When Sophie Tucker was barnstorming in the Nevada desert’s fancy motel, Walter Liberace was tickling the ivories and pattering with tuxedoed gentlemen and their gowned ladies at the Normandie Roof in Montreal’s elegant Mont Royal Hotel. During his Canadian engagement, he had mailed Maxine Lewis one of his advertising cards, which asked, “Have you heard of Liberace?” Lewis called him back. Yes, she had heard of Liberace, she told him. He professed ignorance of her and the Last Frontier, and he knew little more about Las Vegas itself. At the time, of course, the desert resort had almost no reputation outside the Nevada-L.A. corridor, and the pianist had never been much west of Dubuque or south of Fort Lee. As a hungry and ambitious performer, however, Liberace had jumped when Lewis offered to match his income at the Normandie Roof. He was earning $350 a week, but he said he was making $700. Lewis agreed to this figure and offered him a six-week run. He began his engagement on Thanksgiving weekend, 1944.46
Liberace—and perhaps Maxine Lewis as well—touted his engagement at the Last Frontier in the context of the “superstar” Sophie Tucker. You’ll be following her, Liberace quoted Lewis as saying. He used the information to reflect on his own circumstances: “Knowing the stature (no pun intended) of Miss Tucker at that time, this should have told me immediately that I’d asked too little or that they planned to make up on me what they overpaid her. But none of that ever crossed my mind. I was elated at the thought of playing Vegas.”47
The reality was different.
Tucker was long gone from Las Vegas by the time Liberace showed up. She had played the Last Frontier almost a year before. Stars, super or otherwise, were nowhere near when Liberace opened at the Last Frontier in November 1944. Indeed, “Walter Liberace” was only one element in a nightclub “review.” He neither led the bill nor opened the show. He shared the stage with Rolf Passer, “the world’s mental wizard,” Ray Smith’s puppet show, Lola and Andre Dancers “In costumed Splendor of SOUTH AMERICA,” and “Lester Cole and His Debs,” a singing group notable for filling popular requests—“Hit Show Tunes, Irish Ballads, Popular Novelties, Old Favorites.” Lester Cole’s act actually won top billing in the Last Frontier’s initial newspaper advertisement for the show.48 But, regardless of whether or not, in his own mind, Liberace was competing with Sophie Tucker rather than the mind-reader Rolf Passer, he presented a show worthy of Broadway. His combination of energy and ambition, talent and art paid off. According to his memoir, Maxine Lewis appeared in his dressing room after the first night’s show and volunteered to up his already inflated salary. “After that show you gave tonight,” he quoted her, “I feel guilty about paying you seven hundred and fifty dollars.” She doubled his compensation then and there to fifteen hundred a week, he related. It was a personal landmark. He had broken through a three-figure weekly salary for the first time, he remembered.49 For his six-week Thanksgiving-to-Christmas run, Maxine Lewis paid him nine thousand dollars.50
Did it really happen the way Liberace tells it? The local newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, offers some confirmation of his account. The day after the opening, the paper described him as “the big hit of the show.” And after his initial performance, the Last Frontier boosted him to top billing in the newspaper advertisements.51
While, inexplicably, he missed Las Vegas in ’45, the showman returned in September ’46 to play a second engagement to the same enthusiastic audiences in the Ramona Room. He was back again six months later, receiving still livelier reviews and generating more impressive advertising copy.52 Maxine Lewis had a winner. She almost lost him. The gangster Bugsy Siegel wanted him, too. In 1946, the mob had broken into the Las Vegas with the Flamingo Hotel, the Strip’s third casino. The hotel opened in the ’46 Christmas season, but financial difficulties closed it soon after. Siegel planned a reinauguration in March.53 In the interval, he discovered the Ramona Room star. He intended to have him for his new show. The mobster’s assassination in early ’47 saved Liberace for Maxine Lewis.54
With no regrets about missing out on playing the Flamingo, the pianist delighted in repeated lucrative contracts from the Last Frontier for almost another decade. Indeed, while the Flamingo foundered, the Last Frontier thrived, and, with it, its star piano-playing artist. In 1948, he led the prestigious New Year’s Eve show, and he returned again that September. Long before his television fame, Las Vegas accepted him as simply a fixture in the town’s entertainment scene but also as one of the most popular entertainers of the gambling town’s history. Thus, typically, one Review-Journal critic began his article with the words “Liberace is back,” followed by the observation, “We might stop right there and make this the shortest show review on record and sufficient to send droves of people crowding into the Ramona Room to hear this master young piano virtuoso,” so popular and appealing was the entertainer.55
In 1954, Liberace had played the Last Frontier twenty-five times. His ten-year contract with the hotel was expiring. At the same time, the resort was encountering financial problems because of growing competition on the Strip. Other hotels had taken their cue from the Frontier’s efforts to beat El Rancho, and the competition had destabilized profits and management.56 Indeed, the newest of the challengers planned a facility that would eclipse anything Las Vegas had seen before and that would remake the Strip completely. For over a decade after the Last Frontier had opened, the Strip’s hotels had accumulated at a steady pace: after the Flamingo’s completion in 1946–47 came the Thunderbird in ’48, the Desert Inn in ’50, the Sahara and the Sands, both in ’52, and the Desert Showboat Motor Inn in 1954. Despite different decorative modes, all resembled in profile the earliest resorts on Highway 91. None rose more than three stories above the desert floor. The Riviera broke the pattern. Towering more than ten stories above the street, it gave the town a profile. It changed the way Las Vegas looked; it escalated the pattern of more, better, different—and costly—to a new level.57 Its main entertainment facility encapsulated the changes. The Clover Room’s ten-thousand-square-foot space could accommodate twelve hundred diners—double the number that the thirteen-year-old Ramona Room could hold. Each patron possessed an unobstructed view of the huge stage, which measured eighty by forty feet. With four turntables and the most sophisticated lighting available, it could handle a full Broadway musical. And, in contrast to the old-fashioned, rustic elegance of the Last Frontier, the Riviera’s management had customized the Clover Room with a “Tiffany setting of classical design.” It was “draped in swathes of platinum gray velour, faced with Empire green, hanging from huge brass rings beneath a jet black ceiling illuminated by huge spheres of starlight constellations,” as a local reporter described it.58
Searching for an act to inaugurate these spectacular arrangements, the management turned to Liberace, much as the Last Frontier had hired Sophie Tucker years before. The fifty-thousand-dollar salary persuaded him to leave the Last Frontier, and the Riviera got one of the hottest names in American entertaining to head its opening bill. The hotel, too, benefited from all the publicity, not only of Liberace but of that astronomical fee, as well.
Liberace’s opening show in the Clover Room on April 20, 1955, matched the opulence of the space. It consisted of three “gigantic production numbers”: “The Riviera Story,” “The Liberace Story,” and “The Magnificent Candelabra Ballet.”59 Beyond all this, the pianist added his own glittering personal touch. Ever eager to give his patrons and employers their money’s worth, for this opening show, the showman created the first of the spectacular costume changes for which he would become known. He opened the performance in a white silk lamé tuxedo he had commissioned from Christian Dior. His second-act costume topped it: a hand-stitched tuxedo jacket with nearly a million and a half shimmering sequins, according to giddy press reports.60
The Riviera was the place to be. And so it was for a few years, too. Liberace was there, but so were a crowd of other notables, including the hottest pop singer around, the teenage heartthrob who was changing the face of American popular musi
c, Elvis Presley. The King had not quite acquired his dominion, however, at least not in Las Vegas, where he made his first appearance in 1956. After Liberace jumped ship to the Riviera, the Last Frontier had scrambled to recoup its declining fortunes, and this effort included modernization, a name change to Hotel New Frontier, and a new entertainment bill. The revamped hotel opened in April 1955, the same month as the Riviera, and the new management offered to the Mississippi rocker a contract to headline its show in 1956. Liberace was playing the Riviera for his second season when the New Frontier engaged the pop singer. Presley had just made his celebrated “waist-up” appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, but the twenty-one-year-old singer’s New Frontier act went nowhere. Not until he returned in 1969—taking a leaf from Liberace’s notebook—did the King conquer Las Vegas.61 Much earlier, during his aborted 1956 engagement, the glittery pianist had counseled the younger performer along these very lines—to adopt more glitz, in effect, to show off. From the outset, Elvis’s New Frontier act failed to work. His manager, at least according to Liberace’s recollection, appealed to the showman appearing across the strip at the Riviera. “Elvis’s manager, Colonel Parker, came to see me. He said, ‘My Boy’—as he used to call Elvis—‘is appearing across the street. He’s havin’ some problems.’ He told me what was happening and then added, ‘He admires you so much. If I could bring him over for a picture, he’d really appreciate it.’”62 The two performers did get together for a photo session; the camera reveals the rock and roller as awkward and rather ill at ease. That fall, Elvis attended Lee’s Riviera show after the conclusion of the pianist’s European tour. In showy white tails, Lee serenaded the rocker, who was seated immediately stageside. A famous publicity episode followed. Lee’s geniality helped Elvis relax, and these two icons of the entertainment world exchanged instruments and clothes: Elvis in the gold lamé jacket, Lee in Elvis’s broad-striped sportcoat. While Elvis banged away at the piano, Lee strummed a guitar, and they dueted for nearly a half hour, to the delight of photographers—and, of course, of their publicity agents. “Elvis and I may be characters—me with my gold jackets and him with his sideburns—but we can afford to be,” Lee had burbled to the reporters.63 Presley never forgot Liberace’s generosity. Every time Lee opened a new Las Vegas show thereafter, Elvis sent him a guitar made of flowers. It was not pro forma. “‘I only send them to the people I love,’” Presley told him.64
Elvis’s act, with or without the pianist’s advice, had bombed. Liberace would soon face the same fate. He still had two more years, however, to play the scene. In 1957, the year after his Presley session, he cashed in on the current reincarnation craze, calling his show, “Liberace Takes a Bridey,” for the reincarnation story of “Bridey Murphy,” as described in the bestseller, The Search for Bridey Murphy. He hired the doddering Bela Lugosi to play a mesmerist who would hypnotize the pianist so that the latter could explore his previous lives. He described what followed: “I sing, dance, do comedy, ballet, have ten changes and work in everything from tails to tights.”65 The magic wasn’t working. With the Riviera in financial trouble, too, the showman played Las Vegas one more time in 1958. His white-heat fame had cooled. With Cassandra looming over his life, maybe the gay chickens were coming home to roost as well, as he himself believed. His contract was not renewed in 1959 or for the three years following. His four-year absence from the gambling casinos epitomized the collapse of his career and reputation.
When he returned to Las Vegas on July 2, 1963, for a five-week engagement at the Riviera, it was a victory, then, indeed.66 It marks, most critically, the redemption of his reputation as a performer and a crowd pleaser. His career never flagged again. The return signals, too, his turn to the splendid excess that would become synonymous with his name, synonymous with a new identity and still another new name he chosef for himself, “Mr. Showmanship.” Even to the point of moving his legal residence to the gambling town, Liberace chose henceforth to associate himself ever more closely with Las Vegas, and, by the same token, he became a model of what Las Vegas represented in American life from this time on.
As early as 1955, when the Riviera opened, Las Vegas was changing, and its changes mirrored critical transformations in the nation itself. Before the Riviera, Las Vegas remained bound essentially to Los Angeles, the West, and regional culture. Afterwards, the pattern altered. Las Vegas became a national rather than a regional entertainment center. The expansion of air travel and the creation of interstate highways helped fuel the shift. But other elements, like the huge growth of domestic wealth and disposable income during the period, contributed to the change as well. A demographic revolution undermined people’s affection for the local and stimulated their desire for travel—which, of course, new highways, cheap cars, cheap fuel, leisure time, and the new wealth all exaggerated. Most appropriately, 1956 saw the construction of the first stretch of the interstate highway system. Television played an essential role in the nationalization of culture, too. All these elements together further enhanced the image of Las Vegas as a national center. There emerged, then, something like a national village, in which Las Vegas became a sacred or semi-sacred spot.
Disneyland was another such place, and the role of Las Vegas in American popular culture corresponds nicely in both time and content to the Disney enterprise; indeed, Las Vegas could be aptly labeled Disneyland for Adults.67 Disneyland was being built at exactly the time when the new Las Vegas was taking off, and both enterprises, as well as Disney World, which was built in Florida a little later, were founded in spectacle, and not just spectacle, but, in effect, in vulgar spectacle, in the sense of popular appeal. No subtlety here! Haul in dream spinners! Everybody wins! These new cultural centers came to symbolize, then, not only the nationalization of taste and culture but its radical democratization as well. As Robert Venturi noted in Learning from Las Vegas, the vulgar celebration of spectacle might indicate the cheapening of taste, but it was also wildly exuberant and visually splendid, as exciting and dramatic as it was brassy and tawdry.
Las Vegas became a microcosm of the new America anticipated by suburban wealth. The exuberant search for tourists and gamblers—and almost unlimited capital—led Las Vegas entrepreneurs to exceed what they or their competitors had done yesterday or might do tomorrow. They engaged in a war to outdo each other in creating a Fantastic Kingdom in the desert. Changing yearly, or more frequently, Las Vegas was a fabricated world that was part county fair, part Alice in Wonderland, part hyperventilated bazaar, and all-American in its totality. The motives that created this phenomenon were the same ones that drove the engines of the American social, cultural, and economic order after the war. They inspired the Milwaukee-born piano player no less. This was an America where streets were carpeted with gold lamé. As one chronicler of the gambling city wrote, “Liberace epitomized what he called the ‘ever better, onward and upward attitude’ of Las Vegas. Each stage performance surpassed the previous one for gorgeous—often outrageous—outfits that glittered in cunningly conceived stage sets and skillfully executing lighting.”68 This was what he called “topping” or “topping himself”—to exceed himself, to go where no man had gone before and go there gaudier. Another reviewer summarized the issue concisely. “His audience is mostly old. Too bad—young people should turn out in large numbers and learn about show business. Besides Ringling Bros. and Disneyland, they have little opportunity to see what production really is.”69
Liberace knew who he was, he knew Las Vegas, he knew the country, and he knew precisely what he was doing all along. He knew, not least, production. He was a consummate performer. The most sensible critics knew the same thing. His act “is a display of elegance and opulence so extreme it practically mocks the American dream of wealth and status.”70
After 1963, Liberace played the greatest venues in Las Vegas. Besides his long-term contract with the Riviera, he also starred at the Sahara, Caesar’s Palace, and MGM Grand. Had his association with Las Vegas and the Las Vegas temper ever been in question
, his partnership with the Hilton International Hotel guaranteed it. In 1971, the Hilton chain bought out the International Hotel. The management commissioned Liberace as the lead opener and extended him a long-term contract with the mind-numbing salary of $300,000 a week. He earned his pay; he gave his bosses their money’s worth. Indeed, his show in the Internationale Room in 1972 set a standard for both him and Las Vegas. This was the largest room he had ever played, and he took advantage of the size with a particularly striking opening. He had always liked grand entrances. His earliest reviews remarked on his dramatic flair—darkened lights and sudden spots, for example, at the Plaza or the Terrace Room. Later, he used drum rolls, brass fanfares, or harp glissandos to mark his appearance on the stage.71 He was chauffeured onto the stage in a custom-designed Phantom V Landau Rolls-Royce, only one of seven—in Blüethner grand/Liberace/Las Vegas hype—ever produced. John Lennon owned one of them, Queen Elizabeth another. To match the car, he appeared in a calf-length ermine coat trimmed with diamonds over a gold lamé jumpsuit, the same outfit he had worn for his most recent command performance for Queen Elizabeth. He also closed the act with an another automobile entrance: this time, he wore jeweled red knickers and appeared on stage in a fire-engine red Model A roadster. Other acts, other performances showcased similarly outrageous outfits, similarly incredible cars.72
Liberace: An American Boy Page 37
