Such goings on might have prompted some eyes to roll, but more conventional citizens had their own secrets; they cultivated privacy for their own reasons. The oasis village had nothing to gain by outing him. Thus, even traditional folk participated in the conspiracy of silence of the gay fraternity. He thrived in Palm Springs. The community gave him time and space to do what he wanted in a way he had not been able to before. It was this that put him at odds with his brother. George seems to have counseled him about the inappropriateness of this behavior at the very moment that Liberace was making public claims against his homosexuality.114 George got it wrong. George got expelled. The star determined he would have it both ways. He lived the life he chose, he fought the gossips, he sued his detractors, he jettisoned his brother. Not least, he fought to regain his popularity with the folks. He would have it all.
Ten
GETTING BACK
His skill at steaming up an audience, slowing it down and sending it jumping again is surer than it was years ago. He simply holds them in the hollow of his dexterous hands and knows it. He obviously likes to play for them, clown for them and dress up in outlandish formal ensembles for them.
Variety
Jack Paar was the first of the great late-evening television talk-show hosts, and he set a high standard for his successors like Johnny Carson and David Letterman to maintain. His broadcast on the evening of November 23, 1963, typified the wit and variety of his programming. That evening he was interviewing Liberace. It was not really an interview, of course, but bantering between two men: Paar in his conservative suit and tie, Lee in his spangly dinner jacket, which he described as “Hart, Shaeffner, and Cartier.” The buttons spelled out his name in diamonds. One of Paar’s favorite guests, the showman had appeared numerous times on The Tonight Show. This evening, the television host suggested why he liked Liberace: it was because of the entertainer’s rapid-fire repartee. “I won’t ad lib with you,” Paar laughed. “You’re too fast!”
For over twenty years, the showman had been squelching hecklers, converting skeptics, and re-delighting old fans with his wit, and people came to hear his banter as much as his music. He was perhaps even better at the former than the latter. He was very funny, and this appearance with Paar demonstrated the pianist’s mastery. Indeed, Paar was hardly more than a straight man to Liberace’s comic that night. “When you are out and people recognize you, do you get much reaction?” inquired the talk-show host. And, in a voice best described as purring, the entertainer smiled coyly and replied: “Oh yes, it takes courage to come up to me, and they will say, ‘Are you . . . or aren’t you . . .?’” With his calculated pauses and fey manner, the performer had his host and the audience in stitches with the sly humor, double entendre, and self-mocking mode of phrasing the question “Are you . . . [Liberace/gay]?” Just so, he could make comparable jokes about Judy Garland, the greatest icon—then and later—of gay culture in America.
While his jokes with Paar bordered on the cute, his irony and self-mocking tone generally saved them from being precious. And, even when he verged on the saccharine, he projected such warmth, sincerity, and affection that he managed to carry off the performance. Although he succeeded with the sophisticated, urbane Jack Paar, he could perform equally well with other types entirely. With Zsa Zsa Gabor, he repeated his routine—perfected and practiced for over two decades of club work—of giving piano lessons. He used the exact same jokes: “Closer,” he told her, and when she squeezed nearer to him, he replied, “No, your hands.” One more time, in the thousands upon thousands of repetitions, Gabor and Paar cracked up, and the audience guffawed.
The same evening on which Paar challenged him with being too fast for comfort, the talk-show host also interviewed the young and audacious world heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay. The two performers—both of them brimming with old-style American optimism, innocence, and vim, in those days before Vietnam, Muhammad Ali, tanks in downtown Detroit, and political assassinations—made a delicious twosome. Both born poor, both self-made, the two performers were perfect American lads made good by their own energy and daring, and they gave a splendid performance, Lee and Cassius. Instructing the boxer on just where to stand in front of the camera—and the piano—so as to place both of them at good angles, Lee then improvised music for Cassius’s recitation of his poetry. It was as charming as it was funny—these two men, otherwise antithetical, having a splendid time while entertaining the nation.
It was all terribly poignant too, for this perfect little vignette of American culture had been filmed earlier in the week, just before the murder of President John Kennedy on the streets of Dallas, Texas, on November 22. The show was broadcast the next evening, as the world mourned. The program went on as originally filmed, but Paar had created a post-assassination preface to it based on that terrible event. It was a moving statement about the tragedy that cast a ghastly pall over the show’s smiles.1
The Kennedy assassination was a watershed in American intellectual life. November 22, 1963, held special implications for Liberace, too, for personal reasons. His own desperate encounter with death occurred at this time, as well. Although he made the two events coterminus in his memoir, his ordeal actually took place the day following the assassination. The evening after Americans had watched Jack Paar ad-libbing with the piano player and Liberace playing games with Cassius Clay, physicians rushed the performer to St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with renal failure.2 Unlike the American president, he survived, and the ordeal came to be both a capstone to his recovery of his career and a harbinger of how he would live his later life.
On Saturday, November 23, the performer was playing a club called the Holiday in Pittsburgh. A blizzard outside had restricted his movements, and he had also taken the opportunity to clean some of his own costumes when the hotel staff protested their inability to finish the job by showtime. He had ordered a gallon of cleaning fluid so he could work on his clothes. After finishing, he lay down on the bed—in his unventilated room—and drifted off to sleep. After an interruption from his wardrobe man, who criticized him for cleaning his own clothes, he slept again, rousing himself reluctantly to do the show, which he really had expected the management to cancel because of the assassination. He did not make it through the performance. At the hospital, doctors diagnosed him with kidney failure caused by carbon tetrachloride poisoning. He had been poisoned by the cleaning fluid he had been breathing all day in a closed room.
When his kidneys failed to kick in, the doctors informed him that he was dying. “Put your house in order,” the physician instructed. “It’s a bewildering piece of news to be given,” he reflected later. “First you feel a terrible shock. Then a benign sense of inevitability and sadness at the thought of all the people you love whom you will see no more. It’s strange. You mourn for your friends before they get a chance to mourn for you.” In a typical gesture, then, he decided to honor old associates and family members by giving away whatever money existed in his estate after the obligations of his will were met. He ordered his house by going on a binge of generosity. “I had charge accounts opened at Cartier’s, Tiffany’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and all the other good stores, and the nursing sisters at the hospital each day would phone in what I wanted ordered and where to ship it.” The benefices multiplied. “The gifts ranged from a house in Beverly Hills for my sister to a mink coat, pearls and jewels for my Mother, and a boat for a member of my staff which numbered twenty-eight people. The men got everything from cars and motorcycles to gold jewelry, the women, diamonds and furs.”3
Miraculously, amid this frenzy of giving, he began to recover. “Don’t ask for any scientific explanation but you’re going to make it,” the physicians told him. After a month in the hospital, he flew back to Los Angeles and celebrated Christmas 1963 at home. He did not ask for a scientific explanation. On the contrary, he welcomed the chance to justify his recovery with religion and faith. One day, he related, “a nun I’d never seen before came into my room an
d sat next to my bed and said softly, ‘St. Anthony has performed many miracles. Pray to him.’ Then she touched my arm softly and left the room.” He did pray to St. Anthony; he did recover. If that were not miracle enough for him, he determined, after a studied search failed to turn up any sister of this description, that the nun herself was a part of the miracle.4
Liberace had always fulfilled every ambition he had ever established for himself. As a sixteen-year-old, he had predicted he would play the Pabst Theater. Four years later he did so, fifteen years ahead of his own schedule. He had vowed to play Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl. He achieved both ambitions. A mansion in Hollywood? Performing for the Queen of England? Untold wealth? He set the goals; he fulfilled them. He achieved his purpose through relentless drive and unflagging will. Now, however, he could credit his fortune to Providence. God, or at least St. Anthony, was on his side. Had he escaped the clutches of Hollywood Confidential and veronicaed Cassandra’s horns? Had his health been miraculously restored? The nameless nun’s hand was there. The restoration of his career, in shambles between 1956 and 1962, now appeared providential too. Given the state of his fortunes after the Cassandra trial, he might well have credited his salvation, in retrospect, to St. Anthony—or better, to St. Jude, the patron of impossible causes.
From the lowest ebb in his career in 1959, he had pulled himself back to being virtually an institution in the American entertainment industry by 1963. The process of recouping his fortunes is a remarkable part of show-business history. He got back, in part, exactly the way he made it in the first place: he worked as relentlessly as he ever had as a hopeful, hungry, ambition-driven youth. At the depths of his eclipse, neither his stamina nor his will ever wavered. Years later, when he was well into his sixties, the same motives still drove him. “This is a funny business,” he told a reporter. “The longer you stay in it, you always think that just around the corner is some new thing, some new triumph. Take Jack Benny. He works like a dog. . . . He doesn’t have to. But I’m sure it would almost crucify him to become a has been. And I think that’s the biggest fear that anyone in show business has. They want to die famous. No one ever wants to give up.”5 If in success he drove himself, how much more driven he was when his fortunes waned! Still eclipsed in 1961, he described an agenda that was part whistling in the dark, but all ambition, too. “What I’m going to do in the next few years, God willing, will make people say, ‘Sure he played Madison Square Garden and got $50,000 a week at Las Vegas and all those things but that’s nothing compared to what he is doing today.’”6
In his obscurity, as the decade turned, the entertainer recouped his fortunes by returning to the folks. If films scorned him after 1955, if Las Vegas had dropped him after 1958, if television had failed and then forgotten him after 1959, his faith in the folks and in his ability to delight them never wavered. He loved the hinterland; the hinterland still loved him. He started again here. He hit the local scene with as much energy, enthusiasm, and expectation as he had as a young man playing the supper-club circuit in 1943. While he disappeared from the national media in this period, local papers chronicled his climb back to fame.7 He puffed himself up to a reporter from the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1961. “His present tour, Liberace explained, is built around supper and night club shows, an attempt to extend his appeal beyond ‘the legend and my loyal following.’” He was playing a club called the Holiday House at the time.8 The same year, his hometown newspaper detailed his activity “on the vast club-concert circuit that stretches from Yakima, Wash., to Bell Vernon, Pa. and overseas points.”9 Yakima, Washington? Bell Vernon, Pennsylvania? No town seemed too small.
He returned to the places that echoed his teenage musical tour in the late thirties: Madison, Eau Claire, Appleton, and, yes, even Wausau. He was playing the burg of Jackson, Minnesota, in September 24, 1961, when he offered a telephone interview to prime still another Milwaukee gig that fall. He was preparing a run, this time, at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theater. In contrast to his interview six months previously, he now told the journalist, “I’m doing more theater work and less in night clubs.”10 He was doing whatever he could, wherever he could, for whoever was willing to pay him.
He was relentless. No longer booked at Madison Square Garden and San Francisco’s Cow Palace, he was still in demand elsewhere. “There is hardly an open date in his 1961 itinerary. And he still commands an impressive salary in the nation’s foremost nightclubs and theaters,” observed another reporter. “His engagements this year have or will take him to such places as the Flamboyan Club in San Juan, Puerto Rico; the Chase Hotel in St. Louis; Blinsturb’s in Boston; the Miami Beach Auditorium; Harrah’s Club in Lake Tahoe, Nevada; the Meadowbrook in Cedar Grove, NJ; the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach, Florida, and the Palmer House in Chicago.”11
He returned to the community concert circuit that he had abandoned in 1940. Most of these appearances are lost to the record. They crop up almost at random. How many performances did he play like the one in 1960 or 1961 in the provincial mill town, Greenville, South Carolina, population 100,000, suspended about halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia? That community concert series had also included the celebrity pianist, Van Cliburn, and at least one young Greenvillian, while glad to hear the Texas classical performer, attended the Liberace show almost under duress. “I was a young sophisticate and budding intellectual in 1961, I guess it was, when I got tickets to a Community Concert starring Liberace,” the one-time concertgoer recalled. “I thought Van Cliburn was fine, but I took the Liberace tickets because I had to. I didn’t really want to go, but I have never seen anything like it. I don’t remember anything about Van Cliburn, his playing or anything else, but Liberace’s act is as vivid right now, over thirty years later as it was then. I have never seen a performer who gave so much, so memorably, so long. I hated to leave; it was so much fun. Everybody wanted more.”12 Thus, the showman pleased his old fans and wowed new ones everywhere he played in this uncongenial time.
The audiences were smaller, and so were the venues, but he generated the same reaction in the darkest days of his eclipse. Even the skeptical recorded his extraordinary ability to work an audience. Besides his concertizing, wrote the reviewer of his March 1957 Miami Beach engagement, “his ya-ta-ta is intriguing in a comically odd sense, but he works out the monologs with all the aplomb and assurance of a vet performer who knows he’s got it made.”13 As typified in his return engagement at Chicago’s Palmer House in 1959, he joked about the most awful episodes in his career, turning sows ears into funny silk purses: “Liberace makes of his 75 minutes or so an attractive exhibition of self-kidding cunningly compounded of coyness and candor.”14 He simply dominated audiences: “There can be no denying the showmanship of Liberace. . . . He oozes geniality and friendship all the way, and leaves the customers in a happier frame of mind than when they entered.”15
He pulled the same trick in New York, returning to Manhattan for the first time in five years. And if neither Carnegie Hall nor Madison Square Garden, the famous Latin Quarter was no small potatoes. He played four weeks. Although Variety’s reporter gibed at “the chorus of aaahs from the geriatric set,” the showman packed in the folks, senile or not.16 As another reported observed, “He is playing to turn away audiences at a time when nightclubs are dying all over the country.”17
Besides his almost incredible will, energy, and drive, the showman’s successes had an external source as well, at least according to Liberace himself. He altered his management team again. In 1961, he returned to Seymour Heller. That took some doing, too, for things had gone from bad to worse in regard to his old adviser. At John Jacobs’s prompting, the showman had sacked Heller back in the summer of 1958. In February 1960, Heller and his publicity firm initiated multimillion-dollar suits against the entertainer and his attorney, Jacobs. Lee countersued. With endless rounds of depositions and hearings, the affair twisted its way through the courts until September 16, 1961, when the parties resolved their
official difficulties.18 With the legal issues settled, Liberace determined to reestablish their relationship. He called. “I asked him if he’d meet with John Jacobs, the lawyer who had talked me into getting rid of him, and work out a new management deal.” Predictably, Jacobs failed to negotiate anything acceptable. “So I, personally, took over the arrangements,” wrote the showman. “Almost immediately he turned my career around, got it on the right track . . . ,” allowed the performer.19
Facilitated by his own hard work and assisted by St. Anthony, St. Jude, and now good old Seymour, Liberace was flying high again by 1962. He reestablished his name; once more he had become a desirable commodity. Other entertainers loved him in any case and were delighted to encourage—and to tap—his restored popularity. His guest spot on The Tonight Show on November 23, 1963, was actually only one of numerous appearances he made on the show when Paar was hosting it. Indeed, on his final show on June 6, 1965—a recap of his most notable programs—Paar used film of the quick-witted piano player in a featured spot with his other favorite guests: Jonathan Winters, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Billy Graham, Richard Burton, Bette Davis, Oscar Levant, “Nichols and May,” and Bea Lillie.20 Johnny Carson liked Liberace almost as much as Paar did, judging by the performer’s many appearances on the new Tonight Show. He even hosted one segment of the program. Still later, David Letterman rediscovered what Paar and Carson had known all along: Liberace was surefire company.
Not to underestimate the significance of The Tonight Show appearances, his return to The Ed Sullivan Show in 1962 had put another important imprimatur on the showman’s recovery. Broadcast to millions of homes every Sunday night, this program both introduced new acts and guaranteed legitimacy to the old. It was classic hodgepodge vaudeville. The program on the night of Liberace’s appearance on December 16, 1962, was typical: besides Lee at the piano, Sullivan also presented Xavier Cugat’s band accompanying Aby Lane; the singing Clancy Brothers had come from Ireland; and Victor Julien appeared with his trained dogs. In addition, viewers that evening could catch a ventriloquist, a dance troupe, a group of circus tumblers, a comic, and, not least, the fresh young singer, Barbra Streisand, in her initial appearance on the tube. It was, incidentally, neither her first nor her last encounter with the master showman.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 35
