The name change fit into a much larger pattern of his efforts at self-promotion and reinvention in the mid-forties. Thus, the name became an end in itself, a point of distinction, just as spelling it phonetically—“Liber-AH-chee”—became a standard element in his publicity, for example, on the postcards promoting his records. Soon enough, the name became an important part of his press releases, and—soon enough again—a standard item in news stories about him. By 1947, for instance, even Milwaukeeans who had known Sam, Frances, George, Angie, Wally, and Rudy for decades were now treated to journalistic direction on pronouncing the single patronymic. “LIBER-AH-CHEE,” instructed the writers at the Sentinel.62
The entertainer was manipulating his own image, and this exercise in public relations was an important part of his career; at the same time, he was delighting audiences and giving them what they wanted. Their pleasure delighted him as well, and he was only returning their favor. Reviewers noted such peculiar aspects of his performance as his “respect for his audiences.” He made people relax and laugh. He played every sort of music, including requests he had never heard of before. He wisecracked. He ad-libbed. By 1945, he had become a consummate showman, and people could hardly get enough of him. He was doing what had he always wanted to do.
After 1940, especially after 1942, he was doing what he always wanted to do sexually, too. As he settled into his act, he was also settling into a new world of urbane, homosexual culture. Scott Thorson related how his companion’s work as a New York rehearsal pianist “contributed to his knowledge of the entertainment industry’s extensive gay community. Many of the dancers and singers he met were homosexual. He said that his earlier loneliness evaporated as he found new friends, new lovers.”63 Beyond such generalities, what was happening in the entertainer’s private life? If his autobiography is silent on the topic, even his memoir alludes, at least for cognoscenti, to this sexual underground: “Spivy” of Spivy’s Roof offers the initial key to the young pianist’s queer closet.
In Gay New York, his examination of changing patterns of homosexual culture in the twentieth-century metropolis, George Chauncey examines the smart clubs on the Upper East Side that catered to “a sophisticated clientele,” to use Liberace’s language. “Sophisticated”? It meant patrons who failed to blink at the urbane male couples scattered about the room or lounging at the bar. “Sophisticated”? It meant these very gay couples who shared jokes over martinis. “Sophisticated”? It meant appreciation for the eccentric Spivy herself, and for the clubs that allowed her space and glory. She needed room. Chauncey chronicles how this “enormous lesbian” held court in various Upper East Side night spots. She made her reputation first at Tony’s on Fifty-second Street, where she sang raunchy songs in the back room for the gay patrons who frequented the place.64 Tony’s figured significantly in the elegant, understated, underground homosexual culture of the era. Otis Bigelow, “the best looking man in Manhattan” in 1942, recalled it fondly. “Gay bars, no, I didn’t go to those until later. But there were elegant bars like Tony’s on Swing Alley on West 52d Street where Mabel Mercer sat and sang,” he related. Rich, youngish bachelors maintained elegant apartments nearby, and almost every afternoon one or more of them held open cocktail hour. “More often than not someone would say, ‘Well, I have tickets to the ballet and we can drop in on Tony’s later.’”65
Tony’s, where Spivy sang, had competition. Indeed, Spivy offered it herself in 1940, when she opened her own club, the Roof—Spivy’s Roof—in the penthouse at Fifty-seventh and Lexington Avenue. Liberace knew the place intimately. Like Tony’s and like Spivy herself, it was more or less openly gay—“sophisticated,” as Lee put it. “According to a jazz pianist who worked for Spivy in the 1940s,” Chauncey writes, “her club welcomed small numbers of gay people, so long as they were ‘discreet.’ The policy encountered little opposition, for, as successful business people, many of Spivy’s patrons had every reason to hide their sexual identities. Lesbians and gay men sometimes went to the club together as “couples.” Nonetheless, Spivy still instructed her doorman to exclude homosexuals whenever their numbers or overtness began to threaten the club’s reputation.”66
Chauncey chronicles other such sophisticated venues that appear in Liberace’s record. The Plaza Hotel itself, where he had played intermission in 1945 and headlined two years later, was another notable gay rendezvous. The performer could hardly have missed its Oak Room, where well-dressed men subtly scoped out other gentlemen. The hotel was a hot spot in general. “‘The Plaza Hotel, of course,’” one of Chauncey’s interviewees observed, “‘was a choice place to conduct yourself with decorum and make a pretty good pickup.’”67
There were plenty of opportunities everywhere for homosexual liaisons in Gotham. “In New York one can live as Nature demands without setting every one’s tongue wagging,” wrote one provincial invert who had moved to the city in 1882. What was true in the Gilded Age also applied, perhaps to an even greater degree, sixty years later in wartime New York.68 If, as Chauncey argues, sexual lines were changing and hardening in the period between 1920 and 1940, the war and the period just after it witnessed the most phenomenal liberation in the city’s homoerotic culture. It was an excellent time and a splendid place for men who loved men.
New York had always maintained two general homosexual subcultures. On the one hand, there were what the writer Arthur Laurents derided as “the silver and china queens.”69 They were WASPy, rich, discrete, and sealed off from the hurly-burly. One member of this group described it long afterward: “Gay society at that point was so hermetic and so safe and so wonderful. Everybody was very classy in those days. There was no trade. There were no bums. Everybody that you met had a style of elegance. It was not T-shirts and muscles and so on. It was wit and class. You had to have tails and be polite. Homosexuality was an upscale thing to be. It was defined by class. There wasn’t dark cruising.”70 Obedient to rules of public order, this community met and mingled easily with the gentry of the standard sexual persuasion, sophisticates who accepted or overlooked the homosexuality of their associates and friends. Objections? It was not homosexuality per se that offended but rather outré behavior. Thus, flaming fags and roaring dykes were not welcome. Otherwise, order reigned. A famous maxim summarized the spirit of the day: “‘My dear, I don’t care what people do as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’”71
Beyond these enclaves of aristocratic hauteur, another world of male-male sexuality thrived in New York. It was gutsier, sweatier, and more proletarian, ethnic, and diverse; it revolved around sex, not around class. Subtle it was not. It happened in the streets; no one cared if it scared the horses. The war increased it exponentially. Arthur Laurents, who mocked the Upper East Side gay gentry, delighted in this other homosexual cosmos. “New York in wartime was the sexiest city in the world,” he enthused. “Everybody did it—in numbers.” He continued, “There were two great bars in Manhattan, the Oak Bar at the Plaza and the bar at the Savoy Plaza. Oh, the cream of the crop,” he enthused. “All you had to do was just go. You wouldn’t get in if you didn’t have a uniform on. I felt guilty, I wanted to change—and I loved it. I never had so much sex in my life. It was incessant.”72 The future composer Ned Rorem echoed this reaction: “During the war, when I think of my own sleeping around, my hair stands on end. The thousands of people I went to bed with! Much of that had to do with being a teenager, but it had to do with the war too. Although I was not in the army, I’m sure that had a lot to do with the military.73
Gore Vidal delineates the same picture in his memoir, Palimpsest. He writes that he and maybe thousands of other young American men
were enjoying perhaps the freest sexuality that Americans would ever know. Most of the boys knew that they would soon be home for good, and married, and that this was a last chance to do what they were designed to do with each other. . . . It was my experience in the war that just about everyone, either actively or passively, was available under the righ
t circumstances. . . . Although the traditional hysteria about same-sexuality ran its usual course in the well-policed army camps Stateside, bars like the one on the ground floor of the Astor Hotel throve. At any time of day or night, hundreds of men would be packed six-deep around the long oval black bar within whose center bartenders presided.74
Indeed, the old Astor Hotel at Seventh Avenue and Forty-fifth Street was a gay Kaaba Stone in homosexual Mecca. The Astor had been a notorious rendezvous from early in the century, but “it reached the zenith of its popularity during World War II, when it developed a genuinely national reputation among gay servicemen as a place to meet civilians when passing through New York,” according to Chauncey.75
It was not a gay bar, strictly speaking. Plenty of patrons who had no interest in homosex drank there, too. The one group congregated knowingly on one side of the great horseshoe-shaped bar, while the others, mostly without a clue, wound up on the other. In the recollections of some gay patrons, the staff worked at propriety, as George Chauncey summarized relations at this famous watering spot in quoting one of his informants.
“The management would cut us down a little bit when it felt we were getting a little obvious. If you got a little too buddy, or too cruisy . . . too aggressive, they’d say cut it out, men, why don’t you go somewhere else? You had to be much more subtle.” Men on the other side of the bar, however, were allowed to “do anything they wanted,” the man added. . . . “they could touch because it was obvious they were butch.” Gay men had to be “subtle” so that the straight men among them—including the occasional strangers who unknowingly sat down on the gay side of the bar—would not realize they were surrounded by queers. They used the same clues they had developed in other contexts to alert each other to their identities: wearing certain clothes fashionable among gay men but not stereotypically associated with them, introducing certain topics of conversation, or casually using code words well known within the gay world but unremarkable to those outside it (such as “gay”). Using such codes men could carry on extensive and highly informative conversations whose significance would be unnoticeable to the people around them.76
Despite such precautions, sometimes innocents who wound up on the other side of the bar did realize. A patron from those years—a gruff, resolutely straight, former baseball player who wore his uniform well—recounted his experience long after. In the summer of 1942, just before he shipped out on the Queen Elizabeth for the European front, 2nd Lt. W. H. Harbaugh wandered into the Astor Bar for a drink. “I had always sat at the other side. Now I wondered why the fellow next to me was so friendly. I looked around, realized what I had got into, drank my beer fast and left.”77
The special gift of telling comradery from lust was no particular skill of ordinary gents who eschewed this sort of sex. If the innocent second lieutenant misread his barmate’s friendliness, perhaps the other fellow did so as well, and then perhaps this randy fellow determined to follow another model entirely—simply to run the flag up the pole and see what happened. It was standard operating procedure in these years, when lines defining straight and queer gave at various pressure points. The freewheeling atmosphere of the Astor bar encouraged such experiments, even if all did not partake.
Sexual experimentation at the Astor even caught the eye of scientists. The hotel became so famous, according to Gore Vidal, that Dr. Alfred Kinsey, of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, “used the mezzanine of the Astor as a sort of office, where he would interview ‘human males’ about their sex lives.” The place changed Kinsey’s way of seeing the world, the novelist insisted. “It was by observing the easy trafficking at the Astor that he figured out what was obvious to most of us, though as yet undreamed of by American society at large: Perfectly ‘normal’ young men, placed outside the usual round of family and work, will run riot with each other.”78
For any man who lusted after other men, sex was easy in New York. It was a splendid time for any fellow who relished the occasional stand up, lie about, or roll over with another man, after which he would return to spouse or fiancée or girlfriend or his completely hetero messmates with a conscience no more troubled, perhaps, than it would have been had he visited a female prostitute.
How did it actually work? What did the fellows do? The homosexual world was in sharp change in this period, as George Chauncey describes it, but all manner of sex was readily available almost anywhere.
“Sophisticated” clubs and bars—the Astor bar, the Plaza’s Oak Room, Tony’s, Spivy’s Roof—offered one kind of opportunity for sexual liaisons. One man chatted up another. A typical sequence of events followed. The most beautiful boy in New York during World War II left one version of the turn. He would meet a likely fellow at the Astor or the Oak Room, perhaps, an out-of-towner who was staying at the St. Regis, say. “I would walk him home, and he would say, ‘Why don’t you come up for a drink?’ And he would say, ‘Well, why don’t you stay over? We’ll have breakfast and it’ll be nice. Don’t walk all that way home: you can sleep on my sofa,’” Otis Bigelow reminisced. “Then there would be a little bit of this and that. It was friendly prep-school sex.”79
Gore Vidal grew nostalgic over a different kind of sex in a different sort of bed in a very different environment. There were no prep-school dalliances at the Baths. “I also discovered, that magical winter, the Everard Baths,” he wrote, recalling the season of 1945–46, “where military men often spent the night, unable to find any other cheap place to stay. This was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me.”80 Located in a former church building, the Everard had been in operation since 1888 at 28 West Twenty-eighth Street, immediately west of Broadway, “in the heart of the Tenderloin entertainment district, where it was surrounded by famous theaters and restaurants and by infamous resorts such as the Haymarket and the French Madam’s, as well as some of the city’s largest brothels,” according to Chauncey. It was only one of numerous such places where one could pick up willing men.81
Sliding down the scale of politesse, a horny male could find still other outlets for his passions, often in the briefest encounters. Broadway offered a large selection of “nightclubs run by immigrants, gangsters, and other ‘lower class’ impresarios,” Chauncey argues. No silver and china queens here. Male prostitutes were everywhere in this section. But soldiers and civilians alike also loitered and cruised, not for money, but for instant, anonymous gratification. According to Chauncey, “the highly flamboyant working class ‘painted queens’ who gathered at Bryant Park” near the New York Public Library represented a similar extreme of homosexual style. Public lavatories offered another outlet.82 Wherever it took place, the process hardly varied. One looked out for a single loitering male. When one caught the eye, glances passed, and sometimes short vacuous sentences. Some other words might follow. Beyond, conversation generally ceased as couples swung into a vacant stall, ducked behind the bushes, or fled around a dead corner alley where they would unzip their trousers, pull out their penises, and masturbate. A variation on the theme might involve one or both of the men performing fellatio in the shadows. If the weather was pleasant, a shirt might rise, and one man would fondle a chest or nipples. Trousers and underpants might fall at the desire or request of one party or the other for a hand’s caress or for even just a look. Sometimes, hard, fast kisses might be exchanged. In other circumstances, not always rare, even in the most public places—police, passersby, and horses notwithstanding—one man might perform anal sex with another. On other occasions, perhaps rarer still, one party might take the other back to a flat or hotel room for a hit of men on men.83 In that circumstance, any variety of couplings might occur. This was New York’s stranger sex available around Broadway and in the parks. It was easy, quick, and almost risk free.
Risks were there, however. Although, as Vidal notes, “newly invented penicillin had removed fears of venereal disease,”84 the men in Bryant Park, the boy hookers on Broadway, “trade”—straight men looking for homosex, or “rough trade”—st
raight men of the working classes wanting male gratification, all offered some potential threat and danger. Some thrived on the excitement. At the same time, other dangers were real indeed, whether or not they provided a sexual rush. If they were disdainful of “dark cruising,” the gentlemen from the Upper East Side were home free. Others were not. The vice squads might descend at any time, in any place. Although gay clubs and baths were raided regularly, putting the fear of God into many visitors, even nonhomosexual clubs with a heavy gay patronage were monitored by the vice patrols, and most, like the Astor bar or Spivy’s Roof—even though the latter was run by a lesbian—practiced self-censorship.
Did Walter Valentino Liberace indulge in any of these activities in that first year or so in New York in 1941, which he spent walking the city’s streets? And what about when his rocket was soaring three years later? He spoke little of these days and left no record other than what Thorson recollected. One might expect the good-looking twenty-one-year-old Midwestern musician to have had access to any variety of this sex that he chose. Street sex was there to be had for a glance. He certainly indulged his appetites freely later, but what he did in his younger years is uncertain. Scott Thorson’s memoir suggests one possible pattern. Thorson recalled Lee telling him how he had preferred older men in his younger days, and his club dates—not merely those at Spivy’s Roof, but certainly the ones at the Plaza with its cruisy Oak Room, and even the parties at the Gettys’—provided ample opportunity for the handsome young performer to be passed notes or offered drinks by graying gentlemen in good suits. His attendance at the Metropolitan Opera, one of the most notable of all the classy pickup spots, would have cast him in the same company. If the tradey life pleased him in middle age, his preferences in the forties would have lain much more with the gentlemen on the Upper East Side.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 15
