Scott Thorson remembered even more extreme dissatisfaction that colored his companion’s recollections of the supper-club years. If the lover’s recollection can be trusted, the sense of failure and inadequacy haunted Liberace from very early on. He had won a notable reputation—and again, decent income—in the Midwest by his late adolescence. “But something was missing,” he told his lover. “The way things were going he feared he’d be just another nameless, faceless piano player for the rest of his life, growing old and tired as he drove from one forgettable booking to another. He was just twenty-one but, Lee later remembered, he often felt like a fifty-year-old failure.”30
The sense of inadequacy drove him to seek real fame and fortune in New York, but Thorson remembered his companion’s criticism of his achievement there, too. The Persian Room? Socializing with the salacious Spivy, hanging out with the kingmaker Walter Winchell, meeting princes like Paul Getty? He bitterly resented his circumstances as they appeared in contrast with theirs. His experiences in Hollywood gave rise to the same anxiety. Playing with Spike Jones and palling around with Jack Benny was just as unfulfilling as hobnobbing with New York’s upper crust had been. “From what Lee said,” wrote his lover, “frustration and ambition played leapfrog as he schemed and slaved to create the career and the life of his dreams.”31
Unhappy with the clubs, he was testing other water everywhere. Although he professed to dislike the medium, he broke into radio in these years. He performed with the likes of James Melton, and with his fellow Midwesterner Hildegard, for example. Dick Jones of the Mutual Network praised his performance as possessing “the appeal of Sinatra, the showmanship of Brisson, the wit of Templeton, and the virtuosity of Horowitz.” Perhaps under the guidance of Clarence Goodwin, he launched a recording career at this time as well. By mid-1947, he had signed with the Souvenir label and produced a couple of records. One featured “Begin the Beguine” and flipped to “Ritual Fire Dance,” while the second mixed “Boogie Woogie” and “Warsaw Concerto.”32 Nothing much came of either disc. The same year he cut a disc for Sonora. Simultaneously, he was negotiating with two other companies. He cut two records with Daytone in 1947 and 1948. They repeated musical numbers from the earlier records, including “Ritual Fire Dance” and “Warsaw Concerto”; they added “Tea for Two” and “12th Street Rag.”33 In 1948, he shifted labels to Signature and produced a half dozen records that year. Among the numbers, he recorded “12th Street Rag,” “Malaguena,” “Tea for Two,” “I Don’t Care,” “Tico Tico,” “Temptation,” and “Traumerei.” Under this label, he also re-recorded the Manuel de Falla number and “Warsaw Concerto.”34 If little came of these initial ventures, he dismissed them once he’d achieved superfame as even more inconsequential than they actually were. Thus, he mentioned only one disc, which he called “a kind of specialty thing,” and ignored everything else.35 His recording career went nowhere for three years after this, and he explored still more curious avenues to fame in these years. Thus, in 1951, he appeared in a national beer-advertising campaign, with spreads in Life and Collier’s magazines. “It’s the break Liberace has waited for and we hope it’s the last rung to the top of the ladder of success,” one devoted newspaper writer enthused. “Here’s one lad who really deserves any and all acclaim that he receives.”36
He was not on the West Coast, however, to break into radio, records, and beer commercials. He was there for Hollywood. HOLLYWOOD. In Liberace’s view, that remained the main highway to celebrity.
In his autobiography, and sometimes in interviews, he professed a lack of interest in the movie studios. While everybody supposedly thinks about stardom, he insisted, “that idea had never entered my head. I was still so wrapped up in being a good piano player that nothing else was on my mind except getting as much money as a good piano player could possibly earn.”37 He was certainly interested in making loads of money as a pianist, but he gave no evidence of seeing a movie career as being incompatible with his music. If Sonja Henie and Johnny Weissmuller could turn careers as ice skater and Olympic swimmer into Hollywood stardom, why couldn’t he, as a musician and talented entertainer, do the same? he might have reasoned. Despite his protests, too, Hollywood exerted an inexorable pull not only on him as an individual but on his whole generation.
Hollywood reflected essential elements of American life in this period. In one regard, it represented a kind of radical American democracy: the idea that anyone could go to Hollywood, be “discovered,” and be rewarded with wealth and fame. In its most extreme form, it was not even necessary to go to Hollywood: Hollywood would come to you. Thus, David Selznick’s brilliant, myth-inspired—and myth-inspiring—search for his leading lady in Gone with the Wind led him all over the United States for his screening tests. That he settled on Vivien Leigh—a professional actress and an India-born Brit, at that—affected the dream not a whit.
If radically democratic in one regard, however, Hollywood fame represented antithetical ideas, as well, which were also indicative of the age. Once tapped by Fortune, Fame, Jack Warner, or David Selznick, “stars” became a different breed of folk: hierarchs of beauty, icons of elegance, and, most of all, the embodiment of charismatic glamour. Stars were no longer normal people but idols to be worshipped from afar. Realism had nothing to do with this world, and the more artificial the celebrities, the more compelling the appeal to the audience. Image and impression were everything. Makeup and fashion in the period reflected the tendency—Joan Crawford’s eyebrows and shoes, for example; Cary Grant’s patent-leather hair. Indeed, the glory bubbled over onto makeup artists, who approached celebrity status themselves. While female stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Mae West might have represented the very essence of this artificiality, art, and hierarchy, it also shaped, with equal force, if in a rather different way, the image of masculine icons such as Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, Clark Gable, and, most of all, perhaps, Cary Grant. They represented polish, urbanity, clean profiles, and sophistication. They were artificial men—and gods to a generation or more. Hollywood, then, was not just fame, not just wealth; it represented a cult of glamour gods and goddesses. It was a fantasy world, and it was all the more compelling because of that.
The showman Liberace knew all this. Indeed, he articulated a regular theory about glamour, celebrity, and stardom in his autobiography, and his assertions about entertainment, stars, and their relationship to the folks focused on such cinematic icons as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford. Greta Garbo (who, along with Dietrich and Crawford, was another icon of gay culture) had inspired his fantasies even as a teenager. As he duly noted in his memoirs as well, this sort of world had special appeal to common folk—people whose humdrum lives lacked art, beauty, or mystery. The cult of Hollywood, stars, and celebrity, then, proved an especially compelling creed among the mass of Americans nurtured in Anglo-Puritan values and raised up in the Great Depression.
Wally Liberace fit this mold himself. Over and over, his memoir notes the lack of beauty, excitement, or enchantment in his childhood. Hollywood was everything his life had not been; the world of movies redressed the lack for him even when he was in his boyhood. Movies had been his own mother’s way of escaping from her dreary life, and she had named two of her sons after her Italian screen heartthrob, he insisted. He considered the Alhambra, Milwaukee’s great old cinema, his second home. This world drew him as powerfully as a magnet attracts metal filings. There were, however, other sources of the Wisconsin piano player’s almost cosmic attraction to this world of fantasy.
It is no accident that homosexual culture established a special relationship with Hollywood. If the common folk, their lives lacking grace, idolized Hollywood, the memoirs of young homosexual men, if for different reasons, brim with comparable descriptions of their attraction to the world of stars. To cite contemporary examples, Paul Monette and Andrew Sullivan, whose youths were radically different from one another, have both recounted their loving devotion to scrapbooks of their Hollywood idol
s when they were boys.38 Insofar as Hollywood represents a world of illusion, of fantasy and unreality, it corresponds to many fundamental impulses within gay life. That was a world, too, of illusion and illusions. What is a drag queen? What do you see, a man or a woman? A man in a business suit? What do you see, a husband? A father? Or could it be a homosexual male? Two worlds of illusion coincided.39
Liberace’s combination of class and homosexual biases made Hollywood’s attraction all the more compelling. But, of course, the West Milwaukee boy was no ordinary sissy born into poverty and content to make secret scrapbooks of Hollywood stars. An engine of ambition, he set specific goals for himself and drove toward them as surely as a locomotive under full steam. In this regard, however much he discounted it, everything in his life propelled him toward the studios, Hollywood and Vine, and the star-studded world of Los Angeles.
Beyond such circumstantial evidence, however, the showman left actual information indicating that he wanted a studio career. Many years later he told Scott Thorson that “he dreamed of being a movie actor, of leaving his handprints in the cement of Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, of winning an Oscar.”40 He revealed the same aspirations to journalists as early as 1944. That year, after his initial engagement at the Last Frontier, he told a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he was soon to be headed for Culver City and an MGM screen test. In a full-bloom starlet fantasy, he continued: “The screen test will determine whether I go to Mexico City and South America or remain in California.”41 He seems actually to have done some shorts of one kind or another before the war’s end, as he recorded that his brother, stationed overseas, had seen him unexpectedly in camp. There is no other record of the achievement. In 1946, back in Las Vegas, he continued to talk of his dreams of a movie career. “At the end of his engagement here,” a journalist reported, “he expects to go to Hollywood, where he has a contract for motion picture work with Universal Studios.”42 In May 1949, under the auspices of L. B. Mayer, he auditioned for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, without any tangible results.43
The following year produced the results he craved. After three years of hanging around near the center of the movie capital, he was finally discovered.
If he got to Los Angeles by way of Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, he got to the movies by way of the White House, at least according to the earliest published version of the adventure. At the White House Press Photographers Ball in 1950, he related, he had met Nate Blumberg, the head of Universal Pictures, who, by coincidence, also hailed from Milwaukee. The pianist’s performance delighted Blumberg, and the studio head instructed his minions back in Hollywood to get in touch with the entertainer.44 The showman’s memoirs offer a variation on the story. They omit any reference to the White House, Nate Blumberg and all. Instead, the showman recounted how he had been performing at Ciro’s when his agent, Bill White, called to tell him the Universal-International producer, Michael Kraike, was coming to his show for the specific purpose of sizing him up as a potential movie actor. Kraike was actually one of Blumberg’s men. Liberace professed to have little interest. “The whole incident was so casual that I really didn’t give it another thought,” the showman wrote later. “Then about a week later, Bill called to tell me to meet him out at Universal in Mike Kraike’s office. Mike wanted Louis Lipstone, who was in charge of music, to hear me play.” Debating over what he should perform, he settled on a very abbreviated Liszt concerto—his magic music from the days of Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony performance. His agent fumed, and other studio people went bug-eyed over the possibility of an audience sitting still for six minutes of “Carnegie Hall stuff.” The studio called him back again later, however, to read some lines.45
The studio was not exactly clear about what to do with the pianist. At the same time, however, Mike Kraike was producing a “potboiler,” East of Java, for Shelley Winters. He created a role for the pianist in the film. Co-starring Winters, Macdonald Carey, and Frank Lovejoy, the film recreates essentially the same plot as that of Rain, or the more contemporary Hedy Lamarr film, White Cargo. Liberace appears as a down-and-out concert pianist completely incidental to the plot. His character has abandoned his career and drifted off to the South Pacific. It was “a Hoagy Carmichael sort of character with long hair,” as he described the part.46 He played honky-tonk to Winters’s cabaret singer, but in one episode, Kraike allowed him center stage to play his Liszt and mull over a lost career. When Liberace reflected on this cinematic moment of glory, the image of his father came to mind, not incidentally. “It’s funny,” he related in his memoir, “the character I played was what I started out to be in real life, the kind of musician Dad wanted me to be but which I never became.”47 What was that future his father wished for him? That he become a down-and-out failure of a concert pianist? The recollection both confirmed and denied Sam Liberace’s influence.
The film, released as South Seas Sinner, went nowhere. Liberace’s career continued to languish—by his own reckoning, at least—in the hottest clubs and nightspots in the country.
Almost twenty-five years later, Winters and Liberace reminisced about the movie. Invited to substitute for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” Liberace asked his old co-star to appear with him. What remained clearest in their minds was less the production itself than the publicity tour they made around the country to promote the movie in 1950. The top-billed Macdonald Carey did not accompany them. It turned out to be a real show tour, complete with musicians, the Bobby True Trio, to cover, supposedly, for Winters’s lack of musical ability. Touring by train, the troupe visited twenty cities, and afterwards the pianist used the trip as an excuse to hold forth upon a variety of issues: the nature of the American audience, changes in Hollywood promotion, and changes in attitudes among performers themselves. The studios no longer did this sort of populist tour, he grieved in 1973. “We didn’t just show up somewhere and say hello in a sort of condescending way or say a few words on some local radio and TV show. We did an act! Shelley sang, I played for her.” They didn’t behave like movie stars, either. Winters confused the dining-room staff by demanding to toss her own salad, and when she ordered a chateaubriand apiece for everyone on the tour, Liberace asked to take home the leftovers. “This embarrassed everybody because we were supposed to be high-priced, high-living movie stars who didn’t have to care about money. The maitre d’ was embarrassed for us, and showed it, but he brought the doggy bag,” the showman related. They were behaving like folks, not like celebrities. However sincere the folksiness, the would-be movie star was playing a part as well, even here. His skill at performing in two worlds simultaneously, of playing two roles—that of down-home boy and that of glittering star—at the same time, was not the least of his appeal.
Liberace also used his recollection of the tour as an excuse for discussing contemporary entertainers’ lack of sympathy for American audiences. In the absence of such forays into the heartland, he reflected, young performers come to believe that “Los Angeles and New York are all there is to America. Travel, as I do and you’ll find out that’s not true,” he added. “There’s a whole, big, wonderful country between LA and NYC. It’s full of lots of smart people with opinions and tastes of their own. You have to be prepared to please that whole country. You have to be prepared to entertain everyone. If you have something for everybody, they’ll have something for you . . . their love and appreciation.”48
The promotional tour went considerably further than South Seas Sinner itself. The pianist’s studio career petered out just as thoroughly. He came as close to sour grapes as he ever did in discussing the failure in his autobiography. Winters wanted to become a real actress, he related, “and she made it. I thought I’d become an actor, but I guess I didn’t go about it the right way. I practice playing the piano instead of making faces.”49 He had not given up hope of an acting career, however. In the early spring of 1951, he told a reporter in Milwaukee—where he was headlining the fancy Schroeder Hotel—that he would soon be headin
g back West to work in another movie.50 Contracts were not forthcoming, but he kept applying pressure. He possessed, now, as professional and expert a manager as there was in the United States. Signing on with Seymour Heller after South Seas Sinner was an additional benefit he derived, he insisted, from the movie’s promotional tour.
Management had been a problem for him. As early as 1943, he had signed on with the Music Corporation of America, and he had acquired the services of Mae Johnston, who won him initial bookings on the supper-club circuit, including his gig as intermission pianist at the Plaza in New York.51 After the Navy had released his older brother, George, from active service, Liberace employed him, a talented musician in his own right, to assist him as a general manager of sorts. Lee admired and trusted George, and he liked the idea of keeping things in the family. Employing his brother represented one more manifestation of his familial conservatism. George helped run the musical end of things, and also made engagements, arranged finances, and publicized the act. George had moved to California about the same time his brother did, which facilitated their arrangement.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 18
