LIBERACE BEYOND THE GLITTER, THE APPEAL

The role of Liberace in American culture is one of those things I only think of under duress, as when I read the comment that what his fans liked in him was "his luxury." That is, the glittery bombast, all of it cuddled in fur coats and rococo vulgarity with custardy pianos.

But I would not willingly see his epitaph read, Lotsa Bucks, Lotsa Junk. Millions were attracted to him for deeper reasons than "his luxury." Plenty of Americans spend money in wasteful ways, without any particular adulation from the public. Even Imelda Marcos with all her reduplicated footgear does not seem to have attracted chains of fan clubs, as Liberace did. And the Pentagon is not everybody's darling, either.

Liberace was blessed or cursed with a strong physical resemblance to a koala bear, and he reinforced this with a face of such bland innocence that one would hesitate to say ohfudge within a block of him. He was probably a competent player of the piano, and as I recall through decently veiled ears, he hammered away at the fringes of music, embellishing it with cornball flourishes as if to say, "Well, we all love Chopin, but upon my word nobody has the patience to sit through the B Minor Sonata. But we're all very cultured lads, so let's have six bars of the prelude you all know and love, and then I'll tell you something amusing."

This did not endear him much to those who like their Bach plain, and in strict time, if you please. And his flouncy manner and coy voice was calculated (probably very painfully mastered) to curl the teeth of a great many men. Possibly he made us uneasy, and we disguised that as anger.

One of the charitable things I once said of his stage performance was that Liberace was a natural-born jackass and possibly an ultimate one.

But just here it should be said jackasses, both animal and human, can be valuable to any society. It is no accident, surely, that Christ's triumphal entry into the Holy City was on the back of an ass. And as everybody knows, things that may not particularly attract us may be good for us and may have merits we do not immediately notice or seek. Thus Shakespeare observed that the toad (another animal of mixed reviews) may be ugly and venomous but wears a precious jewel in his head.

Or, if you prefer a grander strain, many who were despised and rejected are seen at the last to have been marvelous in their way. A straight ashlar stone is never going to be the keystone of an arch, but if you know nothing except post and lintel structures, you do not see the use of a strange triangular flared stone, or comprehend that point for point the arch is stronger than a beam.

It may be a bit much to call Liberace the keystone of an arch, but he was a true rebel against the manner American boys are bred to, and much is to be said for rebels. They commonly attract many, Jefferson, Falstaff, Genet, Kerouac, Mitch Snyder and John the Baptist among them. One sometimes wonders if it is not the rebelliousness, rather than the substance, that attracts people to begin with. Liberace's fans were much more likely to say Gee, that guy is sure one of a kind than to say Gee, I wish I had some ermine pajamas.

There is also the matter of the American Dream, which consists of a chicken in the pot, a Cadillac in the garage, a Zenith in the kitchen and a ray gun in the nursery. We all believe strongly in the dream, but Liberace carried it to remarkable lengths. His very furs were diamond studded, and his stage act laid such stress on wildly expensive junk that you had to wonder if there might be some flaw in the national dream to begin with.

You could see in him the folly of unbridled consumption, and the madcap result of piling one luxury on another. But you could not see this without a faint uneasiness in yourself that perhaps $40 shoes would do as well as the considerably costlier ones you bought. Or that you could dine as well in some restaurants as in others that cost four times as much. Or that some plain old rose dating from the Middle Ages (here I shall irk gardeners) is at least as beautiful as the latest novelty. While this self-examination may not have swept the continent like a prairie fire, it is still a possible example of his value to the rest of us.

We are reminded by the wisdom of the ages not to speak ill of the dead, though I assume there is no offense saying a man carefully adopted the stage role of a flamboyant fool if that is in fact what he worked hard to achieve.

This refusal to speak ill of the dead, which I strongly adhere to, comes not from the civility of speaking well of one who is not here to defend himself, but from the bald fact that we have no earthly way of knowing what another human is really like.

We know neither his limitations nor his strengths, so we do not know whether he wasted his talent or made superhuman strides, considering what was possible for him by nature.

This should not be hard to understand, and most people understand it. We each one know ourselves better than any others do, but even with ourselves (I speak only for myself, of course) we are capable of confusing our virtues for our vices and the other way around. Certainly as we look back we may get the impression we had not the foggiest idea what we were doing, not that it stopped us from bounding right along like a bloodhound pup. There are times I think we each have a hidden life within us, as if we were living lives we knew nothing about. In charity I have always felt the guys at the office are bound to be better than they strike me. Charity is a terribly important thing.

The oldest religion I have heard of is the Egyptian, and when I was a kid one thing startled me about it. When the ancient Egyptian died, he appeared before a divine judge who held a pair of scales. On one was the newly dead heart and in the other was a feather. If the heart had enough merit to overbalance a feather, the dead man was received into the grace of Osiris. In like Flynn, as I used to say. I thought what kind of god can be duped in this way, since even the cruddiest heart will weigh more than a feather.

But now it has dawned on me the god had divine systems of avoirdupois and maybe was not so gullible. The guy lives his life contented, rather pleased he gave a buck to a beggar two weeks ago, and other instances of noble spirit. But on the scales of Osiris, his heart might not prevail against the feather.

Even in such ancient times people knew they were nothing before God, who might see their quite dandy virtues with less than enthusiastic eye. In a later instance in a later religion it is shown that whores, thieves and bartenders may do fairly well at the last, and good decent folk like us not so well. This is rattling to think of, but something of a relief, too, in a way.

I seem to have strayed, though only slightly, from our examination of Liberace's place in American culture. Well, what the hell, leave it to some doctoral candidate. It is customary, and I go along with it, to pray for him peace this night, and good luck against the feather, and rest in the patriarchal bosom and joy in the paradise of God.

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