40. Quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 57.
41. Ibid.
42. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 209.
43. Ibid., 32–33.
44. Ibid., 222, 224, 226, 234.
45. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 121–22.
46. Buchwald, “Liberace Abroad.”
47. Johnson, Liberace: A Collecting Guide, passim.
48. Thomas, Liberace, 153.
49. “What Happened to Liberace?”
50. William Leonard, “Liberace Will Rise Again!” Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, June 25, 1961, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 200.
51. Gabbe, Lutz, Heller and Loeb v Liberace.
52. “What happened to Liberace?”
53. Ibid.
54. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 185–89.
55. Ibid., 189, 190.
56. Ibid., 188, 190.
57. Ibid., 192, 193.
58. See below, chapter 14, for Liberace’s connection to the self-help book, The Magic of Believing, and the connection of its author, Claude Bristol, to these very currents in American popular thought. Perhaps not incidentally, Liberace seems to have discovered Bristol about this time. He wrote an introduction to the 1955 edition, and in 1958, the same year as the Australian tour, released a promotional record—on the same disc as “Cuba Liberace”—named after the title of Bristol’s book. See Johnson, Liberace: A Collecting Guide, 41.
59. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 162.
60. The film Truth or Dare memorializes an almost identical defense offered by the performer Madonna when the Italian government censored her show as pornographic. The church, in this case, was the villain. Her defense of her “constitutional rights”—on the Via Appia—echoes every element of Liberace’s argument in Sydney. It is worth noting here, that of the various performers who have been most often been compared to Liberace—Madonna, Boy George, Michael Jackson, and, most critically, Elton John—Madonna actually comes closest to Liberace’s full genius, which hinged on promotion as much as on talent. As much as he, she has mastered the art of imagery and audience appeal. Her play with sexual roles, too, and her integration of gender and sexuality into the fabric of her persona and performance, match Liberace’s, so too does her self-conscious projection and use of glamour. Her energy and ambition are as indefatigable as his. Their common immigrant Italian backgrounds offer still another basis of comparison.
61. “Liberace in Court,” New York Times, Mar. 8, 1957. See also New York Times, Mar. 8, 9, 14, 1958.
62. Gabbe, Lutz, Heller and Loeb v Liberace.
63. See Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 241.
64. International Artists v Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
65. “Liberace and George ‘Dig’ Local Ground Breaking Ceremonies,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 23, 1957.
66. See, for example, Thomas, Liberace, 82–83; 92; 108–9.
67. Gabbe, Lutz, Heller and Loeb v Liberace.
68. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 104.
69. See Gabbe, Lutz, Heller and Loeb v Liberace.
70. “What happened to Liberace?”
71. Fleming and Fleming, First Time, 143.
72. International Artists v Commissioner of Internal Revenue.
73. “When It Comes to Glamour,” June 30, 1969, Liberace File #19, Milwaukee Public Library.
74. “Liberace Puts Punchline First,” n.d., Liberace File #16, Milwaukee Public Library.
75. Variety, July 16, 1958, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 65.
76. Variety, Aug. 13, 1958, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 65.
77. Leonard, “Liberace Will Rise Again!” quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 200.
78. The Complete Encyclopedia, 562.
79. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 104–5.
80. Ibid., 153.
81. Variety, Oct. 15, 1958, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography. 17.
82. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 153.
83. Ibid., 155.
84. Ibid., 104–5.
85. Ibid., 105.
86. James R. Gaines, “Liberace,” People, Oct. 1, 1982.
87. “Silent George Comes to Town and Gives All of the Latest Facts on the Liberaces,” June 7, 1955, Liberace File #18, Milwaukee Public Library.
88. “Liberace Coming Home,” Mar. 29, 1951, Liberace File #2, Milwaukee Public Library.
89. Thomas, Liberace, 29. also, Milwaukee City Directories, passim. 1918–49. Scott Thorson also quotes information he gleaned from the Globe that alleges that “Frances began sharing her home with Casadonte shortly after Salvatore moved out,” which is possible, and that “she lived as Casadonte’s common-law wife for sixteen years,” which is impossible: Behind the Candelabra, 9.
90. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 272–73.
91. Ibid., 274.
92. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 170.
93. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 274.
94. “Silent George,” Liberace File #18, June 7, 1955, Milwaukee Public Library.
95. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 44.
96. Liberace, The Things I Love, 181.
97. “Liberace Whips Up Music, Muffins at His Old School,” n.d., and “Liberace Chooses 5 Young Pianists,” n.d., both Liberace File #3, Milwaukee Public Library.
98. “Wildcat Lair Star,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 8, 1951, and “Thanks Liberace!” Las Vegas Review-Journal Nov. 11, 1951; also “Lessons from Expert,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 8, 1952; “Wins Contest,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, n.d.; “Young People’s Piano Contest Set by Liberace,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Apr. 30, 1953. See also press kit: “Pianist Makes First Appearance for Purely Teen-Age Audience” (Minneapolis).
99. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 38.
100. Thomas, Liberace, 96.
101. Ibid., 97.
102. See the depositions in the files, also newspaper clippings that focus on Heller: Barr v Liberace.
103. See for example, “Meet Liberace’s Favorite Date,” TV Guide, Nov. 13, 1954, with Rio and Liberace on the cover.
104. “Liberace Tells Marriage Plans,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 6, 1954.
105. Thomas, Liberace, 99.
106. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 310.
107. “Liberace Love Affair Declared ‘Just Publicity,’” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nov. 25, 1954.
108. See clipping in the case files, Barr v Liberace.
109. See the depositions in the files, also newspaper clippings that focus on Heller: Barr v Liberace.
110. Thomas, Liberace, 104.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid., 101.
113. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 311–12; Liberace told his boyfriend that he actually carried on a sexual affair with the skating star, who was seven years his senior. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 42.
114. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 102.
115. Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct, 6, 1950.
116. Thomas, Liberace, 98.
117. Liberace, (as told to Edythe Witt), “Mature Women Are Best.”
118. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 38.
NINE
1. Cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 206.
2. I have lifted these more or less at random from the July 1957 edition of the most notable of these magazines, Hollywood Confidential, which features the exposé of Liberace.
3. See Neal Gabler on the most notorious of the gossips: Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
4. “What Do Men Think of Liberace?” cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 254.
5. Michael David, “Why is Liberace on the Pan?” Suppressed, Jan. 1955, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 186.
6. “Are Liberace’s Romances for Real?” Private Lives, Mar. 1955. Cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 176, 12.
7. Edna Carpenter, “Liberace Did Her Wrong!” Whisper, June 1955, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 182,
12.
8. See “Whose Torch Melted the Ice Queen?,” Rave, Aug. 1955; Sylvia Tremaine, “This Month’s Candidate for the Pit . . . Liberace: The Ham That Was Overdone,” Whisper, June 1956; also John Cullen’s much less direct “Mama’s Boy in Curls,” On the QT, Sept. 1956, and Harry Willis, “The Men in Liberace’s Life,” Uncensored, Mar. 1955. All cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 254, 251, 185, 255.
9. Jay Collins, “Is Liberace a Man?” Hush-Hush, May 1957, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 183.
10. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1981; originally published 1975), 374. For other data about Hollywood Confidential, see also Ehrenstein, Open Secret, passim.
11. Gabler, Winchell, 468.
12. Anger, Babylon, 374.
13. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 99.
14. Anger, Babylon, 375.
15. The circulation figures are from Anger, 375, and from Liberace v Hollywood Confidential et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, May 14, 1957.
16. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 99.
17. Thomas, Liberace, 126–27.
18. Gabler, Winchell, 468, 503–5.
19. Anger, Babylon, 377, 379–80.
20. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 102–3, 104.
21. Homosexual blackmail forms a separate category of pre-Stonewall gay history. It certainly constitutes one of the threads of discourse in that era. Circumstantial data suggest the fear was as critical as actual blackmail. Even so evidence also implies that blackmailing is a semiofficial function of government and the social order in these decades.
22. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 20.
23. This value persists. It is not unlikely that Liberace had hundreds of sexual partners, some of whom passed more than a night with him. Of these, no more than two have come forward to publish their revelations. In the process of researching this book, I have turned up, almost incidentally, a few more men who admitted to having gone to bed with the showman. When pressed, one refused to speak for the record with a name; the other insisted that the veil of silence had to fall across what actually transpired between the two.
24. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 50–51.
25. Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (London: Cassell, 1997), passim.
26. Edmund White’s autobiographical novel, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, depicts the protagonist, otherwise described as a middle-class professional, taking a turn at prostitution virtually for the hell of it. Just so, my friend Howard Kaminsky has described an academic associate, not unknown in his field, who spent at least part of his sabbatical taking money for sex in San Francisco in the late sixties or early seventies.
27. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet.
28. This form of sexual activity also suggests peculiarities of male-male desire. If the object of male heterosexuality is the penile penetration of a vagina, satisfaction in homoerotic activity is much more varied. While anal intercourse remains a standard conclusion, it is very far from a universal norm. Indeed, anecdotal evidence suggests the great majority of actual homosexual acts centers on mutual masturbation or even on one partner gratifying himself, without achieving his own orgasm, by bringing off his mate or by watching his comrade get off. In this regard, homosexuality offers a model of full equal partners rather than one in which there is an antagonistic polarity and “otherness,” as is the case with heterosexual coupling.
29. For an old and somewhat ideological but still useful account of public sex, see Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine, 1975; originally published 1970). This manifestation of homosexuality has engendered considerable debate even within the gay community in the late twentieth century. One category advocates public sex as a manifestation of true Gay Liberation, asserting that it is an almost essential form of male sexuality. Another group disdains it as a perversion foisted on homosexual men by a repressive social order. Still another tends to dismiss the practice altogether as a fabrication of a “homophobic” mainstream; normal gay men, this position maintains, do not indulge in this form of sexuality, and where it exists at all it is practiced by maladjusted, closeted men locked into unsatisfying marriages. A fourth category, which is less political and less ideological than the others, appears in such works of art as Edmund White’s autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story and The Beautiful Room, where anonymous public sex is practiced as a kind of natural, thoughtless, and even reflexive norm.
30. Only his arrest a few years ago in a Virginia Key park in Miami elicited one man’s identity as one of the most important dramatists in America. When I began working on this book, the American airwaves crackled with stories of the British pop singer George Michael being arrested for “indecent exposure” in a park loo in Beverly Hills. Taking their cues from this episode, numerous talk shows and newspapers have run exposes on public homosex since then. It seems abundantly clear that this sort of sex is hardly an aberration.
31. See the journalist Earl Wilson’s thinly veiled references to the movie star in the summer of 1953, quoted in Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 13–14; Ehrenstein’s treatment of Hudson is otherwise useful, too, in understanding the circumstances of gay celebrities.
32. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 104.
33. Rock Hudson and Sara Davidson, Rock Hudson: His Story (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 49.
34. Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson, 49. David Ehrenstein (Open Secret, 100) believes that “a formal blackmail payment would be the only logical explanation for [Confidential] holding back on Hudson.”
35. Carl David, quoted in Hadleigh, Hollywood Gays, 149.
36. Hollywood Confidential 5, no. 3 (July 1957). This copy exists in Liberace v Hollywood Confidential et al., Los Angeles Superior Court, May 14, 1957.
37. Thomas, Liberace, 127–28.
38. See Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 61; “Liberace to Sue Magazine for 20 Million,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 1957.
39. Liberace v Hollywood Confidential, et al.
40. Anger, Babylon, 380.
41. Quoted in Gabler, Winchell, 504.
42. Gabler, Winchell, 504.
43. Anger, Babylon, 381–83; New York Times, “M O’Hara drops ’57 $1-million libel suit,” July 2, 1958; “E Flynn ’55 suit settled,” July 9, 1958; “Liberace settles libel suit against Confidential for $40,000,” July 16, 1958. Also Thomas, Liberace, 129.
44. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 201, 202.
45. Ibid., 204, 213; New York Times, June 9, 1959.
46. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 202.
47. Thomas, Liberace, 131.
48. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 203.
49. Ibid., 204–5.
50. Ibid., 228.
51. Ibid., 216.
52. Ibid., 201.
53. Ibid., 217.
54. For the association of homosexuality and aristocratic foppery in contrast to masculinity and bourgeois energy, see Thomas A. King, “Performing ‘Akimbo’: Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,” in Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp. In keeping with this linkage, “ineffectual” provided a kind of code word for “homosexual” well into the twentieth century. “Effete” served as exactly the same code word.
55. The sexual over against the social definitions of maleness (or for that matter, femaleness) in particular, and gender in general, constitutes perhaps the central issue of the debate over gender roles in contemporary society, but especially in academic controversies. Inspired formally by such scholars as Michel Foucault, the dominant school of thought collapses hard, natural distinctions between male and female, gay and straight, public and private; nature requires no social roles or formal behavior, it maintains. Thus the right to work, to demand public authority, and to expect subordination is no manly right at all. It is no masculine prerogative, in the first place, but might apply to women as well as to men. In the second, and more fundamental place, it is hardly the right of any person to make such natural cla
ims over another in this system of thought: far from a right, it is actually a wrong. See, for example, the writing of the academic philosopher Judith Butler, the literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the classicist David Halperin, the political philosopher Morris Kaplan, and the historian Jonathan Ned Katz for manifestations of such values in a variety of scholarly disciplines. This approach does not go unchallenged. Criticism against Judith Butler, for example, summarizes objections from a Marxist, materialist, or more formal political left position to this entire system: see, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum, “Professor of Parody: The Hip Defeatism of Judith Butler,” The New Republic, Feb. 22, 1999, 37–45. Nussbaum develops her argument against the latent nihilism that obviates progress and political activism or even morality within the Foucaultian matrix. This left-oriented criticism is developed still more generally in Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
If without much academic legitimacy, a third position challenges the premise of both others in maintaining the legitimacy or naturalness of sexual roles and gender-linked social behavior. Rictor Norton offers the most aggressive defense of this position—and the most aggressive attack against the constructionists—in his recently published Myth of the Modern Homosexual. This position is not without its difficulties. As with the more problematical version of the stance in the work of Frank Browning, especially his Culture of Desire, it supposes a kind of tribal, anthropological identity among gays and lesbians; as with Norton’s text, it makes historical continuity the source of cultural authenticity and integrity. Its politics, most broadly defined, suggest simply the normalization of homosexuality, as, indeed, something like a third sex, a tactic assumed by the earliest mid-nineteenth-century sexual reformers, for example. A variation on this position appears with later sexual reformers, among them Harry Hay, one of the founders of the Mattachine Society, a 1950s organization that advanced this agenda politically by advocating the decriminalization of homosexual activity.
Each of these positions has its own liabilities and inconsistencies. Liberace’s position possessed still greater drawbacks; nevertheless, they are not without their instructional quality. By taking the most aggressive attitude of identifying masculinity with the public performance of males in the workplace, he radically circumscribed his own sexual freedom. He resolved this problem, at least practically, by falling back on the rigid distinctions between public and private: see above.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 63
