Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  A myriad of factors contributed to the show’s national popularity. Liberace applied all the same formulas to the syndicated program that he had to his local show, with comparable effect. It was, indeed, the same act he had perfected in the period between 1947 and 1952, also to comparable effect. But things were different now. The survival of all the kines from The Liberace Show allows a closer examination of what was actually going on, what the performer was actually doing. But in understanding the change that was taking place, one must consider more than the performer and his act. The audience, however enthusiastic, was different in content as well as size, and it manifested its enthusiasms in new ways. Liberace was discovering that his victory came at an unexpected price. Now a national celebrity, he ran head on into opinion that he could not charm. For all the adoration of his fans—indeed, as a partial function of their devotion—he encountered animosity he had not experienced since his classmates at Pershing Elementary School and the neighbor children on National Avenue had taunted him and called him “sissy.” The present conflict illustrated cleavages in his own persona and his sexual identity, but the animosity—as well as the adoration—also offers a kind of shadowy X-ray picture of American life in these years. He found himself, in part, in the middle of a cultural war between New York and Hollywood—and between New York and Dubuque. And the mythic little old lady from the Iowa town would be a critical soldier in the battle.

  Seven

  MUSIC FOR A MAMA’S BOY

  Being a smart piano player as well as a good one, he has latched onto another 20th Century phenomenon known as television. A result has been his emergence in less than a year’s time as TV’s first genuine matinee idol . . . It has been years since the American public has had one of these animals. It has taken TV to fill the vacuum, bring back to the public that sense of intimacy heretofore claimed as the exclusive property of the stage. His appeal is strictly to women. The women love him in great droves.

  “DON’T LAUGH AT THE PIANO PLAYER,”

  TV Guide

  Duke Goldstone directed the series. Economy and his own talent informed the production. With a limited budget, he made the most of camerawork and lighting, in particular, to make the show interesting. He used motion-picture spotlighting, he told Bob Thomas, the journalist-biographer, “instead of the flat lighting of most television shows, [which] gave the program clear whites and rich blacks for a sophisticated look.” He used two cameras for a split-screen effect so that he could depict the performer playing a duet with himself or make the pianist materialize against a blank curtain. “For ‘Danse Macabre,’” he told Thomas, he “employed a skeleton puppet. As an added effect, he reversed the film to negative.” A Mother’s Day show featured a famed photograph of Frances. The photo sat on the piano and sprang to life at a critical junction: “When Liberace came to the climax of his boogie-woogie, the portrait came to life and Mom shouted, ‘Hey!’”1 Goldstone’s camera also resolved the problem of focusing on the pianist-star while also obeying the dictates of the medium itself for movement and visual variety.

  The nationally syndicated program was Duke Goldstone’s and Don Fedderson’s show, but it was, more critically, Liberace’s show. They were responding to him as well as to the abstractions of art and the demands of television. The showman knew precisely what he wanted.

  Each episode of The Liberace Show began the same way, with the heavily backlit performer sitting in darkened profile at a grand piano against an elliptical backdrop of shallow, draped arches. He plays Chopin. His instrument now is a standard Baldwin, a lucrative contract with that manufacturer having displaced his otherwise beloved Blüthner. A small, electrically lit candelabrum casts obscure light on the left. At the keys, the pianist sits in formal eveningwear. He appears lost in the music as he plays. An unseen orchestra accompanies him. As the lights come up, the camera dollies in for a close-up, and the angle changes. He appears through the open lid of the piano now, over the strings. He looks up as he concludes the piece, shifting his concentration from the music to the camera—to “the box” at home. He smiles, revealing his trademark dimples. He welcomes you to the show in that peculiar voice with odd halts and hesitations, as if he is almost forgetting his cues. Or as if he is not acting at all. He tells you what is coming, and that, of course, varied from show to show in the 177 episodes that Guild Films produced in the two years after 1953.

  Some shows had consistent themes. The segment devoted to Stephen Foster is representative. The performer ran through a whole series of the most popular Foster ballads interspersed with film clips of river steamboats and other Southern settings. He also appeared in the high collar and tie of the 1840s and played a boxy, rosewood parlor piano of the period with its frilly Victorian music rack. Periodically, the background drapes parted to reveal illustrative scenes of one kind or another. On one such occasion, as he played and sang “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” the arch disclosed fields of cotton. A female figure in period costume materializes presently against this agrarian setting, and, as the pianist ended the song, she faded from view—the result of another one of Goldstone’s double-image camera tricks.

  For the same Stephen Foster program, after a station-advertising break, the pianist appeared again in formal evening clothes and introduced a visitor, whom he announced would sing. In his same cozy manner, he told his visitor—and the audience—that her friend, “Stephen Foster” was in the house and would join them, whereupon Liberace vanished, to return immediately in the 1850s garb of the earlier segment. He devoted another part of the Stephen Foster program to a minstrel show, in which he danced, sang, and faked a banjo version of “Oh, Susannah!” As Mr. Interlocutor, he queried his brother, another minstrel, about one riddle or another, while the ever-silent George answered “I don’t know” on his violin.

  He developed another show around the theme, “great women.” The age of Lillian Russell elicited a piano rendition of “A Bicycle Built for Two,” while a Clara Schumann segment was based on the formal music of her husband, Robert. While he played “Dedication,” Schumann’s musical offering to his bride, the performer, in another camera trick, appeared in a cameo on the upper right of the screen reciting the sentimental tribute Schumann wrote to his wife.

  Other installments were more serendipitous, feature numbers having no immediate connection to what preceded or followed. Among these shows, his performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” is particularly notable. This program included a real-life nun. While the show was filmed, it included a live studio audience, in which the sister had appeared with a group of other habited women. Liberace asked her to participate in the program. She knelt in prayer while he played. Curtains were drawn to reveal a stained-glass image of the Holy Mother, and a choir boy placed the candelabrum on Liberace’s piano. It proved a singularly successful production. His recording of the music later became one of his most successful records: his most popular single, “Ave Maria,” sold over 300,000 copies. It affirmed the popular conception of his piety. It won the church’s favor, too.2

  In still another production number, the pianist changed from evening-wear to a plain smoking jacket and from the formal studio to a homelike setting to play “Santa Lucia,” which he identified with his father. This was one of the only references he made on the program to Salvatore Liberace. He changed costumes many times to fit the music, donning, for example, a “wild number” for “The Beer Barrel Polka” or a military uniform for his dance accompaniment to “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy.” Sometimes the costume changes illustrated the shifts from classical to popular music. When playing his version of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto, he wore the traditional white tie and black tails of the concert stage, but when the music segued into “Tonight We Love,” the ballad based on Tchaikovsky’s theme, he appeared all in white eveningwear—and then went back to black when he returned to the formal composition. Simultaneously, the camera was illustrating the same transformations by depicting the sheet music from the two compositi
ons. Liberace constantly mixed the classics and popular music. Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” became “The Bumblebee Boogie,” while he did an entire segment on Grieg’s most singable themes.3

  Generally, the show began with a major production number followed by the local station’s commercial break. The next part of the program opened with the performer chatting intimately with the camera and the audience about some matter of personal or sentimental concern, playing for patients in a veterans hospital, or receiving letters from particular fans. He referred regularly to his mail. This discourse often moved the show into a second production number, which was similar to the first in form. Thus, the singer determined to send a “musical get-well card” to the shutins who had written him, and a lively rendition of “Bye Bye Blues” followed.

  While heavy on sentimental productions, Liberace altered the program’s pace with Latin rhythms, boogie-woogie, film melodies, and the like, always with costume changes to suit the themes. He was in fact producing a version of the variety show that dominated these years of television. While he entertained actual variety acts—a guest singer here, a guest trumpeter there—he himself provided the chief variety. Unlike the network shows that failed to exploit his particular talents, this time, he was the star. The camera knew it. However he was costumed, however he varied the production, however curious the camera angle, his face seldom left the frame. Judging by its visuals alone, the program hinged on the expressiveness of the performer’s face. The one real exception to the face rule was hardly an exception at all: the camera left his face only to concentrate on his hands. If the show, then, was really about personality, and if Liberace’s personality resided chiefly in his visage, then his hands became an extension of his face and personality. If hands, of course, lack the distinctiveness of faces, the showman compensated by dramatizing and exaggerating his movements, and, however subtlety and demurely for the time being, by dressing his hands, if only with one discreet pinky ring.

  In response to the applause that greeted the conclusion of every number, he expressed extensive appreciation, which again became a kind of trademark. “Thank you. Thank you so very much. Thank you. I thank you very much. Thank you so much. I thank you.” In his soft, distinctive, but rather shallow baritone, he closed the half-hour production with what had become his theme song, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Sung—performed—directly to folks in their living rooms, the ballad epitomized the performer’s ideal of intimacy with his audience.4

  Especially with its artful lighting and camera work, and its close-in shots of face and hands, the show emphasized the personal and the intimate. The actual personality the star projected underlined these same qualities. His “warm yet almost shy personality,” as one reporter called it, came through to viewers unlike anything they had ever seen on the tube before.5 While his general demeanor embodied the traits, his voice, in particular, did so even more. His peculiar way of speaking was easy to mock and ridicule, as effeminate, for example. Thus one old friend’s observation that it was not a voice one would expect to hear at football games. It was not merely that Liberace sounded like a sissy and that sissies did not attend sporting events, although that might have been the point of the observation. More than that, however, the emotional range and even the volume was constricted—in contrast, say, to the noise in a stadium. There was, first of all, the slightly nasal Midwestern whine. Besides that, the voice was soft, hesitant, monochromatic. Perhaps as a reflection of his old speech impediment and the therapy that followed, he tended to breathe in the wrong places. It was not a good speaking voice, no way around it, and yet it served him very well. Once again, he had turned a liability into an asset. His voice made, for example, for an extraordinary—and, one ventures to say, appealing—contrast with the enormous energy, exaggerated emotion, and extended range of his playing. More than “nonthreatening,” the voice even invited listeners to fill in its blanks, in the way, for example, that one wants to supply the word to a stutterer. Liberace’s voice was a source of what was often called his “little boy” appeal. It was as if he could not completely recall lines that he had tried in earnest to memorize, and the audience was encouraging him. One reviewer captured the whole picture nicely: “Liberace talks to his audience with a perpetual smile on his face—the kind of smile a little boy musters to prove to his parents that he’s brushed his teeth—and he speaks in the carefully controlled and subdued voice of a kindergarten teacher talking to a nervous child.”6

  He projected a combination of power and vulnerability in other ways as well. Although they were filmed, he insisted that the shoots look “live.” He calculated the disarming on-air mistakes and flaws to fit the image he desired. “We made no retakes,” he related;

  we filmed the mistakes just as we would have done using electronic cameras with no opportunity to stop and go back and shoot it over. . . . Actually we did use electronic cameras and a live audience, as well as the film cameras. But if I perspired I just mopped away the perspiration with a handkerchief as I do on the stage. Or if I made some kind of a language slip . . . mispronounced a word or committed a grammatical error . . . I just excused myself and corrected what I’d said. It was just the way anything would happen in a family situation. And I came across as a human being, not some sort of a facsimile person, the way some performers do in shows that are filmed and refilmed, and edited and cut and fixed up until they have about as much humanity as a plastic puppet.7

  The intimacy involved more than his own personality. Even more aggressively than his early forays on the airwaves had, the show played on domestic intimacy. Indeed, the star made no distinctions between personal and domestic intimacy in the program. “I talked to the viewers as if they were my friends, my next door neighbors,” he wrote. “We had a kind of over the back-fence relationship. I showed them my pets. I talked about my mother and my sister and my brother. My family became everyone’s family, sort of.”8 His blood kin was doubly critical to the show. His brother George was the orchestra director and appeared on camera regularly in that capacity, but he was also as ubiquitous a prop as the ever-present candelabrum; he was another aspect of the program’s ritualized production. His mother served the same purpose. Decked out in a huge orchid corsage, she sat in the front row of the studio audience during every program. The sense of family went further. On camera, the performer treated his entire crew as family; off camera, he did the same. Some of his people, like Marilyn Hecht, his harpist, had been with him for so many years that she might have qualified as kin. So had Gordon Robinson, his musical director. Robinson was normally behind the scenes, but, on occasion, Liberace trotted him out as a part of the family, and added to the impact by instructing the musician to “say hello to his mother in Erie, Pennsylvania.” The obligatory “Hi, Mom” followed.9

  There was nothing else like The Liberace Show, with its striking juxtaposition of high style and hokeyness, polish and error, urbanity and provincialism, in 1953. It is small wonder that Reuben Kaufman encountered initial difficulties in peddling the show to wary station managers and conservative businessmen in the winter. The turn came in the fall of ’53. By September, around a hundred stations had bought in. Four months or so later, the number reached 180.10 By 1955, the figure peaked at around two hundred. By 1958, when the program was still running in some places, it had more than four hundred advertisers and grossed around $7,500,000 for Guild.11

  No objective measure exists for ranking how many people really watched The Liberace Show between 1953 and 1955, when it was in its prime. There are no clearly tabulated popular ratings, as there would have been for a network program. According to one source, the program was syndicated more widely than any other; more people, according to the same authority, watched The Liberace Show than either Dragnet or I Love Lucy, the two most popular network competitors in this period. In New York, reruns permitted viewers to catch the program ten times a week.12 Thirty million people, according to other sources, watched the program at any given time that it wa
s shown during its three-year heyday.13

  The Liberace Show was tapping a huge reservoir of popular desire, but the number of people gathered around television screens across the country offers only one manifestation of the performer’s appeal. By 1954, ten thousand fan letters a week flooded his offices. He was inundated with twenty-seven thousand Valentine Day cards that year.14 Fans mobbed him at every appearance. In New Orleans, he spent two and a half hours signing autographs.15 He appeared at an autograph party for a local sponsor in his hometown, and even the police could not keep proper order.16 It was the same story in Miami, where his appearance to publicize the opening of a new bank provoked a riot in which “several women fainted, many were bruised, and a small child was injured.”17

  How popular was the effervescent entertainer? How to measure his attraction? Mob scenes offer one gauge; his recording career offers another. In the great flourish of activity in ’47 and ’48, he produced about ten discs. In 1949, 1950, and 1951, the record was literally blank. With his KLAC fame, however, his reputation took off. In 1952, Seymour Heller negotiated a contract with Columbia Records for his client. His new label marketed over a score of titles under his name that year alone, chiefly for the Los Angeles market, it would seem. With the national fame of The Liberace Show the following year, that number more than doubled. In 1954, he had over sixty-seven separate discs on the market.18 Liberace recalled this turn of events in his autobiography. He had worked with Mitch Miller, then artist and repertoire man at Columbia Records, he remembered, and his first single in four years, “September Song,” had become a smash.19 According to another source, Paul Weston, “One of our outstanding composer-arranger-conductors” (as Liberace described him) discovered him for Columbia. The two men met at a charity telethon. Weston said he knew the performer only as a TV personality, but his talent as a live performer amazed him. “With nothing but a piano and a smile,” Weston related, “Liberace transformed an inattentive audience into enthralled listeners.” As West Coast representative for Columbia, Weston immediately urged the company’s New York headquarters to sign a contract with the pianist. The company signed the performer and produced three albums, Liberace by Candlelight, Liberace at the Piano, and An Evening with Liberace. While Liberace had relied on his brother to orchestrate his 1952 records, he recorded with Weston beginning in 1953. Each Weston album placed among the top five best sellers in the country in 1954.20 By mid-1954, he had sold 400,000 albums, exceeding significantly even the sales of the pop singer Eddie Fisher, then in his own prime.21