Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Between runs at the Plankton Arcade, Liberace had continued his formal concert tours of the upper Midwest. Indeed, that was one reason he accepted employment in the Red Room—to allow him freedom to continue playing traditional concerts. It was probably in the spring of 1939, then, that his agency had booked him in La Crosse, the Mississippi port city on the Wisconsin border with Minnesota. He played a successful, standard, all-classical program. The applause prompted encores. During this informal part of the performance, he began chatting with the audience. Someone shouted “Play ‘Three Little Fishies’!” a nonsense song, made the most popular radio tune in the country by the bandmaster Kay Kyser. After offering a standard rendition, he played it after the manner of Bach, which delighted the concertgoers. “It not only got me a big hand,” he told an early interviewer, “it got me this head on the review in the La Crosse newspaper the next day: ‘Three Little Fishies Swim in a Sea of Classics.’ Right then, I knew what people wanted.’” Later, he theorized about the affair. “I showed I understood the humor behind the request,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I was trying to tell the people that you could have fun at a concert without sacrificing the greatness of the music. I was trying to show that music is not all heavy-handed culture, that it has its humorous side, just as great literature does.”68

  The triumph extended beyond the Mississippi River port city. Liberace told of how the wire services picked up the story, with its jazzy headline, and gave him completely unexpected publicity. He had hit pay dirt, he told his friend long afterwards. “He finally had the schtick that would set him apart from every other piano player on the circuit. From then on he closed every performance by asking for requests, which he’d interpret in the style of one or more of the classical composers. Audiences loved his new gimmick. The idea proved to be so popular that he later wished he could have patented it.”69

  Walter Liberace had hit on something, but his hit was not quite as novel as he made it out to be. The blind pianist, Alec Templeton, had built his impressive radio reputation by doing the same thing. Famous for his rendition of “Boogie Woogie Washerwoman,” he played classics as well and combined the two forms exactly as the young Liberace was doing, translating them into popular tunes and doing the opposite with popular songs. Through the thirties, Templeton remained an important referent within the musical world. Indeed, the blind pianist provided a standard comparison with the up-and-coming pianist from Milwaukee before the latter completely eclipsed him in the 1950s. Walt Disney’s 1940 feature-length cartoon, Fantasia, was based on much the same idea, with Mickey Mouse acting out “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and magic mushrooms and elephants cavorting to Tchaikovsky, Ponchielli, and the like. Disney made Bach and Borodin immediately accessible to the folks. Templeton and Liberace were doing the same.

  Though his ensuing act may not have been entirely unique, Liberace still considered his La Crosse experience the most important episode in his professional life. Still, it took considerable time for the implications to sink in. If the young classical pianist now closed his concerts with parodies, this had no affect on his musical career at first. It would take another two years or more before it began to make a difference. The La Crosse affair is significant in another way, though. It possessed more immediate implications for the young man’s life, at least in his imagination. Just as the trauma with which he freighted the move to National Avenue in 1926, when he was seven, shed light on the difficulties in his life at that time, so the La Crosse concert illuminated another metamorphosis when he was twenty. The incident provided him with the excuse or opportunity to redefine his relations with his father.

  The psychological subtext of Walter’s revolution with respect to his relationship with Sam Liberace is hardly subtle. The younger Liberace described it clearly in his autobiography, shifting immediately from the public and professional meaning of La Crosse to its personal and domestic implications. He associated the two, making no transition between them. La Crosse was his big breakthrough, but it is inseparable from his breaking his father’s will, breaking his father, and, ultimately, breaking with his father entirely. Thus, he continued, the episode “made my Dad swallow his pride and allow me to contribute to the support of the family which was still very badly off financially.” It marked another kind of turning point with his father, too: “Dad also relented and let me follow my musical career in any direction it led me or that I chose to direct it.” After a brief reference to his father’s failures, he returns to the theme of his own musical liberation from his father’s design—or tyranny. “At last I felt free to play and interpret any kind of music without fear of raising any parental wrath, restrictions and restraints. And I think that was when I began to develop the style of performing that in the not too distant future was to earn me the sobriquet, ‘Mr. Showmanship.’ . . . It tells people who don’t already know it that they are going to get more than just a piano recital when they come to see me.”70 At this point, Sam vanished from his son’s aesthetic world.

  A messier story roils beneath the surface of this narrative of independence. If his memoir does not describe them clearly, other sources betray more obscure motives that came into play in the rebellion of the son against the father. The subtext itself possesses subtexts. These emerge in an interview he did for a book called The First Time, which was published late in 1975. A classic artifact of sexually revolutionized America, this collection of interviews by Karl Fleming and Anne Taylor Fleming offers the personal recollection of a variety of famous and then famous characters about their earliest sexual encounters.71 After its publication, Liberace protested that he had been misled. He never repudiated the interview; he just insisted that the authors had wanted only the earliest recollections of the famous.72 If this is so, his revelations are even more illuminating. He began his story with a general discussion of sex and changing sexual mores, including gratuitous references to homosexuality—even if not his own. The tale then detours through the Liberace family’s sexual conservatism as the context for his teenage years, and across the rowdy days playing the gin mills and roadhouses in the thirties, which included his first lay, the ostensible object of the interview. With hardly a bridge, however, he jumped backwards again, willy-nilly, to family sex: his brother, masturbation, and most arbitrarily of all, his father. Pausing to describe his father’s personal insensitivity and inflexibility, he launched immediately into a discussion of Sam’s sex life and its traumatic impact on Walter himself. His father had a mistress, whom his son found out about around the time of the La Crosse concert—“I was about 19,” he said. He discovered Sam’s philandering in a peculiar way that exaggerated his own sense of betrayal. Leopold Stokowski was coming to Milwaukee. As a surprise, Walter bought concert tickets for his father and himself. Sam refused to go with him. Wally attended, anyway. “So I went to the concert, and there sitting two rows in front of me was my father with another woman. That’s how I found out he’d had a mistress for years. . . . It was a terrible shock to me. To think that my father was living with two women! I couldn’t conceive of that. It made a tremendous mark on me at the time, because I really took it very emotionally.”73

  As told, this narrative underlines the father’s rejection of the son, rather than the other way around. Liberace concluded this interview with even stronger evidence of the anxieties his father generated in the younger Liberace even in his dotage, over a quarter century after the Stokowski concert. In the seventies, Liberace’s brother had installed their father in a California nursing home, he continued. “He’s next to being a vegetable,” Liberace said. “The last time I went to see him he didn’t recognize me, and that hurt me. He told my brother George, ‘That’s not him. I know my boy, and that’s not him,’” He concluded: “I made my brother promise not to ever force me to go again.”74

  The old man possessed, it seems, unutterable power to reject and wound his boy, even then. Liberace’s memoir hints at the same thing. “He’s very old as I write this and has finally come aroun
d to admitting that he’s proud of the fact that George and I have made the name Liberace internationally famous,” Liberace wrote about his almost ninety-year-old parent.75 The reference does not convince the reader that the old man really is proud—or that the son is truly convinced he has finally won his father’s praise. Another interview confirms the suspicion that, even at this late stage, Liberace did not have his father’s approval. The Liberaces’ old friend John Hlaban repeated a snatch of a conversation between the father and son that underlined Sal’s skepticism about his son’s career, even when the younger Liberace had become famous: “The old man, the artiste, asked the kid, Lee, ‘Why do you play that BS? Why don’t you play Rachmaninoff?’ But Liberace just wanted to make people happy.”76

  If Salvatore Liberace had repudiated his son, his son played the same game and beat his father with his own brand of punishment. The Stokowski concert coupled with the revelation at La Crosse provided an excuse for vengeance worthy of Neapolitan mafiosi. He never made up with Sam. Still, Salvatore survived like some ghostly palimpsest in his son’s psyche. According to Scott Thorson, Liberace “seethed with helpless rage every time he thought about the old man.”77 The antagonism suggests his ongoing—and futile—hope for Sam’s acceptance. “Liberace never stopped trying to get his father’s approval,” judged Michael Segell, a writer who worked with the showman earlier.78

  There were other manifestations of Sam’s power. The old man had been demanding, tyrannical, and even physically violent with his children. He was a perfectionist, according to his boy; he was impossible to please. Yet the desire to satisfy him, emulate him, and replicate his standards dominates his middle son’s career. Dealing with that influence was a critical issue within his interior life as well. His shift to a new—and profitable—musical form after La Crosse was a means, in this regard, of asserting his own identity in the face of his parent’s influence. Conversely, and paradoxically, perhaps, with the real, flesh-and-blood father exiled, the son simply internalized the elements of his father’s authority. If he had driven himself (fruitlessly, as it turned out) previously to meet his father’s exacting standards of excellence, Liberace’s ambition and drive now existed completely for themselves. His own aspirations were as insatiable as his father’s demands had been. He had liberated himself from his father and his father’s musical standards, but he now became that stricturing parent himself.

  In short? Walter Liberace’s deep and complicated relationship with his father governed much of what he did, and how he did it. It cast its long shadow even over his sexual preferences and attractions. If in his public career—and even in aspects of his private life—his mother seemed dominant, Frances provided a kind of smoke screen for her son’s still-more-problematic relationship with Salvatore. Insofar as the La Crosse concert represented a major realignment of Liberace’s inner life, it would be a heavy weight on the young performer’s future, heavier indeed than he himself knew.

  Appropriately enough in this season of Oedipal realignment with his father, he also discovered sex, both hetero- and homosex, according to different renderings.

  The memoirist left a literary record of how his popular music led to his first sexual encounter with a woman. He offered various versions of the experience. In his memoir, he claimed to have been sixteen or a little younger when the cops raided the place where he had been playing for stag parties and strippers. “Needless to say,” he wrote, “before the joint I was playing in was hit by the police, I had ceased to be a virgin and found out exactly the meaning of the word, ‘prostitute.’”79 He filled in some of the details of the story for the Flemings in The First Time. His age had dropped to thirteen in this account. When he was playing Pick’s Club Madrid, one of the singers had volunteered to take him home after they knocked off. “She was a big, chesty broad who sang blues songs. She was a very good-looking woman, and kind of wild, but she was old enough to be my mother—in her thirties.” It was summer. The night was warm. She pulled over and began groping the boy. She went down on him. “I didn’t quite know what was happening, but I liked it, I liked it,” he wrote. “I was all ready in a few minutes for a repeat. Then she crawled over on my lap and screwed me. It was very fast, like would you believe about five strokes?” He returned to her apartment for more, but what dominated his memory as much as anything was getting her lipstick off his white trousers.80 In his last memoir, The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace, the venue is the same, but the chesty broad gets a name. Otherwise, the particulars hardly change. The blues singer, “Miss Bea Haven,” gave him a lift home from work and “took ‘advantage’ of me,” he wrote. “She was twice my age and very experienced but she made me feel grown up and manly at last. After that, being around girls my own age didn’t excite me at all,” he concluded. “Compared to Miss Bea Haven, they all seemed so adolescent.”81

  The episode is not unconvincing. Walter was fifteen or sixteen years old when George married his first wife, the Club Madrid singer. His youth and the nature of the club environment lends plausibility to the tale, as do its classic Liberacean details, like the color of his trousers and his concern with removing the lipstick stains. But he told Scott Thorson a very different deflowering story. He didn’t like girls at all, he said to Thorson. But to avoid being designated as a “fag,” he insisted, he would have done anything. “If it meant dating he’d do that too, even though the thought of getting physically close to a girl made him nauseated,” Thorson related. “Fortunately, he never had to carry his pretense that far.”82

  His saloon engagements, he told Thorson, showed him another world. He discovered gay men. He was performing at the Wunderbar in Wausau, Wisconsin. It was the last half of 1939. As he played, he looked around and saw “men coming in together who weren’t the usual after-work blue-collar crowd.” He was naïve, he told Thorson, but he finally recognized that they were fellow queers. And true to a classic pattern among homosexual men, the discovery lifted a burden of isolation and alienation from his shoulders, even if he felt too modest and insecure to risk conversation with any of them. “Knowing he wasn’t alone, seeing that other men like him were capable of enjoying their lives helped to relieve his sense of isolation.” The community remained spiritual only briefly, according to Thorson’s account. “‘I could hardly miss the guy,’ Lee told me, reminiscing about his first lover. ‘He was the size of a door, the most intimidating man I’d ever seen. Every time I looked out in the audience there he was, smiling at me. From then on, he showed up wherever I worked. He’d buy me drinks during our break and tell me how much he liked listening to my music. One night he asked to drive me home. That’s the night I lost my virginity,’ Lee told me privately.” He had hit pay dirt again. He was being courted by “a football hero from the Green Bay Packers.”83

  In one regard, the story is as fantastic as the prostitute version. If the friendly prostitute—the tart with heart—is a sexual fantasy of one order, making it with a door-sized football player is a comparable one from the other side of the fence. Perhaps the entertainer, who, as always, was eager to give his audience what he thought they longed for, then, was telling his readers—chiefly women—what they wanted to hear, while to his boyfriend, he simply inverted the sexual identity of the person to whom he lost his virginity. But other components of the story, as Thorson retold it, make it seem quite as plausible as the Bea Haven narrative. Liberace was playing the Wunderbar in Wausau during this period around 1938 or ’39, which was far enough away from Green Bay to make it seem reasonable that an athlete from there would risk a gay encounter without too much fear of being discovered by his teammates or anyone else who knew him. Even if Liberace’s lover had been an insurance salesman, rather than a football player, however, what followed the encounter, according to Thorson’s retelling, also smacks of reality.

  According to Lee, sex was a part of the relationship, but not the most important part. He’d never been able to share his deepest feelings with his family and he felt he couldn’t trust anyone in the
straight world. The football player became Lee’s first confidante. He also introduced Lee to other gay men. Many of them came from other cities and they told Lee to look them up if he ever visited their hometowns. Although Lee did not realize it at the time, he was laying the foundation for his own gay network, a group he remembered turning to for companionship, understanding, and sexual gratification in the years to come when so much of his life would be spent on the road. . . .

  The year 1940 found him playing two or three gigs a week, making a circuit from Green Bay to Sheboygan to La Crosse and then back to Milwaukee. On the road, Lee said, he made use of the telephone numbers he’d been accumulating. His knowledge of the gay world expanded with each new contact and sexual encounter.

  If he did indeed have his first homosexual experience when he was around the age of twenty, the episode occurred within months of the La Crosse concert and the discovery of his father’s love affair with Zona Gale Smrz, the very time when he was discovering his own voice in still other ways. This was a critical period for him. Then, too, his own career was coinciding with momentous events in world and national history. In January 1940, his adolescent concert career peaked with his performance at the Pabst Theater with the Chicago Symphony. Four months earlier, the German invasion of Poland had provoked the onset of World War II. The year 1940 saw inexorable forces pulling the United States toward that conflict. Long before Pearl Harbor, the war was already transforming the United States. The economic stagnation that had debilitated the country—and wracked individual households, not least the Liberaces’—was giving way to jobs and prosperity. The country was on a cusp. So was Walter Liberace. By 1940, he was earning a salary that made him look like a millionaire against the deprivations of the mid-thirties. He had found a niche doing what he loved—pleasing people by playing the piano. He had liberated himself, both socially and aesthetically, from his father’s grip. He had discovered he not only lusted after men and males’ company, but that he could satisfy those desires. He was, however, not at all content. He craved more. He wanted more than Milwaukee—not to mention Sheboygan, La Crosse, and Green Bay—could give him. Wisconsin could not contain his energies and ambition as he entered adulthood. Wartime America was the perfect place for him to experiment and stretch his wings.