Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  One associate of long standing described Florence Kelly as “an elegant lady.”58 She combined femininity, however, with elements normally associated with masculinity: she was furiously uncompromising, willful, and outspoken. As demanding as Sam Liberace ever thought of being, her perfectionism came without the Oedipal, competitive, or resentful edge that affected the boy’s relation with his father. Just so, her womanliness possessed none of the suffocating attentiveness and aesthetic ignorance of his mother. Coupled with her musical talent, the combination was particularly attractive for her student, Walter Liberace.59

  Florence Kelly left her own record of taking on the fledgling musician from West Milwaukee. A guitar player in the house orchestra at the radio station where she played brought the boy to her attention. “‘There’s a little Polish piano player on the South Side who has lots of talent,’ the guitarist said. “‘He comes from a poor family but if someone would just take him in hand. . . .’”60 The teacher did indeed take in “the little Polish boy.” She instructed him for over a decade and a half, secured him scholarships, and guided his career to notable heights before he was twenty.

  Kelly also “took the boy in hand” in the rougher sense of the expression. Even as a seven- or eight-year-old, he had developed an intractable spirit, which was perhaps obscured by his eccentricities. It did not show in every aspect of his life, as the smile, dimples, and pleasing ways often masked the trait, nor was he hard the way his parents were, but determination, ambition, and willfulness already permeated his character. As his sister observed later of her brother in his childhood, “He always had a goal, but he’d never tell anyone about it until he reached it. He always had a driving ambition. No obstacle was too great for him.”61 His singleminded determination manifested itself mostly relative to music and the piano—as his sister’s references to his pushing others off the piano bench or playing things the way they must be played suggests. Liberace acknowledged the trait himself in recollections of similar episodes. The teacher was devoted to Walter and his talent, but she was no less indomitable. She was, indeed, every bit as stubborn as her student, even as she acknowledged and nurtured his genius. If fiercely loyal and affectionate to each other, the two nevertheless battled furiously. In an interview long after their first lessons, a newspaper reporter captured the relationship of two intensely stubborn wills at war. She conceded his talent from the first, but she launched immediately into the difficulties of his character. “He had talent all right, but he certainly was set in his ways—even then,” she added without pause. “He would do just so much—and no more. We had lots of tussles. When he worked, he slaved, but it was the hardest job in the world to get him to work. That was the cause of all our squabbles.”62

  She described one of the most notable of these “squabbles” to the same reporter. It was 1934. Walter was fifteen. He was supposed to play the composition “Forest Murmurs” on the air at Radio Station WTMJ, where she was the house pianist. “What a fight we had over that number!” Kelly recalled twenty years later. “He brought it back to me after learning only two pages. He flatly refused to finish it.” In Kelly’s rendition of the story, she drove him out of the studio, throwing the sheets after him in the presence of other studio employees. “‘I won’t have anything to do with you until you learn this number,’ I yelled as he slammed the door,” she recalled. She then brought her big guns to bear by calling Salvatore in on the fight. “Then I telephoned his father—something I rarely had to do—and told him that Walter wasn’t working. His dad said he’d fix him. He did, too: he locked up the family piano for one week. Walter pleaded, but his dad wouldn’t let him go near it. By the end of the week Walter was begging to practice. It didn’t take him long to learn ‘Forest Murmurs’ after that.”63

  Wally offered his own version of the story in which the fight occurred after an on-air performance he had botched.

  When the program was over I walked out of the studio into a sort of lounge area where other performers waited between rehearsals or to get into a studio to do a show. Mrs. Kelly was waiting for me with fire in her eyes. She had a terrible Kelly-type temper and she was so angry she grabbed my music from me and flung it in my face, sheet by sheet. She reminded me that she’d told me that I wasn’t prepared to play that song and I’d proved it to the whole world. She really let me have it, and I was more embarrassed than I’d normally be because all the musicians sitting around in the lounge were friends of my father’s. They taunted me with lines like, “Shame! Shame! Wally didn’t do his lesson.”

  When I got home the news had already reached my father and, of course, perfectionist that he was, he agreed totally with Mrs. Kelly. . . . So he called the station and told them that he’d prefer it if his son didn’t appear on the air anymore until he was more thoroughly prepared for it.64

  Stubborn and exacting, Florence Kelly pushed her student to excel. If he resisted and bridled, he also responded to her challenge. “I entered him in everything that came along and he won ’em all,” a reporter quoted the teacher as saying.65 Thus, when he was eleven, in 1930, she encouraged him to enter a National Federation of Music Clubs piano competition, which he won handily, defeating twelve female rivals for the prize.66

  Kelly’s version of Walter’s victory underlines the boy’s stubborn perfectionism even as it introduces the intimacy and comradeship the student and teacher shared. He was Walter, but she was also now “Florence,” in her memory, at least. “I can still see him sitting on my davenport that night after the concert and saying, ‘Why, I wouldn’t think of playing the way some of those girls did, Florence! You wouldn’t allow me to play that way! They were terrible . . . just terrible!’”67 Here was the same arrogance that had made him push his sister off the piano bench and humiliate her in public; it was Salvatore Liberace’s arrogance played out in a second generation.

  In 1933, two years after the National Federation of Music Clubs competition, Kelly arranged for Walter’s first formal recital at the Wisconsin College of Music. Four years later, she was still pushing him. She entered him in a still more prestigious competition, less to demonstrate his talent, she recalled later, than to check his ego; she intended “to pin his ears back,” she said. It did not work out exactly as she planned. Playing a program of Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin, he performed at the Athenaeum in Milwaukee under the auspices of the Society of Musical Arts. He won. Late that night, the elated young man borrowed a nickel for the pay phone to share his victory with his teacher.68 It was a double triumph. Besides the laurels of the Society of Musical Arts, his playing also won the seventeen-year-old boy his first public notice and first press accolades. Roy L. Foley, music critic for the Milwaukee Sentinel, was very impressed. He played, Foley wrote on January 8, 1937, “with a vigor that indicates much youthful physical power. His desire to ‘go,’ with the toning of years and deeper experience, should win him a considerable place in music.” The Liszt, most notably, prompted a special note. That piece, the critic observed, elicited “Mr. Liberace’s talents for flair and showmanship.”69

  Late the following year, the young pianist won additional plaudits and public notice in a still more significant performance. “A crowd of 500 acclaimed Walter Liberace . . . at the Elks Club auditorium for a fine performance of the Liszt A Major Concerto with the Wisconsin Symphony orchestra,” wrote the Sentinel critic, Edward P. Halline, on November 18, 1938. “The young Milwaukeean made the piano’s voice resound eloquently. He kept his grip on the music,” he also noted, “even in the composer’s most elaborate flights.”70

  Such praise was not enough. The boy wanted more. The break came in 1938. “After being recommended, and auditioning, I had the opportunity to give a concert at Kimball Hall in Chicago,” he later wrote. This performance met with more laudatory reviews. “One of the Chicago critics wrote that I had every quality a virtuoso should possess,” he remembered fondly. The concert led, in any case, to greater honor, when, with Florence Kelly’s assistance, he won an audition with Frederic
k Stock, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to perform with one of the great ensembles of the United States.71

  The audition itself was memorable. The boy and his teacher took the train to Chicago, but a Milwaukee snowstorm that hit the day before the audition was scheduled delayed their trip. They found the huge, cold, barnlike orchestra hall empty except for Stock himself and another young auditioner. The conductor “was tearing him to pieces, making him start over again and again. I can still see Stock down in the orchestra pit, his elbows resting on the footlights,” Florence Kelly recalled. “He would hum the orchestra parts out loud, then conduct the piano parts with a baton, rapping it loudly on the stage when something displeased him.” Much did. Although terrified by this carnage, Walter, according to his teacher, “played so well that Stock let him go through the entire Liszt A major concerto without interruption.”72

  At the same audition, Stock had nodded approval to another young pianist from Milwaukee who won her audition with Chopin’s Concerto in F Minor, and Shirley Sax played with the Chicago Symphony the following spring. Florence Kelly had to wait another year, but on the wintry night of January 16, 1940, her twenty-year-old prize pupil soloed the Liszt A Major Concerto with the Chicago Symphony at the brilliant Pabst Theater in downtown Milwaukee. His performance won praise in two reviews in Milwaukee papers. The Journal‘s music critic, Richard S. Davis, observed that “Liberace played with great credit to himself and his teacher.” His playing, he concluded “disclosed a considerable gift for brilliant pianism.”73 The Sentinel‘s critic, if anything, was more generous. Edward Halline observed how the pianist had kept Liszt’s “bombastic passages within reason and he did not miss some of the piano’s most liquid conversations with the woodwinds. . . . One always felt the sure hand of the craftsman, and sometimes there came the transfigured moments which only genius can create.”74 It was a triumph of the first order for the twenty-year-old, especially because it took place in the very spot where, less than fifteen years before, the great Paderewski had anointed the child of poor immigrant parents. It was a dream fulfilled—a goal accomplished thanks to considerable talent, but also as the result of quite as much Trojan effort and Olympian ambition. It was not to be Liberace’s last such achievement, by any means. Already, his brain was working on other schemes beyond the Chicago Symphony and beyond Chicago. He longed to escape, but he was also turning his will toward creating a new world free of the strictures of the Liberace household. He created a new self in the process.

  Three

  SOWS’ EARS/SILK PURSES

  He’d be home by three, get in a few hours at the piano, have a hurried dinner, and rush back to school, where he played piano for silent movies shown in the auditorium. He had already started to make a local name for himself as a musical prodigy. If he couldn’t be “normal,” he decided to make a virtue of being “different.”

  SCOTT THORSON

  By age ten, he was an accomplished pianist. He was a prodigy, but he also devoted himself to his art with the energy of an adult. He worked all the time: his parents could not tear him away from the upright in their parlor, where he practiced. He knew the great performers of his craft, and he could distinguish their styles. He knew the literature, too. The devotion was paying off in the form of increasingly impressive victories. Some things his victories did not help.

  For all his knowledge, ambition, energy, and art, Walter Liberace’s boyhood was a disaster. Along with his speech impediment, peculiar ways, and antisocial behavior, his interest in music alienated him. His peers equated musical ability with being a mama’s boy and a sissy. About the time he entered high school, however, or a little before, he discovered new music, new uses of music, and, indeed, a new self. With music, he invented a new personality.

  The process of reinvention was critical; it related, not coincidentally, to his homosexuality, which it helps illuminate. As important, it inaugurated a process of self-creation that characterized the performer’s entire life. While music was integral to his own transformation, the young man also transformed his music in the process of transforming himself; he discovered a different mode of musical expression that encouraged his personal reinvention. Finally, his new music and his new persona resonated through his inner life. His turning to popular music amplified difficulties with his father even as it provided a weirdly Oedipal resolution of that critical relation. Not least, of course, the new music and the new persona also put bread on the Liberace table, not a minor concern in the hungry times after 1929 that never seemed to end. The Depression was not going away, but people still liked to laugh and sing. Wally Liberace discovered his capacity to delight the folks. They responded enthusiastically to his talents. His turning to popular music, then, represented a unique mix of social, economic, personal, and domestic motives, which combined to produce something altogether new in the Liberace household and in its shrinking violet of a second son.

  Wally Liberace’s interest in popular music preceded his fascination with the classics. The turn to popular music, however, was neither a necessary nor a natural development of his musical career; indeed, it ran counter to some of the most profound biases of his childhood.

  Later in life, Liberace argued that Ignacy Paderewski, the great idol of his life, had approved of popular music. He made the connection in 1951 during the first real interview he did for his hometown newspaper, The Milwaukee Sentinel. In a conversation with the great pianist that took place when her son was only seven, according to Liberace, his mother had demanded that the master tell her if her boy should be “wasting his time” on light works. “Yes, if he wants to play that,” Paderewski supposedly replied. “The other will come later, if it comes. I do the same. I found that Americans prefer lighter music and I give it to them. At the same time I can play the serious music I want to.”1

  If Wally might have been attracted to popular music from the first, and if he later found even classical justification for the form, he received no support at home for the inclination. Did he like popular songs, show tunes, and jazzy melodies? Frances Liberace, according to the Paderewski story, was skeptical. Her opposition paled beside her husband’s. Sam Liberace was not an easy man when it came to any issue he made his own. On this one, perhaps even more than on others, he was intransigent. He insisted over and over upon classical training and performance. Even much later, when his son was gaining wealth and celebrity by performing popular music, he muttered to friends about Walter “playing that BS.”2 Earlier, it was worse. In the twenties, neighbors had recommended capitalizing on the boy’s genius. “‘You should let him work in some kind of child prodigy act and tour the country with it. He’d make big money,’” one visitor insisted. Sam’s response never varied: “Wally’s going to study music and finish his schooling in the proper manner. I won’t let him prostitute his Talent.’”3

  Combined with personal motives, economic necessity pushed the boy to violate his father’s will. The two causes played off each other. The economic motives took precedence, at least initially. About the time he won the Wisconsin Federation of Music Clubs prize, he played commercially for the first time. He did not play Liszt. Chopin was absent from the program, and so was Mozart.

  He remembered himself as being ten years old; he was likely a little older, by which time the country was deep in the Great Depression. He remembered the old Alhambra, where his father played in the house orchestra, as the site of his achievement. The theater was sponsoring a promotional program, “Milwaukee on Parade,” and the boy attended the audition. The show was intended for adult performers, and the auditioners ignored the little boy in his coveralls until members of the house dance troupe interceded. He won a spot in the production. Without telling his family, he got the dancers to obtain a costume for him. He needed a special platform and a bench so he could reach the keys. The stagehands pitched in, and the dancers helped, too. He needed music, as well. “They had to give me something to play because they couldn’t see Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsody’
as the ideal number for a vaudeville show. . . . So they had a man play a number for me, and I learned how to play it from listening to him.” After the show, one of the Fanchon & Marco dancers celebrated his talent. “She said that the man who had played the number for me said to her when I was on, ‘Why can’t I play like that?’” He and I wondered the same thing. I, too, wondered how I played like that.”4

  Angie Liberace remembered the story a little differently. She placed the “talent review” at the Wisconsin Theater instead of at the Alhambra, and she dated the episode during the Depression, when her brother was around eleven or twelve. According to her, he badgered the manager for days before he relented and allowed Wally to perform. “After a week of chasing him away they finally decided to let him play,” she said. She confirmed that her brother had done it all in secrecy without telling anyone in his family, however. “The first thing we knew about it was when Florence called my father, ‘Do you know what Walter’s doing?’ she asked. ‘He’s playing at the Wisconsin theater. He’s pretty good, too!’ I’ll never forget,” Angie concluded; “he got $75 for appearing in that show for a week. It seemed like a million at the time!”5