By Richard Jarman
We don’t see his type so often now, but back then he was the ultimate male icon. He was charming, dashing, debonair. He was a lady’s man. He was the sort of man who was very much at home on a bar stool and who seldom lit his own cigarette. And if he wasn’t decanting himself a whisky into a crystal tumbler, he was practicing his golf swing in a pair of beige slacks.
He was hot. He was hairy. He was probably wearing Dacron.
But women were wise to be wary of his sort: this male of the species bit back. He was a ladykiller. He was the male version of a praying mantis or black widow spider. He was a gorgon in Cuban heels with a ramrod mustache. He was the quintessential alpha male. In the '70s, he wore a satin-effect smoking jacket and left chocolates on your bedside table. In the '80s, his bachelor pad was black and chrome, and he threw a red bedspread on his futon.
Remember his type? As Sade would no doubt chime in: “No need to ask. He’s a smooth operator.” The smooth operator was the archetypal male. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, he was the image of masculinity for men (and women) to buy into, whether it was his aftershave, his chunky jewelry, or his bikini briefs. For the first time in a long time, the male body was up for grabs.
My father appropriated an off-the-shelf version of the smooth operator, albeit with a few twists of his own. He was more what you would term “lathe operator” than “smooth operator,” but I remember one afternoon in 1978, when he drove into town in his tangerine-colored hatchback and returned with a fuzzy perm and man-clogs. For the next few months, I watched him carefully tweak and tease his curls with an Afro comb, displaying the sort of dedication I would later see him give to pruning ornamental roses. And while his man-clogs gave him much needed height, they caused him to clatter around precariously, his exaggerated leg movements giving him the look of a wading duck, the curly perm on top completing the picture of Big Bird.
Dad also began spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, coming out stinking of strange synthetic colognes—smells that would have put many an effluent oulet pipe to shame. And he began unbuttoning his shirt low to reveal a sovereign medallion amongst sparse, but carefully cultivated, wisps of chest hair. I think it was about that time in his life that he started playing squash doubles and invested in a chest expander. Dressed in a short dressing gown which he wore about the house and which showed more thigh than was perhaps appropriate, Dad would perform faux martial-arts displays to himself in the full-length mirror. Out went the nylon briefs and in came the leopard-print G-string briefs, so when Dad did a high kung-fu kick, we were all truly “thonged.” Not since Narcissus fell in love with the image of himself in the pool of Mount Helicon had a man seemed so enamored with his own image.
I was only nine years old at the time and too young to realize what was happening to him, but I knew that he wasn’t normally a vain man: the baggy trunks and cut-off denim shorts that he wore almost non-stop during vacation were testament to that. He wasn’t, as we would say today, “in touch with his feminine side”—he was very much a man’s man and enjoyed doing manly things such as cleaning the rain gutters and racing ferrets. Nor could it be said that he was much of a fop either; it was his brother Derek—and not my dad—who came back from West Germany carrying a handbag, a fashion stumper that’s still spoken of to this day. Truth is, I merely assumed Dad was in the midst of a midlife crisis and said nothing, preferring to leave him to have his mental breakdown in peace.
It’s only now, nearly thirty years later, that I realize my father was performing the most ancient of rites. He was paying homage to the masculine image. Put simply, he was preparing himself for the dating scene. No longer with my mother, Dad was creating his own version of the beautiful male. With his new mane of hair, traditionally the symbol of male strength and virility, as well as the extra two or three inches afforded by his man-clogs, my father was hot to trot. It was a case of “Lock up your daughters.”
However, the world into which my dad furtively stepped with his man-clogs wasn’t the same as it had been when he and my mother had first gone a-courting in the late '50s. It had changed dramatically. In the '50s, the extent of male preening involved nothing more than combing grease through your hair and blowing the mothballs off your father’s demob suit. But by the late '70s, the female form was no longer the sole focus of sexual desire. John Travolta was strutting his stuff in Saturday Night Fever, and before you could say “polyester lounge suit,” men the disco-dancing world over were squeezing themselves into twelve-inch bell bottoms and stuffing socks into their pants.
The sexes had been in turmoil since the psychedelic '60s melted the static gender roles of the '50s. Women were being liberated through birth control and in the workplace. By contrast, there were the first mumblings that men would soon become surplus to requirements, that masculinity was heading for crisis. The androgyny of the '70s led us nowhere fast and only assisted in confusing things, as men and women looked for their lost identities in the approaching '80s. Something was happening all over town. Ready-to-wear emporiums and mail-order catalogs hit, and suddenly fashion became affordable and mass market—not the greatest omen in terms of quality it has to be said. However, I think we can blame the arrival of new man-made fibers and dyeing agents for the more experimental fashion crimes during this period.
It is through this period of flux that our hero the smooth operator, boldly sowed his oats. Unabashed, he flew the flag for the male as sex symbol during a time of sexual uncertainty, and maybe that explains what’s fascinating about him today. Dressed in the fashion shrapnel of the time, the smooth operator stood for the age-old image of the sexually desirable male.
Men have preened and paraded themselves since they fell out of trees. In our culture, the male image can be traced back to the kouros of Greek antiquity, later immortalized by Michelangelo’s David. This Apollonian ideal—the broad shoulders, the expanded chest, the tight buttocks and the stiff pelvis—struts like a peacock aware of its admirers. All that’s new in the pictures in this book is that they’re either doing this in the underpants section of a catalog or they’re modeling Gore-Tex.
There are, however, aspects of the smooth operator’s character that both repel and intrigue us. If you set yourself up on a pedestal, you’re asking to be knocked off—especially so if you’re a man. If women aren’t hanging off the smooth operator's neck, they’re fingering his sunglasses or cooing at this crotch. And while he may have been considered “groovy” in his day, from our present day perspective, he seems seriously out of date.
He’s vain too, and if there’s one thing a woman admires less than a man who doesn’t care about the way he looks, it’s one who does to a fault. We don’t like men to care (or be seen to care) about such surface-deep nonsense. Men are supposed to hunt, gather nuts, and change carburetors in secondhand cars. Even today’s so-called metrosexual man, with his skin care products and plucked eyebrows, is essentially a figure of fun.
But I think there’s something else deep beneath our stone-throwing. If a man loves his own reflection, we suspect it wouldn’t take much for him to transfer that desire to another man’s reflection. So that if the smooth operator is guilty of Narcissism, he might well enjoy another practice of the ancient Greeks, namely sleeping with other men. That, traditionally, has been a great way of bringing the macho heterosexual man down a peg or two. Such is the lot of the smooth operator. He walks a precarious tightrope between impressing the ladies and convincing them he really wouldn’t be interested.
But I think the smooth operator has the last laugh on us. We think these hairy beasts of the sex war jungle are antique relics, Neanderthals that have been selected out of existence by modern sensitive man. Maybe that’s their comedy value, but I urge caution. It is merely his fashion—the man-drag—that has changed to fit in with modern norms. The ancient rules of sexual attraction haven’t changed one iota. Like the kouros, my dad in his man-clogs or today’s modern sensitive man, the smooth operator is merely a chapter in the history of men masquerading as men.
The smooth operator’s dead. Long live the smooth operator.
Text from the introduction to Smooth Operators: The Secrets Behind Their Success, by Richard Jarman and the Advertising Archives. Copyright by Universe Books. Used with permission. Photo is from the book cover.
We don’t see his type so often now, but back then he was the ultimate male icon. He was charming, dashing, debonair. He was a lady’s man. He was the sort of man who was very much at home on a bar stool and who seldom lit his own cigarette. And if he wasn’t decanting himself a whisky into a crystal tumbler, he was practicing his golf swing in a pair of beige slacks.
He was hot. He was hairy. He was probably wearing Dacron.
But women were wise to be wary of his sort: this male of the species bit back. He was a ladykiller. He was the male version of a praying mantis or black widow spider. He was a gorgon in Cuban heels with a ramrod mustache. He was the quintessential alpha male. In the '70s, he wore a satin-effect smoking jacket and left chocolates on your bedside table. In the '80s, his bachelor pad was black and chrome, and he threw a red bedspread on his futon.
Remember his type? As Sade would no doubt chime in: “No need to ask. He’s a smooth operator.” The smooth operator was the archetypal male. In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, he was the image of masculinity for men (and women) to buy into, whether it was his aftershave, his chunky jewelry, or his bikini briefs. For the first time in a long time, the male body was up for grabs.
My father appropriated an off-the-shelf version of the smooth operator, albeit with a few twists of his own. He was more what you would term “lathe operator” than “smooth operator,” but I remember one afternoon in 1978, when he drove into town in his tangerine-colored hatchback and returned with a fuzzy perm and man-clogs. For the next few months, I watched him carefully tweak and tease his curls with an Afro comb, displaying the sort of dedication I would later see him give to pruning ornamental roses. And while his man-clogs gave him much needed height, they caused him to clatter around precariously, his exaggerated leg movements giving him the look of a wading duck, the curly perm on top completing the picture of Big Bird.
Dad also began spending an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom, coming out stinking of strange synthetic colognes—smells that would have put many an effluent oulet pipe to shame. And he began unbuttoning his shirt low to reveal a sovereign medallion amongst sparse, but carefully cultivated, wisps of chest hair. I think it was about that time in his life that he started playing squash doubles and invested in a chest expander. Dressed in a short dressing gown which he wore about the house and which showed more thigh than was perhaps appropriate, Dad would perform faux martial-arts displays to himself in the full-length mirror. Out went the nylon briefs and in came the leopard-print G-string briefs, so when Dad did a high kung-fu kick, we were all truly “thonged.” Not since Narcissus fell in love with the image of himself in the pool of Mount Helicon had a man seemed so enamored with his own image.
I was only nine years old at the time and too young to realize what was happening to him, but I knew that he wasn’t normally a vain man: the baggy trunks and cut-off denim shorts that he wore almost non-stop during vacation were testament to that. He wasn’t, as we would say today, “in touch with his feminine side”—he was very much a man’s man and enjoyed doing manly things such as cleaning the rain gutters and racing ferrets. Nor could it be said that he was much of a fop either; it was his brother Derek—and not my dad—who came back from West Germany carrying a handbag, a fashion stumper that’s still spoken of to this day. Truth is, I merely assumed Dad was in the midst of a midlife crisis and said nothing, preferring to leave him to have his mental breakdown in peace.
It’s only now, nearly thirty years later, that I realize my father was performing the most ancient of rites. He was paying homage to the masculine image. Put simply, he was preparing himself for the dating scene. No longer with my mother, Dad was creating his own version of the beautiful male. With his new mane of hair, traditionally the symbol of male strength and virility, as well as the extra two or three inches afforded by his man-clogs, my father was hot to trot. It was a case of “Lock up your daughters.”
However, the world into which my dad furtively stepped with his man-clogs wasn’t the same as it had been when he and my mother had first gone a-courting in the late '50s. It had changed dramatically. In the '50s, the extent of male preening involved nothing more than combing grease through your hair and blowing the mothballs off your father’s demob suit. But by the late '70s, the female form was no longer the sole focus of sexual desire. John Travolta was strutting his stuff in Saturday Night Fever, and before you could say “polyester lounge suit,” men the disco-dancing world over were squeezing themselves into twelve-inch bell bottoms and stuffing socks into their pants.
The sexes had been in turmoil since the psychedelic '60s melted the static gender roles of the '50s. Women were being liberated through birth control and in the workplace. By contrast, there were the first mumblings that men would soon become surplus to requirements, that masculinity was heading for crisis. The androgyny of the '70s led us nowhere fast and only assisted in confusing things, as men and women looked for their lost identities in the approaching '80s. Something was happening all over town. Ready-to-wear emporiums and mail-order catalogs hit, and suddenly fashion became affordable and mass market—not the greatest omen in terms of quality it has to be said. However, I think we can blame the arrival of new man-made fibers and dyeing agents for the more experimental fashion crimes during this period.
It is through this period of flux that our hero the smooth operator, boldly sowed his oats. Unabashed, he flew the flag for the male as sex symbol during a time of sexual uncertainty, and maybe that explains what’s fascinating about him today. Dressed in the fashion shrapnel of the time, the smooth operator stood for the age-old image of the sexually desirable male.
Men have preened and paraded themselves since they fell out of trees. In our culture, the male image can be traced back to the kouros of Greek antiquity, later immortalized by Michelangelo’s David. This Apollonian ideal—the broad shoulders, the expanded chest, the tight buttocks and the stiff pelvis—struts like a peacock aware of its admirers. All that’s new in the pictures in this book is that they’re either doing this in the underpants section of a catalog or they’re modeling Gore-Tex.
There are, however, aspects of the smooth operator’s character that both repel and intrigue us. If you set yourself up on a pedestal, you’re asking to be knocked off—especially so if you’re a man. If women aren’t hanging off the smooth operator's neck, they’re fingering his sunglasses or cooing at this crotch. And while he may have been considered “groovy” in his day, from our present day perspective, he seems seriously out of date.
He’s vain too, and if there’s one thing a woman admires less than a man who doesn’t care about the way he looks, it’s one who does to a fault. We don’t like men to care (or be seen to care) about such surface-deep nonsense. Men are supposed to hunt, gather nuts, and change carburetors in secondhand cars. Even today’s so-called metrosexual man, with his skin care products and plucked eyebrows, is essentially a figure of fun.
But I think there’s something else deep beneath our stone-throwing. If a man loves his own reflection, we suspect it wouldn’t take much for him to transfer that desire to another man’s reflection. So that if the smooth operator is guilty of Narcissism, he might well enjoy another practice of the ancient Greeks, namely sleeping with other men. That, traditionally, has been a great way of bringing the macho heterosexual man down a peg or two. Such is the lot of the smooth operator. He walks a precarious tightrope between impressing the ladies and convincing them he really wouldn’t be interested.
But I think the smooth operator has the last laugh on us. We think these hairy beasts of the sex war jungle are antique relics, Neanderthals that have been selected out of existence by modern sensitive man. Maybe that’s their comedy value, but I urge caution. It is merely his fashion—the man-drag—that has changed to fit in with modern norms. The ancient rules of sexual attraction haven’t changed one iota. Like the kouros, my dad in his man-clogs or today’s modern sensitive man, the smooth operator is merely a chapter in the history of men masquerading as men.
The smooth operator’s dead. Long live the smooth operator.
Text from the introduction to Smooth Operators: The Secrets Behind Their Success, by Richard Jarman and the Advertising Archives. Copyright by Universe Books. Used with permission. Photo is from the book cover.
