While her husband’s deportment generated angry rivalries among the siblings, so did hers. Narrow and manipulative, she did not merely compete with her husband for her children’s allegiance; she spawned more rivalries among the four, playing favorites, and endlessly controlling them. She did so even as she entered her dotage. The showman’s most famous lover, Scott Thorson, witnessed the performance even when Frances was in her eighties. He marveled at her performance with her superstar child. “She knew exactly how to manipulate him,” he wrote. After one sojourn with her and her son, he mused that “She played him even better than he played the piano.” “She dominated them as youngsters,” Thorson believed, “and she continued to dominate them as adults. On occasion, I actually saw her poke them with her cane to get their attention. . . . Frances could be a sweet old lady one minute and a merciless nag the next.” Quoting her celebration of Lee as a baby, he confirmed that her caul-born child was always her favorite; Lee himself concurred and considered the favoritism and inequity the source of his sister’s and brothers’ resentment.43
All this wrangling seemed to affect Angie—and later, Rudy—the most, while George escaped the worst consequences of both sibling and parental rivalries. Indeed, George’s younger brother memorialized him as “the great arbitrator, the great keeper of the peace among us children,” “a force for good in the musical feuds over the piano.” For whatever reason, the eldest son also played the same role with both Frances and Salvatore. He managed to please each without antagonizing the other. Perhaps his birth and babyhood at the beginning of their marriage represented an easier time for his parents, while the couple’s hostility grew yearly when his siblings were growing up. “His music lessons always met Dad’s approval and, what’s more, he pleased Mom by pretending to be interested in the grocery business,” his brother wrote. Suggesting the riptides of their domestic life, however, (and perhaps something of his own jealousy at his brother’s ease, too) the memoirist added immediately, “I say ‘pretending to be interested’ because if he really had been he’d have gone into it instead of becoming a musician.”44
Long after the world-famous entertainer had abandoned his Walter/Wally identity, family, to a large degree, continued to play an important role in his life and in shaping his public self. He provided his siblings jobs and support; he showered them with gifts and benefices; he employed them in his entourage; he made them a part of his act—indeed, during the height of his career, he integrated his mother and elder brother so thoroughly into his performance that they became a part of his persona. Familial duty played the most active role in his character, but the crosscurrents and paradoxes of Fifty-first Street in West Allis persisted in the glory days of Hollywood and Las Vegas. The tensions and ambiguities about his mother and father permeated his life.
In public, he identified himself so closely with his mother that the association became inseparable from his public life. His critics, especially in the fifties, regularly used the relationship as prima facie evidence of the performer’s decadence. While his critics identified him as a “Mama’s Boy,” a euphemism for queer and sissy, he harbored the most conflicted passions toward his mother. If he loved and respected her, he left evidence of equally potent resentment of this yokel dowager whom he himself had helped invent. He confided to Scott Thorson that he considered his mother’s attitude as “completely suffocating and damn near incestuous.” He was past sixty when Frances died in 1980 at almost ninety. Only with her death did he profess to escape her influence. “I’m finally free,” he confessed in his only reference to her passing.45
His relationship with Salvatore, if anything, was more complicated still. His autobiography hints at its labyrinthine qualities, which he himself seemed to understand only partially. He memorialized over and over his debts to his father, his identity with his parent, his psychological kinship. Despite these testimonies, however, he broke with his father in 1940 and never reestablished cordial relations. For over a decade, he failed even to speak to Sam Liberace. A reunion arranged by a mutual friend, Steve Swedish, in 1953 left no evidence of altering the performer’s public or private attitudes.46 Even then, their reunion was engineered in secret, with arrangements being made for Sam to perform in the orchestra at one of his son’s concerts. The son was not at all pleased with the surprise.47 Twenty years had failed to soften the force of his rejection.
Reflecting on the psychological interpretation of homosexuality that ascribes the condition to a boy’s obsession with his mother and hatred of his father, Scott Thorson related how Liberace believed those circumstances described his own life perfectly: “Lee said he had the perfect parents to blame.”48 If the circumstances of his life were more complicated than Liberace might have known, they were infinitely more complicated than his still-adolescent boyfriend could recognize, and the performer’s attitude toward his father played a direct role in his affairs with a string of young lovers, not least Scott Thorson himself.
But all this—fame, wealth, lovers, and a gay world—lay impossibly far from the smiling American village of West Allis in 1926.
Two
THE GREAT ESCAPE
In those days we had a long, open porch across the front of the house. The kids would pass by and hear him practicing. They’d yell all kinds of names at him. They called him a sissy because he preferred the piano to baseball and football.
ANGIE LIBERACE
The undated newspaper photograph captures a child dressed for a play. He is wearing caveman garb, a fur-like garment worn toga style across one shoulder. Barefoot, he kneels, holding a spearlike section of bamboo. Behind him, a little girl rests her hand on his right shoulder while directing his attention to some object out of the frame. Caught in full profile, he shows a sharp nose and a more sharply pointed chin. With his slender, well-shaped arms and legs, he is very thin, but even pretty, for a boy.
The pointed chin and nose came from the Zuchowskis, but the snap fails to show the full, naturally dark lips his father had passed on to him. Serious and unsmiling in his outlandish getup, the image also reveals nothing of the deep dimples that creased his cheeks with every grin. The exact circumstances of the photograph are not clear, but in it, Wally Liberace looks to be around nine.1 The year was probably 1928, perhaps early 1929, although it may have been a year earlier. Whether it was 1927, ’28, or early ’29, however, this was a notable time for the boy in the picture. These years were hardly free of problems of one kind or another for Sam and Frances Liberace’s family, but the eve of the Great Crash was as close as the Liberaces ever got to bliss. It began with the move from West Allis to West Milwaukee, less than a mile away on National Avenue. In 1926, his mother had abandoned the living-room grocery business, and the family had left its fifteen-year residence on Fifty-first Street, and bought a house on National Avenue across from the National Soldiers Home. They were moving up in the world.
The move to 4301 National Avenue resolved some of tensions of the Liberaces’ domestic life, even as it represented other improvements already taking place. Fifteen-year-old George, thirteen-year-old Angie, and Wally, their seven-year-old brother, now had much more space than they’d had in the original house; the new place must have seemed a mansion in comparison. Though not grand, the house was far from small. Occupying a corner lot, the house, with its half second floor and basement, contained probably two thousand square feet of living space. It even boasted modest luxuries, like the small stained-glass window that still graces the living room.
Not only was the house more spacious, but the quality of the space was much improved, too. Everyone was glad to be free of the groceries. “I guess the most wonderful thing about our new home was that you didn’t have to walk through a grocery store to get into it,” the youngest child remembered. “It was, as my friends in England would say, ‘a proper house.’” It was a good house. His mother demonstrated her culinary skills in not one but two kitchens. While she cooked for company on the main floor, for every day, Frances preferred the bas
ement kitchen, where she “cooked on a great big coal stove and kept things fresh in an oldfashioned icebox, which hadn’t as yet become old fashioned.” Between 1926 and the Great Crash, Sal worked more steadily than before or after, and Frances played proper housewife in her proper house. Extremely neat and tidy, she made the house sparkle, according to her son. In her one concession to the arts, she “made sure there were real lace curtains in the windows and kept old-fashioned lace antimacassars on the arms and the backs of all the chairs so that people’s hands and the oil from their hair wouldn’t soil the upholstery.” Sal loved gardening, and the yard delighted him. His son remembered his lilac bushes in particular, the house being filled with their fragrance in May, around his birthday. “I don’t want anybody to think that we didn’t have nice neighbors, but our house stood out from all the others,” the entertainer boasted long afterwards.2
The house was new, too. All the houses in the triangle area between National Avenue and Beloit Road, running east-west, and Fifty-sixth Street, which ran north-south, had been constructed within the preceding two or three years before 1926. Some were larger than others, but all boasted amenities like sun porches or small gardens colorful with summer flowers. Although National Avenue was even busier than Fifty-first Street, it had advantages the other thoroughfare lacked. All these houses looked out on the beautiful, rolling grounds of the National Soldiers Home with its huge trees, old even when Wally Liberace saw them through his window across the street.
The Liberaces had moved to a thoroughly middle-class neighborhood of the upwardly mobile, and the mere fact that they could afford such a place indicates a major shift in their fortunes. The house was a step up in two ways. First, the family now owned a comfortable house in a nice neighborhood, in contrast to the cottage they had previously shared with potatoes and canned goods; second, they could now number themselves among a minority of Americans anywhere in the country who owned any real property at all. In 1926, probably less than 40 percent of U.S. residents were property owners. The new neighborhood shared many characteristics of the old, however. No less than the community at large, the quiet streets that gridded the area between National and Beloit were peopled by a diversity of inhabitants. The names spoke volumes: Lymans, Dodges, Pritchards, and Hanleys passed Grabeks, Skacels, and Dobrotinseks on the way to work, school, or church; these in turn lived no farther away from Arseneuses, Nelesens, Kissingers, Haerles, and Hipschmanns. This part of the community was as self-contained as Fifty-first Street. The stretch of National Avenue near the Home offered everything from gasoline stations and barbershops to grocery stores and tailors. Then, as now, it boasted plenty of taverns and eateries, although no one was buying legal beer in the twenties.3 George and Angie could walk to high school, while Pershing Elementary School, where their little brother enrolled in the first grade, was only two blocks from the Liberaces’ back door. St. Florian’s Church, where Angie had been christened, was only a couple of blocks beyond the primary school.
In his memory, the world-famous pianist always associated his childhood with material deprivation, but the record does not sustain this judgment, or not completely. The early years on National Avenue were even bountiful. Visits to his maternal grandparents, Frank and Anna Zuchowski, in the country added to the pleasure of these times. Menasha lay 100 miles away on hard country roads, and the trip in the family Ford provided an occasion for adventure in itself. “And that it survived the roads of rural Wisconsin should stand as testimony to the greatness of American automotive engineering,” the memoirist added. While his father had rustled up the vehicle in some unknown way, Liberace also noted pointedly that his mother did all the driving.4
Frank and Anna Zuchowski lived in a tidy gabled house with a large summer porch off the rear wing on land adequate for gardens and livestock.5 All was not completely well on their farm; much later, the entertainer made passing reference to his grandparents “having difficulty and facing divorce.”6 As his memoir scants his grandfather, failing even to offer his name, the other remark suggests that Frank Zuchowski might have been as difficult as Liberace’s own father. He was, in any case, as revealed in photographs, gangling and lanky, with a huge, 1880s-type drooping mustache.7 Liberace’s grandmother was quite different. A tiny woman with hair pulled back in a tight little bun, she was the focus of the boy’s devotion on those visits in the country. Beyond the troubling grandfather, farm life delighted him. He recalled it with unalloyed pleasure. “Grandmother raised chickens and cared for a marvelous kitchen garden. Grandfather took care of the pigs, a couple of cows and an old horse that was in about the same class as our Ford. There were fragrant fruit trees everywhere. From there and the harvest from her garden, Grandmother used to put up ‘goodies’ for the winter. But, looking back, I can’t imagine how she had any left by the time winter arrived.” While a considerable portion of the Zuchowskis’ preserves bounced and jounced back to West Milwaukee in the Liberaces’ Ford, Mrs. Zuchowski also used her larder to fatten up her city-bred grandchildren. “I was a very skinny little kid, and Mom found that our visits to Grandmother’s house were not only fun for me but healthful as well. In this Grandmother concurred and collaborated,” the musician reflected. “I always managed to gain a few important pounds at her urging. Her favorite expression, at least the one I heard her use most, was ‘Yitz, yitz, liebchen’ . . . ‘Eat, eat, dear child.’ And eat I did! I loved my grandmother and I couldn’t refuse her anything.”8
The absence of electricity, running water, and other modern conveniences might have posed a hardship for the family, but their very lack added to the “fascination, the glamour of the place” for the city grandchildren. “We loved the scent of oil lamps and the aroma that came from the stove . . . ,” the grandson wrote much later. A cistern of fresh rainwater for washing hair intrigued him, while the mysteries of the barn galvanized his imagination. Also, unlike the strictures that surrounded his life in West Milwaukee, Menasha had “no restrictions on what we could or could not do or where we might go on the farm and we got into all kinds of scrapes, falling out of hay mows, being kicked by cows, learning about life. . . .”9
The halcyon days lasted three years. They vanished with the stock market crash in October 1929. By the time prosperity returned after the war, the economic insecurities of over a decade and a half had changed the Liberace family completely and had insinuated themselves irrevocably into the American psyche.
It is not possible to overemphasize the impact of the Great Depression on a whole generation of Americans. Sam’s and Frances’s family is representative. The Liberace children’s age group bore its brunt: born in 1911, George was eighteen when it hit, Angie was sixteen, Wally, ten, and as a child the youngest, Rudy, born in 1931, knew nothing but its deprivation. This was Richard Nixon’s generation, Lyndon Johnson’s, Ronald Reagan’s. It was John Kennedy’s, too, only his father’s immense wealth spared him its scars. Almost no one escaped unscathed. As chronicled most graphically in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee, few suffered as much as did the Southern poor, who were at the mudsill even before the crash. Southerners, however, had been bred on social and religious fatalism at least since the Civil War, and they had planted pessimism with their first crops of tobacco, corn, and cotton. Among industrial workers, craftsmen, and new immigrants of the North, the circumstance was different. Having partaken of an American promise denied Southern sharecroppers, the exigencies of the thirties seemed unjust, anomalous, and even un-American. It prompted not the sharecroppers’ fatal acceptance but increased energy and labor, commitment and belief. This circumstance also helps account for the kind of homebrewed radicalism and corn-fed communism the era witnessed in the United States—and in which West Allis and Allis-Chalmers labor unions developed a remarkable share. Thus ran the logic: if prosperity and progress were American benefits, their denial was therefore un-American, so immigrant communists could be more American, as it were, than nativeborn capitalists. The identification of progress, pro
sperity, and the American way also contributed significantly to the collapse of socialism with the economic recovery after the war, and the ease with which even archradicals—not to mention the rank and file—slipped into the suburbs and suburban life in the fifties and after.
The effects of the Depression, however, lasted long, long after economic recovery. The catastrophe still echoes in the lives of the men and women who endured it over half a century after the panic closed its last bank. Deprivation produced various effects. It made some mean, mercenary, and guarded; in others it nurtured profligacy. Postwar cultural phenomena even combined the two. Liberace, it goes without saying, represented the tendency toward prodigality. While his excesses can be read, then, as a function of his deprivations as a boy, his profound audience appeal reflects aspects of this generational influence as well. Actually, his appeal suggests a coming together of the opposing tendencies of the Depression: millions in his age cohort found his extremes gratifying even when they could not or would not go to his limits of consumption. Different combinations of these diverse responses to the Depression echoed through the fifties and sixties in still other ways. They help account for peculiarities of the Baby Boomer generation, for example. If the parents were deprived, they would sacrifice for their sons and daughters, who would not know want. The self-indulgence of young men and women of the sixties and seventies was one result. Even the Baby Boomers’ rejection of standards, style, and convention coursed through Liberace’s later career and underlined a generational split in his appeal. In any event, the Great Depression was the watershed for America—and for the Liberace family on National Avenue, West Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 5