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Within a year, he had conquered the famous concert pianist Olga Samaroff, who married him and gave up her career to foster his. He went on to become conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra—as well as a high-profile ladies’ man. His caprices were so numerous that the Curtis Institute of Music (where he taught part-time) was called the “Coitus Institute.” Eventually his wife left him. By then, he was the toast of the music world, a celebrity known for his iconoclastic innovations such as freehand conducting and fortissimo finales, which were compared to “twenty-two minute orgasms.”

His love life matched his music. At forty-four he dropped a nineteen-year-old debutante to enter into an open marriage with maverick aviator and spiritualist Evangeline Johnson, heiress of the Johnson & Johnson fortune. Convinced that Stoki required affairs to fuel his music, she looked the other way for eleven years. Then came the screen siren Greta Garbo, who saw Stokowski conduct and was electrified. Their much-publicized romance was too much even for Evangeline, and she divorced him in 1937. His third marriage to Gloria Vanderbilt lasted seventeen years, after which he retired to England in the company of two handmaidens from the “Coitus Institute.” He continued, “glamorous to the end,” enamoring women and making spectacular music until he died at ninety-five.

There are other ways to make spectacular music. The male voice in song can be as seductive as an orchestra in full Wagnerian flight. The root meaning of
enchant
,
incantare
, is to bewitch through singing. In ancient Rome a young patrician heard a suitor sing to her and decompensated: “I am undone,” she cried to her sister. “Oh how sweetly he sings! I die for his sake.” Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot’s
Mill on the Floss
is overtaken by the “inexorable power” of a gallant’s “fine bass voice,” and never recovers.

Frank Sinatra, a songmeister and seducer of the first order, should have been a Darwinian discard. Skinny and jug-eared with a “dese-dose” accent and Hoboken address, Sinatra began his career with a string of failed employment attempts and an empty wallet. But as soon as he stood up and sang in those early dives, “broads swarmed over him.” He “wasn’t the best singer in the world,” but he had “dick in [his] voice,”—a lush, intimate lyricism—and used the microphone “like a girl waiting to be kissed.”

Women were insane for him. They snatched his handkerchiefs, begged barbers for his hair clippings, bared their bras for autographs, and threw themselves in front of his car. Although a difficult man by any gauge—subject to temper tantrums, mood swings, and capricious no-shows—he was a love pasha. To seduce a woman, he would tilt back in a chair, hot-eye her, and sing, “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Lauren Bacall, Sophia Loren, and Marlene Dietrich adored him. His second of four wives, Ava Gardner, hyperventilated: “Oh god, it was magic. And god almighty things did happen.”

Smart lovers envelop girlfriends and wives in a sonic bath of sensual melody and song. “Sing,” Ovid exhorted, “if you have any voice.” As the sign in a St. Thomas music store says, “No matter how ugly you are, if you play the guitar, you’ll have a way with women.” “Love,” wrote Elizabethan amorist Robert Burton, “teacheth music.”

Kinetic Voodoo: Body Language and Dance

You got to let your body talk.

—D
ADDY
D
J

Psychologist and ladies’ man Jack Harris doesn’t simply walk into a room; he glides. He settles on the sofa, pulls a leg under him, stretches an arm over the back cushion, and pins you with his eyes. Reminiscing about his romantic life, he begins, “It sort of exploded in my thirties, and I’ll tell you what it was: dancing.” It happened, he says, by accident. During a teaching stint in San Antonio he wandered into a bar and discovered Tejano, a South Texas couples’ dance that involves complex spins and fancy footwork. One of his students offered to teach him. “It was amazing,” he recalls, “when you dance it’s like turning on a light. If you’re a good dancer—and I
am
a good dancer—women want to dance with you, and the attraction ensues from that.”

Body Language

Bodily movements may appeal to the eye quite as much as bodily proportions.

—T
HEODOOR
H
ENDRIK VAN DE
V
ELDE
,
Ideal Marriage

Ladies’ men are kinesthetic shamans, masters of body movement and (usually) dance. “Besides spoken language,” proclaims the
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
, “there is also a language of parts of the body.” Gifted lovers are fluent in this idiom. As well they should be: women have an enhanced ability to decipher gesture, posture, and facial expressions, and psychologists estimate that 50 to 90 percent of our communication, especially in romantic relationships, is nonverbal. Ovid understated when he told trainees, “You can say a lot with gesture and eye.”

Our faces do most of the talking. In the first three or four seconds of meeting a man, a woman will subject him to a face scan, spending 75 percent of the time on his mouth and eyes. Within five minutes she will have sized him up. And it’s curtains if he gives her a frozen poker face. Women like features that are plastic, expressive, and vibrant.

Eyes are heavy artillery, “the purest form of seduction.” Ancient cultures such as classical Greece thought they possessed occult powers and could infect the unwary with an airborne “
bacillus eroticus
.” Kama, the Hindu god of love, directed his gaze at victims and they swooned with desire, while Dionysus radiated the light of Aphrodite from his eyes.

Some men just know how to look at a woman. They create a “lustline”—they gaze a fraction longer and tight focus as if she’s the only person in sight. Love giants like Aly Khan, actor Richard Burton, and reggae singer Bill Marley were renowned for their “eye sex.” Lord Byron’s trademark was his infamous “underlook”—his upper lids lowered at a woman as though he were in the throes of sexual excitement. Women, significantly, rank men’s eyes as their favorite feature.

At the same time, women watch men’s mouths with “close attention.” If a man is interested, his lips will part slightly, redden, and engorge. Nineteenth-century female fans loved poet Alfred de Musset’s full “vermillion lips,” and modern romance readers demand descriptions of a hero’s mouth. Dallas Beaudine’s looks like it belongs “on a two-hundred-dollar whore” in
Fancy Pants
, and the heroine can “barely breathe” when he smiles.

A smile is a female sweet spot. The genuine “Duchenne” kind, where cheeks lift, teeth flash, and eyes crinkle, is a “powerful courtship cue.” Brian, the New York banker, says he is a compulsive smiler; instinctively, he insists, it sets up an attraction and a smile-back reflex. Warren Beatty, like so many darlings of women, gives “the best smile in the whole world.”

Herbert Beerbohm Tree owed much of his romantic (and professional) success to his mastery of facial expression. Founder of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and His Majesty’s Theater, he was a luminary in Edwardian England, both as a manager and character actor and as a world-class Casanova. In his youth, he pored over Darwin’s
Expressions of the Emotions
, and soon became fabled in the theater for his protean impersonations. Seducers were Tree’s specialty.

Off stage, he practiced what he played. He had a preternatural ability to fascinate and draw women. Although he was nothing to look at—a tall, rawboned man with red hair and sand-colored skin—his eyes were extraordinarily “expressive and alert,” and were said to have “transfixed” his wife, actress Helen Maud Holt, into marrying him.

He used them to the same erotic effect on mistresses, including leading ladies and a secret second wife who bore six of his ten children. One inamorata said he seduced her at a spa simply by gazing at her like a “true artist”—with “deep admiration.” At close quarters even great actors can’t fake this; involuntary micro-expressions give us away. Tree genuinely loved women.

In seduction, the entire body gets in on the act. Gestures have to work in sync and send the same message. Every courtship move—open palms, subtle shrugs, posture mirroring, taut carriage—has to match the love language of the face. And to enrapture, it should be done with grace and feeling. Tree finessed this art as well, captivating women through his eloquent hands, “cat-footed” stride, and regal carriage.

The male animal in motion has a primal hold on the female libido, harking back to the remote past when men strutted on sexual parade grounds to procure women. In studies, women show distinct preferences in men’s gait; they favor a long, light step, swaying torso, and assertive arm swing. Rhett Butler rivets Scarlet with his “lithe, Indian-like” walk, and the young officer of
A Hero of Our Time
has a “careless, lazy” stroll that captivates belles at a Caucasus resort. Writer Katherine Mansfield recalled being spellbound by a stranger’s walk: “I watched the complete rhythmic movement, the absolute self-confidence, the beauty of his body, and [felt] that excitement which is everlasting.”

Zsa Zsa Gabor claimed that Porfirio Rubirosa snagged her just by the “primitive” way he sauntered across the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel with an “intriguing spring” in his step. It was no accident. Rubi cultivated the art of movement. From adolescence, he studied every sport—boxing, fencing, swimming, and horsemanship—and kept limber with yoga.

Dance

And then he danced . . .

—L
ORD
B
YRON
,
Don Juan

Dance, however, was Rubi’s real ace. Asked for his secret with women, he replied, “I take them dancing a lot.” An expert dancer, he mastered the merengue, the twist, and everything in between, and romanced all his lovers on the dance floor. As study after study has shown, “Men with the best dance moves have the most sex appeal.” Researchers Cindy Meston and David Buss found that women will often have sex with a man just because he dances well. In one survey of five hundred women ages twenty-five to sixty, they ranked dancing above financial success or sexual prowess as the most desirable trait in a man.

Dancing is intrinsic to mating. Animal life is a continual round of rollicking courtship dances. Male grebes enact “water ballets,” and certain species like fallow deer and sage grouses gather in groups called “leks” and leap, stamp, and do-si-do to attract females.

Havelock Ellis speculated that primeval men cavorted in a similar vein, vying in vigor and grace to obtain the best women. Evolutionary psychologists ascribe this to a fitness contest. Men whose feet smoke, they claim, prevail because they demonstrate greater symmetry, health, strength, coordination, speed, and—if they vary their steps and style—higher levels of testosterone. They also exhibit playfulness and artistic creativity.

But there’s more than evolutionary logic to women’s lust for a dancemeister. While dance arose for multiple purposes, a key function was aphrodisiacal; prehistoric peoples danced at fertility rites to draw down divine sexual energy. By miming intercourse, they channeled cosmic eros and worked themselves into a copulatory lather.

In myth, the sex gods enter dancing. Vishnu, the Indian Adonis, greeted postulants with a crotch-swiveling Tandava, and Shiva, lord of eros, danced with his penis in his hand and enacted nine routines—the basis of classical Hindu dance. Dionysus, “the leader of the choral dance,” jetéd throughout the countryside followed by a corps of nymphs and bacchantes. He so intoxicated Ariadne with his gyrations that she “could scarce sit still,” and flew into his embrace.

Traditional cultures contain a full repertoire of erotic dances, from the Chilean
cueca
to the Hungarian
friss
, a “violent couple dance.” Men of the Wodaabe tribe in Niger stage all-day dances to compete for brides. Adorned in black-and-white face paint and dressed in tight sarongs, white beads, and ostrich feathers, they undulate for hours until three women pronounce the winners and give them the choice of mates.

Fictional ladykillers waltz divinely and dance women into love with them. Olga in Alexander Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
loses her heart to her fiancé’s best friend during a mazurka, and Anna Karenina falls for Vronsky over a quadrille. When Hardy Cates gathers Liberty Jones into his arms for a two-step at a country fair in Lisa Kleypas’s
Sugar Daddy
, Liberty is flooded by “uncontrollable” desire and follows him off the floor to a back lot. The most cherished chick flicks feature “honeys who can swing,” such as the snaky-hipped Patrick Swayze in
Dirty Dancing
.

Casanova took this primordial turn-on seriously. He hired ballet master Marcel to teach him the minuet, and acquitted himself like a professional, executing a
furlana
in 6/8 time. Similarly, French eighteenth-century duc de Richelieu was “one of the best dancers” at court, and a generation later, philosopher and heartthrob Claude Helvétius performed with the Parisian ballet.

Mikhail (Misha) Baryshnikov was the “Russian superstar Casanova,” both a dance wonder and an
homme fatal
. An unlikely premier danseur, he was too small, stocky, and gamin by ballet standards. But when he made one of his gravity-defying, shoot-the-moon leaps, he brought down the house—and women. Ballerina Gelsey Kirkland thought him a poor piece of work—an “adolescent”—until he soared onto the floor. After that, she pronounced him “the greatest male dancer on earth” and “fell in love with him then and there.”