57. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 81.
58. Liberace, The Things I Love, 86.
59. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 82–83.
60. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #17; and “Walter Busterkeys Played at Old Plankton Arcade,” Feb. 5, 1987, Liberace File #59, Milwaukee Public Library.
61. See Walter Liberace to Max Pollack, letter, Jan. 30, 1940, Liberace Museum, Las Vegas.
62. Don Asher, Notes from a Battered Grand: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), 90, 91–92.
63. See Walter Liberace to Max Pollack, letter.
64. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #17; and “Walter Busterkeys Played at Old Plankton Arcade,” Feb. 5, 1987, Liberace File #59, Milwaukee Public Library.
65. Ibid.
66. “Play It Again, Wally,” Apr 25, 1987, Liberace File #51, Milwaukee Public Library.
67. “Old Friends Knew Liberace Would Hit the Big Time,” Feb. 5, 1987, Liberace File #62, Milwaukee Public Library.
68. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #9, Milwaukee Public Library; Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 79–80.
69. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 80; Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 20.
70. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 80. He offers a somewhat different version of the conflict with his father in The Things I Love, 58, in which he credits his performance with the Chicago Symphony with softening Salvatore’s objections to his playing popular music.
71. Karl Fleming and Anne Taylor Fleming, The First Time (New York, Berkeley Publishing Corporation, 1975), 148.
72. See Cal York, “Remember You Read It First in Photoplay,” Jan. 1976, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 257.
73. Fleming and Fleming, First Time, 148.
74. Ibid.
75. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 48.
76. “He Dusts Off Stories,” Feb. 8, 1987, Liberace File #70, Milwaukee Public Library.
77. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 8.
78. Segell, quoted by Michelle Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman,” People Weekly, Feb. 16, 1987, 31.
79. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 74.
80. Fleming and Fleming, First Time, 146, 147.
81. Liberace, Wonderful Private World, 40.
82. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 16.
83. Ibid., 17.
FOUR
1. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. “Local Man Entertains,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
6. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
7. “Local Man Entertains,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
8. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 80.
9. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 19.
10. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
11. Bohemia, Aug. 26, 1956. My thanks to Kevin Taracido for the translation from Spanish.
12. Quoted in “Liberace: Musical Showman Dies at age 67 in Palm Springs,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1987.
13. Liberace, The Things I Love, 47.
14. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
15. Liberace, The Things I Love, 61.
16. Ibid., 20.
17. See the Times Square photograph at the Liberace Museum, Las Vegas. The apartment photograph appears as plate 10 in this text.
18. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 22.
19. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #9, Milwaukee Public Library.
20. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 89–90.
21. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 23.
22. “Our Liberace Is Going Strong,” July 21, 1965, File #14, Milwaukee Public Library. Although Liberace allowed that “he was still in his teens,” he offers no evidence that he did other work that would put him in a league with Morgan until this later period.
23. Liberace’s autobiography regularly skews time and dates, in this period, particularly. Thus, for example, after discussing his engagements at fancy clubs around Fifty-second Street, he refers to returning to the Plaza Hotel “seven years later” in 1945. Perhaps taking a cue from Lee’s memoir, Thorson also gets dates wrong. Bob Thomas is worse still in this regard. Liberace’s 1947–48 press kit lists the Ruban Bleu engagement in 1945, and Liberace himself associated that gig with Spivy’s Roof and with playing ritzy Upper East Side parties. By 1945, his reputation was certainly taking to the air, but it seems less likely that he would have been able to pick up such elegant and sophisticated venues during the earlier period. See below. For these reasons, I treat the performances that I think more likely to have taken place later not here but when I discuss the period after his return to Manhattan.
24. Liberace, The Things I Love, 61. Bob Thomas relates a much more involved version of the West Orange story on page 30 of his book. He writes that Jay Mills had disbanded his orchestra, moved East, and invited his pianist to join him. This, he argues, prompted Liberace’s decision to go to New York. If the narrative might contain seeds of truth, it is, like much of Thomas’s work, highly suspect, as he regularly spins a line or two from some secondary source into a full-fledged episode. The story is fanciful, with “tearful farewells to Mom” and goodbyes to the Mixers—who had long since parted ways with their much younger colleague. Besides the fictionalization, one additional problem with Thomas’s New York story is the way it downplays how much the performer’s own initiative and spunk contributed to his taking off on his own for Manhattan. In this regard, Thorson’s version of the story seems more in keeping with the patterns in the pianist’s life. Otherwise, his less-elaborate version seems closer to fact, as well.
25. “Piano Virtuoso Is Big Hit of New Show at Hotel Last Frontier,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 25, 1944.
26. Untitled, undated review from the Liberace press kit, Las Vegas Public Library. This press kit, which dates from around 1947, is the single most important source for the period covered in this chapter. It is also an important document in itself in illustrating the performer’s publicity genius. Hereafter, I refer to it simply as “press kit.”
27. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 23.
28. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
29. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 84–85.
30. Ibid., 85.
31. Ibid., 87.
32. Press kit.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 174; also press kit.
39. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 123.
40. “Hildegard Recalls Memories of Liberace,” Feb. 10, 1987, Liberace File #76, Milwaukee Public Library.
41. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 87.
42. “All Time High Is Reached in Frontier Show,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sept. 16, 1946.
43. Press kit.
44. Ibid.
45. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 88.
46. Ibid., 87. The Things I Love, 62, offers a very different version of playing for Getty: Liberace performed at Getty’s upstate New York estate and missed the public conveyance back to the city.
47. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 22. This chronology, which is perhaps based on Liberace’s own mixed-up dates, is off as well. Beyond the matter of dates, the treatment illustrates the showman’s retrospective hostility, as noted in chapter 1.
48. Press kit.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Liberace, The Things I Love, 63.
53. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 171.
54. Ibid., 90.
55. Ibid., 81.
56. Press kit.
57. “Liberace Coming Home,” Mar. 29, 1951, Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library.
58.
Liberace, The Things I Love, 86.
59. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 35.
60. Ibid., 24.
61. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library; and press kit.
62. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #10, Milwaukee Public Library.
63. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 23.
64. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 349.
65. Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis, 1940–1996 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 8.
66. Chauncey, Gay New York, 349–50.
67. Ibid., 350.
68. Ibid., 131.
69. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 7.
70. Ibid., 12.
71. Ibid., 16.
72. Ibid., 39, 40.
73. Ibid., 39.
74. Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995), 101–2.
75. Chauncey, Gay New York, 350.
76. Ibid., 350–51.
77. William Henry Harbaugh, letter to the author.
78. Vidal, Palimpsest, 101–2.
79. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 8.
80. Vidal, Palimpsest, 101.
81. Ibid.; Chauncey, Gay New York, 216.
82. Chauncey, Gay New York, 349.
83. For a 1930s version of what went on in such circumstances, and how, see the account left by the sometime homosexual Whittaker Chambers as recorded by his biographer, Sam Tanenhaus. Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 344–55.
84. Vidal, Palimpsest, 101.
FIVE
1. Press kit.
2. The timing of Liberace’s move to California is uncertain. While he himself admitted his chronological confusion, he often solves the problem, as here in his biography, by failing to date things at all. Bob Thomas and Jocelyn Faris compound the chronological confusion. Thomas, for example, puts Liberace in Long Beach during the war itself. No evidence exists for this assertion. Liberace’s press kit offers clues to his postwar relocation in the West. He played Las Vegas for the first time in 1944, and then did not do so again until 1946, after which the gigs became regular. The kit makes no reference to California until the late winter/spring and summer of 1947, the time of the San Diego and Long Beach jobs. His autobiography tends to support the idea that he made his shift West during the postwar period, too. Thus, when he discusses the Goodwin family, he makes reference to two young, but grown, unmarried sons. If the autobiography can be trusted here, he must surely have stayed with the Goodwins after the war, as it is highly unlikely that both of the Goodwin sons would have escaped service. For the initial encounters with Mr. Goodwin, see Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 144–45.
3. Ibid., 145–46.
4. Ibid., 123.
5. Press kit.
6. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 146.
7. Press kit.
8. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 309–10.
9. Ibid., 288.
10. John Rechy, City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1984; originally published 1963), 212. Santa Monica also figures notably in Rechy’s Sexual Outlaw.
11. Rechy, City of Night, 177.
12. See also E. Michael Gorman, “The Pursuit of the Wish: An Anthropological Perspective on Gay Male Subculture in Los Angeles,” in Gilbert Herdt, ed., Gay Male Culture in America: Essays from the Field (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1992). Also David Ehrenstein, Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928–1998 (New York: William Morrow, 1998), especially, 33–42.
13. “Milwaukee Entertainer Wows ’Em With His Big ‘Priceless’ Piano,” Liberace File #1, 1947, Milwaukee Public Library.
14. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 85.
15. “Milwaukee Entertainer,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library; press kit.
16. “When It Comes to Glamour, Liberace Rates an A Plush,” June 30, 1969, Liberace File #19, Milwaukee Public Library. Also press kit, and “Milwaukee Entertainer,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
17. Liberace, The Things I Love, 80.
18. “A Master Showman, but Liberace Also Valued His Privacy,” Feb. 5, 1987, Liberace File #64C, Milwaukee Public Library.
19. Press kit.
20. Besides the story ideas, the press kit also contains actual reviews. These newspaper articles reveal their debts to the press kit itself.
21. “Liberace Coming Home,” Mar. 29, 1951, Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library.
22. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 16.
23. See photograph credits in the Liberace Museum.
24. Jack Cortez, “That’s for Sure,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sept. 23, 1951.
25. See advertisements in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 21, 1948; Dec. 31, 1948; Feb. 22, 1949; Sept. 22, 1949.
26. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library.
27. See the dated photograph in the Liberace Museum. Also, “Liberace in Hollywood,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library, which also dates the White House performance to March. Bob Thomas takes this date and moves it back to 1949.
28. David Richards, “Liberace, Laughing Last,” Washington Post, July 19, 1985.
29. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 83, 84. Lest this all be taken as Liberacean hyperbole and self-justification, one might also consult the hilarious memoirs of another, slightly younger supper-club/cafe performer, Asher, Notes from a Battered Grand, passim.
30. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 20.
31. Ibid., 22–23.
32. Johnson, Liberace: A Collecting Guide, 22, 31.
33. Ibid., 95, 18, 91.
34. Ibid., 18, 49, 90, 95, 91.
35. Press kit; also Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 64.
36. Cortez, “That’s For Sure.”
37. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 110.
38. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
39. Although she does not deal with the gay affinity for Hollywood, Marjorie Garber, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1992), has increased my own understanding of the illusionary aspects of dressing, “gender coding,” and related issues of sex and sexuality in American culture.
40. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 30.
41. “Piano Virtuoso Is Big Hit,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 25, 1944.
42. “All-Time High Is Reached in Frontier Show,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Sept. 16, 1946.
43. “Liberace in Hollywood,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
44. “Liberace in Hollywood,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library. This articles seems the source for Bob Thomas’s rather more fanciful and elaborate tale in Liberace, 51–52.
45. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 110–13.
46. “Liberace in Hollywood,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
47. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 114.
48. Ibid., 44–45.
49. Ibid., 45.
50. “Liberace Coming Home,” Mar. 29, 1951, Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library.
51. “Liberace: Musical Showman Dies,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1987.
52. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 146.
53. Ibid., 45.
54. Thomas, Liberace, 60; Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 46.
55. Thomas, Liberace, 60–61.
56. All of these quotations are taken from Joanne Rio Barr v Liberace, Los Angeles Superior Court.
57. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 75, 76. See also “A Day in the Life of Seymour Heller: Veteran Personal Manager for Liberace and the Treniers Lives Musical Life,” Billboard, May 6, 1969.
58. See the depositions in Barr’s case against Liberace, in which both Barr and Liberace testify to the degree to which Heller managed everything relating to the publicity of their relationsh
ip. Also, the Scott Thorson case that was tried ten years later affirms that Heller was the aggressive manager carrying through on Liberace’s determination to get Thorson out of his life.
59. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 89.
SIX
1. “Liberace Coming Home,” Mar. 29, 1951, Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library; Cortez, “That’s For Sure”; press kit; and “Liberace in Hollywood,” n.d., Liberace File #1, Milwaukee Public Library.
2. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #9, Milwaukee Public Library.
3. Ibid.
4. N.t., n.d., Liberace File #4, Milwaukee Public Library.
5. Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, Watching TV: Four Decades of American Television (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 63.
6. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows. 1946—Present, 4th ed. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 963.
7. For the Benny show, see Castleman and Podrazik, Watching TV, 81.
8. Ibid., 75.
9. Ibid., 63.
10. Ibid., 75.
11. Ibid., 78.
12. Ibid.
13. Andrew Ross, in No Respect: Intellectuals & Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), ignores movies and television, but he introduces some of these problems by focusing on music, literature, and intellectual culture in general.
14. N.t., n.d, Liberace File #3, Milwaukee Public Library.
15. This information on early Los Angeles television is drawn from two sources: “KTLA at 45” (1992) and “Happy Birthday LATV” (1977). Museum of Broadcast History, New York.
16. “What Happened to Liberace?” TV Guide, May 3, 1958.
17. Thomas, Liberace, 63.
18. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 94–96.
19. Ibid., 96, relates to Liberace’s signing on with Heller. At least one document confirms that Heller did not sign on as agent until 1952: see the letter of Dec. 31, 1952, from Liberace to Heller in the official records of proceedings in Richard Gabbe, Sam Lutz, Seymour Heller, William Loeb v Liberace, International Artists, John Jacobs, et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, July 15, 1960. This confirms that there was a contract beginning on January 1, 1953, to run for two years. Perhaps another letter existed from two years earlier; conversely, perhaps there was no letter at all: elsewhere, the legal proceedings affirm that John Jacobs instructed his client against a written agreement. Evidence from the Scott Thorson palimony case also confuses the dates.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 61
