Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  All of this, not merely his longing for other men, set him at odds with almost every conventional value in the world of West Milwaukee. Indeed, it set him at odds with virtually every accepted value in the world at large. Here was the problem. He could not, would not change his own nature, but the world was equally intractable. Even so, he hated conflict, despised contention, and longed to please and to belong. His art bridged that gap. It blunted enmity; it soothed the savage passions of his classmates and community. And perhaps his greatest artistic achievement was that of creating and re-creating himself. As he remade his speech, he reworked his life. In this regard, his life mirrors the fundamental issues and dilemmas homosexual boys and men perpetually encounter.

  As long as children are conceived by standard methods and raised by ordinary men and women, homosexual boys will have one model for their lives—a model that fails to apply to their adult lives and affections and that sometimes fails to kick in at all. By six or so, when they discover the world beyond the hearth, they will already be off center from the model, eccentric, first queer, and only then, gay. They will be odd, in effect, before they have much sense of sex, per se, of any sort. Wally Liberace’s sense of trauma, which he associated with his family’s move in 1926, might represent a first, presexual manifestation of difference and peculiarity. As his sexual consciousness grew, so did his sense of estrangement, so that as a sixty-year-old he recalled adolescence as his time of alienation, guilt, and outlawry—despite his not having violated any social norm of sexual activity.

  What does all this mean for a life? What does it mean for one life in particular? It suggests, for one thing, that every gay boy has to create and recreate his own model. If the father model doesn’t work exactly, and the mother model doesn’t work exactly, and the family coupling model doesn’t work exactly, the boy experiments and plays with various models and combinations of models, or creates new models. The experimentation might be sexual—hence the regular inclusion in Gay ISO ads of headings like “Bi-Curious” or the justification of homosexual activity as “experimenting around.” It involves sexual inventiveness. The experimentation, play, and curiosity, however, is more than physical: it involves the spirit as well as the body. In one regard, this is the very stuff of art, insofar as the experimenting involves not merely creating models, but the idea of creation itself. In the absence of fixity, the making of things, making things new, remaking things, becomes the focus of existence. By the same token, insofar as one’s own being is the most immediate thing that one can have or make, creating a persona, experimenting with personae, performance and acting—and with it dress and illusion—come close to the heart of the homosexual male experience.47

  Regardless of the theoretical bases or implications of homosexuality, these elements appeared early in the life of the high school student, Walter Valentino Liberace. His adolescent flair for drama and theatrics, his fascination with dress and clothing, and his concern with the shape, form, and presentation of all things speak to this characteristic in his life—the centrality of art: homo faber, man maker with a twist. He was a self-conscious actor in a play. He wrote his own part. He rendered a classic performance. He projected a very clear self-image—confident, insouciant, daring. He gave evidence, even at the time, however, that this was an act and that he was not always on. People remembered a disparity between the gay blade and another boy. “For all his energy and involvement in school activities, classmates said Liberace maintained a calculated detachment from other students,” a reporter wrote in summary after interviewing his chums. “He wasn’t the type of fellow to fool around in classes with the other kids,” one boy said. “It didn’t seem like the same relationship I had with other fellows. It wasn’t that kind of tomfoolery. He’d talk to you, but he was reserved. I don’t think he palled around with anybody outside school.” Another friend from the Rhythm Makers concurred: “He wasn’t the mingling type. He went his own way.”48 If this recollection suggests isolation, detachment, and even loneliness, his revelations about his high school years to Scott Thorson long after confirms it. “Alienated from his family and his peers,” according to Thorson, “he experienced terrible guilt, as if he’d committed an unspeakable crime that must forever be hidden. It was, he recalled unhappily, the worst period of his life.”49

  If Wally Liberace was not happy, and if he created his charming persona the way he created animals out of soap and snow, he possessed social gifts, too, quite as remarkable as his musical and artistic ones. Perhaps he worked at it, perhaps it was cultivated, but the basis of his appeal was indubitably sincere: he really did enjoy other people, he delighted in pleasing them, he loved making folks happy. His old friends and associates never differed on this question. One summed it up: “He was very considerate of others, too. He didn’t do just what he had to do—he was always thinking of helping out the other fellow. We all liked Walter very much.”50

  Was Frances’s boy grim in the privacy of his own room? He confessed decades later that Pagliaccio’s spirit of the clown masked his pain. The circumstances take another turn here, too, for people and performing also elevated his spirits and lifted him outside himself. His show was not all tragedy disguised. In the smock, substituting for the lady emcee, pointing out the high points of high school high fashion, he was surely playing the clown, but he was not always weeping on the inside. If he transformed an audience with laugher, the laugher transfigured him as well. The stage, the dramatic rendering, possessed a transformative power that blunted the analogy with Pagliacci. Not only could he transform audiences with his humor, he could transform his own humors. “Vesti la guibba”? He sang it in a major key.

  It took some doing to carry all this off. A half century later, he still shuddered at the terror of being caught out. As a teenager, he threw courage up against his fears. As an adult, he often referred to bravery. “When you are doing something you believe in, you’ve always got to stick to it. It isn’t always easy.”51 If facing a line of determined football players on a playing field requires one form of courage, for a mincing high school boy to face the enemy every day in every school corridor—not merely in an athletic contest once a week during the athletic season—requires another. There is gallantry, even nobility, in both performances. In later years, at least as he relived these times for his teenage boyfriend Scott Thorson, the horror might have blotted out the joys and benefits of West Milwaukee High, but his classmates celebrated his accomplishments. They celebrated him. If he forgot it, his classmates held him in the highest affection and regard, and they captioned his yearbook photo with a notable tribute:

  Our Wally has already made his claim

  With Paderewski, Gershwin and others of fame.

  He finished West Milwaukee High in the spring of 1937. He had just turned eighteen, making him a year older than most of his classmates. He now faced the problem of what to do next. He left no evidence of ever having questioned his plans to devote his life to music, but he had not resolved the wheres and hows of this commitment. Indeed, the high school annual’s tribute captures one of the problems he faced that summer he graduated: the choice of Gershwin and popular music versus Paderewski and the classics.

  Throughout the thirties, the young man had bifurcated his life along these lines, without much overlap between the two. He continued to do so for the next few years as well. His Paderewski discipline dominated one part of his life. He tried to capitalize on classical music, too. No later than 1938, perhaps earlier, Florence Kelly had negotiated her prize student a contract with a booking agency, and he began a community concert series, touring “all over the Midwest playing large towns and small cities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan.”52 He ventured as far west on the circuit as Omaha, Nebraska, where a dated photograph from 1939 depicts him.53 As an outgrowth of these early tours, he had played Kimball Hall in Chicago in 1938, won his audition with Frederick Stock soon after, and performed with the Chicago Symphony in January 1940. He was twenty. He was still touring perhap
s even into 1941. The concert circuit provided both cash, however pitiful in amount, and even a modicum of fame. “Brilliant Young Pianist Appearing in Concert” proclaims the poster, and names the venue as “Congregational Church Auditorium.” The city remains anonymous, but it could have been one of scores of New England-like towns and villages in the upper Midwest, where hard-pressed citizens tried to scratch out a little culture as the Depression stretched on and on. Touring had its glamour, too, however limited. The publicity stills reveal a part of it: the serious young artist, barely out of his teens, dressed in the elegant tails and white tie, or a little less formal, in a tuxedo and black tie.54

  This was Walter’s Paderewski career. Meanwhile the “Gershwin” impulses pulled him relentlessly in another direction.

  On the surface, at least, he performed popular music chiefly for the cash. As his friends recalled, he chased the dollar relentlessly. About the time he graduated from high school in 1937—and as late as 1939, according to one source—he toured with a local dance band, the Jay Mills Orchestra, even when he was playing the community concert circuit, too.55 He was the youngest member of the group until the vocalist Vivian Stapleton, later known as Vivian Blaine, joined it. When not working, the two of them hung out at skating rinks and other benign spots, while the rest of the band was boozing and carousing.56 The orchestra played out of town with more professional musicians for better audiences, but otherwise their engagements differed little from those of the Mixers and the Rhythm Makers. One report has it that Frederick Stock disapproved of such activity before Walter’s performance with the Chicago Orchestra. Just as likely, it conflicted too sharply with playing serious concerts, which still took precedence, according to Liberace’s own judgment at this time.

  He continued to pick up other popular-music gigs. As the thirties wore on, the saloons and “gin mills” he’d played as a hustling teenager gave way to slightly fancier watering holes. A couple of these stand out. He got his first out-of-town engagement playing on his own probably in 1938 or early 1939. He was around nineteen at the time. He described the gig as a six- or seven-month engagement at a saloon called the Wunderbar in Wausau, Wisconsin, the major city in central Wisconsin, about ninety miles inland from Green Bay. In addition to being his first independent performance, the Wunderbar job provided the occasion for his experimentation with names that would match his new, popular-music persona. His autobiography memorializes the effort. “Walter Valentino Liberace sounded too high class,” he determined. “W. V. Liberace sounded a like a sign on the desk of a vice-president of something. I couldn’t use Walter Valentino because it sounded too Latin for that part of the world.” The management of the place then came up with “Walter Buster Keys.” He kept Walter so that the boy would listen when anyone addressed him, Liberace explained. “Buster was an acknowledgment of my youth and seemed to describe my ‘joi de vivre’ as well as my piano playing technique.” The name lasted no longer than his run in Wausau.57 In The Things I Love, he offered a different story: he adopted the name to hide his identity as a popular performer from the manager of the Chicago Symphony, who objected.58

  Although the young piano player had been on the road a good bit before this with the community concert tours and the Jay Mills Orchestra, he had never spent so much time away from home at one stretch, and certainly not in one place. He fell into a pattern that was to characterize much of his life thereafter. He took up with people. In Wausau, he moved in with “a lovely Irish family” and became, in effect, a part of their domestic circle. He continued his religious life in Wausau, too. As he tells it in his autobiography, a local church choir lunched at his saloon, and the director invited him to sing with them. He picked out Gounod’s “Ave Maria” (based on a Bach theme) and sang the solo in the very large church, where, he judged, “I made a very small, unresonant sound. They never asked me to sing another solo,” he concluded, but he continued to participate in services by playing the organ occasionally.59

  Offers from other cities started coming in during this period. In 1939, “Ice Vanities of 1940” offered him an eight-week contract at eighty dollars a week to accompany the skaters on a tour of major cities in the northwest. Alverdes restaurant, a swanky dining room in St. Paul, offered him sixty-five dollars a week for an unlimited engagement. He turned both down in favor of a long and notable run at the posh Red Room at the old Plankton Arcade in downtown Milwaukee in 1939. He played from five o’clock to midnight, earning thirty-five dollars a week, plus all the food he could eat.60 The pay was good, but the gig was also particularly attractive in that it enabled him to live at home. Moreover, and perhaps more important, it allowed him to continue his musical studies with his piano teacher. The explanation he made to his new employer, Max Pollack, that he was turning down other job offers and working in the Red Room because it was more convenient for his “future concert engagements,”61 is suggestive of the tension present in his musical life. Liszt and Paderewski still held the upper hand, if tenuously.

  If it offered decent and convenient work, the Red Room still posed problems for the twenty-year-old performer. For one thing, Pollack’s piano, like most saloon instruments, was awful. Some of these pianos achieved legendary status within the fraternity Walter Liberace was in the process of joining. One member left a classic account. “Ivories were discolored and chipped or missing altogether; the felts looked like they had been chewed by crazed rodents; the strings were coated with a whitish substance that could only be salt . . . , and the casting was studded with drink rings and cigarette burns.” The broken ivory actually gashed this performer’s finger, and his blood joined other performers’ salty sweat on the strings. “Here’s what you should do with this aberration,” the pianist’s bandleader instructed the saloon owner: “‘Tune it, clean it thoroughly, refurbish the felts and hammers, polish the casing. Then hire a handyman to chop it up for firewood. And you know what you’d have?’ the owner shook his head. ‘A bad fire.’”62

  The bane of any pianist, such instruments drove the perfectionist Walter Liberace to distraction. It is fitting, then, that one of the few surviving letters in his hand chronicles his efforts to get a new piano for his show in the Plankton Arcade. The note is vintage Liberace, too: it is at once diffident and deferential, yet he remains very clear about his own needs and desires. The letter had two purposes, one direct, one implied. Most obviously, he wanted a new piano, and his request emphasizes first his concern with quality, but hardly less his attention to style, presentation, and appearance. “You realize, Max, that in order to do my best work, I must have a good piano and the piano now in use is on its last legs,” he wrote his boss at the Red Room. “I tried it when I was in Milwaukee last, and know that it would be a hindrance to my playing to work on that instrument. . . . A small grand of good make would not only lend distinction to the room but sound well.” And he concluded with his little curl of modesty: “Just a suggestion, of course.” Beyond the explicit desire for a new instrument, he also suggested implicitly that he deserved a raise. By stating that he had received offer of jobs that paid sixty-five and eighty dollars a week, he implied, however modestly, that Max Pollack should be paying him more. This was not the last time that his ambivalence between modesty and avarice would appear.63

  Did he get a good piano? The record does not say. Whether with a high-quality instrument or a poor one, however, the young performer had made his mark. His boss knew he had a prize, and by 1942, Max Pollack was paying him a phenomenal ninety dollars a week. Walter Liberace earned his keep. He may have longed for wealth and fame, but he was just as bent on giving folks their money’s worth. He did, and audiences responded. One of his bosses from these days, Walter Ludwig, marveled over the performer. “He’s the only musician I ever had in a commercial restaurant in Milwaukee that people applauded after he finished a set of numbers. There were lots of times when we had customers waiting in line for tables.” Liberace was honing his style, too. His pressing for a good—and beautiful—piano represented o
nly one manifestation of his concern about presentation. One friend remembers that he was already costuming himself by then, as well.64

  His old boss, Ludwig, remembered other peculiarities from these days at the Plankton Arcade. The young musician repeated the pattern he had established in Wausau of taking up with folks. “He practically lived with us,” Ludwig insisted. “When my wife and I went on vacations, Walter went along. And you know what he’d do? He’d take along a practice keyboard—a cardboard affair. No matter where we were he’d practice on that thing at least three hours a day.”65 As this recollection affirms, the young piano player maintained a rigorous routine and schedule for himself. Neither his ambition nor his energy flagged. Joe Zingsheim, one of the original Mixers, still played occasionally while doing stints on the family farm, and he recalled his friend’s will and energy from the Red Room days. He “would get off work at 1 A.M. and he would come and play for us at parties. I remember one party that Wally came to after work. He was still playing at 5 A.M. when I went home to New Berlin to milk the cows.”66 His friends recalled his musicianship and his show-business sense; they also recalled him as a “go-getter and a very hard worker.” “He was a worker,” his friend Zingsheim repeated. “You’d have to ask him to stop playing sometimes.”67

  These furiously capitalistic, Gershwin elements of his life were completely out of synch with the Paderewski side. In 1939, however, the young pianist experienced an epiphany that suggested a way to combine the divergent halves of his musical life. He repeated the story over and over. It figured significantly in his memoirs and in newspaper interviews. Four decades later, according to Scott Thorson, even while he shied from other tales of his youth, he still delighted in describing the episode.