Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Except for appearing later on television, the movie sank without a ripple. One more time, the pianist had bombed in his attempt to launch a cinematic career. If Sincerely Yours busted almost as completely as South Seas Sinner had, its failure also generated some of the same resentment on the part of its star as the earlier failure had. Later, he also blamed the film for his decline in popularity. Even so, he had too many irons in the fire to spend time sulking. He still had his forty-week domestic tour, but his American fame had bubbled around the world and had encouraged him to launch international tours.

  As early as the mid-forties, he had fantasized about foreign triumphs—tours of Latin America, for example; he had dreamed of being received by kings and queens, of being treated like a head of state himself. His first international engagement—a tour of Cuba in 1956—fulfilled every element of the fantasy. It was a dream trip. In the first place, the tour had been planned by Gaspar Pumarejo, the founder of the “Club del Hogar”—The Housewife Club—which promoted culture and artistic events among Cuban women, chiefly Habaneras: they were Lee’s natural constituency. In the second, he played off the extraordinary appeal of the United States and things American in what were actually the last glittery, troubled days of the ancien régime on the island.

  Appropriately enough, insofar as Miami, Florida, formed an intimate community with Havana in those days, the Cuban tour actually began in the United States. Pumarejo and Seymour Heller inaugurated the festivities with a press reception for Cuban journalists at the Eden Roc, the flashiest, newest, and most luxurious hotel on Miami Beach, on August 20, 1956. After an interview session in the fourteenth-story penthouse, the promoters treated the entire press corps to an elaborate dinner, during which incredulous journalists noted that the showman had coordinated his own dress with the table dressings.11 Two days later, the Liberace entourage arrived at José Martí Airport to the most extraordinary welcome. Indeed, the regime treated him like a visiting head of state. All incoming and outgoing traffic ceased. To the distress of some Cuban nationalists, military bands performed both the Cuban and the American national anthems when he appeared. Liberace himself recalled entering the terminal beneath the crossed sabers of Cuban military officers, and the army’s salutes with rifles and little cannons.12 It was, as one somewhat jaded Cuban journalist observed, “an apotheosic reception at the airport—as has never been done in Cuba for any American general, senator, or cabinet member.”13 In keeping with such honors, the president of the republic received Liberace formally at the presidential palace later that day. Batista’s lavish style impressed him. He knew nothing about his politics, Liberace protested, “but I admired the way he lived. I guess it was his politics that made such high living possible. Whatever it was,” he concluded, “he sure enjoyed it when he had it.”14

  Cheering crowds lined every roadway between Havana and Rancho Boyeros, the airport town. Liberace stayed in the presidential suite at the Hotel Nacional, and throughout his five-day visit, his devotees allowed neither him nor any member of his troupe to pay for anything, anywhere—not in restaurants, not in shops, not even at the gambling tables, he recalled fondly. He was the guest of honor at the Tropicana; he danced with the star performer, Ana Gloria; he attended the dog races, where the ninth race was named for him.15 And, of course, he performed for turnaway crowds.

  The Cuban promoter, Pumarejo, had scheduled three performances chiefly for his Hogareñas at the new, 3,500-seat Blanquita Theater downtown. Within four years, the new dictator would make it a jail for dissidents and later reopen it as a theater renamed after Karl Marx,16 but in late August of 1956 its only problems were overworked air-conditioning units and a faulty sound system. Although Pumarejo had limited admission to all three performances to dues-paying members of the Club del Hogar, Cuban television broadcast the Sunday evening show to the whole nation. Lee’s arrival at José Martí had been one of most-watched events in Cuban TV history, according to reporters; the Sunday night show outdid it twice over. At 8:00 P.M. on August 26, virtually every set in the island was tuned to the Blanquita show.17 In his memoir, the showman told of how he had delivered monologues in Spanish which he had memorized phonetically, as he did not speak the language. American residents on the island mocked his “muchas grassias,” but his efforts won more applause than they did scorn, he wrote.18

  The Liberace Show had played well on the island, but nothing had prepared the showman for the excitement his tour generated. It possessed “the extraordinary proportions of a national event,” observed one not uncritical reporter.19 It “altered national life,” noted another.20 It influenced both fashion and language; new fabrics named after the performer hit the market, for example.21 It provided the opportunity, as well, to discourse on the state of national politics. Were patriots offended by the folderol? Liberace only played his role, came the reply. He had not lied or done anything wrong or out of character. The problem lay elsewhere: “If, despite his evident frankness in easily showing us who he is, we Cubans had him parade under flags, to the strains of the national anthem (played by the bands of the navy and the orphanage), and we took him later to the Palace to shake the President’s hand, that’s our business. . . . In the end, this is not France or England, but rather a laughable little republic in the West Indies [English in the original], where people have to have fun with something.”22

  The showman’s lexicon had no space for such jaded, fatalistic sentiments. Nor did he have to bear their consequences. He anticipated only the rosy future. He used the Caribbean excursion as the basis of a new composition and a new record; “Cuba Liberace,” he called it.23 It never made the charts. It didn’t matter. He was still off in a thousand directions at once. Most critically, he was calculating a triumphant tour of Europe. He had quit the island on August 27 for Hollywood via New Orleans. He was already fantasizing about greater fame. Europe beckoned. With Cuban cheers still boosting his ego, he sailed for England on September 9.

  His European tour in 1956 was not actually his first visit to the continent. He had visited it in 1955 on an expedition arranged by Jack Warner on the last day’s shooting of Sincerely Yours. The studio wanted European publicity for its van Gogh movie, Lust for Life, so Warner was dispatching its star—Kirk Douglas—and his wife on tour. At the last minute, he included Liberace on the junket. Liberace lacked a passport, inoculations, and everything else, but Warner resolved all such details. The musician was still in costume for the film’s final Carnegie Hall scene when the studio’s photographers snapped his passport photos. The little group landed in Paris the day after Warner had proposed the trip to Liberace.

  After a whirlwind of Paris studio parties, the movie stars retired to Jack Warner’s home in Cannes. The awestruck pianist described it as “New Year’s Eve twenty-four hours of every day.” He attended Elsa Maxwell’s famous receptions. When he met Grace and Rainier of Monaco, the princess flattered him further with an invitation to perform at a Red Cross benefit gala she was hosting. He played while Danny Kaye was singing and dancing “and doing all the things he does so well.”24 He was awed. “What a show!” he sputtered. He met more famous people than he could remember.

  He had never experienced anything like this before. It was too much. He compared himself to “Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.” It prompted most uncharacteristic reflections on who he was—or might have been. He summarized it in the only known reference he ever made to himself in the third person using his christening name: “Young Wladziu was impressed,” he mused. “There was nothing like it in West Milwaukee.”25 Cannes was actually a little too far from Kenosha, Sheboygan, and West Allis for his taste. These were not his people. He was Dorothy in Oz. On the whole, he preferred Kansas.

  His second trip in the fall of 1956 differed completely from the first. Fastidious planning replaced the grand anarchy of the earlier journey. In place of the hurried airplane flight, he made a leisurely crossing on the greatest of the old liners, the Queen Mary. Instead of the famous str
angers, Kirk Douglas and his wife, the pianist surrounded himself with home folks and familiar faces—George and his then wife, his mother, and his manager, Heller.26 Had he felt awkward and provincial in the company of international swells like Princess Grace, Elsa Maxwell, Aly Khan, and scores of others? This time he found popular audiences that loved him as much as his devotees in New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Miami did. Finally, for the hedonistic pleasures of St. Tropez, he substituted the faith of Rome, and he and his party concluded their trip with a pilgrimage to the Holy City. Filling another ambition of his life, he also won an audience with Pope Pius XII for himself and his whole entourage.27 The Liberace party spent almost a half hour with him at his summer residence, Castel Gondolfo. The “Ave Maria” episode of The Liberace Show accounted for the stroke of fortune. “I discovered that [the pope’s] private secretary who was a monsignor had attended a filming of my television show, which included the ‘Ave Maria,’” Liberace recalled. “It was because of this Monsignor that we were invited to a private audience with the Holy Father.”28 A fading photograph in the Liberace Museum memorializes the occasion. A group of perhaps thirty darkly clad pilgrims cluster around the white-robed, sepulchral pontiff. Several kneel. Heavily veiled, Frances Zuchowski Liberace, who had been the widow Casadonte for twenty years, stands by her two sons. George’s eyes are on the pope; Lee smiles at the camera.

  While the trip ended famously, it began well, too. The crossing itself was notable. The entertainer had chosen a sea voyage in part because he was bringing all his most elaborate props with him, like the glass-topped grand piano and his piano-decorated Cadillac. He also took the Queen Mary because he loved its luxury and opulence. He anticipated, too, that the world of luxury liners would soon be finished; cheap, speedy, democratic air travel doomed such grandeur. Dining at the captain’s table and traveling first class on the Queen Mary, he enjoyed the full treatment. He gave, as always, as good as he got. Thus, he had committed himself to a shipboard performance, and he asked the captain that he be allowed to play for the entire passenger list, not merely for those traveling first class. Although the idea might have come to him, he insisted that his fellow passenger, Noël Coward, had put the notion in his head when the two met while strolling the deck. Liberace had recognized the composer (who was also an icon of gay culture); he expressed astonishment that Coward recognized him, knew his work, and even complimented him. “What you do you do very well,” he told the entertainer, as he encouraged him to play for the whole ship. The captain had been skeptical, but the scheme worked beautifully. The second- and third-class passengers loved him. “They were my audience,” he smiled. “So many of them came that they practically squeezed out the first class passengers. I played to standing room only and when it was over Mr. Coward said, ‘Glad you took my advice. Wish I’d thought of doing it myself. Marvelous audience.’”29

  All of England itself provided an even more “marvelous audience,” even if the cheers did not always mask the snarls. Arriving at Southampton on September 25, 1956, the performer’s entourage had chartered an entire train, The Liberace Special, to deliver them to London—another one of those publicity ploys the showman delighted in. At Waterloo Station, thousands of women old and young roared greeting to their darling—and virtually prohibited any movement by the Liberace party. The next week, Time ran a photo of the pianist crushed against the train by his devotees. The English comic Bob Monkhouse had been on the scene and offered one version of the crush: “I never saw so much female-ness all crowding in one place—all pushing and shoving—to get a look at Lee. Some enterprising tradesman had been outside the station peddling bags of red heart-shaped confetti, and a lot of the ladies brought along rose petals to pelt him with. The stuff lay there on the deck, ankle deep. You never saw such a litter.”30

  Mounted police and bobbies with dogs could not restore order, although they managed to get Liberace to the limousines for the trip to the Savoy. That trip provided another manifestation of the “marvelous audience” of Great Britain. The adoring mobs stripped the car of everything movable for souvenirs, and when the travelers emerged at the hotel, the fans tried to do the same to its occupants. “When we got out they started to grab at our garments, hats, jackets, anything for a souvenir.”31

  Royal Festival Hall had scheduled him for a performance on October 1, Royal Albert Hall for October 15 and 17, and the London Palladium on November 5. Besides these engagements, the showman had scheduled a full tour of Britain; it included television performances and club dates as well as concerts. A week after his arrival in London, he appeared on one of the major television programs in the country, Sunday Night at the Palladium. Arriving at the Palladium Theater for the performance at three thirty, he faced another melee. Until police arrived, he could not get out of his car for the crowds. The same mobs prohibited his departure for hours that evening. Finally, fifty bobbies assisted by specially trained German shepherds allowed his departure around ten that night.32

  London welcomed him in other venues. While the fame of his television show had pushed his old supper-club act far down on his list of priorities, he had lost none of his charm in the smaller and more sophisticated setting, and his England trip proved he could still pack in the patrons. He won kudos at the most famous night spot in England, London’s Café de Paris. He won more than kudos: “While he refused to give out the figure he is being paid for his service, he revealed it was ‘400% more than Marlene Dietrich or Noël Coward had received,’” reported Art Buchwald in the Paris Herald-Tribune.33

  Although headlining such notables as Dietrich, Coward, and Liberace himself, the club’s redoubtable manager, Major Neville Willing, won the showman’s special commendation for hiring fresh, untested talent, too. Thus, he praised Willing’s commitment to the then unknown singer, Shirley Bassey, who later became famous for her James Bond Goldfinger music. The showman projected onto Willing his own values: sympathizing with unknown performers, giving new talent a chance, in short, encouraging breaks for little guys. However famous he became, the showman, as he himself admitted, never outgrew West Allis. His affection always lay with the folks.

  For all Willing’s innovative bills, he also played to the most sophisticated crowds in London. They resembled the swells who had frequented Spivy’s Roof a decade before, except more so—“real British blue bloods and international and theatrical celebrities. Night after night they had the classiest crowd I’ve ever had for an audience,” he related, “lords and their ladies, dukes and their duchesses and, sometimes, princes and their . . . friends,” he concluded ambiguously. Willing knew how to work even these sophisticates. If no slouch himself at public relations and manipulating an audience, Liberace learned things from the British major. His classy audiences could not get enough of the American piano player. “Long after I’d changed out of my show clothes and into my street clothes the people who had been applauding had come up the stairs and were still pounding my dressing room door,” the entertainer recalled. “The major was in full command,” he continued. “He opened the door of the dressing room a little bit to give them another glimpse of the man they were applauding. Then he asked them to step back and be patient. He came inside and told me what to do next. And I did it. I put on a white sheared beaver coat and walked out to my waiting Cadillac and drove off into Piccadilly Circus.” “Always leave them wanting more,” Willing repeated over and over. It was the same advice Hildegard had given him. The results, even in Liberace’s hyperbole, were “fantastic.” “But for me, what a memory,” he concluded. “It was the most exciting Club date I ever played.”34

  His triumph at having played the Café de Paris paled beside other English honors. The thought of performing for the British monarchy had fueled his imagination for years. It was like his promise to play the Hollywood Bowl and “crack this town wide open!” back in 1947. In 1953, as his celebrity exploded across the United States, a Milwaukee journalist had written an article focusing on Liberace’s ambition and determination.
“What’s his present goal?” the reporter queried him. “‘To play for Queen Elizabeth,’ says Liberace. He’ll probably do it too,” the writer concluded cheerfully.35 He got his invitation to play for the Queen, even if events thwarted him, this time at least.

  His command performance was scheduled for Guy Fawkes Day, but international fireworks—not domestic bomb plots—forestalled the show. Since July, an Egyptian crisis had been simmering about the Suez Canal. It blew up soon after he arrived in England—in the middle of his command performance rehearsals, he noted, and the emergency prompted the cancellation of the show. “We at the theater would have liked to pull off a gunpowder plot against the Egyptians and their Suez Canal,” he pouted.36 He got other chances at command performance, and within three years, the queen mother was applauding him as roundly in Manchester as if she’d been a Cockney.

  The tour produced mixed results. Adoring fans filled the halls and mashed him in the streets; formal reviews were rather less enthusiastic. He might have smiled over some of them. “Liberace is no more a concert pianist than I am a Zulu princess,” shuddered the London News Chronicle.37 Others hit harder. “A cross between a circus turn and a fancy-dress parade,” proclaimed one; “a deliberate peacock and a preposterous walking wardrobe” sneered another.38 The New York Times summarized the mix: “Liberace played his first London concert last night and drew squeals of delight from feminine listeners and cries of pain from music critics.”39 Variety‘s London stringer nailed another paradox in covering the extremely successful performance at the Café de Paris: “That he was able to have his ritzy cafe audience cheering him for minutes on end at the conclusion of his 50-minute cabaret show was positive indication that press and public have powerfully opposing views in their assessment of him.”40