I owe still more direct debts. Two of my seminars on twentieth-century American history read and criticized two earlier versions of this book. I have profited from my students’ observations about contemporary culture as well as from their comments on the book itself. Friends, academic and otherwise, have deepened my understanding of the subject, not to mention the peculiarities of modern American civilization, homosexual culture, and aesthetics in general. We argued furiously about these matters, but Dan Childers, John Bailly, Barry Sparkman, Alfredo Cruz, and Natalia Garcia helped me refocus the whole text after one particular discussion.
Another category of folk have kept me primed with more discrete material: a cartoon here, a television reference there, a magazine citation somewhere else, or useful books or bibliographies. Among these I mention Butler Waugh, Mike Ebner, Joyce Peterson, Sarah Awan, David Lavin, David Lee, and Fernando Quiroga.
More often than not, especially early on, friends encouraged me with their skepticism, but the project has never been without supporters. I have mentioned Bill Robertson already. Jean Trebbi was great. Tony and Sylvia Vera-Leon have cheered An American Boy for five years in New York, Miami, and the mountains of North Carolina. The historian John D’Emilio encouraged it in terms that still inspire me. More critically, the novelist-essayist-biographer Edmund White earned my gratitude by suggesting in the fall of 1997 that I contact his friends at St. Martin’s and at the University of Chicago Press. As a result of his kindness, my heirs will have one less bulky, unpublished manuscript to deal with.
A number of readers, professional and lay, have plowed through various drafts of this manuscript. No one has followed this project more closely than Howard Kaminsky. I owe no one deeper thanks, especially considering that he still finds Liberace a horror. He has criticized two or three drafts line by line, but he reads for structure and ideas as well as for spelling, usage, grammar, and syntax. Flaws and shortcoming remain, but An American Boy is better for his bracing criticism. I could ask for no more intelligent readers than my old teacher Bill Harbaugh, my colleague Nicol Rae, and my friend Miguel Costa, who doubled as a research assistant, too. Mike Novak’s enthusiasm cheered me when I needed it especially. Ruth Barzel, who provided fastidious copyediting, also offered praise that kept up my spirits. I owe different sort of thanks to the two anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press. Their criticisms sharpened my revisions. Press production editor Jenni Fry has made this a better book, while Doug Mitchell has been as encouraging an editor and advocate as any writer or scholar could wish for. Finally, in the very last stages of editing, my friend André McKinnon has been my strong right arm. For the assistance and support of all these folks, I am deeply appreciative.
LIBERACE
One
WISCONSIN RHYTHM AND BLUES
Don’t be misled by this flamboyant exterior. Underneath I remain the same—a simple boy from Milwaukee.
LIBERACE
Frances Zuchowski and her husband Salvatore Liberace were ill prepared for the prodigies of her accouchement in the village of West Allis, Wisconsin, on May 16, 1919. She gave birth to twins that day. While one baby was, mysteriously, born dead, the survivor weighed a phenomenal thirteen pounds. More notable, this infant entered the world still enveloped in the delicate, transparent membrane of the birth sac. He was born with a caul. In many primitive or traditional societies, to be born “under the veil” portends wonders and marvels. It marks out genius, supernatural powers, mysterious gifts, sixth sense, cosmic insight—and just plain good luck. It was the perfect entrance into the world for one who would later make a reputation for spectacular entrances, but, more than that, the magic of the caul illuminated his whole biography. Years after his own death, even, his family continued to explain his career and personality in the context of the genius of his birth.1
Wladziu Valentino Liberace, otherwise known as Walter, Wally, Lee, and, eventually, just plain Liberace, fulfilled the promises of his entrance into the world. As a toddler, he was a prodigy, a musical marvel. He was otherwise singular as a child, a boy, an adolescent, and a man. His peculiarity, however, gains the most extraordinary meaning from the antithetical circumstances of his rearing. All his life, his eccentricities played against the most conservative and traditional patterns of his community, his family, and his faith. These, no less than his personal genius, constituted a part of who he was. The contours of his career, his audience appeal, and the shape of his act itself do not make sense except in the context of his social background.
He grew up in the working class, blue-collar, farmer-tan heartland of the American Midwest. He carried its fuzzy, nasal way of talking to his grave. His beginnings marked his character indelibly. Just so, for all the bickering and hostility of his immigrant parents, an American ideal of domesticity governed his whole life, while his religious faith, inculcated at both hearth and altar, shaped that life no less critically from beginning to end.
The community of his birth and nurture, the twin villages of West Allis and West Milwaukee, Wisconsin, might have been a movie set for an American community in the three decades before World War II. They lay an easy trolley ride of about five miles from the great urban center of Milwaukee to the east. Locals could take advantage of the wonders of Milwaukee if and when they chose. For those like the Liberace family, with pretensions to art, the elegant Pabst Theater, built with donations from one of the city’s great fortunes, provided a regular venue for musical and theatrical events. With its large, diverse population, its monumental stone office buildings, and its deep roots in high Germanic civilization, Milwaukee provided a sophisticated cultural center in the early decades of the century for everyone north of Chicago—including people in the rural hinterland as far west as Madison.
While the metropolis to the east exemplified urban culture, the famously rich Wisconsin farmland began at the very western edge of West Allis. If anything, country life impinged even more directly on these communities than did the urban civilization of Milwaukee. The presence of the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds almost in the heart of West Allis formalized the role of the country in the town. Then, too, plenty of orchard and dairy farmers’ sons actually attended West Milwaukee High School with the children of West Allis’s shopkeepers, craftsmen, and industrial workers.
West Allis and West Milwaukee melded something then of metropolis and country. They epitomized small-town America. But, more American still, the two towns represented a melting-pot diversity that came with industrialization in the region. The two communities, indeed, were bracketed and defined geographically by two of the great manufacturing enterprises of the state, even of the Midwest. The huge Harnischfeger metalworks sat on the eastern border, while toward the farmlands rose the still more impressive and important industrial plant of the Allis-Chalmers Corporation. Both were producers of heavy machinery. Of the two, Allis-Chalmers was particularly important. In its second and third decade of operation, it employed as many as five thousand workers and could produce gargantuan castings of up to 120 tons. Not inappropriately, journalists referred to it as “America’s Krupp,” after the great German machineworks of the same period.2 The life of the community was inseparable from the local plants. “They’d say that opportunity waits at Harnischfeger’s gate,” observed a local historian, “and it was Harnischfeger and Rex Chainbelt and all the other industries that were here, and that’s what really caused West Milwaukee to develop.” As a journalist reported, “West Milwaukee was a lunch bucket town when Lee was growing up.”3
All these once-bustling factories—Rex Chainbelt, Allis-Chalmers, Harnischfeger—are closed and abandoned now, their ruins Rust Belt monuments. All fell victim to foreign competition, shifting patterns of labor, and alterations in American foreign policy—and, indeed, to the epochal shifts in domestic and cultural life in the United States in the decades after World War II. These changes are a part of Liberace’s history, too; they are cause as well as effect. But in 1919, the year of his birth, few could have prophesie
d such upheavals in these quiet, hardworking communities.
Although legally separate, the twin villages of West Allis and West Milwaukee blended imperceptibly one into the other and formed a coherent community. Roads defined them. Running due east-west, Greenfield Avenue marked the northern limit; it cut directly from the heart of downtown Milwaukee to the Milwaukee County line. On a southeastern diagonal below, Beloit Road outlined the southern boundary. These two arteries formed two sides of a triangle of roughly three and a half miles on the north and four and a half on the south; the third side extended a mile or so to the west along 108th Street running north-south. The most important street, National Avenue, split this triangle down the center. Lying parallel to Beloit just to its north, it linked the villages and served as their main street.
It was a walking neighborhood. Indeed, enough of the old ways persist that one could still live there without a car at the end of the twentieth century. Shopping, greengrocers, and bakeries were nearby; so were diners and family restaurants. The neighborhood boasted numerous churches that described the community’s demographic and religious diversity. If the dome of the grand Catholic basilica jutted above the skyline in the west, most of the houses of worship were more modest. The Liberaces’ parish church in the east, St. Florian’s, with its connected Carmelite cloister, had some claims to style, but the Polish Catholic and Lutheran churches were no more than functional places of devotion for their working-class parishioners. The community supported its own schools. Four Liberace children attended Pershing Elementary. West Milwaukee High School provided special cause for local boasting. Besides its claims to academic excellence, it was also one of the few distinguished examples of architecture here. After over a half century, its present users take as much obvious pride in its grounds and its elegant Spanish Baroque architectural style as did its first students and teachers when Walter Liberace graduated in 1937.
Like the mostly humble public buildings, the blocks and blocks of West Allis’s and West Milwaukee’s residences confirmed the nature of the community’s life and aspirations. Here, its working-class conservatism showed clearest yet. There were virtually no apartments or tenements; instead there was street after tree-shaded street of freestanding houses. Some few might have boasted two or two and a half stories, and more than three bedrooms; most were considerably smaller. Even the most modest, however, reflected their owners’ pride in tidy lawns and neat hedges. Almost everyone had a garden. Lilacs scented the air in May, roses later; hollyhocks re-seeded themselves year after year in garden after garden, while devoted residents replanted annuals every spring and set out small vegetable plots with the last frost. People liked it here. They stayed put. People resided in the same community year after year; they maintained the same residences for decade after decade. The pattern persisted even into the second generation. Folks who grew up here even in the twenties still remain, three quarters of a century later. Exaggerating the tradition of stability, local households provided each other sweethearts and spouses: young men and women who had grown up together in the same neighborhood wound up wedding each other and living close to their parents.4
The streets of quiet homes have not changed very much in seventyfive years. The trees might have grown, and the dwellings in the district might have acquired additions and brighter paint, but the great majority of the houses built during the first three decades of this century still survive. Almost all are still recognizable in ground plan from insurance maps drawn in the 1920s; indeed, one can even travel the whole triangle of streets using 1930s maps.
While the lawns and shade trees of private homes account for the suburban tranquillity of the district, city maps—then and now—reveal parks and public greens that further the impression. Mostly of standard, smallish size, they were all dwarfed by one of the great public spaces of Milwaukee County, the nearly half-mile square of rolling grounds and ancient trees of the veterans retirement home on National Avenue just north and east of its diagonal intersection with Greenfield. Generations of Milwaukeeans knew this simply as “the Home.” The national government developed the site soon after Appomattox as a benefit for Civil War veterans, and it soon sprouted its Second Empire-style buildings that housed these veterans’ diminishing numbers down into the 1930s. When the last of these ancients were gone to their rewards with Generals Grant and Sherman—and maybe even with Lee, Jackson, and Beauregard—the federal government used the grounds for new veterans affairs offices that now line National Avenue between Forty-fourth and Fifty-seventh Streets. But on the gentle rise in the middle of the tract, the original, 120-year-old buildings appear undisturbed—as do the enormous conifers, ginkgoes, and other trees that shade the park.
The Home—encompassing stately buildings, aged veterans, lofty trees, and rolling grounds—was a part of the heritage of West Milwaukee, West Allis, and their citizens. The American past bumped as unobtrusively onto the present as did the two villages into each other. As a boy, Wally Liberace, son of an Italian-born father and a Polish-speaking mother, regularly walked across the street from his home on National Avenue to play among the gnarled relics of Gettysburg, Shiloh, and Antietam.
American history lurked in the shadows of the Home’s great firs and oaks; the American present blossomed elsewhere in the village streets. West Allis and West Milwaukee offered models of twentieth-century American ethnic diversity. If now—as in 1920—the city directories reveal little or nothing of Jewish or Black culture, the great industrial plants attracted all manner of other folks. Meanwhile, the agricultural hinterland offered a population almost as varied. Southern Italians shared coffee with German Protestants, German Catholics went off to the plants with Czechs and Poles, men with Swiss ancestors and roots among Southern Baptists led unions of them all, while everyone drank the milk from the dairy farms of native-born Scots-Irish Americans.
For all the variety of the people, however, no evidence exists of ethnic or religious animosities. Something of the same holds for class antagonisms. If, five miles away, visitors could see the great Victorian mansions of the fabulously rich, Milwaukee had less to boast of in its crowded tenements. In contrast, in West Allis and West Milwaukee there was little architectural distinction between the dwellings of the rich and those of the poor. In the exigencies of the Great Depression, union radicalism thrived and spawned communism and communist sympathizers, yet even class antagonism seem to have been projected outside the community itself. Even so, the existence of a powerful left influence within the union at Allis-Chalmers, for example, seems a particular function of odd, local circumstances.5
By and large, these classical immigrant communities devoted themselves to the ideals of family, hard work, education, self-actualization, and geniality. If the residents flirted with communism in the thirties, they mainly played their music, drank their beer, and danced their polkas in the evenings. Most of them attended their various churches on Sunday, but no one seemed particularly troubled by those who stayed home. In the forties, their young men fought the fascist East and West without political reservations. The return of prosperity after the war rekindled the old expectations of the promise of American life, even as the establishment’s crusade against communism during the strike of 1946–47 penalized the dissidents. Radicalism did not survive here after 1950.
On the eve of the Great Depression, West Milwaukee and West Allis provided a microcosm of Midwestern American values. With their diversity of farmers and industrial workers, shopkeepers and craftsmen, natives and immigrants, ancient veterans and hustling foreigners, these two villages bred in their heyday a kind of natural community based on values of progress, economic advancement, and tolerance under the general aegis of American institutions. These are, in any event, the very values that their most native son, born here in those most peculiar circumstances on May 16, 1919, and christened Wladziu Valentino Liberace, reflected and echoed to the tips of his twinkling toes and glittering fingers all his life.
The influence of this small-town, Midwest
ern world on the life of the pianist known to the world after 1963 as “the Showman” is incalculable. For the first years of his life, he hardly even visited any other place. He considered West Allis his legal residence until he was in his early twenties. Well after his relocation to New York and then California, his mother continued to live in the family house on National Avenue until she moved to California with her son. Liberace’s sister, Angie, remained in the house where she had grown up for many years after her brother had left. Even after he had lost all family connections with the area, Liberace returned often to play the local theaters with special enthusiasm. It remained his hometown, full of old friends and rich associations. It affected him permanently. He never lost his Midwestern twang, but the influences of his West Milwaukee upbringing lurked in his heart as well as on his tongue.
The trajectory of his career, and his ambition, energy, perseverance, and good nature all represent elements of his baptism in Midwestern American values. He was the working-class son of immigrants who seized the brass ring of American promise to make his own way through hard work to fabulous wealth and fame. He is a paradigm for his generation. Even the contents of his biography—with all its eccentricities and perversions—mirror elements of his West Milwaukee heritage. They do so doubly. On the one hand, his excesses represent no more than every working-class family’s dreams of profligate wealth pushed to caricatured extreme; on the other hand—and perhaps more critically—his life represents, literally, a reverse image of the most conservative values of his upbringing. His eccentricities confirmed rather than repudiated the conservatism of his origins. He did not approach his life, dress, and style as normal. He calculated his eccentricity or even outrage within the most conservative frame of politics and social order. Conservative in his own politics and faith, he sought neither to overthrow standards nor to impose new ones by his outrages against convention. He was a cultural eccentric, not a rebel, much less a revolutionary. Indeed, he did not like rebels and revolutionaries. Eschewing politics in general, he had no tolerance in particular for dissidence and dissidents. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House, and the three represent a kind of centrist ideal he himself approved of. Along the same lines, he cared nothing for “alternative lifestyles.” He never liked hippies, and they gave no evidence of liking him. The same holds for alternative sexual lifestyles. Despite his own homosexuality, he evidenced little sympathy for gay liberation, and in the post-Stonewall world of politicized homosexuality, gays tended to return the sentiment.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 2
