Liberace’s audience appeal supports the conservative biases of his West Milwaukee heritage. He did not play to crowds that dressed as flamboyantly as he. Indeed, the core of the faithful sprang from roots close to his own: conventional, traditional, lower-middle-class small towners. The people with whom he grew up or people very much like them—ordinary middle-of-the-road Americans, conservatives, blue-collar folk, some of them with extra money in their pockets—remained the heart of his enduring audiences. These were the people he played to. He did it naturally; he was one of them. He confirmed their values even as he inverted and transgressed them. This indeed was a part of his genius of playing borders and margins against the center, of performing the outsider in the middle of things. While other elements also contribute to his peculiar circumstances, a critical source of his character lies along National Avenue and Beloit Road.
Despite his double dip of Midwestern and American values, Liberace’s actual roots did not run very deep in the rich Wisconsin soil. Like the families of most of his neighbors in Milwaukee County, his family had appeared here late in the high tide of immigration around the turn of the century. His family, and, in turn, the immediate environment of his domestic circle, offers the second great source of his character and of an understanding of his career. Family and culture played against each other and played themselves out in his biography to the end. If he never really abandoned West Allis, neither did he ever escape his parents and their formidable impact on his life. The perpetual discord at the Liberace hearth affected him, as did the sources of that conflict: two powerful parents with antithetical values from conflicting cultures. At the same time, despite the dissonance, the power of family and family attachments he knew as a child influenced almost everything he did: it governed his relations with his actual family long after he had outgrown its circle. Family values also shaped his attitude toward friends, audiences, and homosexual liaisons. Understanding his family illuminates his shadowy interior life as well. Beyond this, Salvatore Liberace, son of Naples, and Frances Zuchowski, child of Krakow, were colorful and even emblematic characters in their own right.
Born in 1886 in the Italian village of Formia near Naples, Salvatore L. Liberace should not have been anywhere near the dairy farms of Wisconsin after emigrating to the United States around the first decade of the new century. If not in Italy, he belonged in Philadelphia with the rest of his family. All his American connections lay there, where his older brother, Benjamin, had settled before him. The Pennsylvania branch of the family was already taking its own route of Americanization: they anglicized the pronunciation of their surname—dropping the emphasized final “e”—and moved into medicine and other middle- and upper-middle-class professions as the century progressed.6 Sal, or Sam as friends knew him, had another destiny. He never anglicized his name. Unlike his brother, he evidenced no interest in middle-class professionalism either for himself or for his brood. He lacked that sort of ambition. Indeed, he lacked ambition—traditionally defined, at least—altogether. Economically, he never made it to fully self-sustaining middle-class prosperity. Most of his life, he hung near the ragged upper fringe of the proletariat. The fate seemed a function of choice, however perverse the decision and disastrous the consequences. He was a musician in Italy, and he would be a musician in the United States. If his adopted country scorned artists, that was Americans’ problem, not his. It was, in any case, music that brought him to the upper Midwest by the close of the century’s first decade, although the specific date of his arrival is not clear.
Salvatore Liberace was a professional French horn player who toured with John Philip Sousa’s prestigious concert band, according to his son. The year 1910 found him performing in Wisconsin. When the Sousa troupe moved on, Sal Liberace stayed.7 He had found a woman. Eros confounded his life. If love did not thwart his musical career, it gave him more than excuse enough for the peculiar course of his ambitions over the next thirty years, and had every manner of direct and indirect influence on his children and family.
As he emerges from the fragmentary records, Sam Liberace was a curious character. He demonstrated nearly equal parts Latin machismo, artistic devotion, and bohemian self-indulgence. Domineering, demanding, and even tyrannical, he was an exacting taskmaster and a relentless perfectionist. He lacked all patience for others’ opinions. His character allowed no room for either compromise or affection. He possessed a fierce temper, and physical violence was a normal part of his domestic life. While these aspects of his character helped shape the personalities of all his children, they affected his family more directly and immediately in the early years of his marriage. His unwavering commitment to art and music in an environment that was seldom congenial meant many things; not least, it meant that he was a notoriously poor provider. His economic inadequacy was the flip side of his devotion to the muse. Both these elements reverberate through the children’s judgment of the father.
Issues about working, employment, and money dominated the Liberace household and accounted for a host of difficulties in the family circle as the boy grown rich and famous remembered them.8 The problem emerged at the beginning; it assumed almost legendary proportions in family lore. Thus, Lee Liberace launched his own recollections of his parent with a discussion of the difficulties of making a living as a musician in Wisconsin in the decades after 1900, long before his own birth. Soon after Sam’s marriage in 1910, then, the paucity of jobs in Milwaukee prompted him to return to Philadelphia with his young wife. The couple remained in Pennsylvania for the birth of their first child in 1911, according to their son, but the relocation gave rise to the first great dispute between husband and wife, and, jobs or no, the couple soon returned to West Allis.9
After his return to Milwaukee County, Sam was working, if not always on his instrument of choice. Photographs capture him playing not French horn but trumpet in 1911; another image memorializes him with his old instrument performing with the Harvester Band of Milwaukee in September 1912.10 Other evidence, however, poignantly confirms the son’s description of the difficulty his father had in finding employment as a musician. Sam’s earliest notices in the West Allis City Directory in 1911 and 1912, for example, list him as a laborer, a “machine hand,” or a “tinner.” As late as 1918, the listings retain this identification. In 1921, he identified himself as “musician,” but in 1925 his tag is “grocer.” A man did what he could to keep body and soul together and provide for his dependents. In this regard, Sam Liberace only repeated the pattern of innumerable others in comparable circumstances. The Casadontes, a family closely related to the Liberaces, were in a similar situation. Alexander Casadonte, who lived around the corner from the musician’s family and who was later to wed Sam’s ex-wife, listed himself in the directory at various times as a laborer and a confectioner as well as a musician.11 If it was perhaps necessary for men to abandon their passion in order to eat, such decisions had ramifications. For a man like Salvatore Liberace, who defined himself as an artist, manual labor must have proved especially galling. His son recalled that it was just that when, later, his father “had to get himself some kind of factory work. It was a terrible blow to his aesthetic sense,” he related. “His once immaculate hands turned calloused and grimy from handling tools and machinery, and he rarely played his beautiful brass French horn. He did, however, get it out occasionally and polish it with loving care.”12
There were other problems associated with Salvatore Liberace’s commitment to making his livelihood through music. Not least, of course, he proved incapable of sustaining a regular income except in the flushest times, and flush times were not the norm for most of his married years. If the circumstances might have created tensions in the most loving of homes, in the Liberace household the problem was all the more severe. The woman Sam Liberace had married numbered neither grace, tolerance, nor affection among her virtues. The two of them, Salvatore L. Liberace and Frances Zuchowski, made an odd couple from the outset. Not an easy man himself, Salvatore had courted a harrid
an, whether or not he knew it. He wed Frances on September 9, 1910, in Milwaukee.13 She was why he was living in Wisconsin and perhaps why he was working as a machinist in West Allis when he wanted to be playing the horn in Philadelphia.
Salvatore Liberace was twenty-five and his bride eighteen when they married. Although he stood only five feet three inches tall, Sam Liberace was a handsome man with his dark complexion, thick black hair, and obsidian eyes. He had a squarish face and close-set eyes, but his generous mouth and full, naturally red lips exaggerated the sensuousness of his exotic swarthiness. His bride was perhaps a couple of inches taller than her diminutive mate. Although her hair was dark, too, she was otherwise fair. A buxom girl, she loved to cook and eat, and added weight with years. A photograph at the time of her marriage reveals a busty young woman with a peculiarly heart-shaped visage. She had a high brow and a prominent chin, and, in spite of her wide-set eyes, her features seem to crowd the center of her face. It was a look underlined by her thin lips and small mouth that appear almost to recede into her face because of her long, sharp nose and pointed chin. Altogether, the photograph gives the young woman a somewhat pinched look.14 The image certainly suited her character.
Frances Zuchowski’s ethnic and personal background contrasted sharply with her groom’s. Her young husband was a loner, who seemed to have lived in America parentless, having immigrated here when he was around twenty. She, in contrast, was American born of Polish parents and maintained close familial ties. The Zuchowski clan was large, too. Frances came from a brood of seven—six girls, one son. Her parents seem to have left Europe in the 1880s, and they staked their American claims near the town of Menasha, Wisconsin, soon after. On the outskirts of the larger city of Appleton, Menasha lay on the northeast shore of Lake Winnebago about 100 miles north-northeast of Milwaukee and about the same distance from the state capital, Madison. The family supplemented its income by working in the local paper mills in Menasha and Neenah, just across the river, but they identified themselves chiefly as farmers and country folk.
If family and farming focused Zuchowski values for two generations, so did religion and the church. Indeed, piety, family, and farming all tended to reinforce one another. The Zuchowskis were traditional, conservative, and religious in the manner of Polish immigrants to America, and of Poles in the Old Country, for that matter. They gave one of their daughters to the church, for example, and she took the name of Sister Mary de Sales in the Order of St. Joseph at Stevens Point, Wisconsin, where she spent her whole life.15 While Frances Zuchowski failed to take orders, she was hardly less devoted than her sister. As one of her son’s friends wrote, she had two passions even in old age: the church and her children.16 The friend might have added money, too, for she was as tight and materialistic as she was conservative and traditional.
The Zuchowskis of Menasha were hardworking and poor, and had few luxuries, but they lived well after the manner of farmers and country people. Their grandson recalled them as being not without culture. He remembered them as “a family of amateur musicians who gave lessons and were very popular in concerts on the local church and charity circuit.”17 According to one family story, his grandmother Zuchowski had lived in Berlin, and while working in a music studio, had met the very young Ignacy Paderewski, for whom she had acted as translator.18
While Liberace might have linked his mother’s people generally with music, he never related them, as he did his father, with the arts or culture in any other way. Then, too, if the Zuchowski clan enjoyed music, Frances herself did not share their affection. On the contrary, her son described her even as positively discouraging it. Still further, in his memory (in particular contrast with his father), she lacked aesthetic sense altogether. While the son conceded that the mother had “a flair for interior decoration,” he returned much more often to terms like “shabby” and “drab” to describe her attitude to life; “mean” fits, too. Even after her son became rich, for example, Frances Liberace took little pleasure in his efforts to beautify her life or her person. “I sometimes find it hard to believe how long it took me to convince Mom that she should have her hair done by a professional. She considered it the height of luxury and an unforgivable extravagance,” he wrote.19
As here, Liberace’s autobiographical references to his mother generally reflect the values of a narrow, immigrant country girl who never transcended her rural Wisconsin upbringing—who, conservative to the core, never even seemed to have imagined such transcendence. Rejecting innovation out of hand, she preferred the old, the tested, the tried. She kept her coal stove and her icebox into the late forties, for example, and when freezers came into use, “Mother wouldn’t have one in the house. She stuck to her idea that it was unhealthy to eat food that had been frozen,” her son remembered.20 She lived as if value began and ended with farm life in the Midwest. “She grew up with simple things,” her son wrote, “and those were the things she understood and preferred.”21 Frances Zuchowski honored her Polish provincial country legacy in other ways. Her son also described her as hardworking, determined, and unpretentious, but also as materialistic, headstrong, and quarrelsome. Although respectful and not really invidious, his remarks also leave the impression that his parent was cheap and graceless. Thus, he memorialized the way she resented both the time and money that her husband devoted to the children’s musical training. He recorded, too, the way she sought sympathy from neighbors by complaining about her two youngest “practicing the piano and George taking violin lessons—all that money being spent on music lessons” while she slaved away at work.22
The union of the conservative Polish farm girl and the worldly Neapolitan musician was not made in heaven; it was, however, fruitful. Within a year of their marriage, the couple produced their first child, George, born in 1911 in Philadelphia, according to his brother.23 Two years later, on December 11, 1913, Frances gave birth to a girl, Angelina Anna, named for her maternal grandmother; she was christened at St. Florian’s Church in West Milwaukee a few months later. On May 16, 1919, five and a half years after Angie’s appearance, came the omen-laden birth of the third surviving child. For the survivor of this double birth, his parents chose a polyglot name that echoed the divergent ethnicities of his heritage. He was Wladziu Valentino. Wladziu was the Polish Walter that his family favored, either that or Wally. The performer himself, in fame, circulated the story that his mother chose his second name after the Italian heartthrob, silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino. This is perhaps true, but as the actor did not soar to international fame with his film The Sheik until two years later in 1921, it is unlikely. The source of the name remains otherwise ambiguous, too, because Valentino Liberace had been Salvatore’s father back in Naples, and his paternal grandfather seems a more likely source of the boy’s appellation than his mother’s fancy does.24 In any case, the division of his name between his Polish and his Italian roots serves as a nice device for understanding his own sharply divided debts to his mother and his father.
When the third Liberace child was twelve and the senior sibling twenty, their parents gave them a final brother, Rudolph Valentino, born in 1931. He was always Rudy. Perhaps the mother really had intended to identify her third child with her movie-star hero, but her husband’s father’s name diluted her purpose. In her third son’s name, she allowed no ambiguity. By this time, in any case, she no longer compromised on much of anything. Indeed, even earlier, both Frances and Salvatore Liberace found little basis for compromising on issues large or small. Their house echoed with conflict. Almost from the beginning of their marriage, fighting dominated the family circle.
The couple exchanged real blows, and they swapped verbal brickbats, too. Indeed, their fighting assumed almost mythic status, at least in the recollections of their second son. He placed their first confrontation a decade before his own birth in the 1910–11 fight about moving to Philadelphia. Sam persuaded Frances to go. He wanted to remain there; she did not. “The City of Brotherly Love didn’t instill any sisterly love in her heart.
She didn’t like the metropolitan place. . . . She longed for the simple life in a small friendly community where everyone knew and loved his neighbors.”25 Frances won, but Sam would have his day.
On returning to Milwaukee County, the Liberace family found a place to live on Fifty-first Street, one of West Allis’s main north-south thoroughfares. The first city directories list them at 709 Fifty-first. This is where Walter Valentine and his dead twin were born. The house stood on the west side of the street, almost exactly halfway between National Avenue and Beloit Road, the major, diagonal cross streets in West Allis. The dwelling survives. In a row of nearly identical homes, the house sits about twenty-five feet back from the road. With gabled short side to the street, its front door—directly beneath the central window in the eaves—opened onto a small living room, with other rooms stacked up behind.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 3