Women played little part in modernism. They figured in the system about the way they did in On the Road: as servants and as objects of the male world as constructed by Kerouac and Neal Cassady. The presence of a single female, Lee Krasner, among the abstract expressionists was the exception that proved the rule of the male-dominated New York School. After the manner of men, power relationships defined modernist values rather than the softer, communal, and ameliorative ones linked traditionally with women. The system was, perhaps not incidentally, the perfect aesthetic for American Cold Warriors, the hard line against international communism linked indelibly with the pressure for capitalistic expansion abroad. If it contained debilitating paradoxes, such as hatred of the bourgeoisie but dependence on aggressive international capitalism, these faults were less obvious until later in the century.92
Liberace’s sense of order, aesthetics, and virtue contradicted every aspect of classic modernism. Where the showman believed in the accessibility of art and beauty, modernism held for art’s difficulty and inaccessibility. Where Liberace was bright and optimistic, engaging and lavish, romantic and idealistic, modernism was bleak and pessimistic, abstract and sparse, realistic and materialistic. Where Liberace believed in hope and pleasure, modernism issued jeremiads. Modernism lacked tolerance and generosity as much as play and humor—it prophesied, condemned, and called to repentance; Liberace comforted in inclusiveness—he wanted to please, charm, and elevate. Liberace delighted in tradition and sentiment and spoke openly of love. Religious himself, he considered religion an integral part of life and made his act a semi-religious cult. He ritualized family. The modernists considered sentimentality and tradition not only reactionary but the very bane of art, and they sneered at love as only a guise or cover for power and psychological manipulation. Family manifested one more reactionary bourgeois tradition. Modernists were, too, militantly secular, anticlerical, and antisectarian. Liberace loved the local and particular; modernism despised the provincial, preferring the international and the great sweeping forces of history. Modernism loved abstraction and theory—especially Marx and Freud. Liberace lived myth and liked what worked.
The basic tenets of modernism were elitist and insular where Liberace was popular and inclusive; they were leveling and socialistic, however, where was he aristocratic and hierarchical. Thus, if aesthetically Liberace was a practical democrat among these radical antipopulists and anti-capitalists, his emphasis on idols and heroes made him elitist where modernism tended toward economic socialism and political egalitarianism. Liberace considered the celebration of stars, demigods, and achievers fundamental to human nature. He worked hard himself, earned his pay, rose in the economic order, and respected others who did the same. Public figures awed him. He had no problem with deference and authority, either economic, cultural, or aesthetic. Little characterizes modernism much more thoroughly than does skepticism about authority and repudiation of the received wisdom of economic, cultural, and aesthetic standards—even if this modernist antiauthoritarianism, paradoxically, became virtually inviolable dogma in its own right.
Whether theoretical, aesthetic, or practical, however, the opposition to Liberace ran deep. With his surrender of the traditional concert stage after 1940, the pianist never again referred to himself as an artist. Specifically repudiating the title, he called himself a performer, an entertainer, and a showman. “I like the word ‘performer’ a lot better than a stuck-up word like ‘artist,’” he protested. “The word artist suggests a self-oriented, inward directed person who creates only what he pleases, for himself, and the public can like it or leave it.”93
His disclaimers failed to mollify the metropolitan culture’s vanguard. “Liberace displays good fingers and prodigious skill at faking ‘brilliant’ runs up and down the keyboard,” judged the New York Times critic of his Carnegie Hall concert. “He has two styles of playing—fast, loud and energetic; and slow, with sentimentally exaggerated retards and accelerandos. It is a type of piano-playing that is frequently heard in cocktail lounges, and it is very pleasant to go with cocktails.”94 A later New York performance elicited much the same opinion. The music, wrote Lewis Funke, “must be served with all the available tricks, as loud as possible, as soft as possible, and as sentimental as possible. It’s almost all showmanship topped by whipped cream and cherries. Everything is showmanship, including the numerous changes of tuxedos and tails—almost as many changes as Rosalind Russell in ‘Auntie Mame.’”95
If these critics condemned the book Liberace never wrote, others went on to make him something of a cultural anti-Christ. In the spring of 1954, the New Yorker turned its very jaded eyes on the performer, mocking everything about the Madison Square Garden performance.96 Almost simultaneously, the New York Times’s music editor, Howard Taubman, produced a more extended version of the same ridicule in the Times’s magazine. The same critic who won some fame later for attacking “a homosexual mafia in the arts,” Taubman scorned the pianist himself, but also used the performer in his articles as the perfect representative of a degenerate age, even as he condemned the homosexual “rot at the drama’s core” seven years later.97 Taubman condemned every element of the pianist’s performance. Liberace was too easy, too smooth, too faultless, for the critic. He lacked austerity and discipline; he didn’t take himself seriously enough; he mocked himself and allowed others to mock him, too. He left nothing to the imagination. The sentiment and sentimentality of the performance offended Taubman profoundly; so, too, did the nostalgia, the demonstrations of piety, the show of reverence. Liberace homogenized everything, Taubman wrote, ignoring the art and intentions of the composers. “Grieg, Chopin, Johann Strauss—they’re all easy to reduce to manageable length. Would a mere composer complain if he knew that such a sensitive young musician was bringing his own creative gifts to bear on long, old-fashioned forms?” the critic snarled. “After all, Liberace recreates—if that is the word—each composition in his own image. When it is too difficult, he simplifies it. When it is too simple, he complicates it. Could anything be more reasonable?” His technique and musicianship provided other sources of the critic’s offense: “slackness of rhythms, wrong tempos, distorted phrasing, an excess of prettification and sentimentality, a failure to stick to what the composer has written, . . . a parlor pianist who ought to be kept in someone else’s parlor.” “So what?” Taubman concluded. “Does Liberace claim to be a Horowitz or Rubinstein? The square will reply then he ought to be a solid jazz player or an honest ‘pop’ stylist, and he isn’t either. His beat doesn’t send you. His ideas are not inventive. And he won’t let even a sentimental piece speak for itself; he has to make it so maudlin it sticks in your craw.” The Jeremiah-critic did not stop here. He issued a moral indictment against the showman from West Allis. “Taste based on denatured music,” he declared, “ends in debasement of an art.” That was the closing note. Did Liberace’s success depend on “the loneliness of old girls and the slushiness of young ones?” No, not really, Taubman thought. Liberace represented a perfect icon of a decadent era: “He is a product of the superficiality, sentimentality and uneasy nostalgia of our times.”98
If Taubman only played with the gender biases of Liberace’s art, others attacked them head on. Indeed, few national commentators and critics ever failed to note and protest the femaleness of his following. Almost all those who dealt with the issue were male. The notes appeared, almost inevitably, in some more or less overt political context relative to men, women, and their social relationships. In the late spring of 1954, Time had produced the article that had spoofed the Liberace phenomenon as “musical momism,” taking off on the phrase coined by the violently misogynistic American writer Philip Wylie in his bestselling 1940 book, Generation of Vipers. If Time writers poked sophisticated fun, other males were baffled and outraged by the performer and his fans. “If women vote for Liberace as a piano player—and I’m sure they do—it raises questions about their competence to vote for anything,” wrote the critic of the New York Hera
ld Tribune in 1953. “I’m not suggesting we repeal the 19th Amendment, exactly, just that maybe we think about it a little.” “Sometimes,” he continued, “a man wonders . . . whether the women of this fair land are people or whether some other designation ought to be given them—say, plips—to distinguish them from the rest.”99 The Los Angeles Mirror offered another version of the idea. Liberace’s popularity, the journalist assayed, “raises speculation over the sanity of the nation’s women—particularly those in their middle and late years—who idolize him.” He was “the Candelabra Casanova of the Keyboard, the musicianactor who makes millions out of Momism.”100
As a woman’s man, Liberace cut across the “regenderfication” of the social order after the war and violated the new strictures about sexual order. As he was identified with women, misogyny played its role in his condemnation, too. Other elements were also brewing in the social cauldron. Homosexuality was the unnamed eye of newt in this postwar witches brew. If it was perhaps the most critical element in his personal life between 1955 and 1961, it was only one of a series of crises he was navigating in these years as he turned forty.
Eight
THE SHOALS OF FAME
I began to go from bad to worse until I found myself playing a second-rate club in Indianapolis where I’d made $15,000 in one night. . . . I doubt if that club made that much profit in a whole year.
LIBERACE
When Liberace had signed with Guild Films in the winter of 1953 for a nationally marketed show, he had agreed to perform in 177 separate installments. By 1955, he had fulfilled his obligation. He and Guild Films did not renew the contract. According to one source, Liberace had, in effect, become too expensive, and Reuben Kaufman determined to drop him for a new performer, Florian Zabach, a violinist with an act similar to Liberace’s. Why had Guild Films not renewed him? “The cause of death: greed.”1 Other factors played an even greater role. For one thing, with networks extending their broadcasting time, the demand for syndicated films was declining. For another, for a program to last two or three years was not unusual, even for network shows. Just so, Guild’s rerun policy had scores and scores of stations from one end of the country to another playing the show over and over. Liberace had given the folks all they wanted, maybe more, in what he had provided them already. Liberace offered his own explanation: he cut back on television because “overexposure” undercut his pulling power in other performances—as if “other performances” were really more important than national exposure on television. The showman might have been reluctant to admit it, but evidence exists that his popularity was already waning by 1955.2 When the year opened, however, he was rich and busy. The future beckoned.
A second invitation to play the White House early in the new year augured well for 1955. On March 19, he performed for President Dwight Eisenhower. As star studded as his first Presidential performance, this evening in the White House included such guests as George Murphy, Ezio Pinza, Jane Froman, and Danny Kaye. Liberace was front and center of this gathering. The NBC Symphony backed him up, and he played classical works as well as his standard popular music.3
Despite the honor it represented, the presidential concert was small potatoes beside the new contract that Seymour Heller had negotiated with the new Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas for the spring of 1955. The gambling town was changing to match new circumstances in the country by the mid-fifties; the showman rode the tide. In the preceding three years, the Strip, the section of Highway 91 west of the city, had boomed with new hotels and casinos. Most of these continued the pattern of the first resorts, like the Last Frontier itself and its immediate predecessor, El Rancho Vegas: they rambled across the desert with bungalow-type lodgings around central dining and gambling facilities. The Riviera broke the pattern. It soared upward, giving the Strip—and the city—a skyline for the first time. The management planned everything about the casino as the biggest, best, fanciest, and, of course, most expensive. Construction cost ran to 10 million dollars, and the hotel touted its continental-style luxury as a clean break with the past. The Riviera wanted an opening act to match its opulence. Liberace was the hottest thing in the country at the time. The management went after him.
By the winter of 1954, Liberace had played Las Vegas twenty-five times over the preceding decade. The Last Frontier was paying him very well: he was earning twenty-five thousand dollars per engagement. He liked the management. He was not eager to leave. He hit on a solution, he wrote later: set a price the new hotel would not match. “Tell the Riviera people I want fifty thousand. They’ll never pay it,” he instructed Seymour Heller. The Riviera management didn’t hesitate. They signed, and the glitzy performer agreed to open the elegant Clover Room on April 20. Fifty thousand dollars was, literally, an epoch-making figure; the fee presaged a future of constantly inflating celebrity salaries in Las Vegas. To that point, Marlene Dietrich, for her 1953 act, had topped out the Vegas salary scale at thirty-five thousand a week. Then, at the height of his glory, Liberace beat her by fifteen thousand. In the same category as the legendary German star! More ambitions fulfilled.4
This was not the only triumph Heller was negotiating for his client. In the winter and spring, he was also haggling with Hollywood, and he finally contracted with Warner Brothers. The distinguished German-born director Henry Blanke was charged with reworking an old George Arliss film for the performer. Produced originally in 1922 and then remade ten years later, The Man Who Played God chronicles the life of a pianist who is going deaf. He spends his life watching people with binoculars from his apartment. He helps resolve their problems and difficulties, teaching them the way to happiness. Irving Wallace wrote the new screenplay. This version—released as Sincerely Yours—plays up the romantic interests. Two women love Anthony Warrin, the protagonist: his socialite fiancée and his secretary. He allows the former to find a new love, while he winds up with his selfless, devoted employee. At the end, Warrin’s hearing is restored, he gets the girl who loves him most, he recovers his concert career at Carnegie Hall, and he is surrounded by everyone he has assisted in attaining a better life. It was a completely Liberacean script. Besides the happy ending, the victory of the secretary over the socialite echoed his own social commitment to the little guy.
Shooting began on May 16, 1955, Liberace’s thirty-sixth birthday. Gordon Douglas directed. The movie also starred Joanne Dru as the secretary, Dorothy Malone as the socialite, and William Demarest as Liberace’s competition for Malone’s affections.
In his autobiography, the pianist remembered without much affection this second attempt at a movie career. “It beats starving to death,” he replied when asked about being a star. Full of goodwill himself, he disliked the bitter competition of “the Hollywood scene.” He complained of the “actors, musicians, writers and directors who occasionally have to work off their aggressions (and their anger at not working).” He singled out an episode with the singer-actor Mario Lanza, of the recently completed Serenade, as a particular manifestation of the nastiness. He played Lanza’s goat. The singer visited the set daily, offering the novice actor unsolicited advice. Beyond this, Lanza caused still other troubles. In a perfect imitation of Liberace’s shy Midwestern twang, he would telephone Blanke every evening, “call him all kinds of names and bawl him out, telling him what he did wrong and what he should have done.” The trick strained relations between the director and the star, and while the truth elicited laughs all around, “only Mario thought it was funny,” the pianist related.5
Moviemaking brought the showman little joy retrospectively. At the time, however, he exulted in his new career. “He was as exuberant as I had ever seen him,” reported one newsman who visited him on the set. Liberace drove to the studio in his long white limousine with the piano keys-inspired interior, and he boasted of his oversized dressing room that Judy Garland had used before.6
Previewed on October 18, 1955, the movie won early praise. Critics compared it with Going My Way, Magnificent Obsession, and The Jolson Story. Early crit
ics and Hollywood insiders considered it, as one headline trumpeted, “Headed for a Bonanza at Box Office.” If the film’s pervasive sentimentality put off some reviewers, they also noted that its very corniness “is the box-office staff of life.” The Hollywood Reporter’s notice applauded even the star: “To my utter amazement,” wrote Jack Moffitt, “I found him making me gulpy.” Similarly, while other reviewers found the sentiment just too much, they could still praise its pianist-hero. If Ruth Waterbury panned the movie, “Nevertheless,” she wrote, “the genuine warmth of Liberace’s personality radiates from it, and his really superb showmanship frequently rocks you.”7
The movie had several premieres around the country. It opened in Chicago on October 28 and in Los Angeles at the Pantages Theater on November 22. A month-long publicity tour accompanied these various openings.8 The film flopped. Jack Warner might have written the preview notices, but another tone governed other reviews. The New York Times captured the flavor: “Liberace spends an hour and fifty minutes oozing dimpled sincerity from the screen, frequently skimming the glistening keyboard and bestowing his smile like a kiss. . . . But one can delicately hint that the good fellow is nobody’s Barrymore. When he wears his black-sequined jacket, he hits the peak of his acting skill.”9
The film did no better at the box office. The star was not happy. He grumbled over the critics. He insisted that the movie would redeem itself. “I’m certain we will do well on the picture in the long run. I think some of these newspaper complaints about such unimportant things as my clothes are silly,” he fumed. “I feel there is a public which will awaken to the film’s theme, which is based on my philosophy of life—to bring happiness to people. It is based on faith, on love of God and your fellow man.”10
Liberace: An American Boy Page 26