But still other elements were at work in the shift to Hollywood, to film, and to a rerun strategy, and all of these elements had potent implications for the career of the ambitious young piano player from Milwaukee. By the end of 1952, both of the two major networks had opened studios in Los Angeles, “so that for the first time,” one authority insists, “New York and Los Angeles were competing on an equal footing.” That the two were in competition is obvious; that they were on “equal footing” is more questionable. Los Angeles represented a different broadcast philosophy from New York. In drama, for example, the New York aesthetic celebrated experimentation and novelty, controversy and innovation. These grew organically from the nature of the New York theater—and through different sets of values that were percolating throughout the East. “The East Coast, Broadway-based live TV plays were, by their very nature, imperfect. Like any individual performance on Broadway, mistakes were bound to occur and often did. Even the best performances were usually gone after one broadcast, because few were kept on kines. Yet these limitations were a source of strength. Producers were more willing to experiment with new ideas and challenging themes because the plays were one-shot affairs. If they did not work, there was always next week.”12
As summarized here, this approach to live New York television theater actually suggests the profounder biases in the East that contrasted with values spawned in Hollywood. With its roots in a deeper, darker philosophical approach to life, “New York,” as represented in a peculiar and distinctive mind or mindset, drew on equal parts of a Judeo-Calvinist tradition that celebrated controversy, conflict, argument, righteousness, and theory; skeptical of capitalistic virtues, it also leaned toward the political left. Such values contrasted not only with a Hollywood world view but ran against the grain in large parts of the country as well.
The Heartland as well as Hollywood emphasized the comfortable and the familiar; it celebrated such alternative values as accommodation, common sense, practicality, and making one’s own way. Commerce and money were just fine. In contrast, New York tended to “play to the problem” and appeal to particular (in both senses of the term) audiences; beyond this, it disdained, consciously, provincials and a provincial mentality. If the New Yorker magazine scorned “the little old lady in Dubuque,” Hollywood loved her. In contrast to the New York aesthetic, Hollywood played to the common denominator and a general audience. Where the East Coast aesthetic looked askance at popularity and a cash nexus, Hollywood relished both. Where the one challenged American enthusiasm and innocence—and, indeed, doubted patriotism and American values—the other relished it all, even as movies represented the very embodiment of genial American vulgarity.13
The tension between Hollywood and New York suggests not merely a struggle over television programming but also an ideological cleavage in American culture that would have extraordinary meaning for post–World War II American history. Insofar as the Great Depression, World War II, and a host of other influences seemed to undermine traditional values, the first guns of a “culture war” were sounding, although from these early days it was not clear who was on what side.
The conflict between New York and Hollywood, the meaning of film, popular audiences versus particular ones—all of these elements lay quite beyond the control, or even the ken, of most Americans in 1953. These social forces, however, were the rising tide; they helped carry the West Allis piano player’s bark farther than even he might have imagined. He was calculating; he was lucky, too. He had moved to Los Angeles at the perfect time. He was primed and seasoned when the coaxial cable and Lucy revolutionized television production. His supper-club act, honed night in and night out across the country, had prepared him to appeal to any audience. More directly, his gigs all over the United States reaffirmed his kinship with and affection for the folks, for popular taste and values. If movies failed to make his name a household word, and if network broadcasting failed to exploit his genius, he was still honing his act in preparation for the biggest break of all.
For at least two years prior to 1952, he made all the rounds and did everything he was supposed to do “in a vain attempt to interest the big networks in a Liberace show.” But, as a reporter noted, “he failed to shake the widespread conviction among video show producers and network executives that the TV public would not respond to his type of entertainment.”14 Only then did he turn to local television and accept an outstanding offer from a new station, KLAC, in Los Angeles. The history of local broadcasting in Los Angeles fills out the picture of network television history even as it bears more direct relation to the showman’s rise to fame in 1952.
Local television in Los Angeles began in 1947, when Klaus Lansberg, a brilliant Jewish German émigré, inaugurated the city’s first commercial television station, KTLA. A programming genius, he initiated the first children’s programs, the Hopalong Cassidy series, and the first science fiction show—Space Patrol. He launched a spate of musical variety shows, Dixie Showboat, Frosty Frolics, Ina Ray Hutton and Her All Girl Orchestra (that had also played Vegas with Liberace), and Lawrence Welk. He took his cameras to location at the Aragon Ballroom and the Santa Monica Pier, but the studio performances were just as important. Dixie Showboat, for example, which featured Country and Western, or, as it was known then, hillbilly music, catered to Okies and Arkies who had wound up in the area during the Great Depression and the wartime industry boom. Such programs followed a particular form, with a front door opening to a camera as if it were a guest, and the performers speaking affectionately to the lens-guest as a welcomed visitor in the hillbilly household.
Lansberg made other innovations in the medium. His cameramen appeared wherever something seemed to be happening. He turned human-interest stories into news, news into entertainment. Once, for example, he provided round-the-clock coverage of the ill-fated attempt to rescue a small child who had fallen into an abandoned well in 1949. The coverage galvanized the city, won national media treatment, and dominated the television ratings. Along the lines of the coverall-clad yokels welcoming the camera-guest-viewer into their “home,” the affair of the girl in the well “intimized” a news or human-event story. Viewers lost the sense of being merely passive observers; they felt engaged in the rescue operations; they became a part of the broadcast; they gained membership in a family of television watchers. The unknown child’s death, then, became a “personal” loss. Lansberg’s camera “created” an event that then demanded a certain effect, popular grief, in this case, for a figure who would have been of no national consequence otherwise.
Lansberg employed comparable genius in experimenting with other kinds of programs and performers, too. He introduced the world to Korla Pandit, for example, an exotic-looking Indian who played the electric organ. Extremely popular, Pandit played over nine hundred programs, and he remembered Lansberg’s instructions long after. They echoed to the Yokels’ “Ya’ll come on in!” and the technically engendered mass sympathy for the child in the well. “You are playing to one person when you perform on television,” Lansberg admonished the organist. “Play to that one.” The program had its own gimmicks, too, which heightened its appeal. The camera played up Pandit’s very handsome, if delicate, or even feminine, good looks—his dark, long-lashed eyes, in particular. The show followed an invariable formula. With the tremulous tones of “Song of India” in the background, the camera always opened on the large, glittering jewel in Pandit’s striking turban—the two unvarying props—before dollying back to reveal the musician’s sexily downcast eyes, and only then pulling back farther to reveal the pretty face, now smiling and uplifted, and then the whole man at performance. Another gimmick: in nine hundred shows, Pandit never spoke a word, again on Lansberg’s instructions, to increase the sense of exotic mystery associated with the turban, the jewel, and the inscrutable Orient.15
Lansberg’s successes with KTLA established the norm for local broadcasting in Los Angeles, and soon other commercial stations were offering aggressive competition. Independent st
ation KLAC—Lucky Channel 13—was an important challenger. Its innovative manager, Don Fedderson, was no slouch either, even when taking his cues from the boy genius over at KTLA. To become most famous later for the television series The Millionaire, Fedderson had acquired rights, for example, to the baseball and football games of the local college and professional teams.16 He hired “the nation’s first disc jockey,” Al Jarvis, and initiated an afternoon program with Jarvis and Betty White, where famous recording figures stopped by to chat and advance their latest releases.17 Signing up Liberace was another effort to innovate programming, seize a market, and fill air time.
Fedderson had first seen the pianist perform in the Circus Room of San Diego’s great Victorian hotel, the Del Coronado, some time in 1950, or perhaps the year after. It was a particularly notable performance. In Liberace’s dramatic retelling, a heavy fog had rolled in from the Pacific, and the rotten weather had virtually eliminated hotel guests. The performer played to a house of only seventeen people. It has been said that the mark of the best performers is an ability to work a scanty audience as energetically as a great one. Liberace himself theorized about the difficulties of a small crowd. “When the house is full a certain amount of excitement rubs off on the audience before you even get on the stage. Everyone in a packed theater says to himself, ‘If all these other people came, I must have been right to come, too.’” Empty seats, vacant tables, he mused, have the opposite effect. Patrons feel that they’ve erred, “and this makes them more selective about what they see on the stage and harder to please. The fact that more people didn’t come makes them feel that maybe the performer is slipping. The result is that you have a house full of critics.” That evening, he pulled out the stops. “If those seventeen people are expecting a show—a show they will get,” he determined.18
Among those empty tables and chairs sat Jack Hellman, a radio and television writer for Variety, and Fedderson, the new manager of Channel 13. As he had been doing for a decade, Liberace bowled his audience over. He didn’t pay much attention to the two television men. Nor did his agent. “Seymour hadn’t bothered to tell me,” he related.19 The station manager wanted a contract, but Liberace hesitated. He resisted for two years. Fedderson kept the pressure on. Circumstances finally dictated the deal with KLAC: “When the pianist found he could not break into the networks, he finally accepted this offer, largely, he said, to try out his ideas as to how he should be telecast.”20
The Liberace Show aired for the first time at 7:30 P.M. on Wednesday, February 3, 1952, which was to be its standard slot for the next year. It lasted fifteen minutes. While, later, the pianist joked about competing with Hopalong Cassidy, he did not face much competition in the 7:00 to 8:00 P.M. slot. Of the six Los Angeles stations, five ran half-hour programs from 7:00 to 7:30, without much coherence. They ranged from The Son of Monte Cristo, the news, Mr. Wizard, and Blue Ribbon Bouts, to the Invitation Playhouse that preceded The Liberace Show on KLAC. Just before network programming kicked in at 8:00, the 7:30 and 7:45 slots were still more broken up. Liberace vied with five programs, among them After Dinner Round-up with Jimmie Dolan (Channel 9), Jungle Adventure (Channel 5), and the only other character who made it big, the playfully ambiguous Pinky Lee.21 If the slot picked up audience carryover from the drama before, it offered the clearest alternative to hillbilly roundups and the juvenile high jinks of Pinky Lee. It worked.
It was artfully done, too. Directed by Jim Hobson, the show was broadcast live before a live audience in the Music Hall, an old movie theater in Beverly Hills. The performer wore a plain tuxedo and played a grand piano decorated, simply, with his now-trademark candelabrum. In a format he had perfected in his supper-club act, he played a mixture of condensed classics and pop tunes, intermixed with his supper-club patter. His brother George conducted the house orchestra, and the piano-playing brother conversed with the violinist brother, who did not speak. If he had not been able to win a network contract, he had not been happy with the networks’ camerawork and his own inability to influence his presentation. Having his own show guaranteed that he would have authority over the production. An early reviewer summarized how the show worked: “Soft lights, sweet strings, brother George—smiling and silent, and plenty of closeups of Liberace and his candelabra.”22 He had worked out this format with Fedderson, an L.A. reporter noted. They had agreed that “he should be presented simply and intimately, much as he was used to working in night clubs. To his playing of hot and classical music he added considerable showmanship and a friendly ‘homey’ quality that quickly made him ‘just folks’ to his audience here. For some of the more erudite music critics, he dealt a little too much in ‘schmaltz.’ But, as he will tell you, he’s never been a ‘stern longhair’ and his warm personal approach to his televiewers soon helped him to build up a large following in a surprisingly short time.”23
This very early review is useful in that it captures Liberace’s act when the performer was right on the cusp of national celebrity. It summarizes in a straightforward manner the sources of his appeal, even as it introduces the invidious references to “erudite critics” and “schmaltz” that would soon become almost inseparable from any press notice. That first year on KLAC, however, almost no one expressed anything but pleasure with The Liberace Show. Outrage and offense did not spill over the dikes of public delight for another year and a half.
Fedderson paid the star a thousand dollars per session, which Liberace then divvied up among himself, his brother, and the five-member band. Without a sponsor at first, KLAC met expenses out of the station’s general revenues. Fedderson quickly found enterprises to support the show. By mid-February 1952, after a couple or three weeks of shows, he persuaded the Citizens National Trust and Savings Bank to pick up the show’s tab. If reluctant at first, soon enough Liberace’s first local sponsor was boasting about the pianist’s multiplication of its revenues. Thus, for example, on one evening’s show, the pianist announced that everyone who opened a new account with ten dollars or more would receive a free recording. The next day, according to newspaper reports, the bank opened to a huge line of people, which bankers mistook for the beginning of a banking panic. They had forgotten the television offer. “In two weeks the bank had 2,350 new depositors.”24 Three months after the offer had been announced, the bank had honored $600,000 in new deposits. After two years, they attributed a significant portion of $1,400,000 in new accounts to the Liberace sponsorship.25
Sponsorship was linked with popularity. The show made an almost immediate impact. While local newspapers failed to notice the program, viewer response compensated for print media’s obliviousness. While entry to the production site at the Music Hall was free, soon patrons were reportedly scalping tickets for fifty dollars each. By spring, a million and a half Los Angelenos were watching Liberace every Wednesday night. According to another source, the show was winning the highest ratings ever registered by an independent television station in the city. The attraction rippled out beyond the television set. Liberace’s on-air announcement that he would play the Pasadena Civic Auditorium prompted a run on the box office, and all seats were sold within forty-eight hours.26 Three months after his initial show, the pianist filled the house at Los Angeles’ Philharmonic Auditorium, his one-shot appearance netting him over four thousand dollars. His greatest prize still lay ahead. Within six months of his first television appearance, he also packed the Hollywood Bowl, an unprecedented achievement for the thirty-three-year-old pianist.27 Indeed, his July 19 performance, which inaugurated the Hollywood Bowl Pops series, was the only concert to fill the famous amphitheater to capacity in 1952: twenty thousand people bought tickets. No one has matched the achievement since.28 And again, he profited grandly, with a check for five thousand dollars.29 It was much more than the money, though, and perhaps even more than the fame that sealed his accomplishment in the Bowl. It was his own driving ambition. The Bowl did it for him.
After a half century, this huge outdoor theater has lost much of its cachet. If
later generations are inured to its appeal, it, like Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall, focused the imagination of more than one generation of artists and performers. For the popular musician, it represented the height of achievement. In the winter of 1947, the twenty-seven-year-old Midwestern piano player had visited the site as a lowly tourist as soon as he had landed in Los Angeles. “I wandered onto the famous band shell and looked over the vast auditorium of empty seats. As I did so I promised myself that someday I’d be on that stage again, but playing the piano with all the seats occupied.” “My main ambition,” he wrote, “the one thing my life was pointed at, was to play the Hollywood Bowl.”30 About the same time, his faithful piano teacher, Florence Kelly, visited him in Los Angeles, and he revealed to her his broader ambition in moving to Movieland. “He was an unknown in the movie capital in those days,” she recalled for a reporter. “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!’”31 In five years, he was doing it.
The Milwaukee piano player was hot stuff. Publicity fed on itself in a publicity-mad town. The talk of the city, he got his first shot at national fame in 1952, almost simultaneously with the Bowl performance, when NBC tapped him as the summer replacement for Dinah Shore’s twice-a-week fifteen-minute program from July 1 to August 28.32 These were pre-film, pre-rerun days, and he performed live, as he did on his own show. That fall, in a poll conducted by a local monthly magazine, Televiews, thirty thousand respondents voted him their favorite performer of everyone appearing on television.33 In February 1953, the fifth annual meeting of the Television Association of Arts and Sciences awarded him two Emmies—one for outstanding local television show and the other for outstanding male television performer.34
Liberace: An American Boy Page 20