B007Q6XJAO EBOK (9 page)

The desire to know really
is
desire.

—C
ATHLEEN
S
CHINE
,
Rameau’s Niece

Over vodkatinis in a Manhattan bar tonight, the city’s “great Hungarian lover” is telling yet another woman, “When I make love to you, I will go very slow and you will have multiple orgasms.” What more could a lady want? For a grand passion, she might want something else he provides: brains. As one of his lovers tells me, “You know what his real secret is: he’s very smart. Smart is sexy.” Laszlo speaks five languages, and if you find him on his favorite bench beside the boathouse in Central Park, he’ll be deep into Lacan, Maimonides, or Primo Levi. Intellect even enhances his promised assignations:
Tristan and Isolde
on the Bose and pillow talk about Modigliani. “The ecstasy,” says this recent conquest, “is unbearable.”

You don’t see the 1960s bumper stickers and tee shirts anymore that say, “Intelligence is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac.” Now it’s more about chiseled abs, bespoke shirts, tactics, and two-comma incomes. But the brain is the biggest sex organ, and a woman’s second (maybe first) most loved part of the male anatomy. Studies show women favor intelligence over beauty or wealth, even for one-night stands.

The fourth-century sex manual
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
alerts men that without knowledge nothing is possible, and assigns an ambitious curriculum for a lover: fourteen sciences, seven religious traditions, the Vedas, and six other tomes. To be loved by a woman, say each of the great amorists, one must acquire “distinction of mind.” It’s easy to see the parallels, writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “between sexual desire and the desire for wisdom.”

Yes, but. Anyone who has slept through Econ 101 or dated a leaden Proust scholar knows that super-smart doesn’t always mean super-sexy. Women-charmers understand how to make intelligence seductive; they sparkle with mental energy, surprise, amuse, instruct, up the drama, and surf the whole realm of knowledge—high-, middle-, and lowbrow. And they really can look like Woody Allen on a bad day.

Evolutionary psychologists have several explanations for the sex appeal of male IQ. Ultra-Darwinists believe ancestral women valued intelligence in men because it predicted economic and social success. Geoffrey Miller puts a sexier spin on this. Bigger brains evolved the same way penises did, he theorizes; they “reached inside women’s pleasure system.” Men with the most cerebral bells and whistles gave women a better time and edged out the dim bruisers.

None of the mythological love gods was slow-witted. Ganesha, the Hindu Lord of Letters and Learning, acquired his elephant’s head because he so enthralled the goddess Pavarti that her husband, Shiva, had to decapitate and deform him. Dionysus brought civilization to the world in his wanderings, and Hermes the Seducer was the “Clever One” and culture hero. The Irish folk hero and sex god Cuchulain was a scholar of Druid lore with gifts of “understanding and calculation.”

Recently intellectuals haven’t fared well in mainstream fiction. They’re portrayed as sex-driven, debauched scoundrels whose trips to the library are euphemisms for trysts with young lovelies. Scholar-satyrs who exploit the erotic hit of knowledge doubtless exist, but women prefer to see them otherwise in their fantasy literature. Intellectuals proliferate, and professors are one of the eight archetypes of romance novels.

When they appear, as in Nora Roberts’s
Vision in White
, they are sober good guys, like Carter whose mojo with the heroine, Mac, is his mind. “He made her think,” she muses, “the man was charming.” In Norman Rush’s
Mortals
, two pedants in Botswana duel with their learning to gain the affections of the heroine. Ray, her husband, realizes what women want: not “buns or dick size,” but “intellect,” and he wins her back with his brains.

A number of unlikely ladies’ men used their heads to enchant women. The diminutive eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire—a polymath of immense range—kept the tall, brilliant beauty Émilie du Châtelet interested for thirteen years. He challenged her to scientific competitions, staged plays and poetry readings, debated politics, and traded repartee with her over four-hour dinners.

And then there’s mathematician Bertrand Russell. Gaunt and small, with a “Mad Hatter’s” features, bad breath, and a high, fluty voice, he disheveled women, accumulating four wives and many lovers. (One was my great aunt Barry Fox, who collared him in New York and gave him “several enjoyable evenings.”) In just one night’s fireside chat, he pitched bird of paradise Ottoline Morrell into a grand amour. “In spite of myself,” she wrote, “I was carried away, but fate sometimes throws a ball of fire into one’s life.”

Aldous Huxley’s fabulous love life has to have been a case of mind over matter. Nicknamed the “Ogre” as a child, he was over six foot four with coke-bottle glasses and an enormous head atop a spindly frame. Yet women adored him. Of the distinguished Huxleys, Aldous, said his brother Julian, was the “one genius in the family.” The scope of his mind and achievements was astounding; he wrote well-known novels like
Point Counterpoint, Brave New World
, and
Island
, as well as poetry, short stories, travel books, screenplays, and twenty-three volumes of essays on subjects from science and politics to parapsychology. His
Doors of Perception
about his experiments with LSD made him the father of the hippie movement.

When he arrived at Oxford nearly blind from an incurable eye infection and smarter than anyone, “he made a tremendous impression,” especially on his female peers. Highly sexed, unpuritanical, and fond of women, he was much sought after. One infatuated young playwright remembered how he “threw open a whole world” to her—French poetry and the arts—and how much she wanted to kiss him. His choices were gifted, unconventional women such as violinist Jelly d’Arányi and artist Dora Carrington. With Carrington, he spent nights on the roof talking about books and ideas and singing ragtime tunes.

In 1919, he married Maria Nye, a cultivated Belgian beauty who devoted herself to his welfare and consented to the most unusual of open unions. Without a touch of rancor, she abetted his extramarital affairs, selecting lovers, arranging rendezvous, and sending books the morning afterward with appropriate risqué French inscriptions. He enjoyed sex and women, she reasoned, and needed escapades as a relief from his mental exertions.

Included among his lovers were a Romanian princess, the political activist and writer Nancy Cunard, and one of Maria’s bisexual friends, Mary Hutchinson, who lived with them in a ménage à trois for almost a decade. Several had marital designs, but Aldous and Maria had a close—albeit unique—relationship that lasted thirty-five years. At her death Maria handpicked her successor, a violinist and psychoanalyst twenty years Huxley’s junior who gave up music and dedicated herself to him, nonexclusivity and all.

Pictures of Huxley cannot account for the spell he cast on the female sex. He looked, Virginia Woolf observed, like a “gigantic grasshopper.” But five minutes in his company and the necromancy of his learning put stars in women’s eyes. Said one: when he talked “he was ribald and cynical and brilliant.” As his son’s marriage was breaking up, he told him his secret: “Intelligence,” he wrote, “endows love with effectiveness.”

Social IQ

Loving well requires a full social intelligence.

—D
ANIEL
G
OLEMAN
,
Social Intelligence

Social circles are full of men who talk shop, blow their own horns, and tune out women. Real-estate mogul Mort Zuckerman isn’t one of them. He’s attentive, plugged in, and “one of the best dinner-party companions,” says Barbara Walters, she has “ever known.” He navigates social waters like a sonar-guided submarine, from beach barbecues, business deals, and high-level politics, to black-tie penthouse parties.

None of this is lost on his romantic life. He’s a swami with women and has dated such A-listers as Betty Rollin, Nora Ephron, Diane von Furstenberg, and Marisa Berenson. He’s “fun to be around” and mind-reads the feminine heart. Gloria Steinem said he wrapped her in an emotional “sheepskin jacket” when she was at a low ebb. Former girlfriend Arianna Huffington cited his “gift of intimacy” and compared him to the god Hermes, “the master of love magic” who is also socially “wise” and knows how to “deal with strangers.”

In seduction there are two ways to be smart: IQ and EQ. Cognitive brilliance, the light-and-laser show of learning, has potent charms, but so does emotional intelligence. Only recently recognized by academic researchers, social dexterity is now regarded as a crucial life skill, increasingly correlated with success in love and work. What it boils down to is savoir faire: a radar for other people’s feelings, mastery of synchrony, and the practical skill to get the answer yes. Social IQ may or may not make the course of love run smoother, as some advocates claim, but it can release the floodgates. Ladies’ men are master hands.

Science writer Daniel Goleman says they have to be: the rational brain alone can’t manage romance, which is a subcortical activity and requires the complex coordination of three different brain systems. A great lover needs his social wits about him. None of which is new, Goleman admits; it’s just being ratified by social neuroscience.

Two millennia ago, Ovid provided a crash course in social competence for lovers-in-training, prescribing courtesy, tact, and intuition. Every amorous guide since then advises men to shine up people skills. Geoffrey Miller thinks we owe civilized behavior today to women’s preference throughout history for interpersonal finesse—empathy, rapport, and good manners—over brute physical prowess.

Arch-seducers, though, practice an elite form of erotic intelligence. Whether through talent or practice, they have an “eighth sense” (as they say of Warren Beatty) with women. These experts possess an almost paranormal sense of a woman’s hidden desires and the optimal way to handle the moment. Sexologist Havelock Ellis referred to this as a “fine divination,” and philosopher Ortega y Gasset, as “
tacto
,” an intuitive grasp of another’s psyche and needs.

Sex gods had that magic touch. The Sumerian deity Dumuzi intuits the source of love goddess’s Inanna’s anger, and senses how to placate her and bring her around. He promises her heart’s desire: equality, no women’s work, and a husband who will be a father and mother to her. Dionysus soothes the jilted Ariadne with divine delicacy, approaching gently, praising her to the stars, and promising fidelity: “I am here for you a lover,” he says, “faithful.”

Like Dionysus, romantic heroes lavish heroines with their social gifts. Empathy, attunement, the apt gesture: even the most callous rakes supply them in women’s love stories. Explaining why she’s hooked on a certain guy, the heroine of a popular romance says, “I think he’s just really, really,
really
good with people. Empathetic.” Czech lothario Tomas of Milan Kundera’s
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
has an extra gene for social aptitude, with a knack for “emotional telepathy.”

Although social savvy, say psychologists, has fallen out of fashion, women-charmers are adroit practitioners. David Niven was a virtuoso. His bonhomie, warmth, and wizardry with people opened all the doors—and bedroom doors—in Hollywood. Inconstant as he was, women excused his defections in exchange for his tuned-in “concern and affection” and interpersonal brilliance.

Sometimes social prowess in love can migrate into politics. The synergy of the two was Sir Walter Raleigh’s fortune and downfall. An obscure soldier without rank or connections, Raleigh arrived at court in 1581 with only his “caressing manners” and uncanny ability to wrap people around his finger. As soon as he finagled an audience with Queen Elizabeth, he became her darling. He gave her a taste of the “bumptiousness” she craved, mixed with wit, passion, drama, and shrewd praise. For twelve years he advanced from post to post until the queen discovered his secret marriage with one of her maids of honor, Bess Throckmorton, and imprisoned him in the Tower.

Prince Clemens von Metternich, the nineteenth-century “Knight of Europe,” allied love and diplomacy with greater success. Handsome, elegant, and a social maestro, Metternich was one of the most stellar statesmen of his age. As Austrian minister, he brokered the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe after Napoleon’s defeat, and steered the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the next thirty years. Through his dexterity in managing intricate negotiations, he extracted compromises, maintained a balance of power, and created the European Alliance that prefigured NATO.

He was no less smooth with the ladies. Raised by his sophisticated mother on the finer points of politesse—adaptability, social telepathy, rapport, and grace—he was an “Adonis of the Drawing Room,” with a high-bridged nose, sensuous mouth, and slate-blue eyes beneath crescent eyebrows. When he left home, his mother said presciently, “He is pleasing to women . . . He will make his way.”