Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Candelabras everywhere. The color motif: black and white, like the piano. The living room was huge, necessarily so to house the Baldwin grand piano, which was six inches longer than normal size. A large, glass-topped planter was piano-shaped, and pianos were etched into the bottoms of the lamps. The bookends were shaped like pianos. Shelves displayed a collection of miniature pianos and pictures, each with a printed card of explanation. . . .

  The tour continued through the dining room with its music-scrollbacked chairs, and to the bedroom, dominated by an immense bed covered with a satin spread emblazoned with a large script “L” intertwining a piano. More piano lamps, a large oil painting of Liberace on the wall. The large bathroom was done in black and mirrors.

  The bathroom, with its sunken tub, delighted Liberace especially. When doing a musical short at RKO, he explained, he had visited a nearby set where the 1952 Androcles and the Lion was being shot. “An actor was sitting in billows of suds in one of those Roman baths, and it seemed to me the height of luxury,” he later said.49

  As a young piano player on the make in 1947, had he dreamed of a house with a pool? He got it with a vengeance on Valley Vista Boulevard six years later. It was shaped like a grand-piano top, the shallow end culminating in steps painted an alternating black and white to resemble the eighty-eight keys of a piano. Like the phonograph gimmick, like the Blüthner grand, like “Liber-AH-chee,” the pool became a publicity device of extraordinary worth to the entertainer. Photographers couldn’t keep away from it. It turned into the representation of the house itself, even as the house emblemized the showman. The dwelling became the “piano pool house,” and it acquired virtually legendary proportions in the seven years he owned it. This was the place where Edward R. Murrow interviewed him on Person to Person on January 6, 1956. It was his home when he first attained international celebrity; to see it was the object of thousands of tourists driving over from Los Angeles.

  If the house fulfilled his own dreams and signaled his arrival, its legendary fame suggests the vicarious fulfillment of the dreams of millions who lived more modestly, those still locked into subdevelopment ticky-tacky, or even still hoping for the suburbs. While the excesses of the Valley Vista house might have appealed to anyone in humble circumstances, it could have been calculated for the men and women of Liberace’s own generation. The timing of the Depression and the war had denied them their own excesses; afterwards, the business of raising families and paying bills was hardly conducive to such indulgences. Lee spent for them. Folks delighted in giving him their cash for such splendid vicarious displays. The Valley Vista house had additional significance, however, and introduces other aspects of the piano player’s career at this time that suggest, ultimately, added sources of his attraction.

  The house memorialized his commercial success, but it did so twice over. It was a sign, of course, of his having arrived at a pinnacle of wealth, but the house itself was a gift of his commercial sponsors. He had built it not with his own funds, but rather through endorsements, through “contributions of various companies for advertising purposes of their own.”50 The house itself, then, was an advertising gimmick. The same held true for his automobile, a white Cadillac limousine with seats done up in the same black-and-white piano motif as his swimming pool. It, too, was the gift of commercial sponsors, even as it also represented the gaudy demonstration of his commercial success. He had no problem accepting the automobile; he had no problems flying to Ohio to assist the donor in selling cars. He liked selling things. He liked advertising. He liked making money. He liked spending money. He promoted himself shamelessly, but he promoted his sponsors with equal commitment. It is not the least interesting component of his celebrity.

  From his earliest days on KLAC, he had associated himself with selling, salesmanship, commerce, commercialism, and capitalism. His acceptance speech for the local Emmy awards for Most Outstanding Male Personality of the Year in February 1953 offers an early version of the mode. After crediting his mother, his brother, his managers, and the television station producer, he also thanked his sponsor, “the Citizens National Bank, whose product I admire.”51 In 1953, he had cut a promotional, giveaway record for this same Citizens National Bank.52 It established a notable pattern for his “white heat” period of fame. As he grew hotter and hotter, he made records for a whole variety of local sponsors of The Liberace Show.

  Reuben Kaufman had made his first sale to the television station in Denver, Colorado, in 1953, and the showman cut a promotional record for the program’s sponsor there, the Denver National Bank, the next year. The 45 rpm record treated depositors to “The Blue Danube Waltz” and “Humoresque.” Banks in Cleveland, Ohio; Portland, Maine; New Castle, Delaware; and El Paso, Texas, got their own discs, too.53 The First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Rochester, New York, was pleased enough with its first recording in 1954 to request a second the following year. The initial one duplicated the program of the Denver bank’s disc; the second treated locals to more Chopin: “The Minute Waltz” and “Polonaise Militaire.” The First Federal Savings and Loan of Chicago, as befitting the grandest city in the Midwest, offered its patrons a ten-inch, 33 rpm record with eclectic selections that thoroughly typified the performer’s mode: “Liebestraum,” “Chopsticks,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “The Dream of Olwen,” “I Miss You So,” “I Want My Mama,” “Maiden’s Wish Samba,” and his special hit, “September Song.” Another sponsor from the early L.A. fame days, Valley National Bank, got this same extended recording in addition to a two-number 45.54 The salesman cooperated with other sponsors in a similar manner: the insurance company Mutual of Omaha and United of Omaha in 1954; the Union Pacific Railroad the same year; and the otherwise unidentified “Parkview Markets” and “O’Shea’s Jewelers,” which got “Dark Eyes” and “Lullaby” in 1954, as well.55

  By the time he had become a national celebrity, Liberace had hundreds of different sponsors for the local broadcasts of his Film Guild show. Besides cutting promotional records, he associated himself with these sponsors in all sorts of other ways. He relished such promotions. He made personal appearances for many, selling cars in Milwaukee and mortgages in Miami, for example. On national television for the first time, he noted his tunafish advertisers, and invited women with recipes to send them in. Moreover, he made his advertisers a prop as standard as his candelabra, his mother, or his mute brother. “When I appeared in concerts, or in a night club, I did a whole routine about these sponsors,” he laughed. These businesses ranged from morticians, bankers, and cookie companies to toilet paper industries—a “well-known manufacturer of paper products,” he added slyly.

  As sort of an afterthought I’d say, “Everything but writing paper.” (Pause) Then I went on, “It was customary for all these companies to send me samples of their products.” At this point some of my audience would begin to anticipate me and start to giggle. “Naturally,” I told them, “I didn’t hear from the undertaker—fortunately. Nor the banks—unfortunately. However I did hear from the biscuit company and the paper manufacturer. We had more cookies than the Girl Scouts ever dreamed of. And toilet paper to match every bathroom in the house. . . . Wallpaper, that is.”

  He continued: “Just talking about these sponsors in a chatty way enabled me to get hearty laughs from my audience.”56

  A not particularly friendly critic offered a slightly different version of the same sort of performance. The stuff of humor, it was easy for sophisticated New York critics to mock, especially when the showman touted sponsors from the Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden stages:

  He enters. Some piano playing ensues, but not much. Comes next some talk. One of his sponsors, he explains, is a tuna-fish packer who has given him lots of cases of the product. And if any of the mothers in the audience have new tuna recipes, he hopes they’ll send them on to his mother, in the San Fernando Valley. Another sponsor is a funeral parlor, and he happens to have learned there that, in the wills of the deceased, Debussy’s “Cla
ir de Lune” is more often requested as the accompaniment to interment than any other number in his repertoire. At that the house lights go out, a single spot lights up his hands and out pours “Clair de Lune.”57

  Liberace’s attitude toward his commercial sponsors reflects a notable manifestation of his character and, ultimately, of his showmanship and audience appeal. It also suggests qualities that permeated his country. Without any pride of art, he identified himself with his sponsors. “If I am selling tuna fish,” he said guilelessly, “I believe in tuna fish.”58 This bond, in turn, mirrors a related unity with his audiences. If he and his sponsors were in the act together, the one no better than the other, the same rule held for him and his fans. If he was folksy, humorous, attentive, and sympathetic toward the businesses that bought his program, these same virtues characterize twice over his response to his audiences. The notion that he worked for a funeral parlor delighted his audiences, and he delighted in the humorous incongruity as well. The same held for his witty, double-edged references to his toilet-tissue sponsors.

  From the days of the priceless twenty-five-thousand-dollar grand piano, its astronomical moving costs, and insurance fees, money and monetary measures had been an integral part of Liberace’s own publicity campaign. It remained a powerful, even compelling, part of his celebrity after 1953: thus the constant references to his unprecedented income, the press releases about the huge revenues from his tours, the repetition of mind-boggling compensation from individual performances. This was “news”; newspaper reporters ate it up. “Liberace to Gross $33,000 Here” was a perfectly appealing headline when he played his hometown. Commercialism, money, and monetary success became so much a part of his persona that he worked it into his act. It became another gimmick or routine that people came to expect—and love. Indeed, the line that won him a place in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations represented only the tip of the ledger sheet in his repertoire. It had become legendary—literally—by 1954. One of the earliest references to the quip also established, perhaps inadvertently, the favorable reception of its sentiments. “A particularly scathing review of one of his performances during a Midwest tour drew this letter from the pianist,” began the 1954 notice, “‘Thank you for your very amusing review. After reading it, in fact, my brother George and I laughed all the way to the bank.’ The critics may rake the man over,” the reviewer crowed, “but he rakes in the money.”59 If this is the first published reference to the quip, time altered it to the now-standard “crying all the way to the bank.” He offered a multitude of similar epigrams based on his joyful commercializing. “I’ve had so much fun myself that honestly I’m ashamed to take the money—but I will!” “Do you like my outfit? You should; you paid for it!” Over thirty years after he had first purred the lines, they were still evoking guffaws, even when the audience themselves repeated the punch lines with him.

  The once-poor kid from West Milwaukee had no complaints about the folks and popular taste, and found nothing objectionable about the desire for making it or getting ahead. Capitalism did not offend him. It was better to be rich than poor. He expressed no guilt about earning a great deal of money or about being wealthy. He relished spending his cash, as well. It was hard earned, too, but he never resented working; indeed, he lived to work. He had no objections whatsoever to the processes of capitalism. “Everything I do has the hope of making a profit. My career, everything I touch in my scope of entertainment field,” he said, was done with money in mind. He expected the same from others. “Nobody works for nothing,” he insisted.60

  Throughout his entire career, he was always casting about for new money-making schemes. While he might have simply squirreled his extra cash away in stocks, bonds, and other securities, this way to wealth failed to attract him. Money and capital in the abstract did not interest him much. He liked investments he could hold and see. With debts to his mother, more than likely, he began and ended his capitalistic endeavors as a petty bourgeois. For a period, he set up shops and sold antiques. He sponsored dieting schemes. He played with a line of men’s clothing. There was a plan for music studios. In 1965, he launched Liberace Chateau Inns, a chain of motels that would each boast a mannequin dressed in one of his outfits. Most of all, again with debts to the Zuchowskis, he believed beyond hope of redemption in real property—land, houses, apartments. He bought and sold these investments as passionately as he did the geegaws that filled his mansions.61 Had his old high school chums remembered him “trying to make a buck all the time”?62 He never lost the passion.

  Capitalistic enterprise was a part of what he considered the rights and privileges of being an American. He was proud to be an American. He was doing what all Americans were doing, should be doing, or would like to be doing. In all these ways, Lee Liberace was a hometown American boy who was speaking to the hopes, desires, and deprivations of all his countrymen. His real audience was the ordinary man in the street. At the same time, his actual appeal was narrower. His man in the street turned out to be a woman. His John Doe was Joanne Doe—better still, Mrs. John Doe, John’s harried spouse.

  Nothing about Liberace’s supper-club act had been oriented, invidiously or otherwise, toward one sex or the other. From his earliest gigs in the forties up to the Dinah Shore summer replacement show of 1952, no reviewers ever mentioned anything about the performer appealing to one category of folks as opposed to another. On the contrary, every notice described him simply as a knock-’em-dead, leave-’em-begging-for-more stand-up piano player and comic. His act was not always sex free—his patter included plenty of sly jokes and double entendre, but his reviews lack any reference to gender. The nature of his audience confirmed the absence of bias. At the elegant supper clubs, he played to couples out on the town, men and women on a fancy date, husbands splurging on their wives. While his audience was generally about half men and half women, if anything, men predominated insofar as males tended to be single and free—footloose service men as the war wore down, or conventioneers and businessmen on the road and staying in good hotels. The latter type describes Clarence Goodwin, for example, who attended the pianist’s show three thousand miles away from his Hollywood home when Liberace played Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel just after the war.

  Liberace’s television show, however, both at KLAC and as syndicated by Guild Films, attracted a different audience. No hard evidence exists to sustain the notion that The Liberace Show was a woman’s program, but other data support this interpretation. The performer himself gave no evidence whatsoever in the beginning of favoring women above men when he planned and executed the show, but within a year and a half of launching his television career, he recognized the critical source of his new popularity. It could, indeed, hardly be ignored. Of his ten thousand weekly fan letters, the bulk “come from married women between 20 and 60,” one journalist noted.63 His Milwaukee sellouts in October 1953 and May of the following year reflected the same disparities. “The place was thronged with 6,500 worshipful customers,” it was reported, “mainly women.”64 Women outnumbered males at both Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. Hundreds of women, too, waited patiently in line to see him in New Orleans; ten thousand females rioted in Miami for a chance to touch his garments.65 Appalled at his fans, one critic blustered that “He has marshalled these middle-aged mommas and exhorted an intensity of hero-worship that is akin to the earlier demonstrations of their teenage daughters for Sinatra or Johnnie Ray.”66

  Women adored him, and the sources of their affection underline specific elements in American culture in the fifties while suggesting a more profound—even mythic—basis of the entertainer’s popularity.

  The most potent and obvious source of the performer’s appeal to a female audience lay in his definition of the Good Son. Did he calculate this, when he dedicated his first national show, on July 1, 1952, to his mother, or was the dedication a natural outgrowth of his own values? The answer is less important than the fact that his Good Son image provided the basis of his new, national popularity.
<
br />   Beginning with the KLAC program, the performer had emphasized family. It was a peculiar family configuration he defined, however: it was brother and brother, mother and son. Sisters rarely entered in; fathers more rarely still. In essence, then, he described the central relationship between men and women as that of son and mother. In this way, the ideal man was, by definition, the ideal son. Men were stars, but their purpose was to celebrate women—mothers, rather—not to court or make love to them. Liberace played this role enthusiastically. Women returned the favor. “The women love in him great droves. This figures for Liberace is still tied to a great extent to his own mother’s apron strings,” analyzed one reviewer. “His habit of introducing her on his tours as ‘My Mom’ (she’s always there) has set critics to gnashing their teeth, but the audience loves it.”67 “You are the man all mothers would like their sons to be,” one woman wrote. “Loving and artistic, you take care of your mother. You are nice, warm, gentle, polite, considerate and still have a sense of humor. In other words you might be what most mothers had dreamed their sons would be, but didn’t turn out to be.”68 An elderly devotee expressed a variation on the idea. “I have a husband and eighteen grandchildren, but I feel that this boy might have been my very own son.”69 A rather more cynical observer satirized the same identification. Referring to the Liberace “phenomenon” as “musical momism,” a writer for Time discussed “his quality—which comes out in his bounciness, his sweet smile, his nasal voice, his my-oh-my prose style—of being just a big little boy. And a good boy, too who would never swear or drink or leave his poor old mother.”70