Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  The circumstances of his life seemed to sap Liberace’s genius, and he turned himself over to Jacobs in 1958 to reform his image. Just before his departure for Australia, Liberace anticipated the transformation. “Everybody has seen me,” he told a reporter. “They know everything I do. In the future I will display a depth of character that people don’t know I possess. I’m not sure exactly what the format will be—but it will be different.”70

  It was different. After making the decision to sue William Conner and the London Daily Mirror, Liberace defagified himself. At Jacobs’s counsel, he determined that charges of homosexuality were responsible for destroying his career. “It hurt me,” he said later about the Cassandra affair. “People stayed away from my shows in droves.”71 He read his declining popularity, then, as a function of his identity as a homosexual. He would butch himself up.

  At Jacobs’s advice, Liberace discarded all his fancy stuff. In the legalese of a tax suit of 1970, attorneys described what happened: “at the urging of his business manager, and prompted by his loss of popularity and reduced income, petitioner discarded the elegant image in favor of a more conservative one. His life style shifted from the spectacular to the conventional.”72 He played it straight, for once in his life. The legendary pianopool house? In 1961, still under Jacobs’s influence, he laughed it off as a cheap trick, “just as the sequined jackets were,” he added. “When you’re starting out in show business you need these things. Once I was established, I gave up the flamboyant clothes. Actually, I had to do it to find out if the audiences came to see me or all the fancy trappings. It became a matter of personal pride.”73 “To me the image has been something I found amusing in a sense,” he told another reporter the same year. “I was caught in a gimmick I really hadn’t planned. Then the pattern was established for me as a flamboyant performer. I was a curiosity who had to come up with $50,000 worth of sensation a week.”74

  He altered his act to fit the new image. Playing the 500 Club in Atlantic City in July 1958, he made only one costume change and abandoned the supporting acts of the years before.75 “Liberace has toned down his spectacular personal habiliments,” noted a reviewer of his August run at Los Angeles’s Coconut Grove. The new act, the notice continued, “doesn’t rely wholly on the ornate glass decor.”76 The performer even repudiated The Liberace Show. In 1961, he related how those programs “represented a certain era in TV—an era now long gone. The quality of the shows couldn’t match the standards of the 1960s,” he insisted. “They were of the low budget category, they were made in a way that would be archaic today—and they certainly were gimmicked. Those old ’54 and ’55 shows suited the standards of their time, but you’ll never see me trying to do the same thing again.”77

  He did not do the same thing again, and when he returned to television, he projected an altogether new image. His show premiered on October 12, 1958. Jacobs had negotiated the new, network show with ABC in the summer. It ran for six months, through April 10, 1959.78 In a blatant attempt to draw the stay-at-home soap-opera set, the program broadcast in the afternoon. Except in that he calculated the show to appeal to this audience, which was made up almost entirely of women, Liberace presented his butch image when it aired. Engineered by Jacobs, his old television mentor, Don Fedderson, and his agents at MCA, the show rotated around his new, conventional persona. “They cut my hair very short, put me in Brooks Brothers suits and shirts with button-down collars.”79 Everything was different: “No candelabra, no fancy clothes, none of the showmanship, that, it turned out, was responsible for my first big success.”80 Variety‘s review captured something critical about the show. The star still possessed his powerful personal appeal: “There’s still something nice about the man,” it judged, but otherwise he “seemed to be under the control of some outside force,” for example, by “talking a couple of octaves lower than he is famous for.”81

  The result was disastrous. If his star had been fading before, the new show seemed to obliterate it altogether, he judged later. Fifteen years after the fact, he pronounced it all wrong from the very beginning. First, the new look failed his audience, he insisted. Viewers, he determined, “resented the plain look. Letters began pouring in saying the music was still beautiful, but all the charm, the glamour, the fun was gone out of the show.”82 Nor was the time right. “I am not a daytime performer,” he discovered. “Daylight is bright and plain, matter of fact, and very real. . . . Nighttime is different. . . . Everything becomes more glamorous, and that’s the way I like it.”83 Third, he resented his problems with advertisers. “I was hardly able to play the piano because my hands were always so full of detergent boxes which I was obliged to hold up and try to sell.”84 He disliked selling certain products. “Nair for briar patch legs!” offended him especially. And he fumed about the inappropriateness of selling a particular product at a particular juncture in the show—Drano, for example, during a Thanksgiving feast. These concerns suggest others, chiefly his lack of authority over anything in the program and his inability to express his own peculiar self. His power as a performer, he determined, lay in his sincerity and believability. He acknowledged that he was not a good actor, that he didn’t read lines well, that he couldn’t perform effectively if he was doing something he disliked. Here he was, however, violating every tenet of his personal code. Things were very much awry. When he gave himself over to Jacobs and ABC, he surrendered something in himself, and his conflict was not merely external but also internal. He played without conviction. The show failed completely. Afterwards, he considered himself worse off than he had been before. “This show almost put me entirely out of business. When it failed, which was quickly but not soon enough, I not only couldn’t get any concert bookings, I couldn’t get any TV bookings either,” he wrote.85

  As he approached his fortieth birthday, he reached the nadir of his career. Exaggerated after 1957, his professional woes paralleled difficulties in his personal life after 1955. Indeed, the two intersected and played off each other. The personal problems involved family, his ideals of family, and their contradictions with his homoeroticism. Homoeroticism, in turn, bubbled perpetually to the surface of his career as well. Together, these conflicting elements created the most treacherous crosscurrents he had ever had to deal with in his life.

  Liberace talked about family endlessly. He returned to domesticity over and over in his public pronouncements and press releases about his act and career. The subject saturates his autobiography. He himself offers one explanation of the emphasis: it was the source of his audience and his audience appeal, the source, not incidentally, then, of his popularity and economic status. Thus, he insisted, “I have a general family audience appeal, and I don’t want to develop only a gay following. It’s going to take many, many years for this kind of audience to accept people who are totally gay or come out on Johnny Carson.”86 In this context, one could label his paeans to family as hypocrisy born of necessity. Just so, cynics, aware of his homosexuality, might interpret his piety as a ruse to cover his own deviancy. Neither is altogether foreign to his motives; both fail to capture the whole truth, however. Indeed, his life becomes much more complex, and even emblematic, when one looks at his commitment to family as a sincere one—a credo he believed in even while he himself lived a homosexual life. The dual loyalties informed impossible dilemmas in his biography.

  Beyond what he actually said about family and family values, he committed himself practically to the domestic ideal, certainly relative to his own kin. His family was far from perfect; he left evidence, especially late, of actually disliking his kin. None of this affected his loyalty. His involvement of his elder brother in his career reflects the entertainer’s insistence on domestic values. Liberace had put George on his payroll right after the war, and had made him his effective manager and an important part of his act. In 1954, when the performer organized his own personal corporation, International Artists, Ltd., he made George one of the three stockholders. By 1955, George and his then wife Jayne had mov
ed to Van Nuys, about a ten-minute drive from his brother’s new home on Valley Vista Boulevard, and the two remained close.87

  His loyalty to his mother was stronger yet. Before all the hoopla about momism came about, he was assuming responsibility for her welfare. In the summer of 1950, while he was filming South Seas Sinner, he broke down her insistence on remaining in Wisconsin and moved her to his home on Camellia Street in North Hollywood.88 By this time, Frances Zuchowski might have been ready to taste the good life. Her life up to that time had not been easy. After separating from Salvatore around 1938 or ’39 and divorcing him in ’40, she had remarried another local Italian immigrant, Alexander Casadonte, in 1943. Like her first spouse, Casadonte had held his life together as best he could by living with his brother in West Allis and working as everything from a common laborer to a confectioner from 1918 through the Great Depression. According to one report, he and Frances had cohabited before their marriage after Sam moved out of the National Avenue house. He survived for only two years after the actual marriage, leaving his widow, Mrs. Alexander Casadonte, as she was listed officially, to make her own way again.89 Up to that point, she still resided at the National Avenue house in West Milwaukee with various combinations of her children and their families—Angie and her husband Fred Cole, their two children, sometimes George, and Rudy—in and out of domicile. As she approached sixty, she still worked and maintained her old habits. Despite her son’s growing fame and wealth, she rejected most of his proffers of gifts that would improve her life, everything from professional hairdressers to electric ranges and refrigerators.90

  Nor did much of this change after her move to California. She managed her son’s home with the same insistence on domestic economy and petty order that had characterized her residence in West Milwaukee. She was not an easy housemate. Despite the presence of servants, she created “self-imposed tasks for herself” like following her son around tidying up after him, emptying the ashtrays he filled, and turning off the lights that he invariably left burning. As bossy, domineering, and opinionated as ever, she followed the servants around, too, instructing them about how to clean, “adding a touch here and there to achieve her state of perfection,” her son noted. She instructed the cooks on how to cook and the gardeners on how to garden, all in no uncertain terms.91 Scott Thorson, reporting on a later period, related one episode of Mrs. Casadonte’s verbal tyranny directed at Liberace’s beloved housekeeper/cook, Gladys Luckie: “I can’t believe my son is going to have to eat meat loaf when the Blacks in Watts are eating steak!” she had raged at the long-suffering black woman on one occasion.92 Even her adored son suggested, however guardedly, what it was like to live with her. “She has a green thumb and feels no one but God can make things grow the way she can,” he wrote.93 If she considered herself a co-equal of the divine in terms of her ability to grow things, otherwise she still adhered to her religious faith and practice as narrowly as ever. Not even permissive California could slack the pious devotion and simple Catholic theology of her Polish childhood and young womanhood in Menasha. But here she was, cohabiting with her boy, a lusty young gay man, on Camellia Street after 1950, and on Valley Vista after that.

  Not content with involving his brother and mother in his affairs, the performer soon helped relocate his sister, Angie, to California as well. There, after divorcing her first spouse, Fred Cole, she found a new husband, Thomas Farrell, a California contractor. By 1955, she had a house in Sherman Oaks, too, close to her brother in the valley. Like George, Angie also moved onto her brother’s payroll. She assumed responsibilities as his private secretary, answering fan mail and the like. At about the same time, the middle brother was in the process of finding a place in California for the handsomest—but least stable and most ill-fated—of the Liberace children, Rudy. After completing his military stint in Korea, Rudy became a neighbor, too. A resident, like George, of nearby Van Nuys, the youngest sibling was employed editing films. Alcoholic and violent, Rudy was the family disaster, and the famous brother rescued him regularly from his self-created scrapes with the law and assisted him with his wife and three young children. It was one more part of family responsibility as Liberace defined it.94 He hewed to the principle that in regard to family, life defaulted to duty and obligation, not to personal happiness.

  His commitments to his family extended into the second generation. He had mothered his niece and nephew, Angie’s children Diane and Fred Cole, when he was still in his teens on National Avenue. “I was changing their diapers and, as they got older, dressing them and even making Diane’s curls. I loved those kids as if they were my own,” he recollected in The Wonderful, Private World. “One of the great joys of my later success was that it enabled me to help put Fred through medical school.”95 Diane Cole returned the favor. She and her husband, Don McLaughlin, were faithful to their uncle’s last hour.

  He matched his affection for his niece and nephew with his fondness of children in general. “I would have loved to have had children,” he testified in The Things I Love. “I admit that not being surrounded by children sometimes makes me feel quite lonely. I would have been a wonderful father. . . . I would be all right with children,” he concluded.96 His behavior in performance affirms his affection. Regularly, when he spied children in his audience, he brought them on stage and integrated them into his act informally. He also loved kid acts and making them a more formal part of his show. These acts ranged from a youthful troupe of Chinese dancer-singers to single performers like the talented banjo-playing Scottie Plummer. Just so, inspiring youth became an important focus of his life. To this end, he formed the Liberace Talent Club to support young musicians. When he returned to Milwaukee, for example, he visited his old high school to encourage the students. He performed gratis and invited promising young musicians to play with him. One Richard Angeletti, aged seventeen, played duets with him on the stage at West Milwaukee High, but the showman also invited him to participate in his act later at the fancy Empire Room of the high-class Schroeder Hotel. During that same engagement, Liberace requested that four other students, ranging in age from twelve to Angeletti’s seventeen, play also.97 This was standard practice, even as the pianist’s wealth and fame increased. Whenever he performed professionally, he also played for high schools, sponsored young talent, and motivated youth’s appreciation of music—whether in “The Wildcat Lair” of Las Vegas High School seniors or at Boulder City High School. In 1951, for example, he staged one of his musical talent shows for Las Vegas young people in the Ramona Room of the Last Frontier on a Sunday afternoon, when no one was gambling.98 When he founded the Liberace Foundation later, its chief purpose was to encourage youthful talent.

  He was devoted to domesticity, dedicated to traditional family values, faithful to his own family circle, tender to children, and respectful of youth. Such values drew him toward making a family of his own. Other forces influenced him in the same direction. His own family, especially his mother, encouraged him to settle down with a good woman; the teachings of the church and his own piety glorified marriage while censuring homoerotic coupling. Practically, of course, he acknowledged the power of the heterosexual bond: all social order reinforced the traditional union and penalized the other. Men romancing men was the stuff of comedy and outrage—it merited snickers and pink slips. If sex with women made him anxious, it was not completely alien to his nature, either; from the time of his boyhood, he had labored to cultivate his interest in girls, and he did admit to having had sex with women, even to later homosexual lovers.99

  If such forces pushed the pianist toward making a traditional family of his own, his fundamental sexual impulses drew him back to his own kind. Men simply interested him more, sexually, than women did. But other issues reinforced his natural impulses and acted as a barrier against his marrying: through the forties, fifties, and even later, his career and schedule were hardly conducive to long-term relationships of any kind. Meanwhile, all the new cities encouraged dabbling in casual homosex as well. On the ro
ad, it was all too easy.

  Family or not; homosexuality or not: the affair with Joanne Rio fell right in the middle of this conflict. In 1948, when he had bought the house on Camellia Street, the Rio family had been his neighbors across the way at 4209. Eddie, the father, headed the L.A. office of the American Guild of Variety Artists. He had been a professional dancer before that. His wife had been a Chicago blues singer who went by the professional name of Mildred LaSalle. Born in 1931, the same year as Rudy Liberace, Joanne, their daughter, was sixteen when Liberace moved in across the street. With dark hair and striking eyes, she was a beautiful young woman who later—and appropriately—doubled for Elizabeth Taylor in movies. Although the new neighbor did not pay much attention to her, she professed to having noticed him both at his home and walking his dog on the street. They also encountered each other at the church where the Liberace and Rio families both attended mass.100

  In 1953, Liberace won national fame and abandoned his Camellia Street address for Valley Vista Boulevard. The Rios moved the same year. In the fall of the following year, however, the couple met again. Joanne Rio was performing as part of the chorus at the Hollywood nightclub Le Moulin Rouge; Lee was in the audience. She recognized her old neighbor at a front-row table and sent him a note. He invited her over and recognized the now-beautiful woman who had been the girl on his block. The celebrity and the chorus girl began courting. While they attended functions at fancy clubs, most of their dates were low key. After a second performance at the Hollywood Bowl, she related, Liberace had held a reception at his home and had given her a place of honor, next to his mother. The next evening, Rio returned the pianist’s hospitality with a dinner party that included not only the Rio family and Liberace but Danny Thomas and his wife, Rosemarie, Virginia Mayo, and Michael O’Shea.101 Liberace also made a place for the young beauty on the payroll of The Liberace Show.102