Air Guitar

by Dave Hickey

  In Liberace’s case, they were never avowed. He never came out of the closet; he lived in it like the grand hypocrite that he was, and died in it, of a disease he refused to acknowledge. But neither, in fact, did Wilde come out of it, and he, along with Swinburne, and their Belle Époque cronies, probably invented the closet as a mode of subversive public/private existence. Nor did Noel Coward come out of it. He tricked it up with the smoke and mirrors of leisure-class ennui and cloaked it in public-school double entendre. What Liberace did do, however, was Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his “open secret.”

  In-crowd innuendo was not Liberace’s game; like a black man in black-face, he took it to the limit and reveled in the impertinence of his pseudo-masquerade. He would come striding onto the stage in a costume that was, in his description, “just one tuck short of drag.” He would stop under the big light, do a runway turn, and invite the audience to “Hey, look me over!” Then, flinging his arms upward in a fountain gesture, like a demented Polish-Italian diva, he would shoot his hip, wink, and squeal, “I hope ya’ like it! You paid for it!” And the audience members would signify their approval and their complicity by their applause. They not only liked the dress, they were happy to have bought it for him. So, unlike Coward, whose veiled naughtiness remained opaque to those not “in the know,” Liberace’s closet was as democratically invisible as the emperor’s new clothes, and just as revolutionary. Everybody “got it.” But nobody said it.

  Even my grandfather got it, for Chris’sake. I can remember sitting before the flickering screen of an old Emerson at my grandparents’ house, watching Liberace, which was one of my grandmother’s “programs.” At one particularly saccharine moment in the proceedings my grandfather leaned forward, squinting through his cataract lenses at the tiny screen.

  “A bit like cousin Ed, ain’t he,” my grandfather said. Getting it but not saying it.

  “Yes, he is,” my grandmother said, with an exasperated sniff. “And just as nice a young man, I’m sure.” She got it, too. She didn’t say it, either. And my point here is that, if my grandmother and grandfather (no cosmopolitans they) got it, if they perceived in Wladziu Valentino Liberace’s performance, in his longing gaze into the television camera, a covert acknowledgment of his own sexuality—and if they, country people to the core, covertly accepted it in him, then “the closet” as a social modality was, even then, on the verge of obsolescence. All that remained was for Liberace and the people who accepted him to say the words. But for the most part they never did and some, recalcitrant to the last, never have.

  Those who got it and didn’t accept it, however, never stopped yelping. Liberace’s career from first to last was beleaguered by snickers, slimy innuendo, and plain invective with regard to his sexuality . . . and his bad taste. The two, perhaps not surprisingly, seem so inextricably linked in attacks on his persona that you get the feeling they are, somehow, opposite sides of the same coin. At any rate, he was so regularly attacked for dramatizing his sexual deviation while suppressing the formal deviations of Chopin and Liszt, you get the impression that, had he purveyed a little more “difficult” art, he would have been cut a little more slack with regard to his behavior.

  He chose not to do either, and, as a consequence, if Liberace had been a less self-confident figure, a more fragile and self-pitying soul, it would be all too easy now to cast him in the loser’s role, as a tragic and embattled sexual outlaw. But beneath the ermines and rhinestones, Wladziu Liberace was a tough cookie and a high-roller—a positive thinker and an American hero. He came to the table to take away the money, so he cashed in the invective and, in his own immortal phrase, “cried all the way to the bank.” His response to the virulent accusations that dogged his progress was always impudent passive-aggression: aggrieved, tearful, categorical denials followed immediately by further and even more extravagant behavior. So, by the end, he was gliding through the showplaces of the Western World with his handsome young “hillbillies” in tow, wearing that outrageous denial like an impregnable invisible shield. Like an old bootlegger smuggling legal booze, he continued to brandish the hypocrisies that he himself had helped make obsolete, just for the thrill of it.

  Honesty is nice, they say, but transgression is sexier. So, in his final days, he must, like Wilde, have decried “the decay of lying.” It was what he did best, and over the years he took some shots for it—the best and most lucrative of which he took on his first tour of the British Isles in 1956, at the peak of his television and movie celebrity. In the autumn of that year, he and his manager, Seymour Heller, decided to skim a little cash off his brimming European popularity and so set sail, with Mom and brother George in tow, on the Queen Mary for an initial round of engagements in London. His reception, as they say in show business, both fulfilled his wildest dreams and confirmed his worst suspicions.

  He was greeted at Southampton by a squadron of press and a gaggle of cheering fans all of whom trooped aboard the chartered “Liberace Special” for the train ride to Waterloo. There, his reception, in volume and hysteria, outstripped anything hitherto experienced in the category of pop celebrity welcomings. An unnerving crush of little old ladies and teenage bobby-soxers screamed, giggled, fainted, waved signs, and scattered paper rose-petals (thoughtfully provided) in his path. Chauffeurs and footmen bowed as his party approached the pair of Daimlers rented to “whisk them to their hotel.” Then, as he was about to step into one of the limousines, a reporter shouted above the crowd,

  “Do you have a normal sex life?”

  Liberace, looking blandly back over his shoulder, said, “Yes. Do you?”

  That night at the Royal Festival Hall, he was greeted by hostile pickets outside (“Down with Liberace!”) and by a standing room audience inside that reacted to his every remark with enthusiastic shrieks and shouts and responded to every number with thunderous and unruly cheers. The press reaction, needless to say, was uniformly uncomplimentary—ranging from bored, Cowardesque dismissal, a wave of the napkin, “Take it away, please, it’s corked,” to hostility that bordered on panic. The masterpiece of this latter category was produced by Cassandra (William Conner) for the tabloid Daily Mirror, with a national circulation of 4.5 million. I quote it at length here because it is world-class screed—but also because I would like to think that, in its little way, it changed the world.

  He is the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want. I spoke to . . . men on this newspaper who have met every celebrity coming from America for the past thirty years. They said that this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12, 1921 . . .

  He reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho. Without doubt, he is the biggest sentimental vomit of all time. Slobbering over his mother, winking at his brother, and counting the cash at every second, this superb piece of calculating candy floss has an answer for every situation.

  Nobody since Aimee Sample McPherson has purveyed a bigger, richer and more varied slag heap of lilac-colored hokum. Nobody anywhere has made so much money out of high speed piano play with the ghost of Chopin gibbering at every note.

  There must be something wrong with us that our teenagers longing for sex and our middle-aged matrons fed up with sex alike should fall for such a sugary mountain of jingling claptrap wrapped up in such a preposterous clown.

  Liberace would ultimately sue the Mirror for impugning his manhood and, all evidence to the contrary, win £40,000 in damages. But what intrigues me about Cassandra’s invective is the possibility that it just might mark the official beginning of the “Sixties,” as we call them. Because Libe
race had this great idea. He had touched a jangling nerve, and I like to imagine young John and Paul up in Liverpool, young Mick and Keith down in London, little David Bowie, and the soon-to-be Elton John, in their cloth caps, all full of ambition and working-class anger, looking up from their Daily Mirrors with blinking lightbulbs in talk balloons above their heads.

  At this point, I would like to think, the rhetoric of closet homosexuality as practiced by Wilde, Coward, and Liberace is on the verge of being appropriated for a broader attack upon the status quo, demonstrating the fact that it was never, in the hands of its masters, a language of disguise, but a rhetoric of deniable disclosure—a language of theatrical transgression that had its own content. This strategy of theatrical subversion would eventually resonate throughout the entire culture and would end, I suggest, very near where it began with Wilde, whose “effeminacy” was regarded as indicative of his dissent and cultural disaffection, rather than the other way around.

  By the time we reach the watershed marked by the heterosexual drag of The New York Dolls, I think, this re-reversal has taken place in American popular culture. Sexuality is no longer a mere matter of biology and whim. It means something. The battle for sexual tolerance has moved on to other, more political, battlefields, and, in view of this transformation, I think we can regard the Liberace Museum as having some general historical significance beyond the enshrining of a particularly exotic entertainer. Its artifacts, genuine rhinestones, and imitation pearls alike mark an American moment—the beginning of the end of the “open secret.” So the cars and the costumes and the silly pianos might be seen as more than just the memorabilia of an exotic saloon singer: because they are, in fact, the tools with which Liberace took the “rhetoric of the closet” public, demonstrated the power of its generous duplicity, and changed the world.

  I would like to think that Liberace knew this, somehow, in some way, as he stood in the sunny parking lot of his Las Vegas shopping center on Easter Sunday, 1979, with the mayor and other dignitaries in attendance, and opened his amazing museum. Maybe it’s sentimental of me, but I would like to think that, as he stood there, the guy had some sense of his own authenticity. The reporters noted that he was wearing a pink, blue, and yellow checkered jacket with matching yellow shirt and slacks. A large gold cross hung around his neck and six diamond rings adorned his fingers.

  “Welcome to the Liberace Museum!” he cried to the assembled multitude. “I don’t usually wear diamonds in the afternoon, but this is a special occasion!”

  THE BIRTH OF THE BIG, BEAUTIFUL ART MARKET

  In the beginning was the Car, and the Car was with Art, and the Car was Art. Thus it was in the American boondocks during the nineteen fifties and sixties. Especially for me. For me, cars were not just art, they were everything. None of the schools I attended (as we gypsied around the American West) were ever that great, nor ever quite real to me. So such secondary education as I received, I received in the physical culture of cars. Wherever I found myself, kids bought them, talked them, drew them, and dreamed them—hopped them up and dropped them down—cruised them on the drag and dragged them on the highway, and I did, too. Thus, of necessity, I learned car math and car engineering, car poli-sci and car economics, car anthropology and car beaux-arts.

  Even my first glimmerings of higher theory arose out of that culture: the rhetoric of image and icon, the dynamics of embodied desire, the algorithms of style change, and the ideological force of disposable income. All these came to me couched in the lingua franca of cars, arose out of our perpetual exegesis of its nuanced context and iconography. And it was worth the trouble, because all of us who partook of this discourse, as artists, critics, collectors, mechanics, and citizens, understood its politico-aesthetic implications, understood that we were voting with cars—for a fresh idea of democracy, a new canon of beauty, and a redeemed ideology of motion. We also understood that we were dissenting when we customized them and hopped them up—demonstrating against the standards of the republic and advocating our own refined vision of power and loveliness.

  My own endeavors in this regard were devoted to a black 1946 Chevrolet Coupe, a coral-and-cream 1955 Ford Victoria, a turquoise-and-white 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, and a bronze-lacquered 1937 Chevrolet pick-up, dago-raked with a Chevy 357 under its pin-striped hood. I bought these cars in sequence, trading one in on the next and paying out the balance with money I earned from before-and-after-school jobs—and this was important, because the guys whose folks bought them their cars tended to be dilettantes, were less inclined to know their vehicles intimately, to tear them down and put them back together at a whim, to adjust and refine their operation and iconography.

  We true devotees aspired to full consciousness of our rides. There was no aspect of their technology and design whose historicity we did not comprehend, whose efficacy we had not analyzed, whose aesthetics we had not contemplated. We knew these cars and knew what they meant; and what they meant, over and above everything, was freedom. But freedom is a gem with many facets: So we pondered the halting gurgle of big V-8s with racing camshafts, the rhetoric of shrouded headlights, the ethics of “cherry” restorations, and the proprieties of altering a vehicle’s profile by chopping, channeling, lowering, and raking.

  Thus, years before I had ever seen an official "work of art," I could claim an evolved aesthetic. I could have told you, if you had asked, that I was neither minimalist nor formalist. I did not hold with the suppression of text and ornament in order to create a blank, reflective sleeve of aerodynamic color. Nor was I a modernist, in the architectural sense, devoted to stripping away the cosmetic surface of a vehicle to reveal its glamorized functional apparatus. Nor was I an expressionist beguiled by Gaudi lead-work and gaudy flame jobs. Why? Because I did not want to drive a singular, autonomous work of art. I wanted to dissent, not defect.

  So I was always looking for something fresh and disconcerting. To borrow Edward Ruscha’s expression, I wanted to achieve “Huh? Wow!” (as opposed to “Wow! Huh?”). I wanted that subtle jolt of visual defamiliarization as a prelude to delight. So I liked appropriating décor, subtly redesigning details and trim to reconstitute the car’s composition and profile. I liked enhancing dumb stuff that other guys just instinctively trashed, like the cartouche on the trunk lid. And I loved tiny pin-stripes that nuanced the highlights, and big engines with no high-end acoustics, just that low rumble bubbling on the edge of audibility, like my Fender bass run through a concert stack. My optimum set of wheels, then, looked and sounded like a high-performance production model from a company you never fucking heard of—as if I had walked into a Dave dealership one afternoon and bought it off the showroom floor—and now you wanted to buy one, too. That was my idea of cool.

  As a consequence of this apprenticeship, my inadvertent discovery of the commercial art world of the nineteen sixties felt just like coming home. In a twinkling, I was back where I never had been. Andy Warhol’s customized Marilyns and Edward Ruscha’s standardized Standard Stations confirmed my aesthetic, of course, but most importantly, I knew the whole gig—the entire business of dreaming and drawing and talking and trading and buying and selling—the deep rituals of sitting around in a big room filled with disconcerting objects, chatting about them, looking at them, privately balancing your desire and your vision of America against your bank account.

  There were structural differences, of course, the principle one being that, since production was disseminated, the custom-model came first in this art economy. It was clear, however, that the large institutions of the art world, like the Whitney Museum uptown and the art school out at Yale, functioned like General Motors, establishing brand-names, institutional agendas, and hierarchies of value out of materials provided by the custom market. I could live with this. I didn’t care about it, but I could live with it, as long as Richard Bellamy, in his dumpy little gallery downtown, continued to function like George Barris in his Kustom Kar Shop out in Los Angeles—promoting rebellion, proposing outrageous reconfigurat
ions and different ideas of how the world should look.

  So, this new world was exciting to me, not least of all because it meant that I hadn’t squandered my youth, that I was bringing something to the table. I remember sitting at a table, in a bar down in El Paso, with Luis Jiménez, one afternoon in the late sixties, saying just that, marveling at the fact that, for dudes like us, who had grown up in the protean discourse of American cars, the permutations of American art from Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to Frank Stella’s protractors were virtual child’s play. What we did not understand, as we sat there smugly sipping our Dos Equis, was that the age of incarnate ideology was over and the Protestants had won.

  If we had thought about it from the perspective of old car freaks, however, we would have known and surely could have predicted that the General Motors of the art world—the museums and universities—would ultimately seek to alleviate their post-market status and control the means of production. They would soon succeed in doing this by revisions in the tax code, by the expansion of public patronage and the proliferation of graduate education—all of which eroded the distinction between art history and art now—and eroded, as well, the even more critical distinction between art and the “liberal arts.” Within ten years, the art world was well on its way to becoming a transnational bureaucracy. Everybody had a job description and a résumé. Junior professors (!) began explaining to me that non-portable, non-object art had arisen during the nineteen sixties as a means of “conceptualizing” the practice of art in response to the increasing “commodification” and “commercialization” of the art object during the postwar era.