Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  The spectacle of the mass as celebrated in this sensuous environment left a permanent impression on Wally Liberace. With an eye already turned to color and design, he admired the brilliant vestments, which changed with the seasons, that the servers of the mass wore each Sunday. In normal seasons, the priests’ gowns and chasubles were celebratory enough, but at Easter or Christmas and on other high holy days the clerics blossomed into a vested splendor that Walter remembered forever. The candelabrum, one of the first objects he used to add glamour to his image, was a silent tribute to the votive lights at St. Florian’s altar, even as his exuberant costumes paid tribute to the priests of his childhood. Wally Liberace grew up with all this—literally—spectacular evidence of faith.

  Later in life, the showman played fast and loose with doctrinal purity, but early on he derived critical lessons from the church. Beyond his mother’s simple piety, which he never lost, his appreciation of the church was more aesthetic than theological. The showiness and spectacle of the mass, and Catholicism’s traditional appeal to the senses, he considered a fundamental source of the religion’s power. “The Catholic Church has never lost sight of this,” he insisted: Catholics “value the mystery of flickering candles, the glory of statuary and art. They know a ceiling by Michelangelo surpasses any other ceiling there is. They know that people want to escape into another kind of world.”37

  Did he theorize as an adult about people’s need to escape the mundane? During his childhood, throughout the Great Depression, Catholicism was the one thing that never failed Wally in its ability to transcend the grind of the everyday. The glory and serenity of the mass compensated to some degree for the strictures and deprivations in his home. But the church exerted other sources of appeal, as well. It offered other consolations; it even held a resolution of his sexual nightmares. “I once thought I ought to become a priest,” he related in his memoir.38 Wally Liberace was neither the first nor last gay boy to consider this track. One scholar has summarized the attraction:

  Catholicism in particular is famous for giving countless gay and proto-gay children the shock of the possibility of adults who don’t marry, of men in dresses, of passionate theatre, of introspective investment, of lives filled with what could, ideally without diminution, be called the work of the fetish. . . . And presiding over all are the images of Jesus. These have, indeed, a unique position in modern culture as images of the unclothed or unclothable male body, often in extremis and/or in ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored.39

  If no one questioned priests’ rejection of marriage and women, the church served as more than an elaborate beard; indeed, the total prohibitions against clerical sexuality offered special comfort and support for boys fighting a sexuality deemed deviant. Giving up sex meant giving up a form of sex especially abhorred in Rome: it was a solution that offered a double benefit.

  Catholicism might have provided one way out of his homosexual dilemma, but it exaggerated the problem in other ways. Catholic doctrine, with its strictures against same-sex coupling, in particular, afflicted this youth as it has innumerable Catholic gay boys. The novelist John Rechy captured the torment in his Sexual Outlaw:

  You had to tell your “trespasses” to a faceless, whispering voice that kept insisting, “How many times did you commit that sin? How many times?” Locked in guilt even when you had no cause to feel guilty. After confession and fasting, came the Sunday morning purification. Communion! You knelt to receive the wafer that was the precious body of Christ. It was all over so quickly, especially since there had been so much agony in confession and fasting! And you knew that soon, too soon, you’d be huddled kneeling guiltily in the darkness again before that mysterious little screen window of the confessional and addressing the faceless presence: “Bless me father, Father, for I have sinned.”40

  Like the boy John Rechy, Wally Liberace prayed. He pleaded for divine intervention. “Lee told me he prayed for a miracle, something to alter him so that he could look at girls with the same lust they inspired in other boys,” Thorson wrote. St. Jude was deaf; the ivory-skinned figure on the cross was another naked man. Intensely religious, the boy hated the idea of avoiding mass, communion, and confession. Rejecting the faith never seemed to cross his mind, but his homosexual longings were as obdurate as church doctrine itself. “No matter how hard he tried, curiosity about the mysteries of sex, and his own sexuality, obsessed him.” He could not confess, yet he sinned, he felt, in failing to do so. “He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t,” Thorson said Liberace had told him.41

  Here he was then, skinny little Wally Liberace, his family surviving on public charity, the National Avenue house an armed camp. Yelling broke the nights’ silence, his parents hurled objects at one another, and the siblings were at war with each other for crumbs of affection. His speech impediment generated snickers from his classmates, and his habits invited their taunts. On top of this, he discovered himself lusting after other males. What of the caul-born child’s good fortune? Curses seemed his fate, instead.

  Music offered a singular kind of solace amid this chaos that, unlike the joys of Christmas, was neither seasonal nor temporary. It offered none of Catholicism’s censorship, either. The piano became a way of life, a refuge from the shabbiness of his existence, the disorder of family conflict, and his inner demons. It pulled him to another world, even as his difficulties encouraged him to flee. His music was the great escape, but in the context of genius and talent, it became something else, as well. It had possessed a transforming power long before he began fretting over his parents’ squabbles or his lust for other males. He was a prodigy; he possessed prodigious talent, prodigious will, prodigious ambition to make a musical career.

  Wladziu Valentino Liberace had been born to music. By 1919, his elder brother had been playing the piano for five years, and his sister Angie for three, and the tones of his father’s horn reached the baby’s cradle, too. He took his first steps to the rhythms of Caruso, Galli Curci, Giovanni Martinelli, Geraldine Farrar, and Paderewski in the background. He was programmed with music, scheduled, like his siblings, to begin lessons at age four. He didn’t wait.

  The first manifestation of his genius is legendary. The main story, repeated over and over with some variation, changed little in essence over time. In an early interview with his sister, a journalist recorded Angie’s recollection that “at 3, little Walter was playing the battered family upright by ear. His sister will never forget that first tune: ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas.’” “You could never keep him off that piano bench,” she reflected. “He’d just brush you aside.”42 In his autobiography, Liberace cited the recollections of Angie and his mother to confirm that he was playing while still in diapers. “As soon as I could reach the keyboard, I played whatever I heard her practice . . . and accurately!” Long before he was able to read music, he could play anything perfectly by ear. He was so gifted, the story ran, that Angelina fooled her parents by letting her toddler brother play her lessons in her stead, when they weren’t looking. With Frances listening to make sure her daughter was practicing, Angie would “skip out to play baseball or something with the kids and I’d carry on with her practicing.”43

  Wally possessed an extraordinary, natural gift of being able to replicate the sounds he heard. Taking over Angie’s practicing offered only one evidence of his talent. Angelina described another when she recounted an incident that took place during the same period, around 1926. “I remember when I was 13 I spent a whole year memorizing 17 pages of ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ One day Lee . . . climbed up on the piano bench and asked me what I was doing. I told him,” she related. “‘Here, give that to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done.’ It took him a day to look over that music—then he sat down and played it through perfectly. Imagine how I felt! A little 7 year old kid showing me up! I think he has a photographic mind.”44

  He was a prodigy. His father knew it, and he treated him accordingly.

  The exact date varies
depending on the source, but around the age of three or four, Wally began formal piano instruction. Here is Angie’s version, with a special twist: “He was 4 when my dad decided to break him of playing by ear and started giving him piano lessons. Dad taught all of us to play the piano.”45 After less than a year or so, Sam Liberace determined that the child needed more professional direction, and he enrolled him with a local teacher, a Mrs. Martin, with whom the boy studied for four years.46

  By around 1926, when he was seven or so, he played better than his own teacher. He learned a long Mendelssohn piece by memory after only a couple of days study. By the time he was in first or second grade, he had also developed very clear ideas about proper playing. This was a critical juncture in his musical career; it was also the point at which a major series of events transformed his life. For one thing, the family bought the new house and moved.

  In his memoir, Liberace described the relocation to National Avenue as an epochal event. Leaving the grocery-store house on Fifty-first for the new place on National Avenue was “an overwhelming experience,” he wrote. He identified the move as the watershed of his boyhood. “It’s a traumatic experience to a child, the first time he has to say good-bye to everything he’s learned to associate with his security,” he related. “But while it is difficult saying farewell to old friends and familiar things it’s full of the adventure of finding new friends and exploring new surroundings. All this is an example of how deeply I was affected by our first move.”47 The recollection is curious. In the first place, it was not the first time the family had moved, but the second in the space of a couple of years. In addition, Liberace gave every indication of how happy otherwise he and his clan were to relocate. As for leaving old friends, he left no other record of having had any; on the contrary, all the evidence affirms that he was a solitary child from the beginning: he played indoors and did not go out. Finally, however, if it seems an exaggeration to describe the relocation to a much better place only a mile away as a “trauma,” other unsettling things were going on in the boy’s life, and he might have focused on the move as troubling him instead of on those other difficulties. He does not make the association, but the family moved around the time he entered school, which was also the period during which he endured his sieges with pneumonia. The move and his bout of illness together seem to have cost him the grade he lost in school. Meanwhile, his father had become so concerned about the little boy’s speech impediment that he was taking his son to doctors, therapists, and even surgeons. While none of these details are included in his memoir, he describes other milestones of this period explicitly.

  For one thing, he experienced an aesthetic revelation at this age. It centered on the Polish patriot-pianist, Ignacy Paderewski. The great patriot-performer had played a seminal part in the boy’s life from very early in Liberace’s musical career. Paderewski figured centrally in family lore; Wally’s grandmother told stories of knowing the young pianist in Berlin, for example. By the time he was six or so, he recounted, he was playing his father’s Paderewski recordings, listening to the notes, the musical line, and the intonation. “I’d spend hours listening to his recordings, playing them over and over again. Then I’d try to imitate his interpretations.”48

  Paderewski had all manner of effect on the child’s ambitions. Here was a Polish national, for one thing, who had turned his talent into worldwide fame. Born in 1860, he had won international celebrity by the age of thirty. In Vienna, Paris, London, and New York he had impressed audiences and critics alike as the leading pianist of his time. His musical renown launched him into the realm of high international politics, and he had helped influence the formation of an independent Poland after World War I. His prestige also led to his appointment as premier of the new Warsaw government in 1919. His energy and ambition matched or even exceeded his talent. Legends circulated about his performing with broken, bloodied fingers. His discipline became legendary too. “If I don’t practice for one day,” he said, “I know it; if I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it; if I don’t practice for three days, the audience knows it.” He also helped create the modern model of the musical celebrity. According to his biographer, he inspired advertising campaigns for popular products and insinuated himself into popular lore all over Europe, and, after extraordinary American tours in the early 1890s, in the United States, as well. He grew very rich in the process. Paderewski offered a model for the poor but aggressively ambitious “little Polish boy” from Southside Milwaukee, as he was known.49

  Paderewski influenced the child in other ways, as well. The boy’s devotion to the legendary musician helped shape his style, and his peculiar approach to the literature. Paderewski cut across popular audiences and classical forms. He attracted concertgoers who otherwise never set foot in a concert hall. He did so, in part, through dramatic and, literally, spectacular playing. Like Liszt—whose tradition he continued and elaborated on—Paderewski created a unique personality for the concert platform; just so, he generated, also like Liszt, a mystical devotion in his audiences, especially among women.50 The boy absorbed it all.

  All this provided a background for Walter Liberace’s epiphany when he actually met the great man around 1927. The encounter, he always insisted, altered his life.

  The experience assumed legendary proportions in family lore, but, as for all legends, several versions of the tale exist. Frances Liberace identified the famous pianist as an associate of her family who actually visited their home in Milwaukee.51 In stark contrast, Liberace himself identified the event not with his mother but with his father. In his autobiography, he begins the Paderewski story with reference to how his “dad and his fine record collection . . . introduced me to the great names of music,” including Paderewski, specifically. He followed this assertion with one about how his father then actually managed to arrange for his family to be introduced to the great man: “You can imagine what a thrill it was to all of us, but particularly to me, when Dad came home one day and announced that Paderewski was going to give a recital at the Pabst theater in Milwaukee, and we were all going.”52

  Meeting with his idol was a turning point in the boy’s musical career. For days, he wrote, “I was intoxicated by the joy I got from the great virtuoso’s playing. My dreams were filled with fantasies of following his footsteps . . . or finger prints.” He continued: “These dreams were encouraged by the fact that the great man had graciously received our family after his performance. He talked to us and gave sincere words of encouragement to my parents and to me when he heard that I could play some of the famous selections he played that evening, selections from Liszt, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. The scope of this repertoire impressed him so that he put his hand on my head and said, ‘Someday this boy may take my place.’ I was eight years old.” The music and the challenge, he related, affected everything about his life. “Inspired and fired with ambition, I began to practice with a fervor that made my previous interest in the piano look like neglect.” Perhaps this was one source of the trauma he identified with moving: if he had had friends before, he did not play with them now. He became the butt of neighborhood children’s jokes, the sickly mama’s boy who played the piano all the time. His obsessions became public.53

  In any case, his post-Paderewski obsession worried his parents, who fretted about his health. His mother simply instructed him to quit. “‘Stop!’ Mom used to say.” She was concerned that he looked too pale and that other people would think he was sick, he related. His father took a different tack. Salvatore told him to consider his music. “You need the exercise. To be a great pianist you must have great physical stamina. Run around. Build yourself up physically.” The admonitions had no affect. “I tried to obey my parents, but my heart really wasn’t in it, and I don’t think exercise that you don’t enjoy really does you any good. So I continued to plug away at the old masters.”54

  The trials of 1926–27—sickness, school, speech impediment, moving, and musical revelations—found some resolution in anot
her great event of this time, his discovery of a new music teacher who became the most important person in his life outside his family for the next two decades.

  He had started piano lessons with his father at around the age of three. By 1923, Salvatore had turned him over to Mrs. Martin. After four more years of lessons with this teacher, he related, “there was no question that I knew more great music and could play it a great deal better than she could.” It took no effort on Mrs. Martin’s part, he wrote, “to convince my father that I required more advanced training than she was equipped to give me.” Salvatore, then, began the search for an instructor worthy of his child’s talent. Thus Florence Bettray-Kelly appeared on the scene.55

  Florence Kelly had earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at the Chicago Musical College. She had studied with Paul Stoye, Rudolph Reuter, Moritz Rosenthal, and Glenn Dilliard Gunn. Even as a mature musician, she continued her instruction with the latter. She studied composition and composed, too, her work “winning the approval of music critics and the public as well.” As a young woman she had placed well in both national and regional music competitions, and she continued successfully on the concert circuit in the thirties. “As a professional pianist, she has successfully appeared throughout the northwest where her press comments have been uniformly flattering,” her biographical notice in the Wisconsin College of Music Bulletin noted. She taught a few seasons at the College of Music in Milwaukee in the early thirties, where, according to its bulletin, her “natural gifts combined with brilliant playing have made her remarkably successful in the development of pupils.”56 The Depression played havoc with her career, just as it did with Sal Liberace’s and with those of so many other musicians of the era. To provide her daily bread, she taught privately and found work where she could, for example, at the house orchestra of local radio station WTMJ, where she heard the Liberace boy’s name for the first time in the mid-twenties.57