Down market all the way to the bank
Jonathan Keates
LIBERACE: AN AMERICAN BOY by Darden Asbury Pyron University of Chicago Press, f19.50, pp. 494 The life of Liberace was one of those which give the impression of having been assembled from a kit of ready-made com- ponents. There was the insecure childhood, complete with feckless, remote father and doting, manipulative mother. There was the dismally unpromising social context, in this case a 'lunch-bucket' suburb of Mil- waukee, where the star's family compensat- ed for the bleakness of the Depression by icing the reject cookies Mrs Liberace brought home from her work in a food fac- tory, after a failed attempt at running a grocery store from her living-room. There was the statutory period of unhappiness at school, with young Wladziu Valentino Lib- erace, otherwise known as Lee, dressed in his brother's cast-offs, mocked both for his girly lisp and for his skills as a cook and a dressmaker. There were the primitive auguries of genius, when the three-year-old played 'Yes, We Have No Bananas' by ear on the battered upright. And there was the artistic breakthrough, in this case a concert at which, for an encore, a voice from the audience suggested that the demure, classi- cally trained soloist play the hit tune 'Three Little Fishes' in the style of Bach. Liberace obliged, went on downmarket and never looked back.
His success as a showman depended on a carefully studied conservatism. The all- American boy, who only went abroad once (with disastrous repercussions), was not a diehard Republican for nothing. Tele- vision, still gifted with novelty value, honed the act to perfection, complete with the sig- nature candelabra, those candyfloss cos- tumes with their weird amalgam of the shaman and the chorus girl, the almost menacing obtrusiveness of that gleaming dentistry and lacquered toupee, and Lee's singing voice, an imperfectly focused whine which became somehow more endearing precisely because he wasn't Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. Indispens- able to the whole knickerbocker glory was his peculiar constituency, patrons of polyester, blue-rinse and home-sales cos- metics, whose eagerness for a touch of his hands suggested expectations of the numi- nous he was perfectly willing to provide.
The plausible implication running throughout Darden Asbury Pyron's biogra- phy is that this context of harmless if some- what sterile excess was designed as Liberace's riposte both to the early depri- vations amid which he grew up and to the father who had failed to take him seriously enough at a formative age. He was going to be a somebody, and the proof of this need- ed to be visibly rather than intuitively grasped. The ultimate signifier of his achievement was his house on Shirley Street, Las Vegas (neighbouring thorough- fares were characteristically labelled Lulu, Merle, Carol and SaraLee), a perfect Xanadu of glitz and chichi, rioting with var- iegated marbles, crystal chandeliers, foun- tains, ormolu, malachite, a bathtub surrounded by colonnades, its swan-shaped taps made of solid gold, and a bedroom whose frescoes studiously exaggerated the homoerotic subtext of Michelangelo's Sis- tine ceiling.
This final detail, not to speak of `matched sculptures of pantalooned harem boys', gave away the game which Lee was bent, as it were, on playing to the last. The Paderewski of tupperware parties and cata- logue shopping was what was quaintly referred to by bien-pensant journalism as 'a predatory homosexual', but the point was always to pretend otherwise, sustaining the illusion for his fans of a celibate flirtatious- ness, unthreatening beneath the rhine- stones and ostrich plumes. Lee's queerness embodied a familiar element of narcissism, expressed at its most bizarre in his sinister inducement of a lover to undergo plastic surgery so as to emerge in the guise of a young Liberace lookalike.
Even if the world guessed that the Daily Mirror's 'Cassandra' had been spot-on in his lethal encapsulation of the star as a 'quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love', Liberace walked away 22,000 dollars richer for having denied his sexuality in the moral topsy-turvydom of a British libel court. The very Aids from which he died was only identified through the accident of an offi- cious coroner insisting on the retrieval of his body from Forest Lawns mortuary for a post-mortem. Darden Asbury Pyron is not, to use the fashionable term, 'judgmental' about such issues. He leaves us with the impression of Lee as an amiable cove, childlike, generous to a fault and worthy of the love he received from America's aun- ties and grandmas, not all of them female. Without such a liberating splurge of high camp, rock and pop, as Pyron rightly points out, we would all have been poorer. Every- one from Bowie and Bolan to Freddy Mer- cury and Wacko Jacko owes something to the man who cried all the way to the bank.
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