This was a sex-free relationship, as was proper for the mother-son bond, and yet eroticism roiled just beneath the surface. Liberace’s Good Son persona overlapped with that of Model Man, but this icon, in turn, conjured images, willy-nilly, of Ideal Lover. Thus, a vaguely incestuous devotion simmered behind the affection of the mother and grandmother fans. Consciously or unconsciously, the performer played to this effect, insofar as the popular mind associates older women with mothers, younger men with sons. He stirred these waters in the article that appeared under his name in a women’s magazine, “Mature Women Are Best.” One could even argue that the association between mother and lover existed subliminally in his published narrative of his first sexual encounter with the aforementioned Miss Bea Haven, a much older woman who was also a woman of easy virtue: “She pulled over to the side of the road and took ‘advantage’ of me. . . . She was twice my age and very experienced but she made me feel grown up and manly at last. After that, being around girls my own age didn’t excite me at all. Compared to Miss Bea Haven, they all seemed so adolescent.”71
In Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, when the king first begins to suspect his sin, he asks his queen (who is his mother, of course) if there is any possibility that a crime of incest has been committed. Jocasta dismisses the concern. Don’t worry, she instructs him, you’ve done nothing, and she reassured him: all men dream of sleeping with their mothers. If, according to Sophocles, the mother-slut, then, is a standard male fantasy-taboo, Liberace’s story of Miss Bea Haven allows a reading from the opposite side, as well. Here, the older woman is depicted as master; she manipulates and controls the youth for her own ends and satisfactions; of her own authority she provided the agency for turning him into a man, in the process spoiling him for girls his age. Insofar as Liberace’s image cultivated these qualities, his appeal underlined female power and matriarchal authority among mothers and “mature women.”
“Mature women,” however, did not comprise the totality of his audience. Girls, adolescents, and young married women adored him, too. In an early review of his syndicated show, Variety defined his sexual appeal to women fans. “Liberace is America’s first real television matinee idol—the type that women grow hysterical about.”72 Chicago papers were billing him as “The Greatest Lover Since Valentino.”73 Time, observing the hysteria, also remarked upon the propensity of these fans to equate him with the late Italian movie star, an equation that dumbfounded the writer, “since Liberace is pudgy, his curly hair is graying, his brow is broad. And he is not the strong, silent type.”74 Such critics missed, of course, Valentino’s own sexual ambiguity or ambivalence—which his harshest contemporary critics had scorned—or his bracelets and flowing robes on the screen; next, critics had warned, he’ll be shaving his manly body hair.75
After the summer of 1953, Liberace went nowhere without being overwhelmed by masses of adoring females. His erotic appeal to younger women, however, played on some of the same attraction he had to older ones, except that it was inverted. If sexual attraction smoldered behind mothers’ affection for the son, the younger women idolized him because he was devoid of overt, physical sexuality. He exerted a unique appeal to them; he was a desirable, attractive man, but one purged of masculine loutishness. “Liberace fills a void in the lives of millions of American housewives whose dull, unromantic husbands,” summarized one critic, “can’t tell the difference between a rose and a dandelion.”76 “Liberace is the sympathetic type. He looks at you and you feel beautiful. For that alone, I believe in him,” one admirer told a reporter. “The main thing about Mr. Liberace, as it hits me,” reflected another fan, “is that he is through and through a Continental. When he kisses your hand, you know he isn’t going to chew off your arm.” A third woman put it even more succinctly. “‘What do I see?’” she snorted to the question about Liberace’s appeal, “I have a little pleasant relief from what I have to look at every day: Loudmouths! Chest-beaters!”77 Like the “walkers” of old—homosexual friend/companions usually of older, wealthy women—Liberace reaffirmed the possibility of sophisticated companionship, witty discourse, male strength, and masculine attentiveness without the likelihood of rape or even sex.
Liberace appealed then to two overlapping impressions of masculinity: the eroticized son and the denatured or desexualized lover, which are, of course, flip sides of the same figure.78 These forms mirror, in turn, comparably paradoxical images of women: the incestuous mother and the lusty virgin. Each role defines an oxymoronic category, suggesting gender bending rather than sexual transgression. These enigmatic relationships are important for all sorts of reasons. In the first place, they suggest hopeless or unthinkable desires projected—or cathected—onto or into art. Just so, they allow a mythic frame in which to appreciate Liberace’s popularity: that is, he appealed to deep, pre-historical impulses in human existence, or certainly in Western thought since the ancient Greeks.
In classical mythology, ambivalent male/female, son/mother relations found one striking illustration in the association between Hera, the mother of the gods, and Heracles. He was her beloved—his name means “the glory of Hera”—yet she also hated him, tormented him, and finally drove him to madness.79 The most popular figure in Greek myth, Heracles—and with him these motives—vanished with Christianity; they reappeared in the Renaissance. Indeed, the Renaissance produced the most vivid and best-known expression of the enigmatic tension between sons and mothers—the eroticized son/denatured lover (and its comparable paradoxes in female imagery) in Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican. In the sculpture, the god/son is dead and yet, in death, languid in his mother’s arms, is sexual and alive. Just so, the sculptor’s depiction of Woman, the Holy Mother: she is very young—far too young for a realistic image of a woman with a thirty-three-year-old child. When he is dead, too, she is alive, not only alive but alive with the bloom of young womanhood; she is the eternal woman, even as she contemplates the dead male draped impossibly across her outstretched arms. Michelangelo produced an impossible sculpture in terms of realistic relationships; beyond its specifically religious import, its power arises from mythic truth in the paradoxical relationship between mothers and sons, men and women. It is in the failure of such liaisons to achieve a perfect fit that myth arises. If the profoundest art always echoes, however faintly, mythic truth, one way or another, helter-skelter, Liberace—and his female fans—played the same ancient game about what it means to be a member of a family, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a mother, what it means to be a son, what, indeed, it means to be a man.80
Beyond the possibility of a mythic definition of the performer’s appeal, the gender biases of his audience and his personal appeal to women offer specific insights into American culture at midcentury. Thus, one source of women’s attraction to the performer lay in the very definitions of culture at this time. There was the sense that “the finer things” were somehow feminine, or that they were the particular domain of women. The days were long past when Thomas Jefferson and George Washington selected fabrics, chose furniture, and pondered the merits of robin’s egg versus Wedgwood blue for color schemes at Monticello or Mount Vernon. In this regard, the pretensions of The Liberace Show to higher things and culture—the dressy clothes, romantic candlelight, polished grand, debonair manner, fancy costumes, and classical music—suggest gender coding. This was women’s stuff, hence Liberace as an idol of females, especially. But this is not all. If culture was feminine, consumerism had heavily female overtones as well: “shopping” was a component of women’s culture, not of men’s. Liberace’s own conspicuous consumption as a critical aspect of his persona offered, then, an additional level of appeal to women. The identity of conspicuousness and culture is almost redundant; so too his offering of consumable culture and art redoubled his gender iconography in the fifties.
A writer for Time captured some of this spirit. “Every now and then, as he goes self-importantly about his business, the American male tends to underestimate the power of his wom
en,” he began. “He forgets that they helped give him Prohibition and the sunken living room, that they choose his ties and the pictures on his wall, that they make him buy orchid corsages and join the Book-of-the-Month Club. Whenever this male forgetfulness about the real balance of power threatens to become habitual, the women tacitly band together to reassert their authority.” So, along with sunken living rooms and orchid corsages, the women now foisted Liberace—one more bit of ephemera, like books, flowers, music, and interior decoration—on the long-suffering male body politic.81
If culture feminized—and commercialized—had its origins in the nineteenth century, American values after World War II added to it a new dynamic. The Great Depression and World War II had drawn women out of the home into the work place and the public world—for example, Ma Liberace opening her store and going to work in the cookie factory while Sam failed to provide steady income or much income at all. The postwar period, in contrast, might be seen as a process of restoring the true, gendered order of things. Gender lines sharpened. Family, domesticity, and home represented the clear purview of women; men reclaimed the public sphere for themselves. In the same way, gender attributes applied in a new way to both public and domestic life. In the dark days of the Cold War, men prided themselves on their realism and hard-edged, calculating materialism—in contrast to the hopeful idealizing, sentimentality, and romance associated with women. Catchphrases of the time suggest the gendered biases of the era: Hard-nosed realism was a virtue; being soft—as on communism—was unnatural.
Liberace violated gender boundaries, and, beyond the noisy, aggressive women who pursued him, another category, almost invisible and largely silent, confirmed the transgression. Gay men, gay boys were watching him in awe as well. “Who did I have to relate to as a pubescent homo in Macon, Georgia, for Chrissake!” remembered one old fan. “He was the only role model available.”82 If Liberace was gluing Southern white boys to television screens in Georgia, an Asian-American adolescent in San Francisco had the same rush of recognition. Nineteen fifty-two glowed in his memory after his family moved to Los Angeles and he was catching Lee’s KLAC show. “I fell in love with the magic of TV, and I liked Liberace’s show best of all. I thought he was very appealing in a low-key way, and when he sang his theme song, ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’ and winked, I would pretend he was singing it only to me, winking at me.” “Rick Shaw” connected sexually with a variety of gay men later, including Paul Lynde and Rock Hudson—against type—and longed to meet his piano-playing idol, “but I guess I was never in the right place at the right time. Then I heard that he preferred blonds anyway. . . . That was disappointing but I was still beholden to the man,” he concluded.83
Still others, like the English lad who would become Elton John, related to the homosexual impulses projected on Liberace’s show. “He was what every straight person wants to think gay people are like—so camp, not at all threatening,” the pop singer recalled. Liberace was the first gay person Elton John had ever seen on television; he became his hero.84
Scattered around the planet, gay boys, transported by Liberace’s glamour, generally muted their affection even as they might have hidden their Hollywood scrapbooks and photo clippings of handsome athletes. Conventional masculinity was less reserved and far less enthusiastic. Ordinary fellows saw the same show and drew a different moral based on the same perceptions. Their antipathy, in turn, is just as critical to understanding Liberace’s place in American popular culture as is the devotion of women and the admiration of gay boys. Actually, many performers—like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and later the Beatles—attracted a largely female following. Unlike these men, however, Liberace’s appeal was accompanied by a male opposition that has no real counterpart in popular reaction to these other women’s idols. As a “woman’s man,” for one thing—with the full range of meaning in the term—Liberace provoked an extreme reaction among males who identified him with females.85
Liberace unsettled other men for the very reason homosexuals admired him. “Men look at Liberace and what they see makes them uneasy,” summarized one review of masculine opinion. “They find his dimples too perky, his hair too wavy, and his personality too soft. The phrase ‘feminine appeal’ is often used to describe him. . . . Many men, after seeing Liberace, have said that their feeling is more like masculine contempt.”86 According to the biographer of Edward R. Murrow, the great newscaster evidenced the same attitude, much more specifically, after he interviewed the performer at the piano-pool house on his network show. According to the biographer’s informant, “Murrow looked faintly nauseous” at the interview’s conclusion. Murrow had found World War II less offensive to report. “‘In your whole life did you ever see anyone so obnoxious’!” he raged to his associate. He then stalked out of the studio to a nearby bar where “‘He had 3 scotches before he was able to utter another word.’”87
A variety of forces contributed to male hostility. Conventional suspicion of the mama’s boy or teacher’s pet or fairy played its role.88 So, too, did the practical pendulum swing against the public woman and things feminine after the war, a shift that also echoed the impulses to contain communism abroad and insurgent democracy at home.89 At least as critical, a theoretical system emerged in these years that gave a powerful shape and form to these values: modernism. Its tenets had been floating around for some time, but they came into their own in the fifties and sixties. This system contrasted violently with the feminine definitions of culture that underlay Liberace’s attraction to “the finer things,” or of art as sentimental.
With the deepest roots in the Northeast, modernism emphasized materialism, realism, brutality, and prophecy; it scorned fancy, romance, sentiment, and idealism. Power and domination stoked its engines. For a generation, this intensely male-ish, even misogynistic mode dominated formal, artistic values in the United States after World War II. It repudiated the soft, the feminine, the decorative in art, even as the politics of the era spurned political accommodation and international compromise. The conflict over the nature and direction of television and television programming around 1951 hints at some of its values, and if the last half of the twentieth century can be read in terms of the gradual dissemination of modernism through American culture at large, the Northeast spawned and nurtured the system. The women-pleasing, crowd-delighting piano player from Milwaukee became a kind of touchstone of everything modernism eschewed.
The International School of architecture represented one notable expression of the form. The very concept of “international school” suggests some of its bias—the rejection, for example, of provincial, local, or even national modes. With its enormous scale, austere facades, and abstract shapes and designs, the likes of New York’s Pan Am Building marched steadily through the center of American cities in the fifties and sixties. In the process, they destroyed many of the greatest monuments of old American architecture, like, for example, the highly decorative, classic-inspired Penn Station, or Grand Central Station, which was obscured by the Pan Am Building. If the literally awesome scale of these new edifices produced a sense of urban pride, the same scale tended to dehumanize the buildings even as cities themselves were becoming increasingly inhospitable and hostile.
The New York School of painting of the forties, fifties, and sixties—abstract expressionism—demonstrated another aspect of the modernist aesthetic. It was as difficult as it was inaccessible. It was not popular art and was never intended for a popular audience. Its perfect home was not private houses but the huge blank walls of the products of International School architecture. The two matched nicely. The absence of popular appeal is no accident, as skepticism and outright opposition to populism and popularity drenched the modernist sensibility. Lonely, rejected men produced art; only the elect understood. Abstract expressionism emphasized technique and painterliness to the complete exclusion of content; indeed, the suggestion of content, narrative, iconography, or tradition set modernist critics frothing. Painting was about abstraction itself.
Painting was about painting, nothing else. Thus, for example, the figurative, narrative-inspired painter Andrew Wyeth was a pariah in modernist circles, the son, to make his sins worse, of an “illustrator,” N. C. Wyeth. Illustration was only commercial art, and both were double sins among the cognoscenti. If provincials hooted that monkeys could paint as well—and proved it with monkey pictures—this only confirmed the modernists’ biases against the folks, popular opinion, and the masses.
Modernism affected music, too. Atonal, arrhythmic music penetrated conservative symphony programs even if it left all but critics and a minority of sophisticates cold. The absence or destruction of lyric line and its debts to international, non-Western music emphasize other elements of the school. Just so, the originators of bebop calculated their jazz to be undanceable as well as unsingable, a nice aural counterpart to abstract expressionism. That only a tiny coterie of aficionados could even tolerate its shrilling pleased its devotees still further. Dancing and singing were for the American hordes.90 Here as well as elsewhere in the modernist temper, the bourgeoisie and bourgeois taste defined the great enemy. These values even penetrated popular music—if in a traditional melodic line—as in Pete Seeger’s mockery of the suburbs as “little boxes made of ticky-tacky . . . little boxes all the same.”
If all of these manifestations of modernist culture tacitly repudiated popular taste, the Beat poets of this same period did so directly. As disdainful of democratic opinion as of commercialism, they completely eschewed beauty and fancy for realism’s grime and naturalism’s horror; they wore their rejections and failures like badges. If an artist was popular—ran modernism’s logic—he had necessarily sold out, surrendered to Moloch, the great enemy. Among modernists, then, popularity itself became a mark of a work’s or an artist’s failure. By the same measure, insofar as the United States came to be associated with popular democratic tastes, the country itself became Moloch. Allen Ginsberg’s “America” summarized the contempt.91
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