"An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing.…Pyron tells an immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews "Nothing less than a social and cultural history of the United States from the end of the First World War to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, with a pair of flashy fingers holding it all together. Far from feeling too long, the book reads like a miracle of compression.…This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph "[Pyron] achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment."—Publishers Weekly "Pyron uses pianist Liberace to explore the bundle of contradictions embedded in the American dream.…Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture. Highly recommended for general readers, music fans, and social historians."—Library Journal, starred review "Pyron intended something significantly larger than a celebratory outing, and he uses Liberace as a catalyst for reflection 'on the nature of twentieth-century American culture.' His engrossing study of a complex performer is also the story of being gay and visible in postwar show-biz.…Sympathetic without being smarmy, it is certainly the deepest study to date of a showman who as enigmatic as a person as he was as a performer."—Booklist • • Liberace links: The Liberace Foundation website, including the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. Bob's World of Liberace an outstanding Liberace fan site. |
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An excerpt from Liberace An American Boy Darden Asbury Pyron
The Days of the Understated Suit
Liberace's successful lawsuit against the London tabloid, the Daily Mirror, was a critical moment in his career. It also provides a vivid picture of the closeted world of the 1950s. This excerpt is from Chapter Nine: "You Can Be Sure If It's Westinghouse." The Daily Mirror had run the Cassandra article the day after Liberace's arrival in London on September 26, 1956. With the counsel of his lawyer, John Jacobs, Liberace had decided to sue by the middle of the next month. The trial was scheduled and rescheduled—chiefly because of the showman's performance calendar—until the contending parties finally agreed to a June 1959 date. That spring, the Queen Mary carried Liberace to his legal rendezvous. In contrast to his memories of the pleasures of his earlier crossing, however, this time he remembered mostly his distress. His apprehensions multiplied as he arrived in London. He reconstructed his actual emotions with difficulty afterward, he said, but "plain, simple, ordinary fear is what I think I felt," he related. "I had a secret feeling I was about to get clobbered." As he described it, "I find it difficult to put into words how I felt that Monday, June 8, 1959, as I sat in an English courtroom, Queen's Bench Number Four, surrounded by black-robed, white-wigged gentlemen, and prepared to hear myself vilified, as well as defended, and waited to find out whether I'd done the right thing or the wrong one in following the insistence of my conscience and the confirmation of my attorney."
Nothing comforted him. His Australian tour had demonstrated his chauvinistic—if innocent—Americanism, and English law and custom unsettled him. He really wanted an American lawyer, and he seemed perplexed at the failure of the British court to allow John Jacobs to defend him. Moreover, the sight of his British attorney, Gilbert Beyfus, recommended by Jacobs, dismayed him. If known in London as "The Fox," Beyfus, at age seventy-six, looked to Liberace like "a toothless old lion," like a Counselor Bumble right out of Dickens. "I watched him fumbling with papers, creating an atmosphere of confusion," the pianist fretted. "He acted like a man who suddenly found himself in a perfectly strange place with grave responsibilities he knew nothing about. My heart sank. I knew then and there that I didn't have a prayer."
Beyfus began the proceedings proper by reading into the record the entire Cassandra article, titled "Yearn-Strength Five." "'Windstarke Fuenf' is the most deadly concoction of alcohol that the 'Haus Vaterland' can produce," William Conner—alias Cassandra—had begun. I have to report that Mr. Liberace, like "Windstarke Fuenf" is about the most that man can take. But he is not a drink. He is Yearning Windstrength Five. He is the summit of sex—Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want.
The trial did rotate on the phrase. The defendants argued that Conner had intended it as a statement of the pianist's sex appeal in general. They calculated all their evidence and witnesses to this end, to prove the "sexiness" of Liberace's act. The plaintiffs countered this strategy by affirming the basis of Liberace's appeal to family and traditional values. They also leapt onto the phrase's challenge to Liberace's masculinity or maleness. This actually seemed to be what Conner had in mind when he told his visitor that the libel lay in this usage. If central to Beyfus's general strategy, however, it was Liberace's own compelling reason for bringing the suit in the first place. "I had put myself on the block of public opinion in defense of one of the three most important things in a man's life . . . ," he testified, "perhaps all of them. They are Life itself. Manhood. And Freedom." He elaborated: "Naturally my life, as such, was not at stake. But the attack on me had threatened my mother's health and so, her life. And, perhaps the quality of my life had been put in jeopardy. Certainly my manhood had been seriously attacked and with it my freedom . . . freedom from harassment, freedom from embarrassment and most importantly, freedom to work at my profession." The issue for the pianist could be summarized in part in his own, formal testimony when he declared, "This is the most improper article that has ever been written about me. It has been widely quoted in all parts of the world and has been reproduced exactly as it appeared in the Daily Mirror. One paper had the headline, IS LIBERACE A MAN."
Was Liberace a man? Perhaps Hush-Hush really got the Cassandra article better than William Conner had, himself. The idea, of course, was that Liberace was homosexual and that homosexuals were not men—not real men, not natural men—not Men. That was the issue for Liberace. What does it mean to be a man? Was a homosexual not a man, but some "third sex," some subspecies? Did lusting after other men obviate Liberace's manhood? How, indeed, was manhood different from sex or from a man's sexual proclivity for other men? Popular culture had the answers. Hollywood Confidential offered the reply in the very edition that had exposed Liberace. The full-page ad for the International Correspondence School had instructed readers in what men were—and weren't. The boy striding cheerfully down the road to job, success, and money (after having completed the course on repairing appliances, of course) caricatures every element of manliness—except the purely sexual. This boy is in the process of overtaking "the genius"—the perfect representation of homosexuality, however ill disguised: the lagger represents the fop, the dandy, the aristocratically pretentious, monocled fruit, the loser posturing on the wayside toward the manly world of work, achievement, and ambition.
The showman Liberace was not singular in associating work, competition, and success with masculinity. Nor was he eccentric, singular, or paranoid in acknowledging the threat to livelihood with charges of deviant sexuality. Beyond the aristocratic enclaves of Manhattan's Upper East Side, this was the same motive that drove many if not most gay professionals: homosexual exposure equaled professional, economic ruin. It was what prompted the actor Anthony Perkins into "deep closet maneuvers to hide the fact of his boyfriends and male lovers" even abroad, where no one recognized the Psycho star. "'You couldn't be too careful in those days,'" Perkins's manager, gay himself, agreed. "In those days," recalled another member of this demimonde, "if you had sex with a man, that put you in a category from which you could not deviate. You were a fruitcake, and destined to be that all your life." Thus, too, reminisced another gay actor: "We lived in fear of an exposë, or even one small remark, a veiled suggestion that someone was homosexual. Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the Studio." George Cukor, one of Hollywood's most famous—and barely closeted—gay men, put it another way: "In those days you had to be very virile or they thought you were degenerate." Getting caught out threatened ruin. Rock Hudson's behavior mirrored Perkins's. "He always had two phone lines when he lived with someone, and made sure his roommate never answered his phone. He was careful not to be photographed with a man. On the set, if he met someone, they would exchange phone numbers with the stealth and caution of spies passing nuclear secrets. Rock would wait until one in the morning to make the call. If it was all right, he would drive to the person's house, park two blocks away, look around furtively and then run to the door."
Gerald Gardiner, the Mirror's counselor, actually objected to the plaintiff's introduction of the issue. "There is no suggestion and never has been anything of the kind," Gardiner remonstrated when Beyfus first raised the matter of homosexuality on the trial's first day. Indeed, Gardiner dismissed the issue as a red herring, or worse. The performer, he sniffed, "had a bee in his bonnet" about the issue. The plaintiff insisted on the argument. The pianist himself testified for six hours in two days of testimony, and early on in the questioning Beyfus charged into the breech of his sexual identity and preference, despite the defense's protests. "Are you a homosexual?" Beyfus queried him. "No, sir," the pianist replied simply. He did not leave the issue at that. Beyfus continued the line of questioning. "Have you ever indulged in homosexual practices?" Again, the showman answered simply and directly: "No, sir, never in my life." He did not stop even there. On he plunged. "I am against the practice because it offends convention and it offends society," he finished. The plaintiff lied. The question remains, however, what to do with his deception. • • • The jury of ten men and two women found in his favor on June 18. He won twenty-two thousand dollars, and the defendants were required to pay court costs as well. This constituted the largest settlement of any libel case in British history. It was the very verdict that Oscar Wilde had sought two generations before, and on similar grounds. Wilde had lied as flagrantly as Liberace, of course, but Wilde lost. The American entertainer redeemed that judgment. And, the showman determined, his name was cleared. Publicly and officially, he could proceed with his life. He won more than the specific verdict, too. The case proved that he would go to very great lengths indeed to fight charges of sexual deviancy. His will was obdurate and his pockets deep, as his contentious ex-lover would discover twenty-five years later.
Publicly and officially, Liberace was not a homosexual. Privately, he continued the pattern that had characterized his life for close to twenty years. That pattern, however, like his testimony to the British court, was full of contradictions and impossibilities.
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