Chapter 4 - Bodily assets, or, ‘S-E-X’

Summary

Brynner has a rumbling yet staccato voice, like a bass viol in a barrel. He has a big smile, and perfect teeth show through thick, sensuous lips. His large brown eyes have often been described as hypnotic. He has an electromagnetic personality, a devil-may-care manner that may be part Brynner, part Lafitte. — Gene Handsaker,

The Chattanooga Times

Starting with his Broadway hit where Brynner, ‘bald, magnetic, graceful as a great cat’ was credited for making women swoon ‘over his shining dome and smouldering eyes,’ his star image was firmly grounded in physical presence, sex appeal, and baldness. ‘What does this man got?’, Cosmopolitan wondered in 1957, then answering its own question by quoting an anonymous female fan: ‘It's a surge of power like electric current. Women can feel it.’ Brynner's star persona was built on an unabashed display of bodily goods and stylized poses complete with taut muscles and hard, fixed stares. Whether adorned in elaborately decorated Oriental costumes of silks and pelts, the elegant apparel of a dandy, or little else than a leather loincloth, his bodily presence was designed to stand out.

Masculine appeal and heterosexual prowess became key to Brynner's star image while, at around the same time – and in equally mythical manner – his fantastic, cosmopolitan tales of origin became central to its constitution. Mapping the secret of his appeal in their 1956 cover feature, ‘Yul Brynner: Why Do Women Find Him Irresistible?’, Collier's – in a familiar rhetorical move – evoked the figure of Rudolph Valentino.

In the 30 years since his death, Hollywood has been longing for a successor to the Great Lover. Every foreign-born actor with good looks and dark eyes who turns up there gets measured as a possibility. The fact that Brynner is unquestionably a fine actor doesn't interest the magnates nearly as much as whether or not he can set womanhood in the mass on fire. Does he have what back in Valentino's days was referred to as IT, and later became known as Sex Appeal?