But Enough About You: Essays (41 page)

Kennedy was a man of uncanny abilities, but among them was a talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And here we—or rather, Kennedy’s perspicacious biographer—arrive at the crux and fatal flaw:

Joseph P. Kennedy had battled all his life to become an insider, to get inside the Boston banking establishment, inside Hollywood, inside the Roosevelt circle of trusted advisers. But he had never been able to accept the reality that being an “insider” meant sacrificing something to the team. His sense of his own wisdom and unique talents was so overblown that he truly believed he could stake out an independent position for himself and still remain a trusted and vital part of the Roosevelt team.

As his son indelibly put it some months before his father was struck down: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” One wonders what was going through the mind of the patriarch, sitting a few feet away, listening to that soaring sentiment as a fourth-generation Kennedy became president of the United States. After coming to know him over the course of this brilliant, compelling book, the reader might suspect that he was thinking he had done more than enough for his country. But the gods would demand even more.

—
The New York Times
, November 2012

We may have landed a man on the moon and invented penicillin, Paris Hilton, and the iPod, but deep down in our stem cells, we’re still hairy, barely bipedal chimpanzee cousins trying to make it through the day while protecting our vital organs from attack.

This at least is the conclusion I drew from this hefty, informative, often amusing, sometimes a tad self-apparent encyclopedia of body language. The first edition of this book
I
was published twenty-two years ago. This one contains 50 percent new material, including lots of pictures of Bill Clinton and Marilyn Monroe. I’m sorry not to have made its acquaintance back then, since a good deal of the body-language studies seem to be devoted to the all-important question:
Is your date going to sleep with you?
How useful it would have been, back in 1984, to know that while her eyes seemed to be saying yes, her right foot, pointed toward the door, was whispering, “I’m out of here.”

If the approximately one zillion studies adduced here by the authors are any indication, it seems that 90 percent of the population has been gainfully employed studying the body-language patterns of the other 10 percent. While you and I have been hunting-gathering at the office, protecting our necks and other vulnerable areas, the authors, along with legions of academics and students of evolutionary behavior, have been monitoring how often French people touch each other in outdoor cafés (142 touches per hour versus zero touches per hour for Londoners); or who opts for the end toilet stall (
that
must have been a fun project); the smiling patterns among middle-class residents of Atlanta and Memphis (more fun than watching public toilets, anyway); the hip-to-waist ratios in fifty years of
Playboy
centerfolds (significantly more fun than the toilet survey); how many among four hundred cigar exhalations at a festive event were directed upward, as opposed to downward (a toss-up between that and observing toilets); and whether larger-breasted women hitchhikers get more rides than smaller-breasted ones. This last was undertaken by “researchers at Purdue University.” Care to hazard a guess as to the finding? I smell an earmark in some omnibus transportation bill.

Indeed, a number of the studies cited here have about them the aroma of sizzling appropriations pork. According to a study of handshaking at the University of Alabama—prepare to have your preconceived notions shattered—“extroverted types use firm handshakes, while shy, neurotic personalities don’t.” Well, thank God
that’s
settled.

Many of the other studies, though, are rather interesting. The Gillette razor company, for instance, commissioned research that indicates that Scotsmen are Britain’s vainest males, spending sixteen minutes a day preening in front of the mirror. (Presumably post-
Braveheart
; or maybe not. All that blue face paint takes time to apply.) And I was grateful to learn that “Professor William Fry at Stanford University reported that 100 laughs will give your body an aerobic workout equal to that of a 10-minute session on a rowing machine.” Now, instead of working out, I’m just going to watch
Young Frankenstein
on the DVD player while eating Cheetos and drinking 36 ounces of Coke.

The authors, whose other books include
Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps
, have over the years advised clients ranging from politicians to rock stars to Australian Customs. This last client wanted help in identifying smugglers. (Hint: When walking through customs at JFK with a half-dozen Cuban Robustos stuffed in your underpants, smile a lot and don’t sweat.) Using research in pupillometry done at the University of Chicago, they were able to help Revlon increase sales of its lipstick by enlarging the pupil size of the models in the catalogues. I’m hard pressed to think of a better example of science at the service of humanity.

In this political season, those running for office might find
The Definitive Book of Body Language
handy. If, say, you’re a candidate being interviewed on TV, don’t look sideways from the reporters to the camera. It will make you look shifty. (Or shiftier.) There’s also some good advice on where to stand while being photographed shaking hands. The chapter titled “Evaluation and Deceit Signals” is illustrated with a photo of Bill Clinton giving his famous grand jury testimony. In that regard, our noses apparently do actually swell when we’re lying. Call it the Pinocchio effect. The even worse news is that “a man’s penis also swells with blood when he tells a lie.”
No, really, honey, it’s this damn Viagra
.

Aficionados of Stephen Potter’s imperishable
Upmanship
books will appreciate some of the tips and strategies. My favorite is in the section called “The Power Gaze,” on how to counter someone who is either trying to dominate you or bore you. (Hard to say which
is worse.) “Imagine the person has a third eye in the center of their forehead and look in a triangular area between the person’s ‘three’ eyes. The impact this gaze has on the other person has to be experienced to be believed.” Can’t wait to try it out this Thanksgiving.

Chess and poker players will profit, too—the latter probably more than the former. If while you touch your chess piece to make your next move, your opponent “steeples” his hands (as in “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple”), this signals he or she feels confident. If he clenches his hands, he feels threatened. If he stabs you in the chest with his bishop, he feels really threatened. The prudent poker player, meanwhile, will wear dark glasses. It’s not an affectation: he’s shielding his dilating pupils from signaling to the other players that he’s aroused by that third king he’s just drawn.

The book is amply and often wittily illustrated with celebrity photographs. There’s a fetching one of Brigitte Bardot, goddess of my youth, executing the “head toss and hair flick.” What’s going on here—God knows how much government research went into finding this out—is that the pose “lets her expose her armpit, which allows the ‘sex perfume’ known as pheromones to waft across to the target man.” Did Gillette participate in this study? And what book on body language would be complete without 107 photos of Marilyn Monroe, who “reputedly chopped three-quarters of an inch off the heel of her left shoe to emphasize her wiggle.”

On a more sober note, Nazis during World War II were on the lookout for males sitting in what the authors call “The American Figure Four”—legs spread to reveal the crotch, with the left crossed over the right at an almost 90-degree angle. “Anyone using it was clearly not German or had spent time in the U.S.A.” Our Department of Homeland Security might do well, as it strips us of our unguents, shampoos, and precious bodily moisturizers, to employ the authors to instruct them on body lingo profiling.

This is a truly fascinating book, though clearly more—much more—government funding is needed to study the hitchhiking patterns of busty women. After reading it, you’ll be able to decode and analyze the signature moments of our times. The famous confrontation, for instance, between Tom Cruise and Matt Lauer on the
Today
show.

Observe as Tom sprays spittle at Lauer for having no understanding at all, Matt, of why Brooke Shields should be clubbed to death for resorting to modern medicine to help her cope with postpartum depression. Note that Tom’s legs are splayed open in the classic Crotch Display. He’s leaning forward toward Lauer, eyebrows lowered in the manner of our Neanderthal forbears. Note, too, that he is pointing his finger at Lauer’s chest, at his heart, a signal of aggression which—listen up, guys—women find
totally
offensive. And what is Matt doing, other than wondering, Will I get rabies from Tom’s saliva? He’s leaning back in his chair. The wide-open eyes denote not only elation over the probable ratings jump for this episode, but also fear that he might not make it out of the studio alive. Now look at his right leg: it’s crossed defensively over the left. What’s with that?
He’s protecting his genitals.
I’d have, too.

—
The New York Times
, September 2006

I
. 
The Definitive Book of Body Language
, by Allan and Barbara Pease.

I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.

—HERMAN MELVILLE TO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Dr. Johnson wrote of Shakespeare that it is impossible to say anything original about him, so the best one can hope for is to be wrong about him in a new way. This humbling insight tugs at my sleeve as I embark on a surely doomed task of contributing an afterword to the great masterpiece of American literature,
Moby-Dick
.

This assignment came about by accident, as a result of something I’d written for an online magazine on the topic of advice to young people, specifically, “Five Things You Really Need to Know.”

I nominated: the U.S. Constitution (surely the least we can do by way of thanking the Founders); the Bible (even if you don’t believe a word of it); the first stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Beyoncé didn’t get that memo, apparently);
The
New York Times
(even if you’re a crotchety right-winger); and
Moby-Dick
(because it’s, well,
Moby-Dick
).

Shortly after it went out into cyberspace, an e-mail arrived from an old friend, one of America’s most distinguished literary critics. He wrote: “I re-read
Moby-Dick
for the first time since prep school, where I had hated it. This time I thought the first 100 or so pages were great but once again got totally bogged down in all that whalings——.”

There is no airtight counterargument to this familiar lament about
Moby-Dick
, and I won’t attempt one here. I’d be dishonest if I myself claimed to have been riveted by the novel’s whaling . . . parts. Let us stipulate that
Moby-Dick
is a challenging work. But let’s also stipulate that there are challenging bits in Shakespeare as well. Nor is the Bible without its challenges. Or Joyce’s
Ulysses
, or Proust’s 4,300-page chef d’oeuvre. And who could forget the perfect moment in 1947 when W. H. Auden, lecturing at Harvard on
Don Quixote
, began by telling his stunned listeners that he’d never managed to get all the way through it—and for that matter, rather doubted that anyone in the audience had, either. (This frank admission may have been enabled by the martinis that the great poet had consumed prior to going on stage.)

Elmore Leonard, a modern master of American literature, was once asked the secret of his success. He beguilingly replied that it was simple—he just left out the boring parts. Why didn’t Melville think of that?

The answer is: He did, but only, by and large, in his first five sea books.
Moby-Dick
is Melville’s sixth. His first two,
Typee
and
Omoo
, were hugely popular fictionalized accounts of his time in the Marquesas living among the savages, including the lovely Fayaway, after
jumping ship. (No boring parts there.) Those books made the author an exotic figure back home. Students from Williams and other colleges would show up at his Massachusetts farmhouse, wanting to meet the man who had lived with savages. In time, this celebrity began to chafe, as we know from a wry letter Melville wrote to a friend: “To go down to posterity is bad enough, but to go down as the ‘man who lived with cannibals’!”

His sea adventure books continued with
Mardi
,
Redburn
, and
White Jacket
.
^I
By early 1850, when he started in on the book that would become
Moby-Dick
, Melville was past his youth, thirty-one years old and intellectually ravenous. He read deeply in classic literature. Straightforward adventure no longer intrigued him. He was after bigger game now.

He absorbed Shakespeare, especially the tragedies,
Lear
,
Macbeth
, and
Antony and Cleopatra
; also Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
, Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s
Aeneid
. And another book, as Andrew Delbanco tantalizingly informs us in his excellent biography,
Melville: His World and Work
: a novel by Mary Shelley by the name of
Frankenstein
.

Melville was given a copy of it in London by his publisher, Richard Bentley, who a few years later would fatally botch the British edition of Melville’s
The Whale
.
^II
In Shelley’s novel, a deranged scientist who has created a monster pursues it into the vastness of the Arctic Sea, aboard a ship that, as Delbanco notes, he has transformed “into an instrument
of his private vengeance.” Sound familiar? The speech Frankenstein delivers to his crew exhorting them not to falter in their quest is uncannily reminiscent of the “Quarter-Deck” chapter, in which Ahab, in the role of Antichrist, urges his own crew to fiendish vengeance. This extraordinary set piece of demagoguery, where Ahab incites his men into an ecstasy of hatred against a nonhuman enemy, is adduced by numerous Melville scholars, Delbanco among them, as evidence of Melville’s eerily prescient anticipation of twentieth-century totalitarianism. “To borrow a phrase from one of his best readers, Walker Percy,” Delbanco writes, “Melville seemed to know in advance the great secret of the twentieth century—‘that only the haters seem alive.’ ”