Respectful of his performance—like Rothstein—or not—like Taubman and Lipman—the classicists dominate the critical judgments of Liberace’s place in music history. If far less articulate, however, another position holds that his real significance lies not in high art at all: it proposes that he is most appropriately studied within a context of popular music and popular performance. It would consider him in the context of the later Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Glam Rock, and perhaps most critically of all, Elton John or Madonna. Advanced mostly as a kind of common-sense position among journalist/critics, this argument has yet to find a coherent exegesis among musicologists or music historians even of American popular culture, who mostly ignore the Milwaukee piano player.
A third assessment is hardly more developed than the one that would establish him within the history of American popular music. It rather assumes the collapse of distinctions between high art and low and makes Liberace something like a classic “American original.” A New York Times review of his 1985 Music Hall performance adumbrates this position. It begins, ironically enough, with the same assumption that Howard Taubman made exactly thirty years before—that Liberace is neither fish nor fowl. In contrast to “the square’s” horror in 1954 at the jumble, Stephen Holden finds it the source of the showman’s genius. Liberace, he judged, “has arrived at a style that is not classical, jazz or pop but an ornamental genre unto itself” with its blend of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and “19th-century romantic mysticism.”36
So where does Liberace really fit in music history? Musicologists can’t agree. Controversy characterizes other aspects of his legacy as well. Indeed, nothing, not even his musical significance, has attracted as much contention as has his sexual import. From his first heady days of national fame in 1953, he functioned as a lightning rod of sexual controversy. He was, first, a woman’s man, and few critics ignored conclusions based on the preponderance of women, especially middle-aged ones, among his devotees. Fewer still were neutral. Given the gender bias toward males among reviewers, the judgments ranged from bewilderment or amusement to outrage. Misogyny, latent or overt, permeated most critical opinion. Behind the misogyny, and not altogether separate from it, lay the fear and distrust of homosexuality. In the 1950s, Liberace found his bitterest antagonists among straight men. The revulsion of the American newscaster Edward R. Murrow and the contempt of British journalist William Conner represent the view.
While straight male mockery of “blue-haired ladies” and ridicule of “gentlemen of a certain persuasion” penetrated many reviews to the very end of Liberace’s career and after, most critics eased off on these biases in the seventies or ignored them altogether by the eighties. Ironically or paradoxically, the post-Stonewall era has witnessed the most profound opposition to Liberace within the gay movement itself. In a peculiar turn of events, some of the showman’s particularly vehement antagonists number themselves among the outspoken proponents of Gay Liberation.
As already noted, the gay academic critic Kevin Kopelson is more concerned with Liberace’s homosexuality than with his music, per se, and hardly disagrees even with Cassandra’s 1956 diatribe, which he quotes in its entirety. “I find this quite as appalling as it claims to find Liberace. I also find it rather appealing,” he confesses, “to the residual snob in me, if not to the residual homophobe.” He continues, however, to conflate his snobbery and latent homophobia: “It can be hard to separate the two—as ‘Cassandra’ himself . . . should have realized.”37 David Ehrenstein, another gay writer, expresses even more impatience with the showman in his Open Secret. While approving Michel Foucault’s assertion about the impossibility of honesty for homosexuals, for example, Ehrenstein then denies the application of that rule to Liberace. The rich and powerful, he would claim—if only for the gaudy showman—have no right or privilege to remain closeted. “There is an enormous difference between a person of average ways and means lying about his or her same-sex affinity in order to keep a job, a residence, or family peace, and the lie of a highly paid and well-connected showbusiness figure who had successfully promoted modest pianistic ability into a career in nightclubs, concert halls, film and television. Moreover, an overt appeal to the sexual sensibilities of his audience was very much a part of Liberace’s act.”38
Boze Hadleigh, a more famous chronicler of gay Hollywood, offers the clearest manifestation of post-Stonewall homosexual biases against the Milwaukee performer.39 In his treatment, Liberace becomes a model for everything gay men should not be—a selfish, self-loathing, hypocritical, closeted, conservative Republican, stereotypical sissy. He associates him, just so, with a whole phalanx of unsavory elements: “bigots,” “rednecks,” hicks, the religious right, “powerful men in politics and pulpits,” and “the Polident generation.”40
Hadleigh condemns the showman, not least, for failing in his responsibility to act as a positive “role model” for young gay boys. Beyond this, he burdened the performer—at least by association—with the still-graver error of actually perverting and polluting the youth of America. After noting that Liberace “occasionally ‘stepped out’ on his steady with an escort or call boy or even a runaway,” Hadleigh proceeds through a trail of sin that sounds something like a homosexual inversion of The Music Man’s “Trouble in River City.” Thus, “runaway” triggers the following sequence: a “shocking percentage” of runaways are gay kids rejected by homophobic parents, mostly dads; these lads turn to prostitution as a necessary evil; and, finally then, “AIDS is not an uncommon end to the survivalist lifestyle forced on these youngsters by their unloving and unthinking parents who believe their sexuality is a ‘sin’ and/or changeable.”41
Paradoxically, perhaps—and not unlike Kevin Kopelson—Hadleigh can’t get very far away from Liberace, despite his distaste. The showman crops up often in his other interviews, even when Hadleigh refuses the pianist any honor. The journalist himself brought up the late entertainer in conjunction with Cesar Romero, for example. While Romero shared Hadleigh’s laughter over the flashy queen, the aging star also expressed sympathy for the indignities of Liberace’s end. “I felt sad for him,” mused the old actor. The young interviewer would have none of it. “Dignity begins at home,” he snapped.42
All these activists actually apprehend critical elements of the career and personality of the piano player from West Allis, Wisconsin. Except for Hadleigh’s claim that Liberace perverted American youth, they see little, in fact, that most of Liberace’s most devoted fans did not also detect. One category of critic praises these elements of the performer’s character and work; the other sees only the liabilities. Liberace’s life and career did violate virtually every element of the new gay orthodoxy after Stonewall. Despite his own homosexuality, his long-term relationship with Thorson and then with Cary James, and the homosexuality of his professional inner circle, he scanted gay culture and gay liberation. Indeed, in the Thorson affair, he had actually attacked, at least indirectly, homosexuals and homosexuality when headlines quoted him saying “Gays Out to Assassinate Me,” and when his spokesman condemned this “slander at the hand of the gays.” Over a forty-year period after 1940, he had worked out his own compromises with his homoeroticism that involved the public disavowal of his affections. He was, in the parlance of the day, very deeply closeted, and thus, according to the same criteria, just as deeply hypocritical.
If a poor model for political activists, however, Liberace’s life, even closeted, possesses its own power and significance for the gay experience. In reviewing the two made-for-television movies of the showman’s life, David Kipen of the Hollywood Reporter observed that “Liberace’s life was one of colossal denial, not only of his sexuality but of his prodigious and under appreciated musicianship. It would have made a fascinating movie, but instead, posthumously, the denial continues.”43 Perhaps Kipen was onto something about the dramatic power of denial itself. The literary critic Eve Sedgwick suggests as much when she affirms that the most fascinating of all narratives is the coming out story that
doesn’t come out.44
Liberace’s career, denial and all, has perhaps even more immediate reference to gay men’s lives. Indeed, even as the millennium turns, it may be more defining of the norm among homosexual men in America than radicals might allow. For whatever reasons, then, however much activists scorn the closet queen, the old showman continues to hold the imagination of the rank and file of ordinary gay men. The affection emerges in odd ways and places. In the Gay Olympics in New York, for example, the American press gave full coverage to the diver Greg Louganis’s public declaration of his affectional preference for other men. In the course of this celebration of one athlete’s coming out, the papers also turned, willynilly, it would seem, back to Liberace, of all people. “Now we can have someone besides Liberace as a role model,” one overheated fellow at the games declared. Perhaps the journalist was actually poking fun in citing the anonymous source—not unlike the stifled snickers of the Los Angeles Times reporter at the parade of gaudy men on the witness stand during the legal contest over Liberace’s will. Perhaps the interviewee himself intended mockery. And then again, perhaps not. Whether he was a role model or not, gay men continue to honor his memory. On February 4, 1997, diners in a posh New York restaurant noted a table across the room set with candelabrum and burning tapers. Shortly, two distinguished-looking men appeared, garbed in the fanciest eveningwear. The maitre d’ ushered them to the table. Only later did at least one other set of diners appreciate the connection between the two men and the memory of the showman. The dinner had taken place on the tenth anniversary of Liberace’s death.45 Still more poignant evocations of the man appear. No one has more patches, all glittery and spangled, in the AIDS quilt than he. There are worse fates, even in the gay community, than to be remembered as an aging queen who died of AIDS: the old sister is a brother, too. Somehow or the other, then, for all the well-placed, well-ordered, politically useful opposition to Liberace and the life he led, his career still touches the lives of other gay men.
Such small tokens of affection—like patches on the AIDS quilt—also suggest the larger potential of his life to ordinary men and women as the second decade since his death rolls by. Did he deny his homosexuality? Denial works two ways. He understood that affirming his homosexuality would have entailed denying a raft of other forces and influences in his life. These, in turn, occupied as critical a place in his conception of himself and his relations to others as did sexual preference. There was honor on both sides. In this regard, the paradoxes of his life become less sexual hypocrisy than, in their own way, a recasting of the normal circumstances of most people’s lives: coveting youth when age sags jowls; the desire to be free amid obligations and responsibility; the craving for beauty when faced with dirty dishes and clogged drains; the apprehension of transcendence before the commonplace and routine; the longing for immortality in a mortal world. In this regard, his homosexuality in a heterosexual world allowed him a handle on larger paradoxes in human nature, and in the American spirit, too. Did he pander to the lowest common denominator of popular culture? If so, he also captured something essential in human longing. He was Mr. Everyman. He was Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, the lad who flew. He lived in Neverland, but he never left West Allis. He was born and died an American boy.
NOTES
ONE
1. The curious circumstances of the showman’s birth are discussed in various sources. Bob Thomas’s Liberace: The True Story (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 1, offers one description; Liberace’s old lover provides another in Scott Thorson with Alex Thorleifson, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 6. A third comes from his sister Angelina, or Angie. Around 1990, Stefan Hemming had purchased “Casa Liberace” in Palm Springs. He knew Angie Liberace Farrell. To him, she repeated the story of her brother being born with a caul, which he heard and repeated as “tail.” She explained to him that the circumstance of the birth anticipated and accounted for her brother’s genius and peculiarities. Stefan Hemming, interview with the author.
Bob Thomas garbles the story of being born “under the veil.” He identifies the phenomenon with the dead sibling and ill portents. This is not the case at all. Angie Farrell’s version gets it right. For other versions of the mysterious gifts of the caul-born child, see Tina McElroy Ansa’s novel, The Baby of the Family. Ansa’s definition of genius is clearly what Angie Farrell had in mind rather than the fatal notions Thomas suggests. For other lore about birth cauls, I am indebted to my friend Elena Maubrey, who was also born with one, in Havana.
2. Stephen Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin”: The Making and Unmaking of Militant Unionism, 1900–1950. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992).
3. “Liberace Out-Glitzed Hometown,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 23, 1982. The Milwaukee Public Library, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has kept a clipping collection on the hometown entertainer. While the material it contains is also available on microfiche, this collection provides the easiest access to it. This is File #71 of that collection. Hereafter, this material will be cited as Liberace File, Milwaukee Public Library, with the appropriate number of the file, the date, and the title, where they are apparent.
4. “Liberace Out-Glitzed Hometown,” July 23, 1982, Liberace File #71, Milwaukee Public Library.
5. Meyer, “Stalin over Wisconsin,” passim. Although Meyer chronicles the history of the union movement here, not the social history of the community, his study offers useful insights into Liberace’s social environment.
6. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 48, 53–54.
7. Ibid., 49.
8. The idea of economic deprivation permeates Liberace’s reconstruction of his childhood, especially but not exclusively in his memoirs. The idea, then, of his father as a poor provider—a “failure”—fits this larger pattern. The sense of deprivation, however, fits an even larger, general pattern in his assessment of his childhood and his own career: the notion that nothing was ever quite good enough. As he repeated stories of his earlier life to Scott Thorson, who became his lover, what stood out, for Thorson at least, was a rancorous, even bitter tone. This tone characterizes Liberace’s description of various episodes, according to Thorson: playing private parties in New York, including those hosted by oilman Paul Getty, in the early forties, and Liberace’s discounting of his performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a young man. Both of these topics are treated below. Occasionally, the tone penetrates even his public record. See the following, also treated below: the bad memories of making Sincerely Yours, his barely veiled sarcasm in his treatment of supper-club performing, and his suggestion that he was doing something akin to charity work when he played such great clubs as Mocambo and Ciro’s in Hollywood in the late forties and early fifties. Liberace’s dissatisfied tone is important in itself. It distorts the Liberacean record in various ways. While it has the effect of diminishing his achievements under some circumstances, it led, almost paradoxically, to the exaggeration of achievements in other; it forced, effectively, the image to live up to his own ambitions. This is particularly but not exclusively true relative to money matters. Under all circumstances, the inclination complicates the difficulties of the biographer trying to describe the life beyond the images Liberace projected. How poor was he during the Great Depression, for example? By the memoirist’s standards, his poverty was indescribable. To cite one example: in 1982 he granted an interview in which he testified that, “I spent 17 years of my life in the nearest thing to poverty you can imagine, and I hated it with a bitter passion. And I vowed I would never be poor, nor my family.” (“Reviewing His Life over the Years,” July 23, 1982, Liberace File #37, Milwaukee Public Library.) From a more objective vantage point, if judged only by his family’s both owning and maintaining real property throughout these years, their circumstance was not so horrible after all. What is going on? Initially, Liberace’s disquiet provides an important glimpse of the almost manic ambition, or sources of ambit
ion, that drove him relentlessly throughout his life. He was always looking for something better, newer, grander, richer. Whatever the manifestations, of course, this discontent echoes to the depth of his psyche, even as it offers the first example of how he could turn a deformity into a virtue, leveraging self-loathing, for example, to achieve enormous success. In whatever guise, the trait appears throughout the showman’s life; it is an important part of his biography and a critical element in my assessment of his career in this study.
9. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 48–50, 54.
10. See photographs in the Liberace Museum, Las Vegas.
11. For Salvatore Liberace, see Milwaukee City Directory 1911, 1912, and West Allis City Directory 1918. For the Casadontes, see West Allis City Directory 1918, 1929, 1931.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 59
