Liberace: An American Boy by Darden Asbury Pyron

Author:Darden Asbury Pyron [Pyron, Darden Asbury]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Eleven

TROMPE L’OEIL

I don’t give concerts, I put on a show.

LIBERACE

The song was already popular when Hildegard, Liberace’s fellow Milwaukeean, first recorded it and made it central to her act at fancy nightspots around the country during the war. It is not exactly clear when Liberace adopted it. It has a graceful melody and lovely lyrics. At the same time, the verses have special meaning for Liberace’s life and values. “I’ll Be Seeing You” reaffirms the showman’s sense of an audience, his aesthetics, and his underlying notions of art itself. It hints, too, at the sexual elements of his show.

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places

That this heart of mine embraces all day through;

In that small café, the park across the way,

The children’s carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well.

I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day,

In everything that’s light and gay,

I’ll always think of you that way.

I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new,

I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.

On the most fundamental level, the song is a simple, romantic, and sentimental evocation of a lost love, friends parting, or companions separated by time or space. It is a song of promises and commitment. It possesses other meanings, however.

First, Liberace himself sang it with specific intent. Using it to close every performance, it honored his audiences and marked his own devotion to his fans. A song of his own composition, “I Don’t Care” did the same thing, as indicated by its subtitle, “As Long as You Care for Me.” He loved performing; he loved his audiences; he thrived on their applause: the song expresses his gratitude. When he closed his shows with the number, he demonstrated his warmth and attachment; he was giving back a portion of what his admirers had given him. “When the performance is over, I will still be thinking of you,” runs the sentiment. It reaffirms, then, his oldest motives in performing, from the time of the “Three Little Fishies” concert: the ambition to redefine the relationship between the artist and the audience in terms of personal affection.

There are still other ways of interpreting the lyrics. These illuminate Liberace’s ideas of art even as they suggest latent sexual motifs in his performance.

Most critically, of course, the song is about seeing and sight. Just so, it is about enumerating physical objects within a line of vision—the café, the park, trees, a carousel, a wishing well, the moon. This emphasizes the significance of actual, physiological seeing for Liberace. Visual apprehension played a completely critical role in his performance. But the lyrics also suggest another kind of seeing that is equally important in his aesthetics. It is not mere seeing or these mere objects of sight that the lyrics chronicle. Their poetry involves illusion, optical illusion, or even self-conscious delusion; the song is about looking at one thing and seeing something else. It introduces, then, the mind’s eye or an inner vision. It is about the conjuring

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