Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  The pianist had appeared on the show only once before, on November 16, 1955, when he had performed the novelty song, “Putti, Putti, Cement Mixer,” in accompaniment to the great opera diva, Risë Stevens.21 Seven years later, Sullivan effectively welcomed the showman back to celebrity, when, in a voice as distinctive as Liberace’s, he instructed his television viewers on December 16, 1962, “And now back to our stage after much too long an absence—Liberace!” Dressed in black dinner-wear with spangled cuffs, the showman wore a reasonably discreet outfit, although his candelabrum was now oversized. The show was typical Lee, except the tunes were contemporary now. He offered “Moon River” in standard form, but produced “Mack the Knife” as Kurt Weill wrote it, then as a waltz with some “Blue Danube” thrown in, in bossa nova style, and then in ragtime. After his breathy, signature thank yous, an off-stage voice yelled, “Hey Libby, let’s do the twist!” whereupon the performer launched, tails flying, into a shameless Chubby Checker dance routine.22

  Half in fun, always for the publicity and cash, Liberace institutionalized himself once again in television from this time on. He appeared in all sorts of shows, from sequences of Batman to The Muppet Show and Saturday Night Live. The mid-sixties saw his face on the big screen again as the wonderfully, oleaginously American casket salesman in Tony Richardson’s The Loved One. Like the Auntie Mame phenomenon, this film was a nearly perfect evocation of pre-Stonewall queer culture packaged wittily for the straight world.23 Most of the movie’s participants were bent. Thus, the gay Christopher Isherwood, who had turned the fey Evelyn Waugh’s novel into a script, had remarked about the production: “I think most of us on both sides of the camera, this time around, are gay or bisexual.”24 It exuded campiness, and Liberace’s cameo performance was perfect as a caricature of a caricature—of a caricature.

  He was a name again. His production of records after 1962, and increasing album sales, affirms his new status.25 All this reflected in his earning power. His earnings climbed back where they had been in the fifties. From a low of $300,000 in 1959, they were back to a million dollars a year by the mid-sixties.26

  He was a name again, and the final verification of his re-arrival was a new contract to play Las Vegas in 1963. He had been away five years. Providence guided his career. Like his brush with death that same year, the return to the casinos marked a milestone in his life. It sealed, just so, a return to the glamorous style that had distinguished his first fame. Glitz and glamour even became contractual obligations in his Las Vegas performances; he was required to outdo himself. By this means, the return to Las Vegas symbolizes less his return to elegance than to his campy commitment to the spectacular that became his indelible hallmark after 1963. From this period on, in fact, he dubbed himself “Mr. Showmanship,” a sobriquet that quickly became inseparable from his public identity.27

  Style and elegance had, of course, been his stock in trade from his schooldays. As he acquired a career and reputation in the forties, he practiced a fairly conventional form of elegance—tuxedos, tails, and, of course, the candelabra after 1945. By the early fifties, however, he began pushing the limits of convention. At his Hollywood Bowl performance in 1952, for example, he had exchanged the standard white tie and black tails for an all-white version of formal eveningwear. The outfit grabbed headlines. He was “the new Cab Calloway . . . the hidey-ho man of the Hollywood Bowl.”28 The “snowy sheared beaver dress suit” he wore to the premiere of Forever Yours in 1955, or his Christian Dior-designed gold lamé jacket of his Las Vegas performance of the same year, represented more play with fashion. Under the direction of John Jacobs, he gave all this up after 1957. He went straight and plain, sans glamour, for almost five years.

  As he regained fame and celebrity after 1961, he also reclaimed glamour. While his reassertion of real flamboyance did not take place until 1962, he had begun establishing the new style earlier, privately and domestically. Indeed, it was in his home that he first began the really radical development of what might be termed fashion as spectacle. This, too, bears a direct relationship to his career.

  As he had retreated to a more conservative public image after the Confidential and Cassandra trials, his homes and houses had absorbed more of his creative ambitions, even as they anticipated the fancy of his Las Vegas style after 1963. Perhaps again because of career problems and his longing for something new, he had become disenchanted with the Sherman Oaks house on Valley Vista by 1958, at the very time, too, that his relations with his family became attenuated. The Sherman Oaks house had other problems. It lacked privacy, sitting as it did directly on the street without hedge, fence, or walls. Tourists haunted the premises. It was easily and often vandalized, with unwelcome guests damaging or making off with the piano decorations on the mailbox, the lights, and other ornaments. In the summer of 1957, in the midst of the Confidential crises, it had also been the scene of a mysterious attack against his mother, when strangers lay in wait and beat her. Afterwards, the showman felt the necessity of maintaining twenty-four-hour security guards. Beyond the dwelling’s physical liabilities, it bored him. He spent little time there; moreover, he wanted something bigger, finer, grander. In March 1959, he put the piano-pool house on the market.29 He found his third Hollywood “dream house” in the Hollywood Hills.

  Kings Way snakes up the southern side of the mountains just off Sunset Boulevard, and Harold Way branches off from it a short distance up the road and twists across and up the flank of the hillside. Eighty-four thirty-three occupies a huge lot on the north side at a major elbow in the narrow, winding lane. It lies on a major elevation just above the valley floor looking down on Sunset Strip. Indeed, Lee could almost throw a stone to Ciro’s, the club that had helped guarantee his West Coast reputation in the late forties. The mansion at 8433 Harold Way provided a spectacular panorama of the L.A. basin. “I’ve always been fascinated by the carpet of lights that is the international trademark of the sprawling City of Los Angeles,” Liberace related, and at night the view was glorious. But he wanted more, and more he got. “I wasn’t about to buy just any house with a view and enough rooms to accommodate my worldly goods,” he insisted. “I wanted a house with some history, some color, some background.”30 The mansion also provided other amenities. While the pianist was silent on the subject, it lay in an area so notoriously gay that cognoscenti called it “the Swish Alps.” Down on the Strip, West Hollywood boasted one of the most sophisticated gay scenes in the entire United States.

  He got history, color, and background all at once. The house had been built in the 1920s in a development called Hacienda Estates. The movie stars Rudy Vallee and later Anne Harding had owned it at one time. Unoccupied for years, however, it had deteriorated badly. “The kids in the neighborhood said it was haunted. It sure looked like it,” he judged. “It was just a tumbled-down mess.”31 Its physical state proved not to be a problem: he had the cash to make repairs and bring it up to par. The deterioration actually pleased him; he loved redeeming the unlikely, mending the broken, reclaiming the forgotten, recovering the abandoned. He had demonstrated the characteristics back in West Milwaukee when he and Angie decorated the pounds of cookie fragments his mother brought home from work, or when he fastidiously repaired the Christmas toys his baby brother smashed. This personality trait became more pronounced with time, especially after this period. It governed his interest in the Cloisters at Palm Springs. It also influenced his affection for people. In the case of the Harold Way house, the fix-up cost $250,000—over two and a half times the original purchase price of $95,000. The repairs took over six months from the purchase date in December 1960.32 He moved in on Bastille Day, 1961.

  The house was grand enough to meet even the showman’s exacting standards of grandiosity. He called it his Hollywood Hills home. “My family,” he related, “calls it ‘the palace.’” His family was closer to the mark.33 With three stories and twenty-eight rooms, by legal definition, it was palatial. Alone comprising fifteen hundred square feet, a studio and living room
dominated the ground floor; the latter also boasted a twelve- by fifteen-foot stage. The first floor also held the kitchen and a dining room. The second floor contained another dining room; another living room—“the most prominent and exquisitely furnished in the house,” with an even larger twelve- by twenty-one-foot stage; a bar/lounge; three sitting rooms; and a bedroom. On the third floor were three more sitting rooms, two more bedrooms, and a huge dressing room; these were his personal quarters. In addition, the house plan revealed eight baths and twenty-five storage areas, among other miscellaneous rooms. The property itself enclosed an Olympic-sized heated swimming pool, a large cabana, and statue-endowed gardens—where the showman also installed outdoor heaters to ward off the chill of Hollywood winter evenings.34

  Visitors entered the mansion through a gold-leafed door that led into a golden foyer with a grand stairway curving to the third floor. The main living room lay to the right; it was done in French blue and more gold. Here is the pianist’s description: “It is furnished in tapestries and pieces from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, upholstered in ivory and the palest of yellow satins and velvet. The chandelier, suspended from a gilded mirror is 18-karat gold and Baccarat crystal. The piano, on a dais, was once owned by Chopin. To the left of this is a small art gallery with some of my treasures.”35

  Off the second-floor living room, the organ room boasted a gold-leaf-encrusted theater organ capable of reproducing bird calls, drums, tambourines, and chimes, in addition to making more ordinary organ sounds. On the lowest level, the studio was decorated in a contemporary style, all black and white, with mirrored walls and a ceiling spangled with twinkling stars.36 Here he auditioned, formulated, and rehearsed his shows.

  Liberace himself did not actually own the house; rather, it had been bought and was maintained by his corporation, International Artists, from whom he leased his private quarters on the third floor. The showman—under the advice of John Jacobs—made this arrangement for tax purposes. In 1968, the IRS challenged the scheme, and Liberace now locked horns with the Feds in still another major lawsuit.37 While the court failed to sustain International Artists completely, it did allow a tax deduction of 50 percent of the expenses connected with the house.38 In the process of the ruling, the judges also affirmed the business/publicity motives behind the acquisition and maintenance of the spectacular house. The court conceded the petitioner’s chief claim that International Artists was providing “a home for Liberace which would enhance his image in the eyes of the public.” “The purchase of Harold Way in 1960 was clearly undertaken, to a significant degree, for business reasons,” the court declared. If, indeed, it was the corporate headquarters for International Artists, “in appearance, however, the home was simply the spectacular personal residence of Liberace.” Beyond this, the court chronicled the ways the Harold Way mansion served as a publicity and advertising function of the corporation:

  The home was extensively photographed. Brochures customarily distributed at Liberace performances emphasized by photograph and reference the ‘palatial home’ of Liberace. The appearance of the home was commonly imitated on stage, including in one instance the reproduction of the circular staircase found at Harold Way. Magazine and newspaper photographers were invited and encouraged to visit the premises for publicity purposes. Press parties attended by members of the press and celebrities, calculated to generate publicity for Liberace, were sometimes, though not frequently, held at Harold Way.

  As a result of the promotional efforts of International Artists, various news media often carried articles or references about Liberace. His unusual home was invariably mentioned in these articles, with description and photographs of the home figuring prominently in some instances.39

  Even more than with the Sherman Oaks house, Liberace was capitalizing, literally, on his domestic arrangements. And what held true for the Harold Way house followed, of course, from his larger creed: “Everything I do has the hope of making a profit. My career, everything I touch in my scope of entertainment field,” he said, had monetary motives.40 He had rediscovered that glamour was not only profitable but highly profitable after 1961. Folks craved it. He was delighted to satisfy their longing. Not least, he enjoyed the spectacle. Show had been his metier since high school, but the conservative eclipse had proven to him, finally, that this was where his future lay. He gave over to glitz like never before in his career. His spectacle now outstripped anything he had ever tried before and, indeed, what anyone had done before.

  By 1961, when he moved into the new house, Liberace was slowly emerging from his monster slump, but his real apotheosis still awaited his return to Las Vegas not quite two years later. At that time, the palace on Harold Way became one more piece of evidence, not only of the new Liberace but also of the Las Vegas style that the performer came to embody and that became his hallmark for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He was destined for Vegas, but Vegas was destined for him.

  Back to Vegas. This was the great tribute he had paid to Seymour Heller. He “got me back in Vegas” after the desperate five-year hiatus.41 Lee had always loved the place, from the time of his first engagement there back in 1944. Going back was going home. No entertainer would have longer or more comprehensive associations with the gambling resort. In many ways, his career matches the city’s history, and together the two represent one of the extraordinary, daffy, and striking phenomena of the second half of twentieth-century American history.

  Despite its contemporary fame, Las Vegas was slow getting invented. Although the Nevada State legislature had legalized gambling in the state in 1931, the act had little immediate impact. Gambling was, in effect, a local matter that especially in the thirties played on the boomtown, singleman mentality that accompanied the construction of the Boulder Dam during the Depression. As the thirties closed, however, various circumstances combined to make the city a regional and then a national entertainment center.

  In 1938, reformers in Los Angeles inaugurated a campaign against prostitution and gambling in Southern California. Their crusade pushed the gamblers across the state line to betting-friendly southern Nevada. At the same time, while the completion of the Boulder Dam dried up the pool of high-rolling construction workers at the gaming tables, the flood of tourists to that spectacular construction site offered a new source of bettors. Las Vegas provided a convenient stopping place for tourists from Los Angeles, and the possibility of betting offered those passing through extra inducement to stop over in the town.42 Simultaneously, the outbreak of the European war and the American military buildup resulted in the general area being awash with money and increased domestic spending. There was cash for tourism, cash for gambling. All this laid the groundwork for the Las Vegas that emerged later in the decade.

  Changes in the town’s demography reflected these other patterns at work after 1939. In the thirties, the betting “industry” had focused on downtown, or “Glitter Gulch,” as the ad men called it. In 1940–41, however, gaming moved west, beyond the city limits, to what would be known as the Strip. Highway 91, the new improved motor artery to Los Angeles, proved the inspiration. In 1941, a West Coast hotelier, Thomas Hull, opened a new-style hotel resort three miles west of the city’s center just outside the town limits. One of a chain of El Rancho hotels, mostly in California, El Rancho Vegas catered to drive-in, drive-through guests to whom Hull offered lodgings mostly in its sixty-three bungalow-type rooms. Located on a huge thirty-five-acre tract out in the desert, its stables, mission-style structures, and other outbuildings sprawled across a fifth of this plot. It was an extraordinary innovation, and Las Vegas’s first tourist facility that combined hotel, casinos, resort amenities, and a luxurious environment, all of which was easily accessed by automobile. With an eye to publicity and catching motorists’ attention, Hull crowned the entrance with a trademark windmill with neon-lit blades. In another flashy public-relations ploy, he opened the facility on April 3, 1941, with a bevy of young Hollywood stars and starlets.43

/>   El Rancho Vegas soon inspired other investors. Buying land a mile farther west out Highway 91, a Texas theater-chain owner, R. E. Griffith, constructed a still more elaborate, in effect grander version of Hull’s resort hotel the next year. He christened it the Last Frontier. It was intended to be bigger, catchier, and more spectacular in every respect than El Rancho. The complex included horseback and stagecoach rides, pack trips, and, a little later, “The Last Frontier Village,” a reconstructed pioneer community filled with artifacts from olden times. For all the primitive accoutrements, Griffith hyped his establishment as “The Early West in Modern Splendor.” The amenities confirmed the slogan with the personalized chambers, Zuni-decorated passages, and, not least, the main banqueting hall that more than doubled the entertainment space at El Rancho.44

  Opening in October 1942, the Last Frontier also planned entertainment to exceed anything its competitor offered. Maxine Lewis was one of the Hollywood starlets who had participated in El Rancho’s inauguration ceremonies eighteen months before. The management of the Last Frontier hired her as entertainment director; she was good. By the end of 1943, she hit on the scheme of contracting with big-name entertainers and celebrity performers to headline the Last Frontier’s shows. The practice distinguished the new hotel twice over: the names pulled in the customers, and a headline-blackening salary attracted attention in its own right. Lewis inaugurated this program in January 1944 by offering six thousand dollars a week to Sophie Tucker, “the rough, tough star of Broadway, nightclubs, radio, and screen,” to headline the show at the Ramona Room. After the sixty-year-old star had arrived to cheering crowds at the train station downtown, the hotel, in keeping with its larger strategy, arranged for her to travel the four miles to the resort on a fire truck, to play on her image of “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas.” Just so, sirens broke the desert calm at her performance, while searchlights swept the sky during her two-week engagement. In the lusty, robust style she had made her trademark, she belted out her signature tunes, such as “Pistol-Packin’ Mama,” costumed in a “cowgirl” outfit to fit her own image as well as that of the Last Frontier.45