In 1929, no one could have foreseen the hard times that would set in during the winter of 1929–30. At the time, the focus was on immediate problems. In the Liberace household, Sam’s work was the first to go. In the twenties, his employment, however unsteady, had enabled the family to buy the house on National Avenue. His income secured their status and guaranteed their material well being. The panic threatened it all. Coinciding with the depression, changing social customs redoubled his economic woes. The son explained: “Radio, which supplied free entertainment to people without the means to go to theater, cut down box office grosses all across the nation. This combined with sound pictures, a great novelty, began to cut the heart out of vaudeville.” In the absence of concert work, Sam Liberace had lived off of this sort of theater performance. It ended. “Theaters didn’t need musicians anymore. Live talent simply ceased to exist as far as cities like Milwaukee were concerned.”10 In an interview decades later, Angie related that her father was out of work for ten years after the Great Crash—except for a stint with the WPA Symphony in Milwaukee.11 The senior Liberace never surrendered his title of “musician” in the city directory, but, according to his son, he returned to the temporary employment of the factories, with terrible consequences to his pride.12 In factories or playing in WPA orchestras, however, he failed to pull his share of the family load. Even so, his unemployment did not prevent his macho antagonism toward others taking up the slack. “He began to do a lots of crazy little things, like hiding the alarm clock so my mother would be late for work and maybe lose her job,” the entertainer wrote. “He didn’t mean anything evil. It was just that he was such a proud man.”13
It was bad for Frances, too. She had to leave the luxury of her two kitchens for factory work. She took a job at a local cookie company. Her life—and her family’s—became still more complicated when, soon after the crash, she became pregnant, at nearly forty, with her fourth and last child. By the time of Rudy’s birth in 1931, the movie idol Valentino was long gone from the scene, but naming her final child after the star suggests the harried mother’s efforts to re-fire the ashes of a happier time. If that was her aim, it didn’t work. On the contrary, the baby became something of a symbol of the family’s financial and social disorder as the thirties wore on.14 Long afterwards, Scott Thorson listened to the surviving Liberace siblings discuss these days, and he repeated their sentiments about the new child, Rudy: “In a happier household he would have been the baby and his mother’s favorite. But Frances used to look at her youngest and say, ‘You should never have been born. You’re an accident!’”15 On top of all this, her husband was trying to get her fired from her factory job.
If Rudy ultimately bore the brunt of the burdens, at the time, misfortune fell heavily on all the Liberace children. Want shoved each into the workplace. “All of us kids, except Rudy who was younger than I am and so was still too young to contribute to the family coffers, chipped in whatever we were able to earn,” reported the pianist. George, entering his twenties, waited tables, taught violin, and played clubs before he left home in 1933 or ’34. Angie, at eighteen, worked as a stenographer and by twenty earned a portion of the family income as a nurse’s assistant in a local doctor’s office. Besides turning his own musical interests to financial account, the second son also did a disastrous tour washing dishes. “We took whatever we could get,” he said.16 None of it sufficed, and they resorted to the dole. “I used to pick up the groceries from the relief station in a coaster wagon,” the entertainer recalled, adding, “I hated it with a bitter passion.”17
When he became famous, the showman joked about their poverty. In those days, he wore George’s old clothes, which, he explained was not a joke, “because they weren’t really hand-me-downs. He was also wearing them. We took turns.” He also explained his adult love of luxury and finery in terms of his “humble beginnings,” “the poverty I knew when I was a child,” and in “psychological” compensation for “those drab surrounds of my youth and the dull clothing that was all we had.”18
Other circumstances complicated the family’s arrangements. By 1934, George had married and moved out with his bride, a singer at a spot where both he and his brother played, Sam Pick’s Club Madrid on the outskirts of Milwaukee. Three years later, however, by 1937, the City Directory lists him again as a resident at the National Avenue house.19 He returned minus the wife—the first of five spouses. If Rudy absorbed and refracted family tensions one way, George’s serial monogamy suggests other evidence of the family’s distress. The ins and outs of Frances’s children, however, were nothing compared to her own new ins and outs with her husband. To add further fuel to her ancient dissatisfaction with Sam as breadwinner, spouse, and father, and to increase the burden of her Depression-era poverty, Frances now discovered that her husband was philandering.
Sometime in the mid- to late thirties, probably by the time Rudy had enrolled in the second grade in the fall of 1937, which was about the same time George returned home, their father, entering his fifties, began seeing another woman. A widow and musician, Zona Gale Smrz lived a couple of miles northeast of the Liberaces near the Marquette University campus. She played the cello and taught at the old Milwaukee-Downer College. If Sal had played around previously, this time he was serious. After the courts dissolved his union with Frances in 1941, he and Smrz wed in 1943, and they remained together until her death, twenty-seven years later.20
Reflecting on the affair long after, Liberace, the celebrity, added another dimension to his father’s faithlessness and to the disruption of his parents’ marriage. As a devout Catholic, he told Scott Thorson, his mother disapproved of divorce. “According to Lee,” Thorson related, “she couldn’t face the potential scandal, the disgrace that would follow the dissolution of her marriage. Frances didn’t want the world to know that her husband had left her for another woman. She told her four children to keep the secret from everyone: playmates, neighbors, and friends.”21 Even if Frances might have drawn back from divorce initially, her husband’s behavior—and her own bile—tipped her in the other direction by 1940.
Like Sal, she, too, would remarry, in 1943, but she neither forgot nor forgave her first husband. In the sixties, she scorned his efforts at peacemaking.22 Her later resentment, however, paled beside her attitude in the years just preceding the divorce in 1940. A family friend related one version of her wrath. “Ma,” as the neighbors called her, stopped by regularly to share coffee and spleen with John Hlaban and his wife. “One day Ma comes in,” the neighbor reminisced, “says she’s been to the lawyer about a divorce, says she tells the lawyer this, she tells the lawyer that, and finally the lawyer says, ‘Doesn’t your husband have any other name than that old bastard?’”23 The formal complaints, even in legalese, capture some of Sal’s offense against her—her lawyer noting that Salvatore “has thrown objects at her, failed to show any love or affection for her, stayed away from home for long periods of time, and failed to contribute any support for plaintiff and the minor child.”24
After the early thirties, little relieved the bleakness of the Liberace household. The escape to the Zuchowskis’ farm in Menasha had offered reprieve earlier, but this trip became increasingly difficult, especially after Rudy’s birth. This left Christmases as almost the only leavening of the sodden lump of the Liberaces’ lives in the dismal decade. When wealthy and famous later, Liberace made the holiday grand indeed and explained his “extra special love” as stemming “from my childhood in the lean years when we always managed to pull ourselves up by our financial bootstraps and enjoy some of the things we had deprived ourselves of all year. . . . I don’t know how they did it, but somehow my Mother and Father managed to provide us kids with everything we had to do without,” he reminisced.25
They invested pleasure in the smallest amenities. When his mother worked at the cookie factory, she brought home bags of rejects for her children. Angie and Wally spent the holiday “decorating them and disguising the imperfections, and icing them in various
ways to make them look festive.” Just so, enchantment surrounded even mundane gifts. “I remember,” he reflected, “being absolutely elated over getting a new pair of shoes or a pair of sox without any darns in them.”26 It was not an uncommon story for a Depression Era child.
As a man, Liberace also made it clear that the season ameliorated more than material deprivations. The Liberace children’s poverty was emotional as much as physical; Christmas provided respite. Betraying the normal absence of affection in the household, he insisted that he cherished the season “because of the love that was lavished on us children at Christmas.” He credited his parents’ efforts: “During my childhood in the Depression years, when both Mom and Dad were working, it took a lot of getting together, of loving and sharing to make Christmas the memorable occasion it always turned out to be,” he wrote. Indeed, “the giving and receiving of loving thoughtfulness” dominated his early recollections of the season. “Our family forgot all the little quarrels every family has during a lifetime and we were happy together.”27
Yet even this blessed season brought its troubles for Wally Liberace. Poverty prohibited elaborate playthings, but some few toys found their way beneath the tree each year. And the family maximized its minimums by carrying these treasures over from one Christmas to the next to be hauled out again and used as decorations. From year to year, the collection grew slowly but steadily. The second son treasured these luxuries. The plan disintegrated with the birth of his younger brother. “You can imagine how I felt when my toys, that had come down to me from George and Angie, were finally given to Rudy,” he wrote. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want Rudy to have them. It was that little Rudy seemed to have a built-in destruction mechanism when it came to playthings. Things we had enjoyed for years lasted only a few minutes when Rudy went to work on them,” he grieved. “I remember being in my late teens and actually shedding tears at seeing some of my most cherished childhood possessions disintegrate before my very eyes.” His complaints brought no relief; they even precipitated rebuke. He was too old to play with them anyway, his parents scolded. “Nevertheless, when my parents weren’t looking, I tried to glue some of the broken pieces together.”28
At best, then, even the season’s gifts and his parents’ cessation of hostilities for the holidays did not redress the liabilities at 4301 National Avenue. The Liberaces’ second son had a peculiar need for compensation. He was different from the others from the very beginning.
With his dead brother and his caul, Wally Liberace had begun life different. The anomalies increased with time. While surviving photographs from the early twenties reveal a hearty, round-faced toddler of three or four, by the time he was ready to enter school, he had endured major sicknesses. “He was always a tiny sickly kid and he missed a lot of school,” his sister remembered. “He had one siege of pneumonia after another. There were many times when my folks despaired of his life.” He himself also referred to his illnesses, repeating that he was undersized as a boy as a result of a severe case of pneumonia when he was young.29 The illnesses and reputation of illnesses served to exaggerate his uniqueness in the family circle. They help account, too, for other family stories of his mother’s and grandmother’s special affection and favoritism toward him. The worst was past by the time he reached the third or fourth grade, when his “cave boy” picture appeared in the Milwaukee Sentinel. He does not look unhealthy, but he was reed thin—certainly not the chubby toddler of his earliest photographs.
Still other elements distinguished the child. From the time he uttered his first words up through his adolescence, he had his own most peculiar way of speaking. Later, he compared his speech with the way Lawrence Welk spoke. While he attributed the peculiarity to the curious inflections of his father’s Italian-influenced English and his mother’s Polish accent, none of his siblings shared the pattern. His speech was so unusual that his recitations always evoked his schoolmates’ derision, even though most shared comparably mixed ethnic backgrounds. He also revealed, in his autobiography, that he could not pronounce his own name until he was thirteen years old. By the time he started school, the idiosyncrasy was so severe that his father looked for professional help. “Lee was about 7 or 8 when Sam came up to me after a rehearsal and told me he was worried about his boy,” the family friend Steve Swedish told a reporter. “Lee couldn’t talk well.” Swedish suggested that the child might be “tongue-tied,” and Salvatore visited a physician to have the skin beneath the boy’s tongue clipped. It didn’t help. Swedish, who had recommended the physician, also thought that the problem lay in the boy speaking so fast “that the words would get jumbled up.” So he also recommended a speech therapist, Fr. Raphael Hamilton at Marquette University. Hamilton worked with the boy for seven years, according to the family friend, “giving him exercises to slow his speech and make it clearer.” In an interview in 1987, after the pianist’s death, Swedish explained to the reporter, “‘What he did was make Lee concentrate on his vowels,’ Swedish said, performing a creditable imitation of the Liberace speech pattern. ‘You see? It was Father Hamilton who gave Liberace his personality.’”30 The performer’s mincing, nasal Midwestern-Wisconsin accent became a hallmark, but by the time he reached the age of fifteen, around 1934, the most notable eccentricities of his speaking had disappeared. He recorded that at this time, one of his favorite teachers, Sylvia Becker, suggested that he enroll in a special summer course, which finally seemed to solve the worst of his speech problems.31
Besides his speech, his manners and habits marked him. As a boy, he disliked sports and the rough-and-tumble games his peers played. “It wasn’t that I had anything against the games,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It was just that you got dirty playing them. I didn’t like that.” Preferring the indoors, he made a virtue of more domestic pastimes. His father as well as his mother cooked, and from a very early age, he also took to the kitchen. He not only cooked, he cooked festively. As an adult, he related how his father, even at the height of the Depression, prepared food pleasant to see as well as satisfying to consume. The son followed the model. Decorating the defective baked goods from Johnston’s Cookie Factory at Christmas served the same purpose. He sewed, too. “While the boys I played with made model cars and model airplanes, I liked to make things out of fabrics I found lying around. For example, if a nice piece of cloth came to hand, I’d figure out how I could fit it to one of our chairs that needed recovering.” On another occasion, he taught his mother to execute one of his millinery designs, which won high praise from her friends.32
Queer in speech and habit as a boy, Wally Liberace soon enough discovered other meanings of queer. “He said he’d always known he wasn’t like other boys, but he’d never been able to label the difference,” reported Scott Thorson.33 The neighborhood knew the label. Pershing Elementary School lay just around the corner from the Liberaces’, and the children on their way to school shouted their epithets, his sister recalled. “They’d yell all kinds of names at him. They called him a sissy.”34 By age ten, he began having crushes on his male teachers, he later told his friend, and the classic phenomena of boyhood homosexuality began kicking in. Terror wrestled with guilt in the prepubescent boy. The social stigma of being queer/homosexual or merely different horrified him, even as he more or less innocently continued his cooking, decorating, music, and lisping. Not only was he alienated from his peers, he feared he might be insane, as well: “He had to be crazy, sick, out of his mind, he thought, to be attracted to men,” Thorson later recollected.35 Religion offered consolation even as it exaggerated his miseries. Indeed, the church influenced the boy in the profoundest and most various ways. It affected his attitudes about sexuality, but, more grandly, it provided a general focus for his life both as a boy and as a man. Along with Midwestern working-class culture, the peculiar circumstances of his home life, and the Great Depression, Catholicism was the fourth important social element that shaped his character and his values.
He got double doses of the faith—one at the
hearth and one at the altar. The brand of religion that he inherited from his parents was a peculiar one. Beyond the specific manifestations of their faith, Salvatore Liberace and Frances Zuchowski represented singular forms of Catholicism that contrasted with the Irish-dominated American Church. Italian Catholicism tended toward a passionate and aesthetic expression of faith, while the Polish variety emphasized conservative personal devotion. If the two branches stressed different varieties of mysticism, both contrasted with the doctrinal purity and prophetic dogmatism of the Irish clerics. The conservative, even superstitious piety of the Poles stayed with Liberace to the end of his life, and the festive faith of Naples influenced him as powerfully.
The Liberace children might have absorbed such values around their dinner table, but their actual churchgoing focused and institutionalized their faith. St. Florian’s was their parish church. Angie had been christened there on February 15, 1914, when the family had lived a mile away in West Allis.36 The church was only three blocks away from the new house on National Avenue. It was almost as new as the neighborhood itself. With its attached Carmelite cloister, the church had been built in 1912. Executed in a stripped-down Romanesque style, it sprouted twin towers at the front and a long, simple east-west nave. Like the fancy high school, it lent a touch of elegance to the neighborhood. The structure lacked the grandeur and richness of the great churches in downtown Milwaukee, but the marble columns flanking the altar and, most of all, the brilliant windows that lined the nave, suggested the mystery of the Eucharist, the majesty of Rome, and the power and nobility of ancient Catholic tradition. The subjects of the windows, like St. Florian, the patron of the parish, were an unusual and mixed lot. Besides St. Florian himself, depicted in the first fenestration to the right as one left the altar, the windows honored St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Albert; the north side of the church depicted St. Joseph, St. Teresa, St. Simon Stock, St. Anne, and St. Richard.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 6
