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Theirs was just one of his many affairs. Among his romantic partners were Isabella Rossellini, prima donna Natalya Makarova, Liza Minnelli, and Jessica Lange, who lived with him for six years and had their daughter Shura. (He now has three children with his longtime companion Lisa Rinehart.) The women he didn’t take to bed dreamed of it. “Baryshnikov leaps higher than your heart,” raved a poet in
The New Yorker
. “You swoon back in red plush,” she wrote, until you feel “as wild as nineteenth-century hopeless love.”

Through no fault of their own, many men are kinesthetically challenged. It’s understandable. Men are socialized to mask emotions, hang tough, and shun “sissy” pursuits like dancing. Pop man-guides perpetuate the problem, peddling expressionless, cool body language, and “seductive” war moves. “Dancing with a woman,” they instruct, is “not the ultimate goal”; “the dance floor is not the natural habitat of the alpha male.”

If “alpha” means king of the hill in the boys’ game, they’re right. But enswooning women is an adult art, designed for animated, poetic body-speakers and princes of the ballroom. As the French put it, “Love teaches even asses to dance.”

Sexpertise

Banging, nailing, and screwing isn’t sex; it’s carpentry.

—
The Secret Laughter of Women

Wynn is the last person you’d pick on Match.com for a lust-soaked rout. He’s on the wrong side of sixty, with a staid address and a job as an antique dealer. But women swear by him. He meets me at a fashionable uptown bar; he’s a little stout, wears a tweed hacking jacket, and has his gray hair slicked back European style. “Listen,” he says over a martini, “I don’t have money, power, or youth anymore, but I think I know what women want. And,” he slants me a glance over his half glasses, “I’m very good at that.”

He runs through the usual reasons—good conversation, TLC, love of women—before he gets to sex. Then he grows expansive. “Typically,” he begins, “I ask the woman. ‘Tell me what you want.’ ” He is serious and puts his heart into it. “I do bond during sexuality; love is when you have a partner for whom nothing is too much trouble.”

For months, he courted a West Coast academic by email and didn’t mince words. At one point he wrote, “How do you accomplish your orgasms?” She flew to New York soon after, and he seems to have listened. “It’s not the gun,” he explains, “it’s the man behind it. It’s what you can do. I mean, I’ve got a long tongue with an eggbeater on the end of it!” Not surprisingly, the professor relocated to New York and moved in.

She knew a good thing when she found it. Increasing numbers of women don’t have the sex life of their dreams. Despite a “go-girl” culture of sexual license, graphic guides, therapeutic aids, and bedside toys, a significant number of women experience sexual problems. In a landmark 1999 study, 43 percent reported difficulties such as lack of desire or inability to achieve orgasm. A more recent five-year survey of a thousand women found that 50 percent “have trouble getting aroused,” and when they do have sex, it’s often for such uninspired reasons as stealing a friend’s mate (53 percent) or keeping the peace (84 percent). According to several 2010 polls, only 65 percent of women said they had had an orgasm in their most recent encounter, and two-thirds of wives would rather do anything than make love.

To be sure, women and sexuality is fraught territory. The female body
seems
a setup for hyperpleasure: the clitoris has eight thousand nerve fibers (twice that of the penis), and orgasms are stronger and last longer than a man’s, and can be multiple. But a woman’s sexual response is capricious and delicate. It’s a “whole-brain operation” that depends on a perfect mesh of the rational neocortex and passional hypothalamus. Then there are psychic killjoys like stress, fear, fatigue, self-image, and cultural bogies. To complicate matters further, women need to be warmed up first—sometimes for up to a half hour—and the clitoral hot button is in the wrong place, about an inch from the vaginal strike zone.

Under these tricky circumstances, what’s a man to do? Classic male guides stress technique: tongue-manship, Frisbee grips, python positions, and delay tactics. Therapists add intimacy and communication and emphasize deference to individual proclivities. “Ecstasy” researchers raise the bar higher: for a woman’s optimal pleasure, men must also show “gender empathy” and prime the narcissistic female libido with passionate praise. Ladykillers cover all these bases and more: skill (customized to specific tastes), emotional engagement, generosity, adulatory ardor, and quality climaxes.

If great lovers didn’t exist, they would have been imagined. As studies have revealed, plenty of women care about good sex. Surprisingly, they’re often the ones you see at the checkout counter with a romance novel, the best-selling and steamiest book genre. At the center of these stories is explicit sex and ladykillers who wax sentimental, ring all the right chimes, and grant heaven-scaling orgasms. Jack Travis in Lisa Kleypas’s
Smooth Talking Stranger
tells the heroine after an aria of sweet nothings, I want to “have sex with you until you scream and cry and see God.” He’s as good as his word.

In ancient history, sex of this caliber was the measure of a man, physically and spiritually. Dumuzi, the Sumerian fertility god of the third millennium BC, copulated with the goddess Inanna in a sacred wedding ceremony that culminated in a mystical union with the Almighty. The epiphany depended on Inanna’s pleasure. “Murmuring words of love,” Dumuzi “tongue-plays” Inanna fifty times, strokes her thighs and loins “with his fair hands,” caresses her tenderly, and “plows [her] holy vulva” until she comes and cries, “He is the one my womb loves best.”

These early civilizations assumed that sex could not scale such heights without cultivation. Archeologist Timothy Taylor estimates that by 5000 BC, coitus had become a spiritual discipline, and classicist Paul Friedrich describes at length the advanced love arts of ancient Greece. The
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
devotes hundreds of pages to the study of ecstatic sexuality. To pass muster and attain “beatitude of being,” a man must know how to set the mood and “relax the girl,” as well as conduct elaborate foreplay and handle sixty-four coital positions. If he does not succeed, “if he is scorned by women in the art of love,” he is a “dead man.”

Casanova’s bedmates, by his account, had no complaints. Enlightened for his day, he believed sex was meaningless without intellectual rapport and a woman’s satisfaction. He demanded “complete harmony of mind and the senses” and received “three-fourths” of his enjoyment from his partner’s pleasure. In an age of perfunctory in-and-out, he discovered the clitoris-climax link (just published in a 1710 English sex manual) and once provided a lover with double-digit orgasms in one night.

Physical virtuosity, though, was only part of his
in excelsis
lovemaking. Before he slept with Henriette, an accomplished French adventuress, he laid the psychological groundwork. He told her he had never “felt such an urgency” or love for a woman, supplied voluptuous preliminaries, and treated her to a night of quasi-religious rapture. He conducted their love affair and others “like a work of art outside space and time.”

Peak sex for a woman takes time. Love, as Ovid taught, is “never a thing to be hurried.” Ladies’ men subscribe to the slow-sex movement; they take the longest route home. Rick, the retired fire captain, savors his lovers for prolonged pleasure. “It’s the touching,” he says, “that’s the best part. I go slow and sort of feather-stroke with my fingertips—places you wouldn’t expect, like the back of the knee or small of the back.”

Rick is onto something. Women have more sensitive skin than men and place touch at the forefront of their sexual fantasies. They’re also better served by light, silky caresses and a gradual circuit from the least to the most stimulating erogenous zones. Skin is the largest organ of the body—the “most urgent of the senses”—and so sexually responsive that a hot hand can set a woman on fire. A hero’s ankle play with his little finger takes the heroine to the brink in Jennifer Crusie’s
Tell Me Lies
. “She’d definitely come if he put his hands on her,” she muses. “Anywhere.”

A kiss is turbocharged touch, and women prize “good kisser[s].” It’s the quintessence of sensuality and demands more skill than neophytes imagine. There’s the matter of timing, synchrony, and mastery of an infinite range of “mouth music” from the degree of pressure and tempo to tongue play. And the media usually gets it wrong. Instead of rabid tonsil-hockey, women are most roused by soft, wispy moth-kisses. The grand amorist Gabriele D’Annunzio was a proverbial kisser. A Michelangelo of oral pleasure, he fondled eyelids with his tongue and planted “stinging kisses” on necks and genitals throughout his long “intoxicating nights.”

For the main act, andante has the edge. Since women take longer to climax than men (fifteen minutes on average versus two and a half minutes), carnal artists pace themselves accordingly and delay their orgasms. The 1950s lover Porfirio Rubirosa was supposed to have been a “Tarzan of the Boudoir” because of his jumbo package, but performance may have been his true claim to fame. Like Aly Khan who studied imsak (the ancient art of semen retention) and who “could control himself indefinitely,” Rubi guaranteed his partner’s gratification and often lasted hours at a time.

John Gray claims in
Mars and Venus in the Bedroom
that “a woman can be just as fulfilled without having an orgasm.” Maybe. But she’ll be missing something: the convulsive pelvic contractions and the flood of chemicals—prolactin and oxytocin—that saturate every pore with euphoria, warmth, and satiation. With the right man she can be turned inside out and flung to numinous heights. “This was all she ever needed to know about god,” exclaims the wife in a short story by Udana Power after an orgasmathon with her husband.

Few ladies’ men have given more thought to transcendent sex than Jack Nicholson. An early strikeout, with PE (premature ejaculations) and predatory-male syndrome, Nicholson went through years of Reichian psychotherapy, a treatment based on removing emotional armor and releasing “orgone”—primordial sexual/cosmic energy. He confronted his demons, shed defenses, and embraced a new model of freed-up, holistic lovemaking.

“Most sex is about nonfeeling,” he observes, but “you can feel the difference when you make love and there’s love there, and . . . there’s not.” Attuned to women’s psyches and idiosyncrasies, he deftly massages them into the mood. A British actress recalled her fear and self-consciousness, and how he “carried [her] up to his bedroom,” where he was “very gentle, very loving, very romantic.”

During sex, said another, he was “indefatigable,” but also “close” and “very oomp!” soliciting verbal feedback throughout. He wants to make women insanely happy: “He satisfied me like no man before,” gushed one, “he was only concerned with my pleasure”; he’s a “perfect practitioner of love; God put [him] on this planet to love women.” And Nicholson puts God into the act. Girlfriends claim he often became “spiritual and talked about the sanctity of what was happening.” “I felt in my heart every time,” he once confessed. “I was in the sublime sexual embrace.”

Men aren’t born with a good-sex gene that tells them how to pull this off. Training and inclination are necessary. But not even a workshop with a tantric master under the direction of Dr. Ruth can turn out a supernatural lover. To hit the high notes in bed, a man has to be “all in”—body, soul, and sensual intuition. And it helps if you adore each other. As the
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
admits, no instruction or advice “will be needed by those who are properly in love.”

Gifts and Wallets

Gifts persuade even the gods.

—E
URIPIDES
,
Medea

Beacon Hill was baffled for years afterward. The Cobb boy (of the old Boston family) had been nothing if not magnanimous, commissioning a portrait of his fiancée Ann, a Smith scholarship student from god-knows-where. This was 1932, and the artist, the cook’s nephew, needed work. Angus was an Irish émigré with a nervous laugh, a blond cowlick, and a wrestler’s body that seemed in perpetual motion. The sittings took place in the Cobb vaulted library, and whenever the husband-to-be dropped by, he noticed odd things: a pair of spectacles painted with a winking eye, a soap sculpture satyr, dandelion chains around Ann’s neck, and once, an envelope in her hand.