He played the White House for Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon; he was a special White House guest of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Each of these politicians mirrored the mainstream American values that dominated Liberace’s life. He did not perform for John and Jacqueline Kennedy. Nor did he dance to the tune of social activism and political engagement announced in Kennedy’s thousand days and delivered in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. His autobiographical treatment of racial issues clearly limns his larger commitments—and his alienation from the activism of the era. In discussing a command performance before the queen of England in 1960, he related, incidentally, how Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. had occupied the same bill. Without any specific reference to race, he described how Davis was catching flak from the press because he was married to a Swedish woman, May Britt. Liberace’s outrage had nothing to do with race. “Those yellow tabloids in London, in those days,” he grieved, “lived on picking the bones of personalities. I felt very sorry for Sammy because I knew what he was going through.”75 Along the same lines, he respected Lena Horne beyond almost any other performer, but as with Sammy Davis, without any specific racial referent. He honored her for the same reasons he admired Davis—for her courage, persistence, and determination to triumph over the odds of making it. “She’s been through so much adversity and prejudice—and triumphed over it all that every time I see her up on stage wowing an audience, I get goose bumps!” he told Scott Thorson.76 In this context, racial prejudice was only one adversity, and his celebration was analogous to praising blind deaf-mutes who learn to speak: a manifestation of will and energy over debilities and handicaps.
He addressed racial politics more directly when discussing a tour of South Africa in the seventies. He related how, while on his way to Johannesburg, he was quizzed by reporters on his Heathrow layover. When one reporter asked him, “Why are you going to South Africa?” he knew the trouble that was brewing. He used the issue to reflect on race, politics, and art. “Anybody who knows my personal life knows that the color of a man’s skin means nothing to me. I think segregation is indecent and inhuman and I loathe the idea of it. But I don’t think that it’s the place of an American piano player to try to change the quality of life in the Republic of South Africa.” “I do not intend to get involved in internal problems,” he told the reporter. “I’m going there to bring entertainment and, I hope, happiness to people. Their way of life is something they have to work out for themselves.” He concluded: “I guess I just can’t see the sense of mixing politics and show business the way some of my friends do.” Within a counterculture context of politics, of course, the only thing worse than playing a South African venue would have been the very justification he offered in separating politics from performance. By asserting that art is apolitical, he violated one of the fundamental tenets of a generational prejudice.77
He elaborated on his notions of art and politics elsewhere. The Kennedy family prompted another discussion. He had bought a monogrammed dinner service that had belonged to the Kennedys. His guests’ opinions on his use of the china varied. “Some of my friends who are more politically minded than I am sometimes question my use of the Kennedy plates. Some feel they’re too sacred to eat from, others act as if they thought the plates were poison. Personally, I think both reactions are inexcusable,” he mused. “I hate to think that things of great beauty created by master craftsmen must have a political connotation. I feel the same way about music and books of certain countries being banned. I don’t think genuine works of art, music and literature are capable of doing harm. I don’t think beauty and politics mix. The former depends on dreams, the latter on realities.”78
If he resented the counterculture’s politicization of art, the radicals’ anticommercialism, anticapitalism, and repudiation of the work ethic puzzled him no less. He liked to work, and he worked hard. He liked making money. He assumed his audiences did so as well. He made a lot of money, and he spent a lot of money. At the same time, he also refused to take getting and spending completely seriously, either. It was the stuff of jokes and humor. As for monetary compensation, he always insisted on giving every audience its money’s worth, too. And more. This was a part of the American way as he perceived it: the United States was a kind of racetrack that encouraged its citizens to run as far and as fast as their energy and natural talents allowed them; it rewarded their swiftness. He liked this American way and loved his fellow countrymen, the ordinary folk. Just so, in respecting his countrymen, he honored the United States in a time when patriotic values were declining and national pride fell to new lows.
His ideas about the rewards for running the American race also contradicted the pop wisdom of the counterculture. In one of the key aphorisms of the era, Andy Warhol claimed that everyone got fifteen minutes of fame. This democratization of celebrity offended the showman’s deepest values. He dismissed the “Johnny-come-lately performers, who cut a record in a garage and find they have a hit on their hands. . . . They make a fast buck but they shorten their careers,” he said. “Of course, there are some to whom one freak hit is their career,” he added.79 Celebrity and fame, he insisted over and over, were neither democratic nor leveling. They were hard to achieve and harder still to keep. And, of course, the object was to get and then to keep one’s status. Fifteen-minute fame made no sense to him. Celebrity was based, instead—if variously—on merit, virtue, hierarchy, style, or calculation. It was aristocratic, not egalitarian, of its nature. Stars, royalty, presidents, and popes earned the deference of common folk who would not, could not ever claim status, not for fifteen minutes, not ever. He believed stars should dress and behave like stars. “It worries me when I’m on a plane and someone with me says, ‘You know who’s on this plane?’ Then they mention some name that I may have read about. ‘He’s just made his third gold record.’ That means he’s sold over 3,000,000 records. I think that’s exciting,” he wrote. “I look around and there’s not a star in sight.”80
The age’s infatuation with chemical-induced fantasy also horrified him. “It is such a shame these days to see bright and talented performers ruin their careers and their lives with drugs and alcohol,” he moaned.81 This pronouncement resonates with a consistent line he took against drugs in any form, even cigarettes. Thus, while he was a heavy smoker, he did not like being photographed with a cigarette. Scott Thorson maintained in his memoir that his lover was actually a heavy drinker as well as a smoker, and criticizes him, in effect, for hypocrisy. The charge rings true. “Do everything in moderation,” the entertainer pontificated in his memoir. “Drinking, smoking, sex . . . all in moderation. They joy of that is that you get to do everything longer, particularly sex.”82 This admonition runs counter to his own glorification of excess; even so, it offers evidence of the entertainer’s sharp differentiation between public and private or between image and reality that was essential to his life and aesthetics.
Style and dress also put him at odds with the younger generation. He was a hierarch and a dandy. Raised up on the glamour and savoir faire of Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, Cole Porter, Joan Crawford, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and the Hollywood idols of the thirties, he was baffled—despite his aesthetic and personal tolerance—by the stylelessness of the period, by wailing folk singers in ragged clothes with acoustic guitars.
He loathed “the dirty, hippie look,” and condemned the values that produced them: “‘hippie’ is such a distorted image; some hippies are just not to be admired,” he instructed one reporter.83 Why did Barbra Streisand, who had one of the most fabulous voices he had ever heard, dress like a hobo, he wondered. “The first time I saw Barbra down in the Village,” he recalled, “it looked as if she’d just been to a rummage sale and was wearing it. Standing next to Emmett Kelley, the clown, she would have made him look like a well-dressed man.” “Kooky clothing was sort of an obsession,” with her, he mused; the one thing “she hadn’t discovered about show business was the value of glamour. It almost seemed as if she’d never even heard the wor
d.” He was relieved, however, that finally “this, too, got through to her.”84 His discussion of Streisand’s discovery of glamour reveals another aspect of his viewpoint. “Soon, inspired by the sort of clothes she obviously liked to wear because in some odd way their oddness suited her, the big couturiers began designing things especially for Barbra, and she has become a leader in the fashion world.”85 He was open to the way counterculture stylelessness could become style in itself. It was, however, a major, conscious transformation.
Rejecting the age’s insistence on naturalness and stylelessness, he also repudiated “kookiness,” as he used the word in reference to Streisand. He included in this category a kind of self-conscious mockery of fashion and style. “The only person who I think outrages would be Elton John,” he reflected in 1977, “but he goes for laughs.” Thus, he dismissed the British singer’s outfits as “bizarre.” “His costumes are not meant to be attractive. They’re meant to be amazing, bizarre.”86 He did not like to see high style ridiculed any more than he appreciated its being repudiated. While he might have used the word “outrage” to define his own style, he always modified it with the term “calculated.” He did not want to outrage the public but rather to push the limits of the acceptable, or to play, literally, with design and fashion. Whether he crossed the line or not, however, this seemed his intent in distancing himself from John’s violation of the public order.
He found other clothing innovations of the era equally objectionable. Nudity, for example, did not interest him at all. It was, in effect, too democratic. “Nudity doesn’t show anything that everybody hasn’t got,” he objected. “We dress to improve our natural endowments.”87 He objected, particularly, to women’s tendency to wearing fewer and fewer articles of clothing in the sixties. “Their scheme doesn’t seem to be working. The law of diminishing returns has set in. The more they show the less attention they get.”88
If nakedness nullified style—and with it glamour, celebrity, distinction, and the like, not to mention accepted conventional notions of public decency—Liberace had other reasons to dread baring all. He defined a natural calculus, in this regard. “When business began to fall off in the film houses and theaters because people were becoming disenchanted with what they were seeing, producers began to throw in a little nudity,” he wrote. “But pretty soon a little nudity became dull and they had to throw in a little more nudity until there was nothing very interesting about it.” The inevitable “topping” process led to other excesses, he related. Jaded with nakedness, he continued, “The need seems to be for nudity, pornographic explicitness and violence.”89 The entertainer disdained nakedness also because it led, he believed, inevitably toward the brutalization of the human spirit. A little nakedness, he thought, led to more nakedness; more nakedness led to overt sex; sex led just as inevitably to violence and brutality. He disdained naturalism, realism, and animal instincts for slaughter and rapine. Art as fantasy, make believe, and escape provided an outlet or alternative to this tendency inscribed, as the entertainer would have it, in human nature itself. From personal experience, too, he recognized the human disposition toward the pornographic. In separating art from nature, he also tried to manage the conflicting aspects of his own nature. He did so fitfully, and, in the end, his own animal instincts helped destroy him.
Twelve
AN IMAGE IN THE WATER
I considered at the time that we were lovers at the time. He stated often—one time I reminded him of his kid brother Rudy. Another time he told me he always wanted children, but he couldn’t have them. He thought—it is so hard to explain.
SCOTT THORSON
“The queens are rioting! The queens are rioting!” the man kept repeating to his associate. When asked for an explanation, the man related that “the queens” were the drag queens, their admirers, and other patrons at a local gay bar on Christopher Street in lower Manhattan not far from the Greenwich Village restaurant where they had dined a little earlier. “They’re fighting the cops!” he jabbered.1 It was June 28, 1969. The New York City police were raiding the Stonewall Inn. In the heady days that gave the world Black Power, Woman Power, Chicano Power, Student Power, and animal rights, among other novelties, homosexual revolutionaries were coming up on Concord Bridge. With the Stonewall Inn raid, sang the hyperbolic prose of the New York Daily News, “Queen power reared its bleached-blond head in revolution.”2
As early as 1964 or 1965, gay radicals and activists were already developing strategies, tactics, and an ideology that corresponded to the other power movements of the era, but the summer of ’69 formalized early efforts and plans. “Stonewall” became the rallying cry for freedom and liberation, autonomy and integrity, legitimacy and public authority for American homosexuality after 1969. “Pre-” and “post-Stonewall” became categories for understanding attitudes both about and within homosexual culture. The latter connoted both public and private acceptance, political legitimacy, honor, and authenticity—one of the especially favored virtues of the age. The other signified antithetical values: victimization, shame, deviance, and crime. Post-Stonewall assumed a break with the past and a new era. As homosexuality moved out of the darkness into public life, so, too, individual men abandoned secrecy for Gay Pride. They demanded accommodation in the public arena. New values emerged; so did new enemies. “Closet Queen” became analogous to “Uncle Tom” as the categories of the Black Power movement slopped over into the politicization of homosexuality. And there were other parallels between what was happening within the black community and the gay one. Indeed, in various ways, the radical politicization of both the Black Power and the Gay Power movements reflected similar forces at work.
In the cases of both black and homosexual politics, a new ideology overlapped with and reinforced generational antagonisms. Conservative or moderate homosexual men, like conservative or moderate blacks, lost standing, even legitimacy, among their fellows. This worked two ways, both from within and from without. From within, young radicals seized the initiative, attacking not only the failures of the American system but, effectively, the failures of their accommodationist predecessors as well. Their puritanical, very American disposition to see the world in absolute categories of right and wrong exaggerated the evils of oppression for them and cut the ground from under moderates—even as it elevated their own standing as the vanguard of justice and righteousness. Just so, their demands for unity privileged their own position and their own leadership.3 From outside, the dominant culture reinforced their position. It did so through a certain cultural ideology; it did so practically as well. Insofar as blacks and gays remained the Other in the mainstream order, the institutions of that order tended to lump all together into undifferentiated categories: a black was a black; a homosexual a homosexual. Even so, a peculiar fascination with otherness tended to exaggerate the mainstream’s interest in the most extreme and bizarre manifestations of the Other. More practically, outré made good newspaper copy and television coverage. The most outspoken, then, were accepted as the norm, effectively, for both subgroups. Their public fame, in turn, boosted their standing within the gay and black movements.4
The sixties witnessed the radicalization of the world and the fragmentation of the social, political order. If the factionalization of the political order into competing power blocks could be seen in the classic political context of Madison’s Federalist Number 10, real life was not so simple as the theory. It baffled the celebrity piano player from Wisconsin.
The Stonewall Riot had erupted in the very early morning hours of June 28. Seven weeks before, on May 16, Lee Liberace had turned fifty. By this time, he had long before worked out his own compromises with his sexuality and with American life. He had settled in. Nothing in his background had prepared him to abandon these adjustments. The alterations in the public scene were so profound, however, that as a gay man he could not have avoided them entirely, even had he chosen to do so. He did not, and he paid heavy penalties for liberation. For Liberace, the Stonewall revolution
was as much a millstone as a milestone.
For homosexual culture as well as for Liberace himself, the Stonewall rebellion had various, even contradictory effects. One was to normalize male randiness. From the forties and fifties, homosexual memoirists have chronicled the frequency and variety of their sexual partners. “The thousands of people I went to bed with!” Ned Rorem had exclaimed, characteristically, of the war years.5 Just so, the elegant, handsome and well-born Otis Bigelow kept a journal of his tricks that fascinated Alfred Kinsey, not least for the numbers. “That’s what one did in those days—you’d have four or five in an hour, if you were attractive and had some nerve.”6 Stonewall registered subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in attitudes about promiscuity. If homosexuality were unexceptional, ran the logic, the extremest manifestations of the activity were, perforce, normal too. Indeed, after the sixties, homosexual promiscuity came to be claimed as a kind of right. Institutions of promiscuity—bars, clubs, the baths—thrived. Effectively, society and the law confirmed these trends, with the waning of police raids and government surveillance, for example. Baths and bathhouse sex, of course, had existed earlier—as in Gore Vidal’s account, but they and the kind of sex they fostered did not constitute the norm, even in homosexual havens like New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. Such institutions made sex easy, even acceptable, where it had been difficult, even objectionable before. Where the Otis Bigelow of one generation had scorned clubs and “dark cruising,” Edmund White, of another, celebrated such activities as the very essence of homosexual life. When Bigelow recorded having multiple sexual partners within a single hour, he was not referring to anal sex, either. The baths and back rooms of clubs of White’s generation, in contrast, facilitated and even encouraged such activity. Much more critical, such institutionalized randiness proliferated over the whole country. Baths, clubs, and bars, once mostly isolated and rare even in the great cities, now sprouted everywhere.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 42
