When I was a little girl, I became infatuated with Grace Kelly, especially in the three films she made with Alfred Hitchcock. I was enchanted by her beauty, yes, and her silvery voice, but also the way that you could always tell she was performing: her enunciation, her gestures, the tilt of her head, the way she would clench her jaw (I tried clenching my own jaw in the mirror, but I just looked angry). She was not a “natural” or “realistic” actress, but an intentional and elegant performer. Within each role, she played a particular feminine ideal that was transparently acted—no one walks like that, no one talks like that, swans her neck like that without a camera—and yet, the performance seemed to be her. Before I had the vocabulary to articulate this, I believed that she had collapsed her performance with her real self. The message I understood at ten years old, wide-eyed and buck-toothed, was that it you could become that woman, if you pulled off the performance.
I watched Rear Window about a dozen times between the ages of ten and thirteen. All of it seeped deep into my consciousness because Grace Kelly did. I’m from Kentucky, and Grace Kelly’s “ladylike” performances seemed to be in sync with the way many girls in the American South are brought up in the culture and communities that surround them—myself included. We were meant to be charming and determined, gracious and decorative, to smile for everyone. Strangeness should come in the form of a “mischievous streak”—a highlight, if you will. We were meant to cultivate lovability within ourselves.
I was nearing the end of my Grace Kelly phase when I understood that I was never going to be one these ideal girls. I was too passionate, too prickly, too worried, too bookish, too ill at ease around those girls themselves, the ones who had either succeeded in collapsing the “ideal feminine” and their natural selves, or the ones for whom there was never any division.
I remember running into one of them at the mall when I was fourteen. She was a cheerleader and beauty pageant queen who lived in a huge white house, and all the cars in the driveway were white too. “Why are you so weird?” she asked me in complete earnestness, as though I might have had an answer.
“I don’t know,” I said.
If some boys where I grew up were “smart,” girls were more often “bright”—like Grace Kelly, who seemed lit gold from within. Her poise—that word was a high compliment from adults—was intoxicating. And yet it was Grace Kelly’s radical confidence that most excited me, as uncertain and insufficient and wrong as I felt most of the time. That kind of confidence in a girl? That was not allowed. But at thirteen, the worst age for many girls, I wanted to breathe it in like magic dust. I was charmed.
Where do girls learn about charm? Maybe from our mothers and aunts and their friends, but more profoundly, I think, from screens: movies and TV tell us it is possible to sparkle as if you were made of colored glass. To be charmed by someone is to like her, even if you don’t really know her; to charm is to make people like you before they know you. Of course I connect my ideas about this particular charm to actors and actresses: stars are mirrors of our own desires, and they exist on screen to please us.
Where I grew up, to be charming meant to give pleasure without (showing that you were) trying. Then and now, to be charming means to navigate the adult world with ease, because the goal of charm is to glide past gatekeepers. As a child, these were my teachers, my parents’ friends, the adults who ran everything. As an adult, these gatekeepers are authorities, real or perceived: my bosses, sure, but also anyone in a position to judge me, including my students. Then and now, I sought rewards for poise and grace, even as I rejoiced in my secret gracelessness, obnoxiousness, in the absence of these judges.
I tell myself that the use of charm is a skill, not a crutch: I am charming in the classroom so that my students will be more open to ideas they have not heard before; I try to be charming in my workplace because to be well-liked is to be employed; I am charming with strangers because it’s tiring not to be. That’s how you know you were raised in a “charming” family.
When I began talking with my friends about charm, I was surprised by how many hadn’t felt beholden to it: the women in their lives had dismissed the idea of charm, either explicitly or by example, as artificial, backward, manipulative. I am jealous of them.
“Charm is about other people’s pleasure,” my friend Rachel said. “I was lucky to escape its pressures.” Instead she worshipped her Aunt Roxanne, a Washington Post style reporter who wore only black and silver and made lasagna with her hands.
But my friend Abi was, like me, raised with/among/to charm. She lives in France now, where she is often called une fille charmante as “a kind of nod of approval, given that charm in this country feels like prerequisite to being a woman.” Abi said:
What once seemed like a prize–being charming which meant being acceptable which meant maybe not being lonely–now seems like signing a contract into behaving a certain way, into continuing to fulfill or appease expectations. I don’t say thank you anymore when someone tells me I speak French well, I raise my eyebrows and say ‘yes, so do you.’ But sometimes all of that is tiring too, because charm is this soft and smooth weapon that says ‘I come in peace.’ And when you’re trying to stake out your ground, whether that’s in a foreign land or in the general patriarchy … sometimes it feels like any weapon will do, even the ones that cut you a little bit, too.
My own relationship with charm is equally fraught. In any new situation—a new job, a new town, a new group of people—I default to charm, even when I want to “just be myself.” As soon as either I am secure or I have the sense that this charm is expected or required, I want to rid myself of it. I become Cartman on Maury: “Whatever, I do what I want.” To reject charm is to reject self-control, but only after you have achieved it.
With those I am close to, I am charmless. Charm won’t survive intimacy, or intimacy can’t survive charm. On the occasions that I am out with a friend and we encounter someone new to just one of us, either I or she will have the opportunity to watch the other be charming as she introduces herself. If I am the observer, I see my friend almost as a stranger; I am going to back in time to meeting her myself, before intimacy.
I spent much of the last five years writing a novel about a girl whose charm is a weapon. I know I was trying to negotiate my own ideas about charm, from Grace Kelly to the archetypal femme fatale, and my anti-heroine is a charming criminal who is never the least bit charmed by herself. Unsurprisingly, she is not all that “likeable.” That was the point. And yet, now that the novel is published, I find myself careening wildly between modes: the rebellion of defiant charmlessness—writing essays like this; refusing to smile in my picture—and the desire to be liked, which I can only achieve by reassuring people that I am not my character. Writing fiction, for me, is a private disobedience, and to make those parts of my brain public is confusing. The part of me that wrote the book wants to destabilize, wants to make people uneasy; the part me who will talk about the book with strangers badly wants to put people at ease. Charm got me into this book, and I need charm to get me out.
Audrey Hepburn, Liz Taylor, Dorothy Dandridge, Samantha Stevens from Bewitched, Marian the Librarian, Jessica Wakefield, Claudia Kishi, Brad and Melody from Hey, Dude!, Cher Horowitz and Dionne, Clarissa Darling, Tammy, Gidget, Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, Scarlett O’Hara, Julie Andrews, Mitzi Gaynor, Jessica Rabbit, Crystal and Alexis from Dynasty, Salt n’ Pepa, Doris Day, Clair and Denise Huxtable, Princess Leia, Dianna Barry and Anne Shirley, Topanga, Daphne from Scooby Doo, Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, Blondie, Isabella Rosselini. These are the people my friends found “charming” as young girls, people they hoped or wished to become. Some are more irrepressible than others. Those from fiction were written by women, but those appearing onscreen were mostly written and directed by men: these are the ones who live as images in our memories.
My friend Francine said she never thought about charm in any “feminine” way; she wanted to be Wonder Woman because “she got it done, and that was charming.” I wish I could say the same. Though I, too, wished to be Wonder Woman, to me the Lasso of Truth represented a starkly unrealistic alternative to charm.
Samantha Stevens’s charm, on the other hand, seemed instructional to me. By the late ’90s, my mother and I had hand-taped every single black and white episode of Bewitched screened on Nick at Nite. I was crazy about it. What did I learn from all those hours of Bewitched? That the goal, always, is to please. Sam witches when she’s worried she has failed to please Darren by burning the roast, getting hit on by one of his clients, etc. You can please by being good, but if you do screw up, you can fix it with charm: an a-line dress, a martini, a plaintive protest followed by a dazzling smile. Even if you must constantly rescue your husband from foibles he doesn’t even recognize, prevent him from realizing this. To succeed in pleasing him is to succeed in pleasing yourself.
I remember, at about the same age, wanting to be charming for my father, whom I saw two or three weekends a year. If he was having a good time, so was I.
We learn to perceive ourselves through the eyes of others, and for many girls, watching TV and watching movies means, necessarily, learning to perceive each other through the eyes of men. We love the heroine, we adore her charm, we see others love her too, and we do the math; we solve for the variable of how to be loved.
Last September, I was at a booksellers’ tradeshow in a hotel reception room, sitting at a card table piled high with galleys of my book, when I made accidental eye contact with a man standing a couple yards away. I smiled reflexively, and I guess that made him feel obligated to speak to me.
“I’m waiting to talk to him,” he explained, gesturing toward the man sitting next to me behind his own pile of galleys. “I saw your book, saw it was a woman author, thought ‘probably fluff.’”
This is not a new or newsworthy kind of interaction, but it was my first of its kind. Instead of saying “No, it’s probably not for you,” as I later wished I had, I smiled even harder. In a strange place, wanting to please, I made myself as charming as possible and tried to convince this human breadstick that my dark and prickly novel was not “fluff.”
He shrugged and stuck a copy in his bag.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, beaming as he walked away. It is an old habit, and I backslid. Next time, I won’t.
