In fact, sharing it with us is the key to Liberace’s success. . . .
The ritual ended with Liberace blessing us with his microphone like a priest dispensing holy water. The subtext to these rites, though, was the exhibitionist/voyeur relationship between performer and audience exploited to the max for pleasure on both sides. I could feel the electricity of audience desire with each new flash of sequins and fur, like “baby, just let me feel it.” Twice, he let us. A few shameless ones down front got to come forward and stroke. . . .
These fetishized fashions are the ultimate consumer goods—really unnecessary, virtually unusable, and completely awe-inspiring. They transport us to the heaven we heard so much about in Sunday School—all dazzling light, jewels and harmonies. No wonder the show ended with a quasi-hymn, folks around me breaking into “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” during the finale. Liberace smiled, said he knew we wanted to sing. And he promised to keep wearing his outfits just as long as we wanted him to. Liberace is really the essence of celebrity, a job in which one makes a spectacle of oneself. And makes no waves doing it.25
As demonstrated in these articles in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, the association of show biz and faith lends itself to ridicule. However invidious the essays, they capture, nevertheless, something essential in Liberace’s show. His show, in turn, mirrors not only fundamental elements in the mass, but even older, more primitive notions of the relationship between religion on the one hand, and showing, performance, and art on the other. Did Mr. Showmanship know about the Mysteries of Eleusis, the cult of Demeter in ancient Greece? It is unlikely. Yet his notions of show mirror one of the first great shows of Western life. The Eleusinian Mysteries, in turn, underline still other sources of Liberace’s mystical, even mythic appeal to audiences.
One of the holiest spots in the ancient world, Eleusis, on the Saronic Gulf not far from Athens, marked the legendary site of Hades’ abduction of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of earth and plenty. With her daughter gone, Demeter fell into deep mourning. Without her attention, the earth went barren. The goddess of life and plenty became, then, in effect, the divinity of death and desolation. Heeding mankind’s pleas, however, Zeus intervened to restore the child to the mother, so earth flowered again in spring and summer; as a part of the bargain, however, Persephone returned to Hades half the year, hence fall and winter.
Far more than a cultic explanation of the seasons, the Mysteries at Eleusis touches upon fundamental, elemental mysteries of human existence: life, death, birth, rebirth, sex, generation, and regeneration. Assignificant, these mysteries came to be demonstrated or acted out in formal, ritualized ceremonies of the Eleusinian Mysteries. For nearly two and a half millennia, people came from all over the Mediterranean world to be inducted into the rites. Show, showing, and light constituted the main elements of these initiation ceremonies. The induction actually formalized showing in two ways. In the first place, the ceremony involved a visual reenactment of Hades’ rape of Persephone—a dramatic caricature, in effect, of that electric scene. Late at night after a day’s fast, the initiates made their way through the sacred precinct. Suddenly, without warning, blazing torches illuminated the brilliant specter of Hades stealing the terrified girl away from her mother. The show stunned the initiates’ senses. There was a second showing, too. Demeter had left sacred objects with her devotees, and the culmination of the initiation involved the hierophant’s ceremonial revelation of these objects to the congregants. This was show business of the highest and most profound form. It involved pomp, ceremony, mystery, seeing, and revelation at their most elemental. It engaged all the senses, and did so in an explicitly sexual context of rape and mother love and procreation. Thus the sacred objects, for example, seem to have been phalluses.
The holy show at Eleusis involved life and death, potency and impotence, men and women, and it celebrated the mysterious, mystifying margins where these primal elements intersected. That these elements lent—and lend—themselves to comedy and caricature as much as to tragedy and awe goes without saying. The late-fifth-century military and political genius Alcibiades lost his country in his comic—camp—reenactment of these very rites. The insouciant, incorrigible student of Socrates had it right. Indeed, the intersection of comedy and tragedy is itself another manifestation of art’s mystery. In The Bacchants, Euripides prompts the audience to smile when the devilish Dionysos persuades King Pentheus to cross dress, yet foreknowledge of the protagonist’s grisly end deflects the humor. This is the way art works. It plays with margins, boundaries, and limits of human, even biological order. It transgresses even as it affirms. It violates; it flirts with pain and punishment; it speaks the unspeakable, sees the unseen. Its power matches its dangers. Liberace called his performances “calculated outrage,” and from very early in his career, he recognized the power “in daring to do something different, in challenging the conventional. I realized . . . I had lightning in a bottle . . . or, at least, in one of the pockets.”26
As his remark attests, Liberace knew that to place oneself on the margin—of life, death, sex, gender—is to participate in magic and power. Explicitly and implicitly, too, he and his act acknowledged the close intersection between comedy and tragedy, delight and horror, vulgarity and transcendence. “It isn’t all spectacle and laughter; it’s a combination with tears and pathos,” he admonished.27 “To do a good show,” he said elsewhere, “you must run the gamut of emotions and have the audience laugh, cry, excite them, calm them, give them nostalgia, give them modern sounds—bring the audience from wild cheers to a silence so total you can hear them breathe. Make them glad they came.”28
The greatest showman of the twentieth century might have never heard of Eleusis, Demeter, and Persephone, yet he intuited a critical kinship between sacred and profane performance. Like the show at Eleusis, Liberace cut across boundaries that limit, confine, and curtail normal existence. He transcended boundaries in other ways, too. If the ultimate end of art is to make the congregant live a new life through the performance and to transcend himself, he assumed that show business served a similar end. Make audiences forget their woes, forget time even: “Make them glad they came.” He wanted to offer them a new life, at least temporarily, to lift folks out of themselves. That is what religion does, classically. It’s why Marx condemned it as an opiate, and why Mr. Showmanship remained faithfully Catholic.
Building on his sense of how both royalty and religion operated, Liberace worked out a still more elaborate aesthetic, even if he presented it in hokey, practical terms. Most critically, he assumed that art—like religion—was essentially escapist. He insisted over and over that art was mysterious and exotic in and of its very nature. It denied daily routines, it transformed normal existence. It involved the alteration, deformation or distortion of reality. It is, as the song lyrics suggest, looking at one thing, a children’s carousel, and seeing something else, one’s beloved. People neither want nor need realism or reality in their shows, Liberace insisted. They want illusion. “Now, the public demands a certain amount of escapism and fantasy from performers,” he explained. “The ones who dare to give it are the ones who skyrocket, like Michael Jackson and Prince. Even at rock concerts, the Madonnas and Boy Georges are the sellouts.”29
Insofar as art denies reality, illusion and optical illusion assumed a critical place in Liberace’s thinking. They illuminated his aesthetics again. As he did in his allusion to votive lights before an altar in a darkened church, Liberace associated beauty with night or darkness, but, better, with half light, stage light, moonlight, and starlight; he associated it with mystery, imagination, and fancy. “I’ll find you in the morning sun,” his lyrics ran, “And when the night is new, I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.” Associated with reality, the sun did nothing for art. Nighttime was another matter. “The stars twinkle, the moon casts a mysterious white light, the shadows take on beautiful shapes, everything becomes more glamorous and that’s the way I like it. The
clothes I wear when I’m working are not daytime clothes, they’re nighttime clothes because the night is when people like to dress up. There’s a little bit of make believe in every night and it’s reflected in the gowns the women wear and the more imaginative clothes the men wear. The night is full of mystery and vibrations. It’s show business. And to pretend that it’s not is like putting Marlene Dietrich in a Mother Hubbard.”30
The reference to the German movie star prompts further discourse on the nature of beauty. Royalty and Catholicism got the show just right; so did celebrities like Marlene Dietrich. In her seventies, Dietrich had played Las Vegas, but not like “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” Sophie Tucker, however memorable that earlier performance may have been. In a spectacular see-through outfit, the siren of The Blue Angel was still fabulous and sexy, still playing effectively to her image. Half-light helped; still, she played the goddess, and people should worship at her altar, Liberace insisted. He did. Star beauty, celebrity beauty, glamour beauty—like the pageantry of royalty and the visual splendor of the mass—exists for itself and demands submission. “I don’t care if she’s a grandmother, a ‘Hausfrau’ in her spare time,” he wrote about his idol. “To me she’s a star. And what’s wonderful about it is that she never lets me forget it. She lives up to her talent. You never see Joan Crawford ‘schlepping’ around in a mumu. She, too, knows the meaning of glamour and its importance to the people who—without any themselves—love to look at it in others.”31
He applied the same glamour/star theory to politicians and other public figures. He used the example of the then notorious New York politician representative Adam Clayton Powell to illustrate his point. Was the dashing, extremely handsome, womanizing minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem abusing his trust? The question was irrelevant, the pianist implied. Powell was behaving like a star. He was giving his people/his constituents what they wanted. “At least one of them was making it. They admired Powell’s daring,” he insisted. “It was his very outrageousness that they, themselves, could not indulge in, that they looked up to in Powell. Through him they defied the power structure that was trying to submerge them. Through him they lived a vicarious life of luxury and maybe sin. He had fun and they loved him for it.”32
Precisely the same motive governed his own act. “When I ride onto the stage in a Rolls-Royce there’s something of the same association. Who wouldn’t want to do that?” he demanded. “Or if he didn’t actually do it, be able to afford to do it.”33 It was the same motive behind the gold lamé, the sheared beaver coats, the mink capes, the jewels, “the palace” on Harold Way, his other mansions scattered around the country, and indeed, his whole outrageous ostentation. He hypostatized Everyman’s fantasy.
Show and showing, sight and illusion figured in still other ways in Liberace’s ideas of artistic virtue. In this regard, how he looked and how he dressed assumed a critical place in his aesthetic notions.
Costume actually figured variously in the showman’s career. Practically, rather than aesthetically, Liberace saw dress as one more gimmick to attract attention and secure an audience. He was a master of self-publicity. It worked the same way his candelabrum did. It was a hallmark, a signature, a calling card. Why did he wear a white mink coat in 1972 for a command performance for the queen and the queen mother? “I didn’t come here to go unnoticed,” he repeated for the umpteenth time. And he continued: “That was not a silly remark on my part. I knew what I was saying. I knew it would be quoted. It’s part of the showmanship that I rely on. The clothes attract attention. They get me newspaper headlines and interviews. They get me audiences.”34
On a rather higher level, however, Liberace also recognized how dress provides identity or even self. At his 1952 Hollywood Bowl performance, he dressed to be seen on the stage from the most distant seats, but he dressed for other reasons, too. He did not want “to lose his identity,” he said. On the contrary, his peculiar costume that evening allowed him to gain an identity, to make a persona, to create a presence. Clothing made the man. He re-created a character called “Liberace” that night. He put on white tails, “and all kinds of wonderful things began to happen.”
Liberace professed no faith in the romantic concept of “natural beauty.” We are what we wear, he proposed. We are indistinguishable from one another naked. Nakedness is democratic; adornment makes us individuals. Costume and dress disguise our sameness and allow the lustrous hierarchies of personality, glamour, and beauty to emerge. That his costumes grew increasingly outré was no accident, either. Costume was not supposed to be natural any more than celebrity was natural. Art and beauty are about outrageousness, he asserted, about bending and distorting reality. Celebrities are not supposed to dress like normal people. Stars should be recognized as such. “I truly hate to dress up when I’m not appearing before the public,” he confessed. “When I am, I want to look like their image of me.”35
He gave audiences what they wanted when he danced onto the stage.
Liberace like to tell his audiences to stand by “while I go slip into something more spectacular.” For 35 years that was the best part of watching him perform—waiting in delicious suspense to see in what outrageous guise he might appear next. A Norwegian blue shadow fox cape with a 16-foot train? A 24-karat gold-braided Russian czar’s outfit? Why not? Liberace was SHOW BUSINESS stripped down to its gaudy heart and then blown up much bigger than life, and when he stepped through the curtains, no costume was too fantastic, no production number too elaborate, no entrance too grand. He never disappointed an audience.36
The cultural critic Camille Paglia has asserted that when women dress as men, they are laying claim to traditional male power; when men cross dress, they claim divinity. Liberace never cross dressed, but he did something almost comparable by pushing the outer limits of the acceptable in his attire. He did it consciously and calculated the outrage. On tour in Australia, he appeared in a long gold embroidered coat over a pair of lace pantaloons and patent leather boots, the only costume, he figured, less notable than that of his second-act opening. A critic described it: “The glamorous and talented Liberace pranced onto the stage in a patriotic red-white-and-blue hot pants suit complete with baton. For anybody else, it would have been a poor attempt at drag humor. But the crowd loved it and the star loved it even more.”37 “Mr. Showmanship is Mr. Everyman doing what Everyman dreams he could do if only he had a chance. And everyone can’t get enough of him.”38
Dress also provided answers to other, subtler questions in the performer’s life. The “naked civil servant,” Quentin Crisp, offered insights into this deeper, even paradoxical significance of the costumes. “He radiated a childlike glee at being popular,” observed the Englishman. “I think it is very unlikely that his gaudiness was just any old way of increasing his income. I think it was much more probable that, as his capacity for dealing with—or rather, winning—his audience increased, his self-assurance grew, and he became more like the bejeweled icon that he always longed to be. As he grew more artificial, he became more genuine.”39 In 1984, still somewhat skeptical about the performer’s transgressions, Time called Liberace, a “Peacock Androgyne.”40 Given the nature of androgyny, “peacock” is probably redundant.
Behind his notions of art, beauty, performance, costume, and even peacock androgyny, Liberace possessed a clear and distinctive understanding of human nature. His huge popularity, again, suggests that he got it right. He applied the same rules to himself in caricature as he did to royalty, the church, Adam Clayton Powell, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford. People wanted to see his outrage. It satisfied their deepest longings. People live humdrum lives, the showman believed. By and large they accept their fate. Not much changes. They will not get wealth or fame, much less power and glory or celebrity. Still, they appreciate these qualities. They admire, moreover, those who achieve or represent these virtues. They look up to them, they stargaze. They worship movie stars. They revere royalty. They idolize celebrities. They deify even politician
s. Popular taste is itself, then, hierarchical and submissive to the power of beauty and glamour, which, by extension, folks recognize on sight. This suggests still another element of both art and human nature. In describing the breach between art and reality or between stars and common people, Liberace emphasized the hierarchical nature of beauty. Beauty presupposes deference. It demands submission. It mocks equality. It makes us servile worshipers, he suggested. Beauty, glamour, and stars turn us into children; they make us “do childish things,” as he testified about himself.
Fantasy and make believe fill the breach between the gazer and the star, and beauty lends itself—indeed, demands—not only fancy and fantasy, but mythology, myth making, legend, romance, dream, and dreaming. This was his essential art, and it addressed fundamental issues of the human condition. Nothing will change, but, through art, one can experience change, transformation, transcendence. This is another aspect of the inner vision adumbrated in the lyrics of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In the half-light of the moon, the flickering illumination of candles, the glow of footlights, and the glitter of stars, illusion becomes a new reality. People need, demand fantasy, he insisted. “I try to help them do this for a little while, to help them forget work and problems and enjoy, vicariously, a folderol of fun, good music and fancy dress. I give them a little recess from the humdrum.”41 “That’s why we have entertainment,” he repeated toward the end of his life, “to make people forget all the troubles of the world.”42
While emphasizing hierarchy, celebrity, and stars, however, Liberace also gave the theory a twist that was all his own. It was a unique contribution. He played Megastar for Everyman, but he never abandoned the Everyman in himself. To interpret the issue slightly differently, he added an Everyman component to his star persona or, alternatively, created a second persona that stood outside his own stardom. He celebrated himself as a hierophant of art and beauty, on the one hand, a simple Joe on the other. This curious combination produced all manner of effects in his career.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 40
