Liberace had a Silicone Implant
Ilena Rose
Jean <jwoo...@home.com>
Liberace bio includes everything but the joy
By RICHARD DYER
c) 2000, The Boston Globe
Darden Asbury Pyron has written the biography Liberace was scared to death
someone would.
``I don't want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS,''
Liberace complained privately, even as the story went out that he was
dying from a watermelon diet.
Over the course of nearly 500 frequently footnoted academic-press pages,
Pyron is intelligent, diligent, and intermittently entertaining - if not
exactly short-winded - in setting forth the facts of Liberace's life.
Describing Liberace's swooping, in-flight entrance over the Radio City
Music Hall stage, Pyron's prose tries to take flight too, and crash-burns.
``Just ... as his Tinkerbell/Peter Pan excursion through the air
hypostatized his own fantasies, so his flight personalized his
countrymen's impossible dreams as well. The dream of audience and actor
united; his wingless flight - if Oz-like fantasy - became a metaphor of
that old American trick of pulling off the impossible.''
Pyron's brows do knit into Gordian knots when he comes to interpret the
facts. His point of departure was Liberace's sexual nature; he was drawn
to the subject when he picked up a copy of Scott Thorson's ``Behind the
Candelabra,'' the tell-all memoir of the man who sued Liberace for
palimony. And the biographer uses Liberace's homosexuality to explain
nearly everything about him, which is too much; he uses the lens of
Liberace's homosexuality to examine not only Liberace but the America of
his lifetime, which is way too much.
After Liberace dated the transexual Christine Jorgensen, she reported,
``He's nice - but a little strange.'' In a way, Liberace is a godsend to a
biographer because the little-known facts are even weirder than the very
strange public phenomenon might suggest. His lovers included the
underground hustler-novelist John Rechy and the young Rock Hudson, who
later complained that Liberace was condescending, even then. The pianist
was so vain about his hairpieces that he refused to remove his wig before
a face lift until the doctor refused to perform the surgery until he did.
Liberace arranged for Thorson to undergo plastic too, so that the lad, 40
years his junior, might more closely resemble his lover and patron.
Liberace died before Viagra was developed, so he responded to sexual
dysfunction by installing a silicone implant.
On the other hand, Liberace proved a difficult subject, despite the fact
he sought and won publicity throughout his life. He told exactly what he
wanted known, and nothing else, even if it meant lying under oath. He
successfully sued the London Daily Mirror for libel after its columnist
``Cassandra'' described him as ``this deadly, winking, sniggering,
snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering,
giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.''
Liberace won the same kind of suit that Oscar Wilde lost, and he lied as
blithely as Wilde did.
But Liberace never became a gay hero, like Wilde. He didn't want that, and
his true constituency lay elsehwere, mostly in the Middle America where he
grew up and learned his values. Although television made and kept him a
star, his work lay outside the purview even of analysts of popular
culture; one of Pyron's footnotes reveals that Liberace's name appeared in
the New York Times only four times during a 23-year period that included
the peak of his celebrity.
Pyron is exhaustive on the subject of Liberace's sexuality, but he is less
successful in dealing with Liberace's showmanship and his place in popular
culture for the simple reason that he never saw the showman in live
performance. He is also not ideally placed to discuss Liberace's
musicianship. Pyron does not seem musically literate in either the
classical or the popular fields that Liberace bridged. (He gets the name
of Morton Gould wrong, misspells Morton Downey's, and thinks that the
McGuire Sisters sang ``Mr. Sandman.'') This is a drawback because Liberace
was not musically illiterate. It would have been more interesting to hear
from musicians who worked with Liberace, his conductors, for example, or
some of the singers who toured with him (who included Barbra Streisand and
the Met's Jean Fenn).
Liberace was a better pianist than he sometimes let himself be - at his
worst, he did play like a lazy lounge lizard - but some of his
arrangements and improvisations in live performance were brilliant
examples of mental, musical, and physical legerdemain. A critic once told
me that Liberace was not a natural pianist, and throughout his career
practiced constantly to keep in trim. If both Pyron's account of nonstop
lechery and the critic are accurate, one wonders where he found the time.
The millions who did see Liberace in supper clubs, concert halls, summer
tents and at Las Vegas enjoyed the experience, even people like this
writer who never expected to. Liberace was always ahead of you, and you
couldn't say anything much worse about him than he said about himself. He
certainly reveled in excess and extravagance of every kind, but he also
kept it in perspective. ``I'm glad you like this outfit,'' he would say.
``After all, you paid for it.'' (It's fun to read that in the baroque
excesses of his luxuriously appointed homes, Liberace preferred not to
shave when he wasn't working and lounged around in a ratty old terrycloth
robe.)
And it was a neat hat-trick that he pulled off, offering a gay sensibility
to people who enjoyed it because they didn't know what it was. Mae West, a
onetime Liberace date, had shown the way. As the years went on, Liberace
dropped more and more beads, but it wasn't until Bette Midler came along
that everyone was in on the joke. His worst sin was that he was of his own
generation, of his own time and place, rather than a later one. There are
many reasons for Liberace's appeal, and Pyron understands most of them
without stressing the principal one: He enjoyed his life and his work, and
people loved him for it.
LIBERACE: An American Boy
By Darden Asbury Pryon
University of Chicago Press< 494 pp., illustrated, $27.50 >
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> http://elvispelvis.com/aids.htm#2 > Liberace: Age 67
b. Wladziu Valentino Liberace, 16 May 1919, West Allis, WI, d. 4 February 1987)
This larger-than-life pianist had no major chartbusters—but had an
indefinable charm and talent that gave delight to multitudes of fans
across the globe. Of Polish-Italian extraction, he was raised in a
household where there was always music— particularly from father Salvatore
who blew French horn in both John Philip Sousa's Concert Band and the
Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. George and the younger Wladziu seemed
keenest on likewise becoming professional players. Wladziu's piano skills
were praised by no less than Paderewski, and he won a place at Wisconsin
College of Music at the age of seven. During a 17-year scholarship—the
longest ever awarded by the academy—he made a concert debut as a soloist
at 11 and was fronting renowned symphony orchestras before leaving
adolescence. He moved to Columbia Records where, supervised by Mitch
Miller, he cut a flamboyant version of September Song which, supplemented
by an in-concert album, brought Liberace to a national audience.
Nevertheless, he struck the most popular chord with encores in which
doggerel like Mairzy Doats or Three Little Fishes were dressed in
arrangements littered with twee arpeggios and trills. He also started
garbing himself from a wardrobe that would stretch to rhinestone, white
mink, sequins, gold lame and similar razzle-dazzle. Crowned with a
carefully-waved coiffeur, he oozed charm and extravagant gesture with a
candelabra-lit piano as the focal point of the epic vulgarity that was THE
LIBERACE SHOW, televised coast-to-coast from Los Angeles, which
established a public image that he later tried in vain to modify. While
in the UK, he instigated a High Court action, successfully suing the DAILY
MIRROR, whose waspish columnist, Cassandra had written an article on the
star, laced with sexual innuendo.Nonetheless, Liberace's mode of
presentation left its mark on stars such as Gary Glitter, Elton John, and
Queen. When the singer died on 4 February 1987 at his Palm Springs
mansion, the words ‘kidney complaint’ were a euphemism for an AIDS-related
illness. ~Music Central '96
Morgan La Fey
been sick. He was a truly wonderful old man and was very, very sweet to a
young girl just starting out. I was very nervous and he noticed it. He told
me to relax and he put his big hand on my cheek and turned to someone and
said, "Doesn't this girl have the prettiest blue eyes and sweetest smile
you've ever seen?" My heart melted. Having dealt with a lot of "stars" who
really treat you like you're nothing, Liberace's kindness and understanding
are one of my dearest memories. And he gave a great performance. He always
did.
Morgan La Fey
Ilena Rose <il...@san.rr.com> wrote in article
<ilena-04070...@dt011n39.san.rr.com>...
E. Varden
Ilena Rose wrote:
> Thanks much to:
> Jean <jwoo...@home.com>
>
> Liberace bio includes everything but the joy
>
> By RICHARD DYER
>
> c) 2000, The Boston Globe
>
> Darden Asbury Pyron has written the biography Liberace was scared to death
> someone would.
>
> The millions who did see Liberace in supper clubs, concert halls, summer
> tents and at Las Vegas enjoyed the experience, even people like this
> writer who never expected to. Liberace was always ahead of you, and you
> couldn't say anything much worse about him than he said about himself. He
> certainly reveled in excess and extravagance of every kind, but he also
> kept it in perspective. ``I'm glad you like this outfit,'' he would say.
> ``After all, you paid for it.''
Perhaps the most famous line: It was Liberace who said of critics' nasty comments that he "cries all
the way to the bank".
This has been robbed of its irony by folk who repeat it as "laughing all the way to the bank".
Pe (Who saw his show in Toronto, and was delighted...)
Tom Hens
M.FERRANTE <fer...@REMOVEprimenet.com> wrote...
> I read many stories over the years from people who met Liberace
> and said he was one of the nicest people they ever met. He never
> made you feel as if you were lower then him, unlike many stars.
In a BBC television biography of Liberace, the British comedian Bob
Monkhouse told a story about working with Liberace when he recorded some TV
shows in Britain in the 1950s. On arrival Liberace went round the studio
and asked everyone working there, from the director down to the grips and
stagehands, for their names so he could address them by their first name,
and also asked about their wives, children, etc., and learned all those
names by heart (using some mnemonic system whose name Monkhouse mentioned
but I forget). When he returned for another series of shows made at the
same studios four years later, he didn't only remember the names of all the
people who still worked there, he asked them about their family members by
name. Monkhouse said that after that there wasn't a soul there who didn't
think Liberace was the greatest guy they'd ever met, and he'd never seen
higher crew morale.