Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  In his autobiographical treatment of Clarence Goodwin, Liberace makes reference to still another manager, who remains un-named. In any case, Clarence Goodwin, by 1947, pointed in the direction that the pianist wanted and needed to go. Goodwin had “appointed himself, unofficially, as my business manager,” the pianist related. With Goodwin running interference for him, rejecting offers summarily when the pianist himself (then and later) said “no” only with difficulty, Liberace’s reputation grew as his income soared. “Everybody thought that I’d been doing so well that they became embarrassed to offer me the salary I’d been getting. They’d call a second time and a third time until they really were offering more money than I could afford to turn down,” he related. “So I graciously was persuaded to take certain jobs.”52

  After 1948, the showman made passing reference to another manager, identified only as Bill White, an agent who supposedly had a drinking problem and who, Liberace complained, lacked a clue as to how best to market him, as the entertainer revealed in his first brush with movie fame in 1950. Liberace suggested that he got his movie role in South Seas Sinner almost in spite of his agent. “I couldn’t reach him when I needed him, and often when I did reach him it was a waste of time to talk to him. I was very unhappy.”53 If Liberace was distressed by this professional relationship, however, the promotional tour with Shelley Winters and the Bobby True Trio, according to his memoir, provided him with a new agent and gave his career after 1951 new professional footing.

  With the exception of one interlude between 1958 and 1961 or so, Seymour Heller of Gabbe, Lutz, and Heller, an artistic-management firm, assumed responsibility for Liberace’s career from 1951 until the entertainer’s death in 1987. The group managed such notables as Lawrence Welk, Frankie Laine, Mel Torme, Al Martino, and the Andrews Sisters. In his autobiography, the entertainer maintained that he had heard of Heller through Bobby True, one of Heller’s clients. After receiving rave reviews of Liberace from the other musicians, Heller agreed to catch the pianist’s Circus Room show at the grand old San Diego hotel, the Del Coronado, where Liberace had a month-long engagement. Heller liked what he saw, and agreed to enter into a contract with the entertainer.54

  Sam Lutz, another partner in the management firm, recalled a slightly different version of the relationship’s origins, according to Bob Thomas. The Liberace brothers had pestered the agents to take them on, but to no avail. Watching Liberace perform at a local Los Angeles theater, the Orpheum, did nothing to increase the pianist’s credit; shortly afterwards, however, Lutz, who was staying at the Del Coronado, attended Liberace’s show with his friend, the movie show-tune composer, Leo Robin, who is most famous for his melody “Thanks for the Memories.” Robin agreed to render a professional opinion. He reacted just like Nate Blumberg; the show bowled him over. “Sign him, Sam,” he instructed Lutz.55 A decades-long professional relationship between Liberace and Heller followed.

  Heller played a central role in Liberace’s career and even in his life. “He is like a mother hen and a wet nurse, or whatever you want to call him,” the entertainer described him. “But he is a very devoted man and great friend, and consequently, he feels that he has to check with me every day, if only to find out if I am well.” He was the perfect manager, the showman insisted, “because he never really does anything without consulting the artist, and that’s why it’s such a good marriage.” “When it comes to paying bills, I consult my accountant. When it comes to my career, it’s Seymour Heller,” he described their relationship after twenty years.56

  Heller, as suggested by the entertainer himself, was not an ordinary artistic manager. He played a critical, even essential role for the pianist aside from the technical ones of arranging for bookings, publicity, and the like. He complemented Liberace’s own character in a definitive way. Heller was comparable to Clarence Goodwin, as Liberace described the latter in his life: both were front man, aegis, shield. He also depicted Goodwin as a gentleman, however, who was motivated by kindness, generosity, and fatherly affection. Seymour Heller made no pretense to such virtues. He was more street fighter than patriarch. If Goodwin represented the strong right arm, Heller was the powerful left hook. He did not mind doing dirty work on his client’s behalf. On the contrary, he seemed even to relish it. When Liberace himself shied from going to the mat, Heller stripped and oiled himself up for combat.

  After their first meeting in 1977, Scott Thorson described Heller as “a small man in his mid-fifties, balding, with a permanent frown etched on his face.” Heller was jealous of Thorson’s position in the Liberace camp, according to Liberace’s young companion, but he complemented his client completely. “Businesslike and pragmatic, Heller made the ideal foil for Lee. Heller played hardball when negotiating contracts, while Lee played the smiling, agreeable, ‘anything goes’ entertainer.”57

  In various critical episodes, especially those involving the showman’s romantic life, Heller did Trojan service in defense of his client, and those affairs make best sense only if Heller’s part in them is clarified. Over the years, Heller stationed himself on the front line to take—and give—the heat when his client himself proved almost congenitally incapable of saying no and leading charges. In this regard, as Thorson judged, Heller balanced perfectly aspects of Liberace’s own personality, and their longterm relationship suggests how profoundly the showman lacked the killer/fighter qualities that appeared to come more naturally to his feisty agent.58

  On occasion, Liberace mocked his manager. He jested about his gracelessness, which was so antithetical to the performer’s own beguiling charm. Sometimes he directed jibes at Heller’s Jewishness. Scott Thorson reported one incident: “‘You can’t come over tonight, Seymour,’ Lee would say with ill-concealed glee. ‘I’m cooking pork for dinner.’”59 He evidenced some skepticism about Heller’s ability to manage, much less see, the big picture, and he liked his manager on a short leash, taking his orders and carrying out instructions, he implied. Then, too, his appreciation of more genteel management ran very deep. Indeed, in one critical—and crisis—phase of his career in the late fifties, he jettisoned Heller and resorted to the more civil and courtly style he had appreciated in Clarence Goodwin. The disasters of that phase of his career, however, affirmed his own need for Heller’s more bare-knuckles approach, and from then on he stuck with the feisty New Yorker almost to the end, when, on his deathbed, he changed his will, resorting one more time to another model for handling his career, this time posthumously. Nevertheless, Heller served him faithfully, and it was for good reason that Liberace considered signing with him as one of the most important events of his career.

  So it was as the century broke in two. The pianist was playing important hotels and clubs all over the country, coast to coast, north to south. He had changed his act and was still knocking critics over; audiences adored him. The act had won him a loyal following from New York to San Diego, from Chicago to New Orleans and Dallas. By 1947, Chicago had actually spawned the first Liberace fan club. With his new piano, he was demonstrating his talent for self-publicity, but he had found himself a very well-placed, aggressive new agent who complemented his own energies. Beyond this, he was thirty-two years old and still craved more. His greatest claim to national celebrity was a small part in a bad movie that only loyal fans in Milwaukee paid much attention to. The issue remained of how to turn his ingratiating manner and killer act to real effect with a large audience. At this point, his life intersected with television. And television was just intersecting with national history, with what were to be awesome consequences. Liberace found his medium, but in the fancy Midwestern piano player, the medium found its own, as well.

  Six

  LUCKY CHANNEL 13

  So you see, television is not one huge audience. It is a huge number of small audiences. . . . It’s a very personal thing. If you can produce this kind of show on television you’ll be holding lightning in a bottle.

  DON FEDDERSON

  In his publicity releases—collected i
n his press kit of 1947—Liberace describes himself as standing exactly six feet tall and weighing 175 pounds. The weight was a little low for what actually registered on the scales, and he stood much closer to five foot seven or eight, only a little taller than his mother. He sported a full head of very thick black hair. For the time being, it was his own. It usually shone with pomade; not plastered down, it mounted in great wavy masses above his forehead. With his sharp nose and pointed chin, he had a decent profile, while a distinctive widow’s peak exaggerated the heart shape of his face. His wide-set brown eyes crinkled to an almost oriental look when he laughed, and he laughed often. The smiles and laughter also revealed the deep dimples in his cheeks. His thin upper and full lower lip set off a striking set of white teeth. Some time around 1950 or so he capped them all. Unlike his younger brother, Rudy, who could have doubled for Errol Flynn, Liberace was not a classic male beauty, but he was striking in his own way, especially when he dressed well, in black tie and tuxedo or still more formal white tie and tails, his standard performing garb. Under normal circumstances, the peculiarities of his speech—a combination of a nasal Milwaukee whine and his own patterns, best described as purring—would have been a liability, but he turned even his mincing tones to advantage using humor and self-parody.

  He was not the comeliest man in the world, but his personality lit up a room—or a whole performance hall. He possessed an enormous capacity to delight people; it was as much of a talent as was his gift for music, and, in television, he found the vehicle for giving himself to multitudes. It took time, though.

  As soon as he moved to Los Angeles, he had begun experimenting with the new medium. By the fall of 1947, he bragged about being “one of the first instrumentalists to be featured in full-color television (NBC)” and about having been called the “Chopin of Television.” Well before his own breakthrough with the medium, he had performed on such programs as This Is Show Business, The Morton Downy Show, The Kate Smith Show, and Cavalcade of Stars. He had appeared on Jimmy Durante’s program and had played with Frank Sinatra, Jack Smith, and Spike Jones. In October 1951, he appeared for the first time on the Texaco Star Theatre with the great comic Milton Berle, who would become a lifelong friend.1

  He liked television; he did not like the way television used him. He intuited that a great portion of the problem lay in the medium itself: the camera’s inability to tolerate a static scene. “When Liberace would report for a guest star stint in those days, the director would throw up his hands in despair and cry, ‘What are we going to do with you?’” one journalist paraphrased the performer himself. “One director even told him it was too bad he didn’t play a clarinet instead of a piano. ‘With a clarinet,’ he explained, ‘at least there’d be a little action.’”2 “On my guest shots,” Liberace insisted, “they used so many gimmicks trying to make my part of the show interesting that they entirely overlooked the most interesting thing I had to offer—me and my playing.”3 He managed to find ways to compensate later, but he hated the camera’s frenetic motion in his earliest performances: “they shot me from almost every angle and in almost every possible way,” he remembered.

  On one show the camera was about 20 feet from me, and between it and me were all kinds of musical instruments on pedestals. I was doing a three minute number and by the time the camera moved in through all those instruments, I had finished my piece. On another show I was surrounded by a ballet and a chorus. I would play a couple of bars, then they’d switch the camera from me to the ballet. They’d come back to me for another few bars, then aim the lens at the chorus. There was so much to watch and so little of me, I wondered if anyone even saw me at all.4

  He no longer considered himself an accompanist. Especially not an accompanist for dumb instruments on pedestals. He intended to be seen. He was not performing for national audiences in order to be invisible. His problem would be how he could turn his piano playing, himself, and his very static grand piano into objects worthy of the camera’s attention.

  As usual, the entertainer was aiming for the biggest game, network television. He disregarded local stations. He misjudged his circumstances. Network television was never his friend, but network television itself hardly dominated the television market in 1950. The play between local stations and network programming constitutes a critical element, even so, in understanding when and how the showman finally made it big in 1952.

  Before 1952, television remained an essentially local phenomenon. The fall of 1951 inaugurated the shift toward national television—and network power—with the completion of a transcontinental coaxial cable. The most dramatic demonstration of the nationalization of the medium came on See It Now on November 18, 1951, when the distinguished newsman, Edward R. Murrow, simultaneously broadcast live images from CBS’s Manhattan studios of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the San Francisco skyline alongside views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan, and New York Bay. The implications of this innovation were far reaching. For one thing, it opened a very lucrative, national market to advertisers. The demand for television advertising soared. So did profits. At the end of 1951, for the first time in broadcast history, television profits exceeded those of network radio operations. Costs ballooned as well, especially costs of sponsoring network programs in prime time. All this affected programming. It confirmed the latent conservatism of the medium. With so much cash at stake, neither sponsors nor producers wanted to challenge the tried-and-true formulas of scheduling. If a performer had not made a reputation on radio, he had little chance of breaking into television, but the 1950–51 season had effectively exhausted radio’s stable. Ambitious young performers, like Steve Allen—or Liberace, for that matter—had to do shows far off prime time, or take their chances with local stations. In any case, the ’51–’52 network season offered little that was new.5 Of the ten top shows in the Nielsen ratings, eight were either holdovers from the previous season—like Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Texaco Star Theatre, and The Colgate Comedy Hour—or they simply repeated the pattern of these programs, as with The Red Skelton Show or Your Show of Shows—vaudeville-like variety programs.6 Of the two innovations, I Love Lucy and The Jack Benny Show, the former was doubly significant. It introduced a series of other critical changes in this Golden Age for television.

  While Lucy introduced the domestic situation comedy to television, The Jack Benny Show had it two ways: on the other, it drew on the “sitcom” formula, and on the other, it confirmed the popularity of the tried-and-true variety show.7 Jack Benny involved a play within a play: a domestic comedy about planning a variety show. A comic genius, Benny was able to play on either the variety aspect or on the domestic situation for laughs. Lucy provided a purer version of domestic comedy, and its popularity demonstrated viewers’ affection for the intimate, domestic, and familial in the medium. Thus, for example, the episode in which Little Ricky was born, on January 19, 1953, attracted a phenomenal 70 percent of the television audience that night. The series in general, and this episode in particular, marks another kind of benchmark in understanding the nature of early television.

  The day after Lucy delivered Little Ricky, the networks showed Dwight Eisenhower being inaugurated as president of the United States. If millions, from California to Maine, participated in that event in their own living rooms, the Lucy watchers outnumbered the Ike observers by millions that night and by millions more every week. The huge numerical differences in the two audiences affirmed the nature of the medium in another way. The contrast between the new president’s inauguration and Lucy’s “parturition” defined television’s essential function as a vehicle for entertainment and amusement.8

  I Love Lucy represented cause as well as effect for other elements critical to this period. Lucy‘s rating in the 1952–53 season pushed CBS ahead of NBC for the first time in a decades-long competition. It prompted a rush to adopt the new sitcom formula. More important, however, it accelerated the transfer of programming authority from New York to Los Angeles. This shift was extraor
dinary in itself and had important implications for television in the mid-fifties.

  The shift began before Lucy‘s success. Indeed, according to one source, the chief impact of the coaxial cable’s completion in 1951 had been to make Los Angeles available as a live origination point afterwards. “Performers who had moved East to host the top variety shows on NBC and CBS immediately transferred back to the West Coast, where their film and radio careers had long been centered.”9 I Love Lucy initiated a “stampede” to California, in one critic’s view. It prompted another equally critical change: the turn to filmed instead of live performances. The 1952 season—the year after the Ricardos first appeared—witnessed almost a doubling of filmed series; they rose in number from twenty-five during the previous season to forty-six that year. While new shows were produced on celluloid, old programs, like The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, which had previously been produced live, were now transferred to film. The shift to film responded to the economic imperatives of the medium. It increased profits. It lowered cost by encouraging stations to offer a thirteen-week summer rerun series during the time when stars were vacationing from their regular program, rather, for example, than producing new programs. The greater economic value lay in marketing the films over and over and over to local stations in reruns.10

  The film/rerun policy had still other implications. It affected program content. Insofar as producers calculated film’s rerun value in a national market, they tended to minimize or omit the topical, the political, and the controversial. What resulted was cheerful drama that emphasized the universality of personalities, characters, and, more explicitly, domestic situations. “Most of us are from the motion picture business, where we worked under a code for a long time so we automatically observe good taste in programs,” said one of the early West Coast television producers, “We must also consider the rerun value of a film,” he added, “which would be impaired if we injected controversial material.”11 The reruns played like Roman farce over Attic comedy, the one emphasizing general situations and folly, the other so self-consciously topical, political, and controversial that non-Athenians might not fully get the joke.