For all these notables, Bristol’s personal and anecdotal data play an even greater part in his argument. Indeed, he herds even the “noted authorities” into this net of the personal and commonplace. By this measure, his own life and biography become the essential element of his proof of mind power. This is critical to his system. His “authorities” are, then, essentially window dressing to his own personal testimony, which remains the primary evidence. He tells his story; he shares his revelation with the enthusiasm of the camp-meeting convert. As a young man, he had experienced an epiphany. He was a penniless, despairing soldier in World War I when he heard his own voice, not God’s, speaking to him in a secular version of Paul’s Damascus Road experience. The voice instructed even as it predicted, “when I returned to civilian life, ‘I would have a lot of money,’” He discovered his fate and future, and with this assertion, he insisted, “The whole pattern of my life was altered at that moment.”3 This transformation of his life is what he extended to his readers.
His science is, then, much more of a highly personal, even idiosyncratic “witness” in a traditional Christian, Protestant manifestation or confessional of proof: this happened to me; the revelation changed my life; it led me to discover it happened to all these other people; it can happen to you. At the same time, he also worked out what he calls a scientific method by which readers could replicate his own control of mind—and, of course, his worldly success as well. This involved lecturing to oneself in mirrors, posting signs around the house, carrying note cards on one’s person, and ritually repeating one’s goals. Naming these goals, however, preceded all this. In this regard, Bristol distinguishes, first, between needs and desires as proper purposes. It is desire, not need, that drives the engine, he asserts. He insists that individuals must both define and cultivate desire, the more beyond need the better. Desire, not need, changes everything. “It is desire for something new, something different, something that is going to change your life, that causes you to make an extra effort,” he proclaims, “and it is the power of believing that alone sets in motion those inner forces by which you add what I call plus-values to your life.”4
While Bristol allows for nonmaterial aspirations, practically, his book focuses attention on things and matter—on material goals and concrete purposes. He allows for the materialization of a desire from thin air—as when he wished himself a particular type of cheese on a trans-Pacific cruise; by and large, however, he assumes that we must first gain money to fulfill our wishes. In short, his book describes how to get rich in order to buy things that we have previously cultivated the desire for. Paradoxically, then, while he celebrates the mind and mental processes, that mentality lacks all spiritual, elevated, lofty, or even intellectual ends, and only circles back to material purpose.
In Bristol’s essentially material world, only individuals possess power and authority. His cosmos is shaped exclusively by individuals’ will, by personal aims and goals. Community, society, politics, law, the common good, and social institutions—family, church, the state, history, and tradition, for example—lack all form and substance in his scheme. When they appear at all, they exist as either negative powers or as objects to be effected by the self-willing, self-activating man.5 Self-help is the only help. Bristol describes, effectively, a society held together exclusively by will and choice, by common adherence to the purposes of individual volition. This is the only politics of the text. He assumes the state—or at least the American republic—to be simply the aggregate of its self-willing individuals. Once, however, he actually articulates the notion. He does so under duress, sensing that his most cherished system is being threatened. Although his insight is circumscribed by his general optimism and by his unwillingness to concede anything negative or evil, he speaks as an American of the heartland when he hints at powers of darkness that threaten the collective folk of free will in the United States with the Cold War going full tilt:
I am cognizant of the fact that there are powerful forces at work in this country that would dominate us, substituting a kind of regimentation for the competitive system which has made America great among nations. They would attempt to destroy individual thinking and initiative, cherished ever since our Pilgrim Fathers established this country in defiance of Old World tyranny. I believe we must continue to retain the wealth of spirit of our forefathers, for if we don’t we shall find ourselves dominated in everything we do by a mighty few and shall become serfs in fact if not in name. Thus, this work is written also to help develop individual thinking and doing.6
In a stroke, he vanquishes Nazism, fascism, communism, socialism, unionism, and even corporate capitalism and Catholicism, among other “isms” and ideologies, for the American way of unfettered liberty, the free-market system, practical reality, and common sense.7 As the Cold War dawned in 1948, Claude Bristol offered the perfect embodiment of Americanism, but his ideology had much deeper American roots.
Complete with its vulgarity, a considerable portion of which Bristol himself genially acknowledges, The Magic of Believing is a quintessentially American text. Besides its skepticism about history, tradition, culture, and institutions, it possesses still other characteristic American biases. Amiable, optimistic, materialistic, untheoretical, nondogmatic, and personalistic, it is a hodgepodge of sources, impressions, and sentiment with the same degree of consistency as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Nor, on the most mundane level, is it far from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pronouncements about the nature of things. Indeed, with its notable nod to New England and “our Pilgrim Fathers,” it identifies its distinctive philosophy with the particular forms of Protestant Christianity of the Yankee mind. Truth as personal witness or revelation is not the least of these. Indeed, all manner of classic New England, Calvinistic elements percolate through the text. It has been said that a social or theological system’s heresies and taboos arise as hedges against the most profound, latent tendencies of that very system itself. In this regard, the Yankee proscriptions of antinomianism—radical individualism otherwise defined—and Arminianism—salvation through works—illustrate the mode completely: with God leached from the system, the grossest heresies of colonial New England became the norm for a New Englandized America—radical individualism and a self-driven work ethic.
Bristol lived in the same ideological world as Whitman and Emerson, Mary Baker Eddy, and P. T. Barnum, and hardly less in that of William James and Abraham Lincoln. If far less artful than they were, he described the American creed that motivated their careers, as well. Here, anyone can get ahead. Here, one can do anything one desires. Here, indeed, desire is limitless, and the perpetual impulse is to create and re-create desire itself, over and over. Where problems arise, they are resolvable by hard work and energy activated by ambition and will. Its sin is the failure of desire and imagination, of pep and spunk. It is a world of impossible dreams, where men can fly and Ponce de León’s springs of eternal youth well up in shopping malls and suburban housing developments. It is a magic kingdom of queens for a day and fame by sortition. It brims with wonder and marvels.
Liberace loved the American promise even as he admired Claude Bristol’s artless rendering of the American way. It possessed special power for him, too, as he seems to have discovered the book at a critical juncture—the mid-fifties—when he was losing his grip on his career and even on his life. Thus, he wrote a preface to the 1955 edition, and in 1958 he wrote and then recorded a song with the title, and on the theme, of “The Magic of Believing.” He cut one disc for public sale; the other constituted his last promotional record, made, apparently, in conjunction with Bristol to sell his book.8
Thirty years after first reading The Magic of Believing, he had made his life a testament to Bristol’s homilies. In 1984, at sixty-five years old, when he flew, literally, across the stage at Radio Center Music Hall, he gave form to Bristol’s admonitions about daring, desire, and executing the impossible. Just so, as his Tinkerbell/Peter Pan excursion through the air hypostatized his own fantasies,
so his flight personalized his countrymen’s impossible dreams as well. The dream of audience and actor united; his wingless flight—if Oz-like fantasy—became a metaphor of that old American trick of pulling off the impossible. “The difficult we do immediately,” boasted World War II Seabees; “the impossible takes a little longer.” Liberace lived by the same maxim. “My attitude is that nothing is impossible, it just takes a little longer.”
Long before he discovered Bristol’s book, Lee was living the dream The Magic of Believing celebrated. The poor little Polish boy with courage and ambition that surpassed even his talent could have been a model of Bristol’s ideal type. Think positively. Avoid woe. Don’t kvetch. Look ahead. Work hard. Sell yourself. Believe! While he left no evidence of actually writing down these maxims and posting them on his shaving mirror as Bristol recommended, they were written on his heart and psyche long before he first opened Bristol’s Magic. He actually did memorize some of the great motivator’s epigrams, however:
To experience happiness, one must express happiness.
To find love, one must give love.
To possess wealth, one must value wealth.
To acquire health, one must live health.
To attain success, one must positively think success.9
Claude Bristol never distinguished between self-fulfillment and the desire for gain, on the one hand, and, on the other, the common good. Indeed, he effectively collapsed the categories. This tendency runs deep in American social thought. Liberace did the same thing. Serving his own ends and turning his talent to profit, he served and delighted the commonwealth as well. This viewpoint permeated his career. He wanted to give people what they wanted; he wanted to reify their fantasies as well as his own. His performances did so perfectly. So did his lavish consumerism. The museum he founded and the memoirs he wrote did so precisely. While turning handsome profits and securing his image, these enterprises also delighted the folks. They represent the genial boosterism of the American spirit quite as much as does anything found in Claude Bristol’s prescription for positive living. At the same time, these autobiographical and memorial enterprises represented still other facets of Liberace’s life and American values.
Liberace had conceived of a museum in the early seventies. He launched the enterprise in February 1975, when he opened the mansion on Harold Way to paying visitors, at six dollars a pop.10 He noted that when he appeared on Cher’s television program, he had touted the enterprise, and, as a result, seventeen thousand fans requested reservations. The pathlike road that wound up the Hollywood Hills to the mansion-museum was hardly conducive to tourists and tour buses, however. Nor were locals happy about having a commercial enterprise among their fancy homes overlooking Sunset Boulevard. The neighbors sued to end the operation.11 He quit Hollywood Hills. He did not give up.
He next scouted his hometown for a museum site. A great Victorian mansion on Milwaukee Avenue in the suburb of Wauwatosa seemed perfect. Neighbor anxiety helped eliminate that site, too. So did the threat of a lawsuit by the property’s former owner and present tenant. The showman dropped his bid for the property.12
None of these difficulties applied to Las Vegas. Here, anything could fly. It was here that Mr. Showmanship himself had first actually taken to the air on invisible wires as a part of his act in 1975. Las Vegas was a natural for the museum. Various issues propelled him toward the Nevada gambling center. Since the mid-seventies, this had been his official home, as he had moved his legal residence here for both work and tax reasons. However much he loved the Cloisters, the Shirley Street house had not only become his primary residence but had rapidly come to embody his very person. He loved Vegas. Its delicious vulgarity might have been made to order for the museum.
By October 1978, he had settled on a specific site in the gambling resort, a shopping center that he purchased for three million dollars. It was a few minutes’ drive from the Strip. Abetted by his new young companion, Scott Thorson, Liberace turned museum making into a full-time enterprise that fall and winter. There were, first, the costumes and the replicas of his jewelry to put on display. Among his automobiles, he gave up the piano-key stationwagon, the red, white, and blue Rolls-Royce, the Auburn, his first limousine, and his ’57 Thunderbird. Not least, there was the furniture and the objets d’art that had been his passion for twentyfive years. “We stayed up three nights straight just going through the Vegas house, and the task had to be repeated in all the other homes,” Thorson reminisced.13
The Liberace Museum opened for visitors on Easter Sunday, 1979. Some tourists had waited in line as long as three hours when Mr. Showmanship showed up in person to greet the first visitors. Decked out in a “pink, blue and yellow checkered sports jacket with matching yellow shirt and slacks, he wore a huge gold cross around his neck and sported six diamond-studded gold rings, each the size of an enormous peach pit,” a reporter noted. Photographs had memorialized that his then companion Vince Cardell had helped him inaugurate the Hollywood Hills museum in 1975. The guard had changed in two years, as recorded by journalists. “During the opening he was joined by his 23-year old [sic] companion/road manager/onstage chauffeur named Scott Thorenson [sic], who wore almost as much diamond-studded gold as the maestro,” the journalist reported further. Thorson gave his own interview. “‘I did wear a lot of jewelry before I met Lee,’ said the deeply tanned Thorenson. ‘But as you’re with Lee, you gotta keep the image. And it’s fun. It’s become a company thing, a trademark for all his employees.’”14
What did the institution mean for the entertainer? In retrospect, Scott Thorson treated the enterprise cynically. He considered it mere ego stroking, a way to get rid of things without selling them, an opportunity to buy new things to “fill the gaping holes” created by the moving vans, and not least, a “tax shelter to end all tax shelters.” Controlled by a tax-exempt foundation, the museum became so profitable that, according to Thorson, the showman even tried to rearrange the management so as to tap this new source of revenue.15
Thorson missed other motives. Liberace himself offered a different take on the enterprise: “When you have something beautiful, it’s a shame not to share it.”16 As with all his ventures, the showman saw no contradiction in charging people to share his treasures. As always, he drew no distinctions between personal profit for himself and providing the folks with what they wanted. He knew what people liked; he liked pleasing them; he gave them what they wanted; they paid for the privilege; he turned a profit: everyone was happy. As with his performances, so with the museum.
The skeptical Rolling Stone writer mocked the museum as the “Church of Liberace” and the Liberace cult as “a fey sort of evangelism.” Minus the cynical language, Liberace himself agreed with the general outline of these sentiments. He always had a sense of the semi-sacred, quasi-religious dynamic of art, beauty, and show business. He acknowledged the totemic response of folks to glamour and specific objects of glamour. The museum institutionalized these values, even as it represented one more manifestation of his cultivation—and capitalization, literally—of his image and his fancied self.
There were other, subtler things at work in Liberace’s founding of the museum, too. Scott Thorson missed them. So did Rolling Stone. The piano player wanted to be remembered. The museum memorialized his life.
The showman himself conducted the first tours, and when asked to indicate his favorite display, he passed the Chopin and Liszt pianos, his numerous commendations and awards, the jewels and other treasures. He pointed to an unassuming cabinet that contained an ancient French horn. His father had died exactly two years before. Despite the fact that he’d had virtually nothing to do with his parent since 1941, his father’s old instrument still touched him.17 He was remembering his father, and, without children of his own, he did not want to be forgotten, himself. “I would like to be remembered as a kind and gentle soul, and as someone who made the world a little better place to live in because I had lived in it. “Obviously,” he continued, “I would like to
think that my music will be remembered. But I hope also that some of the beautiful things I have collected in my homes will be preserved. In fact, I have formed a trust so that my personal belongings and my homes will be shared by the world long after I have gone.”18
His trust—the Liberace Foundation—like the museum it sponsored, served various purposes, both magnanimous and venal. As Thorson implied, it did provide a major tax shelter, as indeed any such foundation does. No less, it reaffirmed and institutionalized some of the oldest, most generous impulses in the pianist’s character. If he had always loved children, and if he missed having his own, the foundation helped compensate. If he had always made a place in his performance for young and fresh talent, the foundation continued the tradition. If he longed to live after he was dead and to have future generations remember him fondly, again, his foundation addressed the longing. The trust operated the museum and generated fresh revenues, but the showman defined its chief purpose as that of assisting young musicians and struggling popular performers, in particular. In his lifetime, it sponsored contests for young artists and funded scholarships for these same folks. Long after his death, it still does.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 50
