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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 than 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.

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.