Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Liberace himself added a significant trailer to his retelling. If the gig had surprised the whole Liberace household, it infuriated the father. “Instead of that appearance being a triumph for me at home, it was a disaster. Dad got awfully mad,” he recalled. “I wasn’t playing the kind of music he wanted me to learn or to perform, and he told me so with a lot of emphasis and muscle.” His father loathed the music, disliked the venue. Had Salvatore Liberace, artiste, wasted his life in the hole at the Alhambra accompanying silent movies? He took out his indignities on his son. Masculine pride exaggerated his loathing. He despised the idea of living off his children’s income. “‘No kid of mine’s going to take over the responsibility for my family,’” he said, even when his own financial contributions to the household were nonexistent or pitifully small.6

  Even over the father’s objections—and perhaps because of them—the boy seized other opportunities for gaining fame and fortune by performing popular music. By the time he was in his early teens, he was performing every Saturday afternoon on the local radio station WTMJ. His father did not protest. After all, Sam played for the same radio station, as did Florence Kelly. Not least, of course, the boy was playing classical music, although, given the brouhaha that arose over Liszt’s “Forest Murmurs,” he was perhaps not devoting all he could to this sort of public performance. He played for anybody who would pay him. “He was so busy. He was trying to make a buck all the time,” one friend laughed.7 He played for dancing classes and Polish weddings. He himself recalled so many performances for Hadassah, the Jewish women’s organization, that people began assuming he was Jewish, he joked.8 A fellow musician remembered that the Wauwatosa Women’s Club extended regular invitations to his friend to play for teas and fashion shows.9

  About the time the radio regularized his performances, he found a more lucrative and exciting way of making money, creating, in the process, more difficulties at home. When Wally was fourteen, three older boys, Del Krause, Carl Lorenz, and Joe Zingsheim, tapped him for the pianist of their group, the Mixers. Although Krause lived nearby, he had never met Wally until around 1931 or 1932, when Wally was twelve or thirteen. “He was a mama’s boy, never out much in the neighborhood,” Krause reminisced sixty years later.10 Krause knew the boy’s reputation as a piano player, however. Hearing him play regularly increased Krause’s respect. He had an infallible ear, Krause testified. “He never had to use spots (sheet music). All you had to do was hum a few bars and Walter could play it.” He was a natural musician. He “could make an out of tune piano sound good,” he declared.11

  It was not a bad time to be able to play jazz and honky-tonk. In 1932, the country had rejected the Republicans and elected Franklin Roosevelt president. The repeal of prohibition quickly followed his inauguration. Suddenly, the famous beer-hall tradition of the sturdy folk of Milwaukee County flourished again—and legally. Bars, saloons, and gin mills soaked up entertainment. “The first job we ever played together was at Little Nick’s on Muskego and Mitchell Sts in 1933,” recalled Krause. “The place had been an ice cream parlor during Prohibition, but it became a gin mill when beer came back in 1933.” The group pulled in no more than two dollars a night, but in the heart of the Depression, none of the members groused about the money or anything else.12 Frances, conversely, raged.

  Sam hated popular music for aesthetic reasons, but his wife had other objections. According to Krause, Ma Liberace kept a crucifix on the household piano.13 The image suggests her limits and her ideals. The Mixers played few spots where crosses and pictures of Jesus hung on the walls. With her conservative, Polish, religious background, Frances Liberace associated the kinds of venues where the Mixers performed with sin and corruption. Meanwhile, her son’s new job undermined her control of her adored third child. Frances was not happy. The passage of half a century did not dull her offense, according to Scott Thorson, who, much later, heard about Lee playing with the Mixers. “Frances,” he recounted, “recalled being furious when Lee told her about the opportunity. She didn’t want her baby hanging around older men, playing in speakeasies or even worse places. There was no telling what went on in dives like that, she warned Lee.”14 On one occasion she prohibited her son from leaving the house altogether. Krause had to find a ladder and sneak Walter to their gig through an open window.15 The Mixers seldom saw Sam around, but Wally’s “domineering” mother filled the breach. When she relaxed her guard and let her son out at all, she persistently waved them off her porch with the admonition, “Del, you take care of him!” as they mounted the streetcar that ran down National Avenue to Milwaukee. “She groomed him,” Krause related, saying that she warned Walter over and over again as they departed, “Behave! Behave!”16

  The Mixers played together for about seven months, until the three founders graduated from high school in 1934. Afterwards, Wally played with other groups, including the Rhythm Makers, which made around the same amount of money and played in similar venues as the Mixers had, according to one of the new band’s members, Wallis Schaetzke, who grew up a couple of blocks away from the Liberaces. They took home about a dollar sixty a night, he remembered, “after knocking out songs until midnight.”17

  Wally also played with his brother, George. Together, they performed fairly regularly in various spots around Milwaukee, including Sam Pick’s Club Madrid, a fancy watering spot for those who still had money. This was where George had met his first wife, a cabaret singer. “This was one of our classier jobs,” Liberace said later. “The big nightclubs of the day all had an orchestra plus a floor show featuring a soubrette or pop singer, a prima donna who did the light opera numbers, and a blues singer who sang songs like “Body and Soul” and “Love for Sale.” My job was to accompany the singers as they went around the room between shows, singing requests from the audience. People would tip them five or ten dollars for each number, and they would split whatever they got with me.”18 In his autobiography, he describes one particularly memorable performance at the Club Madrid. He got roaring drunk, he remembers, fell off the piano bench in the middle of playing “The Carioca,” and threw up all over his brother’s borrowed dress clothes on the way home. “The next thing I remember was being delivered to my outraged parents, very much the worse for wear in George’s very messed-up tuxedo.”19 Neither then nor later, he protested, was he fond of alcohol. Generally, he was in greater danger from drunk patrons than from getting drunk himself, as his friend Joe Zingsheim from the Mixers recalled. “I remember one night he was playing piano in my brother’s gin mill and someone poured beer over his hands. He never missed a beat, he just kept on playing.”20

  Not all his gigs were as classy as the ones he played at Sam Pick’s, nor as prim as the women’s club teas. Some engagements were even rowdier than those that took place at the gin mills. He played stag parties, for one thing. His parents disapproved, so he lied to get out of the house. Sometimes he accompanied pornographic films, and he provided music for live strippers. “I loved to punctuate their movements with special chords and riffs as I accompanied their weird gyrations.” He was sixteen, he remembered, when in the midst of naked women and cheering men, the police broke in. The authorities turned him over to his parents, who raged and attempted to restrict him to performing at more genteel locations. But the cash called, and he was off again to the freedom and ready money of Milwaukee’s fleshpots.21

  With money in his pockets, his confidence soared. He was transforming himself. Photographs of his various bands reveal the change. They show a smiling and self-possessed teenager, a sanguine young man. By the age of seventeen, playing on his own and earning his own income, Wally Liberace had come a long way from where he’d been when he had entered high school. In 1932, he had been a skinny seventh-grader with an embarrassing speech impediment; he had little life outside practicing the piano. By 1934, the boy who, two years earlier, couldn’t pronounce his own name was speaking as clearly as his peers, even if—as one family friend remembered—in “a voice that you don’t often hear at foot
ball games.”22

  Classical music had provided an escape from some of the horrors of his childhood; popular performance did the same thing even better. Had his classmates ignored or mocked his burgeoning career as a classical prodigy? His vocation as popular entertainer had diametrical effects. Instead of separating him from his peers, popular music became a source of community with them. One of his old friends, Joe Zingsheim, told a journalist how the schoolboy musician “hurried home for lunch and back to school each day so that he could play dance music for his classmates on an old piano in the West Milwaukee High School gym. ‘He could play anything they asked him to play,’ said Zingsheim. ‘If he didn’t know the song, he’d asked them to sing a little and then he would know how to play it.’”23 Schoolmates, especially girls, always thronged around the banged-up instrument in the gymnasium.24 Sometimes he invited his classmates back home with him during his lunch break, where he would entertain them at the family piano. They accepted.25 He played anything. A friend could hum a bar or two of some current song, and he was off. Through popular music—and his great gift—he turned his sissy liability into an asset.

  So it was with much of his life at West Milwaukee High between 1933 and 1937. Was he making “a virtue of being ‘different,’” as Scott Thorson put it?26 If he made his “differences” charming, it was an extraordinary feat, for his eccentricities remained as numerous as they were flagrant. Indeed, formal music and classical piano playing were only minor details among his social liabilities.

  For better or for worse, Walter Liberace was not a normal boy. Steve Swedish, an old family friend, insisted that “anyone who knew Liberace in high school and just afterwards had no doubts about his sexual orientation. ‘I don’t know what might have happened in later life,’” he told a newspaper reporter, “‘but when he was here, he was—what do you call it?—heterosexual.’” Steve Swedish was either blind or ignorant. Wally Liberace was a mama’s boy, a sissy, and faggy ways distinguished almost everything he did long after 1932.27

  Unlike most boys, Walter had no “girl problems.” “He was very popular with the girls; they always crowded around him at the piano,” but theirs was a pal, confidante kind of relationship, nothing romantic, Del Krause noted.28 Wally enjoyed female company, but he never expressed any interest in dating girls, recalled another old high school friend.29 This was not the most peculiar of his eccentricities.

  As a little boy, he had disliked the outdoors and sports. The prejudice persisted into high school. “He didn’t go out for sports. He was always in dramatics and classes pertaining to theatrics,” said his friend William Schmidt, who had performed with him in the Rhythm Makers.30 Walter pursued other classes and competed in still other areas normally considered the domain of girls. “He was a great typist,” a female classmate recalled. “In competitions he’d beat everybody, women included.” He liked home economics and boasted of his culinary skills. His teacher offered her own opinions: “His cooking was very artistic. He took a lot of pride in his work. Everything had to be just so.”31 He himself had persuaded the staff to inaugurate the cooking course for boys, and the males followed his lead with enthusiasm. “It was a new thing,” recalled a member of that first class. “We had a heck of a time.”32

  Did his father consider himself an “artiste”? His second son outpaced him, both in degree and in type. He was so gifted a draftsman and painter that some teachers debated about whether he should give up music for the other art form. He turned anything into art. “He used to carve animals and figures out of soap,” his principal related. “Other kids would make snowmen in the winter. Not Walter—he’d turn out a fantastic snow sculpture of a deer or a horse. He’d have all the kids in the neighborhood icing it for him.”33

  Age increased his love of fabrics and design. He played with cloth; he re-upholstered his parents’ furniture; he designed clothes; he tried his hand at millinery.34 Like La Bohème’s Mimi, he made silk flowers. He won local fame for this skill. Thus, he came to make silk corsages for his classmates. “When we’d have dances—the June prom, the Silhouette Dance, where all the girls asked out the boys—he’d make up different corsages,’” a high school friend remembered. “All the fellows would buy them from him to give to the girls.”35

  He loved pretty things and dressed accordingly. His home ec teacher offered one view: “He used to come to me with his clothes problems. ‘What color do you think I should wear with this tie?’ he’d ask me. He loved gay clothes.” Examining an old high school annual fifteen years later, Joseph Schwei, his assistant principal, pointed out the boy’s graduation photo. “Look. That’s a purple boutonniere. . . . That was Walter for you. And see that double breasted vest with lapels. Nobody but Liberace would have dared to dress like that in those days—and the kids liked him for it.”36 “He was a real showman,” the principal observed on another occasion. “He could get by with anything. The fellows liked him.”37 Henry Mahr, a violinist with the Rhythm Makers, remembered the fancy boy in spats. “He always wore a vest and suit to school. The rest of us were wearing sweaters,” recalled another old bandmate.38 Del Krause recalled him in cutaways and evening dress at school. Strange? Confirming their principal’s judgment, his old friend asserted, “He was accepted, whatever he did or wore.”39 He was making a virtue of being different.

  If he favored costume on a daily basis, formal dress-up occasions—character days—at school elicited the most imaginative efforts. Steve Denkinger had known the boy since they were in the seventh grade. “He’d always dress up,” Denkinger said. “One year, he dressed up like Greta Garbo. Wally, he always won first prize.”40

  He made his interest in fashion design a matter of public consumption, and it won his school chums’ affectionate regard. When the emcee of his high school fashion show fell sick, Walter substituted for her. “That night he came out on the stage in a beret, smock and flowing artist’s tie. He had a long pointer and an easel. He did a perfect job of describing the clothes. It brought down the house—and I don’t know one boy who resented it; everybody thought it was a big joke.”41

  On his own, a million miles from the nearest homo, light years away from any gay subculture, a lone invert, Wally Liberace rediscovered a standard sissy boy’s response to his own peculiarities. The good citizens of West Milwaukee had no word for it. Others did: camp. A survival technique, it mocked and objectified itself, even as it objectified and mocked the world. It celebrated style over content, appearance over substance—including, of course, substantial differences and conflict; exaggeration, caricature, and artifice dominated the style. The artiste in flowing smock and jaunty beret was already a caricature when the high school student swished into the role; parodying such parody represented the perfect expression of the form. More critically, Walter Liberace, like many before and after, parodied himself or what he might have been: Spats? Tails. Purple boutonnieres! GRETA GARBO!! The Marquess of Queensbury condemned Oscar Wilde for “posing” as a sodomite. The artifice of posing and posturing—for Wilde no less than for the West Milwaukee adolescent—dulled the social threat of sexual deviance, by, paradoxically, making it more obvious, more artificial, more fake, less real. Caricature suggests humor, too, almost by definition, while smiles and laughter, by extension, defuse antipathy.42 The antipathy was always there, in any event. It lurked in the nearest dark corner, including the dark corners of the gay boy’s psyche: hostility, real or imagined, informed the camp strategy.43 While his peers tolerated—even loved—the eccentric, West Milwaukee also considered this circumstance anomalous. The natural social default for gender deviation was hostility, rejection, ill will; tolerance, popularity, and affection always required explanation and justification. “The fellows liked him,” the principal added, not ungratuitously, after cataloging Wally’s deviations; “I don’t know one boy who resented it; . . . everybody thought it was a big joke.” The authorities apologized, effectively, for the absence of queer bashing.44

  If Walter Liberace never got bashed, if he,
on the contrary, won the plaudits of his schoolmates, he nevertheless led a highly conflicted life. Taking a cue from the feminist philosopher Judith Butler, modern academic critics refer to all gender distinctions as performance rather than as natural activity. Performativity rather than being becomes the watchword. This generalization rather diminishes the particular difficulties of the campy production that Walter Liberace felt it necessary to maintain in high school. His perpetual staginess required extraordinary energy, even as it conflicted with a different self that he defined as real. With his new persona, the mama’s boy fought more demons inside than outside. Scott Thorson later recounted Liberace’s dilemma this way: “Adolescence can be agony for anyone, but it was a special hell for Lee. Still struggling to deal with his own sexual identity, he had to live through the torture of hearing his classmates making crude jokes about ‘homos.’ Every time it happened he recalled dying a little inside.” He told Thorson he made “an all-out effort to transform himself into a heterosexual. . . . He would look at a shapely bosom or a round female rear and will himself to feel desire. But then his eyes would stray to a pair of broad shoulders or well-muscled arms and the battle would be lost. He couldn’t help being attracted to men.”45

  The circumstance was actually more complicated than Thorson’s rendering—or perhaps Liberace’s memory—suggests. His dilemma rotated not merely on the axis of erotic longing for other men but on his other affections, affectations, and passions—the sissy ways that characterized his life long, long before he indulged in sex with fellows. He was who he was—the admirer of men and boys, but, no less, he was the devotee of art and music, a slave of beauty, a hierophant in life’s show. If men filled his fantasies, so did silk corsages, flowing smocks, dandy dress, artwork and sculpted animals, the well-turned musical phrase—or even the decorative bit of parsley dashed across a plate of spaghetti. He could resist having sex with other men; the other sources of his queerness, however, were beyond his power of transformation, almost beyond his awareness. Thorson summed it up. “He had to face the truth. He couldn’t change, no matter how hard he tried. Being gay was as much a part of him as the color of his eyes or his hair.”46