Over and above the riots and record sales, the popular culture of the period bubbles over with other evidence of Liberace’s appeal. He was a mainstay in television beyond his own show. Ed Sullivan invited him to appear on his Sunday night program in the fall of 1955. That most distinguished journalist Edward R. Murrow featured him on his CBS program Person to Person on January 6, 1956. He cropped up on the screen repeatedly with other notables of the day, like Red Skelton and Jack Benny. While one Jack Benny performance (that also featured Mamie Van Doren) failed to make much of the pianist, another got more comic mileage out of him. Devoid of any pretense whatsoever, and full of great good humor, Liberace satirized and parodied his own persona. In a classic twist on his domestic comedy-cum-variety show, Benny, playing himself, came calling on Liberace to invite him to appear on his show. On a set of Liberace’s “home,” candelabra occupied every space, and servants were busily lighting the tapers. When the two stars played a duet, a tiny candelabrum even glowed on Benny’s violin.22
Liberace figured in popular songs of the day. Begging “Mr. Sandman” for a dream lover, the McGuire Sisters crooned about a hero “with a lonely heart like Pagliacci; and lots of wavy hair like Liberace!” He appeared as “Loverboynik” in Al Capp’s popular daily cartoon strip, “Li’l Abner.” The cartoon episode had its own story. In the fall of 1954, the cartoonist informed the showman that he was creating a character called “Liverachy.” Lee was not flattered. His lawyers took up the case. Only then did Capp invent the figure, Loverboynik, a television pianist surrounded by hoards of fans. Capp later informed the press that his character and Liberace could not be one and the same because his character could actually play the piano well and never giggled hysterically.23
Major American magazines—Collier’s, Coronet, Life, and Time—profiled Liberace and chronicled his career. He was cover-story and frontpage material repeatedly for TV Guide. Liberace jokes, meanwhile, circulated everywhere. Next to the price of coffee, remarked one journalist, “the most popular joke on TV is ‘I get rich selling dental floss to Liberace.’”24 He became a household word, according to another critic, “the topic of more jokes than the proverbial mother-in-law.”25 Liberace’s candelabrum rose to become “a staple of the airwaves’ gagmen, like Benny’s miserliness and Bing Crosby’s glue-pot horses and Bob Hope’s ski-run nose.”26 “Did you ever see such a smile?,” joshed Hope himself. “He’s got so much ivory in his head, when he takes a bath he and the soap float together. . . . But it isn’t his fault, really, you see, he was such a delicate baby that instead of slapping him the doctor patted him with a powder puff, and he’s been smiling ever since.”27 Many of the stories played on Liberace’s delicacy more directly. Some still circulate after years and years. The comic James Coco repeated one of them as “a Liberace riddle”: “What is better than roses on a piano? Tulips on your organ!”28
Other measures of his popularity? His escalating revenues and attendance at his performances offer still more evidence of his hold on the popular imagination. He reported earning a very healthy fifty thousand dollars a year before he started doing television; afterwards, his income soared into the millions. Even before his television program was syndicated, his reputation was rippling out from Los Angeles and exciting the provinces. In the summer of 1952, for example, he had filled the fourteen-thousand-seat civic auditorium in Kansas City.29 In the rush of national fame the following year, he played twenty-four different engagements around the country. These performances grossed over $300,000.30 This tour broke, according to one observer, “almost every box-office record in every theater, auditorium, field house and stadium he has played.” His remuneration reflected the ticket sales. Three sold-out performances in his native Milwaukee netted him over forty-seven thousand dollars; two New Orleans shows added to his income by nearly thirty-eight thousand; one engagement in Sioux City and another in St. Louis brought him twenty-three thousand and over twenty-eight thousand, respectively.31 New Orleans witnessed the same rush. “In Chicago, the Civic Opera House, sold out four days after his concert was announced, had to schedule two more.”32
His concerts were unlike anything the country had witnessed. He was the hottest entertainer in the United States. Under the headline, “Liberace to Gross $33,000 Here,” his hometown newspaper chronicled one bit of the phenomenon. “Most of the greats that have gone by—Horowitz, Paderewski, John McCormack, Marian Anderson—made one appearance (there were few matinee occasions) in an auditorium confined to half its capacity.” In contrast, the hometown boy “will play the piano to a full auditorium and to a full house both nights.”33 The actual concerts, which took place in October 1953, attracted twenty thousand people. If the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra could not match these figures, the reviewer noted, neither could such popular entertainers as Bob Hope and Jack Benny.34
Seven months later, he repeated the triumph in the city. Richard S. Davis, who had reviewed classical performances for over a decade in Milwaukee, had his own take on the matinee the pianist played on Sunday, May 2. “Man and boy, the present historian has attended a number of impressive musical affairs, but none of them even faintly resembled the triumph under discussion,” he reflected. Most of all, he noted the pianist’s audience control that never wavered in a staggeringly long performance, “the longest of modern record.” Hometown boy, television celebrity, and everything else aside, wrote Davis, “it is still a minor miracle when 6,000 will sit still for nearly four hours on the hard Auditorium chairs, most of the time in ecstasy. The temptation is to be sharp and supercilious about the demonstration, but the impulse must be resisted.” He concluded: “The resplendent Liberace clearly has something more than meets the eye.”35
The pianist was wowing them in Kansas City, knocking them dead in Milwaukee, bringing down the house in New Orleans. Even in New York City he left audiences begging for more. Indeed, his extraordinary New York concerts in 1953 and 1954 provide a model of these others.
Liberace had headlined the great hotels and supper clubs in Manhattan in the 1940s, but he returned in glory and triumph to the city on September 25, 1953, to perform in the venerable Carnegie Hall. He not only filled the house, he could have filled it twice over. Until curtain time, patrons besieged the box office, some, as the New York Times reported, “with tears in their eyes,” pleading unsuccessfully for tickets.
The performance itself followed a pattern that Liberace seldom varied except in its details. While his brother conducted the twenty-five-piece orchestra, he entered the stage with regal fanfare, resplendent in white tie and tails. He began the show with his usual disarming patter: he squinted into the darkness of the balcony, and crooned, “Oh look, there are people way up there!”
The actual program consisted of a mixture of well-known melodies, classical and otherwise. He played from the standard, classical repertoire, themes from Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”; he also performed somewhat lighter material, more themes, this time from the score “The Warsaw Concerto,” and also de Falla’s “The Ritual Fire Dance.” In addition, he included purely popular material, Latin American music, Italian folk songs, and Broadway show tunes. He also sang, among other numbers, Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” which was close to being his theme song by this time. Between the musical selections, he interspersed jokes, more patter, and verbal asides.36 He went through various costume changes, including dressing as a yokel along with his brother, and performing a hillbilly, hayseed, hoedown routine. He ended the performance with his breathy, signature words of appreciation: “Thank you very much, thank you. I thank you, thanks so much.” He then plopped himself down on the corner of the stage, dangled his legs over the edge, offered autographs, shook hands, touched the patrons, and accepted embraces.37 The audience, three-fourths of which consisted of women, loved it all and responded enthusiastically to every number, every joke, and every concluding touch.
The Carnegie Hall performance did not exhaust the interest of the Ne
w York audience. Eight months later, Liberace returned to Manhattan in even finer fettle. On the evening of May 26, 1954, he played Madison Square Garden. Fifteen thousand paying fans turned out. Once more, he filled the hall; only a few of the worst seats went unsold. People wanted to be close to the stage, and they paid for the privilege. No pianist had drawn such an enormous audience since Paderewski had appeared there twenty years before on February 8, 1932. Indeed, this performance won Liberace a place in The Guinness Book of World Records: he was paid $138,000 for the performance, the most money a pianist had ever received for one show. He was topping his idol.38
The format of his Madison Square Garden performance was almost identical to that of the Carnegie Hall concert. After an overture from Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne,” he burst onto the stage—dressed completely in white—to a gong’s crash, a drum roll, and a harp glissando. He acknowledged the audience itself: “Isn’t it great, George? Did you count them?” He instructed the lights to go up, and spots swept the crowded house. More patter: “That makes it even more fabulous. Now I can play.”39
He offered an exaggerated version of his television performances. One critic described the form, invidiously: “Both his feet are jouncing rhythmically, with vigorous knee action. He flings a hand high into the air after hitting a chord. One instant his fingers are clawing at the keyboard, the next they are caressing or pounding. Often he crosses hands, or lets one hand lie conspicuously at rest on his knee.”40 The program itself also followed the same lines as the Carnegie Hall concert, if perhaps relying rather more heavily on popular tunes. This time, Liberace also sang. Among his vocals he included a number dedicated to his critics, which later became a regular part of his performances: “I Don’t Care (As Long As You Care For Me).” He also resorted to much the same pattering asides that had become his trademark: “Have to raise my bench a little more. It’s a pretty high-class number,” represented the norm. He made small talk about his television sponsors. A tunafish packer, he said, had given him cases of the product. Do any of you mothers in the audience have recipes? Send them along to Mother in California.41 His mother figured in the performance in other ways. She was seated in a theater box; he introduced her and asked for a round of applause. She got an enthusiastic one. Foreshadowing later days, he also gave up his white tails for a glamorous gold lamé dinner jacket, which was only one among several costume changes. The audience, which was this time estimated to be 80 percent female, ate it up and left wanting more.42 As one commentator remarked, “The most buzzed about attraction at large in the concert business today does not, of course, in these paradoxical times, give concerts. He gives, instead, himself.”43
By the mid-fifties, Liberace was earning a million dollars per year from public appearances, with additional income from records, piano-instruction courses, and real-estate investments. His television program made him immensely wealthy: he netted 20 percent of the profits on the first run, and up to 80 percent on fifth runs. His income from his television program amounted to seven million dollars during the show’s first two years. He was earning fifty thousand a week. His devotees organized into more than two hundred fan clubs and turned out whenever he appeared.44
If all this data represents manifestations of the showman’s popularity, its meaning—not to mention its sources—are harder to calculate. What is the significance of popularity? Its sources? How is it calculated? The issue raises a host of problems. In the first place, popularity remains a dubious or even a negative virtue, at least for many analysts. In this view, popular, democratic, or mass taste is debased and debasing by nature. “The popular” is thereby not worthy of thorough study. It is incapable, indeed, of sustaining extended treatment—except as a model of what good art or real art cannot be. One critic put it most succinctly in his discussion of Gone with the Wind, perhaps the most persistent icon of twentieth-century popular culture in the United States, not to mention the world: “Great literature can occasionally be popular, and certainly popular literature can occasionally be great. But with a few notable exceptions, such as the Bible but not Gone with the Wind, greatness and popularity are more likely to be contradictory than congenial.”45 Second, even when popular culture is considered worthy of examination, some of these negative notions about the masses still come into play, but beyond that, a larger problem looms: How, in short, is popularity measured? Are there nonsubjective standards for calculating the significance of mass appeal, whether of soap operas, McDonald’s hamburgers, Danielle Steel’s novels—or Liberace? Third, in treating icons of popular culture, how does the critic maintain a balance between the actual object of popular desire and the desiring populace?46 Other issues arise from these. For example, what is the role of social structures in governing the popular? What of “hype,” or advertising, in encouraging or even creating popular appeal? Is popularity foisted on a neutral public?47 Beyond all this, popularity has its own dynamic and tends to exaggerate itself. This was certainly the case with Liberace between 1953 and 1956. “Liberace” had become a media creation in its own right now, an effigy that critics could do with as they wished. “Under any other circumstances, Wladziu Valentino Liberace would merely be a nice guy, a bit on the naive side, playing the piano for a living,” observed one critic in the middle of the pianist’s “white heat” years. “Under Hollywood circumstances, he is a Character, a Personality, a Celebrity, and thus fair game for the poison-pen set. They make fun of him, for outwardly he is the perfect patsy for such shenanigans—a perpetually grinning matinee idol, slightly on the pudgy side, who seems for all the world to be an overgrown little boy dependent on his mother.”48
Behind the effigy, what was there? Beyond the hoopla, extraordinary as it was, Liberace touched something in the American temper. The appeal existed on various levels. His personal and domestic intimacy are important, but they cannot entirely explain the runaway popularity of The Liberace Show. If his persona emphasized a “‘homey’ quality that quickly made him ‘just folks,’” as one reviewer wrote, this was not Klaus Lansberg’s Dixie Showboat brand of homeyness at all. On the contrary, his formal, after-eight eveningwear, the large, shiny black, very grand piano, and not least, the useless elegance of his candelabra, created a sense of refinement, taste, and class. As with his supper-club performances, this combination, of folksiness on the one hand and style on the other, made for a particularly potent mix and contributes significantly to understanding Liberace’s early appeal—and the nature of the American viewing public at midcentury.
Without much if any elegance in their lives, the mass of American folk gathered around their television sets could access culture now in an altogether new way. These people might never dine by candlelight—unless the power failed. They might never own a single piece of silver—much less fancy candelabra. They could boast at best Sunday-going-to-meeting coats, ties, and dresses; few, if any, ever even rented tuxedos and evening gowns, let alone possessed such garments. Some might have owned pianos, but nothing like a costly Baldwin or lustrous Steinway. The differences between Bach, Brahms, and Berlioz might be lost on them. They might not ever know any of this; they might not really want to know it. Nevertheless, the folks, at least in 1953, acknowledged the existence of a world where such things existed, carried import, and were admirable. Liberace played to this sense. He made these elements of High Culture accessible to every home with a television set. In his show, it was not foreign; it was not arcane; it was not hard; its delights were available to anyone. The actual music he simplified, but his presentation of the music—his gentle introductions—made it seem even more natural and easy.
This identification with culture and wealth became a critical part of Liberace’s identity after 1953. While it constituted one element of his television program’s popularity, he integrated the values associated with money and culture into his personal life so seamlessly that the accoutrements he used to create a high-class ambiance on television became virtually inseparable from the man himself. Off camera as well as on, he
calculated his image to fulfill the public longing for wealth, grandeur, and display. He concentrated them all in the new home he built in 1953. He made the place a symbol of his public image; it was a private home yet a public emblem of his achievement. His first “celebrity house” was only on the surface his private domicile; it was, more, one more element in his calculated imagery.
In 1953, he moved from Camellia Street in North Hollywood to Valley Vista Boulevard on the lower northern slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains, still in the San Fernando Valley. Not far from the busy intersection of Sepulveda Boulevard and Ventura Drive in Sherman Oaks, the new home lay about six miles from Camellia Street. This time, however, he wasn’t buying a tract house.
Unable to find exactly what he wanted, the showman bought land and hired an architect to execute his dream house. “I contributed my own ideas all the time,” he boasted to one visitor. “I made little sketches of the things I wanted. I picked out everything, from hardware to furniture. What you see is what I had in mind. The house has drama, but it also has touches of humor. It’s classical, but it’s modern, too.” The result was “well, pure Liberace,” in the summation of this same visitor who reported back to the folks about touring the mansion.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 23
