The museum and the Liberace Foundation would memorialize him “after he was gone.” His books fulfilled the same objectives. He produced four: an autobiographical cookbook and three autobiographies.
His books honor Claude Bristol’s creed, but they fit just as nicely into a still broader spectrum of American thought that had originated in the time of Benjamin Franklin. The Philadelphia founding father supposedly composed the bit of doggerel that ran:
If you would not be forgotten,
After you are dead and rotten,
Write something worth the reading
Or do something worth the writing.
The patriot’s life confirms the notion that if one gains monetary compensation in addition to immortality from the written word and public acts, that is all the better. Franklin’s Autobiography bears an even more direct relationship to the showman’s memoirs. It chronicles Franklin’s self-creation, even as it played a major part in his actualization of himself. Franklin wrote an autobiographical success story about his triumph over adversity and his rise from poverty to—literally—dining with kings. He intended it, too, as a model or instruction manual for those who followed him. Claude Bristol’s vulgar interpretation of the same ideas draws on the same principles. So do Liberace’s autobiographies, right down to the bits about meeting kings and queens.
Published in 1970, Liberace Cooks! Recipes from His Seven Dining Rooms, is so personal as to be virtually autobiographical. He had joked that he preferred the title Mother! I’d Rather Do It Myself!, a takeoff on one of the hugely popular advertising slogans of the day, and the book brims with all manner of personal material. It was founded in the personal as well. Food was important to Liberace. He had loved the kitchen since before his high school days, when he encouraged the establishment of a home-ec class for boys. His press kit of 1947 includes pieces on cooking and eating, and even recipes. Cooking was one of the few things that both his parents had enjoyed and done well, and most of the dishes he included in his cookbook hark back to his childhood, or even further, to his parents’ pasts in Poland and Italy. While his love of eating evoked the primitive passions of his immigrant parents, eating was another manifestation of his American consumerism, literally, as well. Scott Thorson wrote of how the star made trips to the market a shopping adventure when nothing else was available to amuse him. And if, as Thorson also insisted, his patron had difficulty showing love, cooking relieved this problem, too. He and Thorson delighted in the kitchen together. Consuming the product of their efforts resulted in the young man having to loosen his belt by several notches, while his successor, Cary James, added sixty-five pounds to his slender frame after moving in with the cookbook author. Liberace simply gorged his protégés, not only with gifts but also with food. As a final autobiographical element, Liberace Cooks! also offers readers a variety of glossy color photographs of the showman in the process of preparing food and dining in the crystal glamour of his various homes.19
For all the personalistic elements of Liberace Cooks! the showman also wrote more purely autobiographical books that, in both form and content, are even more important for gaining an understanding of his life.
At least from the sixties, Liberace had begun producing biographical-type writings, which he had printed in large format booklets, like the twenty-four-page Liberace Legend, which he sold at concerts. Heavily pictorial, Legend includes a couple of pages each on “Liberace at Home,” “His Palm Springs ‘Hideaway,’” “A Second Career” (selling antiques and objets d’art), and the like. Such booklets were doubly or triply commercial. While they were printed to sell at a profit, they also contained actual advertisements. One page carried the showman’s endorsement of Baldwin Pianos, another touted his latest albums for Dot Records. “Your Own Command Performance!” sang the headline. They were commercial in still other ways, too. More than anything, they advertised Liberace himself. They shaped and marketed an image of the performer.20
These were only the performer’s initial forays into biography. While maintaining many of the motives and impressions of the biographical brochures, Liberace’s memoirs, written between 1973 and 1985, formalized and regularized his impression for a larger audience.
The showman published his first life story in 1973. He left a contradictory record of its creation. One version survives in legal documents. The book’s references to his old girlfriends had prompted Joanne Rio Barr to sue. Liberace’s depositions in the suit emphasize his own role in the text’s creation. Around 1972, he had contacted William Targ of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, he testified, about publishing his memoirs. Targ came out from Manhattan to meet the performer at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. “I had written six chapters of the book, which I was anxious for Mr. Targ to read, and while I was performing on stage,” testified the showman, “he read the six chapters, and then after the performance ended, I cleared everyone out of my dressing room, and he sat down to tell me about his reaction to the six chapters that I had written.” Targ liked the project; he offered a contract. Soon after, Liberace hired his own research assistant, Carroll Carroll, who went on Putnam’s payroll. “He researched a lot of things for me,” Lee stated. “I can remember—like I said, I have great recall, but I have difficulty remembering dates. I think he was able to go through old scrapbooks and magazines and newspaper files and libraries and he was able to come up with a lot of chronology that I needed for the book.”
“Did Mr. Carroll contribute to the actual writing of the book as opposed to editing?” the lawyers queried. “No,” the showman replied flatly. “All the words in my book are my very own, and he did help me with punctuation and spelling and things like that, and dates. I had the wrong dates about some shows that I had seen. Things like that.”21 A contemporary interview confirms some of this: a journalist reported that Liberace wrote the book over a fourteen-month period after and between professional engagements.22
While it might have served his purposes in these legal proceedings to emphasize Carroll’s role in the book’s production, he did not. At the same time, he left evidence that Carroll might have played a larger role in the volume’s production after all; thus his dedication of the book to his researcher “for his editorial assistance.” Thirteen years later, he contradicted his earlier sworn testimony with the suggestion that none of his autobiographical writing was “the real thing” but was “written in collaboration with somebody else. The trade term was ‘as told to.’”23 Along these lines, some of the book seems a transcription of tapes, with Wausau, Wisconsin, being rendered as “Warsaw,” and his high school friend Del Krause’s German-pronounced name appearing phonetically as “Krausy,” for example.
Regardless of how the book was put together, it bears Liberace’s indelible imprimatur. Its chatty, discursive flavor comes with everything but his nasal, Milwaukee whine. If his act always flirted with being precious, the off-setting self-mockery works less well in print, and the tone is often saccharine. It is, however, his own. The book also possesses no particular structure; one story triggers another; it lacks chronological order altogether. In this regard, it operates very much like Liberace’s performances—which never had a set program—or like his pattering asides, which possessed no more order than does any conversation between friends. The same sort of idiosyncrasy also characterized The Magic of Believing. Both were founded in the essentially American value of the primacy of an individual’s feeling or sentiment rather than in formal rules and order.
The book’s relentlessly sunny tone is also quintessential Liberace. The text tends to gloss over or ignore unpleasantness—such as the Hollywood Reporter allegations, for example—or to consider problems—like the Cassandra trial—merely as obstacles to overcome. In this regard, the book demonstrates classic American cheerfulness and optimism, the expectation that the future possesses limitless opportunities that also pervades Bristol’s work. Such cheeriness is a quality that, for example, makes tragedy a contradiction in American culture. Does one fall or fail? It’s no los
s. In the language of popular tunes, one moves another rubber tree or picks oneself up, brushes oneself off, and starts all over again. Good vanquishes evil, and victors have only to work hard and keep their eyes on the goal to achieve their aims. One has only to trust oneself to conquer.
If, as Alexis de Toqueville noted in his Democracy in America, this individualistic imperative undercuts the social good and social responsibility, this philosophy offers its own antidote to anarchy. R. W. Emerson framed one answer: by internalizing order, the American system channels and controls even more effectively than do external constraints of law and guards. Then, too, by framing social values exclusively in material and economic terms, it puts everyone on the same track of production and consumption. Even so, it eliminates or reduces class identity by holding out the promise of material benefits to everyone who works diligently. Last, but hardly least, the victors in the competition possess their own social obligations to inspire others to fulfill their own potential. Inspirational or self-help literature, then, is inseparable from these values. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography could be placed in the category, and self help is the informing motive of Claude Bristol’s manual. Liberace’s memoir is equally evangelical, however “schmaltzy, glittering, or vain” it might be. Indeed, the showman introduces the volume with a tribute to courage, overcoming fear, transcending inner conflicts, and trusting “the validity of [one’s] instincts.” Even more appropriately, it opens with a tribute to Claude Bristol himself. Quoting the preface he wrote for The Magic of Believing, Liberace makes his own book an accolade to self-reliance.24 He closes his introduction with a ringing appeal to his readers: “So never let yourself lose your belief in yourself. With that you can be the greatest salesman in the world, selling the most important product in the world . . . YOU!”25
Liberace’s Liberace: An Autobiography affirms classic elements of the American creed and falls into place among many other memoirs of its type. It provides, effectively, a motivational model summarized along the lines of: trust oneself, show no fear, work hard. These convictions are easy to satirize. They are the stuff of skits on Saturday Night Live. They are very much the point of the Rolling Stone review in relating Liberace to a “fey sort of evangelism,” too. Detecting the same qualities in the book, one critic called it “a conspirational collection of anecdotes . . . that reveals [the author] to be as shrewd as a cat stalking a fly while he exhorts us readers to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.”26
The book sold self-confidence even as it sold Liberace himself. He wrote it to sell, as well. Did you plan on making a profit, the deposing attorneys in the Barr case inquired? “Everything I do has the hope of making a profit,” he replied guilelessly. “My career, everything I touch in my scope of entertainment field and that would include the publication of a book, yes.” “Nobody works for nothing,” he added elsewhere, as if to drive the nail home.27 Did he write it to sell? The folks, one more time, did not disappoint him. First hyped with excerpts in the National Enquirer on November 18, 1973, Liberace sold furiously. By the time it had been out three weeks, 250,000 people had snatched up copies. In England, it was the second- or third-best-selling book during the same time period.28 Who bought and read it? The serialization in the National Enquirer helps define the audience.
The 1973 volume was the most important of Liberace’s autobiographical writings. His second and third books contain elements of the first. The Things I Love, written with Tony Palmer, appeared in 1976. This volume adds little to the personal elements revealed in the autobiography, but it does record a shift in his life after the early seventies. While he had always loved things, celebrating his objects is the chief purpose of this volume. His last book does the same thing with even greater determination. Contracted in 1985 by Harper and Row and published the following year, The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace is excessive and fantastic—even by the showman’s standards.
Lee’s “wonderful world” possesses no homosexuals, much less homosexual lawsuits. Scott Thorson’s name comes up nowhere, although his face seems to appear in the photograph of a receiving line for Great Britain’s Princess Anne: cropping would have eliminated the very flattering image of his patron standing next to him.29 Although Cary James’s photograph appears, the caption lumps him indiscriminately with the singer Kenny Rogers merely as “my friends.”30 References to age are as conspicuously missing. Completely bald except for a fringe around the back of his head, Liberace protests that his toupee is his natural hair. Just so, he denies having had cosmetic surgery, although his face reveals the transformation, which was not necessarily to his benefit. Dr. Startz had reduced his previously large eyes to slits, while the deep skin peel turned his complexion into the shiny, peachy parchment of a fresh scar. Banishing both faggotry and age, so too he eliminated sickness from his private world. Although he was both HIV positive and symptomatic when he signed the publishing contract with Harper and Row in 1985, The Wonderful, Private World fails to hint at any of this. On the contrary, the showman covers his illness with a preposterous story of a “watermelon diet,” which, he related, “robbed my system of essential nutrients, which was causing me to experience a letdown in my normal high energy level. . . . As a result,” he continued, “false rumors started to circulate about my health. According to the gossips, you name it, and I had it. Let me assure you,” he concluded, “I’ve never felt better in my life!”
There was no homosexuality, no illness, and no conflict in Liberace’s literary Neverland. Evil for the showman simply did not exist, insofar as he monitored his own thoughts. His depositions in Joanne Rio Barr’s suit in the mid-seventies offer one manifestation of the characteristic. He saw “nothing in my book that was damaging or derogatory about Miss Rio,” he insisted, but this was hardly the sum of his response. He was incredulous about her suit. “As far as I am concerned, Joanne Rio does not exist because this is something that happened 20 years ago,” he testified. “It was like a ghost coming out of the past to haunt me.”31 He didn’t like it? It wasn’t good? It did not exist. His father was another such phantom. Banished to the netherworld of yesteryear, Salvatore hardly existed after 1941. Liberace’s brother George fell into much the same category after the two fought in 1957. Recording the affair with Vince Cardell, Scott Thorson noted the specific ways his patron eliminated unpleasantness and bad memories. Cardell’s hostility filled the air when Thorson moved into the Shirley Street house, but Lee simply ignored it once he took a new lover. Then, when Thorson forced the issue, Liberace turned the ejection over to his houseboy, Carlucci, and Heller, his manager. Once Cardell had been physically banished, Lee then eliminated every piece of evidence of Cardell ever having been part of in his life, according to Thorson. “When [Cardell] finally departed it happened so quickly and completely that I felt as if someone had waved a magic wand. Once he’d gone Lee went about systematically removing all traces of the life he and [Vince] had shared. He stripped [his] bedroom and bath down to bare walls, disposing of the furniture and repainting and papering. He went through the house, gathering every item they’d bought together so Carlucci could get rid of them. Clearly, Lee wanted no reminder of [Vince] in the home we now shared.”32
As Scott Thorson’s rendering depicts the affair with Vince Cardell, the Bristolian admonitions to think only positive thoughts dominated Liberace’s career, his writing, his life, and, not least, his sense of himself and others. It played a critical role in his affair with Scott Thorson and, to a large extent, shaped much of his response to the horrors of his bout with AIDS.
Dealing with Thorson was perhaps the greatest crisis of Liberace’s life. Liberace may or may not have stripped the walls bare in the rooms the two had shared, but otherwise, when the pair split in the spring of 1982, the showman stripped the young man from his life. Locks on every joint residence were changed within forty-eight hours after Heller had ejected Thorson from Beverly Boulevard. Lee instructed his devoted Shirley Street housekeeper, Gladys Luckie, to pack up everything of Thor
son’s at both Las Vegas dwellings. That was finished within two or three days, too. Probably to Lucille Cunningham’s relief, Thorson was formally eliminated from the payroll within hours. In the hubbub, everyone forgot the joint credit cards. Thorson took advantage of the oversight and ran up a bill in excess of three thousand dollars to cover his and his friend/lover Papadakis’s junket to Hawaii at end of March and beginning of April. If not soon enough, the entertainer caught the mistake within two weeks.33 The young man himself was not canceled as easily as a MasterCard.
Between 1982 and 1987, the rejected lover refused to disappear. Thorson wanted to fight. On his return from Honolulu in April after the Beverly Boulevard affair in March, the young man began looking for a lawyer. He found one through his old drug connection, Eddie Nash, and the owner of the Odyssey, Chris Cox. His counselor did not encourage him. David Schmerin advised him that Liberace was a tough adversary who “would litigate this thing all the way and he had a very deep pocket and would hire the best counsel.”34 Indeed, by the time Schmerin was offering this advice, the showman had already turned the case over to Joel Strote, the forty-three-year-old attorney who had replaced the venerable John Jacobs as Liberace’s chief counsel in 1971.
Strote and Schmerin began conferring in mid-April. The palimony issue figured significantly in their conversations. Ever since Michelle Triola Marvin had sued her companion, actor Lee Marvin, for financial support in the late seventies, the press had hyped the concept of alimony for live-in lovers. Journalists had dramatized the issue by quoting one judge, who averred that “‘Marvin’ would do for women’s rights what Miranda did for criminal law and what Brown did for school integration.” Shortly afterwards, Marilyn Barnett’s suit against her lover, tennis star Billie Jean King, lent additional currency to the furor while adding homosexual titillation to the concept.35 Palimony was in the air, in any event, long before the Liberace-Thorson breach. Indeed, when they were still comfortable together, Thorson and his mentor had even joked about the latter case. “Billie Jean—what a guy!” Liberace laughed; “You’re next,” joshed Thorson.36
Liberace: An American Boy Page 51
