Liberace had bought his house on the street from the character actress Lurene Tuttle, who later appeared with him in his 1955 film, Sincerely Yours. Twenty-five years after the purchase, he still romanticized the place. “It was not only the first house I owned in California, it was the first one I ever owned anywhere. And like the homes of so many ambitious young newcomers to Los Angeles, it was in San Fernando Valley. But that was before ‘the Valley’ became, as it is today, mountain-to-mountain houses. Then it was still kind of country and western, still sagebrushy enough to inspire the hit song that told the story of a man who was going to ‘settle down and make the San Fernando Valley my home.’”8 The young performer loved the valley and fit into suburban life with hardly a hitch. To go with his nice house, in 1949, he learned to drive and purchased a fancy Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible.9 The American boy was home free.
The American boy was also an American gay boy, and as a homosexual man, he had other reasons to celebrate his new home. While no public evidence whatsoever survives about his sex life between 1947 and 1953, the showman had relocated to a homosexual center almost as freewheeling as New York. Southern California had a dish for any palate. In the course of hitching up with the Goodwins, for example, he made passing reference to his hotel in Santa Monica. With its snowy white beaches and beautiful sunbathers, Santa Monica was a kind of homosexual heaven after the war.
John Rechy left one notable, if somewhat morbid, version of “living the life” in Santa Monica in his autobiographical novel, City of Night. Crystal Beach focused the action. Every variety of men who wanted men was here, he began:
the queens in extravagant bathing suits, often candy-striped, molded to the thin bodies—tongued sandals somehow worn like slippers; the masculine-acting, -looking homosexuals with tapered bodies and brown skins exhibiting themselves lying on the sand, trunks rolled down as far as possible—or going near the ocean as if undecided whether to dive in, posing there bikini-ed, flexing their bodies, walking the long stretch of beach, aware of the eyes which may be focused on them; the older men who sit usually self-consciously covered as much as the beach weather allows, hoping perhaps for that evasive union, more difficult to find now—ironically now, when the hunger is more powerful, the shrieking loneliness more demanding; the male-hustlers, usually not in trunks, usually shirtless, barefooted, levis-ed, the rest of their clothes wrapped beside them, awaiting whatever Opportunity may come at any moment, clothes, therefore easily accessible for moving quickly for whatever reason.
“Sally’s Bar,” located a block from this scene, offered both assignation spot and watering hole for more or less off-duty gays.10
Gay life in Los Angeles and Hollywood was even easier than in Santa Monica. Although writing slightly after Liberace first moved in among the palms and bougainvillea, Rechy, again, offers a fitting memorial to the California dream for the gay subculture. It beckoned gay men from everywhere. “You come here to find the wish fulfilled in 3-D among the flowers . . . and the invitations of The Last Frontier of Glorious Liberty (go barefoot and shirtless along the streets) have promised us longdistance for oh so long.”11 He chronicled the ease and ubiquity of homosex in Los Angeles, from the “youngmen” of Pershing Park and the cheap bars and hotels downtown, to the private parties of the bourgeoisie in Hollywood Hills and the elegant decadence of the famous parties of “the famous director,” George Cukor. If Rechy and others chronicled the perpetual threat of police raids, arrest, and public censure, gay culture still thrived. Gay clubs, for example, came and went almost with the seasons, but some entrepreneur was always willing to take the risk and open another. The Waldorf, the Cellar, 326, the House of Ivy, the Open Door, the Cherokee House, the infamous Chee-Chee’s, Maxwell’s, the Crown Jewel. Individual gay bars might have sprouted like mushrooms in a summer field to vanish almost as quickly, but the city was never without its male-male saloons; others, Sally’s in Santa Monica, for example, flourished in outlying towns. And with the bars, of course, came a whole culture. Southern California was gay for the asking.12
Even if he never confessed it publicly, this was Liberace’s world after 1946. Beyond this, he settled comfortably into the whole California scene. As he adapted to his new environment, he also altered his career one more time, abandoning the phonograph part of his performance. He transformed his act around the time he moved into his new home. The phonograph was gone by 1947, when he explained to his hometown newspaper that “the phonograph contraption split my audience. Some of them liked it, some of them complained that they would rather hear me play alone. I had to conclude that the phonograph was too much of a gadget novelty. It was giving me the wrong buildup, as a mechanical performer.”13 Twenty-five years later, he offered another explanation in his autobiography. The unions, he sneered, protested that his recorded music was keeping live musicians from playing. “I am now glad,” he concluded, “because it forced me to come up with my own individuality in playing rather than bask in the glory of other performers by imitating them.”14 While he tended to downplay the significance of the innovation, the shift represents a major break with his own past, for playing to the New York Philharmonic and the other great symphonic ensembles had kept alive something of the concert-stage discipline, however altered its presentation had become. Henceforth, the arrangements were his own; he was following his own genius, his “own individuality.”
The recording gimmick had given his act a classy tone. When he dropped it, he hit on another device that would do the same thing. He continued to offer his own idiosyncratic versions of Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff to supper-club audiences, but he now did so on a spectacular piano that traveled with him on every engagement, no matter where he performed. It suited him perfectly.
Most practically, this spectacular new instrument resolved his constant dissatisfaction with pianos on the road. Beginning with the poor excuse for a piano he’d found at the Plankton Arcade in 1940 in Milwaukee, he’d been forced to play on one inadequate instrument after another. “I was fed up with finding bad pianos in the smaller cities. I wanted a piano that not only sounded but looked the best.” Had he been on speaking terms with his father, Sam might have nodded approval at his purchase.15 Haunting the piano exchanges in Los Angeles in the winter of 1947, he found the instrument of his dreams in Long Beach. It was a very rare, custom-made, double-strung, gold-leafed, oversized grand that had been made in Leipzig by Julius Blüthner and brought to the United States before the war. Its twin had been destroyed in the conflict. It cost twentyfive thousand dollars at a time when a family might have purchased a modest dwelling for a fifth of that amount. Typical of the showman’s record, two very different versions of the piano’s acquisition appear in the sources. The piano salesman himself left one account. He insisted that the young pianist had bought it on the monthly installment plan, not every payment of which he had made on time.16 Lee himself left another version. He saw the piano and fell in love with it, he related, but lacked the money to buy it. He informed Mr. Goodwin. “The next day, the piano was in their living room. He had bought it. And he made arrangements for me to pay him back a little at a time as I was working. What could I say? I was overwhelmed by Mr. Goodwin’s kindness. But it turned out to be a shrewd investment. With my new piano, Mr. Goodwin managed to get even bigger increases in my salary! I was able to pay him back in less than a year.”17
The Blüthner grand filled various functions in Liberace’s new career. Beyond its practical virtues, it provided a most dramatic publicity device. The piano, indeed, represented only one element of a new publicity campaign that the entertainer launched around 1947 as a part of his remade self.
Years after the showman first made himself famous, Walter Monfried, the longtime drama critic at the Milwaukee Journal, referred to the pianist “in his own way [as] a sort of public-relations genius.” He related that as early as the Plankton Arcade days, “whenever Lee came into the office with an idea it was always a good one. It was a good idea for a story.”18 T
he showman’s press kit of 1947, which survives at the Las Vegas Public Library, offers primary evidence of Monfried’s assertion.
The kit contains predictable information, like professional accomplishments, reviews, a biography, and so forth, but it goes far beyond any of this standard data. It is made up of eighteen pages of story ideas, quirky themes, and distinctive elements that distinguished the entertainer. One page consisted of interview and picture ideas. There were three pages on Liberace as cook, complete with his recipes, including “LIBERACE HAMBURGER,” “LIBERACE SALAD,” and “DESSERT—LIBERACE FLAMBEAU.”19 The kit also demonstrates how completely—and effectively—he turned his great, grand piano into a trick for seizing public attention.
Walter Monfried of the Milwaukee Journal—the same man who referred to the pianist as a public-relations genius—revealed the way the piano worked as a gimmick for the entertainer soon after Liberace acquired the instrument. “You can generally expect something new from him, and he does not disappoint,” Monfried described Liberace. “He has now taken on a partner,” he concluded: the Blüthner. In the 1947 press kit, the grand piano dominates three of the six features the showman used to publicize himself—“THE STORY OF LIBERACE’S PRICELESS PIANO” is only one story provided for journalists. With its “gold-cushioned seat and its adjustable levels,” even the bench—“as strikingly beautiful as the piano”—became news. The details of transporting it provided still more advertising copy. It moved “in a specially-designed shock resistant crate, cushioned with tailor-made paddings,” read the press releases.
Weighing 1,700 pounds, the grand piano’s great length and width—four inches larger than any piano built—and heaviness makes the big difference in moving. That’s where Liberace’s piano moving talent comes in.
Not even the Iturbis, nor any other pianists, attempt to take their piano with them from job to job. But Liberace’s act is centered around the world’s largest piano.
So when moving times comes along, Liberace spits on his hands, rolls up his sleeves, takes out a special crate and padding, worth $3,000 and supervises the work on the impressive moving job. The average cost of a move from one city to another is $1,000—plus premiums on a special $150,000 insurance policy.
The biggest, the rarest, and—most important—the costliest: Liberace used all to masterful effect in his references to the piano, and ultimately to his career. The hype was, too, splendidly American, complete with the oxymoronic references to a priceless piano costing twenty-five thousand dollars. At worst, the entertainer’s campaign represents the cheapening of art for a mass audience that Ortega y Gasset prophesied and analyzed in his work, The Revolt of the Masses. This is no inconsequential consideration. From another, more genial perspective, the showman falls in an old line from an ancient American tradition of adapting art and traditional culture—Liszt and custom grands—to provincial American democratic tastes and audiences. P. T. Barnum would have smiled, and Walt Whitman would have recognized a brother. The poet who wrote his own reviews, hoodwinked that staid Yankee Ralph Waldo Emerson, and composed odes to himself and the bumptious American Self would have been as happy as Barnum.
Like both Barnum’s and Whitman’s, Liberace’s campaign was as effective as it was vulgar. The most cursory survey of press reviews underlines the critics’ debts to Liberace’s own projection of himself. Unlike Walter Monfried, who was aware and appreciative of being manipulated, most journalists quoted from the showman’s press releases without irony or references to the source. Indeed, some journalists, under their own byline, reproduced the exact stories from the press kit.20 Most others took their leads from the press kit section entitled “Interview And Picture Ideas.” Liberace and his act, however, were more than public-relations manipulation. The recipe for “Liberace hamburger,” for example, in the press kit hints at this other element: it is as honest as it is hokey. Great PR? It also suggests an underlying sincerity and simplicity. These elements, in turn, completely permeated Liberace’s act, and even his personality. He effected a nearly unique combination of sincerity and artifice.
Reviewers almost invariably picked up on these elements of his act. While they relied heavily on his kit for their impressions, they also alluded regularly to other themes of his performance beyond the purview of the entertainer’s publicity—his sincerity: how much he loved performing, how much he liked his audiences, and how his audiences responded in kind, calling him back for encore after encore. He gave them what they wanted and more, and with an energy that had not waned since the Red Room days in Milwaukee, when he played until dawn as his friends went off to chores on the farm.
With the old verve, a new act, and splendid publicity, Liberace’s career advanced notably after ’47. His mainstay remained fancy hotel dining rooms and supper clubs; he played from coast to coast now, however. Thus, in the summer of 1948, he headlined the bill at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and at the Wedgwood Room at the Waldorf-Astoria across the continent.21 In between, he played all spring and early summer at the Pere Marquette Hotel in Peoria, Illinois.22 Later the same season, he performed for ten weeks at the Palmer House Empire Room in Chicago.23 He maintained a furious schedule. One account of his pre-celebrity bookings from the fall of 1951 exists; it differs little from his schedule of three years earlier. He departed on a Friday morning from a Lake Tahoe engagement for the Bellerive Hotel in Kansas City, where he played that same night and for the next month. From Missouri, he entrained for a run at New Orleans’s Hotel Monteleone. He left New Orleans after another month-long engagement for a comparable run at Baker’s Hotel in Dallas, Texas, before playing Las Vegas again.24
His Las Vegas gigs were growing increasingly important to him. He, likewise, became a mainstay at the Last Frontier. In 1948, he led the New Year’s Eve show in the Ramona Room, for which there was a full-page ad in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Two months later, he celebrated another milestone when the same paper ran an even grander notice, spreading his name (now no longer spelled phonetically) in huge block letters across the bottom of the page. “Hollywood Welcomes Las Vegas’s Favorite Entertainer,” it read, “LIBERACE” (in giant, flame-decorated letters) “Now starring at Mocambo, Sunset Strip, Hollywood.” That September, the occasion of his seventh return engagement, the Last Frontier purchased even more advertising space in the newspaper to herald his return.25 Mocambo was the hottest supper club in Hollywood, but soon Liberace was top billing at the equally famous Ciro’s, and he was hobnobbing with celebrities like Rosalind Russell, Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gloria Swanson, and Shirley Temple.26 He was a very hot property by 1950.
The mid-century mark—he was thirty-one—brought another coup: an invitation to play the White House. On the evening of February 25, 1950, he performed in the East Room for the Washington Press Photographers Ball. The photographs memorializing the affair reveal him as particularly striking in the company of such celebrities as Dorothy Lamour, Wally Cox, Jack Benny, and, of course, the president of the United States, Harry S Truman.27
A command performance at the center of American political power indicated how far the West Allis piano player had advanced since his Plankton Arcade days or even since the Pabst Theater performances in 1940—or how far he had traveled since his twelve-minute intermission act at the Plaza Hotel in the summer of 1945. Still, he wasn’t happy. He continued to measure himself against almost impossible standards, as if Sam were still prodding him invisibly from behind.
In 1985, he surveyed his postwar career for a Washington Post reporter. “Prior to t.v. I was what you might consider a successful unknown. I made a decent salary as a cafe society entertainer.” He continued: “When I came to California in the 1940’s, I played the Mocambo, which was a popular nightspot, where I actually got paid by the night, depending on how good the business was.”28
Here is one more demonstration of the performer belittling his actual achievements in the context of his impossible ambitions. This reconstruction contains quite as much error as it does
truth. On the one hand, the recollection underestimates his success in 1950. He was playing some of the most famous venues in the United States. By his own reckoning, he was making an enormous amount of money. His first two-month engagement in Las Vegas in 1944 alone grossed him over ten thousand dollars. An entertainer’s entertainer, he delighted critics, reviewers, and other performers, too. Extremely popular with audiences, he won return engagements in virtually every club he played. He delighted presidents as well as proles. On the other hand, none of it satisfied him. Did he suggest tin cup or pro bono work at the Mocambo (or at Ciro’s, he could have added)? These engagements at Hollywood’s ultraprestigious Sunset Strip clubs put him in contact with some of the most powerful figures and most famous celebrities in the film industry and in American culture. Rubbing elbows with the rich and famous brought as much discontent as it did satisfaction, though. These people reminded him of his own shortcomings, and he measured himself constantly against the most exalted standards. When asked what labor wanted, Samuel Gompers supposedly cried, “More!” It was an American idiom. Liberace spoke it with his soul.
Measured against his vaulting ambition, the showman’s dissatisfaction was just as real as his successes. Beyond this, he was disillusioned with his work. Perhaps he anticipated that even the solidest clubs—Ciro’s, Mocambo, the Wedgwood Room, the Stork Club, and all the rest—institutionalized in the hearts of the greatest cities, were doomed, along with the old downtowns themselves. More likely, he simply craved a bigger audience, more money, and more fame than nightclubs provided. He could bring the house alive at the Ramona Room, but it only held six hundred people. “More,” he chanted with Gompers. His memoirs, in any case, illustrate his discontent. While generally putting the happiest possible face on his own circumstances in his autobiography, he lingered uncharacteristically over the liabilities of his club dates. People want to drink, not listen, he muttered. “A salesman wants to relax a prospect. A guy wants to make a girl. A fellow’s been jilted and he wants to forget.” The liabilities mounted: “Everybody has his favorite song which he hums for you. An impromptu quartet is formed to serenade you. And, suddenly, you wish you were someplace else.” He had little better to say about the supper-club circuit. As an intermission act—like the one he performed at the Plaza even in 1945—he could not dominate an audience, either. He wrote: “The girls are on their way to the powder room to touch up their makeup, and the guys are absorbed in speculating whether the cost of the evening has been worth it so far and whether it’ll get any better. If the chances for the latter look good, it’s likely that he’ll call for his check and they’ll leave . . . for his place or hers to be decided in the cab.” The woes of a supper-club performer. He mused further: “Have you ever played ‘Tea For Two’ while listening to celery and olives, cold consume, tossed salad, beef Wellington with broccoli and lyonnaise potatoes, strawberry parfait and coffee for one hundred and thirty-two people?”29
Liberace: An American Boy Page 17
