by Dave Hickey
Anyway, that was my folks. Donald and Daisy they weren’t, but neither were they Ward and June, so I was scared and covetous of my perks as an outlaw child. I didn’t know quite how to respond, and then, amazingly, I did. I told the truth. Donald Duck, I said, was not like my mom or dad. He was like my dog, Darwin the Beagle, excitable but lovable. Like, whenever people would walk by in front of our house, Darwin would just explode, squawking and baying and bouncing along behind the brick wall until they went past; and since the beach sidewalk in front of our house was a well-traveled thoroughfare, Darwin was one busy beagle. But when you yelled at him to stop, he just stopped and walked over to you, tilting his head and giving you that look so you had to give him a big hug.
The giant lady just looked at me, but not the way Darwin did. She didn’t move. She sat there like a statue and didn’t blink. She didn’t write anything down. She just looked, and now I was pissed, because I had given her a great answer. I knew this because, after thirteen grammar schools, I knew how to deliver a professional, precocious answer—how to build those extended point-by-point analogies that boosted your score on the tests they gave you when you came to a new school. But June Cleaver wasn’t buying. She turned over a piece of paper and asked me about the Road Runner cartoons. Did I like them? Yes, I did. Did I identify with the Road Runner or the Coyote? Again, I wanted to tell her that I didn’t identify with cartoons. They were just cartoons. But, in truth, I sympathized with the coyote, so I said, “Wile E. Coyote.”
Wrong! Clearly, wrong again, from the look on her face, but I was committed and I wanted to win, so I pressed on. I identified with the coyote, I said (like a pitiful slut), because he was always sending off in the mail for stuff from ACME that didn’t work, like when I sent off for that Lone Ranger Badge and Secret De-coder, and when it came, it was just this dumb piece of cardboard. Again, I considered this a very suave, precocious kid answer. But again, nothing. She didn’t write anything down, and I couldn’t believe it. I was flunking a quiz on cartoons! So I withdrew into sullen hostility. This was my standard response to intransigent adults. My little brother, on the other hand, being a little brother, invariably turned silky sycophant, so I have no doubt that a few hours later he was sitting there smiling away at June Cleaver, saying yes, our home was pretty much a Satanic cauldron.
I folded my arms and stuck out my lower lip. June turned the page and asked me if I liked Tom and Jerry. A testy nod from little Davey. And was I ever, perhaps, frightened by the violence? she asked emphatically. A moment of thought and then, with an edge of icy sarcasm that would have impressed even my mom, I said: “Oh yeah, I’m always terrified.” And she wrote this down! Thus, I discovered virtue’s invulnerability to contextual irony. And I couldn’t take it back! For years, I would replay this scene in my head, wishing that I had said something more sophisticated, like Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked!” Something like that, but I didn’t, damn it. I had never felt quite so betrayed by the adult world—until six months later when the “results” of this “study” hit the news nationwide.
Even Dave Garroway talked about it on The Today Show, and he was shocked, shocked. Children were being terrorized by cartoons! We trembled at Donald Duck in the role of an abusive parent. We read the Road Runner as an allegory of fear. And, worst of all, we were terrified and incited to violence by the aggressive carnage we witnessed in The Adventures of Tom and Jerry. And maybe so. Maybe some kids actually said this stuff, but speaking for the student body at Santa Monica Elementary I can assure you that we were mostly terrified and incited to violence by those enormous, looming ladies. They were real, not cartoons, and we knew the answers they wanted. But like good, brave little Americans, we were loathe to provide them, since they did not coincide with our considered opinions as citizens of this republic.
So, we did our best, you know. We told the truth and were betrayed—for our own good—and I am being perfectly candid when I tell you that this experience of betrayal was more traumatic and desolating to me than any representation I have ever encountered. All of the luxurious freedom and privacy I had felt in California dissolved in that moment. Because those ladies, in their presumption that we couldn’t distinguish representations from reality, treated us like representations, to be rendered transparent and read like children’s books. What’s more, we kids knew whereof we spoke. We held symposia on “issues of representation” at recess, and it turned out that everyone knew that if you ran over a cat with a lawn mower, the cat would be one bloody mess and probably die. Thus, when the much-beleaguered cartoon, Tom, was run over by a lawn mower and got only a shaved path up his back, we laughed.
It was funny because it wasn’t real! Which is simply to say that the intimidated, abused, and betrayed children at Santa Monica Elementary, at the dawn of the nineteen fifties, without benefit of Lacan or Lukács, managed to stumble upon an axiom of representation that continues to elude graduate students in Cultural Studies; to wit, that there is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented—that the responses elicited by representations are absolutely contingent upon their status as representations—and upon our knowledge of the difference between actuality and representation.
What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-mowered cats, exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting coyotes was so important to us. Today, it’s clear to me that I grew up in a generation of children whose first experience of adult responsibility involved the care of animals—dogs, cats, horses, parakeets—all of whom, we soon learned, were breathlessly vulnerable, if we didn’t take care. Even if we did take care, we learned, those creatures, whom we loved, might, in a moment, decline into inarticulate suffering and die—be gone forever. And we could do nothing about it. So the spectacle of ebullient, articulate, indestructible animals—of Donald Duck venting his grievances and Tom surviving the lawn mower—provided us a way of simultaneously acknowledging and alleviating this anxiety, since all of our laughter was premised on our new and terrible knowledge that the creatures given into our care dwelt in the perpetual shadow of silent suffering and extinction.
So, what we wanted to see represented were chatty, impervious animals. What we wanted to see, however, was that wall of vibrant, moving color, so we could experience the momentary redemption of its ahistorical, extra-linguistic, sensual embrace—that instantaneous, ravishing intimation of paradise that confirmed our lives in the moment. Which brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to the true occasion for this essay: a moment, a few days ago, when I looked around my living room and realized that, for once, the rotating exhibition of art I maintain there was perfectly harmonious. Even the painting sitting on the floor, leaning against the bookcase, worked. The whole room hummed with this elegant blend of pale, tertiary complements and rich, bluey reds. I even recognized the palette. Flipping open a large book on my coffee table, I found it displayed on page after page in the paintings of Pontormo.
I found this perfectly amazing. Since I never consciously “arrange” things, the accidental harmony spoke of some preconscious, developing logic in my eye, and I loved the idea that after years of living with color I would end up with Pontormo. Not such a bad place to be, I thought, but it spoke of more than that—since I realized in that moment that I had, indeed, spent a good portion of my life creating, discovering, or seeking out just such color-saturated atmospheres—in my glowing, scented room in the house below the Palisades, in art galleries, artist’s studios, museums, casinos, and cathedrals—at the old Criterion in Santa Monica, in the Bishop’s residence at Wurzburg, and on the beach in San Diego, standing with the water around my knees, peering through the surf spray at some extravagant orange and teal sunset that flashed back in the glassy curl. Even as I considered this, another such spectacle, the Las Vegas Strip, was blazing away right outside my windows.
I already knew, of course, that the condition of being ravished by color was p
robably my principle disability as a writer, since color for a writer is, finally, less an attribute of language than a cure for it. But it was a disability that afflicted most of the writers I loved, so I took comfort in it—and in the thought of Flaubert in North Africa, of Djuna Barnes in the salons of Berlin, of Fitzgerald in St. Tropez, DeQuincey in his opium dreams, Stendhal in Florence, Ruskin and Henry James in Venice, and even Thomas Jefferson, my old companion in self-indulgence, who was physically discombobulated by the gardens at Versailles. In my own life, I could pinpoint the moment I came into this knowledge. When I was very young, my grandparents had a little flower shop in south Fort Worth, the centerpiece of which was a large walk-in refrigerator for storing fresh flowers. The refrigerator had glass windows and doors. The first time I stepped into it, closed the door behind me, and stood there amidst all that color, coolness, and scent, with the light streaming in, I was like Dorothy transported to Oz. I knew why I hated Texas, and this was something important to know.
So, I liked hanging around the flower shop and riding in the delivery truck with my grampa as he made the rounds of hospitals and funeral homes. I liked the way sick people always smiled at the flowers, and I even liked setting up the sprays of flowers around the coffins with dead people in them—which is probably why I felt like I had died and gone to heaven when we moved to California. Because there, at the flower shop, as in those Saturday-morning cartoons, color always occurred in league with and in opposition to suffering, negation, and death. As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue—and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.
The branch upon which the blossom hangs may be long or short, rough or smooth, strong or weak according to our expectations, but the redness of the blossom is irrevocable, and the word “red” tells us next to nothing about it. There are thousands of colors in the world and only a few hundred words to describe them, and these include similitudes like teal and peach and turquoise. So, the names we put on colors are hardly more than proper names, like Smith or Rodriguez, denoting vast, swarming, diverse families of living experience. Thus, when color signifies anything, it always signifies, as well, a respite from language and history—a position from which we may contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment—as we kids in Santa Monica contemplated the death of puppies in the embrace of cartoon rainbows.
Moreover, when art abandons color, as it did in the nineteen seventies, it can only recede into the domain of abjection—into the protocols of language, history, and representation. The consequence of this (which I suffered at the hands of June Cleaver) is that all discussion of art under such régimes begins at a position of linguistic regress that renders invisible the complex dialogue between what we want to see and what we want to see represented. In a more civilized world, the question I would have been asked as a child was not: “Do you like animated cartoons?” but “Do you prefer animated cartoons in color or in black-and-white?” I know what my answer would have been, but if I had been asked, I would have had a running start. I would have begun wondering, right then, why I liked cartoons in color and would have known, long before now, why I did. Instead, I moped around feeling betrayed by unction, punishing myself for not coming up with something as cool as Claude Rains in response to it. I am still shocked, shocked.
A RHINESTONE AS BIG AS THE RITZ
The balcony of my apartment faces west toward the mountains, overlooking the Las Vegas Strip; so, every evening when the sky is not overcast, a few minutes after the sun has gone down, the mountains turn black, the sky above them turns this radical plum/rouge, and the neon logos of The Desert Inn, The Stardust, Circus Circus, The Riviera, The Las Vegas Hilton, and Vegas World blaze forth against the black mountains—and every night I find myself struck by the fact that, while The Strip always glitters with a reckless and undeniable specificity against the darkness, the sunset smoldering out above the mountains, every night and without exception, looks bogus as hell. It’s spectacular, of course, and even, occasionally, sublime (if you like sublime), but to my eyes that sunset is always fake—as flat and gaudy as a Barnett Newman and just as pretentious.
Friends of mine who visit watch this light show with different eyes. They prefer the page of the landscape to the text of the neon. They seem to think it’s more “authentic.” I, on the other hand, suspect that “authenticity” is altogether elsewhere—that they are responding to nature’s ability to mimic the sincerity of a painting, that the question of the sunset and The Strip is more a matter of one’s taste in duplicity. One either prefers the honest fakery of the neon or the fake honesty of the sunset—the undisguised artifice of culture or the cultural construction of “authenticity”—the genuine rhinestone, finally, or the imitation pearl. Herein I take my text for the tragicomedy of Liberace and the anomaly of his amazing museum.
As its emblem, I cite my favorite objet in his collection—its keystone, in fact—the secret heart and sacred ark of Las Vegas itself: “The World’s Largest Rhinestone,” 115,000 karats revolving in a circular vitrine, dazzling us all with its plangent banality. It weighs 50.6 pounds and is fabricated of pure lead glass. It was manufactured by Swarovski Gem Company, the rhinestone people of Vienna (where else?), and presented to Liberace as a token of appreciation for his patronage, for the virtual fields of less substantial rhinestones he had acquired from them over the years to endow his costumes, his cars, his furniture, and his pianos with their ersatz spiritual dazzle. In my view, this was money well spent, for, within the confines of the Liberace Museum, dazzle they certainly do.
Within these three large showrooms, spaced around a shopping center on East Tropicana Boulevard, dazzle rules. Everything fake looks bona fide. Everything that Liberace created or caused to be created as a function of his shows or of his showmanship (his costumes, his cars, his jewelry, his candelabra, his pianos) shines with a crisp, pop authority. Everything created as a consequence of his endeavor (like the mega-rhinestone) exudes a high-dollar egalitarian permission—while everything he purchased out of his rising slum-kid appetite for “Old World” charm and ancien régime legitimacy (everything “real,” in other words) looks unabashedly phoney.
Thus, in the Liberace Museum, to paraphrase Ad Reinhardt, authenticity is something you bump into while you’re backing up to look at something that interests you. And there is much of interest there, because Liberace was a very interesting man. He did interesting things. When I think of him today, I like to imagine him in his Palm Springs home sitting before his most “priceless antique”: a full-tilt rococo, inlaid and ormolued Louis XV desk once owned by Czar Nicholas II. He is wearing his Vegas-tailored “Czar Nicholas” uniform. (He said he never wore his costumes off-stage, but you know he did.) He is making out his Christmas list. (He was a fool for Christmas.) There is a handsome young “hillbilly” (as his mother called them) lounging nearby.
In this scene, everything is “real”: The entertainer, the “hillbilly,” the white, furry shag carpet, the Vegas-Czarist uniform, the red ink on the Christmas list, even Palm Springs is real. Everything is real except for that silly desk, which is fake just for his owning it, just for his wanting to own it—fake, finally, for his not understanding his own radicality. He had, after all, purchased the 1962 Rolls Royce Phantom V Landau out in the driveway (one of seven ever made), then made it disappear—let it dissolve into a cubist dazzle of reflected desert by completely covering it with hundreds of thousands of tiny mirrored mosaic tiles—in a gesture comparable to Rauschenberg erasing a de Kooning. But Lee didn’t get that.
He was an innocent, a pop naïf, but he was more t
han that. Most prominently, Liberace was, without doubt and in his every facet, a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice, whose only flaw was a penchant for imitation pearls—a certifiable neon icon, a light unto his people, with an inexplicable proclivity for phony sunsets. Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege; Liberace cultivated them both in equal parts and often to disastrous effect. But if, by his reactions—his antiques and his denials—he reinforced a tattered and tatty tradition of “Old World” respectability, then by his actions—his shows and his “showmanship” (that showed what could not, at that time, be told)—he demonstrated to m-m-m-my generation the power of subversive theatricality to make manifest attitudes about sex and race and politics that could not, just for the mo’, luv, be explicitly avowed.