Something was happening.
Partly responsible for the L.A. Liberace phenomenon was the performer’s own personality, his ability to play to a television audience, and, not least, a producer who allowed and encouraged him to do just that. Besides the consummate “showmanship” that one of the earliest reviewers had remarked on, Liberace also conveyed a “warm personal touch,” “a friendly ‘homey’ quality that quickly made him ‘just folks’ to his audience.” From the earliest accounts of his oldest acquaintances, warmth, sincerity, and affection governed his character as much as they did his act. In his television show—as in his club performances—he aestheticized these impulses to make them a working part of his performing persona. In his imagination, mythical, invisible Goodwins clustered around the television set, in the same way that Clarence, his wife, his two sons, and their girlfriends had gathered around the piano in their Hollywood parlor in the spring of 1947. He used his own personality to re-create something that he adored. His later syndicator, Reuben Kaufman, summarized what he thought was going on when asked about Liberace’s popularity: “I think it may be because he appeals to everybody who tried to learn to play the piano as a child and gave up. Also, I think he hit upon an old, half forgotten American home custom which was very pleasant. Remember how the family used to gather around the piano while mother or father banged out popular tunes.”35 It was just an act, but it wasn’t just an act, and perhaps the audiences responded to the man behind the performance.
Whether or not the performer was actually sincere in his “homey, just folks” approach to his performance, it was a style that Don Fedderson immediately realized would be perfect for the medium. The manager at television station KLAC, Lucky 13, may or may not have cared about the performer’s character; he saw the pianist’s skill at manipulating an audience, he knew how television worked, and, unlike the more hidebound network producers, he understood how he could maximize the pianist’s impact and translate this talent to a mass audience.
From the beginning of their relationship after he first saw Liberace perform, Fedderson possessed very clear ideas about how to succeed on television and about the entertainer’s potential television stardom. At their initial interview after he had performed to the seventeen-member audience at the Del Coronado Hotel, the pianist recalled the station manager instructing him about the nature of the medium:
Contrary to what everyone believes when you’re on television you’re not playing to tens of millions of people. Your audience is really small groups; families sitting around in their living rooms, or play rooms or people in beds in hospitals. Maybe it’s not a group at all. Your audience may be just one lonely person.
So you see, television is not one huge audience. It is a huge number of small audiences. These are people you are playing to, personally. You are alone with them in their homes. While you are entertaining them, you are their guest. It’s a very personal kind of thing, and it’s that personal sort of entertainment that you gave us this evening. If you can produce this kind of show on television you’ll be holding lightning in a bottle.
To this advice, Fedderson added a class or cultural coda. Prior to his first show, he drove the pianist all over the city, from the wealthiest parts of Beverly Hills to the trailer courts beyond the suburbs. The poor and middle-class districts sprouted the most television antennae, he noted. These people, Fedderson told Liberace, were the ones who had seized the medium “as entertainment the like of which they’d never expected to see. It was the seeing that got them, and they were entranced.”36
The pianist agreed. “That little automobile ride reminded me of what Don said down in Coronado about the little groups of people, possibly lonely people, watching TV,” he reflected afterwards. For Liberace, the ride even suggested that the medium had political overtones. “The audience was not the sophisticated, intellectual element that had a kind of snobbish attitude about all popular entertainment anyway, and so had nothing but sneers for TV. It was the solid backbone people of America. The ones who did the work, kept things going and were ready to be friendly to anyone who was friendly to them.”37
His own ideas, political and aesthetic, meshed nicely with Fedderson’s. His act had rotated on this very axis: the breaking down of barriers between the music and the musician, the performer and the audience, upper class and low, highbrow and popular music itself. He wanted and calculated mass appeal. He rewrote the music in performance—popularizing the classics, classicizing pop melodies, improvising one way and then the other. Taking popular requests, inviting individuals to perform with him, and bantering with the audience were only techniques that underlay a larger structure or ideal of his performance art. Achieving this intimacy was nothing to him at this stage of his career, he thought. “It’s what I did all the time,” he judged. “I tried to set up a one-to-one relationship between me and every individual in the room. . . . The only job I had was how to make it work when I could not get the ‘feel of bodies in a room,’ and the audience could not, if it felt like it, reach out and touch me.” His technique, he related, was to think of the camera itself as a living person.38
The pianist insisted that personalizing the camera was his innovation. It was, however, one basis of Klaus Lansberg’s successful productions. Lansberg had instructed Korla Pandit to play to the camera, literally, to assume an intimate relationship between himself and the camera, as between guest and friend. It was the same approach that lay behind the pretense of the guest’s knock at the hillbillies’ door and behind the invitation to sit a spell and join in the pickin’ and singin’. With Pandit, as, indeed, with Liberace, the domestic intimacy also suggested sexual intimacy.
Liberace was only capitalizing on or celebrating a technique discovered by others and suggested by the medium itself. He did it better than any of the others, however. And his fame eclipsed theirs immediately, although any viewer could see the relationship between Korla Pandit—the single-instrument performer—and the piano-playing Liberace. If Pandit, indeed, established a precedent, Liberace did him one, two, and three times better. Liberace replaced Pandit’s provocative smiles with the winning wink, and, if he used the medium as a perfect stage for his patter, his brother George replaced the Indian’s mystical silence with Harpo-comic dumbness. Liberace had his own props, of course; his candelabrum took the place of Pandit’s bejeweled turban. He made his own innovations that pushed him into stratospheric popularity. Still, Lee owed his unacknowledged debts to Klaus’s Korla.
Through intuition, skill, knowledge—or some intuitive combination of these elements—Lansberg, Fedderson, and Liberace himself were all hitting on something essential relative to the most successful TV. Within a generation of Liberace’s first show, scholars were theorizing about the elements that these television pioneers were including in their television performances by 1951. It all begins, one critic insists, with the size of the television set, the dimensions of its screen, and its function as a piece of furniture in a private home. In formulating a “television aesthetic,” the critic Horace Newcomb has argued, it is essential
that the art created for television appears on an object that can be part of one’s living room, exist as furniture. It is significant that one can walk around the entire apparatus. Such smallness suits television for intimacy; its presence brings people into the viewer’s home to act out dramas. . . . Television is at its best when it offers us faces, reactions, explorations of emotions registered by human beings. The importance is not placed on the action, though that is certainly vital as stimulus. Rather it is on the reaction to the action, to the human response.
One especially thoughtful television cameraman, Jim McMillan, referred to the technique as “shooting for the box”—that is, for the piece of furniture in people’s homes.39
The logic of television, then, validates intimacy, domesticity, and personality in the programming content. Thus, for example, “the iconography of rooms,” the scholar Newcomb continues, “is far more important to television than i
s that of exterior locations,” and faces and personal reactions are more critical than scenes. By this same measure, what happens with individuals or characters takes precedence over large, abstract, or impersonal themes. He might have said political themes, as well—and have contrasted the spectators of Little Ricky’s birth with those of Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration. The numerical disparity between those audiences suggests that, when given a choice, folks will opt out of politics and public life altogether for the reaffirmation of what they know at home and hearth. Only, or chiefly, when politics and public life itself becomes domestic and personal does it regain the attention of the viewers.
Dealing with soap operas as a kind of essential expression of this aesthetic, Newcomb argues that such programs “have developed from the time when audiences were made to feel as if they were part of a neighborhood gossiping circle until today, when they are made to feel like probing psychiatrists.” The end—concern with individuals—remains essentially unchanged. “Closeness,” he insists further, is a natural function of the medium and thus a logical end of television film editing.40
As anticipated in the discussion of soap operas as perfect television, the values of closeness, intimacy, and individualism—playing to the box—govern not only the form of television, but its content, too. It all predisposes television toward domesticity and family, the next and most critical ring out from the individual. The role of family, in turn, elicits another stratum of the aesthetic. Family represents the endless repetition and changing configuration of limited or predetermined roles and themes—lover to lover, parent to parent, parent to child, children to parent, sibling to sibling, family to family. This is the stuff of myth and ritual that is both recognizable and familiar and also new and fresh. Through the emphasis on family and family ritual, writes Newcomb, “television manages to entertain vast numbers of viewers with patterns of action and with characters who seem familiar to the cultural consciousness.”41 While enunciated for application to television drama, these concerns pertain with equal power to other forms of programming. Although ritualistic domesticity—and its regular inversion—was essential to both I Love Lucy and The Jack Benny Show, it applied no less to Liberace’s first foray into television. Indeed, almost everything about his show—not least of all its tremendous popularity—confirmed Liberace’s appreciation of this television aesthetic long before it was elucidated by scholars.
While no films survive from the live-only productions of the KLAC show, literary evidence confirms that these patterns of intimacy, personalism, family, and ritual characterized both Liberace’s first local program and the NBC Dinah Shore replacement program. Indeed, Liberace’s show provides virtually a case study for the theory. His performance was ritualistically predictable. The show opened and closed the same way. He used the same equally predictable props, chiefly the candelabrum and fancy clothes. In these regards, his show merely echoed the same characteristics that Klaus Lansberg had imposed on Korla Pandit. Liberace, however, went beyond Lansberg and the Indian organ player to infuse his program with specific and particular domestic values. If his ideal was playing to a happy family circle gathered around the family piano, his intimacy with the camera and with the television audience underlined his familial-like affection for the viewer. It was less vulgar than the hillbillies’ domestic circle, but it worked even more effectively. He reified the theme with a close, domestic setting and, still more important, he included real family, his own, in programming. Thus, if he ritualized his performance, he also ritualized family and domesticity into his program. This is what he himself considered the source of his popularity. “When I first started on TV the medium was in its infancy (I came along right after Hopalong Cassidy),” he said. “I discovered at the time that TV viewers were composed essentially of family units. I appealed to and became part of their simple way of life.”42
Liberace’s brother George was a fixture on both programs. His mother was not yet the prop she was to become, but the summer-replacement program anticipated her eventual appearance. He dedicated his first show to her, and later, when he announced she had suffered a heart attack, “the flowers she received filled a room, and the mail could not be squeezed into three big cartons.” His mother? She became “Mother” to viewers. He integrated even his absent younger brother, Rudy, into the act. His sibling was serving in Korea during the summer of 1952, and the pianist mentioned on air that the boy was lonely and that Rudy could use some mail. In the first week after the announcement, the agents at NBC who monitored such things reported that the station had received 10,000 inquiries about Rudy Liberace’s address.43
Liberace persuaded viewers that he was a member of their domestic circle. He also reconstructed a mythical television family around the real-life Liberaces, who, of course, in real life were no more like the projection than the Ricardos were like the chaotic union of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. He made this television family an integral part of his broadcast, but he also beguiled viewers into considering this family their own. He established all this within a context of predictable place and well-ordered home. These elements, combined with his consummate showmanship, made him a hot commodity by the fall of 1952.
If network television, especially after The Dinah Shore Show, seemed the logical course to a national audience, the pianist did not go this route. It was his second defeat at the networks’ hands. He did not elucidate his failure to win a contract. Circumstances suggest the answer, however. In 1952–53, he was looking for a show at the very time when the coaxial cable was pushing television advertising costs through the roof. Media executives and sponsors had turned aggressively conservative, and they shied from Liberace’s unprecedented act. Would the pianist return their investment? His reviews on Dinah Shore’s show had been good, but mixed. “He’s a good showman, although on the schmaltzy side . . . ,” judged Variety. “His personality comes across as ingratiating, but a little too saccharine; a more casual, relaxed approach is more suited to tele’s intimacy.”44 He remained a tough sell. Networks withheld their endorsement—and their cash. Liberace himself hinted at this years later, when he noted that, “no national sponsor wanted to take a chance on me.”45
In the absence of anything else, then, he signed not with NBC or one of its competitors for a regular show, but with one of the new, local, independent television filmmakers or syndicators, Guild Films. Newspapers carried the news of the transaction on February 11, 1953. He was contracted for 177 half-hour shorts, each budgeted at thirteen thousand dollars, with financing provided from KLAC-TV and from Guild Films, which was headed by Reuben Kaufman, formerly of Sader Telescriptions.46
Kaufman’s Guild Films was only one of an extensive series of syndicators in the early years of television, and such companies reveal fundamental issues about not only The Liberace Show but also about the context in which it thrived in television’s pioneering era.
In the chronological gap between full-time network broadcasting and autonomous local stations, chiefly in the early fifties, syndicators played a critical role. Besides the likes of Kaufman’s Guild Films, a series of film companies, like Hal Roach Studios, Screen Gems, Revue, and, most important, Frederick Ziv’s operations, cranked out television versions of thirties Hollywood B movies—“screwball comedies, soap opera-ish romances (“women’s films”), kiddie Westerns, and pulp adventure sagas.” Local stations devoured them.47
Other sources encouraged the syndicators. Not only did every station desire to fill the gaps in network programming, but the number of homes with television sets, and the number of stations, grew phenomenally in the period between 1948 and 1954, increasing the demand for shows all the more. In 1948, American families possessed 900,000 sets; by 1949 the number had swelled to 3.5 million. In 1950–51, 107 stations operated in the country; four years later the total had more than tripled to 393. These expansions spelled enormous profits. The networks’ revenues offer only one guide to the growth of television’s popularity. From $12 million in 1949, their income
soared to $127 million three years later, and up to $320 million by 1954.48 With the networks turning such revenues, local stations did well, too, thereby feeding the need for still more programs.
This was the need that Reuben Kaufman intended to meet. His difficulties in marketing The Liberace Show confirmed the networks’ general skepticism about taking on the piano player. Don Fedderson had found sponsors for the initial KLAC show after two or three weeks; he had only needed the one bank. Kaufman’s task was more complicated. He had to market the program to local stations throughout the country; the local stations then found their own local advertisers. He began on a wing and a prayer. “Scraping together every cent he could get his hands on,” Kaufman plunged into production of the first thirteen episodes of the show, which he used to sell the program.
Initially, he had few buyers. “It was a really tough sell, selling the program to conservative advertisers and businessmen,” according to Will Lane, a Guild Films executive. “It took the sales genius of Reuben Kaufman (chairman of Guild’s executive committee) as much as the talent of Liberace to put it across.” No one ever challenged the pianist’s appeal to the folks, but it was hard to sell where people didn’t know him. Kaufman toured the country with his thirteen films. He signed his first contract with KBTV in Denver.49 In the first weeks of the series, only fifteen stations had bought in. The next three months brought only twenty more contracts. By September, however, that thirty-five had tripled.50 The showman was airborne for a thirty-year national and international celebrity ride.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 21
