Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Topping himself may have been written into his contracts, but he didn’t do it just out of legal obligation. He loved it. He delighted in doing something new or offering a new twist on old themes. He supported a small industry of costume makers. First Ray Acuna and afterwards Michael Travis elaborated on and executed his designs, or offered proposals of their own. Period costumes, or variations thereof, especially delighted him. History was a costume drama for him. Hollywood presented history the way he liked it. The Chopin movie, A Song to Remember, had given him his candelabra. He loved the Hollywood costumes of Beau Brummell, the 1954 film starring Stewart Granger and Elizabeth Taylor and based on the life of the Regency dandy. A junk-store photograph of George V in coronation robes inspired another costume. Different fabrics and textures, fur included, enchanted him. For his Internationale Room show, in addition to the ermine outfit he had worn, he had also donned a minktrimmed one. In 1973, he appeared on stage in a $35,000 coat made of one hundred Danish mink pelts. In 1982, when he returned to the Riviera to headline its show, he inaugurated his performance in a cape of virgin fox for which he had paid $300,000. “How do I know they’re virgin?” he winked to the audience. “It takes one to know one.”73 Less costly than outlandish, his costume for his Caesar’s Palace show in May 1971 consisted of a red, white, and blue hot-pants outfit with a streamered, starred, bespangled jacket. Las Vegas News Bureau photographer John Cook captured him in this getup in mid-act, and the resulting photograph made history: it was the most widely run wire-service transmission ever dispatched from Las Vegas.74 Perfect.

  The entertainer pulled still other tricks out of his sleeve. There were always new cars—and frequently handsome new chauffeurs, as well. He devised other sorts of “topping” techniques. For his 1975 Internationale Room show, he rigged himself up with wires, à la Peter Pan, to fly off and on the stage, trailing a cape of white ostrich feathers. On another occasion, he wired himself, literally, so that his costume blossomed into a thousand twinkling lights when the theater cut the spots. He appeared with monkeys, elephants, chimpanzees, and Russian wolfhounds in performance and for publicity—the two were hardly separate categories by the seventies. In 1967, outside the Sahara, he was lowered by block and tackle to a giant cake on his forty-eighth birthday, and he rode a hot-air balloon to another opening.

  While it seemed that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to capture popular attention—whether it involved mink coats, rhinestones, leather hot pants, hot-air balloons, or custom-made cars—his shows were structurally very conservative. He practiced a general form of production that changed little in his lifetime and that drew, still further, on old vaudeville variety shows from a half-century before. It was, of course, the same stuff that early television capitalized on in such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Kate Smith Show, Cavalcade of Stars, and The Texaco Star Theater. Liberace stuck to the pattern throughout his career, and even his last Las Vegas shows resembled his first appearance at the Last Frontier. Maxine Lewis had programmed the finger-synching pianist along with a hypnotist, a puppet show, costumed dancers, and an all-girls chorus specializing in popular requests. The pianist orchestrated almost identical shows for himself later, with jugglers, puppets, juvenile performers, and other novelty acts, otherwise defined, even as he himself always occupied the center ring with his glitter and amusing patter.

  These were the shows he took on the road, too, after reestablishing himself in Las Vegas. One bill included “a grinning magician (‘Mr. Electric’) and a fine boy banjoist (‘my protegee, Scotty Plummer’),” according to one press report.75 “Dieto, a European hat juggler and fledgling pop singer” also traveled with Liberace for a time.76 In 1969, appearing in New York City, the pianist employed a Trinidad steel band “which played everything so well,” according to one report, “that Ethel Merman sang out ‘They’re like a symphony’!”77 His touring show in 1977 featured “the internationally famed Dancing Waters, a backdrop of superbly programmed water fountains that turned their fluid patterns and lights into a ballet to accompany Liberace’s playing of Johann Strauss waltzes.” It also showcased Barclay Shaw, “an incredible puppeteer” and a less critically acclaimed British trio of two Scotsmen and a Welsh girl. Then, too, there was the subtle piano playing of “the talented Vince Cardell,” described as “Liberace’s handsome protege.”78 Cardell had been a part of the act for three years, according to a second notice in 1978. Before he began playing solos and duets with his boss, he had been his chauffeur. It was not, incidentally, Cardell’s only appearance in the Liberace saga.

  Liberace loved singers and discovering new talent, too. The hefty, big-voiced Fay McKay performed regularly with him, and so did the Metropolitan opera singer, Jean Fenn. The showman also introduced Barbra Streisand to Las Vegas through his act. The New York singer was on the make. Critics had raved about her part as Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway production, I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She had also produced record albums, and she was singing in a Greenwich Village club when the pianist first caught her act. They had performed together on the same Ed Sullivan show in 1962.79 She wowed the showman. He wanted her in his act. She made his 1963 show at the Riviera, but initially, at least, she impressed neither audiences nor critics, both of whom complained about her makeup and grooming as well as her voice. Others viewed her more favorably, including the producer Ray Stark and lyricist Jule Styne, who were collaborating just then on a new musical, Funny Girl. Streisand, of course, got the part that catapulted her to fame.80

  Liberace searched constantly for new talent and novelty acts to include in his show, just as he pushed the limits with his own outfits and his own behavior. Yet, within a larger frame, nothing at all changed about his performance. Indeed, the constancy of his act was another manifestation of his ultimate conservatism. His show was almost ritually predictable. The audience’s wonder and delight came not from what was going to happen but from how the familiar would appear this time. While many critics, especially in the East, complained about the lack of real innovation on the one hand and the insubstantial novelty on the other, this complaint, reversed, offers another clue to Liberace’s audience appeal. The show-business trade journal got it just about right in reviewing his opening at the Riviera in the summer of ’63: “Liberace is back at the Riviera with the same glittering corn which established him as one of the phenomenal novelties of the biz. The singer-88er’s warmly extroverted showmanship, complete with three spectacular costume changes, is an unchanging type which made him a legend.”81 The next year, his Americana Hotel show in New York won a similar notice. “He’s a hard pro, able to charm the oldies, overcome the resistance of the young with an easy and familiar pattern of music. . . . He trods [sic] no new musical paths . . . the audience is comfortable with his style of music. . . . He has that air of surefire professional skill.”82

  It was the jazzy repetition of the familiar. The allure of his show was not dissimilar to the appeal of the Catholic mass. Indeed, Liberace himself spoke constantly about the analogies between religion, theater, performing, and show business. Drawing deeply on his Catholicism, he worked out a coherent aesthetic theory and a practical approach to theater and performance. His almost unprecedented half century of success suggests the power of his perceptions.

  Eleven

  TROMPE L’OEIL

  I don’t give concerts, I put on a show.

  LIBERACE

  The song was already popular when Hildegard, Liberace’s fellow Milwaukeean, first recorded it and made it central to her act at fancy nightspots around the country during the war. It is not exactly clear when Liberace adopted it. It has a graceful melody and lovely lyrics. At the same time, the verses have special meaning for Liberace’s life and values. “I’ll Be Seeing You” reaffirms the showman’s sense of an audience, his aesthetics, and his underlying notions of art itself. It hints, too, at the sexual elements of his show.

  I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places

  That this heart of mine
embraces all day through;

  In that small café, the park across the way,

  The children’s carousel, the chestnut trees, the wishing well.

  I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day,

  In everything that’s light and gay,

  I’ll always think of you that way.

  I’ll find you in the morning sun

  And when the night is new,

  I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you.

  On the most fundamental level, the song is a simple, romantic, and sentimental evocation of a lost love, friends parting, or companions separated by time or space. It is a song of promises and commitment. It possesses other meanings, however.

  First, Liberace himself sang it with specific intent. Using it to close every performance, it honored his audiences and marked his own devotion to his fans. A song of his own composition, “I Don’t Care” did the same thing, as indicated by its subtitle, “As Long as You Care for Me.” He loved performing; he loved his audiences; he thrived on their applause: the song expresses his gratitude. When he closed his shows with the number, he demonstrated his warmth and attachment; he was giving back a portion of what his admirers had given him. “When the performance is over, I will still be thinking of you,” runs the sentiment. It reaffirms, then, his oldest motives in performing, from the time of the “Three Little Fishies” concert: the ambition to redefine the relationship between the artist and the audience in terms of personal affection.

  There are still other ways of interpreting the lyrics. These illuminate Liberace’s ideas of art even as they suggest latent sexual motifs in his performance.

  Most critically, of course, the song is about seeing and sight. Just so, it is about enumerating physical objects within a line of vision—the café, the park, trees, a carousel, a wishing well, the moon. This emphasizes the significance of actual, physiological seeing for Liberace. Visual apprehension played a completely critical role in his performance. But the lyrics also suggest another kind of seeing that is equally important in his aesthetics. It is not mere seeing or these mere objects of sight that the lyrics chronicle. Their poetry involves illusion, optical illusion, or even self-conscious delusion; the song is about looking at one thing and seeing something else. It introduces, then, the mind’s eye or an inner vision. It is about the conjuring of the absent or the unseen, about the restructuring of the natural world, the refiguring of the scene to include objects of fancy or the imagination. The lyrics celebrate, then, not mere things but images of things, and imagination itself. It chronicles the mental reconstruction of the world.

  Issues of this inner vision or imagination complicate the ballad’s meaning. To whom exactly are the lyrics addressed? The “you” is ambiguous. The object of affection may or may not be present. Is the poetry directed toward a lover who is to depart and will soon be recalled affectionately? Is the song, in contrast, not a dialogue but a monologue, a reflection about a lover already departed, about love already gone? There is still another option: the love is not only reconstructed in the imagination, but the lover is altogether imaginary. If “you” is there even when unseen, the love is then essentially an object of fancy or a creation of the imagination. By this means, the lyrics suggest some of the fundamental motives in art and artistic creativity.

  The imagined “you” of the song functions like the artist’s muse, like Dante’s Beatrice, for example: the poet did glimpse in passing a real girl in Florence by this name, but she is nothing in comparison with his vision of her, a vision that inspired, in turn, his poetry. The real Beatrice, the physical presence, is restructured into something else in the imagination. The “something else” is beyond the reach of time. It is like art. It begins with seeing or a sight and turns into a vision, something that exists on its own. This reordering of the natural world into something transcendent is what art, at least traditionally defined, is all about.

  Finally, the lyrics also underline connections between sex and seeing in the creative process. Insofar as art involves the visionary recreation of the natural world, that vision itself classically begins with a look, a glimpse, a glance, a visual attraction transfigured into poetry. It was Dante and Beatrice, again, or Petrarch and Laura, or, in more modern times, William Faulkner and the little girl “with muddy drawers”—the vision that inspired and focused in his novel The Sound and the Fury. In this context, it is critical to note that this sort of seeing is a sex-linked activity generally associated with males. Just so, men’s imaginative looking suggests not only sexuality, but forbidden sexuality as well. Tradition and myth confirm the linkage. The Jewish elders did not physically rape Susannah; they merely saw her at the bath. The hunter Actaeon did not even mean to spy on the naked goddess Artemis. Both stories, however, equate seeing with sexuality, indeed, with a sexual violation of the woman. To have a woman visually was to have her physically. Seeing equals seizing. It was within this primitive context, too, that Southern white men lynched scores of black males for looking wrong at a woman or for merely looking at a white woman. The crime of rape, in this context, had nothing to do with the physical penetration of a woman’s body, but rather with possessing her with the eye and imagination.1

  Associated with both art and sex in general, seeing/looking possesses more discrete associations with homosexuality. Just so, it underlines an alignment between homosexual impulses and the creative process. These ideas lurk beneath the surface of Liberace’s theme song, too.

  “I’ll Be Seeing You” possesses both general and specific homosexual import. The references to “seeing you in everything that’s light and gay” is only the most obvious element. Beyond this, the lyrics suggest both specific and general elements within homoeroticism. On the simplest, more immediate level, looking, a particular function of males, is doubled, effectively, for homosexual males. Both within and without the gay underground, the glance, the look, appearance define the essence of sexual identification and desire. With what a future generation would call “gaydar” (as in homosexual radar), Walter Liberace himself first experienced the recognition process when he was a twenty-year-old playing the Wunderbar in Wausau, Wisconsin. Long before and well after, this visual understanding has made the homosexual world go ’round. In Cities of the Plain, Marcel Proust described this ocular recognition, according to Leo Bersani’s summary, as the basis of “a universal freemasonry of inversion.”2 The homosexual lodgemen “recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs,” writes Proust. If obscure to others, these visible signs mark, in turn, the most diverse members of the fraternity to each other. Thus, they

  indicate one of his kind to the beggar in the person of the nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the person of his daughter’s suitor, to the man who has sought healing, absolution or legal defence in the doctor, the priest or the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secret but sharing with the others a secret which the rest of humanity does not suspect and which means that to them the most wildly improbable tales of adventure seem true, for in this life of anachronistic fiction, the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince with a certain insolent aplomb . . . , on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the ruffian; a reprobate section of the human collectivity, but an important one, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed; numbering among its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in prison, or on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in an affectionate and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of the vice as of something alien to it—a game that is rendered easy by the blindness or duplicity of the others.3

  Using his examination of Proust as a basis, Bersani describes homosexual visuality more grandly: “The world is nothing but a massive enlargement of the image in the invert’
s eye.”4

  Looking and homosexuality possess still other ducks and turns, as suggested by Liberace’s theme song’s lyrics. Looking at one thing and seeing something else has it one way; not looking at something and seeing anyway—the ungaze—has it another, another phenomenon of the homoerotic subculture. As a young, mostly latent gay man, the writer Walter Clemmons first noted the homosexual unlook. “Queers had funny eyes,” he observed. “And I only gradually worked out what it was. It’s the cautious homosexuals that looked at you without moving their face. In order not to be caught looking, you’re suddenly aware that you’re being looked at by a face that’s frankly not looking at you at all. So the eyes look very peculiar. It’s a kind of snake-eyed look.”5

  Critical in homosexual culture, the glance or look produces recognition; it is generally preliminary to sex as well. The sentiments behind the theme song’s lyrics, however, suggest something both less and more than physical activity or community. In his biography of the French writer Jean Genet, Edmund White relates the story of Genet’s first “crush,” or first discovery of homoerotic desire. Genet saw—and this is critical in the story—he spied another boy, he related, and, in effect, “fancied” him. His desire manifested itself in the wish not to do something to the boy but rather to be the boy. This is, of course, an impossible longing; it is fulfillable only in fancy, in the imagination, or in some inner vision. The optical image of a real boy, then, triggers something else: the pre-adolescent homosexual voyeur reworked the image to produce a mystical coupling and transformation of reality, otherwise defined. Liberace’s theme song suggests the same sensibility.6