Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Four

  CHICO AND CHOPIN

  Three cheers and a boola-boola for that Gotham haunt of the Westchester aristocracy, the Plaza Persian Room. Its new show is so good, the cigaret gal, who’s seen ’em come and go, with jaded eye, said it’s the best she’s watched here. I agree. The star is a young pianist-entertainer, Liberace.

  LEE MORTIMER

  The period from 1941 to 1947 is the most obscure of Liberace’s life. His memoir scants it, and he spoke of it seldom to others. What enigmatic references exist muddle dates and data. Fragmentary data suggest only outlines of his wartime history and raise almost as many questions as they answer. Even his place of residence in these years cannot be definitively determined. City directories confirm that he had abandoned Milwaukee by 1942: that year marked the last time his name appeared officially as a part of the Liberace household on National Avenue. While he would relocate to Southern California around 1947, his whereabouts in the interval are uncertain. The murkiness of this period is not irrelevant to his biography in itself, but some things are indisputable. What is clearest of all is that between 1941 and 1944, Walter Liberace changed his entire approach to music. He changed the music he played, he changed the style, he changed the venue, he changed the audience. These adjustments, in turn, established him as one of the up-and-coming entertainers of his generation, which is also clear from otherwise obscure evidence. He abandoned the formal concert stage entirely and remade his career around popular audiences and popular music. Although their nature is more uncertain still, changes in his personal life paralleled the metamorphosis of his career.

  Walter Liberace’s hometown newspapers shed the first light on the native son’s career during this otherwise dark period. Although the pianist departed his hometown more or less permanently in 1941, he returned to Milwaukee to play important concerts, one in 1942, another two and a half years later in 1944. Newspaper reviews of these programs offer a measure for evaluating transitions in his aesthetic, and they hint at the larger changes in his life that were occurring simultaneously.

  On January 16, 1940, Liberace had performed the Liszt A Major with the Chicago Symphony at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. No jazzy encores followed the applause. Nine months later, in October, he played another major concert at another Milwaukee concert hall, the Athenaeum. The program for that performance does not exist, but one review indicates his shifting focus. The La Crosse experience was taking root. While laudatory, the notice also suggests some skepticism about the alteration. “A few whose experience had been voluntarily confined to classical music expressed dismay when the young pianist ventured into modern composition,” wrote newspaper critic William H. Radloff on October 18, “but on the whole his effort to present a versatile program was well received.”1

  After this concert, Liberace disappeared from Milwaukee for a year and a half. He returned in March 1942, when he took to the stage again. The program he played included a new act in which he played along with phonograph recordings of great pianists.2 He was still experimenting. Two and half years later, he played the Pabst Theater again. This final wartime engagement revealed his full evolution. Everything about the performance of November 19, 1944, differed completely from his first engagement in the hall, not quite five years before. The programs bore no resemblance to one another. Nor did the form or the presentation of the concerts. Also entirely different was their appeal, the audiences too. As remarkable as these other changes were, however, the publicity surrounding the concert differed in both degree and in kind from the publicity that preceded the earlier one. The new style of marketing portended these other changes.

  Posters tacked up around town and quiet notices in the local papers were now things of the past. Hoopla became the order of the day. Actually, Liberace’s ’42 performance had presaged the publicity campaign two years later. The entertainment writer Buck Herzog, not the classicalmusic reviewer, reported that performance. After referring to an “extensive concert tour of the East,” Herzog noted that the hometown boy had “received salvos of press praises for his unique piano renditions synchronized with phonograph records of the masters.”3

  Who was supposed to review Liberace’s performances? The fine-art critics or the popular-entertainment writers? Liberace’s new performance tangled the categories. Buck Herzog wrote up the ’42 engagement, but the 1944 performance ricocheted back to the music critic Edward P. Halline (who had praised the pianist’s traditional concerts of 1938 and 1940). In the mood of the moment, however, the classical reviewer employed the exaggerated language more closely associated with sports and entertainment journalism. Not least, the day before the actual concert, on November 18, he previewed the program with the most untraditional hyperbole. “Long hairs and bobby-soxers may not lie down together like the lion and the lamb at the Pabst tomorrow afternoon,” he enthused, “but young Walter Liberace, whose home town is Milwaukee, hopes to have them rolling in the aisle with his explosive pianistic mixture of the classics and boogie woogie. For he is spreading both gospels, hoping to soften the Bach-hardened hearts of one group and to open the jazz jangled ears of the other.”4

  The program itself confirmed the promo. The pianist opened with Beethoven’s D Minor Sonata, opus 31, number 2, and Chopin’s Nocturne in F Sharp Major. He played these straight, proving, according to one critic, that “he could handle both masters adequately.” It was the audience’s last glimpse of tradition that evening. The critic described what happened next. “With the aid of a phonograph sitting sedately beside his piano, Mr. Liberace summoned full symphony orchestras to accompany him in excerpts from several famous concertos. He went along in perfect unison with Egon Petri in Liszt’s concerto in A major; with an unnamed soloist in the same composer’s “Hungarian Fantasy”; and with Vladimir Horowitz in an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s B minor (“Tonight We Love”) classic.” Liberace did not wait for encores to demonstrate the Templeton-La Crosse trick, either. Thus, as a part of the regular program, he transformed “Home on the Range” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas” into Strauss-style waltzes, “while ‘Mairzy Doats,’ not a concert standby,” sniffed the critic, “was offered in the style of Bach, Brahms, Chopin and Paderewski.” After the intermission, he performed Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” selections from Duke Ellington, and some boogie-woogie.5

  The performance received mixed reviews. It amused, even delighted Edward Halline of the Sentinel, who had effectively shilled for the pianist the day before. The performer, he noted, “scrambled the masters, dressed up popular airs in classic garments and superimposed his nimble performance on those of major orchestras, as reproduced by a phonograph. . . . The program was mainly a series of stunts, expertly done, and Mr. Liberace had his good-sized audience applauding enthusiastically most of the time.”6 Over at the Journal, however, the music critic looked askance. Without invidiousness, he called the performance “a jukebox piano recital,” but he reported the phonograph trick with raised eyebrows. The gambit was “novel and well-performed,” he conceded, but he observed in passing, too, that the performer could play adequately enough without needing “the aid of another pianist on a machine.” He praised more reluctantly still Liberace’s classicizing of popular tunes. “In both these sections of the program,” he wrote, “Mr. Liberace showed versatility and wit reminiscent of Alex Templeton. But there was left the impression that a little of such gamboling goes a long way.” As for the Gershwin, Porter, and Ellington? “He played this idiom with skill, and did not need the runs and other embellishments which he frequently employed.”7

  With the development of his act from 1940 to 1944, Walter Liberace was obviously trying to make sense of his epiphany in La Crosse. What exactly did he have in mind? He himself offered various explanations about what he was doing and his reasons for doing it. These differ significantly, yet, taken together, they reveal facets of a whole life.

  His most standard explanation of his change revolved around his dissatisfacti
on with the limits of traditional concerts. He disdained the sharp distinctions, for example, between classical and contemporary music. Music was music, he insisted. He rejected the distinctions, too, between highbrow and lowbrow audiences, the “long hairs” versus the “bobby-soxers.” Halline wrote that Liberace “hoped to soften the Bach-hardened hearts of one group and to open the jazz jangled ears of the other,” but the words could have been the pianist’s own.

  He disliked even more the isolation of the performer from the audience, he insisted, and what he considered the tendency of classical concerts to isolate and fragment the audience itself. “I felt being a concert pianist was a very lonely business,” he wrote in his memoir. “I felt as if I were up there playing alone and each of the people in the audience was alone in his own little world listening to me. The audience never came together as it did when I played the ‘Three Little Fishies.’” If he wanted to break down the isolation between the performer and the audience, then, he also wanted to unify, in effect, the audience itself, by reemphasizing the power and delight of all melody and rhythmic line. He wanted to present music to new audiences in a new way. He wanted to give folks “something new and different, . . . to introduce people, who had never been to a piano recital or a symphony concert because they thought it would bore them, to the wonderful works they’d been denying themselves.” About the same time, he confessed later, he realized “that my heart was not in concertizing but in entertaining.”8

  He was formulating a new aesthetic and a new sort of sociology of performing, in effect. Both, however, corresponded to more interior motives that had manifested themselves even in his high school years. As a teenager, he had felt personal alienation, which was comparable, of course, to the isolation he identified with the concert stage. Unable, in effect, to deal with the real world on a day-to-day basis, the teenage Wally Liberace had conjured a new one that he could manage and control. It was the gang in the high school gym hanging around the battered old piano he was playing. It was the crowd in the school auditorium who joined his conspiracy of making fun of himself in his flowing smock and beret. He had broken down their hostility even as he resolved his own alienation; in the process, he created a new community around his own new persona. He redefined social relations and social order through art, entertainment, and performance. As he acknowledged, this characteristic itself arose out of his need to redress his sense of personal isolation, which was rooted, in part, in sexual alienation. From his mid-teen years, he nurtured his ability to please people, to get them out of themselves, to make them laugh: to create a new world for them, and, of course, for himself. After 1941, such personal motives coincided perfectly with his new professional ones.

  While aesthetics as well as psychology inspired the alteration of Liberace’s career toward boogie-woogie and away from the classics, he later admitted that still other considerations came into play in his decision to change tacks. Forty years later, he told Scott Thorson that he had abandoned the concert stage because he considered himself inadequate as a classical pianist. According to Thorson’s account, the Pabst Theater performance with the Chicago Symphony marked the watershed in Liberace’s life. “By the evening of the concert Lee told me he knew the Liszt concerto so well he could have played it backward,” Thorson reported. “His performance was received exactly as he had anticipated. He didn’t set the concert hall on fire—but he didn’t disgrace himself either. A warm wave of applause greeted the end of his performance. The critics were kind, in view of his obvious youth, but Lee hadn’t indelibly impressed any of them with his brilliance. He felt a mild depression that quickly passed. And then, without looking back, he returned to the world he loved—the world of saloons and night clubs.”9

  Events did not actually transpire like this. The Pabst concert was no failure by any means. On the contrary, the reviews lauded the performance. “A gift for brilliant pianism” is not merely “kind”; and while “the sure hand of the craftsman” might be damning praise, “transfigured moments which only genius can create” is not.10 Indeed, the reviews of the first Pabst engagement were far more uniformly laudatory than were those greeting his aesthetic experiments in ’42 and ’44. If his Pabst performance cannot objectively be. called a failure, the possibility that the pianist believed it so subjectively bears closer examination.

  Liberace knew how he played. He was smart as well as talented. He had studied all the great piano literature. Even so, he had always leaned toward certain forms and expressions of classical music. The romantics, especially the late ones, dominated his repertoire. He loved Chopin, but he venerated Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Paderewski. He adopted the style of late romantics, too, with their tendency toward bombast, extravagance, flamboyance, and drama in interpretation. Whatever the demands of his audience, he testified later, “in the depths of my soul, I am still a romantic.”11 When he was seventeen, his first newspaper review noted his “youthful vigor,” “physicality,” and “talents for flair and showmanship”—the hallmarks of late-romantic performance; even so, the same reviewer suggested the need for “toning of years and deeper experience”—more subtlety and nuance, in effect. “The runs and other embellishments” condemned by another reviewer were a part of this whole dramatic approach. Perhaps the performer’s sense of inadequacy, then, arose from his inability or refusal to adapt or change the style to fit different forms, or perhaps even to alter his repertoire. By the time of the first performance at the Pabst, after all, he had already offered the Liszt A Major Concerto twice publicly in Milwaukee. Perhaps, then, he believed that he had gone as far as he could go doing what he did the way he did it. By the same token, he could turn this liability, otherwise defined, to better account by doing something different for a different audience.

  Beyond this, other notions of inadequacy also came into play in his decision to abandon the traditional concert stage. Thus, if the end was not merely excellent concert playing—which Walter Liberace might have achieved—but a more grandly conceived notion of Musical Success, his concert career in general, and his first Pabst performance in particular, could well have seemed inadequate. Liberace’s perfectionism and ambition goaded him constantly. Over and over, in various contexts, the performer discussed his father’s intractable perfectionism; he had inherited the characteristic, he insisted. According to Florence Kelly, from the time he was eleven, he had condemned other children for their failure to measure up not only to his own standards but also to a formal, abstract standard of virtue and excellence. He demanded that of himself, and the sense of his own limits hung over him always and compelled him to make major alterations to his life and career. He was driven. He did not want anything ordinary, not even ordinary success.

  Measured against his own ambitions, then, the plaudits of Milwaukee critics might have seemed faint praise, and the applause of audiences in Sheboygan, Decorah, and Dubuque more anemic still. He was at least as determined, willful, and ambitious as he was talented, and so his shift to a new form of musical expression around 1940 arose in a certain measure out of his search for a field or venue worthy of his best, most ferocious energies. He envisioned his program shift as the way to attracting larger audiences. Larger audiences, in turn, pointed the way to Fame. Almost as important, he calculated that his decision to change his course could lead to glory and cash. He had calculated the main chance all his life. Popular entertainment offered the possibility of larger and more immediate monetary rewards than did plodding through the cornfield concert circuit of the Middle West. Who were the great pianists, beyond Horowitz, Rubinstein, and Iturbi? In comparison, popular entertainment was a much broader field. He determined that he could capitalize, literally, on audience enthusiasm. Describing people’s reaction to his fun and whimsy in La Crosse, he said, “they relaxed and enjoyed themselves and . . . they smiled. That was the big thing, for me. They smiled a way that they hadn’t for the straight classical repertoire, no matter how well I performed.” The house lights rose; a light bulb glowed above his head:
“And suddenly I had an idea of how to make piano playing pay more than the $35 a week I had been getting.”12

  Last, if not least, Liberace also professed to prefer a different audience. “I was happy playing classical music. I love it,” he testified. “But the people for whom I played the classical music were not the people I wanted to please. Early in my career I had traveled as a concert pianist and had often played to a handful of musical purists. But I longed to please the man on the street, the people who had relatively little appreciation of music.”13 It was his neighbors in West Allis he wanted to please, his parents’ friends in West Milwaukee he longed to delight. His career change honored them.

  The desire to alter the relationship between audience and performer, his personal imperatives to charm and delight, his furious ambition, his desire for wealth and fame, and, finally, his identity with the common folk all drove the evolution of Liberace’s career, but it took some time for him to pull it all together between 1940 and 1944. Neither the process, the chronology, nor even site of that development is clear. When did the young pianist give up the traditional concert stage? He might have continued his community concert series into the new decade, but he left no record of playing those upper Midwest towns after 1940. The Athenaeum concert in the fall of 1940—he was twenty-one—was the last verifiable classical concert that he performed in the more-or-less traditional manner. The transformation did not occur exclusively in Milwaukee, either; indeed, the major line of development took place outside his hometown. As his ambition drew him away from the classical stage, so his ambition also outgrew Milwaukee and the Midwest. In the weeks or months after his fall Athenaeum concert in 1940, he left his native turf for what the journalist Buck Herzog had described—obviously with assistance from the performer—as “an extensive concert tour of the East.”14 He abandoned National Avenue for Fifth Avenue.