His career expanded even more significantly in 1944. While still playing in Montreal, he added the Embassy Room in the national capital, the Cleveland Statler’s Terrace Room, and the Vanity Fair Room in Toronto. He had returned to his hometown in the fall to play what reviewers called the “jukebox recital,” but by this time, such programs had become anomalous. He was not one to turn down a lucrative gig, however, especially in his hometown. In any case, he quit Milwaukee for Las Vegas, Nevada, almost immediately after the November 19 engagement. His month-long run between Thanksgiving and Christmas, 1944, at the Ramona Room of the Last Frontier Hotel, was the first in what would be literally hundreds of performances in the gambling center over the next forty-three years. While his association with Las Vegas forms a separate chapter in his life, still, his initial performance in Nevada affirms all the other patterns in Liberace’s wartime career.37
While Las Vegas—and Liberace, too, for that matter—would became synonymous with vulgarity and democratic taste from the mid-fifties or early sixties, a different standard prevailed in the forties. The Last Frontier and El Rancho Vegas, the first two hotels on what would be later be called the Strip, were at that time more rural, Western versions of the great inner-city hotels and clubs where Liberace had been playing since 1941. Elegance reigned. The main dining and entertainment facility—the Ramona Room—was done up in Western style with flagstones, exposed beams, and wagon-wheel chandeliers. It was only pseudo-rough, however. It could seat six hundred guests at one time and boasted an excellent stage with perfect sightlines. The Western elegance came with a great deal of cash. Maxine Lewis, the entertainment director, offered him an initial salary of seven hundred dollars a week. After his first performance, she doubled it for his six-week run, which would have grossed him a whopping nine thousand dollars.38 He was on a roll.
In 1945, the performer added another monument to his career—a very significant twelve-week run at the Empire Room at Chicago’s most prestigious hotel, the Palmer House, where he played with another performer fated for a national reputation, Mike Douglas. He worked with pre-fame Marge and Gower Champion at this time, too.39 This was also the year that he performed at the Buffalo Statler’s Terrace Room and the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh. Most important, however, he was making an impression back in New York City, apparently his base of operations all along. He entertained the tuxedo- and gown-clad guests at the ultra-sophisticated Rainbow Room opened by the Rockefellers in a penthouse high above Rockefeller Center. He had still more notable engagements in Manhattan. His greatest break came with his stint at the swankest of the swank supper clubs, the Persian Room, at the plushest of hotels, the Plaza.
It was 1945. He was still only the intermission act, performing for a scant twelve minutes, but he was playing the most famous room in New York and seconding one of the biggest draws of the era, the pianist Hildegard, who also, by a fluke, happened to be a Wisconsin native. He drew considerably on the other star’s technique. Thirteen years older than her fellow Milwaukeean, Hildegard had won her spurs on the supper-club circuit in the thirties but really came into her own with the war. While, in later years, she forgot that her fellow pianist from the Midwest had performed while she took her break at the Plaza, she did recall him studying her performance at Chicago’s Palmer House. “Of course I knew him, and he would sit there and just watch me over and over and over again, so he got a lot of ideas from me,” she told a reporter long after. Practicing classy elegance and very high style, she maintained a certain aloofness from the audience and went by only one name. She insisted that she always left her fans wanting more. She played in elbow-length gloves that became her signature. She practiced other techniques that audiences loved—and that Liberace copied. “I gave away roses to VIPs and other people,” she said, “and also he noticed that I had a handkerchief and that I had characteristics—roses and the hanky and the glove—that were a part of my image.” “I wore elaborate clothes, too,” she added. If the young man from West Allis had watched her closely in Chicago, he admired her in New York, too, long before they shared billing. In 1941, he had practiced his artistic skills for her, hand painting a white satin blouse with her portrait and her trademarks—roses, a glove, and a keyboard—which she treasured for forty-five years.40
Besides the fact that he was sharing a billing with a celebrity pianist at one of the great spots in Manhattan, Liberace had still other reasons to boast about his performance at the Persian Room. The Bible of the entertainment world, Variety, reviewed the act, which is notable in itself. It did not merely note the performer, however; its editor, Abel Green, wrote the glowing notice that appeared on July 18, 1945. “Liberace looks like a cross between Cary Grant and Robert Alda (who plays Gershwin in the Warner Picture). He has an effective manner, attractive hands which he spotlights properly and, withal, rings the bell in a dramatically lighted, well-presented, showmanly routine. He should snowball into box office, which at the moment he’s not, but he’s definitely a boff cafe act.”41 “A boff cafe act.” “Snowball into box office.” The pianist had just turned twentysix. He was arriving, or at least the big guns were signaling his arrival. Coming from Variety, coming from “Abel,” as the editor signed himself, this was both gold and goad.
New York was noticing Liberace. Manhattan was remembering his name. And, with unflagging energy, he did everything to keep that name before the public. Thus, in addition to his paying work, he played a benefit concert in Madison Square Garden to a crowd of twenty-five thousand in the first year after VJ Day.42 It was a comparable performance, it seems, to the one he played in October 1946 at Carnegie Hall.43 Other gigs were coming in, too.
He played the ultra-smart club Le Ruban Bleu in 1945.44 In his autobiography, he linked this engagement with his performance at another club, Spivy’s Roof, which he characterized as “a favorite hangout of very sophisticated East Side clientele.” He was rubbing shoulders with other comers. At Le Ruban Bleu, he appeared on the same bill with Ella Fitzgerald, “a jazz singer who really rocked the hip crowd that first got acquainted with her type of singing when she worked the spots on 52nd Street in New York.” He shared billing with other rising stars, too. He raved about the Revuers at Spivy’s, who “sang original comedy songs and did sketches which they made up themselves.” All the members of the quartet went on to fame and celebrity. Liberace gave them their due: “The four people in The Revuers were Judy Holliday, one of Broadway’s and Hollywood’s finest comediennes; Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who have written some of our greatest musical shows for both the stage and pictures; and Imogene Coca, who also went on from The Revuers to enormous success as a comedienne.”45
The Rainbow Room, Spivy’s, and Le Ruban Bleu contacts led, in turn, to other engagements. The oilman Paul Getty numbered among those who frequented Spivy’s, and such sophisticates provided more opportunities for the entertainer. In his memoir, Liberace remembered Getty with special affection. The millionaire, recalled the pianist,
used to invite us to his swank Park Avenue town house after hours to entertain his friends and guests until the wee hours. He never failed to slip a folded bill (usually $100) into my palm when he shook hands as I left the party. Or the time he slipped something into my handkerchief pocket of my tux when I wasn’t aware of it. I later discovered accidentally when I pulled out the handkerchief to mop my brow that the something was five $100 bills which came in very handy during those low-salaried days ($175 a week salary was the going rate in those ‘chic’ East Side places if you were lucky).46
If his memoir recalls such affairs with affection, Scott Thorson remembered a more rancorous tone. “When he wasn’t booked at clubs he supported himself by playing at private parties in the greater New York area. Lee had uncomfortably vivid memories of those parties: the luxurious homes and the self-assurance of the people who lived in them,” Thorson related. “He’d take a bus or commuter train to his destination and be admitted through the servants’ entrance. The handsome tip he received at the e
nd of the evening merely fueled Lee’s resentment. ‘Most of those people treated me like a waiter or a cab-driver,’ he later complained, still smarting from injured pride.”47 Whether the slights were real or imaginary, his vaulting ambition needed few goads. He was, in any event, making a name for himself. New contracts rolled in every year; he consistently renewed the old ones. Audiences were eating him alive. Critics loved him.
If the old hand “Abel” could nod approval in Variety and anticipate Liberace’s coming fame, other critics confirmed his arrival when he went from intermission act in 1945 to headliner in the Plaza’s Persian Room only two years later. Along with Walter Winchell, one of the important gossip columns of the time, Lee Mortimer of the New York Sunday Mirror agreed with the jaded cigarette girl that it was one of the best acts he had ever seen. The star “has a better left hand for boogie-woogie than anything in Harlem, 52nd St., or the Village,” Mortimer told his readers.48 Other critics shared Mortimer’s excitement over the act. “With all due respects to the many talented performers who have worked at the Persian Room at some time or another, we feel their current presentation of LIBERACE . . . is their finest to date—not only their finest,” the critic effused, “but one of the most differently outstanding artists to ever appear in a nite club.” This reviewer went on to praise the performer’s “showmanship, magnetic charm, and personality.” “We were thrilled as were all who attended the packed premiere last Thursday nite,” he concluded. “There were shouts of bravo and encores galore. Liberace finally had to beg off graciously with the hope all would return for more and there is no doubt—all will!”49
Was he knocking ’em dead in Gotham? Entertainment editors and reporters in the hinterland waxed as rapturous as the New York critics. By 1947, Liberace was stealing the show at the Empire Room in Chicago. “There is the excitement of showmanship shined to a blinding sheen, a positive musicianship and expressive versatility that is pianist LIBERACE. . . . ‘Summertime Review’ deserves the word ‘exciting,’ and we urge you to see what we mean in person at the Palmer House,” wrote Gene Morgan of the Chicago Daily News. “Solidly talented as a pianist, he performed his serious numbers with distinction, his humorous ones with an understated satire that was delicious. A thoroughly good entertainer,” crowed the Tribune after the same performance. The Chicago Times was equally laudatory. Liberace was supplanting Chicagoans’ old favorite, Hildegard, Ray Hunt observed. “Half the time he’s spoofing,” remarked another Chicago reviewer, “But he’s not kidding when he lights into those ivories in a ‘Tea for Two’ that breaks the track record or a ‘Warsaw Concerto’ with all the stops pulled right out by the roots.” “He’s all lit up like Hildegard, only he can play the piano and he doesn’t insult the audience,” the Times reviewer continued. He wowed ’em in Detroit, too, where he “made like Chopin one minute and then turns on a Chico Marx bit the next.”50
And so it went everywhere. He “mowed ’em down” in February 1947 at the Detroit Statler’s Terrace Room, but he returned in September to even more enthusiastic praise. He’s “smoother and suaver,” observed the News on May 7, 1947. “But there is also his piano lesson you’ve seen of course, but he has learned how to make it even more easy and laugh-getting but always in good taste. He does two hot numbers with Joe Sudy’s Orchestra and especially we like his Helen Morgan-Jerome Kern bit, in which we heard him sing for the first time. He was called back again and again.”51
He was wowing audiences, and none of his success was luck. If his first boss from the old days at the Plankton Arcade had remembered how the adolescent piano player had practiced for hours a day on a cardboard keyboard in the absence of a real piano, if teacher and family recalled his willfulness and determination, these elements contributed to his success in the mid-forties. With an extraordinary energy level, he practiced relentlessly, up to six hours a day, but he worked on his act and publicity no less diligently. He was making himself.
His attention to the details of his act matched his attention to promotion. He had signed on with Music Corporation of America in 1941, and MCA, apparently, had negotiated his contract in Montreal. He wanted more. He figured the largest music agency in the United States was not working hard enough in his behalf. He would do it himself. He determined, he wrote later, “that I would have to do something dramatic in order to make a name for myself. I would have to do something to take myself off the bottom of [MCA’s] list. So I went on a campaign, as it were, of self-publicity.”52 He publicized himself primitively, but effectively. He mailed penny postcards to “entertainment buyers” all over the country. “Have you heard of Liberace?” read the cards, which also listed where he was appearing and how he could be reached.53 A slightly later variation of these cards survives in the Liberace Museum. With the name “LIBERACE” written artfully on the diagonal beside a sketch of a concert grand, the card also carries the following information along the bottom edge:
LIBER-AH-CHEE
NEW ON SIGNATURE RECORDS!
ORDER FROM YOUR LOCAL DISTRIBUTOR
He made up hundreds of these and mailed them almost indiscriminately. He professed to never having heard of Las Vegas, much less of Maxine Lewis or of the brand-new Last Frontier where she worked. But off a card went to Nevada, for example, and a record-breaking run resulted. And so it went.
Taking Gypsy Rose Lee’s admonition to heart—“You Gotta Have a Gimmick”—he worked relentlessly on his own image and his own performing tricks in these years. The classical-to-popular shtik was only the first. Performing to records distinguished him more thoroughly. In 1945, he came up with his candelabra as a prop. Candelabra of course became, literally, his trademark. He repeated the story of the candles countless times. He had seen the film A Song to Remember, starring Cornel Wilde, Paul Muni, and Merle Oberon, about the life of Chopin. “It interested me to see that in the film, whenever the great composer played, he had a candelabra on the piano,” he noted. It seemed natural for Liberace to follow suit. The classical imagery, the general association with wealth, luxury, and class, and the specific association with Chopin (not to mention the free ride on the film’s coattails) all fascinated the pianist. Not least, he already had a working theory about the importance of lighting to his act’s success; he was working on particular notions about candlelight, halflight, and other partial illumination as a source of mystery, excitement, and romance that went back to his earliest experiences at St. Florian’s Church in West Milwaukee. “So I went out to a little antique shop and bought a brass candelabra for $15 and a quarter’s worth of candles and put it up on the piano that evening when I did my act. After that whenever I opened somewhere, reviewers commented on the candelabra.”54
He had his phonograph that played his symphonic accompaniments. He had his white tie and tails. He had his candelabrum. He had his witty patter and repartee. He had created an image for himself. He was also inventing a new name for the image.
He circulated a score of stories about renaming himself. Most consistently, he associated his rebirth with his idol Paderewski. He told the simplest version of the story in his autobiography. In 1939 or ’40, he returned to Wausau’s Wunderbar after his stint as “Walter Buster Keys” and came up with the idea of using only his last name. “With the greatest conceit in the world, I reasoned that if my idol, Paderewski, could become world famous using only his last name, Liberace couldn’t be so bad,” he wrote.55 He embellished the Liberace-Paderewski story on other occasions. In his press kit of 1947, he offered this response to the question of “why Liberace uses the last name only”: “It was at the suggestion of the late Paderewski, Poland’s most distinguished pianist, who did not achieve world-wide recognition until after he dropped his first name.”56 The story grew more elaborate over the next few years. In 1951, a journalist interviewed him and reported that the great concert pianist had visited the Liberaces’ home around 1927 and had “suggested eliminating the first two names.”57 In still another variation on the theme, The Things I Love credits the naming in
novation to Paderewski’s tour manager, who was also public relations director of the Statler Hilton in Washington.58
In the late 1970s, Liberace told another story about how he chose his stage name that had nothing to do with his aesthetic idol. He told Scott Thorson that he simply did not like his first name. “Maybe Walter sounded all right with Pidgeon, but it sounded awful with Liberace,” he complained.59 His fellow Milwaukeean, Hildegard, had made her reputation with one name and gloves, but, without the impossibly Polish Wladziu and the dowdy Walter, Liberace’s unusual Italian surname had a dash that was lacking in the other pianist’s solid German identity. In this regard, Scott Thorson recalled something of homosexual panache in his old lover’s decision to adopt only his last name. “In his opinion, ‘Liberace’ sounded important, unique, fabulous!” Thorson quoted.60 Along the same lines, the showman was working out a whole theory about hierarchies, society, and entertaining, and the new name fit his theory in that it evoked a certain sense of royal prerogative, like Charles, Elizabeth, or Nicholas did. No other identity was needed. The name might have served other purposes, too. Ever so subtly, it affirmed his identity with his Italian father over and against his Polish mother.
By 1945, the showman had, in any event, identified himself with his new name and his new name with his new performing persona. He had played Las Vegas as “Walter Liberace” in 1944; with his return to the Ramona Room in September 1946, however, he was officially “Liberace.” When, as late as 1947, a reviewer referred to him as “Walter Liberace,” for example, the entertainer discreetly blacked out the Walter in his photocopied press release.61
Liberace: An American Boy Page 14