Even in megastardom, Liberace insisted on this humbler identity. He bragged about shopping at K-Mart and drinking André Cold Duck, for example. Just so, he never took his own fame for granted nor ever lost his awe at beauty, glamour, and the people who represented it. He could identify with the humblest member of his audience. “If I live to be 100, I’ll be in awe of celebrities. I really don’t consider myself one,” he said.43 “I am a star-gazer from way back in the days when I was much younger and very new in the world of glamorous entertainment,” he wrote. “But I’ve never lost the fascination that success holds for me. I don’t think that if I live to be a hundred I’ll lose the excitement of meeting someone I admire, a celebrity . . . someone who has written a great book, painted a great picture, written a great play or made a great movie. When I see one of these people, I sometimes do childlike things.”44
His little-boy innocence provided a critical source of his charm as a man and a performer. Friends and associates emphasized over and over how decent, fun, generous, and sincere he was. “He was exactly the same off stage as on, but funnier,” reminisced Julie Budd, who had begun touring with him as a teenage prodigy in 1975. “There was an ease about him . . . he was the most genuine, caring, sincere guy who ever was.”45 The generosity he evidenced in the hospital room in Pittsburgh in 1963 pervaded his life. It took the most striking turns. Invited to the White House by Ronald and Nancy Reagan, for example, he asked his housekeeper at the Cloisters, Dorothy McMahon, to accompany him. To quiet her anxiety, he bought her appropriate clothes. When she fretted about her teeth, he paid for them to be capped.46 His personal bounty equaled his material largess. Almost every friend or associate noted it. He was like the croupier who sympathized so completely with the players that he could hardly resist letting them win.
The same qualities permeated his act. “That little boy image, that warm sincerity you see onstage, it really is him—backstage, in his leisure time,” testified Terry Clarkston, his friend and wardrobe manager. “He just wants everything and everyone in life to be happy.”47 “Few entertainers ever gave themselves over to their audiences so fully, and with such obvious affection,” noted a critic. “To criticize him for excess was like complaining that Dolly Parton wasn’t Joni Mitchell.”48 A fellow performer, and no slouch himself at controlling an audience, Milton Berle called him “one of the warmest . . . gentlemen I ever met, and I believe that the feeling flowed over the footlights and embraced the audience.”49 A hometown journalist captured the same quality near the end of the showman’s life. After summarizing the technical qualities of his April 1986 performance, the critic continued to the heart of Liberace’s appeal: “Mr. Showmanship has another more potent, drawing power to his show: the warm and wonderful way he works his audience. Surprisingly enough, behind all the glitzy glitter, the corny false modesty and the shy smile, Liberace exudes a love that is returned to him a thousandfold.”50
A Las Vegas writer described the same characteristic: “He has that magic quality that makes him a star. It’s called LIKABILITY.” He continued: “People LIKE Liberace. It doesn’t matter that at times, he’s outrageous. Looking at the faces of the SRO audiences in the Hilton showroom, and that of the entertainer, you know they like each other. And, as friends are wont to do, they try to please each other. He in his performance, they in their applause. A magic formula that works.”51 “His act was based on excess. But the man himself was without pretense,” observed another critic. “Underneath the feathers and the finery and trains fit for a coronation, he remained an eternal child, as dazzled by the wonderland he inhabited as the tourist who regularly paraded before his many houses, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.”52 “Liberace’s sincerity is beyond reproach,” observed still another. “His joyful flamboyance is rooted in a child’s wonderment. He’s still the child with his nose pressed against the shop window. Only the window is Tiffany’s.”53
As an additional source of his appeal, this modest, flip side of celebrity also allowed him to objectify and even mock his own megastar creation with all its excesses. Half of his jokes hinged on making fun of himself and his various woes, otherwise defined. Was he “Mad About the Boy”? He was making light of the Confidential case even as his lawyers mounted their big guns against Robert Harrison. Was he terrified of being caught out in homosexual activity? That was subject for his stage humor too. “His gift was an infectious mixture of self-mockery, indefatigable energy, and an almost childlike desire to please,” one observer noted.54 “He exaggerated the very elements of his persona and performance that had earned him his early notoriety,” wrote another astute observer, so that “finally, it was impossible to make fun of Liberace because he was having too much fun making fun of himself. He was in on the joke; he may have created it.”55 He showed off his wealth, but he did so as if it belonged to someone else—while he remained the simple boy from Wisconsin. “In his show, he’d look at the audience, then at his dazzling apparel and say with a laugh, ‘You know, sometimes I can’t believe this myself,’” his old friend Jamie James chuckled long after.56 “His self-deprecating humor and ‘Gee whiz, aren’t I lucky’ attitude towards his wealth prevent him from alienating people when he flaunts those riches,” wrote a Los Angeles Times reviewer. “He supplies fantasy fulfillment for everyone who yearns to revel in affluence.”57 “The piano was merely accompaniment to the good-humored vulgarity that was the real focus of his performances. . . . And he invited his audience to join him in giggling at the sheer silliness of it all,” remarked one more reviewer.58 His hometown newspaper got his performance on the money: “It would have all been difficult to endure if he had given the slightest indication of taking it seriously. That’s clearly one secret of Liberace’s success: He is fully aware that he’s something of a joke, and he’s very much in on the joke.”59
The performer had it both ways. He compelled his audiences with his sincere pleasure and childlike delight in making them smile, even as he celebrated splendid stardom. The little-boy humanity, however, even multiplied the wonder of the accoutrements. The stage was his own escape from who he was, and he led his audiences from their own humdrum lives with the special enthusiasm of one who knew whereof they spoke. He was escaping into art and beauty on the very stage before the audience’s very eyes. He transformed himself in every performance. And the stage and art transformed him, even as his own transformation changed and transported the audience. Every performance reenacted—like the mass—the miraculous transformation of the audience, and of the little boy himself.
Here, then, was the core of his performance, the basis of his act, and the aesthetics of his show. It was apparent from the beginning, back in La Crosse. He executed it modestly at first, in the supper clubs and fancy nightspots, with his elegant white tie and tails, the fancy candelabra. He continued the same expression in his television shows. He expanded the usage in his Las Vegas shows in the mid-fifties with his gold lamé and white sheared beaver. While he backed away from this aesthetic during the crises after 1957, in the last twenty-five years of his career he returned to radical visuals, stylistic extremism, and all the other elements of his practical definitions of art and beauty. Classically, in this regard, he reduced—or expanded—the solidest objects to sensory manifestations of light and splendor. He turned his piano itself into light and movement. Playing Caesar’s Palace in 1985, he performed on a rhinestone-covered piano, “and when he launches into the finale, it starts to revolve, a merry-go-round shooting off splinters of light like a glitter ball on prom night.”60
By 1962, then, the entertainer had not only reverted to his primary notions of show, he had moved into a new realm of showiness that made all his earlier costumes and performances look almost flat and colorless. By his own design and plan, his exaggerations accelerated yearly. While his devotees still loved him, the sixties and seventies were not generally congenial to his act. Although the entertainer hit on key themes in traditional definitions of art and myth, he still contradicted other important eleme
nts and tenets of American culture. If his astonishing popularity reflects the degree to which he played on fundamental elements in showmanship, opposition persisted and found a new voice after 1963. Establishment culture remained almost as skeptical as it had been in the fifties; what was increasingly called “the counterculture,” however, had even less affinity for his art. As does the male vexation that characterized the fifties, countercultural opposition reveals essential elements in that culture itself.
In the sixties and seventies, the umpires of culture, centering in the Northeast, dealt with the Liberace phenomenon basically by ignoring him. The New York Times, that ultimate arbiter of the acceptable in establishment culture, mentioned his name in print only four times between 1959 and 1980. In this very period, however, while his popularity was swelling in the heartland, even New Yorkers were mobbing him. In 1962, he performed at Manhattan’s famed Latin Quarter where he played “to turn-away audiences.”61 Eight years later, he opened “so spectacularly,” according to one report at the Waldorf-Astoria’s Empire Room, “that he helped reawaken New York’s long sleeping night life.”62 All this was beneath the Times’s notice. In this regard, Liberace was something like Las Vegas itself in these years, a kind of national embarrassment. While Robert Venturi’s study, Learning from Las Vegas, helped spark an intellectual interest in the gambling resort in 1977 as an important phenomenon of American culture, Liberace had to wait until the eighties for the cultural elites to pay him any mind.
When the high-toned critics took the time in these years to notice him, they dismissed him even more profoundly than they had in the fifties. Back in his hometown, even, one reviewer led his notice with the observation that “there is one thing you have to give Milwaukee’s Liberace—he violates everything including himself. What he has done to his God given talent is unforgivable. What he does to the music of Chopin is unmentionable.” He continued: “No man with any sense of self-respect would present himself on stage in a sequined gold jacket. Liberace does. No pianist worth his keep would make the mish-mash Liberace does of the lovely Chopin airs and polonaise themes. In the last analysis, no one would hold up one’s relatives to such ridicule as this person does.”
Was the showman playing a high school benefit concert to raise funds for a new piano? The critic conceded nothing. “The cause is commendable. The performance was inexcusable.” New York had penetrated even the Midwest heartland, and the critic actually paraphrased a line first offered by the ferociously condescending critic at the New York Times in conjunction with Liberace’s 1953 Carnegie Hall performance.63 “Given a certain number of cocktails in an agreeable lounge, you might enjoy his music. With luck, you might not even hear it.”64
The Milwaukee reviewer made these observations in 1962. In 1975, another hometown critic echoed the same opinion. Besides dismissing the pianist’s “hokey” monologues, he wondered “if all the vulgarity that convulses his middle aged and older audience is really necessary.” There was something pitiful, too, he added, “about Liberace’s pudgy little boy smile.” Unlike the other reviewer, however, he conceded the pianist’s musical talent. “All the kitsch may be integral to Liberace’s act and success. But his pianistic skill and serious musicianship make the act bearable.” What he gave he immediately retracted, however, with the invidious reference to the performer’s commercialism: “Liberace will repeat his money making act for another sold out house at 8 p.m. Thursday.”65
His commercial success, his popularity, and pandering, as it was called, to his audience still left high-toned critics apoplectic. The New York Times and its devotees in the provinces represented “culture” as it was formally defined in the United States, but its alternative—the counterculture—found even less to admire in the boy from West Allis. Liberace, in turn, found the sixties revolutionaries as objectionable as he had his old critics, maybe even more so. Tenets of the counterculture actually resembled many establishment values apparent in the 1950s debates over early television. The radicalism of the sixties exaggerated some of these and added others, all of which ran completely against Liberace’s ideas of life, art, and performance.
In form, at least, rebellion and rejection dominated the values of the generation maturing in the sixties. It was literally reactionary—it was counterculture before it was anything else, even when its antagonism assumed a positive, if countervailing epistemology. Radically egalitarian and individualistic, it mocked authority and challenged any order outside a subjective sense of things. The bumper-sticker slogan, “Challenge Authority” fit nicely. Naturalistic and realistic, it assumed power and power relationships as the most fundamental elements of natural order. Politics, in this frame of reference, was nothing more than the gross or subtle manipulation of power, and politics became, thus, the essence of everything. It assumed the politicization of art, for example, in painting and protest songs, but no less in sex and racial issues. It spawned feminism, gay rights, and Black separatism. Its forays into fantasy were drug-induced, but even drug use was justified as a political activity. In a supreme oxymoron of the age, dropping out became a political act. As objects of scorn, all traditional institutions came under attack, not to mention tradition, itself, of course: family, religion, the state, universities—the formal institutions, as well as masculinity, femininity, capitalism—the informal ones.
The counterculture challenged everything Liberace cherished, and if the piano player from Milwaukee was not important enough to be bombed in his Palm Springs or Las Vegas digs, he recognized the threat and took occasion to criticize the movement in most of its particulars. His criticisms underscore his own aesthetic but also his profound, deep-dyed conservatism.
Liberace had no interest in politics, and certainly not in radical politics. He joked about his two terms as honorary mayor of Sherman Oaks: “I didn’t like it,” he asserted. “So enough of politics. It’s not my cup of confusion.”66 If he voted at all, his values lay with Midwestern, conservative Republicanism. He believed in the importance of individual responsibility, for example. Social evil? No, he answered, “Much of the sorrow that exists is brought about by the individuals themselves.” Whether “a pianist or a bricklayer or a senator,” he continued, “as long as you do your work with sincerity and dedication, as well as a happy outlook on life, you can avoid many unhappy burdens.”67
Liberace’s idea of the polity resembled that of his fellow Midwesterners Ronald Reagan and Rock Hudson, who had also gone West to make their fortunes in Hollywood. He disliked “big government” and taxes, for example. He grieved over the loss of wealth and aristocratic grandeur to federal taxing policy, in particular. His own long, drawn out run-in with the IRS exacerbated his antagonism. “Not many people realize that I have a partner,” he complained in The Things I Love. “Whenever I make a dollar, fifty cents of it goes to taxes. There was a time when if you made a million dollars, you had made a million dollars. You didn’t have to say, “Well, only half of it belongs to me; the other half belongs to Uncle Sam.” He concluded: “How America is changing!”68
Liberace’s dislike of unions was another manifestation of his personal conservatism. In a world that favored individual enterprise, he saw no need for collective bargaining; on the contrary, unions ran completely against this ideological grain. He would have known of leftist strikers and communist sympathizers from their campaigns at the Allis-Chalmers plant in his hometown in the thirties and forties, and perhaps they exaggerated his natural antipathy. Union opposition had made him abandon the phonograph part of his old act in 1947. He considered the objections frivolous. Just so, he took no cognizance whatsoever of a musicians’ strike when he was playing the Sahara Tahoe in the late seventies. Scott Thorson repeated that after a most unlikely dinner with Bella Abzug and Shirley MacLaine, Liberace expressed astonishment “when Bella refused to be his guest at our show because she didn’t want to cross a picket line. Bella and her concerns were totally alien to him, a part of the wider world that Lee chose to ignore,” Thorson claimed.69 L
iberace had immediately followed his objection to the welfare state with a criticism of unions and unionization. They represented, he mused, one more manifestation of changing times and American decline.70
The leftist politics of the sixties and after left the entertainer completely cold. On that memorable evening they spent with MacLaine and Abzug, Thorson related, his lover nearly passed out as the conversation grew more and more political. While the two women waxed increasingly passionate, the pianist “got quieter and quieter until his eyes began to glaze. I remember that Shirley and Bella were quite agitated about a recent incident involving police brutality, but by then,” Thorson remembered, “I was so afraid that Lee might actually fall asleep at the table that I don’t recall where or when the police brutality was supposed to have taken place.”71
The showman grew more heated, however, over stars—like Jane Fonda and Ed Asner—who used stardom to advance a leftist agenda.72 Over and over he returned to the theme: “An entertainer’s function is to entertain, not to preach.” He concluded, “So I’m very apolitical; I do not want to get involved in politics at all. An entertainer should stay out of it.”73 “I never go on the stage to preach,” he repeated. “I do my thing, and I do it sincerely. I want the audience to love me; and the only way to do that is to let them know that I care about them and love them. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I planted a different seed (which I have seen other performers do), a seed wherein you incite riot and disorder. If only you could get an audience all thinking one way, and thus create a feeling of congeniality, you could dispel many of the world’s problems.”74
Liberace: An American Boy Page 41
