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The diagnoses get worse. The problem with ladies’ men, contends Gregory Pacana in the
Philadelphia Mental Health Examiner
, is a “Casanova disorder,” a subset of borderline personality disorder, which includes eleven symptoms ranging from social anxiety to mania. One twentieth-century psychiatrist described “Don Juanism” as “eroticism deformed into delirium.” Today this goes by the name of sexual addiction and leads malefactors down “the Gentle Path” to a twelve-step program of enforced sexual abstinence, public penance, and group therapy.

An even graver psychiatric profile is the seducer as sociopath. These are romantic con men devoid of conscience who are masters of seduction and out for thrills and sexual pillage. At the criminal end of the spectrum, they are psychopaths—scary imposters, like thirty-six-year-old Michael Murphy. An inmate serving twenty-six years in a Montana jail, Murphy put his seductive talents to such effective use that he persuaded at least five female prison employees to have sex with him and grant other contraband favors. His therapist, who found herself kissing him in her office (and more), said, “I couldn’t say no to him.” And two guards sent him letters, one of which read, “I’m in love with you.” The other is unprintable.

The Real Woman-Pleaser

Mental health, of course, is relative and exists on a continuum. Rare is the person who can withstand life’s heavy weather with perfect poise. The ladies’ men are no exception. They have their share of hang-ups and unhinged moments. Romantic poet and love idol Alfred de Musset suffered occasional nervous seizures, Casanova once contemplated suicide, and Richard Burton and Kingsley Amis were alcoholics. But as a group, they challenge the disease model of the seducer. Not infrequently, they belong to another category: the supernormal men of positive psychology. Most share some or all of the qualities of the actualized “healthy human specimen”—ego strength, vitality, resilience, authenticity, creativity, autonomy, nonconformity, personal growth, and the capacity to love.

In her revisionist study, psychoanalyst Lydia Flem puts Casanova in this class. He was sincerely infatuated by each of his lovers, sought in-depth relationships with them, and never ditched anyone. A striver and thriver, he lived with effervescence and “complete harmony between the mind and senses.” He became a polymath and social adept befriended by Voltaire, Catherine the Great, and other leading lights.

Among these friends was a ladies’ man of nearly the same caliber who has slipped into relative obscurity: Lorenzo Da Ponte. An
home du monde
and librettist of twenty-eight operas, including three of Mozart’s, Da Ponte had an ability to charm that seemed “near-magical.” Woman after woman succumbed to his fascinations, from two married Venetians to an Austrian innkeeper (who wrote “
Ich liebe Sie
” on a napkin at their first meeting), to “la Bella Inglesina,” Nancy Grahl, who became his wife of forty years. At the time of his marriage to Grahl, he was broke, toothless, jobless, and twenty years her senior.

Like Casanova, a confrere of his youth, Da Ponte was a psychological high achiever, a man of stature who sparkled with élan and self-belief. He surpassed simple sanity; he was able to create, love deeply, evolve, and bounce back from adversity. Born Emmanuele Conegliano in 1749 in a Venetian Jewish ghetto, he came up the hard way. He was poor, motherless since age five, unlettered (his classmates called him the “Idiot”), and forced to convert to Christianity and change his name when his father married a young Christian girl. Pushed into the seminary, he became an ordained Catholic priest.

Da Ponte, however, beat the odds. He taught himself to write poetry and at age twenty-four fled the cloister for Venice, where he tutored and wrote sonnets on demand. He was magnetic and handsome—with an elegant aquiline nose, strong jaw, and flashing iridescent eyes. Women took notice. For four years he returned the compliment and played the cicisbeo to several signoras before being exiled by the Inquisitors for loose morals and seditious poems.

In Vienna he charmed Emperor Joseph II into appointing him poet to the court theater. There he collaborated with the greats, Mozart in particular, and became a celebrated librettist. As before, women descended. A “serial romantic,” he was often in love, although he never said “ ‘I love you’ to a woman,” he insisted, unless he meant it. He had a regular “sweetheart” for ten years who bore his son, and a “Calliope” who brought him “coffee, cakes, and kisses” whenever he rang a bell while he was writing
Don Giovanni
.

One inamorata rejected a surgeon’s proposal too fervently for her lover’s good; not only was the doctor ugly, she said, but she adored Da Ponte. The surgeon retaliated by prescribing nitric acid to Da Ponte for an abscess, so that all his teeth would fall out. Still women found him delectable. Always a fancier of strong mistresses, he had a last fling with a feisty diva, “La Ferrarese,” until disaster struck; his patron, the emperor, died and enemies drove him from Vienna.

Soon after, he met and married the twenty-two-year-old linguist Nancy Grahl and moved to London without a shilling. He made shift as a bookseller and left for America with his wife in 1805—bankrupt and unconnected. A veritable “Phoenix,” he reinvented himself in Pennsylvania and New York, tried a number of professions (including grocery-store owner), and lived to become a distinguished member of Manhattan society. He wrote his memoirs, helped found an Italian opera house, and finally taught Italian at Columbia University. In his late sixties, his fifty-eight schoolgirls “sighed for him in secret.”

Admittedly, Da Ponte had issues; he was vain, quick to take offense, and overanxious to be liked. But a Casanova with a complex he was not. More than symptom-free, he thrived amid hardship and took the high road to a replete, creative identity. He is of a piece with many great lovers—men like Denis Diderot, Prince Grigory Potemkin, and Benjamin Franklin—adored precisely for their expansive selfhood, ability to rebound from tragedy, and raging life spirits.

The Darwinian Alpha Male

Displays of power and abundant resources work in any epoch.

—R
EUBEN
B
OLLING
“Tom the Dancing Bug,”
Salon

“Surely,” say the mating biologists, “no one has seriously doubted that women desire wealthy, high-status men.” This image of the ladies’ man comes to us courtesy of evolutionary psychology. Since it carries the imprimatur of science, the Darwinian beau ideal has become an established dogma in relationship circles.

Surprisingly, though, the whole alpha male theory is based on a thought experiment of dubious validity. Projecting into the deeps of prehistory, psychobiologists speculate that the earliest women—vulnerable and beleaguered—sought power males to protect them from the elements, support progeny, and provide superior genes. Over eons, these scientists argue, the preference for such men became soldered into the female libido, creating a permanent sexual “fix.” As a result, women instinctively gravitate to the guy who supplies the best survival benefits and DNA. His qualities vary among scientists, but nearly all agree on the big four. Evolutionary psychologist David Buss sums them up: 1) money and status; 2) stability and fidelity; 3) kindness and compatibility; and 4) physical superiority.

The first premise of male sex appeal, wealth and prestige, has the widest cultural currency. A ladykiller without rank and riches is practically an oxymoron. Almost every mating authority, from Dr. Helen Fisher to Dr. Phil, subscribes to it. “A high-status male,” writes biobehaviorist Donald Symons, “is both the best choice for a husband and for a sex partner.” Propelled by the sugar-daddy dictate, men battle their way up the social ladder and flash credit cards the way lightning bugs flash photons. It’s “basic”: swells get the babes; they have the adaptive edge—resources and top-of-the-line sperm.

Security is another article of faith. Women, say neo-Darwinians, want “dependable” men—faithful, committed, and “emotionally stable.” Their dream man, declares Richard Dawkins in
The Selfish Gene
, is a “good, loyal domestic type.” With infants under foot and saber-toothed tigers at the door, our female ancestors didn’t need mercurial mates and gadabouts on the premises. By Darwinian logic, a woman would be crazy not to put her heart in the service of a homebody, a protector who can be counted on to hold down the fort and stick around.

Compatibility and decency are equally seductive. In unsettled times—tribal warfare, treks over ice scarps, and the struggle for provisions—the dark stranger signaled potential danger and difficulty. Hence the female preference for a nice man from the same tribe, someone with similar views, customs, tastes, and opinions. Commonality, claim scientists, confers an evolutionary payoff: domestic cooperation, less strife, and longer relationships, all of which accounts for the guy-next-door allure.

Then there is beauty and brawn, the quintessence of male sex appeal. From an evolutionary perspective, women are predestined to go for taut beefcakes who telegraph protection and beautiful babies. Sociobiologist Bruce Ellis belabors the point: “For women the world over, male attractiveness,” he writes, “is bound up with strength . . . and prowess.” Ladykillers, by selective right, are tall, buff, and handsome with biceps like Smithfield hams and bulging crotches.

The Real Alpha Male

Science popularizers never tire of saying that “from a biological standpoint we’re still prehistoric.” If so, ladies’ men hail from another prehistory. The kind of men who consistently enrapt women call the whole Darwinian alpha model into question.

Gabriele D’Annunzio is typical. One of the most compelling figures of the fin de siècle Europe, he was a noted Italian poet, novelist, politician, war hero, and ladykiller. “The woman who had not slept with him,” said a Parisian
salonnière
, “became a laughing stock.” Women found him devastating. They trailed him around Europe like frenzied maenads, pouring out passionate declarations, abandoning families, and twice offering a fortune for his favors. The international stage diva “La Duse” never got over her “Apollo.”

With D’Annunzio, Apollo doesn’t come immediately to mind. Proof against evolutionary progress, he was a sad physical specimen—short, bald, and “ugly,” with “unhealthy” teeth, fat legs, wide hips, hooded eyes, pallid lips, and thick mottled skin.

Nor did he radiate “strong provider” appeal. He was nearly always in debt and went spectacularly bankrupt midcareer, losing all his possessions, including his thirty greyhounds, in a ten-day auction. When he first arrived in Rome, he was a nonentity without pedigree, reputation, money, or connections. Men of his sort weren’t “received.” Yet due to his impact on women, he breached high society and bore off the daughter of a duchess—three months pregnant. Despite his mistreatment of his aristocratic wife, she loved him to the end and came to look after him in his old age.

Instability was his middle name. Chronically unfaithful and forever in transit, he lived from caprice to caprice. Women, however, were undeterred. Not only did Eleonora Duse endure his affairs, but she once dispatched him into the arms of a rival. “Look, look, since you love him,” she declaimed to a houseguest, “there he is!” and discreetly closed the door. Another rival refused to go quietly. A Russian marchesa confronted La Duse after a tryst with D’Annunzio, drew a gun, and tossed it “from hand to hand” until the diva packed her bags and left. La Duse tried “in vain to forget her great love” for the rest of her life.

D’Annunzio was also impulsive and labile, subject to rash moves and buying binges. After one of his sprees, he rhapsodized, “I have a need for the superfluous . . . divans, precious fabrics, Persian carpets, Japanese china, bronzes, ivories, trinkets, all those useless and beautiful things.” Ever undependable in a crisis, he fled from women when illness and tempests struck.

He was not the brotherly type. D’Annunzio was a man of enigma and exotic otherness with bizarre habits (quill pens and clerical robes), mysterious haunts (a baroque monastic hideaway), and a penchant for remarks such as “green mouths of the sirens suck my voluptuous blood.” Instead of a guy next door, he was the guy from the next galaxy, a self-described “sorcerer.”

Sorcerers aren’t known for fair play, and D’Annunzio disported above bourgeois morality. Although gentle and generous when he chose, he could misbehave. But no one could beguile, spoil, and transport women like D’Annunzio. He was “the most remarkable lover of [his] time,” “a ladies’ man before whose exploits the most dashing Don Juan must bow his head in admiration.”

Like D’Annunzio, few ladykillers fit the neo-Darwinian bill. There
are
, of course, rich, handsome, famous, kind, and stable ladies’ men. But something else accounts for their erotic firepower. Starving artists and working-class nobodies fill the ranks of great lovers. Stolid guardians of the hearth and wholesome, known-forever men also belong but don’t predominate—far from it. Casanovas aren’t always pinups either. A guy can have belt overhang, bat ears, mini-genitals, dewlaps, and bad skin and still be the most desirable man on the planet. It takes more, much more than evolutionary psychology imagines, to enthrall women.