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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 139
Dracula shows us the powers of the monopolist unchecked—he thrives on
accumulation without interference—and the helplessness of others against
him once he has seduced his operatives and secured their properties. This
is the monster produced by competition run rampant, and if Dracula
doesn’t stand out in metropolitan London, it is because his modes of
operation, his transactions, are not significantly different from those of
other entrepreneurs.
(197)
True, but the difference is, Liberace strove to stand out and in so doing
celebrated his accumulation without interference and indeed called attention to
his seduction of the audience.
Liberace’s vampire image plays on the metaphor money is blood (after all, you
can’t squeeze blood from a turnip). As a conspicuous consumer supreme,
Liberace made clear that he thrived on the earnings of his blue-collar audience.
In the same way, capital thrives on its labor force. What Liberace pointed out
very dramatically was the vampire nature of the capitalist system itself and the
workers’ desire for material wealth. As Karl Marx put it, “capital is dead labour
which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the
more labour it sucks” (342). Accordingly, workers become vampires once they
have been bitten by a vampire (capital), for that is how vampirism is perpetuated
(see Barber 32). As Randy Martin has suggested, capitalism did not really take
hold until the workers could afford to buy the products of their own production.
Liberace was a marginal man operating in a liminal zone. He laughed at himself,
the spectators laughed with him, and at the same time they laughed at themselves
and he laughed at them. What was set in relief was their mutual desires and
aspirations; theirs as yet unfulfilled, his fulfilled in excess. Liberace was a
symbol of capitalist potential in its extreme. How did the Rockettes figure in this
capitalist scenario?
The Rocket(te)s: “They’ll be straight and will go up like
rockets”—Russell Markert (qtd in Roman 48)
The Rockettes were a mini-spectacle nested in a larger spectacle, part of the
structure of aggrandizement. Perhaps more than any other production unit, the
Rockettes reinforced the power of the Music Hall and its stage technology. The
Rockettes were modeled after the Tiller Girls who were conceived by another
industrialist, John Tiller, in early-twentieth-century England (Wershing 28). If
the Radio City production expressed the spirit of America broadly, then that
spirit was surely to be found in its most enduring component. But what did
that spirit represent? According to Webster’s, a “rockette” might be
simultaneously: 1) a little rock, 2) a female rock, and 3) an imitation rock (“ette”
1969). The name carries multiple valences, all simulations of something else as
were the souvenirs sold in the lobby. Someone once told James Waring that a