Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2000 by Darden Asbury Pyron

  All rights reserved. Published 2000

  Paperback edition 2001

  Printed in the United States of America

  09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 2 3 4 5

  ISBN: 0-226-68667-1 (cloth)

  ISBN: 0-226-68669-8 (paperback)

  Frontispiece courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV. The Liberace Foundation, founded by Liberace in 1976, is a non-profit organization providing scholarships for students in the performing and creative arts. For a list of funded schools or grant guidelines, please write to the Liberace Foundation at 1775 East Tropicana Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89119.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pyron, Darden Asbury.

  Liberace : an American boy / Darden Asbury Pyron.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

  ISBN 0-226-68667-1 (acid-free paper)

  1. Liberace, 1919– 2. Pianists–United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML417.L67 P97 2000

  786.2′092—dc21

  [B] 99-08931

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Liberace

  AN AMERICAN BOY

  Darden Asbury Pyron

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO AND LONDON

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Jo Scott Pyron,

  and to the memory of my grandmother,

  Marian Asbury Pyron (1892–1972).

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  One

  WISCONSIN RHYTHM AND BLUES

  Two

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  Three

  SOWS’ EARS/SILK PURSES

  Four

  CHICO AND CHOPIN

  Five

  THE SUCCESSFUL UNKNOWN

  Six

  LUCKY CHANNEL 13

  Seven

  MUSIC FOR A MAMA’S BOY

  Eight

  THE SHOALS OF FAME

  Nine

  YOU CAN BE SURE IF IT’S WESTINGHOUSE

  Ten

  GETTING BACK

  Eleven

  TROMPE L’OEIL

  Twelve

  AN IMAGE IN THE WATER

  Thirteen

  THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY PLEASURES

  Fourteen

  PETER PAN

  Fifteen

  ET LUX PERPETUA

  EPILOGUE

  NOTES

  INDEX

  PHOTO SECTION

  PREFACE

  This is not the book I first imagined writing.

  In mid-November 1991, I was stranded in Washington, D.C., for a day. Rummaging around the remainder section of a local bookstore, I encountered Scott Thorson’s memoir of his years as Liberace’s lover. I remembered a little of Liberace from his television days when I was a boy, and I recalled only the headlines of Thorson’s “palimony” suit against the entertainer. The book’s revelations intrigued me. I flipped to the photographs. They included images of Thorson before and after he underwent plastic surgery to make him resemble his patron. The longer I stared, the more bizarre the episode seemed. I wondered what Liberace could have been thinking; I also reflected on the plastic surgeon who had performed the operation, and on the society that encouraged such transformations. These questions inspired the first idea of a Liberace biography in my mind. I composed some more questions and determined that I could put together a quick, hard little study before I went on to more serious subjects. It didn’t work out that way.

  The more I reflected on the subject, and the deeper I dug into the data, the more complicated the Liberace problem seemed to become. While the peculiarities, even anomalies, of Liberace’s private life had first piqued my interest, other issues soon competed for my attention. Increasingly, Liberace seemed to me a kind of emblem of modern America, overflowing with both the virtues and the vices of the contemporary national character. I began imagining him as the American Boy. Even so, his sexual peculiarities became more glaring as I continued my research. Paradoxically, as he became more and more representative, he grew increasingly less typical. I made my own resolution to the conundrum. It seemed that his homosexuality encouraged his campy artificiality; the campiness, in turn, encouraged the caricature, in life and art, of the American dream. The anomalies, then, became the very sources of his representativeness.

  The simple little book I had imagined was no longer so simple. What I envisioned as a three-year commitment, from beginning to end, stretched on and on. But other difficulties complicated the work. Few fellow academics and, more critically, fewer presses shared my enthusiasm for the project. With a small number of notable exceptions, like my old book-reviewing friend from the Miami Herald, Bill Robertson, folks were mostly incredulous that I—or anyone, for that matter—would devote serious attention to such a character. My faithful agent, Jonathan Dolger, was hard pressed to find a publisher willing to consider even the prospectus. He offered his own take on publishers’ skepticism: he suspected the prejudice of even gay editors. What does a dead, closeted queen performer, adored by “Midwestern grannies” (as the actor Tony Perkins called Liberace’s audiences) have to say to contemporary gay men? Not much, came the answer. That his life might speak to others seemed incomprehensible.

  Other problems arose in the writing that had nothing to do with publishers’ skepticism. Sometimes the project seemed as incredible to me as it appeared to editors. Reading Liberace’s memoirs regularly prompted this response. Their syrupy tone, coyness, and evasions grated, sometimes furiously, on my nerves. Formal criticisms of the showman exacerbated my own misgivings. The harshest depict the pianist as nothing less than a cultural demon and a sexual monstrosity. He undermined the highest standards of taste, even while he broke down traditional sexual or gender boundaries, ran the complaints. The criticisms, even the most violent, like Howard Taubman’s scathing 1954 critique in the New York Times or William Conner’s 1956 broadside in the London Daily Mirror, contain truth. Criticism of the showman continues over a decade after his death. The cudgels are wielded now, paradoxically perhaps, by gay writers instead of by his old enemies among the sexually orthodox.

  I was not unsympathetic to the biases. Insofar as the criticisms identified the entertainer as a womanish, lower-class, consumer sissy who corrupted art (and maybe the youth of America), I was not eager to justify, much less identify with such a figure. If the queer stuff doesn’t get you, the class and cultural angle will—although as the academic critic Kevin Kopelson has noted, the two can be inextricably combined. I dealt with the difficulty in part by trying to objectify the critics, much as I sought to objectify Liberace himself. This led, however, to other complications in the conceptualization of the project, as I began reflecting on the nature of twentieth-century American culture. A short book was developing into a mighty long manuscript.

  Other problems complicated the original plan. From beginning to end, confirming sources, facts, and data proved particularly difficult. Unlike Margaret Mitchell, the subject of my previous project, for which I could consult extraordinarily rich literary documentation, Liberace’s life has been extremely difficult to pin down. In some cases, confirming the most basic information—when he was living where, for example—was hard or impossible. The question of where he was living with whom is, obviously, more problematical still. He confessed his own weakness regarding dates, and his chronologies sometimes make no sense. He also dated various episodes in his life differently at different times. Beyond this, Liberace was notoriously secretive, and he revealed lit
tle that he did not want revealed. His memoirs leave out much. At least as much as any memoirist, perhaps more, he shaped events both consciously and unconsciously to fit his own image or sense of things. He left almost no private literary sources to check against the public imagery.

  Liberace manipulated journalists and newsmen no less assiduously than he did his fans and readers. Insofar as newspapers provide major sources of data about his life, this material is, then, suspect, too. Journalistic sources produced other problems. If the data from standard, establishment newspapers like the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Washington Post come with a spin, making sense of the tabloids’ stories poses yet more difficulties. But papers like the Globe, the Star, and the National Enquirer—not to mention the sensational scandal rags like Hollywood Confidential, Rave, and Hush-Hush—provide significant chunks of information about the performer. The lines between fact and fancy blur constantly. Dealing with gossip, rumor, and hearsay proved a persistent challenge. Oral history has been a doubly problematical source of information, too. Besides the normal liabilities of such recollections, old friends and associates have been reluctant to speak or reluctant to speak for the record.

  The same problems apply to other sources of data. Liberace was constantly suing or being sued, and court records provide a potential check against the rumor. They have a downside: depositions are fragmentary, rulings are obscure, and not least, statements are contradictory. Then, too, the showman lied, even under oath, while his antagonists hardly refrained from self-interested testimony, either. The same problems and more apply to the most important outside testimony, Scott Thorson’s Behind the Candelabra. It is the only extended, insider’s account of the showman’s life not governed by Liberace’s image making. But Thorson had his own agenda. Even if one takes his facts as essentially true, his voice in the text differs significantly from how he sounded elsewhere, as, for example, in the surviving depositions from his five-year lawsuit against his old lover. His literary co-author rounded out his prose, to say the least. Then, too, his judgments contain many of the old problems of gossip and rumor.

  Secondary sources don’t always help. Liberace’s 1987 biographer, Bob Thomas, a popular journalist, has produced a journalistic account that compounds the Liberace problem almost as much as it contributes to a solution. Something of a Hollywood insider, he draws on fresh sources, especially on interviews with old Liberace associates. At the same time, he relies uncritically on newspaper reports; he spins fictional dialogue from these and fails to cite sources or evidence anywhere. The question of what of his account is fact and what is fiction obscures the record one more time. Just so, empirical evidence sometimes confounded Thomas’s judgments, speculations, and even factual evidence, otherwise defined.

  Jocelyn Faris’s Bio-Bibliography is different. Lacking much interest in biographical conjecture, Faris catalogues published sources of Liberace’s career. Her work offers an extraordinary wealth of raw information, and this biography would hardly have been possible without her aweinspiring labor. Even so, her compilation is not complete. The absence of data, particularly at critical junctures in Liberace’s career, skews her generalizations. Confusion characterizes even the most empirically based sources, then.

  In short, unambiguous evidence is not very apparent anywhere in Liberace’s record. If the historian’s ideal of three facts for every generalization were to be applied, we would be able to say very little about Liberace’s life. The gaps are vast. Contradictions muddle even what should be obvious. This book resolves the difficulties variously. I have taken a shard of reality—like Liberace’s reference to an early engagement at Spivy’s Roof in Manhattan—and played it out against verified bits of historical truth—like the historian George Chauncey’s connection of “the enormous lesbian Spivy” and the whole gay scene in New York in the early forties. I try a similar test with gossip and rumor: I attempt to determine how closely they conform or fail to conform to other patterns. The method works better on some occasions than it does on others. Research has turned up some of my own errors as the result of such speculating. In all the early drafts of this book, for example, I rejected Scott Thorson’s judgment about how Liberace got new boys. Thorson asserted that Liberace’s friends effectively procured them for him. Though Thorson himself entered the showman’s life this way, more or less, to make such a judgment would appear to have been outside the range of what Thorson could actually have known. That Liberace got new lovers this way seemed unlikely to me as well, in light of Rock Hudson’s situation, for example. Late in the production of this book, however, I was able to make sense of the novelist John Rechy’s references to “the star” in the late fifties—actually Liberace—that confirm the pattern Thorson described. I had looked to the wrong model: George Cukor, not Hudson, provided the appropriate prototype. I changed my interpretation.

  I have dealt with the ambiguity of the data in other ways as well. Thus, I have approached lacunas—most notably, Liberace’s homosexuality itself, which he publicly ignored throughout his whole life—not as the absence of something, but as material things themselves. Liberace was a gay man; he never admitted it in public. The lies and failures to deal with his own sexual appetites and affectional longings I take as critically as his actual sexual values. They help define who he was, where he came from, and how homosexuality worked or failed to work for him. I take his lies and public denial further, using them as guideposts in the larger wilderness of gender and sexual identities in twentieth-century American history.

  I have tried to turn the liabilities of the data into virtues in other ways. There is a mythic Liberace, in part self-constructed; it bears a sometimes tenuous relationship with the otherwise obscure real man. Thus, he once referred to himself as a “one-man Disneyland” who had no existence outside the performance. Instead of deconstructing the myth, I have set out to analyze the mythologizing—how it worked, how it worked so long, so successfully, and what its author might have had in mind. The process of analyzing Liberace’s own mythic ambitions also introduced the importance of the idea of mythic reality in general in understanding his life. He constructed his own myths, but these also resonated with other mythic truths, such as those of the Oedipal family, the American dream, and the human comedy in general as performed for three thousand years in the Western tradition.

  Henry James insisted that we only have three or four stories to tell. Genius lies in telling them as if they had never been told before. In this regard, Liberace was a special kind of genius—that, at least, is one thing I discovered in re-creating his life. Specifically, he applied the same formulas to his act for fifty years, pleasing audiences all along. When accused of unoriginality, he retorted that he would change when the crowds stopped coming and the audiences stopped laughing. Except for one brief period, they never did. His formulas worked. Beyond this, they intrigued me. Liberace himself discussed the nature of art and how aesthetics spoke—or failed to speak—to the human condition. His success argues that he got the big formulas as well as the little ones right. That is another thesis that I advance here; once again, it goes far, far beyond what I first imagined on that blustery Washington day in 1991.

  I began this book as a kind of exercise. I intended to take Liberace seriously, but I had no burning affection for the subject. As I worked, my attitudes changed; so did the book. If Liberace never charmed me the way he did innumerable audiences, still, I came to respect him, in some ways even to admire him. And, from the beginning to the end, he never bored me. His life taught me things. The research—touring the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, tromping along the gilded avenues of West Hollywood, and poring over scandal sheets—was special fun. With all its complications, writing was equally engaging. In its own way, settling on this topic was as fortuitous and gratifying as my discovery of Margaret Mitchell as a subject of biography twenty years ago.

  In the process of both researching and writing this book, I have run up numerous debts. Florida International University has supp
orted me with travel funds, research money, and a sabbatical. I could hardly have finished without this aid. Research assistants Tim Van Scoy, George Schmidt, and Franni Ramos labored above and beyond their obligations. So did Kevin Taracido, who researched Liberace’s 1956 Cuba trip for me. Linda Salup was no less energetic but labored for devotion alone. Joy Reitman of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel made my research easier; so did the staffs at the Milwaukee Public Library, the Milwaukee Family Center of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints, the Milwaukee County Historical Society, and the Las Vegas Public Library. I appreciate all the assistance from the folks at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas, but the archivist Pauline Lachance made my work there easier than I ever imagined.

  I regret having been able to arrange so few interviews with Liberace’s friends and associates, but this makes me appreciate all the more those who did speak. Beyond formal interviews, I have delighted in the numbers of people who have shared Liberace stories with me. I mention my subject, and everybody seems to be off and running with tales of their own about their Aunt Mae or their grandmother or some other family member’s devotion to the showman. Folks offer evidence of their own affection, too, under the most peculiar circumstances. By Discovery Bay in Jamaica, my friend Marina Ituarte described an intimate concert in Mexico City; over pasta in Florence, Victor and Ana Marie Carrabino recounted their encounter with the performer in Tallahassee; sharing office doughnuts in Miami, Maezel Brown described a charity concert for poor kids in Kansas City she had attended over four decades before. From 1951 to 1986, the responses were all the same: he put on a hell of a show. Everyone had stories. Remembering Liberace’s television days, my aging bank teller still waxed wistful about Lee’s beautiful things—she always wanted a candelabrum, she told me; my neighbor across the canal described how the pianist was the only gay public figure to admire on television when he was a little boy. Some, like the Cuban telephone repairman—inventor, in his own testimony, of “the educational piñata”—volunteered theories as well as stories about the showman’s attraction. I got story after story from antique traders: the silver dealer who sold Lee a diamond ring remembered the beefy bodyguards; the shopkeeper in Connecticut joked about Scott Thorson’s jewelry, but not about Liberace’s largess. At a friend’s wedding in Coral Gables, I was quizzed intelligently about my research, and I discovered that Richard and Ruth Shack had socialized with the showman for years through common associations with MCA. The narratives sometimes got much more personal. On three or four occasions, to my astonishment, they included sexual experiences with the gaudy performer. I have included only a tiny fraction of all these tales in the text. I did not even get the names of all the storytellers. All of them enriched my understanding of Liberace the man and Liberace the performer.