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Antony’s encounter with Cleopatra at Tarsus in 42 BC was a meeting of two force fields. Dressed in the robes of Isis, she was his mythic counterpart, a ruler who mixed politics and festivity better than he. While they plotted the formation of a Roman-Egyptian dynasty, they founded the “Society of Inimitable Livers,” dedicated to the celebratory arts. Together they nearly achieved their dynastic ambition. But after the naval defeat at Actium in 30 BC, they went down in divine form. Before their joint suicides, Antony hosted an extravagant feast, with entertainment, music, and the best wines and cuisine. That evening, they say, inhabitants heard the “marvelous sound of music” and chants of bacchanals as the god Dionysus and his entourage left the city.

If Antony’s carnival spirit captivated women, it worked tenfold for Romeos of the 1950s. When “ladies” were girdled and gloved and conditioned to “good girl” asexuality, men who tore off the restraints and brought on the revels held an irresistible appeal. David Niven, British film star of over a hundred movies, was one of the most appealing. A delectable meld of English gentleman and randy cutup, he endeared women in droves—many long-term. Said one of his conquests, everyone was “crazy about him.”

As soon as he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, he began laughing women into bed, from newcomers like Marilyn Monroe to Rita Hayworth, Merle Oberon, and Grace Kelly. A carnival king, he was a ham, prankster, risqué raconteur, and fabulous party-giver. Although twice married, once to his great love, who died at twenty-eight in an accident, he was a chronic womanizer. Nevertheless, women forgave him everything when he strode in with his saucy smile. He was “total fun,” recalled lovers, with a humor “as delicious as French pastry.” Women looked at him, they said, “as if it was God turning up.” In a way, it was—the god dearest to women—the “joyful one” who bursts bonds and ushers in play and jubilation.

Another British bon vivant, Kingsley Amis, had the same limb-loosening effect on the female fifties generation. Teacher, poet, and author of
Lucky Jim
and other comic novels, he was an enticing hybrid of literary lion and Liber, the Roman god of fertility and festival. With Amis, women “seemed to have no verbal or sexual inhibitions at all.” He was a lark—playful, irreverent, and fall-down funny.

His first wife, Hilary Bardwell, remembered being disenchanted with him at first. He had “yellow and snarly” teeth, a rotten haircut, wretched clothes, and no money or distinction. But he was a freer-upper; he “made everyone laugh.” He also made free with the ladies. After his marriage to Bardwell in 1948, he philandered with a vengeance, once charming guests at a party into the garden for a quickie.

Yet she was too smitten with him to leave. She gamely sat out his 1959 teaching stint in America, where he turned Princeton into an academic Woodstock a decade in advance—boozy picnics, hijinks, and liaisons with faculty wives. One ascribed his sex appeal to his liberating sense of the ridiculous—“the most powerful seduction of all.” For him, she elaborated, “America with her straight-laced Puritans, was one big laugh-in.”

After fifteen years, his wife divorced Amis, and he married novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who stood by him throughout his downward cycle into drink and dissipation. At the end, “Hilly” took him to live with her and her third husband, Lord Kilmarnock. There, she tended him lovingly until he died, knowing “his weaknesses” and “ador[ing] him anyway.”

We now have carnival license everywhere we turn: X-rated entertainment, clothing-optional resorts, orgiastic club nights, and Las Vegas. But there’s mounting evidence of a national fun-seepage. Author Pamela Haag writes of the rise of semi-happy, “melancholy marriages,” and critic Barbara Ehrenreich thinks we’ve lost the arts of festivity and entered a “drab and joyless” era. But eros always unchains the pleasure principle, the archaic instincts, and has the last laugh. In sexual selection, it really
is
the survival of the fizziest. The couple that plays together stays together.

Novelty, Curiosity

Keep it New or it’s Through.

—
ADAGE

Professor Jack Harris is on spring break and back for a second interview. This time he’s talking about his marriage. “There’s almost nothing a woman could do now,” he says, swinging his legs onto an ottoman, “to get me into bed.” His voice has the same Tidewater tinge, but his looks have changed subtly since his last visit. He has a designer stubble and new dress style: a lavender-striped shirt, black cords, and a bracelet. He spins it around his wrist and explains, “From Japan when I visited the in-laws. A month ago, you’d never see me wearing something like this. Unpredictability: that has to be one of the top qualities of a great lover.”

Since his marriage eight years ago, he’s made a habit of subverting habit. “You have to be proactive,” he says. “Surprise—spontaneity—is one of the best ways to keep things alive. My wife never knows what she’ll get when she comes home. Sometimes I’ll do flowers or sashimi, change plans, or spring a new idea on her, like a sabbatical in Zaire. If you ask her, she’ll say that’s part of the allure and attraction. Still,” he goes on, “I married for the security.” Then he clasps his hands behind his head professorially: “Boredom, though—never,” he exclaims. “A ladies’ man is someone—here goes!—who continues to seduce and fall in love, and have that reciprocated over the life course.”

Romantic love requires dependability and security, but there can be too much of a good thing. Total predictability—same old, same old—can drain desire. To keep passion juiced, experienced lovers inject the familiar with novelty, change, and mystery. The unexpected, say scientists, gooses the brain, throwing pleasure switches and unleashing dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters associated with energy and elation. Such jolts may be vital for sustained ardor. New and exciting things, claim love experts, preserve “the climate of romance” and ward off the toxic effects of tolerance. The unforeseen can make the heart grow fonder.

According to folk wisdom, men are the erotic novelty hounds with an innate lust for variety. That view may be changing. Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss found that women may be just as avid for the new and different. Darwin believed that novelty seeking, “change for the sake of change, acted like a charm on female[s]” and was a driving force in sexual selection. This prompted men, conjectures Geoffrey Miller, to devise novel and surprising courtship maneuvers. Prehistoric suitors included delightful marvels and mysteries in their amorous arsenal, Miller surmises, as a way of holding women’s attention and securing longer relationships with more offspring. Romance, perhaps inherently for women, includes mystique, novelty, and surprise.

Secrecy and surprise are standard tools of the seducer’s trade. Johannes of Kierkegaard’s
Diary of a Seducer
structures his campaign for the guileless Cordelia on the startle-and-swoon principle: “If one just knows how to surprise,” he gloats, “one always wins the game.” Curiosity can be so erotic, writes Roland Barthes, that it’s almost “equivalent to love”; we’re exalted by those who puzzle and intrigue us.

These seductions only potentiate for the long haul. Honoré de Balzac warned husbands that if they didn’t supply variety, surprise, and curiosity, someone else would. Mate poachers, he advised, come “arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery.” Without some enigma and novelty in a relationship, writes psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz, a woman will likely contract “old boyfriend syndrome” and take her love down memory lane. As amorist thinkers caution, female affections can fluctuate; a man must preempt ennui with “perpetual freshness.”

The first female love objects weren’t designed for predictability or boredom. Dionysus, the “mysterious and paradoxical” deity, vanished in incomprehensible ways and reappeared in spellbinding apotheoses. Shiva personified mysteries and arrived without warning in dozens of strange forms, while the Norse fertility god, Odin, was nothing if not a man of surprises. The object of an all-female ecstatic cult, he trafficked in the occult and paid random calls as an old wizard, eagle, squirrel, or peasant.

Lovers of this cast in literature are rarely husband material. They’re compulsive seducers, like Tomas of Milan Kundera’s
Unbearable Lightness of Being
, whose strategy of choice is mystery and amazement. He pops up outside a woman’s apartment window as a window washer and enters and leaves bedrooms like an incubus. Gareth van Meer in Marisha Pessl’s
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
is a more sophisticated maestro of marvels. Ostensibly an eminent political science professor, this “Pajama Playboy” operates a clandestine political ring and cloaks himself in conundrums and disguises. Women literally beat down his door. “Having a secret,” he tells his daughter. “There is nothing more delirious to the human mind.”

As to be expected, romance readers have no use for these reprobates; their heroes are both “one-woman” men and fonts of incessant novelty. A core theme of women’s erotic fiction, writes editor Lonnie Barbach, is the “unexpected or unknown” within established relationships. Romance novels specialize in mystery men with conjurers’ packs of surprises—double agents, exiled lairds, and incognito reporters—but they’re domesticated and devoted exclusively to the heroine.

No one does it better than Sir Percy Blakeney—a uxorious spouse and “the Scarlet Pimpernel,” the mastermind of an underground rescue mission during the French Revolution. When he shocks his wife with his true identity, Lady Blakeney exalts: her “mysterious hero” is now “one and the same” as her beloved husband.

The swashbuckling Cam Rohan of Lisa Kleypas’s
Mine Till Midnight
is a novelty junkie’s dream. A half gypsy with a diamond earring, he runs a private gambling parlor, materializes as if by magic in drawing rooms, and spirits the heroine, Amelia, to sex under the stars. True love, though, corrals him, and he gives his wife the best of both worlds. Settled with him in her family manse, Amelia sighs rapturously, “How could anyone have a normal everyday life with you?”

Casanova, famous for his staying power in female hearts, realized that love is “three quarters curiosity.” While “ever-available” to those he loved, he took care to supply women with novelties and question marks. “
Coups de théâtre
are my passion,” he wrote, “joyful surprises,” such as the gift of a portrait concealed in a jewel with a secret hinge, or exotic costumes produced for two marchesi before a ball, or the sudden arrival of a theater troupe by boat at a party. A natural dramatist, he relished mystery and camouflage, and once piqued his mistress, a lascivious nun, by crashing a convent fête masked and disguised as Pierrot.

The eighteenth-century diplomat and war hero duc de Richelieu owed his “fantastic renown” with women to more than charm, charisma, and boudoir skills. He was a captivating mix of genie and grand seigneur. And he kept lovers infatuated with him. A cadre of former mistresses joined forces to free him from the Bastille in 1718; an old flame successfully campaigned for his promotion at court years later; and his wife of six years thanked him as she died for the permission to love him.

Loving Richelieu was far from tranquil. This “dashing little duke” liked to mystify and astound. During one intrigue, he tunneled into a lover’s bedroom through the fireplace, and in another, he dressed in a nun’s habit and rendezvoused with a mistress at her convent. But his most famous caper involved his affair with the daughter of the regent whom he had plotted to overthrow. When the regent caught Richelieu and sentenced him to death, Princess Charlotte forced her father to pardon him—for a price. In exchange, she promised to marry the loathsome Duke of Modena and live in exile with him in rural Italy.

Unfazed, Richelieu disguised himself as a ragged book vendor and traveled to Modena. There he infiltrated the palace, revealed himself to the astounded Charlotte, and dallied with her each afternoon while the duke hunted. One day the duke returned early, saw the “derelict” with his wife, and suspecting nothing, asked for news from Paris.

“And that rascal the duc de Richelieu?”

“Oh, he’s a gay dog,” replied the peddler. “They say he made a wager that he’d come to your palace in spite of you and try some extraordinary adventure.”

At this, the duke roared with laughter: “I defy him! But you’re such an entertaining fellow, come back whenever you please.”

Richelieu obliged, and lingered for weeks until his admirers lured him back to Paris. The princess never recovered. Each day she repaired to a private “chapel,” where she wept before an altar she had built to worship him, adorned with souvenirs and a lock of his hair “surmounted by a crown of interlocked hearts.”

Viennese Belle Époque painter Gustav Klimt was as sensual and enigmatic as his famous erotic masterpieces,
The Kiss, Danaë
, and others. A staid society painter and bourgeois bachelor who lived with his mother and sisters, he was a ladies’ man swathed in secrets. Beneath his blue smock he wore nothing, and he had a sub rosa relationship with couturier Emilie Flöge for twenty-seven years. She was the mystery lady of
The Kiss
, and his lifelong companion and adorer.