Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  After the astringency of the Nixon era and the self-conscious destylization of Jimmy Carter’s years, the United States was catching its breath and letting go by the time Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. With his Midwestern Americanism and Hollywood glamour, Reagan represented a version of Liberace’s own career and values. They were of the same generation, too, these two Hollywood stars and heartland celebrities. The first lady’s elegance and polish—so different from any of her predecessors’, even Jacqueline Kennedy’s—established a standard for style and stylishness that Lee could only admire as well. Nancy Reagan, no less than Liberace, celebrated wealth, beauty, and celebrity. The couple practiced Hollywood in Washington without apologies for eight years. Government policy echoed and occasioned analogous influences in the national economy and social life. Easy money fueled a soaring GNP and ever-accelerating consumer spending. Consumer spending, in turn, tended to channel into luxury expenditures. Liberace’s life might have been the model for the kind of opulent surfeit that Tom Wolfe mocked and celebrated in that great satire of the era, The Bonfire of the Vanities.56 This age of cheerful excess honored profligacy in all its manifestations, not least, of course, in sexual extravagance. If the devil leered just offstage, it was still Morning in America, and Liberace was the decade’s Sun King, or Sun Queen—the distinction being almost irrelevant in the decade’s theatrical liberation of the American libido and economy.

  On these very grounds, of course, the showman had never lost his appeal in the heartland and the hinterland. The folks had always loved his self-mocking opulence, his exuberant consumerism, his sunny excess. As one critic judged appropriately, Liberace appreciated “that in the heartland where he found his audiences, less remained less and only more was more.”57 In this regard, he continued to play the provinces as successfully as he ever had. The Las Vegas engagements continued. So too did the performances at Lake Tahoe and Reno. He kept up his furiously popular national tours in the wake of the Thorson affair. He was packing folks in and making millions off his provincial gigs. Even though he had reduced his touring to only fourteen weeks in 1985, he still grossed 3.5 million dollars that year alone. His Caesar’s Palace contract by itself netted him $400,000.58 The performances back in Milwaukee stand in for the rest. In the summer of ’82, he played to nine thousand fans at Milwaukee’s Summerfest.59 Two years later, he was back again for a five-day stand at Uihlein Hall of the Performing Arts Center, where he played to maximum-capacity audiences. Between the March and August 1986 runs at Caesar’s Palace, he filled the Riverside Theater in his hometown.60

  All these appearances now drew the same sort of appreciative reviews. Even when the journalists arrived skeptical, they generally departed incredulous at their own pleasure. After reviewing the performer’s chronicle of his personal acquisitions and achievements, one reporter noted that “under normal circumstances, all his boasting might have been wearisome. But Liberace plays the role of peacock to such an extreme that he practically parodies himself. He is also able to laugh at himself by cracking winning, if corny jokes with that sly grin ever in place.” “Some may call him the king of schlock,” the reporter concluded, “but Liberace does what he does so well that one can only relax and marvel as he turns excess into a thoroughly entertaining extravaganza.”61 Similarly, two years later, another reviewer expressed the same combination of horror and delight at Liberace’s excesses. It was “hideously flamboyant but thoroughly enjoyable,” he declared.62 Wrote another: “Everything Liberace did was calculated, tested, and sure-fire. He commands an audience.”63

  His appeal now radiated far beyond the provinces, too. He played the great venues in the East. The national capital celebrated his excesses. The reviewer for the Washington Post waxed as enthusiastic as the old Midwestern critics. Scott Thorson? Palimony? Homosexuality? HIV and AIDS? It was all invisible. “At 66, the pianist who was once the butt of more jokes than Brooklyn is again the height of fashion and popularity and he’s lapping it up like cream from a solid-gold saucer,” observed the critic. “In a land that honors conspicuous consumption, he has become His Lord High Excellency of Glitz, the spiritual granddaddy to a generation of rock stars who wear sequined gloves and gleefully turn our notions of gender inside out.”64 The Post article assumed his legitimacy in American culture, his arrival, in the same way his performance at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1982 did. He was, indeed, a tremendous hit in Washington, visiting the Reagan White House, and collecting a whole series of articles in the Washington Post called “The Liberace Watch” that chronicled his comings and goings like a public-relations agent’s dream. He was, in short, News.

  At sixty-five years old, he was crackling. In 1984, he offered a major performance in Los Angeles for the first time in fifteen years. It was a remarkable show. The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times mixed about equal parts horror, delight, and respect in writing up the show. “The Sultan of Schmaltz also reconfirmed that he may be the sharpest showman since P. T. Barnum,” he judged. “To the cynical, Liberace may bring to mind Mencken’s adage, ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.’ But the key to Liberace’s success is that his fans never depart wanting for more. . . . The 65 year-old Liberace knows how to charm an audience.”65

  He was winning important notices not only in L.A. and Washington, D.C., but in New York City. He had arrived among the arbiters of elite culture in the country. Indeed, what marked his altered status in the eighties was his acceptance—however tenuous—by the cultural establishment in Manhattan. This actually suggests some of the problems with that decade, not to mention with the culture of the age. Although Liberace took his act seriously, he had made wit, parody, and self-mockery an essential, inseparable part of the act itself. He burlesqued—even as he honored—American values. To be taken seriously when he was spoofing suggests a dimension of the difficulty. He was, however, taken seriously by the cultural umpires of American taste in the era. However he did it, he made it in New York. He won almost unanimous praise for the first time since he had wowed audiences in the Persian Room in 1947.

  If succeeding in New York is the goal of all great entertainers, success is not an absolute commodity. When Walter Liberace first played the Plaza back in 1945, audiences adored him. So did critics. In 1953, he had performed at Carnegie Hall and the next year at Madison Square Garden, but the enthusiasm of the audience was matched by the disdain, this time, of critics. Condemning every aspect of his performance itself, they also attacked the piano player in moral terms even, as representative of “the superficiality, sentimentality and uneasy nostalgia of our times.” That sentiment won out over the popular devotion. For the next thirty years, the showman was virtually a nonperson in Gotham. The world had changed by 1984. If he suffered from the change in the litigiousness of the social order, for example, he profited from it in other ways.

  Radio City Music Hall was a national institution. Like Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, or the Hollywood Bowl, it occupied an iconographic place in the American mind, especially for members of Liberace’s generation.66 The showman had honored the legend by including the Rockettes in his Las Vegas review by 1980. As a part of that decision, he had negotiated with the management and toured the Rockefeller Center facilities in 1979. “It fired his imagination,” wrote Thorson, who had accompanied him. Play Radio City? “‘It would be totally outrageous,’ he said, giving the place the highest praise he could imagine.”67 As early as 1941, the twenty-two-year-old pianist had determined he would play this venue. It was one of his last unaccomplished goals. His advisers discouraged him. They feared the old prejudices that had dominated the establishment opinions since the reviewing debacle after Carnegie Hall in 1953. “Play Long Island. That’s like New York. And you won’t be taking any chances,” they said.

  “Do you realize there are six thousand seats in that place? What if you do only half a house? It’ll hurt you career-wise.”

  “Stay in the hinterlands. Stay out of the big c
ities.”

  “You know the New York press. If they don’t like you, they’ll murder you.”68

  Seymour Heller might have huffed and puffed against the venture, but Scott Sanders, on the theater’s management staff, shared the showman’s enthusiasm about an engagement.69 Overcoming the advisers’ qualms, Liberace agreed to a spring date in ’84. Sanders wanted him on with the theater’s traditional “Glory of Easter Pageant.” The performer demurred. “Either you can have the resurrection or you can have Liberace,” he supposedly exclaimed, “But you can’t have both.”70 The resurrection lost out.

  The New York Times, the organ of establishment opinion, had little use for upcoming news of the performance, even as it had ignored the performer for the preceding twenty-five years. The paper, however, had miscalculated the news; the Times, the times. David Letterman had not. If the Letterman show, and David Letterman himself, offered another representation of the eighties’ vulgarity and excess, Liberace was completely at home on the late-night program. His first appearance, at Christmas 1983, delighted everyone concerned. It was the first of many. His appearances on another television phenomenon of the era, Saturday Night Live, taught the same lesson. This later generation of TV people were discovering what Jack Paar and Johnny Carson had acknowledged years before, what Abel Green had articulated in Variety as early as 1945: Liberace knew how to work an audience. Liberace equaled “box office boff.” By the time the show actually opened on April 4, 1985, even the staid Times was catching on. “There was a front-page story in the New York Times, headlined ‘Liberace Is Here, with His Glitter Undimmed.’ It was absolutely precedent shattering,” he gloated. “About the only way an entertainer makes the front page of the Times is with a little box in the corner that announces you can read about him on the obituary page.”71

  Even before the New York Times carried the formal announcement of the Rockefeller Center show, the theater had already sold a phenomenal 65 percent of all the available seats for the scheduled performances. With dollar signs clinking, the management wrangled an additional four shows to be added to the slated ten. Few reporters remained from thirty years before. Then, Manhattan critics had ridiculed the teary patrons begging tickets for the Madison Square Garden performance of 1954, when the showman had counted his money and wept over his deposit slips. But it was the exact same story in 1984. The music hall could have sold more tickets, had seats been available. Even with the augmented schedule, every performance was completely sold out, an unprecedented occurrence at the Rockefeller Center Theater. It was the same story in 1985 and again in the fall of 1986, the date of his last performance.

  As astounding as the rush for tickets—at least on the surface—was what the patrons crowded the theater to see. In form, the show virtually duplicated the flashy performance that had opened the Riviera in 1955, with its completely self-referential act, “The Liberace Story” and “The Candelabra Ballet.” Selling himself, being himself, performing himself—parodying himself—remained the very core of Liberace’s act. He entered wearing an impossible white fur cape. He played Chopin to accompany the color-coded “dancing waters.” He showed a film of what it was like to be a ring on his finger. He kicked with the Rockettes. He changed costumes. He played more. He took popular requests. All this he sandwiched between jokes, chit-chat, and patter. After the performance’s hyperactive two and a half hours, he stood on the edge of the stage and received the audience that was reluctant to leave the hall.

  The Easter show of 1985 repeated in its general form the 1984 performance, although Liberace added a spectacular entrance, appearing on the stage for the first time in one hundred pounds of feathers as he emerged from a Fabergé-type Easter egg. While he missed the Easter engagement in 1986, he appeared in the fall for another extensive run. He flew onto the stage this time, and this show also included two films, one a grandiose vision of his ring collection, another a tour of the Shirley Street mansion.

  Again, nothing changed but details. The show’s request segment, for example, followed the same pattern he had hit upon in La Crosse in 1939. The dress-up had always been there, too. The cars had figured predictably in the act since 1972. So too had all the jokes and pattering lines: “Well, look me over, I don’t dress like this to go unnoticed!” and “I’m having so much fun, I’m almost ashamed to take the money. But I will.” Crying to the bank made its appearance, and his rings elicited another thirty-year-old gag: “I’m glad you want to see them because—let’s face it—you bought them.” He still joked about raising his piano bench—“as this is a very high class number.” And audiences knew by heart, too, the answer to his question, “How do I play with all these rings?”—“Very well, thank you.”

  Nothing fundamental about his act had changed, but critics had. They alone offered a new story. Granted, there were some holdouts. The Village Voice still hawked the old line, virtually unchanged from the opinion of 1953. He was “a celebrity whose only portfolio is sheer excess,” carped the hardliners at that publication. The New York Daily News and the Post were generous, but even the Wall Street Journal gave him his due: “Liberace has transcended ordinary everyday life to such a stupefying degree that he occupies his own special rhinestone-studded niche in the American Dream.”72

  Most critically of all, however, the Times capitulated. In 1984, it cited the commendation of the composer John Corigliano and the praise of the jazz pianist George Shearing and virtuoso Earl Wild—“I think Liberace is a fabulous entertainer,” had testified the latter.73 Recording the show’s hokey finale, during which fans surged down the aisle to touch the hem of his garment, the reviewer had gotten into the feel of such demonstrations. “‘I feel like the pope,’ joshed Liberace in mid-encore,” Neal Karlen wrote, adding without invidiousness, “his ageless smile serving to reassure the assembled that some things, gratefully, will never change.”74

  The 1985 Times notices were more effusive still. For one thing, the paper got on board the Liberace hyperbole wagon before the show. If not quite so breathless as “The Liberace Watch” of the Washington Post, the great “newspaper of record” had caught the drift that Lee was news. The Times‘s William Geist of “About New York” had remarked upon the variety of Liberace’s special guests—from Diana Vreeland, Glenda Jackson, and Walter Cronkite to the entire cast of Saturday Night Live and Chuck Zito, head of the Hell’s Angels. Not unlike “The Liberace Watch” had, Geist also chronicled the variety of the performer’s activities in Manhattan. “Since arriving a few days ago,” he wrote, “Liberace has been seen here, there and everywhere appearing on almost every known talk show, showing up on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ dancing with some Rockettes at a professional wrestling match, stopping in at the Rolls-Royce dealer to talk valve jobs and mink carpeting.” The wrestling focused Geist’s attention. What was he doing on the wrestling circuit, the reporter inquired? “Because the fans were found to be one and the same,” the showman replied. But he spun out more of the deadpan joke: My mother loved wrestling, he told the reporter; she was thrilled when she met Gorgeous George: “She said they used the same lavender rinse on their hair.” The reporter himself got into the spirit of the joke, moreover, as he interviewed “the rock promoter backstage at the wrestling spectacular, which featured appearances by Liberace, Muhammad Ali, Billy Martin and Mr. T., [who] spoke reverently of Liberace as the ‘sage of the glitter age.’”75

  The Times‘s actual review of the performance in ’85 was as generous as it was appreciative. Stephen Holden began with the showman’s classically self-parodying first appearance. “It was as grand and amusing an entrance as any performer has made on a stage famous for its grand entrances,” he began. He offered a straightforward analysis of Liberace’s playing and pianism as well as of his showmanship, however, recognizing the pianist’s profound musical debts to late romantics. “If his fondness for ostentation has influenced two generations of pop-music showmen, the iconography of his presentations is 19th century romantic. His forerunners are Chopin and Liszt. .
. . The blending of Hollywood, Las Vegas and 19th-century romantic mysticism,” he judged, “informs Liberace’s musical style as much as it does the decor.” “Liberace,” he intoned, “has arrived at a style that is not classical, jazz or pop but an ornamental genre unto itself.” The showman is “a one-of-a-kind musical monument,” he concluded, “in whom romanticism and conscious self-parody merge into a complex, endearing caricature.”76

  The folks had detected as much all along. The New York crowds reaffirmed the truth. They roared their approval as enthusiastically as the Las Vegas and Milwaukee crowds had. They clapped as hard as the good folk of Kansas City, Tulsa, and Pittsburgh. They went home no less happy, it seems, than had the concertgoers in La Crosse, Wisconsin, almost fifty years before. At least as late as 1985, the magic had not dimmed by a single glittering sequin. Margaret Thompson Drewel, an anthropologist at Northwestern University, left a compelling reminder of the performer’s power. A specialist in Yoruba performance rites, Drewel had attended the Radio City Music Hall show in 1985 as a scholarly obligation. A determined critic of “corporate capitalism” and a scornful judge of the showman’s subservience to the economic engines of American life, Drewel also chronicled her own reluctant surrender to his charm. The rhinestone-spangled upright rolled in. Lee was taking requests. It was La Crosse all over again.

  When he broke into “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” the entire audience began to sing. The acoustics in the theatre created a warm, sonorous sound so that I too was finally drawn into the spectacle. I found myself singing and feeling misty-eyed. . . . And then Liberace played “You Made Me Love You,” and the audience, including myself, continued to sing. At that moment the spectacle worked even on me, even as I was analyzing and taking notes. It engendered a communitas and broke down the bicameral roles of the performer and spectator, making the spectators part of the spectacle.77