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 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