For the first time, he also encountered still-more active hostility. Angry picketers waved their signs at his arrival at Southampton’s docks and Waterloo Station. Nor did they go away. They cropped up all over. “A hostile group, mostly composed of young men” offered their equally hostile opinions outside Royal Festival Hall in London. Marchers carried “We hate Liberace” signs. “Cyprus, Suez, and Now This,” read other pickets.41 At Sheffield, the rowdies actually made it into the hall and disrupted the performance with their chants.42 In his Midlands performances, some of the audience took to making paper airplanes from the program and sailing them toward to stage to disrupt his act, ran one report. He managed this, mostly. As the paper airplanes floated toward the stage, for example, he began playing “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The wit and verve of it convinced the audience. The disruption ended. It was not all over.43
While, back home, Bob Hope joshed about Lee and “powderpuffery,” American puritanism tended to inhibit sexual humor; it deflected discussion of homosexuality even more. The British were bawdier. An English comic, Jimmy Thompson, created a ribald skit about Liberace on homosexual themes that he played on a number of different stages. In its television life, Thompson did his impression on a late-night review, Chelsea at Nine, but also on the prime-time Sunday Night at the Palladium. The skit was salacious enough that one commentator expressed bafflement at how it made it past the censors, according to the profoundly offended American. Thompson also made the performance an integral part of a theatrical review, For Amusement Only, which ran for close to two years at London’s Apollo Theater. Besides mocking Liberace’s sexuality with a wig and other gestures, the skit included a ditty with the refrain:
My fan mail is really tremendous,
It’s going so fast my head whirls;
I get more and more,
They propose by the score—
And at least one or two are from girls.
Liberace insisted that Thompson grew to regret the characterization, having come to the conclusion that it was defamatory. He tried to apologize with a floral bouquet in the shape of a dove bearing a card on which was written: “To show I had no malice towards you.” Liberace sued him. The British comedian settled out of court.44
The innuendo and mockery had actually begun very early. The day after Liberace’s arrival in the country, the London Daily Mirror had published a long article by William Conner—writing under the pen name Cassandra—that Liberace himself took as the source of the scurrility or at least the most vicious manifestation of the temper. “He is the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want,” snarled the journalist. With English women throwing themselves at this strange male, the scene at the train station, especially, had offended the British writer. “This deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station, Waterloo, on September 12, 1921,” he fumed.45
Cassandra outraged the performer. After he left Britain, Liberace’s anger grew. Normally, he was thick skinned about criticism, professing that “I Don’t Care” as long as he kept his audiences. But the British attacks got to him. Visiting in France for a long weekend around October 11, he complained about the “vulgarity and underlying degenerate tone of 25 percent of the British newspaper stories.” “I’m never bitter about things written about me, but I must admit I do become bitter when my love for my mother is described as any kind of ism,” he groused, “whether it’s Communism, Fascism or momism.” “What I don’t understand,” he said in his interview with reporter Art Buchwald, “is, if I was as degenerate as they claim, and an unmanly man as they indicated, how do they explain the interest all the women have shown in me?”46
As time passed, the Cassandra affair agitated him more and more. He consulted his lawyer and decided to sue. On October 22, 1956, the British court entertained his charge of libel against Conner and the Daily Mirror. If the Cassandra article had distressed the entertainer, the libel trial entailed its own traumas. The case did not come to trial for three more years, and every year for the next half decade brought the performer additional woes, both personal and professional. Cassandra was only the beginning.
“As Long As You Care for Me,” the subtitle of Liberace’s composition ran, he “didn’t care” what others said or did. By 1955, however, folks had indeed begun caring less. His record sales mark one measure of his decline. In 1953, he had made a total of fifty records, including albums and singles. That figure rose to sixty-seven the next year. In 1955, however, he cut but twenty-three discs, in 1956, ten, in ’57, only three. There were thirteen in ’58, seven the next year, fifteen in ’60, and eight in ’61.47 His drawing power, too, declined as his record production plummeted. In April 1957, he scheduled a four-week run at New York’s Palace, where Judy Garland had staged the performance that set her career on fire again. His show closed after two weeks.48 And there were far more disastrous troubles and signs of trouble. If in 1955 he had dropped the Last Frontier in favor of the Riviera and its offer of a fifty-thousand-dollar salary, the casinos, in turn, dropped him after his 1958 run. For the first time in fourteen years, he was not playing Las Vegas—his oldest, most reliable, and most lucrative gig. He descended to playing clubs that grossed less in a whole year than he had netted in a night in his “white heat” period of 1953–56.
“What happened to Liberace?” popular magazines were demanding by the spring of 1958.49 By ’61, journalists were dubbing him a has-been, identifying him as the “onetime TV idol.”50 His astronomical income dropped with his failing popularity. In April 1956, he testified that he had earned less than $125,000 so far that year.51 The showman was not poor, not by any means, but $125,000 per quarter was a far cry from the two to three million dollars—or more—he had packed away during each year at the peak of his fame. His manager protested in 1958 that his man “is just as popular now as he has ever been. It’s just that the press is no longer writing about him. He’s still one of the highest paid performers in show business,” he insisted. “During this ‘slump’ he’ll earn between $500,000 and $750,000. In other words, don’t feel sorry for him.” Seymour Heller added, however, “Time changes some things. That’s why Lee’s taking this vacation from TV—to give him a chance to think things over and to decide in what direction to move next.”52 The entertainer’s once-rosy future had become obscure.
By 1958, the performer himself was referring publicly to a “cooling off” period, which he dated to the failure of Sincerely Yours in the winter of 1955–56.53 By the time of his autobiography, fifteen years later, he was more brutal. He described his career in 1957 as being in “a monster slump.”
With his reputation foundering at home, he looked again to his international audience to boost his falling stock. In the late winter of 1958 he launched a tour of Australia. It did nothing he expected. On the contrary, it confirmed, even exaggerated his new liabilities. A legal and public-relations nightmare, it typified the disorder of his career in this period. In his autobiography, he describes it as a disaster piled on top of chaos. The trip began poorly and worsened quickly. He arrived in the country in February, in the middle of an oppressive heat wave. He was competing for headlines with the heat, but also with the queen mother’s visit to Sydney. As devoted to the royals as ever, he willingly took second place to the queen, however, when he received an invitation to a reception in her honor. His memoir chronicles his humiliation. On his best behavior and in his most conservative garb, he appeared at the Royal Garden Party only to be charged, first, with being an impostor, and then later with being the real Liberace with a forged invitation. He never met the queen, but he at least left under his own power and in his own time, he consoled himself.54
More trouble awaited him. The brouhaha at the garden party threw his schedule of
f, and he was late, consequently, to a press interview. To make matters worse, several journalists all appeared, each expecting a personal interview. Already fired up by American and British press biases, the reporters then struck the hapless entertainer two additional blows. While Liberace himself noted his ability to captivate even the most hostile critics when he dealt with them in person, his charm did not always work. This was one such occasion. One reporter asked him: “In 1956 when you first went to London, the Sketch said, ‘Liberace will make thousands of pounds in this. He deserves every penny he gets. Such shameful exhibitionism must be rewarded.’ He then looked up and smiled and asked, ‘Do these remarks hurt you?’” Liberace’s bitterness against the press had been waxing steadily since the Cassandra episode; this affair infuriated him all the more.55
These stories appeared the next day, cheek to jowl with reports about the garden party. The headlines read, for example, “LIBERACE CRASHED ROYAL PARTY—THEY WANTED TO THROW HIM OUT.” As if this were not enough, he faced another barrage of infuriating press reports the next day, when critics savaged his performance at the Trocadero. “His music is slovenly and sentimental enough to disgrace a mediocre high school student,” wrote one. His defenders were hardly better: “Liberace’s genius lies not in his ability to play the piano but in his capacity to gauge the taste of his audience with unfailing accuracy. It is quite probable that in the course of his recitals, Liberace heightens the musical appreciation of his audiences by introducing them to music of which otherwise they would be ignorant.”56
The worst still lay ahead.
As a central part of his act, Liberace offered a medley of tunes from the current Broadway hit, My Fair Lady. An Australian corporation, Chappell and Co., which held the rights to the musical “down under,” sought and received a legal injunction from the Australian Supreme Court to prevent the performer’s use of the score. They refused a ten-thousand-pound gratuity in exchange for allowing Liberace to perform the music. Even the intervention of Lerner and Loewe, the American composers, failed to sway the Australian copyright holders. Finally, the showman broke. Walking onto the stage to traditional fanfare, he read the following pronouncement:
I, Liberace, an American-born citizen of the United States have been restricted by law from playing any of the compositions from My Fair Lady, which constitutes a portion of my program.
Any laws that prevent my democratic right to perform the music of my country are in violation of the doctrines of my government and its people and must be interpreted as Communistic.
Never before in my entire lifetime have I been prevented from expressing myself as an artist, to exercise my democratic freedom of musical speech.
If necessary I will call upon my government of the United States of America to assist my defense.
Until I am once again permitted to perform any and all music of my country without any further restrictions, I am compelled by my American convictions and beliefs to refuse to give any further performances in your country.
After a brief apology, he then walked off the stage.57
Although he had served as honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks, California, this statement was as close as the entertainer ever came to enunciating a political theory. The statement is about as complex as his duties as honorary mayor had been. It is, however, perfectly in keeping with his character; it is no less suggestive of values that dominated the American mind and even American foreign policy in the generation after World War II. Liberace was not a thoughtful American, but he was a devoted one. He identified American citizenship with freedom, democracy, and practical rights—especially freedom of speech, freedom to work, and freedom to express oneself artistically. He was uncomprehending of systems and theories that denied what he considered sensible and commonsense prerogatives.58 Thus, he was as guilelessly anticommunist as he was innocently American. In 1981, on his European tour, he visited the Berlin Wall, and although he lacked any systematic politics, it moved him very deeply, according to Scott Thorson. “Freedom lay on one side—the right to be whatever you dreamed you could be—while a life of severely limited possibilities was on the other. Lee, who had dreamed big and seen those dreams come true, shuddered as he looked through that opening in the wall.”59 Like so many Americans of the Cold War era, he assumed that the world was divided into two antagonistic camps, the Free World and its enemies. If communism represented repression and tyranny, it was, however naïve, hardly exceptional for him to have identified his Australian woes with the Communist Menace.60
However sincere and even revealing the American showman’s pronouncement may have been, it was highly atypical. He had no interest in politics, and he avoided public conflict at almost any cost. His statement emphasizes the peculiar stress under which he was operating in the spring of 1958. It didn’t matter, though. The good people of Sydney would have none of it, under any circumstances.
When he left the stage, all hell broke loose. Loud boos followed a stunned silence in the hall. More banner headlines darkened the papers: “BOOING CROWDS HELD BACK FROM LIBERACE”; “LIBERACE WALKED OUT—THOUSANDS BOOED.” There was more to come. Besides his conflict with the Australian legal system and Chappell and Co., he now confronted a legal challenge from the tour’s promoter, who threatened legal action if he refused to perform. Chaos reigned. It was a public-relations horror that slopped over into the American press as well. On March 8, 1957, the New York Times reviewed the affair and quoted an Australian judge who called Liberace “a petulant child” for refusing to play for the Sydney audience.61 After paying court fines, making more apologies, and enduring massive ill will, the tour continued, but the affair soured the performer so profoundly that he did not return to Australia for over a decade.
Beyond its implications for the Australian tour, his completely uncharacteristic bout of ill temper, his recourse to politics and political discourse, and, indeed, his overall disposition throughout the affair suggests larger crises in his life as he neared his fortieth birthday. Something was going badly wrong at home and abroad. He found those responsible among his business managers and professional entourage. This led, ultimately, to still new trials and woes.
Was his career faltering? He looked for culprits. He blamed Seymour Heller, in part. As early as the spring of 1956, he had determined to reduce Heller’s cut of his income. Their original agreement had stipulated a 10 percent management fee as long as the performer’s revenue remained above $125,000. In April 1956, that figure kicked in, according to the performer, and the contracting parties reached an oral agreement to drop Heller’s share to 5 percent. The relationship deteriorated from here. By late 1958 or ’59, Liberace jettisoned Heller altogether. Although Liberace devoted considerable space to the breakup in his memoirs, the breach was even more difficult than the entertainer allowed. Thus, for example, the autobiography ignores the lawsuit Heller instituted in 1960 against his old client. Heller charged the showman with concealing income when they renegotiated their contract in 1956, and with denying him money that was properly and legally his. Heller wanted $2.3 million dollars. Liberace mounted a countersuit, claiming that from the specific date of November 2, 1956, Heller failed to do his job of publicizing the performer’s career.62
Was Seymour not earning his keep? The showman had found a new adviser and erstwhile manager. Although John Jacobs eventually came to grief as well, Liberace looked to him as savior in the “monster slump” of the late fifties.
In his memoir, Liberace is not at all clear about when and how he discovered Jacobs. Nor does he reveal the depth of the association. He had engaged Jacobs’s services as a lawyer no later than 1950, when newspaper accounts publicized the performer’s efforts to change his name.63 By 1954, however, Jacobs was one of the most important people in the showman’s entourage. He seems to have been the force behind Liberace’s self-incorporation as International Artists, Ltd., that year. He was certainly one of the three stockholders in the corporation, holding nineteen shares against the fifty-four the entertain
er held himself. The rest were allocated to brother George. The corporation was organized chiefly, it seems, as a de facto tax shield, but legally it served “the purpose of producing and promoting concerts featuring LIBERACE as the principal attraction [and] derived its income during the taxable years at issue primarily from sources related to LIBERACE’S performance as an entertainer in nightclubs and television appearances and from royalties with respect to the sale of records.”64 The two were business partners and invested in various projects together, among them the apartment building they constructed together in Las Vegas in 1957.65
John Jacobs was the contemporary of Sam Liberace—and of Clarence Goodwin, too. The right age to be Liberace’s father, this courtly, Virginiaborn patrician, in Liberace’s memory, looked the part of the ideal patriarch as well. In his crisis, Liberace seems to have given himself over to this parental authority just as he did to Goodwin in earlier times. Beyond this, Jacobs was as aggressive a protector as Seymour Heller had been—or as Goodwin had been, for that matter; as a high-powered downtown Los Angeles attorney, however, he possessed connections and a kind of authority that the more rough-cut, street-smart Heller lacked. In normal times, Jacobs was onto Lee’s enemies like a duck on a June bug. He threatened and actually initiated lawsuits against all manner of folk.66 Crises found him even more aggressively protective. Here, again, the showman found the good father who appeared in troubled times to shield and protect him. Jacobs’s growing presence in the showman’s life after 1955 suggests the power that this type of character still wielded over him, particularly as his own professional and personal woes increased. Liberace trusted him even when his instincts cautioned him to do otherwise.
It was to Jacobs that Liberace had gone in the Cassandra affair. Jacobs was the one who encouraged the performer to sue the Daily Mirror; Jacobs himself handled the details of that suit. On Jacobs’s advice, too, the performer had insisted on only an oral contract with Heller after 1955.67 Also on Jacobs’s counsel, Liberace sacked Heller in 1958: “He said that since I wasn’t traveling, booking concerts, what did I need a manager for? He said he could do everything a manager did, and at his urging I severed my connection with Seymour.”68 In 1960, when Heller sued Liberace, the former’s parallel suit against Jacobs followed naturally.69
Liberace: An American Boy Page 28
