Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Their association launched a flurry of media speculation about their intentions.103 By early October, the showman himself was fueling the rumors of marriage. In a news release on the 6th, he disclosed his plans to wed after fulfilling a year’s worth of previous engagements and obligations. “Current concert, TV and film commitments would keep him too busy for a happy home life,” journalists repeated him. “When I get married I don’t want my career to interfere with my marriage like those Hollywood couples such as Marilyn and Joe,” Liberace said. “I want to give my marriage the full Catholic treatment. It must be a lasting thing.”104 Religion figured in Rio’s responses to her boyfriend, too: “If it’s God’s will that Lee and I get married, then we will. I’m leaving everything in God’s hands,” she told another reporter.105 Whatever God’s will may have been, his family’s wishes seem clear, at least in Liberace’s mind. “There was a lot of sideline cheering from both our families trying to push things too fast.”106 As he later revealed, the Rios actually opposed the union; the enthusiasm had clearly stemmed from the Liberaces rather than from her people, and “his people” were, chiefly, Frances Z. Casadonte.

  Soon after his October 6 press release, the entertainer took off on a five-week concert tour. On October 13, 14, and 15, a series of three articles appeared under Joanne Rio’s name in the Los Angeles Mirror about her romance with the pianist. Liberace himself knew about these pieces; his sister had contributed to their composition, and Seymour Heller had overseen their creation. Once they were actually in print, however, they offended the pianist. When he returned from his tour, he announced publicly that the essays “embarrassed” him. She replied in kind. “I’m the one who’s embarrassed. I just agreed to that article because I thought it would help Lee,” she insisted. “Every word of it was okayed by Lee’s press agent and if there was anything he didn’t like, he should have cut it out then and not waited until it was in print to kick.” The romance, she fumed, “was just a lot of publicity, and it looks like I got caught right in the middle of it.”107 The Rio-Liberace romance was history.

  Joanne Rio vanished from Liberace’s life, but he did mention her in his autobiography two decades later. His references opened the whole affair up again, with Rio, now Mrs. David Barr, suing the entertainer. Her suit, in consequence, elicited still more revelations about their relationship, her old suitor, and how his entourage worked. For one thing, it emphasized Seymour Heller’s part in the affair, and his role in managing Liberace’s image in general. According to the depositions, Heller had overseen the romance, instructing Rio on how to answer reporter’s questions, for example. He had also sanctioned the three-part Mirror article. If the entertainer was unhappy with what was printed, he held his agent at least partially culpable. Contemporary newspaper articles limned the showman’s irritation. “Seymour, this is all your fault and I’m going to see to it that you are out of this business in six months,” one of them quoted him.108 In a role he would play again, Heller also became the hit man for straightening out the mess.109

  Joanne Barr’s suit also reopened the issue of the performer’s sexuality. The Autobiography made her hysterical, she warranted; she kept crying to herself, she told her interrogators, “‘Why was he degrading me to justify why he never got married? Why was he lying about me?’” Some of her friends and associates, she said, assumed the answers: “‘Was he a homosexual? Did you go to bed with him?’”110 The case also allowed Liberace to give his version of the romance, too, and his testimony played at the edge of the sexual issue, even while suggesting other values that influenced his career.

  As far as I am concerned, Joanne Rio does not exist because this is something that happened twenty years ago. We all agreed it was like a ghost coming out of the past to haunt me. . . . As I remember it, she was a very pretty girl, a very nice girl. I liked her very much. I wanted to marry her, and that’s exactly what I said in my book. The reason I didn’t marry her was because of these goddamn articles and her father screaming at me and calling me all kinds of names. I suddenly realized I had found out in the nick of time that all was not going to be sunshine and roses.111

  The record is silent about the sources of Eddie Rio’s objections, but one clue to them might lie in what Rio’s father was “screaming” about and what kind of “names” he was calling him. Bob Thomas, who interviewed Eddie Rio, reconstructed what transpired in the old hoofer’s exchanges with the pianist. Rio was skeptical from the outset about the match and tried to discourage his daughter. His doubts were confirmed later when he received information about “an incident involving Liberace that had the makings of a scandal but had been hushed up.” After advising his daughter about the affair, Rio then counseled the pianist. “The marriage wouldn’t work,” he told him, “and you know in our church there is no divorce.” After hearing all this, according to Thomas, Liberace wept softly, accepted Rio’s opinion, put marriage out of his mind, and indeed, put the entire affair out of his head until he mentioned it in his autobiography, which conjured these ghosts from the past. Although Liberace considered the suit stupid, it remained alive for almost six years until the showman finally settled out of court for “a substantial amount” of money around 1979.112

  Was Liberace serious about the romance? Although Rio concluded that the performer was using her as a cover, the affair resembled nothing that happened before or after in Liberace’s history. Like other gay Hollywood celebrities, he did find women who provided date material: the queenly old Mae West, the transsexual Christine Jorgenson, or the aging ice-skating queen Sonja Henie. He compared his relationship with Henie to scenes from the Gloria Swanson film, Sunset Boulevard—hardly a proper cover story for a normal, lusty man.113

  Young and fresh, Joanne Rio differed completely from these other women. Perhaps in her case Liberace was indeed flirting with the idea of marriage and family. Beyond such circumstantial evidence of the affair’s seriousness, the breakup seemed to have left some psychic residue. Only a few weeks after the exchange with Eddie Rio, the star suffered what his physician described as a heart strain. The doctor prescribed rest and diet change, and the pianist went into a two-month seclusion. Up to now, ever since he recovered from the illnesses of his early childhood, Liberace’s health had remained phenomenally good. Until thirty-five years later, when he contracted AIDS and died, this was one of the very few bouts of illness of any kind that he had suffered. Nor had he ever used illness as an excuse or cover for anything before. Even when he was dying, he refused to acknowledge illness. Yet, in this season, he went into a two-month seclusion on the basis of a doctor’s recommendation, his brother said. His mother had her own announcement about the break in her son’s routine: “He has been giving so many concerts, working and traveling so much without a vacation,” she explained. “It has nothing to do with Joanne Rio.”114

  It might have been that Liberace did play with the idea of wedding Joanne Rio, but other evidence sustains Rio’s notion that the relationship was indeed another publicity ploy. By the time he was thirty-one, his press agents had already started to become concerned about popular perceptions of his bachelorhood. As early as 1951, they generated publicity releases with headlines like, “Liberace Gives A Few Tips On Wooing Women.”115 Rio’s ghostwritten, Heller-checked article in the Los Angeles Mirror—not to mention Rio herself—could be seen as a part of a similar campaign; it developed Liberace’s image not merely as a romancer but as a certain kind of lover-gentleman; he was “the perfect all-around man any woman would be thrilled to be with,” the article ran. “He’s so considerate on dates. . . . He never forgets the little things that women love. He brings me orchids. He lights my cigarettes and he opens doors. He makes you feel that when you are with him, well, you really are with him.”116 The publicity played the same angle in an article entitled “Mature Women Are Best: TV’s Top Pianist Reveals What Kind of Woman He’d Marry,” which appeared in Coronet, the popular women’s magazine. It appeared, perhaps not coincidentally, right after the Rio affair’s
conclusion.117

  Scott Thorson testified flatly that Joanne Rio was nothing more than cover for Liberace’s sexual inversion. “The problem was not that he didn’t like her, it was that he still loved men,” the boyfriend argued. “Lee told me he never planned to walk down the aisle, with JoAnn [sic] or anyone else. His engagement served to squelch the rumors about his sexuality—period!”118 Thorson’s view notwithstanding, neither the “engagement” nor its conclusion ended the gossip at all. On the contrary, the rumors actually grew louder after, and in part because of, the Rio romance. They had been only whispers before Joanne Rio; after he dumped the beautiful young woman from Camellia Street, the hearsay began to filter into the press, and the showman’s homosexuality became a furiously guarded open secret that shadowed his career and his public persona in the late fifties. It offered the greatest trials—both literally and figuratively—in the darkest years of his eclipse.

  Nine

  YOU CAN BE SURE IF IT’S WESTINGHOUSE

  The pudgy pianist’s many faithful fans would have popped their girdles if they had witnessed their idol in action last year in an offstage production that saw old Kittenish on the Keys play one sour note after another in his clumsy efforts to make beautiful music with a handsome but highly reluctant young publicity man.

  “WHY LIBERACE’S THEME SONG SHOULD BE ‘MAD ABOUT THE BOY,’ ”

  Hollywood Confidential

  It was perhaps coincidental—and then, again, perhaps it was not—that in the couple of weeks just before the Joanne Rio romance hit the papers, a Hollywood scandal sheet printed the first account of Lee Liberace’s homosexuality. The pianist began dating Rio in September 1954. The article in Rave had appeared the preceding August. “Don’t Call Him Mister” begins with a vicious review of The Liberace Show, comparing it to “the Cherry sisters, a vaudeville act which sang behind wire netting to avoid being hit by flying objects thrown by the audience.” Dismissing his hobbies of “cooking, sewing, and marcelling his hair,” it moves on to more direct homosexual allegations. It implies a bathroom pick-up in the reference to the artist singing “Stranger in Paradise” in a public lavatory—toilets, of course, were famous in gay circles for catching quick, easy sex. Next, it notes that Liberace had given his telephone number to a bodybuilder who appeared on television with him. Finally, it describes “a young Hollywood man refusing to allow cops to investigate a burglary at his home after realizing that the cigarette case taken had the following inscription: ‘To my darling, whom the world forbids me to live with, and without whom I cannot live . . . merely exist. L.’”1 This was only the first such revelation. The next three years witnessed a rash of similar stories in such tell-all gossip sheets as Inside Story, Private Lives, Uncensored, Whisper, Exclusive, On the QT, Hush-Hush, Top Secret, and Hollywood Confidential.

  This was a golden age for gossipmongers. It did not last long. A delicate balance of standards, on the one hand, over against quirky celebrity, on the other, was required to sustain it. If standards and manners were too rigid, as they had been before the Great Depression, gossip couldn’t flourish. Nor could it proliferate after the fifties, when everyone became a celebrity and standards and manners lost their power. With the collapse of distinctions between public and private, secrets became either irrelevant—or policy.

  In the fifties, high and low alike relished “dishing the dirt.” Some scandal sheets catered to the prurience of the masses. Their advertisements spoke volumes to the readership. “I WON’T be a CLERK all my life—I don’t HAVE to!” blared the notice for the LaSalle Extension University’s bookkeeping course. The International Correspondence School advocated “Learning at Home in your spare time to Fix Electrical Appliances” with a drawing of a buff, blond youth, chest out, striking down the road “to success,” passing a sniveling, fruity roundhead with a monocle. “How to pass a genius,” reads the caption. Along the same lines, another blared: “You can make yourself what you want to be with YOUR HIDDEN BRAINPOWER.” Or “AUTOCONDITIONING: The New Way to a Successful Life.” Others trumpeted, “I GUARANTEE YOU NEW BOSOM GLAMOUR or your money back,” and included illustrations. Still another advertised “Swift, simple surgery . . . A CURE FOR FRIGID WIVES” or “Now! A Tranquilizing Pill Without a Doctor’s Prescription!”2 If calculated to appeal to the common man—or woman, more likely—such magazines did not have a lock on prurience and gossip. Walter Winchell, Westbrook Pegler, Lee Mortimer, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons represent their appeal to a broader and even more sophisticated audience.3 Dishing Liberace was more attractive to the former category than to the latter, though. His growing fame after his national syndication exaggerated the potential for scandal.

  Within two months after the Rave article appeared in August, Inside Story took up the same theme, if more indirectly. Instead of referring to hunky weightlifters, it challenged the performer’s “feminine appeal” and dwelt on “masculine contempt.”4 The dike broke after this; that is, the avalanche of rumors came after the Joanne Rio affair, not before. In January 1955, Suppressed associated Liberace with homoeroticism with the category “Liberace and old lace.” It mocked the pianist’s effeminacy by repeating a standard joke using two icons of fifties culture—the first transsexual of the new age and an advertising slogan popularized by Betty Furness and television: “The difference between Liberace, Westinghouse and Christine Jorgenson is that you can be sure if it’s Westinghouse.”5 “Are Liberace’s Romances for Real?” inquired another tabloid in March. “Is he, or is he ain’t?” was the burning question America was asking, according to Private Lives. “Being queer for the piano is no crime, but the American public expects a little more sweat and a little less lavender-water from their heroes,” it postulated.6 In June, Whisper told its readers that “Hollywood snickerers are wondering, in fact, if all the male hormones earmarked for the Liberace boys weren’t hogged by George, leaving Lee only with his nimble fingers.”7 George Liberace, by this time, had run through three wives. After this exposé, a standard pattern emerged. Assuming, effectively, Liberace’s homosexuality, it asserted that all his dates were “phony romances” and “hoaxes.” In this regard, the affair with Joanne Rio became a standard for the conventional wisdom that Liberace fabricated his romances with women.8

  In September 1956, Liberace was steaming over Cassandra’s screed written in Great Britain, but the Daily Mirror‘s tirade only capped this swelling chorus of innuendo in the United States. The entertainer’s lawsuit against Conner suggests, then, not merely his quarrel with journalists abroad, but his challenge to the gossip at home. Constantly delayed, however, the suit exaggerated rather than suppressed the erotic scuttlebutt. In May 1957, Hush-Hush demanded, “Is Liberace a Man?” “If not, what?” the article inquired further. The headline alone dished most of the dirt, as the article itself is limited to reviewing the circumstances of Liberace’s upcoming libel suit against the Daily Mirror. It does, however, reprint in toto the Cassandra tirade, and it asserts that the question posed in the article’s title had “bothered Americans for years.” It was, of course, a subtle way of extending the rumors without saying anything for which the publications could be held liable.9

  If Hush-Hush asked what Liberace really was, that same month, the most radical and notorious of all the scandal sheets provided an answer. Hollywood Confidential was the most successful of the expose-all tabloids in the mid-fifties. Its founder, Robert Harrison, had cut his teeth as an office boy at The Daily GraphiC, an earlier sensational tabloid.10 At the conclusion of World War II, he launched his own pornographic enterprise with a series of magazines like Wink, Titter, and Flirt.11 With the failure of this business, he cast about for another. He found inspiration in what would seem the unlikeliest place—Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver’s televised crime hearings going on at the time. If audiences’ preference for I Love Lucy over Eisenhower’s inauguration was not a clear enough indication of what the folks were interested in, Senator Kefauver’s crime hearings cleared up any remaining doubt on that
score. The hearings were politics as salacious television entertainment. Senator Kefauver’s success inspired Harrison to launch Hollywood Confidential. According to Kenneth Anger, the most famous chronicler of Hollywood sleaze, “Harrison had conceived the idea for the magazine after watching the daily televised Kefauver crime investigations. When he observed that these journalistic reports on vice, crime and prostitution eclipsed all other programs in the ratings, he deduced that the public was hungry for gossip and that a publication that presented such material in a spicy manner and did, in effect, name names, would go over big.”12

  Harrison launched the publication in 1952. Al Govoni, formerly of True Detective, edited the magazine.13 “Tells the Facts and Names the Names,” read the masthead. The stories, accompanied by photographs, were short and snappy. In a sardonic style, they mocked indiscretions, chiefly, of Hollywood celebrities. “A born promoter,” according to one source, Harrison knew how to sell: “He knew what his customers wanted. He confided to friends: ‘Americans like to read about things which they are afraid to do themselves.’”14 The magazine had an initial press run of 250,000 copies, and by January 1955, more than six times that number were being sold each time it came out. By November of that year, the figure topped four million. The publication had the widest newsstand circulation of any magazine in the country.15

  The folks loved it. “It appeared in groceries and on newsstands everywhere with catchy headlines about the stars and their sexual/alcoholic/narcotic misadventures,” observed one contemporary journalist. Extremely profitable, “it could also support a small army of reporters and private detectives and pay large fees for scandalous information.” Cash fueled betrayal. “Hospital nurses, hookers, discharged servants, out-of-work publicists turned informers for Confidential. So did legitimate reporters, who risked loss of their jobs to accept a big check for stories they couldn’t print.” Blackmail was its stock in trade. “In fact, the entire magazine was a quasi-blackmail operation,” judged another chronicler. “Like a bargain basement private eye working to ‘get the goods’ on a spouse in a divorce case, Confidential would set about putting together a dossier on a carefully targeted star. Once it was assembled, part of the story might be run—with the rest held back in the hopes of monetary reward.”16 The blackmail did not always involve money. “One gossip columnist was said to have been trapped in a homosexual liaison; in return for Confidential‘s suppression of the story, he passed along tidbits to the magazines.”17