Pretty faces

The arrogant and rapacious super-yuppie we had come to expect--a man said to believe he could buy his way out of anything--had turned up a pleasant, ineffectual nerd.

The capper probably came three days into jury selection when a Kennedy spokesperson (a woman, natch) made it known that, try as they might, no one at the family compound had been able to figure out how to hook up their computers. So now Will was calling around pricing rental typewriters.

Following the case from a distance, many outsiders will be astonished at how readily the strategy seemed to take. Most prospective jurors appeared to like young Will Smith. One could hardly blame the long-suffering Lasch for regarding it all as shameless.

Then again, sitting in the courtroom, I found it was no mystery at all. Attentive, possessed of a remarkably quick grin, self-deprecatory as any Horatio Alger hero (and just as eager with a comforting hand to the elbow of his aging mother--a solitary figure in the row behind), Smith's very bearing cast instant doubt on the likelihood that he had committed the heinous crime that was alleged.

All of which gets us to the subject I want to kick around here self-presentation. The ways that almost all of us, to one degree or another, tailor our behavior to meet particular needs-emphasizing certain aspects of ourselves while doing our damnedest to obscure others.

There are, of course, some who will vehemently deny it. They are wont to disavow dishonesty of any kind as toxic, insisting that in a culture where vast industries--fashion, cosmetics, everything having to do with sports cars--flourish by idealizing image over substance, there is salvation only in distancing oneself from superficiality and artifice. Lots of actors and musicians in particular have lately been mining this lode, and we tend to admire them for it--almost as much as they seem to admire themselves.

Yet it is no coincidence that these same people so often wind up in places like People magazine revealing some whopper of a personal failing. To be human, as they at last acknowledge, is to screw up. What they never admit is that, like most of the rest of us, they were salesmen for themselves from the start--it's just that what they' re selling has shifted with circumstances.

AS IT HAPPENS, I MYSELF AM SOMETHING OF A PRO IN the honesty-for-consumption business---one of those people to whom it is hugely important to come off as amusingly guileless and lacking all skill at pretense. In fact, sitting in that courtroom got me thinking how much trouble I'd be in if ever called upon to project injured innocence in court; how, lacking the appropriate advisers, my dress would come off as too nerdy and my grin transparently insincere; and (since I do this with my wife anyway--I truly can't help myself) how I'd always smirk when I ought to look contrite.

But you know what? The preceeding paragraph, accurate as it is in incidental detail, is itself a pose--both in its characterization of how I'd behave in court (if God forbid it ever really came to that, I'd have my lawyer's instructions tattooed on the back of my hand) and the tone I struck in writing about it. For the real truth--should you, after all this, choose to accept it--is that in my case, like most everyone else's, there exists a real self lurking just behind the projected self: endlessly assessing, weighing, calculating.

I would certainly not claim that my stance is anything but a mixed bag. The truth is, over the years I've often regretted the opportunities I've blown by not kowtowing to various influential sorts who expect to be kowtowed to. On the other hand, I am acutely aware that even that ostensible down side reflects wonderfully on me; and have, if I've scratched deep enough, usually found ways to imagine that even those who have trounced me financially somehow respect my integrity. Then, too, before I was married, it always worked great with women.