rolls up

the sleeves of his court cloak, overrobe, or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe and then briskly secures the outer sash—one really begins to hate him.

—THE PILLOW BOOK OF SEI SHONAGON,TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY IVAN MORRIS

The stranger kissed the woman’s hand. She was going to a ball the following night, she told him; would he like to come? “If I might dare to hope, Madame,” he replied, “that you will dance only with me.”

The next night, after the ball, the woman could think only of Casanova.

He had seemed to anticipate her thoughts—had been so pleasant, and yet so

bold. A few days later he dined at her house, and after her husband had retired for the evening she showed him around. In her boudoir she pointed out a wing of the house, a chapel, just outside her window Sure enough, as if he had read her mind, Casanova came to the chapel the next day to attend Mass, and seeing her at the theater that evening he mentioned to her that he had noticed a door there that must lead to her bedroom. She laughed, and pretended to be surprised. In the most innocent of tones, he said that he would find a way to hide in the chapel the next day—and almost without thinking, she whispered she would visit him there after everyone had gone to bed.

So Casanova hid in the chapel’s tiny confessional, waiting all day and evening. There were rats, and he had nothing to lie upon; yet when the burgomaster’s wife finally came, late at night, he did not complain, but quietly followed her to her room. They continued their trysts for several days. By day she could hardly wait for night: finally something to live for, an adventure. She left him food, books, and candles to ease his long and

tedious stays in the chapel—it seemed wrong to use a place of worship for such a purpose, but that only made the affair more exciting. A few days later, however, she had to take a journey with her husband. By the time she got back, Casanova had disappeared, as quickly and gracefully as he had come.

Some years later, in London, a young woman named Miss Pauline noticed an ad in a local newspaper. A gentleman was looking for a lady lodger to rent a part of his house. Miss Pauline came from Portugal, and

was of the nobility; she had eloped to London with a lover, but he had been forced to return home and she had had to stay on alone for some while

before she could join him. Now she was lonely and had little money, and was depressed by her squalid circumstances—after all, she had been raised as a lady. She answered the ad.

The gentleman turned out to be Casanova, and what a gentleman he was.

The room he offered was nice, and the rent was low; he asked only for occasional companionship. Miss Pauline moved in. They played chess, went riding, discussed literature. He was so well-bred, polite, and generous. A serious and high-minded girl, she came to depend on their friendship;

here was a man she could talk to for hours. Then one day Casanova seemed changed, upset, excited: he confessed that he was in love with her. She was

going back to Portugal soon, to rejoin her lover, and this was not what she wanted to hear. She told him he should go riding to calm down.

Later that evening she received news: he had fallen from his horse.

Feeling responsible for his accident, she rushed to him, found him in bed, and fell into his arms, unable to control herself. The two became lovers that night, and remained so for the rest of Miss Pauline’s stay in London. Yet when it came time for her to leave for Portugal, he did not try to stop her; instead, he comforted her, reasoning that each of them had offered the other the perfect, temporary antidote to their loneliness, and that they would be

friends for life.

Some years later, in a small Spanish town, a young and beautiful girl named Ignazia was leaving church after confession. She was approached by Casanova. Walking her home, he explained that he had a passion for dancing the fandango, and invited her to a ball the following evening. He

was so different from anyone in the town, which bored her so—she desperately wanted to go. Her parents were against the arrangement, but she persuaded her mother to act as a chaperone. After an unforgettable evening of dancing (and he danced the fandango remarkably well for a foreigner),

Casanova confessed that he was madly in love with her. She replied (very sadly, though) that she already had a fiancé. Casanova did not force the issue, but over the next few days he took Ignazia to more dances and to the bullfights. On one of these occasions he introduced her to a friend of his, a duchess, who flirted with him brazenly; Ignazia was terribly jealous. By

now she was desperately in love with Casanova, but her sense of duty and religion forbade such thoughts.

Finally, after days of torment, Ignazia sought out Casanova and took his hand: “My confessor tried to make me promise to never be alone with you again,” she said, “and as I could not, he refused to give me absolution. It is the first time in my life such a thing has happened to me. I have put myself in God’s hands. I have made up my mind, so long as you are here, to do all you wish. When to my sorrow you leave Spain, I shall find another confessor. My fancy for you is, after all, only a passing madness.”

Casanova was perhaps the most successful seducer in history; few women could resist him. His method was simple: on meeting a woman, he would

study her, go along with her moods, find out what was missing in her life, and provide it. He made himself the Ideal Lover. The bored burgomaster’s wife needed adventure and romance; she wanted someone who would

sacrifice time and comfort to have her. For Miss Pauline what was missing was friendship, lofty ideals, serious conversation; she wanted a man of breeding and generosity who would treat her like a lady. For Ignazia, what was missing was suffering and torment. Her life was too easy; to feel truly alive, and to have something real to confess, she needed to sin. In each case Casanova adapted himself to the woman’s ideals, brought her fantasy to life. Once she had fallen under his spell, a little ruse or calculation would seal the romance (a day among rats, a contrived fall from a horse, an encounter with another woman to make Ignazia jealous).

During the early 1970s, against a turbulent political backdrop that included the fiasco of American involvement in the Vietnam War and the downfall of President Richard Nixon’s presidency in the Watergate scandal, a “me generation” sprang to prominence—and [Andy] Warhol was

there to hold up its mirror. Unlike the radicalized protesters of the 1960s who wanted to change all the ills of society, the self- absorbed “me” people

sought to improve their bodies and to “get in touch ” with their own feelings. They cared passionately about their appearance, health, life- style, and

bank accounts. Andy catered to their self-

centeredness and inflated pride by offering his

services as a portraitist. By the end of the decade, he would be internationally recognized as one of

the leading portraitists of his era. . . • Warhol

offered his clients an irresistible product: a stylish and flattering portrait by a famous artist who was himself a certified celebrity. Conferring an alluring star presence upon even the most celebrated of faces, he transformed his subjects

into glamorous apparitions, presenting their faces as he thought they wanted to be seen and

remembered. By filtering his sitters’ good features through his silkscreens and exaggerating their

vivacity, he enabled them to gain entrée to a more mythic and rarefied level of existence. The possession of great wealth and power might do for everyday life, but the commissioning of a portrait by Warhol was a sure indication that the sitter intended to secure a posthumous fame as well.

Warhol’s portraits were not so much realistic

documents of contemporary faces as they were designer icons awaiting future devotions.

—DAVID BOURDON, WARHOL

The Ideal Lover is rare in the modern world, for the role takes effort. You will have to focus intensely on the other person, fathom what she is missing, what he is disappointed by. People will often reveal this in subtle ways: through gesture, tone of voice, a look in the eye. By seeming to be what they lack, you will fit their ideal.

To create this effect requires patience and attention to detail. Most people are so wrapped up in their own desires, so impatient, they are incapable of

the Ideal Lover role. Let that be a source of infinite opportunity. Be an oasis in the desert of the self-absorbed; few can resist the temptation of following a person who seems so attuned to their desires, to bringing to life their fantasies. And as with Casanova, your reputation as one who gives such

pleasure will precede you and make your seductions that much easier.

The cultivation of the pleasures of the senses was ever my principal aim in life. Knowing that I was personally calculated to please the fair sex, I

always strove to make myself agreeable to it.

—CASANOVA

The Beauty Ideal

In 1730, when Jeanne Poisson was a mere nine years old, a fortune-teller predicted that one day she would be the mistress of Louis XV The prediction was quite ridiculous, since Jeanne came from the middle class, and it was a tradition stretching back for centuries that the king’s mistress be chosen from among the nobility. To make matters worse, Jeanne’s father was a notorious rake, and her mother had been a courtesan.

Fortunately for Jeanne, one of her mother’s lovers was a man of great wealth who took a liking to the pretty girl and paid for her education.

Jeanne learned to sing, to play the clavichord, to ride with uncommon skill, to act and dance; she was schooled in literature and history as if she were a boy. The playwright Crébillon instructed her in the art of conversation. On top of it all, Jeanne was beautiful, and had a charm and grace that set her apart early on. In 1741, she married a man of the lower nobility Now known as Madame d’Etioles, she could realize a great ambition: she opened a literary salon. All of the great writers and philosophers of the time frequented the salon, many because they were enamored of the hostess. One of these was Voltaire, who became a lifelong friend.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power

of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Through all Jeanne’s success, she never forgot the fortune-teller’s prediction, and still believed that she would one day conquer the king’s heart. It happened that one of her husband’s country estates bordered on King Louis’s favorite hunting grounds. She would spy on him through the fence, or find ways to cross his path, always while she happened to be wearing an elegant, yet fetching outfit. Soon the king was sending her gifts of game. When his official mistress died, in 1744, all of the court beauties

vied to take her place; but he began to spend more and more time with

Madame d’Etioles, dazzled by her beauty and charm. To the astonishment of the court, that same year he made this middle-class woman his official mistress, ennobling her with the title of the Marquise de Pompadour.

The king’s need for novelty was notorious: a mistress would beguile him with her looks, but he would soon grow bored with her and find someone else. After the shock of his choice of Jeanne Poisson wore off, the courtiers reassured themselves that it could not last—that he had only chosen her for the novelty of having a middle-class mistress. Little did they know that Jeanne’s first seduction of the king was not the last seduction she had in mind.

As time went by, the king found himself visiting his mistress more and more often. As he ascended the hidden stair that led from his quarters to

hers in the palace of Versailles, anticipation of the delights that awaited him at the top would begin to turn his head. First, the room was always warm, and was filled with delightful scents. Then there were the visual delights: Madame de Pompadour always wore a different costume, each one elegant and surprising in its own way. She loved beautiful objects—fine porcelain, Chinese fans, golden flowerpots—and every time he visited, there would be something new and enchanting to see. Her manner was always lighthearted

; she was never defensive or resentful. Everything for pleasure. Then there was their conversation: he had never been really able to talk with a woman before, or to laugh, but the marquise could discourse skillfully on any subject, and her voice was a pleasure to hear. And if the conversation waned, she would move to the piano, play a tune, and sing wonderfully

If ever the king seemed bored or sad, Madame de Pompadour would propose some project—perhaps the building of a new country house. He would have to advise in the design, the layout of the gardens, the decor.

Back at Versailles, Madame de Pompadour put herself in charge of the palace amusements, building a private theater for weekly performances

under her direction. Actors were chosen from among the courtiers, but the

female lead was always played by Madame de Pompadour, who was one of the finest amateur actresses in France. The king became obsessed with this theater; he could barely wait for its performances. Along with this interest

came an increasing expenditure of money on the arts, and an involvement in philosophy and literature. A man who had cared only for hunting and

gambling was spending less and less time with his male companions and becoming a great patron of the arts. Indeed he stamped a whole era with an aesthetic style, which became known as “Louis Quinze,” rivaling the style associated with his illustrious predecessor, Louis XIV

Lo and behold, year after year went by without Louis tiring of his mistress. In fact he made her a duchess, and her power and influence extended well beyond culture into politics. For twenty years, Madame de Pompadour ruled both the court and the king’s heart, until her untimely death, in 1764, at the age of forty-three.

Louis XV had a powerful inferiority complex. The successor to Louis XIV, the most powerful king in French history, he had been educated and trained for the throne—yet who could follow his predecessor’s act? Eventually he gave up trying, devoting himself instead to physical pleasures, which came to define how he was seen; the people around him knew they could sway him by appealing to the basest parts of his character.

Madame de Pompadour, genius of seduction, understood that inside Louis XV was a great man yearning to come out, and that his obsession with pretty young women indicated a hunger for a more lasting kind of

beauty. Her first step was to cure his incessant bouts of boredom. It is easy for kings to be bored—everything they want is given to them, and they seldom learn to be satisfied with what they have. The Marquise de Pompadour dealt with this by bringing all sorts of fantasies to life, and creating constant suspense. She had many skills and talents, and just as important, she deployed them so artfully that he never discovered their limits. Once she had accustomed him to more refined pleasures, she appealed to the crushed ideals within him; in the mirror she held up to him, he saw his aspiration to be great, a desire that, in France, inevitably included leadership in culture. His previous series of mistresses had tickled only his sensual desires. In Madame de Pompadour he found a woman who made him feel greatness in himself. The other mistresses could easily be replaced, but he could never find another Madame de Pompadour.

Most people believe themselves to be inwardly greater than they outwardly appear to the world. They are full of unrealized ideals: they could be artists, thinkers, leaders, spiritual figures, but the world has crushed

them, denied them the chance to let their abilities flourish. This is the key to their seduction—and to keeping them seduced over time. The Ideal Lover

knows how to conjure up this kind of magic. Appeal only to people’s physical side, as many amateur seducers do, and they will resent you for playing upon their basest instincts. But appeal to their better selves, to a higher standard of beauty, and they will hardly notice that they have been seduced. Make them feel elevated, lofty, spiritual, and your power over them will be limitless.

Love brings to light a lover’s noble and hidden

qualities—his rare and exceptional traits: it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal character.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Keys to the Character

Each of us carries inside us an ideal, either of what we would like to become, or of what we want another person to be for us. This ideal goes back to our earliest years—to what we once felt was missing in our lives, what others did not give to us, what we could not give to ourselves. Maybe we were smothered in comfort, and we long for danger and rebellion. If we want danger but it frightens us, perhaps we look for someone who seems at home with it. Or perhaps our ideal is more elevated—we want to be more creative, nobler, and kinder than we ever manage to be. Our ideal is something we feel is missing inside us.

Our ideal may be buried in disappointment, but it lurks underneath, waiting to be sparked. If another person seems to have that ideal quality, or to have the ability to bring it out in us, we fall in love. That is the response to Ideal Lovers. Attuned to what is missing inside you, to the fantasy that will stir you, they reflect your ideal—and you do the rest, projecting on to them your deepest desires and yearnings. Casanova and Madame de Pompadour did not merely seduce their targets into a sexual affair, they

made them fall in love.

The key to following the path of the Ideal Lover is the ability to observe.

Ignore your targets’ words and conscious behavior; focus on the tone of their voice, a blush here, a look there—those signs that betray what their words won’t say. Often the ideal is expressed in contradiction. King Louis

XV seemed to care only about chasing deer and young girls, but that in fact covered up his disappointment in himself; he yearned to have his nobler

qualities flattered.

Never has there been a better moment than now to play the Ideal Lover. That is because we live in a world in which everything must seem elevated and well-intentioned. Power is the most taboo topic of all: although it is the reality we deal with every day in our struggles with people, there is nothing noble, self-sacrificing, or spiritual about it. Ideal Lovers make you feel nobler, make the sensual and sexual seem spiritual and aesthetic. Like all seducers, they play with power, but they disguise their manipulations behind the facade of an ideal. Few people see through them and their

seductions last longer.

Some ideals resemble Jungian archetypes—they go back a long way in our culture, and their hold is almost unconscious. One such dream is that of the chivalrous knight. In the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages, a troubadour/knight would find a lady, almost always a married one, and would serve as her vassal. He would go through terrible trials on her behalf, undertake dangerous pilgrimages in her name, suffer awful tortures to prove his love. (This could include bodily mutilation, such as tearing off of fingernails, the cutting of an ear, etc.) He would also write poems and sing beautiful songs to her, for no troubadour could succeed without some kind of aesthetic or spiritual quality to impress his lady. The key to the archetype is a sense of absolute devotion. A man who will not let matters of warfare, glory, or money intrude into the fantasy of courtship has limitless power.

The troubadour role is an ideal because people who do not put themselves and their own interests first are truly rare. For a woman to attract the intense attention of such a man is immensely appealing to her vanity.

In eighteenth-century Osaka, a man named Nisan took the courtesan

Dewa out walking, first taking care to sprinkle the clover bushes along the path with water, which looked like morning dew. Dewa was greatly moved by this beautiful sight. “I have heard,” she said, “that loving couples of deer are wont to lie behind clover bushes. How I should like to see this in real

life!” Nisan had heard enough. That very day he had a section of her house torn down and ordered the planting of dozens of clover bushes in what had once been a part of her bedroom. That night, he arranged for peasants to round up wild deer from the mountains and bring them to the house. The next day Dewa awoke to precisely the scene she had described. Once she appeared overwhelmed and moved, he had the clover and deer taken away and the house rebuilt.

One of history’s most gallant lovers, Sergei Saltykov, had the misfortune to fall in love with one of history’s least available women: the Grand

Duchess Catherine, future empress of Russia. Catherine’s every move was watched over by her husband, Peter, who suspected her of trying to cheat on him and appointed servants to keep an eye on her. She was isolated, unloved, and unable to do anything about it. Saltykov, a handsome young army officer, was determined to be her rescuer. In 1752 he befriended Peter, and also the couple in charge of watching over Catherine. In this way he

was able to see her and occasionally exchange a word or two with her that revealed his intentions. He performed the most foolhardy and dangerous maneuvers to be able to see her alone, including diverting her horse during

a royal hunt and riding off into the forest with her. He told her how much he sympathized with her plight, and that he would do anything to help her.

To be caught courting Catherine would have meant death, and eventually Peter came to suspect that something was up between his wife and Saltykov, though he was never sure. His enmity did not discourage the dashing officer, who just put still more energy and ingenuity into finding

ways to arrange secret trysts. The couple were lovers for two years, and Saltykov was undoubtedly the father of Catherine’s son Paul, later the emperor of Russia. When Peter finally got rid of him by sending him off to Sweden, news of his gallantry traveled ahead of him, and women swooned to be his next conquest. You may not have to go to as much trouble or risk, but you will always be rewarded for actions that reveal a sense of self-

sacrifice or devotion.

The embodiment of the Ideal Lover for the 1920s was Rudolph Valentino, or at least the image created of him in film. Everything he did— the gifts, the flowers, the dancing, the way he took a woman’s hand— showed a scrupulous attention to the details that would signify how much he was thinking of her. The image was of a man who made courtship take

time, transforming it into an aesthetic experience. Men hated Valentino, because women now expected them to match the ideal of patience and

attentiveness that he represented. Yet nothing is more seductive than patient attentiveness. It makes the affair seem lofty aesthetic, not really about sex. The power of a Valentino, particularly nowadays, is that people like this are so rare. The art of playing to a woman’s ideal has almost disappeared— which only makes it that much more alluring.

If the chivalrous lover remains the ideal for women, men often idealize the Madonna/whore, a woman who combines sensuality with an air of spirituality or innocence. Think of the great courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, such as Tullia d’Aragona—essentially a prostitute, like all courtesans, but able to disguise her social role by establishing a reputation as a poet and philosopher. Tullia was what was then known as an “honest courtesan.” Honest courtesans would go to church, but they had an ulterior motive: for men, their presence at Mass was exciting. Their houses were

pleasure palaces, but what made these homes so visually delightful was their art-works and shelves full of books, volumes of Petrarch and Dante. For the man, the thrill, the fantasy, was to sleep with a woman who was sexual yet had the ideal qualities of a mother and the spirit and intellect of an artist. Where the pure prostitute excited desire but also disgust, the honest courtesan made sex seem elevated and innocent, as if it were happening in the Garden of Eden. Such women held immense power over men. To this day they remain an ideal, if for no other reason than that they offer such a range of pleasures. The key is ambiguity—to combine the

appearance of sensitivity to the pleasures of the flesh with an air of innocence, spirituality, a poetic sensibility. This mix of the high and the low is immensely seductive.

The dynamics of the Ideal Lover have limitless possibilities, not all of them erotic. In politics, Talleyrand essentially played the role of the Ideal Lover with Napoleon, whose ideal in both a cabinet minister and a friend was a man who was aristocratic, smooth with the ladies—all the things that Napoleon himself was not. In 1798, when Talleyrand was the French foreign minister, he hosted a party in Napoleon’s honor after the great general’s dazzling military victories in Italy. To the day Napoleon died, he remembered this party as the best he had ever attended. It was a lavish

affair, and Talleyrand wove a subtle message into it by placing Roman busts

around the house, and by talking to Napoleon of reviving the imperial glories of ancient Rome. This sparked a glint in the leader’s eye, and

indeed, a few years later, Napoleon gave himself the title of emperor—a move that only made Talleyrand more powerful. The key to Talleyrand’s

power was his ability to fathom Napoleon’s secret ideal: his desire to be an emperor, a dictator. Talleyrand simply held up a mirror to Napoleon and let him glimpse that possibility. People are always vulnerable to insinuations

like this, which stroke their vanity almost everyone’s weak spot. Hint at something for them to aspire to, reveal your faith in some untapped potential you see in them, and you will soon have them eating out of your hand.

If Ideal Lovers are masters at seducing people by appealing to their higher selves, to something lost from their childhood, politicians can benefit by applying this skill on a mass scale, to an entire electorate. This was what John F. Kennedy quite deliberately did with the American public, most obviously in creating the “Camelot” aura around himself. The word

“Camelot” was applied to his presidency only after his death, but the

romance he consciously projected through his youth and good looks was fully functioning during his lifetime. More subtly, he also played with America’s images of its own greatness and lost ideals. Many Americans felt that with the wealth and comfort of the late 1950s had come great losses;

ease and conformity had buried the country’s pioneer spirit. Kennedy appealed to those lost ideals through the imagery of the New Frontier, which was exemplified by the space race. The American instinct for

adventure could find outlets here, even if most of them were symbolic. And there were other calls for public service, such as the creation of the Peace Corps. Through appeals like these, Kennedy resparked the uniting sense of mission that had gone missing in America during the years since World War

II. He also attracted to himself a more emotional response than presidents commonly got. People literally fell in love with him and the image.

Politicians can gain seductive power by digging into a country’s past, bringing images and ideals that have been abandoned or repressed back to the surface. They only need the symbol; they do not really have to worry about re-creating the reality behind it. The good feelings they stir up are enough to ensure a positive response.

Symbol: The Portrait Painter. Under his eye, all of your physical imperfections disappear. He brings out noble qualities in you,,

frames you in a myth, makes you godlike, immortalizes you. For his ability to create such fantasies, he is rewarded with great power.

Dangers

The main dangers in the role of the Ideal Lover are the consequences that arise if you let reality creep in. You are creating a fantasy that involves an

idealization of your own character. And this is a precarious task, for you are human, and imperfect. If your faults are ugly enough, or intrusive enough, they will burst the bubble you have blown, and your target will revile you. Whenever Tullia d’Aragona was caught acting like a common prostitute (when, for instance, she was caught having an affair just for money), she would have to leave town and establish herself elsewhere. The fantasy of her as a spiritual figure was broken. Casanova too faced this danger, but

was usually able to surmount it by finding a clever way to break off the relationship before the woman realized that he was not what she had imagined: he would find some excuse to leave town, or, better still, he would choose a victim who was herself leaving town soon, and whose

awareness that the affair would be short-lived would make her idealizing of him all the more intense. Reality and long intimate exposure have a way of dulling a person’s perfection. The nineteenth-century poet Alfred de Musset was seduced by the writer George Sand, whose larger-than-life character appealed to his romantic nature. But when the couple visited Venice together, and Sand came down with dysentery, she was suddenly no longer an idealized figure but a woman with an unappealing physical problem. De Musset himself showed a whiny, babyish side on this trip, and the lovers separated. Once apart, however, they were able to idealize each other again, and reunited a few months later. When reality intrudes, distance is often a solution.

In politics the dangers are similar. Years after Kennedy’s death, a string of revelations (his incessant sexual affairs, his excessively dangerous brinkmanship style of diplomacy, etc.) belied the myth he had created. His

image has survived this tarnishing; poll after poll shows that he is still revered. Kennedy is a special case, perhaps, in that his assassination made him a martyr, reinforcing the process of idealization that he had already set in motion. But he is not the only example of an Ideal Lover whose attraction survives unpleasant revelations; these figures unleash such powerful fantasies, and there is such a hunger for the myths and ideals they have to sell, that they are often quickly forgiven. Still, it is always wise to be prudent, and to keep people from glimpsing the less-than-ideal side of your character.

‌the Dandy‌

Most of us feel trapped within the limited roles that the world

expects us to play. We are instantly attracted to those who are more fluid, more ambiguous, than we are—those who create their own persona. Dandies excite us because they cannot be categorized, and hint at a freedom we want for ourselves. They play with masculinity and femininity; they fashion their own physical image, which is

always startling; they are mysterious and elusive. They also appeal to the narcissism of each sex: to a woman they are psychologically female, to a man they are male. Dandies fascinate and seduce in

large numbers. Use the power of the Dandy to create an ambiguous, alluring presence that stirs repressed desires.

The Feminine Dandy

When the eighteen-year-old Rodolpho Guglielmi emigrated from Italy to the United States in 1913, he came with no particular skills apart from his

good looks and his dancing prowess. To put these qualities to advantage, he found work in the thés dansants, the Manhattan dance halls where young

girls would go alone or with friends and hire a taxi dancer for a brief thrill. The taxi dancer would expertly twirl them around the dance floor, flirting and chatting, all for a small fee. Guglielmi soon made a name as one of the best—so graceful, poised, and pretty.

In working as a taxi dancer, Guglielmi spent a great deal of time around women. He quickly learned what pleased them—how to mirror them in

subtle ways, how to put them at ease (but not too much). He began to pay attention to his clothes, creating his own dapper look: he danced with a corset under his shirt to give himself a trim figure, sported a wristwatch (considered effeminate in those days), and claimed to be a marquis. In 1915, he landed a job demonstrating the tango in fancy restaurants, and

changed his name to the more evocative Rodolpho di Valentina. A year later he moved to Los Angeles: he wanted to try to make it in Hollywood.

Now known as Rudolph Valentino, Guglielmi appeared as an extra in several low-budget pictures. He eventually landed a somewhat larger role in the 1919 film Eyes of Youth, in which he played a seducer, and caught women’s attention by how different a seducer he was: his movements were graceful and delicate, his skin so smooth and his face so pretty that when he swooped down on his victim and drowned her protests with a kiss, he seemed more thrilling than sinister. Next came The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which Valentino played the male lead, Julio the playboy, and became an overnight sex symbol through a tango sequence in which he seduced a young woman by leading her through the dance. The scene encapsulated the essence of his appeal: his feet smooth and fluid, his poise almost feminine, combined with an air of control. Female members of the

audience literally swooned as he raised a married woman’s hands to his lips, or shared the fragrance of a rose with his lover. He seemed so much more

attentive to women than other men did; but mixed in with this delicacy was a hint of cruelty and menace that drove women wild.

In his most famous film, The Sheik, Valentino played an Arab prince (later revealed to be a Scottish lord abandoned in the Sahara as a baby) who rescues a proud English lady in the desert, then conquers her in a manner that borders on rape. When she asks, “Why have you brought me here?,” he replies, “Are you not woman enough to know?” Yet she ends up falling in

love with him, as indeed women did in movie audiences all over the world, thrilling at his strange blend of the feminine and the masculine. In one

scene in The Sheik, the English lady points a gun at Valentino; his response is to point a delicate cigarette holder back at her. She wears pants; he wears long flowing robes and abundant eye makeup. Later films would include

scenes of Valentino dressing and undressing, a kind of striptease showing glimpses of his trim body. In almost all of his films he played some exotic period character—a Spanish bullfighter, an Indian rajah, an Arab sheik, a French nobleman—and he seemed to delight in dressing up in jewels and tight uniforms.

Once a son was born to Mercury and the goddess Venus, and he was brought up by the naiads in Ida’s caves. In his features, it was easy to trace

resemblance to his father and to his mother. He was called after them, too, for his name was

Hermaphroditus. As soon as he was fifteen, he left his native hills, and Ida where he had been

brought up, and for the sheer joy of travelling visited remote places. He went as far as the cities

of Lycia, and on to the Carians, who dwell nearby. In this region he spied a pool of water, so clear that he could see right to the bottom. The water

was like crystal, and the edges of the pool were ringed with fresh turf, and grass that was always

green. A nymph [Salmacis] dwelt there. Often she

would gather flowers, and it so happened that she was engaged in this pastime when she caught sight of the boy, Hermaphroditus. As soon as she had seen him, she longed to possess him. She

addressed him: “Fair boy, you surely deserve to be thought a god. if you are, perhaps you may be Cupid? If there is such a girl [engaged to you],

let me enjoy your love in secret: but if there is not, then I pray that I may be your bride, and that we may enter upon marriage together.” The naiad

said no more; but a blush stained the boy’s cheeks, for he did not know what love was. Even blushing became him: his cheeks were the colour of ripe apples, hanging in a sunny orchard, like painted

ivory or like the moon when, in eclipse, she shows a reddish hue beneath her brightness….

Incessantly the nymph demanded at least sisterly kisses, and tried to put her arms round his ivory neck. “Will you stop!” he cried, “or I shall run

away and leave this place and you!” Salmacis was afraid: “I yield the spot to you, stranger, I shall

not intrude,” she said; and, turning from him, pretended to go away The boy, meanwhile,

thinking himself unobserved and alone, strolled

this way and that on the grassy sward, and dipped his toes in the lapping water—thenhis feet, up to

the ankles. Then, tempted by the enticing coolness of the waters, he quickly stripped his young body of its soft garments. At the sight, Salmacis was spell-bound. She was on fire with passion to

possess his naked beauty, and her very eyes flamed with a brilliance like that of the dazzling sun, when his bright disc is reflected in a mirror She

longed to embrace him then, and with difficulty restrained her frenzy. Hermaphroditus, clapping his hollow palms against his body, dived quickly

into the stream. As he raised first one arm and then the other, his body gleamed in the clear water, as if someone had encased anivory statue or white lilies in transparent glass. “I have won! He is mine!” cried the nymph, and flinging aside her garments, plunged into the heart of the pool. The boy fought against her, but she held him, and snatched kisses

as he struggled, placing her hands beneath him,

stroking his unwilling breast, and clinging to him, now on this side, and now on that. • Finally, in

spite of all his efforts to slip from her grasp, she twined around him, like a serpent when it is being carried off into the air by the king of birds:for, as it hangs from the eagle’s beak, the snake coils round his head and talons and with its tail hampers his beating wings. “You may fight, you rogue, but

you will not escape. May the gods grant me this, may no time to come ever separate him from me, or me from him!” Her prayers found favour with the gods: for, as they lay together, their bodies

were united and from being two persons they

became one. As when a gardener grafts a branch on to a tree, and sees the two unite as they grow, and come to maturity together, so when their limbs met in that clinging embrace the nymph and the

boy were no longer two, but a single form, possessed of a dual nature, which could not be called male or female, but seemed to be at once both and neither.

—OVID, METAMORPHOSES, TRANSLATED BY MARY M. INNES

In the 1920s, women were beginning to play with a new sexual freedom. Instead of waiting for a man to be interested in them, they wanted to be able to initiate the affair, but they still wanted the man to end up sweeping them off their feet. Valentino understood this perfectly. His off-screen life corresponded to his movie image: he wore bracelets on his arm, dressed impeccably, and reportedly was cruel to his wife, and hit her. (His adoring

public carefully ignored his two failed marriages and his apparently nonex- istent sex life.) When he suddenly died—in New York in August 1926, at

the age of thirty-one, from complications after surgery for an ulcer—the

response was unprecedented: more than 100,000 people filed by his coffin, many female mourners became hysterical, and the whole nation was spell- bound. Nothing like this had happened before for a mere actor.

There is a film of Valentino’s, Monsieur Beaucaire, in which he plays a total fop, a much more effeminate role than he normally played, and without his usual hint of dangerousness. The film was a flop. Women did not respond to Valentino as a swish. They were thrilled by the ambiguity of a man who shared many of their own feminine traits, yet remained a man.

Valentino dressed and played with his physicality like a woman, but his

image was masculine. He wooed as a woman would woo if she were a man

—slowly, attentively, paying attention to details, setting a rhythm instead of hurrying to a conclusion. Yet when the time came for boldness and conquest, his timing was impeccable, overwhelming his victim and giving her no chance to protest. In his movies, Valentino practiced the same

gigolo’s art of leading a woman on that he had mastered as a teenager on the dance floor—chatting, flirting, pleasing, but always in control.

Valentino remains an enigma to this day. His private life and his character are wrapped in mystery; his image continues to seduce as it did during his lifetime. He served as the model for Elvis Presley, who was obsessed with

this star of the silents, and also for the modern male dandy who plays with gender but retains an edge of danger and cruelty.

Seduction was and will always remain the female form of power and warfare. It was originally the antidote to rape and violence. The man who

uses this form of power on a woman is in essence turning the game around, employing feminine weapons against her; without losing his masculine identity, the more subtly feminine he becomes the more effective the seduction. Do not be one of those who believe that what is most seductive is being devastatingly masculine. The Feminine Dandy has a much more sinister effect. He lures the woman in with exactly what she wants—a familiar, pleasing, graceful presence. Mirroring feminine psychology, he

displays attention to his appearance, sensitivity to detail, a slight coquettishness—but also a hint of male cruelty. Women are narcissists, in

love with the charms of their own sex. By showing them feminine charm, a man can mesmerize and disarm them, leaving them vulnerable to a bold,

masculine move.

The Feminine Dandy can seduce on a mass scale. No single woman really possesses him—he is too elusive—but all can fantasize about doing so. The key is ambiguity: your sexuality is decidedly heterosexual, but your body and psychology float delightfully back and forth between the two poles.

I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they

like men, and since they themselves are women they are reverting to normality.

—PABLO PICASSO

The Masculine Dandy

In the 1870s, Pastor Henrik Gillot was the darling of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. He was young, handsome, well-read in philosophy and literature, and he preached a kind of enlightened Christianity. Dozens of young girls had crushes on him and would flock to his sermons just to look at him. In 1878, however, he met a girl who changed his life. Her name was Lou von Salome (later known as Lou Andreas-Salomé), and she was seventeen; he was forty-two.

Salomé was pretty, with radiant blue eyes. She had read a lot, particularly for a girl her age, and was interested in the gravest philosophical and

religious issues. Her intensity her intelligence, her responsiveness to ideas cast a spell over Gillot. When she entered his office for her increasingly frequent discussions with him, the place seemed brighter and more alive. Perhaps she was flirting with him, in the unconscious manner of a young girl—yet when Gillot admitted to himself that he was in love with her, and proposed marriage, Salomé was horrified. The confused pastor never quite

got over Lou von Salomé, becoming the first of a long string of famous men to be the victim of a lifelong unfulfilled infatuation with her.

In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was wandering around Italy alone. In Genoa he received a letter from his friend Paul Rée, a Prussian philosopher whom he admired, recounting his discussions with a

remarkable young Russian woman, Lou von Salomé, in Rome. Salomé was there on holiday with her mother; Rée had managed to accompany her on long walks through the city, unchaperoned, and they had had many conversations. Her ideas on God and Christianity were quite similar to Nietzsche’s, and when Rée had told her that the famous philosopher was a friend of his, she had insisted that he invite Nietzsche to join them. In subsequent letters Rée described how mysteriously captivating Salomé was, and how anxious she was to meet Nietzsche. The philosopher soon went to Rome.

Dandyism is not even, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in

personal appearance and material elegance. For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of

the aristocratic superiority of his

personality •What, then, is this ruling passion

that has turned into a creed and created its own skilled tyrants? What is this unwritten constitution that has created so haughty a caste? It is, above all, a burning need to acquire originality, within

the apparent bounds of convention. It is a sort of cult of oneself, which can dispense even with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never oneself being astonished….

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, THE DANDY,QUOTED IN VICE: AN ANTHOLOGY, EDITED BY

RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES

In the midst of this display of statesmanship, eloquence, cleverness, and exalted ambition, Alcibiades lived a life of prodigious luxury,

drunkenness, debauchery, and insolence. He was

effeminate in his dress and would walk through the market-place trailing his long purple robes, and he spent extravagantly. He had the decks of his

triremes cut away to allow him to sleep more

comfortably, and his bedding was slung on cords, rather than spread on the hard planks. He had a golden shield made for him, which was

emblazoned not with any ancestral device, but with the figure of Eros armed with a thunderbolt. The leading men of Athens watched all this with

disgust and indignation and they were deeply disturbed by his contemptuous and lawless

behaviour, which seemed to them monstrous and

suggested the habits of a tyrant. The people’s feelings towards him have been very aptly

expressed by Aristophanes in the line: “They long for him, they hate him, they cannot do withouthim.

…” • The fact was that his voluntary donations, the public shows he supported, his unrivalled

munificence to the state, the fame of his ancestry, the power of his oratory and his physical strength

and beauty … all combined to make the Athenians forgive him everything else, and they were

constantly finding euphemisms for his lapses and putting them down to youthful high spirits and

honourable ambition.

—PLUTARCH, “THE LIFE OF ALCIBIADES,” THE RISE AND FALL OF ATHENS: NINE

GREEK LIVES, TRANSLATED BY IAN SCOTT—KILVERT

When Nietzsche finally met Salomé, he was overwhelmed. She had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, and during their first long talk those eyes lit up so intensely that he could not help feeling there was something erotic about her excitement. Yet he was also confused: Salomé kept her distance, and did not respond to his compliments. What a devilish young woman. A few days later she read him a poem of hers, and he cried; her

ideas about life were so like his own. Deciding to seize the moment,

Nietzsche proposed marriage. (He did not know that Rée had done so as well.) Salomé declined. She was interested in philosophy, life, adventure, not marriage. Undaunted, Nietzsche continued to court her. On an excursion to Lake Orta with Rée, Salomé, and her mother, he managed to get the girl alone, accompanying her on a walk up Monte Sacro while the others stayed behind. Apparently the views and Nietzsche’s words had the proper

passionate effect; in a later letter to her, he described this walk as “the most beautiful dream of my life.” Now he was a man possessed: all he could think about was marrying Salomé and having her all to himself.

A few months later Salomé visited Nietzsche in Germany. They took long walks together, and stayed up all night discussing philosophy. She mirrored his deepest thoughts, anticipated his ideas about religion. Yet when he again

proposed marriage, she scolded him as conventional: it was Nietzsche, after all, who had developed a philosophical defense of the superman, the man

above everyday morality, yet Salomé was by nature far less conventional than he was. Her firm, uncompromising manner only deepened the spell she cast over him, as did her hint of cruelty. When she finally left him, making it clear that she had no intention of marrying him, Nietzsche was devastated. As an antidote to his pain, he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book full of sublimated eroticism and deeply inspired by his talks with her. From then on Salomé was known throughout Europe as the woman who had broken Nietzsche’s heart.

Salomé moved to Berlin. Soon the city’s greatest intellectuals were falling under the spell of her independence and free spirit. The playwrights Gerhart Hauptmann and Franz Wedekind became infatuated with her; in 1897, the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke fell in love with her. By that time her reputation was widely known, and she was a published novelist. This certainly played a part in seducing Rilke, but he was also attracted by a kind of masculine energy he found in her that he had never seen in a woman. Rilke was then twenty-two, Salomé thirty-six. He wrote her love letters and poems, followed her everywhere, and began an affair with her that was to last several years. She corrected his poetry, imposed

discipline on his overly romantic verse, inspired ideas for new poems. But she was put off by his childish dependence on her, his weakness. Unable to stand weakness of any kind, she eventually left him. Consumed by her

memory, Rilke long continued to pursue her. In 1926, lying on his deathbed, he begged his doctors, “Ask Lou what is wrong with me. She is the only

one who knows.”

Further light—a whole flood of it—is thrown upon this attraction of the male in petticoats for the female, in the diary of the Abbé de Choisy, one of

the most brilliant men-women of history, of whom we shall hear a great deal more later. The abbé, a churchman of Paris, was a constant masquerader in female attire. He lived in the days of Louis XIV, and was a great friend of Louis’ brother, also

addicted to women’s clothes. A young girl,

Mademoiselle Charlotte, thrown much into his company, fell desperately in love with the abbé,

and when the affair had progressed to a liaison,

the abbé asked her how she came to be won … • “I stood in no need of caution as I should have with a man. I saw nothing but a beautiful woman, and

why should I be forbidden to love you? What

advantages a woman’s dress gives you! The heart of a man is there, and that makes a great

impression upon us, and on the other hand, all the charms of the fair sex fascinate us, and prevent us from taking precautions.”

—C. J. BULLIET, VENUS CASTINA

One man wrote of Salomé, “There was something terrifying about her embrace. Looking at you with her radiant blue eyes, she would say, ‘The reception of the semen is for me the height of ecstasy.’ And she had an

insatiable appetite for it. She was completely amoral … a vampire.” The Swedish psychotherapist Poul Bjerre, one of her later conquests, wrote, “I think Nietzsche was right when he said that Lou was a thoroughly evil woman. Evil however in the Goethean sense: evil that produces good.. , .

She may have destroyed lives and marriages but her presence was exciting.”

The two emotions that almost every male felt in the presence of Lou

Andreas-Salomé were confusion and excitement—the two prerequisite feelings for any successful seduction. People were intoxicated by her

strange mix of the masculine and the feminine; she was beautiful, with a radiant smile and a graceful, flirtatious manner, but her independence and her intensely analytical nature made her seem oddly male. This ambiguity was expressed in her eyes, which were both coquettish and probing. It was confusion that kept men interested and curious: no other woman was like this. They wanted to know more. The excitement stemmed from her ability

to stir up repressed desires. She was a complete nonconformist, and to be involved with her was to break all kinds of taboos. Her masculinity made the relationship seem vaguely homosexual; her slightly cruel, slightly domineering streak could stir up masochistic yearnings, as it did in Nietzsche. Salomé radiated a forbidden sexuality. Her powerful effect on men—the lifelong infatuations, the suicides (there were several), the

periods of intense creativity, the descriptions of her as a vampire or a devil

—attest to the obscure depths of the psyche that she was able to reach and disturb.

The Masculine Dandy succeeds by reversing the normal pattern of male superiority in matters of love and seduction. A man’s apparent independence, his capacity for detachment, often seems to give him the upper hand in the dynamic between men and women. A purely feminine woman will arouse desire, but is always vulnerable to the man’s capricious loss of interest; a purely masculine woman, on the other hand, will not

arouse that interest at all. Follow the path of the Masculine Dandy, however, and you neutralize all a man’s powers. Never give completely of yourself; while you are passionate and sexual, always retain an air of independence and self-possession. You might move on to the next man, or so he will think. You have other, more important matters to concern yourself with, such as your work. Men do not know how to fight women who use their own weapons against them; they are intrigued, aroused, and disarmed. Few men can resist the taboo pleasures offered up to them by the Masculine Dandy.

The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful.

—COLETTE

Beau Brummell was regarded as unbalanced in his passion for daily ablutions. His ritualistic morning toilet took upward of five hours, one hour spent inching himself into his skin-tight buckskin

breeches, an hour with the hairdresser and another two hours tying and “creasing down” a series of

starched cravats until perfection was achieved. But first of all two hours were spent scrubbing himself with fetish zeal from head to toe in milk, water and eau de Cologne. Beau Brummell said he used

only the froth of champagne to polish his Hessian boots. He had 365 snuff boxes, those suitable for summer wear being quite unthinkable in winter,

and the fit of his gloves was achieved by entrusting their cut to two firms—one for the fingers, the

other for the thumbs. Sometimes, however, the tyranny of elegance became altogether

insupportable. A Mr. Boothby committed suicide and left a note saying he could no longer endure the ennui of buttoning and unbuttoning.

—THE GAME OFHEARTS: HARRIETTE WILSON’S MEMOIRS, EDITED BY LESLEY

BLANCH

Keys to the Character

Many of us today imagine that sexual freedom has progressed in recent years—that everything has changed, for better or worse. This is mostly an illusion; a reading of history reveals periods of licentiousness (imperial Rome, late-seventeenth-century England, the “floating world” of eighteenth-century Japan) far in excess of what we are currently experiencing. Gender roles are certainly changing, but they have changed

before. Society is in a state of constant flux, but there is something that does not change: the vast majority of people conform to whatever is normal for

the time. They play the role allotted to them. Conformity is a constant

because humans are social creatures who are always imitating one another. At certain points in history it may be fashionable to be different and rebellious, but if a lot of people are playing that role, there is nothing different or rebellious about it.

We should never complain about most people’s slavish conformity, however, for it offers untold possibilities of power and seduction to those who are up for a few risks. Dandies have existed in all ages and cultures

(Alcibiades in ancient Greece, Korechika in late-tenth-century Japan), and wherever they have gone they have thrived on the conformist role playing of others. The Dandy displays a true and radical difference from other people, a difference of appearance and manner. Since most of us are secretly oppressed by our lack of freedom, we are drawn to those who are more fluid and flaunt their difference.

Dandies seduce socially as well as sexually; groups form around them, their style is wildly imitated, an entire court or crowd will fall in love with them. In adapting the Dandy character for your own purposes, remember that the Dandy is by nature a rare and beautiful flower. Be different in ways that are both striking and aesthetic, never vulgar; poke fun at current trends and styles, go in a novel direction, and be supremely uninterested in what

anyone else is doing. Most people are insecure; they will wonder what you are up to, and slowly they will come to admire and imitate you, because you express yourself with total confidence.

The Dandy has traditionally been defined by clothing, and certainly most Dandies create a unique visual style. Beau Brummel, the most famous Dandy of all, would spend hours on his toilette, particularly the inimitably styled knot in his necktie, for which he was famous throughout early- nineteenth-century England. But a Dandy’s style cannot be obvious, for

Dandies are subtle, and never try hard for attention—attention comes to them. The person whose clothes are flagrantly different has little imagination or taste. Dandies show their difference in the little touches that mark their disdain for convention: Théophile Gautier’s red vest, Oscar Wilde’s green velvet suit, Andy Warhol’s silver wigs. The great English

Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had two magnificent canes, one for morning, one for evening; at noon he would change canes, no matter where he was. The female Dandy works similarly. She may adopt male clothing, say, but if she does, a touch here or there will set her truly apart: no man ever dressed quite like George Sand. The overtall hat, the riding boots worn on the streets of Paris, made her a sight to behold.

This royal manner which [the dandy] raises to the height of true royalty, the dandy has taken this

from women, who alone seem naturally made for such a role. It is a somewhat by using the manner and the method of women that the dandy dominates. And this usurpation of femininity, he makes women themselves approve of this. The

dandy has something antinatural and androgynous about him, which is precisely how he is able to

endlessly seduce.

—JULES LEMAÎTRE, LES CONTEMPORAINS

Remember, there must be a reference point. If your visual style is totally unfamiliar, people will think you at best an obvious attention-getter, at worst crazy. Instead, create your own fashion sense by adapting and altering prevailing styles to make yourself an object of fascination. Do this right and you will be wildly imitated. The Count d’Orsay, a great London dandy of

the 1830s and 1840s, was closely watched by fashionable people; one day, caught in a sudden London rainstorm, he bought a paltrok, a kind of heavy, hooded duffle coat, off the back of a Dutch sailor. The paltrok immediately became the coat to wear. Having people imitate you, of course, is a sign of your powers of seduction.

The nonconformity of Dandies, however, goes far beyond appearances. It is an attitude toward life that sets them apart; adopt that attitude and a circle of followers will form around you.

Dandies are supremely impudent. They don’t give a damn about other people, and never try to please. In the court of Louis XIV, the writer La

Bruyère noticed that courtiers who tried hard to please were invariably on the way down; nothing was more anti-seductive. As Barbey d’Aurevilly wrote, “Dandies please women by displeasing them.”

Impudence was fundamental to the appeal of Oscar Wilde. In a London theater one night, after the first performance of one of Wilde’s plays, the

ecstatic audience yelled for the author to appear onstage. Wilde made them wait and wait, then finally emerged, smoking a cigarette and wearing an

expression of total disdain. “It may be bad manners to appear here smoking, but it is far worse to disturb me when I am smoking,” he scolded his fans.

The Count d’Orsay was equally impudent. At a London club one night, a Rothschild who was notoriously cheap accidentally dropped a gold coin on the floor, then bent down to look for it. The count immediately whipped out a thousand-franc note (worth much more than the coin), rolled it up, lit it

like a candle, and got down on all fours, as if to help light the way in the search. Only a Dandy could get away with such audacity. The insolence of

the Rake is tied up with his desire to conquer a woman; he cares for nothing else. The insolence of the Dandy, on the other hand, is aimed at society and its conventions. It is not a woman he cares to conquer but a whole group, an entire social world. And since people are generally oppressed by the obligation of always being polite and self-sacrificing, they are delighted to spend time around a person who disdains such niceties.

Dandies are masters of the art of living. They live for pleasure, not for work; they surround themselves with beautiful objects and eat and drink with the same relish they show for their clothes. This was how the great Roman writer Petronius, author of the Satyricon, was able to seduce the emperor Nero. Unlike the dull Seneca, the great Stoic thinker and Nero’s tutor, Petronius knew how to make every detail of life a grand aesthetic adventure, from a feast to a simple conversation. This is not an attitude you should impose on those around you—you can’t make yourself a nuisance— but if you simply seem socially confident and sure of your taste, people will be drawn to you. The key is to make everything an aesthetic choice. Your ability to alleviate boredom by making life an art will make your company highly prized.

The opposite sex is a strange country we can never know, and this excites us, creates the proper sexual tension. But it is also a source of annoyance and frustration. Men do not understand how women think, and vice versa; each tries to make the other act more like a member of their own sex.

Dandies may never try to please, but in this one area they have a pleasing effect: by adopting psychological traits of the opposite sex, they appeal to our inherent narcissism. Women identified with Rudolph Valentino’s delicacy and attention to detail in courtship; men identified with Lou Andreas-Salomé’s lack of interest in commitment. In the Heian court of eleventh-century Japan, Sei Shonagon, the writer of The Pillow Book, was

powerfully seductive for men, especially literary types. She was fiercely independent, wrote poetry with the best, and had a certain emotional distance. Men wanted more from her than just to be her friend or companion, as if she were another man; charmed by her empathy for male psychology, they fell in love with her. This kind of mental transvestism— the ability to enter the spirit of the opposite sex, adapt to their way of thinking, mirror their tastes and attitudes—can be a key element in seduction. It is a way of mesmerizing your victim.

According to Freud, the human libido is essentially bisexual; most people are in some way attracted to people of their own sex, but social constraints (varying with culture and historical period) repress these impulses. The Dandy represents a release from such constraints. In several of Shakespeare’s plays, a young girl (back then, the female roles in the theater were actually played by male actors) has to go into disguise and dresses up as a boy, eliciting all kinds of sexual interest from men, who later are delighted to find out that the boy is actually a girl. (Think, for example, of Rosalind in As You Like It.) Entertainers such as Josephine Baker (known as the Chocolate Dandy) and Marlene Dietrich would dress up as men in their acts, making themselves wildly popular—among men. Meanwhile the slightly feminized male, the pretty boy, has always been seductive to women. Valentino embodied this quality. Elvis Presley had feminine

features (the face, the hips), wore frilly pink shirts and eye makeup, and attracted the attention of women early on. The filmmaker Kenneth Anger said of Mick Jagger that it was “a bisexual charm which constituted an important part of the attraction he had over young girls … and which acted upon their unconscious.” In Western culture for centuries, in fact, feminine beauty has been far more fetishized than male beauty, so it is

understandable that a feminine-looking face like that of Montgomery Clift would have more seductive power than that of John Wayne.

The Dandy figure has a place in politics as well. John F. Kennedy was a strange mix of the masculine and feminine, virile in his toughness with the Russians, and in his White House lawn football games, yet feminine in his graceful and dapper appearance. This ambiguity was a large part of his appeal. Disraeli was an incorrigible Dandy in dress and manner; some were suspicious of him as a result, but his courage in not caring what people

thought of him also won him respect. And women of course adored him, for

women always adore a Dandy They appreciated the gentleness of his manner, his aesthetic sense, his love of clothes—in other words, his

feminine qualities. The mainstay of Disraeli’s power was in fact a female fan: Queen Victoria.

Do not be misled by the surface disapproval your Dandy pose may elicit.

Society may publicize its distrust of androgyny (in Christian theology, Satan is often represented as androgynous), but this conceals its fascination; what is most seductive is often what is most repressed. Learn a playful dandyism and you will become the magnet for people’s dark, unrealized yearnings.

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles

everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will

excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.

Symbol: The Orchid. Its shape and color oddly suggest both sexes, its odor is sweet and decadent —it is a tropical flower of evil.

Delicate and highly cultivated, it is prized for its rarity; it is unlike any other flower.

Dangers

The Dandy’s strength, but also the Dandy’s problem, is that he or she often works through transgressive feelings relating to sex roles. Although this activity is highly charged and seductive, it is also dangerous, since it

touches on a source of great anxiety and insecurity. The greater dangers will often come from your own sex. Valentino had immense appeal for women, but men hated him. He was constantly dogged with accusations of being perversely unmasculine, and this caused him great pain. Salomé was equally disliked by women; Nietzsche’s sister, and perhaps his closest friend, considered her an evil witch, and led a virulent campaign against her in the press long after the philosopher’s death. There is little to be done in

the face of resentment like this. Some Dandies try to fight the image they

themselves have created, but this is unwise: to prove his masculinity, Valentino would engage in a boxing match, anything to prove his masculinity. He wound up looking only desperate. Better to accept society’s occasional gibes with grace and insolence. After all, the Dandies’ charm is that they don’t really care what people think of them. That is how Andy Warhol played the game: when people tired of his antics or some scandal erupted, instead of trying to defend himself he would simply move on to

some new image—decadent bohemian, high-society portraitist, etc.—as if to say, with a hint of disdain, that the problem lay not with him but with other people’s attention span.

Another danger for the Dandy is the fact that insolence has its limits.

Beau Brummel prided himself on two things: his trimness of figure and his acerbic wit. His main social patron was the Prince of Wales, who, in later years, grew plump. One night at dinner, the prince rang for the butler, and Brummel snidely remarked, “Do ring, Big Ben.” The prince did not

appreciate the joke, had Brummel shown out, and never spoke to him again. Without royal patronage, Brummel fell into poverty and madness.

Even a Dandy, then, must measure out his impudence. A true Dandy

knows the difference between a theatrically staged teasing of the powerful and a remark that will truly hurt, offend, or insult. It is particularly important to avoid insulting those in a position to injure you. In fact the

pose may work best for those who can afford to offend—artists, bohemians, etc. In the work world, you will probably have to modify and tone down your Dandy image. Be pleasantly different, an amusement, rather than a person who challenges the group’s conventions and makes others feel insecure.