Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  In The Things I Love, Liberace described his shift to New York City: “I left Milwaukee in 1941 and went East to make my big splash. I was already twenty-one years old and figured I had gone as far as I could in my home town. I had the best jobs, the best work, and was the most sought-after pianist in town. Indeed, I had more work than I could handle, but I was still only a big frog in a little pond. I felt I wasn’t getting the recognition I deserved.”15

  The duration of his tenure in Manhattan is obscure. Also in The Things I Love, he jests that he never even made it there, as he got hung up in New Jersey. The same book, however, describes his first home away from Milwaukee, “a one-room apartment in New York.”16 He was certainly in residence in the city by Christmas, when a dated photograph captures him in Times Square and a second shows him in what is obviously his “one-room apartment” with his older brother before a decorated tree.17

  He returned to Milwaukee in the spring of 1942 but disappeared again almost immediately, apparently going to New York again. Although he traveled extensively between 1942 and 1947, he was certainly back in New York regularly during this period, and his experiences in the metropolis are important to understanding his development, both musical and personal.

  Liberace liked challenges, and New York was a challenge of the first order. His first sojourn in the city in 1940–41 was especially hard. “An extensive concert tour of the East” was hyperbole or an inside joke. He revealed some of the tribulations he experienced to Scott Thorson forty years later. If he had been a big frog in Milwaukee’s small pond, as he told Thorson, he was hardly a tadpole in Manhattan’s lake. “For a while he actually went hungry,” Thorson wrote. He hit the Horn and Hardart cafeterias, making tomato soup out of ketchup and hot water. “It took guts to stay on—but stay on he did, Lee told me proudly.”18 Indeed, his determination—his ambition—never flagged. “People who know him best say Walter Valentino Liberace always has a goal,” an interviewer noted in 1953. This first stint in Manhattan offered proof of that assertion: “When he was an unknown musician in New York—washing dishes while pounding the pavements in search of concert assignments, his goal was Carnegie Hall. ‘I used to sit in Radio City all day with a dollar in my pocket,’ says Liberace. ‘I’d walk past Carnegie Hall and say to myself: ‘Someday I’m going to give a concert there.’”19 Sometimes he made it into the halls, Carnegie and others. With no money for tickets, he appeared at intermission dressed in his dinner jacket and drifted back into the auditorium when the bells sounded. He caught concerts and Broadway plays this way. “This system worked equally well at the Metropolitan Opera, and I must say,” he added, “that half an opera is better than no opera at all.”20

  While scrabbling for food, scavenging culture, and calculating his career, he did what he could to hold body and soul together. He repeated how he had worked as a rehearsal pianist in these times. “Those experiences in cold, drafty halls gave him a healthy respect for the dancers and singers, the ‘gypsies’ of Broadway,” he told Thorson. “As he played he watched, judging the individual performers, developing an eye for talent that would serve him well in the years to come when he would choose acts for his own shows.”21 During this first residency in Gotham in 1941, or perhaps during the second in 1942, he made some cash playing as an accompanist. He recalled a stint with the famous vocalist Helen Morgan, which likely fell within this period. “I was a good foil for her. I was an emotional kid, and when she sang ‘Bill,’ the tears would roll down my cheeks,” he laughed long after. “But when I’d heard it a lot, one night I didn’t cry. Helen got furious with me. ‘What are you trying to do,’ she said, ‘ruin my act?’”22 He made reference to playing clubs and private parties in these years, too, but it seems more likely that these engagements took place in the later New York period rather than during the tough year and a half after he first abandoned Milwaukee.23

  He got some reasonable gigs. He had one job that lasted for about six months in West Orange, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City.24 He told a newspaper reporter that he had played a concert with the New Jersey Philharmonic Orchestra, as well, “and was offered the opportunity to appear with Martin Gould to present ‘Rhapsody in Blue’”25 These jobs allowed him to feast on something more than watery ketchup soup, but they did not satisfy his ambition. In 1941, he signed for a multiperformance engagement to play the Normandie Roof, the fancy dining room at the swank Mont Royal Hotel in Montreal, Canada.26 World events undercut his pleasure. As 1942 dawned, America’s entry into World War II cast a pall over the futures of all young men his age.

  With the declaration of hostilities in December 1941, draft boards around the country began calling up American men to service. As a strapping, single, twenty-two-year-old man, Walter Liberace was a prime candidate. It was perhaps to answer a draft-board notice that the pianist returned home in the spring of 1942. George joined the Seabees and served honorably in the Pacific, entertaining troops and winning some small fame in the process. His younger brother did not go off to war. He told Thorson that a “cyst on his spine” exempted him.27 He returned to New York, where he continued to innovate and to experiment with performance.

  In spite of the draft and military service, scores of musicians and performers still trooped about Tin Pan Alley and the country looking for their break, something to distinguish themselves from the others. The gimmick of playing with the phonograph provided just the trick for Walter Liberace. It was, as an early reviewer had noted, “an innovation entirely his own.”28 It remains so. The scheme required a quirky imagination coupled with enormous technical skill and awesome audacity—not to mention hokey sincerity tinged with camp. He described the innovation and how it came about in his autobiography.

  I’d seen vaudeville acts where men who couldn’t sing a note, mouthed their impressions of Rudy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Morton Downey, Jimmy Durante and other big recording stars. It always got a big hand. . . . But it set me to thinking about how the gimmick might be adapted to music.

  Ever since I was a very little boy I’d been able to play, almost immediately, anything I heard. So with that for a starter I began to experiment on doing an act with me at the piano, “sitting in” as it were, with some of the big popular bands of the day or substituting for one of the great concert pianists playing with one of the big symphony orchestras. I figured if people with no voice at all could get big hands mouthing along with a singer, I, who really could play the piano, could make it big with the same basic idea. . . .

  I spent many hours rehearsing with recordings of Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Paderewski, Jose Iturbi, playing as solo artists with the greatest symphony orchestras like the New York Philharmonic under Toscanini, the Philadelphia Symphony under Stokowski, the Boston Pops under Fiedler, the London Philharmonic under Sir John Barbirolli. . . . I was brazenly placing myself in the same league with these great names of music. But I realized that in doing so I had to be very good.

  What emerged was the music of two pianos, mine and the great artist with whom I was playing. These blended into one as if I, alone, were being accompanied by a great concert orchestra.29

  Afterwards, he tended to gloss over the innovation, obscuring it even as he muddled this whole period of his life. Thus, his memoirs insist that the act lasted only for a brief time: union opposition cut it short. “They said by doing what I was doing I was using records to take the place of live musicians and keeping them out of work.” So, he concluded, “my gimmick, like most gimmicks, was short lived.”30 In fact, it was not short lived by any means. He practiced it for five or six years. More critically, it provided the heart of his act and the basis of his waxing fame in the early forties. After 1942, his “finger synching” propelled him to fame and glory. He had worked out an act that differentiated him from other performers. Indeed, he had worked out a distinguished performance on its own terms. He had an act and a half. He was becoming a hot commodity.

  Abel Green, one of the most important men at Variety, o
ffered a thumbnail sketch of what the showman did in reviewing Liberace’s intermission act in the Persian Room of Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel around 1945. By this time, Liberace had honed his act to perfection. “Liberace brings a nice style to the big league nitery circuit with his legit and synchronized piano recital. It runs the gamut from synchronizing with the Boston Pops recording of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (playing the Jesus Sanroma part) to a legit Chopin recital of the ‘Polonaise,’ Grieg, ‘12th Street Rag,’ boogie-woogie, Beethoven and a novelty piano duet with a femme customer (who gets a token gift for her collaboration).”31

  The flawless accompaniment to the phonographs astonished audiences, but, as Abel Green suggested, the act went beyond the skill of nimble fingers. The pianist also played classical music, or classic themes and excerpts unaccompanied by recordings. He mixed in popular music or ballads just as easily. “Running the gamut of concert timbre, hot music, and Alec Templeton operatic travesties,” the variety delighted audiences as much as his pianistic skills did. He played Jerome Kern off against Helen Morgan, “The Warsaw Concerto” against boogie-woogie, Chopin against Gershwin, and back again. Indeed, the unpredictability of the mix provided an extra fillip of audiences’ pleasure. Thus, one critic celebrated “that touch of whimsy that makes him give out with a bit of boogie just at the point when you expect the classics.”32

  Pianistic virtuosity and musical variety constituted only one part of his act. True, he could play the piano, but he played the house as well—or better. He created an extraordinary rapport with his audiences. He loved integrating the patrons into his act; they loved participating. Taking popular requests provided only one source of the fun. He also gave piano lessons. It was his best trick, observed one reviewer, “getting some patron who doesn’t know one note from a hole in the head, to make his debut in a duet with Liberace. They all laugh when he sits down at the piano and they are still laughing when he gets up which is a neat job unless one evening Iturbi shows up and fools Liberace.”33 In his interchanges with the audience, he made dialogue as central to his act as playing the piano. Dialogue was important to the request part of his performance, and to his lessons, too. Beyond this he ad-libbed easily and worked his patter to a fine art. “Likability,” “personableness,” and similar terms permeate almost every discussion of his act from these early years.

  He made it all look easy, but he was working very hard. His act was a whole little cosmos in which he was a divinity of the parts. More than one reviewer noted the skill with which the performer managed and mastered everything, however small—lighting, props, entrances, exits, and other particulars. Presentation was as critical to him as what he did and how he interacted with the audience. “Not to underestimate the virtuosity of Liberace,” apologized one critic, but the pianist’s control over the minutia of the act demanded equal respect. “Incidental as these details are to a performance, we admire the attention that has gone into making the visual picture and mood as well-groomed as the star and his training.34 Echoing this praise of Liberace’s command of details, another reviewer gave, in the process, a nice word picture of what it was like, sitting in a darkened room anticipating the performance: “Bob Grant and his smooth dance crew ‘roll the drums,’ the lights go out, and you hear exquisite piano playing of the Chopin score from ‘Song to Remember.’ Then on the climax and crescendo, the lights gradually brighten to full, and seated at a magnificent Concert Grand, in white tie and tails, is a dark, handsome young man of some 27 years whose resemblance to Cornel Wilde, who played the title role in the picture, is startling.”35

  He mastered other details, too. If he apprehended a critical source of audience delight in the mix and match of classical and popular, other elements of the act built this same juxtaposition into the very structure of the performance. The grand piano, the classical music, the formal eveningwear, and later the inevitable candelabra, all bespoke formality, elegance, and traditional culture. The patter, the folksy asides, his friendliness, sympathy, and “just folks” attitude toward performance played off another set of values entirely. His extraordinary audience appeal suggests the power of his insights—or instincts—in structuring this duality into his performance.

  Whatever the source of his magic, however, he was bowling people over. The impression was perfect. It was all too splendid! “Just imagine one so youthful, handsome, and personable being so great a virtuoso as LIBERACE!” sang the critics.36

  By 1943 or ’44, Walter Liberace had perfected his act, but he had also found the perfect vehicle for its delivery. Had he scorned the physical limits of the traditional concert stage? It was not a medium that lent itself to his act, anyway. Thus, the reviewer for the Milwaukee Journal had complained that the piano had overpowered the phonograph in 1944. The innovation called for a more intimate environment. It was made to order for fancy nightclubs and elegant dining establishments. Indeed, Liberace’s whole act complemented this setting, just as his supper-club performances help illuminate an institution and an era.

  Squeezed between the eras of big bands on the one side and television on the other, the supper club has attracted little attention as a cultural phenomenon. In its heyday in the forties, it mirrored peculiar social and economic circumstances of the decade. It drew on the tradition of European café society after World War I, but, more strictly American, it lacked the flapper generation’s avant-garde daring and recklessness. The Depression had tempered and moderated café-society cynicism. The supper club reflected, in part, the era’s wartime prosperity after the exigencies of the Great Depression. Although big bands, swing, and even movies dominated popular, democratic entertainment from the thirties, the fancy dining rooms, supper clubs, and exclusive nightspots filled a breach for the middle and upper classes. Their associations lay not only with the elites, but with old-line Protestant elites, in particular. Thus it was that one reviewer referred to one of the most notable of the Manhattan clubs as “the Gotham haunt of the Westchester aristocracy.” Indeed, a kind of WASPy tone permeated “the big league nitery circuit,” as one non-WASP critic called it. Slightly understated Anglo elegance dominated the form, and terms like “svelte,” “swank,” “posh,” “smart,” and “sophisticated” permeated the standards of the institution. It was a world of tuxedos and dinner jackets, of long gowns and corsages, of tinkling crystal and muted conversation.

  Catering to a unique audience, the clubs were founded in notions of sophistication and wealth, good manners and refinement. The club was an urban phenomenon, too, when WASPy elites had no fears about strolling downtown streets all night. More often than not, the clubs were attached to the grandest old downtown hotels, which were themselves in their fullest pre-interstate highway bloom of elegance. Every great city had its great hotels—the sources of local pride: the Peabody in Memphis, the Fairmont in San Francisco, the Plaza and Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Bellerive in Kansas City, the Copley Plaza in Boston, Baker’s in Dallas, the Monteleone and Roosevelt in New Orleans, the William Penn in Pittsburgh, Chicago’s Palmer House. And all the great hotels had their elegant dining rooms and supper clubs with the names that make a kind of subtle litany: the Embassy Room, the Terrace Room, the Vanity Fair Room, the Empire Room, the Wedgwood Room, the Flame Room, the Persian Room, the Normandie Roof. They all became Walter Liberace’s turf. Although swank hotel dining rooms defined the norm, some cities, especially the greatest metropolises, spawned even more sophisticated clubs independent of the hotels. In New York, there was Le Ruban Bleu, Spivy’s Roof, and the Rainbow Room in a penthouse at Rockefeller Center, all of which Liberace played in these years. Manhattan also boasted the Stork Club and the Latin Quarter. Hollywood offered Ciro’s and Mocambo; he performed there, too. All formed a variation on the theme. Their clientele tended to be more urbane, stylish, and liberated than the patrons of the standard supper club. All, however, also sprang from the same or similar circumstances.

  Club patrons had a certain amount of both cash and free time. Servants might have
kept the children, for example, while parents were out enjoying a night on the town that might have included a romantic evening in the hotel attached to the club. But, especially in heat of wartime and just after, the institution suggested romance in the absence of children and servants, too. Military uniforms competed with tuxedoes and dinner jackets over martinis, and the circumstance of soldiers added urgency to the romance of the supper-club scene as young men prepared to enlist, packed for the front, or celebrated their leave from war. With elegant young women in eveningwear hanging on their arms, they offer a snapshot of a passing moment in American history.

  This was the venue; this was the audience upon which Walter Liberace built his fame. Truly, in the decade after 1942, few entertainers knew this circuit so completely. And few turned it so completely to personal and professional advantage.

  He had inaugurated his supper-club act in 1941 at the Normandie Roof at Montreal’s Hotel Mont Royal. He scored high and won a return engagement the next year, at which he claimed the salary of $350 a week, ten times what he had earned in Milwaukee’s Red Room three years before. That year, he also added the Flame Room at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis. Two years later, he was doing better still. In 1943, he signed on for a whole series of engagements at the Statler chain of hotels. He played the Terrace Room in Detroit, the Terrace Room in St. Louis, and the Oval Room at the Copley Plaza, Boston. He had found his niche.