What he did and how he did it and with whom he indulged himself is lost to the record. Still, homosexual New York was his turf after 1940, and he would have known all these venues, whether or not he utilized the facilities. This became his scene. And if he told Thorson the truth, he established connections in all the cities he played—Detroit, Washington, Boston, Minneapolis, Chicago, Montreal. These large metropolises spawned a same-sex underground, even if it remains as shadowy in history as it did in life. Sex that was unsanctioned by religious or secular law could only exist here. The sex life of the young Walter Liberace, in the process of becoming Liber-AH-chee, is as shadowy as that underground world. Whatever he was doing privately, however, he never relaxed the furious focus of his professional life.
Well before the end of World War II, the musician had found his social or sexual niche. He had won a considerable reputation as an entertainer and was making extraordinary money. If he delighted New York audiences, he maintained an aggressive following in the hinterland. He continued to renew his old hotel engagements while expanding his new contracts. His Las Vegas performances introduced him to a still-wider audience, and by 1947, at the latest, he began playing the same sort of highclass hotels and supper clubs in the West that he had in the East. He had fulfilled Abel Green’s prediction that he would be “box office boff.” For all the triumphs, however, he was not content. As the war ran down and peace followed, he remained dissatisfied. Indeed, right about at the war’s end, when he was around twenty-seven or so, he underwent a major crisis. He was still dreaming of bigger and better. By 1947 he had changed direction one more time.
Five
THE SUCCESSFUL UNKNOWN
He was an unknown in the movie capital in those days. When it came time for her to leave, he turned to her and said: “Florence, some day I’m going to crack this town wide open!”
FLORENCE BETTRAY-KELLY
World War II changed the United States forever. The transformation of American life in the wake of that conflict is incalculable. Demographics hint at the revolution. If always on the move, Americans were moving now like they never had before. They abandoned one region for another; they left the countryside for the cities and the cities for the suburbs. All manner of Americans swarmed West: California boomed. Blacks thronged from the rural and village South to every great metropolis in the country, and, by the sixties, for the first time since slavers commenced their trade to Anglo-America in the seventeenth century, more blacks lived outside Dixie than in it. A parallel shift occurred among urban whites. With money in their pockets and babies crowding their apartments, they began to look to suburban housing developments as the answer to long-deferred dreams. Cheap, mass suburban housing was, simultaneously, putting home ownership within the range of almost all but the poorest of citizens.
These primary demographic patterns produced still more secondary effects. Increasingly abandoned to a black underclass, urban cores began collapsing onto themselves; the old urban infrastructure disintegrated, too. With suburbs, of course, came suburban commerce, like malls, and a still more critical alteration in transportation: the shift to automobiles and multi-laned roadways, the abandonment of public transportation, especially trains, and the rise of air traffic. Always fascinated by cars, Americans sealed their affection in these years when a car came within almost everybody’s reach and when increasing numbers of families had two. These trends played off one another, so that the destruction of urban centers, for example, now increasingly black, poor, and powerless, became a purposeful matter of policy in the urban-renewal campaigns of the sixties. The development of massive highway systems—as wide as a football field is long—through the heart of American metropolises indicated one aspect of the shifting power structures and demographic patterns in the decades after the war. Indeed, little captures so completely both cause and effect of the massive changes in American life as does the inauguration of the federal interstate highway system in 1956.
Americans were on the move, moving faster and faster, farther and farther. They were moving up as well as out. As with the accelerating patterns of home and property ownership, prosperity and wealth was filtering down and across the social scale. The poor were moving into the middle class. Federal guaranteed housing loans accelerated the trend. The GI Bill opened up higher education to the masses, and the imprimatur of bourgeois culture followed—even as traditional education, like the traditional city, was being radically redefined in the process.
While such changes affected every aspect of American life, one of their critical implications was to undermine localism and parochial or provincial values with a more homogeneous national culture. Interstates were the same everywhere; malls became interchangeable. Suburban development imposed common standards from California to Long Island, Chicago to Dallas, Seattle to Miami. A new social-economic system developed, and with it a new American type emerged. It centered on the buying and production of consumer items and the shift away from capital goods and production. Indeed, the term “consumer” came to supplant the older political concept of citizen. “Consumerism” became the great, if anxiety-producing purpose of the American republic. If automobile-crowded interstates and goods-filled suburban shopping malls came to symbolize national culture, television tied it all together in an even neater package. While television both encouraged and embodied translocal democratic or mass culture, the development of such huge public but private entertainment centers as Disneyland, Disney World, and Las Vegas did exactly the same thing, and did so simultaneously.
Some parts of the country denied these changes. The bred-in-bone conservative South resisted after a fashion, if often in a rear-guard and only half-articulate manner. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, leftist, highbrow opinion in the East challenged the changes as well. The latter would play an important part in the Liberace story. It not only impugned the suburban commercialism of the new era but spearheaded a campaign against Liberace himself. New York intellectuals and intransigent Confederates notwithstanding, however, most Americans considered the alterations in national life natural and good, excellence itself. No part of the country welcomed them more enthusiastically than California did. Nowhere did they have a greater and more immediate impact. Indeed, Southern California represented a model and a test case of the demographic, economic, social, and cultural revolutions in the decades after World War II. It is altogether appropriate, then, that Walter Liberace, the successful supper-club entertainer, abandoned both West Milwaukee and now Manhattan for the suburban life of Southern California, just as he determined to launch a new career as well. The American boy was mid-passage in the American postwar dream.
It took him a little time to wind up there in sunny California. The entertainer had never played the West before his first engagement at the Last Frontier in 1944. He returned to the Last Frontier in September of 1946, when he led the bill, and again in March of 1947, when he won even grander billing for his two-week run there. The interval between these last two engagements found him in Los Angeles. In February 1947, he gave a concert at the Long Beach Municipal Auditorium—where, one more time, he won the concertgoers’ cheers. This was the first of a series of engagements on the West Coast. He made a long-run performance that spring and into summer, for example, at the Continental Room of the Hotel San Diego.1 Soon after, he moved to the West Coast permanently. He arrived there, most circuitously, by way of Boston.
In 1943, the performer had played the Oval Room at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston for the first time. He repeated the bill regularly over the next few years. At one of the later dates, probably in ’46, he found a particularly attentive patron in Clarence Goodwin, a wealthy California businessman in Boston for a shoe manufacturers’ convention. Goodwin liked Liberace’s act; he liked the performer, too. He offered inspiration and good will: “He’d frequently stop and talk to me and give me encouragement which is a great help to a young performer,” the pianist recalled. Goodwin gave him his card and invited him to call if
he hit the West Coast. It was probably late 1946 or early 1947 when the pianist, fresh from his Las Vegas run, arrived in Los Angeles. Ensconced at a hotel in Santa Monica, the entertainer pulled out Goodwin’s card. He called him. The telephone conversation resulted in a dinner invitation—and much more.2
Clarence Goodwin had a big car and a driver and lived in “an exquisite house in Hollywood, . . . a place that was exactly like what I’d expect a Hollywood star to have, swimming pool and everything,” the pianist recalled long after. More than the wealth and material comforts, however, the family itself delighted Liberace. He found “a good home-cooked meal in a nice comfortable happy home . . . surrounded by love. . . . What impressed me most about the Goodwins,” he continued, “was that they were such a closely knit family, a beautiful mother, handsome father and two grown sons who, with their fiancées, had dinner with us.” After eating, the family asked him to play. He obliged readily, “because such a warm feeling had grown up between us. I even fell in love with their piano,” he related. At this point, the Goodwins inquired about his present lodgings. Discovering that he was staying at a hotel, they insisted that he live with them during his stay in California. After initial protests, the pianist agreed to give up his hotel room and move in. The very next morning he was unpacking at the Goodwins, and he “became a part of their happy family.”3 He lived with them for a year, he said.
The Goodwin stay acclimatized him to living in California, but it has other significance, too. This was at least the third time he had taken up with strangers and joined their family circle. When he was playing the Wunderbar in Wausau, he told of the “lovely Irish people who had taken me in.” Walter Ludwig, his old boss at the Plankton Arcade, wrote of having a similar relationship with the young musician.
Liberace’s ability to establish familial relations with strangers illuminates various aspects of his character. On the one hand, his personality invited such intimacies. As a person, he projected much the same quality he did as a performer—he had the attributes of a loyal son, a devoted brother, an endearing friend. His personality was “nonthreatening” in the most positive, engaging ways; he charmed and delighted people, made them feel good or better, and encouraged them to want more of him—hence the invitations to “join the family.” On the other hand, taking up with families, as he did with the Goodwins, answered some of the oldest needs in his own life. He dreaded loneliness. This very anxiety had driven him to abandon the concert stage for more intimate and friendly supper-club settings. The sources of this anxiety illuminate the showman’s personality.
On the simplest, most obvious level, his sense of alienation grew out of his peculiar childhood. While it has been said that “dysfunctional family” is redundant, Frances and Salvatore Liberace’s domestic relations—exacerbated by the insecurities of the Great Depression—fell especially wide of a Norman Rockwell paradigm. With a nagging, possessive mother, a demanding, authoritarian father, and relentless competition among the siblings, the pianist grew up amid domestic tensions that included physical as well as verbal violence. If this circumstance might have prompted Diogenes-type cynicism about family life, in Frances’s and Sal’s boy it produced the opposite effect. The stress exaggerated Liberace’s celebration of the ideal. He was a fiercely driven and furiously willful man, and his search for the perfect family paralleled his relentless quest for fame and fortune. With all innocence, sincerity, and honesty, Liberace defended the most traditional and conservative definition of family values. He extolled the ideal without cant or hypocrisy. He loved the warm family circle; he idealized it in its very absence in his own life.
His search for family and community, however, redressed another imbalance in his life. It remedied his loneliness as a function of his sexual exceptionalism. In intimate conversations with Scott Thorson, he dwelt upon his oppressive loneliness and alienation as the West Milwaukee Queer Boy. While he played the terrific sport—and played it well, winning the affection and even the admiration of his high school mates—the most astute of his chums remembered his isolation and distance from the others. Much about the dynamics of his social life—and even aspects of his career—are readable as manifestations of the effort to transcend sexual exile. He remolded his audiences, for example, as the perfect family that accepted him as he was, that, indeed, demanded him as he was.
All his life, he repeated this pattern represented by the Goodwins, although for shorter periods of time. Family after family took him in, cooked for him, and put him up. He did the same, turning his hotel rooms into cozy chambers where he fed, entertained, and cozied up with friends, coworkers, and fellow performers. He did so memorably in Chicago, for example, where he played the Palmer House in major engagements right after the war. “Because of the long booking,” he explained, the hotel had designed a suite for him, complete with kitchen facilities. He used it to entertain the entire troupe that was performing in the Empire Room. This included the young Mike Douglas, who was singing with Kay Kyser’s orchestra, and a whole crew of young women from the Merrill Abbott Dancers.4 His press kit made special references to cooking for guests in his hotel rooms between performances. He put his domestic talents to work as a publicity gimmick, but they went beyond that. He reveled in making his environment inviting. He prided himself on carrying “personal effects with him to make each suite seem like home,” he wrote. Besides “rows and rows of shoes, boxes of records, a full-size gas station-type soft drink dispenser, miniature piano collection,” and a myriad of even more diverse items, he also boasted that “a steady stream of visitors” kept him company at every one of his homey apartments.5
He did not have to invent domesticity with the Goodwins. It came ready-made. If the Goodwin family met his test of domestic perfection, Liberace’s vision of an ideal man was mirrored even more exactly in its patriarch. Handsome, self-possessed, a bountiful provider, and master of his estate, Clarence Goodwin represented a conservative icon of masculinity in Liberace’s extended treatment. The Liberace memoir suggests how Goodwin fulfilled the showman’s fundamental needs—needs that grew out of imperatives in his own character. For all Liberace’s furious willfulness and stubborn ambition, he hated conflict almost pathologically. The two tendencies in his character—willfulness and the desire to avoid conflict—often clashed. He needed a stiff right arm. As a consequence, he was attracted to characters who could shield him from discord and contention, even as they did battle with his foes. Goodwin represented one—and not the last—model of the type. He volunteered to front for him; besides his disinterested concern with the pianist’s career, however, he was also kind, solicitous, nurturing, and generous. These characteristics came with no apparent strings. He protected without suffocating; he was encouraging but not demanding, devoted yet respectful. He was, in Liberace’s treatment, the perfect man, and he represents the ideal parent and father in the memoir. Neither Sam nor Frances could have played this role. If Frances’s protectiveness suffocated her son, this cross-gendered American version of maleness was alien to Sam’s Italian brand of masculinity. Its male ends/female means worked perfectly for this new son.
With Clarence Goodwin, the Good Father assumed his proper role in Liberace’s memoir. The Loyal Son put himself into the older man’s hands. “Mr. Goodwin . . . was, of course, a very good businessman. He was also very kind and generous,” Liberace began. He continued, “He began to sort of take a fatherly interest in me and appointed himself, unofficially, as my business manager. He asked me how I was doing and I told him I thought I was doing rather well, but no doubt, I could do better. He asked me how much I was getting and when I told him he said, ‘I don’t think they’re paying you enough. The next time your agent calls with an offer just tell him it’s not enough, that you think you deserve more. Better still, if you want me to, I’ll speak to him. You’re an artist. You shouldn’t have to talk business.’”6
Beyond his discovery of the ideal patriarch in Clarence Goodwin, his year-long stay with the Goodwin family otherwise cha
nged his life. After he moved out of the Goodwins’ home, he never lived in the East or Midwest again. Indeed, he seems to have gone directly from living with the Goodwins in Hollywood to buying his own California home around 1948. He chose a prototypical suburb, North Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley.
In his egregiously charming press kit of 1947, created the year before he got his first housing loan, he included, along with recipes and other trappings of domesticity, a description of his “dream home”—“a ranchtype house (with a swimming pool) in southern California—plus cocker spaniels.”7 He realized something like his dream when he bought a house on Camellia Street in North Hollywood. Even if his home lacked a pool and was a bungalow rather than a rambling ranch house, it was a model house in a perfect suburban community.
North Hollywood lay at the northern base of the Santa Monica Mountain Range across from Los Angeles and Hollywood proper. From exotic Sunset Boulevard, one could cut across the mountains on Laurel Canyon Drive or Cahuenga Boulevard to the perfect grids of the suburbanizing San Fernando Valley just north of the Los Angeles River that cut through the valley. While the great housing boom took off after the war, the development on Camellia Street had begun earlier, in the late thirties. This had been farmland, but by the time Liberace moved here, trees were growing, adding a touch of permanence and a sense of settled life to the street. Its dwellings were all built simultaneously, and, after the fashion of the time, represented two alternating models. They possess a charm lacking in much postwar development. Set back about twenty-five feet from the quiet street, they came with small front lawns and back gardens, although between the houses there was almost no space. Additions have enlarged some of them, but in their original form, they would averaged about fifteen hundred square feet of space, with three tight bedrooms.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 16