With the ambiguity of the object, the song suggests an imaginary love, unconsummated, indeed, unconsummatable in the transformation of the physical world to a world of imagination or ideas. From Plato to Walt Whitman, Thomas Mann, and Jean Genet, such idealizing of desire has figured centrally, even critically, in homoerotics. It involves very much the same process in heterosexuality—as in Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, or Faulkner’s Caddy, although the male-male form tends to multiply the effect. In ancient Athens, a man spied the beautiful boy, the kalos, in full knowledge that the boy would thicken, coarsen, age, and die. This beloved—the eremenos—is then frozen in a vision of youth in the imagination of the lover, the erastes: the boy becomes both the source and object of art and imagination—the Boy. This defines the most fundamental component of Socratic or Platonic love: the idealization of love, love that cannot, indeed, that must not be consummated. The language Leo Bersani uses to dissect Proust’s relation with Albertine confirms the homosexual reading of “I’ll Be Seeing You” in this visually idealized regard: “Albertine was always within Marcel; but he becomes aware of her presence only when she disappears from his field of vision as a desired object and desiring subject.”7
High-flown language of perception, treatises on epistemology, and academic discourses on reality and aesthetics were equally foreign to the piano player from Milwaukee. He left no evidence that any such theoretical understanding contributed to his favoring the graceful lyrics of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” He betrayed even less evidence of having any theoretical conceptions of homosexuality. Even so, Liberace’s act suggests a clear, well-formed aesthetic. Still further, his autobiography offers a practical theory of aesthetics that mirrors what he actually did in performance. Both sources confirm the artistic themes embedded in his song about vision, seeing, and sight. Not least, some of this touches on themes of homosexuality, as well.
First of all, everything about Liberace’s career emphasizes the centrality of seeing, light, and vision in performance. Was his theme song about “seeing”? So was his act. Throughout his career, he often repeated the admonition that performers should always remember the importance of the “show” of show business. As he wrote in 1972, “Too many young performers have forgotten that the most important part of show business is not the second word, it’s the first. Without the show there’s no business.”8 This notion lies at the heart of his appeal. Seeing and showing, however, existed on several levels in his career.
On the most primitive level, show relates to seeing, to giving spectators something to look at: providing an “audience”—hearers—something to see. As a pianist, of course, Liberace’s primary appeal was not to sight at all but to hearing, yet he believed people needed a visual object in a performance. As a pianist at a large, static piano, his impulse toward the visual posed a critical problem. He solved the problem in a variety of ways in the course of his career, ultimately making his instrument only one element in what amounted to pure spectacle. From the beginning, however, he was critically concerned with visuals, visuality, sight lines, light, and color as essential elements of entertainment and the art process.
When he was still a supper-club performer, he made lighting a vital part of his act. Repeatedly, critics singled out this aspect of his performance for special praise; it indicated his professionalism and fastidiousness, they all agreed. He was his own lighting director, and it was in the process of calculating this part of his act that he joked about mistaking millionaire Howard Hughes for a lighting flunky during his first engagement at Las Vegas’s Last Frontier in 1944.9 As he cast about for new avenues to celebrity after 1948, he tested and repudiated radio. The absence of the visual element played its part in eliciting his skepticism. When he moved to television, the problems of performance changed, but his emphasis on visuals did not. The medium demanded new techniques for being seen. He required that the camera focus on him, but he knew his static instrument offered little to show. He resolved the problem variously: by exaggerating his hand movements, offering visual surprises in the form of costume changes, using two cameras for split images, and the like. The dramatic black silhouette that always opened the show indicated another aspect of his concern. In this regard, lighting and dramatic lighting were virtually synonymous to him.
When he changed the venue to public concerts for thousands, he came up with still new resolutions for problems of visuals. By the time of his Hollywood Bowl performances in 1952 and 1954, he had developed an articulate theory of performance as a chiefly visual activity—a show. When he first went to California in the late forties, he had tromped through the great outdoor amphitheater and had stood on the stage imagining what it would be like to play there. He made two commitments: One, he promised himself “that someday I’d be on that stage again, but playing the piano with all the seats occupied.” Two, he determined that he would be seen. Being seen, in turn, involved all sorts of corollary issues and problems that illuminate his practical aesthetics.
The Hollywood Bowl sat over twenty thousand people, and Liberace’s first visual problem was that of how to be seen at all from the upper ranks of seats. As he surveyed the amphitheater before the performance, the most distant audience members were almost indistinguishable as individuals. It worked the other way, too: “It was perfectly clear to everybody that if I sat there, wearing the conventional black tails of the concert circuit, with a whole orchestra behind me in black tuxedos, I’d just blend into the ‘black-ground’ and lose my identity.” He did not lose his identity. He had his tailor make him the famous white evening clothes, and he appeared in them on that sellout evening. Everybody saw him.10 While to those poor patrons on the highest benches of the Hollywood Bowl Liberace might have been only a white speck on the stage on July 19, 1952, he was still visually apparent. Photographs from the farthest reaches of the Bowl reveal that he was indeed visible. In his second appearance on September 4, two years later, he implemented still other innovations in his visual presentation. As the Los Angeles Times put it: “A Liberace show puts a great strain on electrical equipment. . . . The lights go up and down and change color so often.” And, the critic added, the showman used “enough spotlights to forestall an air raid.”11 By 1954, the lighting itself had become a part of the spectacle; it was no longer the means of being seen but an end in itself.
The initial Bowl performance also introduced the other, imaginative kinds of seeing foreshadowed in the visionary “you” of his theme song. Liberace not only made sure that he would be seen physically, but he contrived to inspire the imagination with a discrete image or persona. His costume that evening triggered this other sort of vision. It excited the mind’s eye. Liberace knew the power of apparition was far more potent than mere physiological seeing. His fancy costume at the Bowl allowed him to be seen practically or physically, but, more critically, it gave him an “identity”—as he himself called it—that lived in the fancy of his fans. He created, in effect, a powerful impression by making or remaking a visual persona for himself that his devotees could conjure even in the absence of actual vision. As in the lyrics of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” this image in the mind is alive, even when the actual object has vanished, or, from the point of view of the spectators in the upper reaches of the Hollywood Bowl, is mostly a white speck.
Appreciation of the overlap between these two kinds of seeing made up the basis of Liberace’s act: the real seeing and the vision or mental image he inspired. “I didn’t get dressed like this to go unnoticed” was one of his standard lines repeated over and over to countless audiences over the years. Just so, he always instructed his fans “to look me over.” It never failed to draw knowing and familiar laughter. He calculated appearance to produce in the audience the effect of Beatrice on Dante; his image triggered the audiences’ fantasy, and the adoring fans then wrote their own plots and drew their own pictures in their imaginations.
Liberace knew what he was doing in all this. “Liberace is a creation,” he himself insisted, using, approp
riately, the third person. “Little by little he was created by me and by the public who accepted him. He’s a combination of music and personality and a certain amount of shock value. It’s a fantasy. I’m a one-man Disneyland. It all sort of developed gradually [but] none of it is accidental. I’m always trying to see how far I can go.”12 Critics acknowledged the truth. “Liberace is primarily a visual showman,” wrote one.13 “Liberace was a visual rather than an acoustic phenomenon,” confirmed another.14 “For Liberace, it’s what you see that counts,” echoed a third.15 “Liberace has entrenched himself in the minds of his public as ‘the’ pop keyboard artist through masterful application of a simple formula: Wrap a variety of music in visuals,” elaborated still another. “His slick well-paced special must have satisfied his fans’ expectations. He epitomized his own ‘Mr. Showmanship’ sobriquet.”16
Other elements of sight, seeing, light, and show were critical to the entertainer’s career. Thus, he identified show and show business in part as “showing off.” He interpreted showmanship as caricature. He employed the same techniques of exaggeration as did eighteenth-century Italian comic opera, with its pot bellies, putty noses, and overblown gestures. It was himself, however, that he caricatured. The idea was not only the visuals of performance, but bold-stroke visuals. Liberace developed this aspect of his act into a very refined art, however unsubtle the final product may have been. Long before he turned to showy costumes, he was using movement to capture people’s visual attention and to make—literally—an impression. As a matter of actually playing the piano, his grand gestures—like his exuberantly lifted hands at a piece’s conclusion, or his racy, signature arpeggios—were hardly necessary musically; they were, however, thoroughly appropriate both as a means of adding a visual component to the music, and, no less, as a way of “showing off” and caricaturing piano playing. They turned an auditory experience, otherwise defined, into a visual act or performance. His bejeweled fingers served the same purpose of concentrating eyes upon his hands and focusing visual energy on his playing.
For all his emphasis upon visuals, Liberace actually possessed a more elaborate idea of sensual perception, of which sight was only the queen element. “It’s not easy to be glamorous, the image that I always strive for, when nobody can really see you,” he wrote. “To enjoy the clothes I wear the audience must be close enough so that their eyes can almost feel the texture of the fabric.”17 To touch with the eyes, with a combination of the senses: the notion constitutes another critical basis of Liberace’s ideal of both performance and success.
His basic idea of performance, then, was appealing not only to sight as well as hearing, but exciting the senses in general. He wanted, in short, to give a sensuous performance. Sight was the easiest sense to access. Although his dancing acolytes failed to swing incense burners in his act, smell was the only sensory perception the performer did not exploit. Ritualized touching, for example, constituted an important element of all his performances. “People like to touch a performer,” he wrote. “In fact, touching has become a sort of cult among some people.” He always invited people onto the stage to feel his clothes, handle his jewelry, and touch his hands. At the end of his performances, too, he allowed kisses, hugs, handshakes, and caresses. He especially liked playing in the round because of its physical access to the audience. “I’ve been doing it almost since in-the-round theater was revived,” he said. “I found the round stage made it easier for me to make contact with my audience. . . . I find it much easier to bridge the gap between performer and audience when there are no foot lights, no orchestra pit to divide us. And it can be done without losing any of the excitement I love.”18
His ideas about the senses and about sensuousness dominated his act. They also help account for his otherwise curious inclusion of a discussion of the deaf and the blind in his autobiography. While the entertainer was kind, compassionate, and sympathetic, especially to the young, his inclusion of references to the problems of the deaf, blind, and mute suggests his larger appreciation of the role of sensory understanding as a part of his life—and act. “Can you imagine what it must be like deprived of those three senses, isolated in a dark, silent world, unable to say what you think, ask for what you want? The thought makes me shudder.”19 These handicaps, however, precipitated a call to those who had them to use their senses fully. The world overflows with things of wonder, he testified, “and it is almost sacrilegious not to enjoy them to the fullest. No one in the world has any right, ever, to be bored, because it’s true that the best things in life are free: Sight, sound and everything those senses open to us.”20
Most critically of all, behind his glorification of the senses lay a coherent theory of beauty and aesthetics. He expressed it in part, at least, through his discussion of royalty. The nobility galvanized his imagination. Russian czars and French kings fascinated him. He made trophies of imperial possessions, like the elaborate ormolu-mounted desk that had belonged to Nicholas II, and he numbered among the great triumphs of his life his command performances in Britain, and actually meeting the queen and the queen mother. “I love pomp and ceremony . . . heads of state . . . Presidents, Kings, Queens, Princes. I’ve played for three of our Presidents, Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon,” he boasted in 1973. “I’ve entertained for Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and for everyone in the British Royal Family. These are the kind of people I respect most deeply. I admire what they represent and admire the way they go about representing it. . . . For they inject beauty and pageantry into the lives of those who yearn for something better . . . those who can only dream. It’s showmanship of a very high order. The changing of the guard, the Beefeaters’ old uniforms, the velvet, fur-trimmed robes of state, the impractical but luxurious quality of everything . . . the gold.”21
Much closer to home, literally, religion, at least Roman Catholic religious practices, filled the same function. Indeed, he followed his celebration of royalty and royal pomp immediately with a paean to Catholicism, religious ceremony, and visual splendor as the basis of the church’s institutional power and influence. It was all about beauty and awe, he wrote. Catholicism’s appeal lay in “the mystery of flickering candles, the glory of statuary and art,” the spectacle of the Sistine Chapel. As with royalty, he insisted, the church’s power arose from the knowledge that people need “escape into another kind of world.”22
The simple nave of West Milwaukee’s St. Florian’s was hardly grand; still, this was no chaste Presbyterian chamber or ascetic Methodist hall. Nor did the officiators at the mass resemble the ministers of these other faiths in their black robes or business suits—not to mention the parishioner-priests of the Society of Friends who wore everyday street clothes each First Day. The ceremonies at the neighbor parish church in West Milwaukee offered something profoundly different. Tinkling bells echoed against St. Florian’s stone and marble to herald the miracle of the Eucharist. Attended by acolytes, priests in brilliant vestments swung fragrant censers and chanted ancient liturgies by the mystical light of tapers and votive candles. Liberace had it right. This was show and brilliant spectacle indeed, even in its provincial manifestations.
Liberace was profoundly Catholic in his world view, profoundly Roman Catholic. His ideas of religion set him at odds with the theological precepts and ritual practices of Protestantism. His Catholicism provided, just so, an additional source of the WASPy skepticism of his act. While disquieting to the American Judeo-Protestant mind, his views opened him to a much broader understanding of both religious impulses and human nature than were available to the ascetic, rationalized puritanism of the American establishment. He assumed the mythic validity of the ritualization, ceremony, visual splendor, and hierarchy of the mass. His own act provided something of a secular version of the Catholic festival.
His act echoed other elements of traditional religion in its ritualistic repetition, for example. For all the novelties of his performance, he also offered what amounted to a ceremonial show, complete with ritualiz
ed jokes. As a function of the ritual, he appeared; he showed himself, old but ever fresh. As much as the eucharistic celebration, the performance was an unnatural act that broke completely with the routines of daily life. This secular communion was as real as the mass, and Liberace himself was the Eucharist. As Look magazine observed as early as 1954, “In these paradoxical times, he doesn’t give concerts. He gives, instead, himself.”23
The eucharistic image fits. In 1981, the writer Michael Segell wrote a caustic essay in Rolling Stone about Liberace and religion. With passing references to “the Church of Liberace,” Segell sneered that the performer “founded a fey sort of evangelism that celebrates schmaltz, glitter, and vanity.” The writer mocked the star’s declaration of religion “as a form of show business,” and show business, in turn, as a manifestation of the religious impulse. The showman had instructed Segell that people need “to worship whether it’s religion, an entertainer, or a movie star.”24 Another writer for the equally skeptical Village Voice made similar connections a little later. “We entered the Temple of the Holy Most, longing for a vision of excess,” he began his review of the showman’s last appearance at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1986.
Liberace’s act makes of commodity fetishism a quasi-religious experience. He gives emptiness form—specifically, a crust of rhinestones and fluff. He just can’t overdo his overdoing, since a stage can’t hold the surfeit we long for. Liberace understands this. That’s why he began the evening with a film—sort of a ‘Lifestyles of the Glutted and Flaunting It” let loose in his Las Vegas home—so we could see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel re-created over his bed, the piano keyboards woven into rugs and bedsheets and painting along the pool, the mirror-lined rooms choked with a veritable Versailles of gilded gewgaws. Embarrassment of riches? Ain’t no such thing.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 39