Poverty dominates almost every reference Liberace made to childhood, but, despite his memories, the old house on Fifty-first Street was a modest but adequate dwelling for a small family in humble circumstances. So too was the dwelling a block or so up, at 635 Fifty-first (now 1649 Sixtieth Street), where the family had relocated by 1925. It resembled the other house in general form. This is the place that Liberace recalled best from these years, although he seems to have conflated the two houses. His memories of this second house and the move there also relate to new difficulties between his parents. Frances turned the house into a grocery store as well as a residence.26 She concocted the arrangement ostensibly for economic reasons, but other forces seem to have been at work, as well.
The general economic prosperity of the mid-twenties buoyed up even the musician corks of West Allis, like Sam Liberace. After 1925, he never again listed himself as anything but “musician” in the city directory. His son remembered his playing at the great movie theaters of the era, for example, the Alhambra, where live orchestras accompanied the silent films. He was providing for his family in a way he had not done before. He was even saving money, his boy remembered, cash that soon after 1925 permitted them to purchase a new house of their own in a nicer neighborhood. In spite of their increased prosperity, however, Sam’s wife determined to enter business on her own. When the family moved up the street around 1924, she opened the grocery store. The enterprise pleased no one in the family but Frances herself. The house was not large, and now they had still less space. “When you walked through a door in the rear of our store,” the pianist recalled, “you were in our living room.” Nor did the store provide much income. Later, Liberace compared the store to a farm: “You may not make a lot of money, but you can always find something to eat. I can remember running from our little kitchen out into the store to get a couple of potatoes, or something for dinner.” While at age five or six, the youngest family member was spared any real chores having to do with the business, his mother dragooned both George and Angie into helping out. They tended the counter and made deliveries. Both disliked it. Nothing in their father’s history suggests any affinity at all for the grocery scheme.27 While the store was Frances’s brainstorm entirely, she managed to identify her husband with the business, too. Thus, in the city directory of 1925, “grocer” follows his name.28 If having a store in his front room offended Sam Liberace, perhaps this accounts for another anomaly in the public records of this time. The 1925 West Allis Directory names Salvatore as a resident-grocer at 709 Fifty-first Street, but the Milwaukee City Directory lists him as an inhabitant of that city, registering him at a different address—424 Layton Avenue, a couple of miles east of the other house. It also records his profession, once more, as “musician.”
The grocery-store scheme lasted only a couple of years at most, at least according to official records, from when Wally Liberace was around six until he was about seven. He made it a central part of his memoir, however, where it plays a kind of iconographic role, standing for everything he hated. While he never criticizes his mother outright, he leaves little room for doubt about his skepticism of her judgment. Theirs was not, he determined, “a proper house.” Canned goods and oranges in the front room constricted the family’s living and thereby limited privacy twice over, once with customers and again with each other. It exaggerated controversy within the household. Did his father actually move out in these years? Did Wally want to flee with him? He remained with his mother, his siblings, and the potato bins in the front room. He was not a happy six-year-old. Liberace as an adult almost never complained or criticized and had little patience for those who “kvetched,” as he put it. He avoided making disapproving or invidious remarks. When he did so, he often followed the observation with some aside to disguise or mute his discontent. After a half century, however, the memory of the grocery store in the front parlor still unsettled him. It suggests his larger, only semiconscious dissatisfaction with his childhood; it stood as an emblem for other conflicts at his hearth in these years. They were numerous.
The houses on Fifty-first Street echoed regularly with the Liberaces’ squabbles. Dissension revolved around money, but disagreements over finances revealed deeper differences between the parents. Salvatore had his own way of doing things and his own commitments, and he refused to bend for any exigencies. In a single image, one of Salvatore’s old friends left a nice record not only of the father but of the sources and potential sources of conflicts in the family as well. “The artiste, he called himself,” John Hlaban recalled. “At home Ma (Liberace) would be on the front porch, hammering or sawing or doing something, and the old man would say, ‘Not my line.’ Sam, the artiste,” Hlaban chuckled.29
Sam Liberace did not consider himself subject to ordinary rules. He scorned repairs and household chores as being beneath his dignity and left such drudgery to his simmering wife; he also manifested his arrogant singularity in other ways. He held no regular job. The stock market crash in ’29 and the Depression played havoc with his career. He was a professional musician, however—the “artiste”—and when he couldn’t play his horn, he did not work. Although he played in the Milwaukee Symphony, according to his daughter, and took occasional industrial jobs, according to his son, he was basically unemployed after 1929.
Salvatore Liberace’s identity as “artiste” manifested itself in still other ways; these, in turn, possessed their own repercussions for his relations with his wife and children. Music, which was the key to his superiority, had to be perpetually present in his home. Along with the melodies of his horn, his Victrola, his record collection, and his piano dominated his household. In keeping with his aesthetic arrogance, he wanted only the best of each. Was the family scraping by for lack of money? No matter. He owned the best record player available, a “very special Orthophonic Victrola.” He demanded the splendid machine also because of his equally high-caliber collection of recordings. “We had Caruso, of course, and Galli Curci, Giovanni Martinelli, Geraldine Farrar . . . all the great opera and concert stars of the early twentieth century,” Sal’s son recalled. “The classical Victor records were called Red Seal Records, and people took pride in owning a large collection of them. We did, too,” Liberace continued. “But the difference between our collection of Red Seal records and most people’s collections was that we really played ours . . . all the time. . . . My Dad and his fine record collection . . . introduced me to the great names of music.”30
No record survives of the kind of piano in the household, but Liberace later identified the upright as “a little tired and worn.” He compared it invidiously to the grands he played when he began formal instruction.31 His complaint not withstanding, the piano, like the “very special Orthophonic Victrola,” was most certainly the best Salvatore could afford—more likely, it was better than he could afford. His second son often testified to his father’s selectivity and discrimination. The senior Liberace regularly proclaimed that, “a musician is only as good as his instrument.” The son never challenged the pronouncement directly, but he periodically probed his parent’s assertion. “I didn’t dare talk back to my father, but occasionally I’d throw in something that bothered him. Like when I asked him if he wouldn’t rather hear a good musician on a bad instrument than a poor musician on a great instrument,” he related. “To this day I don’t know what I would answer to that question, but my father’s answer was simply, ‘A poor musician desecrates a great instrument.’”32 Regardless of the brand of the piano, however, Liberace made it clear that, thanks to his father, it occupied a prominent place in his home. The entertainer correctly described the piano as a central element in most households at the time. “In ours it was more than a big piece of furniture to gather around for a little casual singing,” he testified. “To the Liberaces the piano was a way of life.”33
So here, then, was the Neapolitan immigrant, marginally employable, with a only a small, unsteady income, spending money on instruments and music that a rich man might covet.
But there was more. He demanded all this not merely for himself but also for his children. As a superior being, he would impose his standards on his children. They would be superior beings, too. The element that separated Salvatore Liberace from the herd would also distinguish his offspring. His son’s recollection captures a hint of that ambition: “My dad’s love and respect for music created in him a deep determination to give as his legacy to the world, a family of musicians dedicated to the advancement of the art.”34 Once he had set upon this or any other course, Sam became as implacable as the tides: “Just as soon as the sun rose in the east every morning each of us began taking piano lessons at the age of four. That was Dad’s plan. Get them early and keep them at it. He followed this routine just as carefully and as perfectly as he followed the beat of whatever conductor he was playing under.”35
Both ends and means of Salvatore’s ambitions generated sharp tension within his family. It irritated his wife increasingly over the years. She steamed over the record player, for example. “It was a tremendous luxury,” her son remembered.
I remember my mother and father having the most noisy argument over it. We needed many other things, my mother argued, but my father always spent his money on the phonograph because it reproduced the sound of music so beautifully. My father said it was more important to have music in the house than even food. . . . My mother was more practical. She worried about whether we had clothes, whether we had coal for the fire and food on the table. My dad was more aesthetic. He’d save up his money and take me to concerts which we could not really afford.36
Along with precious victrolas, costly pianos, and high priced concert tickets, the expenses of the children’s music training aggravated the mother’s discontent. Frances groused bitterly about spending money on luxurious music lessons while she sweated at her grocery business or slaved in the factory. “But their father insists they are all going to be professional musicians like he is,” she grumbled. “Personally, I think they’d be better off learning the grocery business, but I have nothing to say. He’s the boss.”37 The boss? Sam Liberace was closer to a tyrant. “I remember hearing many arguments and loud words when things didn’t go just the way he wanted them to go,” the middle boy remembered. “His Italian temper was something we grew to fear and Mother had only to say ‘Wait til your Dad comes home,’ to turn rebellious hellions into little angels.”38
The father brooked no opposition to either the form or content of his ambitions for his offspring. If his circumstances in Milwaukee left him little opportunity to shape his own musical destiny, Sal Liberace never questioned his aesthetic values, and he determined that all his children would share his commitments. His rigor and perfectionism left no room for his wife’s reservations, nor for childish foibles. His eldest, then, George, was banging away at the piano by 1916, and Angie was playing well before her little brother was born. Both, however, rebelled in their own way. George compromised. He hated piano lessons, but his switch to the violin by 1923 or so satisfied his father. Angie was less fortunate. She loathed musical discipline, but she offered no substitute to satisfy her parent. Despite skipped practices and disastrous recitals, her father did not bend. Because “Dad was such a hard taskmaster,” the younger brother determined, “he turned her off to music.”39
Sal Liberace left no evidence of giving easy praise; approval stuck in his craw. A perfectionist, as his son described him, he drove all relentlessly before him. His children responded variously to his demanding nature. The circumstance embittered his daughter, but his ambition created still other violent eddies in the household. It generated bad blood between Angie and her younger brother. Wally turned out to be a musical prodigy, and the race between them was over before it began. “Angie had a rough time not only with the piano lessons but also with me. It wasn’t that she didn’t like music or that she didn’t like me,” the pianist wrote. “I guess I made her self conscious because music that was a problem for her came easily to me.”40 The brother became the measure of her inadequacies by the father’s standards.
As if in a predictable effort to win his parent’s praise, Wally pressed his advantage. The artist told of one incident that suggests the degree of competition between brother and sister at recitals. Angie had played poorly, and, “when it was all over I’d . . . rush up to her and say ‘Angie, did you play that bad! You hit a clinker. It was awful! Let me show you how it should go,’” he recounted. “Then I’d play it right there in front of all the people.” The episode ended with his sister’s tears, his mother’s anger, and his own complete identification with his father. He had, indeed, become Salvatore Liberace. “I couldn’t help it,” he concluded coolly. “Like my Dad I’m a perfectionist. I want to see that everything is done properly.”41
The great showman as an adult left other even more compelling evidence of his close, if warped identity with his parent. His earliest memory revolved around his father. He remembered his age as two; Salvatore had taken the toddler to work with him. In the early twenties, the era of vaudeville and silent films, the transplanted Neapolitan musician played in the orchestra that accompanied the movies in one of the great old theaters of Milwaukee, the Alhambra. The little boy was there so often “that it almost became a second home to me,” he related. “I spent many hours each day sitting in the first row engrossed in the happenings on the stage, while Dad watched me out of the corner of his eye from the pit, which he called ‘the hole.’ Between shows he’d come and get me and take me with him to the orchestra room where his fellow musicians, who were not involved in the continual card game that is always going on in an orchestra room, would take a little time to play with ‘Boo-Loo.’ That was Dad’s nickname for me. Why he called me that even he couldn’t remember.”
The memory is significant because it establishes Liberace’s father as central in his life, making Salvatore the primary—if distracted—nurse or caregiver, imagining a “second home,” and configuring that home as a world of theater, men, and music. The memory becomes more significant, however, in the particular context in which Liberace related it, for this general recollection prologued a second, much more explicit memory. It involved Liberace’s discovery of both himself and the world simultaneously, and only his very late acknowledgment of the presence of females in his otherwise all-male cosmos.
The memoirist launched into the other episode immediately after recounting the scene in the orchestra pit at the Alhambra Theater. “But there were times when conditions were such that Dad couldn’t take ‘Boo-Loo’ with him,” he began the second narrative. Unable to care for the child, the father turned over his responsibilities not to his wife but to his daughter. Only six years older than the baby, however, at one point Angie became so engrossed in her play that she forgot about her brother, and he wandered off, walking twenty blocks to the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds that lay in the north part of West Allis. “The music and happy noises that rise from any fair attracted me,” he related, and “for a little while I lived in the beautiful world of sights, sounds and smells that make a wonderful place of any fair or amusement park.”
When the park security discovered him, the officers interrogated the two-year-old, and he reconstructed his baby answers in a way that related back to his earlier experience with his father at the theater. He identified himself specifically as his father’s child: “What’s your name, sonny?” the officer asked. The child repeated his father’s name for him—“Boo-Loo”—and the dialogue continued:
“What is your Daddy’s name?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does your Momma call you?”
“My Mama calls me kid.”
“What does your Daddy do?”
“He plays a toot-toot.”
“Where does he play the toot-toot?”
“In the hole.”
After describing his parents’ anxiety, Liberace concluded the memory by relating a triumphant episode before his return home: “The reunion was preceded by one of the happiest times of m
y life. What two-year-old kid wouldn’t find sheer, unadulterated joy, riding through the streets of his home town sitting in the sidecar of a police motorcycle?”
If Liberace’s association with his father were not apparent enough from the body of the memory itself, the tale’s coda, which juxtaposes the two stories against his own discovery of music, emphasizes it even more. “It was not long after my unscheduled visit to the Wisconsin State Fair that I discovered the upright piano in our living quarters,” he concluded, and the rest, he implied, was history.42
That the episode might not have happened exactly as he remembered it is beside the point. As he structures it, the memory amplifies the intimate relationship—in his own sense of things—between his father, the “beautiful world of sights, sounds and smells,” and his own career. It contrasts the shadowy images of his mother and the irresponsibility of his sister with a colorful, sensuous, public world of men, art, adventure, and performance. In one respect, the story turns the toddler into his father. Wally became Salvatore, the performer in the policeman’s sidecar. And Wally as Salvatore, not to mention Salvatore as Salvatore, was not an ordinary being.
But Wally Liberace had a mother, too. This Polish peasant woman was altogether as demanding as her husband. She had her own ambitions and her own ambitions for her children. She wanted material security first, and with it practicality—in contrast to her husband’s financial insolvency and high-flown notions about artiste-ery. Her admonitions about business and selling groceries gave verbal form to her goals. Her daily life confirmed the same sentiments as she sawed and hammered on the front porch, organized the grocery goods in what otherwise would have been her living room, and, during the Great Depression, trudged off to work in a cookie factory while her husband listened to Geraldine Farrar on his Victrola or played penny-ante poker with fellow musicians in the orchestra pit of the Alhambra. If her activities offered a countermodel, they implied reproach as well, but Frances Zuchowski was not one to suffer in silence and do her duty. Lacking subtlety and generosity, she vented her resentments freely. Hence the rancorous arguments her children remembered. Locked in battle with her husband, she looked for allies in her offspring. Her behavior gave rise to other tensions in the family.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 4