Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Scott Thorson had wondered about Lee’s failure to identify him as his lover to his family. They must have known; they had to have known, he concluded. Not necessarily. There is knowing and there is knowing. For all the time she spent with him, for all the companions that she had seen come and go, for example, Angelina Liberace Farrell, for one, denied her brother’s homosexuality to the end of her own life. Not long before she died, she was visiting with Lee’s dear old friend Vince Fronza and Stefan Hemming, who had bought the Cloisters around 1990. In Hemming’s recollection, she explained everything to the two, including her brother’s peculiarities. They did not include homosexuality. “Angie couldn’t accept her brother was gay. She absolutely derided the idea. She sat right there with her crew cut (she had been taking chemotherapy) talking to me and Vince and explained to us, ‘He was just unique. He was special because he was born with a caul. He wasn’t that way.’ She also insisted that ‘He did not die of AIDS; the doctors killed him.’”16 Although Angie hated Dora, her sister-in-law who had gone over to the enemy, Strote, George’s widow seemed to have shared the same opinion. “He did not have AIDS,” a docent at the Liberace Museum confided to one visitor after the musician had been dead for over a decade. “Dora told me so,” she whispered.17

  What was true; what was false? Reality grew even messier after Lee’s passing than it had been during his life, when at least he had dominated the fictions. Thus, two years after his death, the peculiar memoir, I’ll Be Seeing You: The Young Liberace appeared, in which its author claims to have borne Liberace’s love child in 1943. The author also protests that her Lee contracted the HIV virus not from homosex but from tainted blood after a facelift.18

  Whatever the reality of his life, Liberace continues to fascinate the public long after his death. Publishing offers one measure of his continued hold on the American imagination. Besides the most eccentric revelations of his supposed mistress, various books trafficked in his fame. Although The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace had lost Harper and Row a bundle in 1986, St. Martin’s Press capitalized on the furor over the showman’s passing and released a biography when Liberace was hardly cold in his crypt. Its author, Bob Thomas, had already cranked out a score of books and journalistic biographies on the likes of Ethel Merman, Bing Crosby, Ricardo Montalban, and William Holden. He had known Liberace for thirty-five years or so. He had produced interviews with him from the Valley Vista days even as he had helped fuel the media hype over Liberace’s romance with Joanne Rio in 1954. He also worked in tabloid journalism and had generated articles about the showman there after Liberace’s death. He was a natural. Liberace: The True Story appeared within months of the performer’s death.19 Very shortly after Thomas’s biography went on sale, E. P. Dutton published Scott Thorson’s memoir, written with Alex Thorliefson, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace. Both books circulated widely. In 1994, Ray Mungo published another, short biography in the series edited by the historian Martin Duberman, Lives of Notable Gay Men and Lesbians, created for young adults. It approaches its subject less as an authentic character for himself than as a model for how society distorted—or distorts—homosexual men.

  Other books featured the glitzy showman. Although the Hollywood writer Boze Hadleigh refuses to disguise his contempt for the performer, Hollywood Gays, as well as its successor, Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World, continue to trade on the showman’s name and reputation.20

  Nineteen-ninety four marked the beginning of what passes for methodical, systematic work on the musician, with Karl B. Johnson’s Liberace: A Collecting Guide to the Recordings of Liberace, and His Brother George. If not widely available and if intended chiefly for collectors and not for scholars, it nevertheless registers by year, label, and content almost seven hundred records, albums, and titles produced by the showman or associated with him in some other way.21 The following year, Greenwood Press added an important research volume about Liberace, written by Jocelyn Faris, to its Bio-Bibliography Series in the Performing Arts.

  Books, however, mark only one measure of Liberace’s place in the popular imagination. Perhaps more important, he still sells. As of 1994, thirty-one new editions of his records had been issued since his death seven years before.22 Just so, attendance levels at the Liberace Museum remain high in the second decade after his death, with over one hundred thousand visitors a year arriving to admire all the performer’s stuff. The museum is one of Nevada’s top three tourist attractions. The Liberace Foundation, which controls the museum, also sponsors a regular newsletter for fans and patrons of the institution. Generating more publicity, the foundation funds scholarships in the showman’s name. While the newsletter draws attention to Liberace imitators, the showman’s impersonators have a life of their own, if they are not so notorious as those of Lee’s friend Elvis.

  Liberace still fascinates. Early on, television cashed in on his appeal. In the late spring of 1988, not one but two television networks announced upcoming television movies on the superstar.23 ABC sponsored one, called, simply, Liberace, while CBS did the other, Liberace: Behind the Music. Had Judge Wendell in Las Vegas settled the legal conflict of the estate in August? These television productions continued the war by other means. Joel Strote signed on with the ABC production as executive producer; Liberace entouragers Terry Clarkston and Jamie James joined him. Predictably enough, Seymour Heller advised the CBS crews. Both camps made their pitches for their own people. Heller, for example, is invisible in the one, Jamie James in the other. The two productions, also perhaps predictably, precipitated new legal suits and countersuits.

  Although two sets of television executives believed that gold hid in Liberace’s glitter, their interpretations of the market varied significantly. Stephen Farber, the New York Times journalist who reported the productions, chronicled these justifications—even as he betrayed some of the fundamental New York biases against the showman. He seemed incredulous that even one studio would do Liberace: “Why is there such tremendous interest in telling the life story of an entertainer who was regarded by many as a minor camp figure?” he inquired half rhetorically. Gavin Lambert, the CBS screenwriter, shared some of the same bias. “It’s the AIDS connection,” he replied. “If he had not died of AIDS, I don’t think there would have been a biography within a few months of his death or two competing television movies.” Allen Sabinson at ABC offered a different take: “Liberace was an American original. He is still regarded with great affection by a large audience of fans. And there are many other people who weren’t his fans who are curious about him. They want to know, ‘Who was this odd, flamboyant duck?’” If ABC’s movie was aiming for this more general audience, it specifically played down the homosexual angle. Just so, the Lambert script at CBS counted on both AIDS and homosexuality to sell.24

  The Strote-ABC production did soft-pedal homosexuality. Jamie James had delighted in the Liberacean homoerotics of Palm Springs, and his influence can be detected in the bevy of boys who cruise the movie’s Palm Canyon Drive, but this is a minor part of the film. Joel Strote got the gist of it: “We show Liberace as the wonderful, magnanimous, caring, sensitive, kind human being he was. We don’t say he was patently homosexual,” the lawyer said. “That would be gross.” He added, “I hear. CBS is taking a more negative approach.”25 Whether or not homosexuality was gross and negative, the ABC film actually takes a very similar line to the one the showman himself had assumed publicly. It concludes with the palimony suit and a female journalist posing the question, “Do you still claim you’re not a homosexual?” Played by Andrew Robinson, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the showman, the actor repeats a Liberace line almost verbatim: “I’m not claiming anything. I just don’t happen to believe that entertainers should publicly air their sexual or political tastes. . . . I’ve always admitted that my act borders on drag but I’m not a female impersonator. I have a general family audience appeal and I don’t want to develop a gay following.”26

  The ABC, estate-authorized film aire
d on October 2. Exactly a week later, the CBS production premiered. As promised by its hype, it does place greater emphasis upon the musician’s inner life and sexual impulses. It stresses the tension between his parents and between him and his father. It makes rather more of his affair with Scott Thorson than does the first movie. It compromises his homosexuality, even so. Lifting a page directly from Bob Thomas’s biography, it assumes a conversion to homosexuality in the mid-fifties. At the same time, as summarized by the New York Times critic John J. O’Connor, even the CBS film is “insistently discreet. If anything, Liberace emerges as something of an asexual Teddy bear, always looking vaguely puzzled when dealing with the advances of either men or women.”27 The film, then, tends to confirm rather than alter the showman’s own public denial and ambiguity about his sexuality. The CBS Liberace wonders aloud, for example, when hearing of Rock Hudson’s infection, “Why would he tell everyone?” and the movie ends with the showman contemplating—and rejecting—a public declaration of his homosexuality as he himself expires. Thus, for all the hype, CBS’s production actually diverges very little from ABC’s. “It’s a little dispiriting to think that two TV movies, separately developed and presumably antagonistic, should come out so interchangeable,” continued the writer for the Hollywood Reporter. “[It is] an indication of how slavishly they both conform to the rules of televised biography.”28

  After a decade, both movies, however shallow, still show regularly on the tube, keeping the showman’s name and image alive and kicking. In these same years, production companies have created two different documentary-type biographies on the showman for television audiences. These telecast regularly as well. If nobody much seems to care about South Seas Sinner, Sincerely Yours plays periodically on late-night television; it still makes at least some folks “gulpy,” as previewers predicted it would. Fans can purchase a whole series of Liberace videos, too. These range from excerpts of The Liberace Show to films of his Las Vegas performances. In short, the Liberace industry still thrives.

  Despite the incredulity of many, like the Times‘s writer Stephen Farber in 1988, this “minor camp figure” remains a name to reckon with. Attendance records at his performances are still unmatched in books of world records. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations has institutionalized him by including his witticism about crying all the way to the bank. A decade after his entombment, the cartoonist Gary Larson elicited more chuckles, probably, with his visual jokes about the performer, than Al Capp did forty years before with his character Liverachy. The showman’s name and character have become a part of the fabric of American culture. Thus, when a major American newspaper described the glitzy old Miami Beach hotel, the Eden Roc, in reference to “a Liberace style,” no elaboration was necessary. A Liberace joke in the 1997 film comedy, Austin Powers, drew familiar laughter from audiences who were not even teenagers at his death. After the manner of the folk, Liberace is honored in the most various and even peculiar ways. Milwaukeeans have seen an opera based on his life and loves staged in their city. Poets ponder Liberace’s appeal in various works and even title collections on the theme: Why My Mother Likes Liberace: A Musical Selection.29 An English recording group, the Bomb Party, produced an album called Liberace Rising in 1987. Five years later, the Pontiac Brothers recorded their tune “Liberace’s Dead” on a Frontier Records album, Fuzzy Little Pieces of the World.30 In 1999, the “shock jock” radio personality, Howard Stern, touts a wacky rap performer, Niggerace, who plays off the showman’s cognomen.

  While the late entertainer is a part of popular discourse in America, the specific meaning of his life or his place in American culture remains as controversial and contested as his legal estate. He won his reputation as a musician, but where does he fit in music history?

  Liberace has attracted almost no formal examination among musicologists and historians of music, but two general positions seem obvious: one treats him as a classical pianist, a second as a popular entertainer. While these two are not completely exclusive, a third opinion tends to combine these categories into something different yet.

  Even among the classicists, at least two positions appear. The first condemns him as a failed artist who degraded good music. Howard Taubman’s New York Times Magazine article of March 14, 1954, offers the clearest, early manifestation of the complaint. Without taste or discrimination, Taubman insisted, Liberace simply debased his art and corrupted music, even popular music or jazz. He produced neither one thing nor the other. He was a fake. This jeremiad conceded nothing.31 Forty years later, the academic critic Kevin Kopelson confirmed this opinion in the chapter on Liberace in his study, Beethoven’s Kiss. Although a pianist himself, Kopelson is more concerned with Liberace as a queer phenomenon than as an artist. And as a phenomenon, “the man simply haunts—and taunts—my imagination. Liberace baffles me,” he declares. The source of his bafflement lies, in part it seems, in the contrast between the showman’s huge appeal, especially for straight women, and the inadequacies of his talent. In this regard, Kopelson accepts uncritically the most negative reviews, especially of the mid-fifties, of the showman’s performances, including even Cassandra’s, though Cassandra never even attended a performance. Kopelson dismisses Liberace, then, as a “bad pianist” with “technical disabilities” and middlebrow sensibility who “belittles and bastardizes” classical music.32

  Also a pianist, Samuel Lipman offers a third and more studied, if less widely circulated version of this “debased art” view.33 First, unlike either Taubman or Kopelson, Lipman grants Liberace’s real, pianistic skill. “He displayed at all times a large, accurate, and brilliant technique,” he writes, “even indulging himself from time to time in impressive displays of octaves, scales, and complicated passage work.” He concludes: “All in all his playing purled and glittered just the way an accomplished pianist’s should.” His talent, if anything, made Liberace’s offense all the more damning. Like Taubman and Kopelson, Lipman argues that Liberace debased music by appealing to people who did not know anything about art—in specific contrast to disciplined musicians and “sophisticated audiences” who possessed such knowledge. Liberace profaned the sacred by pandering to the untutored. Beyond this general sin, Lipman also argues Liberace’s specific role in the degradation of classical music by relating him to the careers of other performers, like operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti and, most critically, the Texas pianist Van Cliburn. Liberace and Cliburn specialized in the same kind of late romantic music—Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, for example—already marked as decadent by its vulgarity and bombast, in effect. Such scores were “hugely appealing to an enormous public” that had little other interest in serious music. More specifically, the Milwaukeean actually broke the ground for the Texan in legitimizing a kind of heartland America approach to performance, argues Lipman. Cliburn’s manner “seemed not just authentically American but, like Liberace’s, authentically non-New York American.” While “Liberace’s great commercial success from 1956 on—using as it did television and hyped personal appearance to sell a debased version of classical music”—prepared the way for Cliburn’s triumphs after 1958, the Texan, in turn, bore his own burden in the degradation of classical music. His career confirmed “contest mania among young performers all over the world.” This mania led to the proliferation of contests, competitions, and winning and to “a dearth of interesting performers growing up at their own pace.” He considers the reputation of both musicians “great but ephemeral” and concludes that each “provided spectacularly inapplicable models for the careers of serious musicians.”

  Where Taubman is polemical and Kopelson coy, Lipman is ironic and resigned. Thus emerges his final observation that Liberace and his Texas heir represent the culmination—and collapse—of a splendid 140-year epoch during which music in general and the piano in particular defined Western cultural aspirations. “The piano in the living room, like the candelabrum . . . in the dining room, became an emblem of cultural advancement and participation. It was this touching aspiration
which made possible [these] two huge successes. . . . Whatever the future holds in store for music in general, the piano will probably never again enjoy such popularity and prestige.”

  Taubman, Kopelson, and Lipman speak for the degraded art-school approach to Liberace’s performance; another opinion diverges significantly. It considers the Milwaukeean more generally—and generously—within a musical genealogy of flamboyant, romantic performers from the early nineteenth century: From Liszt and Paderewski—to Liberace. Thus, Edward Rothstein, music critic of the New York Times and later of the New Republic, evaluated the Wisconsin pianist most specifically in the context of that other great showman Franz Liszt, who proclaimed, “Le concert, c’est moi!” and boasted of “affecting the Louis XIV style.”34 “Both then and now, in both Liszt and Liberace,” Rothstein continues, “the insistence upon regal mythic powers in the midst of ordinariness—all this is not extraneous to the figure of the virtuoso, but part of his substance, the signs to an audience of the meaning in this nineteenth-century music or its contemporary popular musical descendants. It is not only pure sound that is at work, but an entire world of associations; what is dreamed of in the music is made real on the stage; what is heard is also seen.”

  Rothstein allows the difference between the virtuosi; the contrasts, he argues, reflect in part the difference in two ages. He concedes that Liberace transformed the Lisztian nineteenth-century bourgeois desire for transcendence into nostalgia, “as frequently happens when Romanticism begins to decay. The result,” he offers, “is kitsch, warm and beloved.” Yet kitsch, he argues, permeates the modern age. And even kitsch touches the ultimate object of art, he insists. How does he compare to the modern virtuoso, Vladimir Horowitz? “Liberace is more representative of our time,” he cautions. “He is simply an exaggeration of the character of our musical life, which itself is a distorted, peculiar transformation of nineteenth-century musical culture, thriving on invoked images, ritualistic signs, and commercial energies.” What he takes with one hand, however, he returns with the other. Thus, while he judges that Liberace’s performance was built on nostalgia and double layers of artifice, he also describes the pianist’s genuine power to move his audience—à la Liszt. As remarkable as the general audience’s response to the 1984 Radio City Music Hall show is Rothstein’s own reaction to the performance, which, as he describes it, “left even a hard-nosed critic admiring.” As of old, the virtuoso took requests from the hall. The showman improvised an impossible medley of “New York, New York,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and “Chopsticks.” “And what happens is a shock,” the critic writes, “a surprise that again echoes images of the virtuoso’s past. For the music is so genuinely sweet, so sensitively lyrical, that it becomes moving.”35