Mr. Showmanship's Comeback
Mr. Showmanship's Comeback
ANNETTE ON THE ROAD A superstar's residency at a Las Vegas . . . museum
This is an Annette on the Road post, in which Annette discovers museums and historic sites on a vast range of subjects, and across a huge range of quality, from brilliant and engaging to, well, absolute crap.
Don’t miss out on inside scoops like these, exclusively for paying subscribers . . .
Become a Nonnie today. Contributing annual or monthly subscribers make Non-Boring History happen, and that's why you get the full benefit of NBH. Join us !
Note from Annette
In my most recent Saturday post for Nonnies, I tried to lighten the mood after Hate’s Modern Masters, my two-parter on Dr. Gregory Mixon's The Atlanta Riot. I'm shameless: I featured cameos from DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy off the first and best Star Trek), and Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
I know the past two weeks at NBH have been heavy heavy heavy, in so many ways. But history done right is never a light subject—intellectually or emotionally— even though I sometimes make it look that way. On the bright side, reading about awful things in the past is a lot easier than living through them! We get to feel like we're there, but we're really not. And that makes an enormous difference.
No matter what, and no matter the risk, I'm not going to whitewash the past here at NBH. But I'm not a monster. You need a break, some fluff, and as you know, I do fluff, too! Hey, the Gnomes and I live to serve.
Yes, OK, even my fluff isn't that fluffy. My historian training kicks in no matter what, and leads us out of the comfort of fluff. Sorry not sorry. Today, though, I give you my very best shot at maximum fluffery! Oh, yes!
I've been holding this post in the wings of the NBH stage since April, waiting for the right moment to ask the Gnomes to wheel it out, along with our slightly out of tune grand piano, the one with the missing leg, and the B flat key that goes plunk.
Ladies and gentlemen, now is the time! Put your hands together for a museum exhibit on a 20th century showbiz legend in (where else?) Fabulous Las Vegas!
HEEEEEEEEERE'S LIBERACE!
Yes, it's the one and only Liberace, Mr. Showmanship himself! 🎹 Whether you've seen him in action (probably sitting in front of the TV with your grandma) or not, let's head to 1981, and his spectacular Vegas show!
Do watch this six minute intro to get into proper 1981 Vegas Liberace mode:
Wow. I mean, where to start? That blindingly flashy home that appears to be a warehouse of furniture stored by guillotined French aristocrats with bad taste. That enormously toothy grin. That cape, shamelessly made from 100% dead foxes, and looking suspiciously like Princess Diana’s wedding dress. The British Royal name-drops. The vintage Rolls-Royce, driven onstage by the dishy chauffeur. Liberace introducing the chauffeur by name, because he's not just the chauffeur, he's Scott Thorson, Liberace’s secret lover. But it’s 1981, and we're not yet allowed to say what was bleedin’ obvious to this Brit, and any Brit under forty*: Liberace’s GAY! G-A-Y!! GAY!!!! Sing it to Y-M-C-A, the Village People hit that came out three years earlier, in 1978!
*I’m not saying Americans under forty were clueless, but there was a sweet naivete about my high school and college classmates in Sacramento that was both charming and astounding. Seriously.
Forty years ago, I wasn't in the least troubled that Liberace was gay, although I was baffled that we were supposed to pretend he wasn't. However, everything else in this video would have left me in excruciating cringe mode.
To this teenage Brit, living in California, the popularity of Liberace symbolized all that was deeply embarrassing about so many older American adults. Or maybe I'm remembering the Lawrence Welk Show. But you get the idea.
Now? I’m a grown-up, and I gotta give Liberace credit: Yes, he laid on what he called “the schmaltz” with a bulldozer, but he was charming, and he was entertaining. Now I see the self-deprecating humor. The guy was well aware he was completely over the top, and he was having a blast.
Lee Liberace was maximum Vegas. More Vegas than Vegas itself in 1981. But what made him a truly stellar performer was that there was genuine heart in that act, a love of entertaining, and a connection with his mostly middle-aged, mostly female fans, who overlooked the obvious because, well, they loved him, and he made them feel loved. That's the secret sauce of celebrity, from Liberace to Taylor Swift.
Vegas was not the glam place it is now, with huge hotels dominating the Strip, and even gritty downtown repackaged with glitz at the Fremont Street Experience. In 1981, Vegas’s heyday, the Rat Pack era, was already over. Not that this is the end of the story or even the whole story. But nobody knew in 1981 that things would look up. Liberace's own career had been in decline, despite his throwing everything he had at it, since as long ago as the late fifties.
And in the low-ceilinged grimy Vegas casinos of 1981, there was precious little glamour. You had rows of chain-smoking elderly folk in polyester, toting walkers and even oxygen tanks, grimly pumping coins into multiple machines at once, and barking at anyone who approached “their” slot machines. Yes, I know that’s still mostly true, but it was all a lot more true forty years ago. Yet, without competition from Indian tribal casinos in California, the money poured in anyway. Still, 1981 Vegas had a few fabulous ships in its fleet, and Liberace was its flagship.
If Liberace's career was struggling in 1981 (and it really was), there was no sign of that when you entered the magical theatre. He transformed a huge space into an intimate room.
Here was glamor, glitz, and lots of what Liberace called “schmaltz”, meaning staged sentimentality. Here was a touch of posh culture to make the audience feel sophisticated, classical music (without the boring bits, he said) mingled with popular tunes, performed by a genuinely talented pianist with charisma by the bucketload. He lovingly caressed the ivories and his thrilled audience with music and words. And everything sparkled, not least Liberace himself, from his sequin and rhinestone suits to his shiny toupee! This is how you entertain, folks!
I added this next video well after I sent out the post, because it shows what made Liberace so appealing: He takes audience requests, a whole bunch of them, then turns round and weaves every last request into a medley. What a memory. Um, Hoosen, a musician himself, just pointed out that Liberace could choose the tunes he knew best from the shouted request. Spoilsport. 😂 But Hoosen reminded me that something like this takes a lot of rehearsal, no matter what. Fair enough.
When Liberace's audience starts —unprompted—singing along to You Made Me Love You, it’s a lovely moment of folksinging in the true sense, building community through music:
OMG. I just had a revelation . . .
Gnomes, take down the portraits of great historians! Farewell, T.H. Breen, Christine Heyrman, Paul Boyer, and Edmund S. Morgan! My new role model is Liberace! Fetch me a sequined frock at once! Oh, and Gnomes? You're all fired! I’m replacing you with dancing toyboys!
Ah, crap. Who am I kidding? Sigh. I write a little newsletter called Non-Boring History, I am not now and never have been in residence at Las Vegas, or even Harvard, I dress so as not to be arrested. And no matter how much I play the renegade, the scholar-gypsy*, I'm still a historian. Even when I try, I can't do glamour. Never could. Who's got time, when I’m racing against time to try to understand the world and my place in it, which includes helping my audience find yourselves, too? To quote 19th century poet Matthew Arnold, Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
*That’s a reference to a favorite Matthew Arnold poem, about an Oxford student who gives up his conventional studies to run off with gypsies and see the world differently:
The story of the Oxford scholar poor, Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain, Who, tired of knocking at preferment's door, One summer-morn forsook His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore, And roam'd the world with that wild brotherhood, And came, as most men deem'd, to little good, But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
Liberace forsook his friends in classical music, and when he did, he found himself.
When The Curtains Came Down
Corporate Vegas today simply can't hold a candle to Liberace’s world. Not even the fabulous Donny Osmond (currently doing a Vegas residency at Harrah’s, where you can attend his intimate Q and A for an extra $249, no photos please) can match Liberace for showmanship.
The show ended suddenly, and tragically, and in more ways than one. It's not just that Liberace died. There's a much bigger loss, I reckon. After the upheavals of the Sixties and the betrayal of Watergate, a more cynical, less innocent, and yet still (strangely) uncritical hero-worshipping America was unfolding. This America no longer seemed to have a place for a Liberace and his schmaltz. This also became a less joyful America, and yeah, yeah, I understand (better than you may think) if you’re shaking your head. I too can think of a million objections to that statement. But that’s my take all the same. See, I’ve been here all along, living in this country, yet not quite of it, lurking in very ordinary places, and in the homes of unglamorous people. I think of humdrum Sacramento lives in the early 80s that were brightened by a bit of glamour beamed through the TV, and maybe highlighted by a pilgrimage to Vegas, to see Liberace.
See, I don't attack Americans who feel a sense of loss now. As my old professor John Phillips liked to say, perception is reality. People who sense loss are not all racists, and not all delusional, either: Imagination is delusion, and yet we’re poorer without it, in this new world in which young people (unless rich) are urged to drop Shakespeare and pick up tech and trades. In every performance, Liberace made his audience feel special and drew them into a world of happy imagination.
Even thousands of miles away, in dreary suburban 1950s London, young Reg Dwight watched Liberace on TV, and for the first time, to his joy, knew he was seeing a gay person like himself. Reg, of course, grew up to be Elton John, to do a spectacular piano act and live an extravagant life of spending, parties, and hanging out with Royalty. He was not a million miles removed from the example of Liberace.
But it's also true that, as times changed, and gay rights moved center stage, Liberace embarrassed many gay men as a stereotype they wanted to leave behind. Attitudes seem to have mellowed in the decades since, along with (despite what we often hear to the contrary) widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans. I'm a straight woman, sure, but I’m also a foreigner in your midst, and I do pay attention to people, not just talking heads.
Showbiz is a fickle creature. Tastes change fast. Even historians’ work has far more sticking power than that of most entertainers. That's why The Liberace Museum, which opened in 1979 and was once the biggest draw in Nevada, after the Las Vegas Strip and the Hoover Dam, closed thirty years later. Its collection was mothballed, car collection and all, and moved into storage.
When Hoosen and I were last in Vegas in 2018, I learned the museum was long ago closed. Hoosen, honestly, didn't seem that cut up about missing out on the experience. But then I saw earlier this year that I would have one more chance to visit Liberace in a museum, because the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas was hosting a temporary Liberace exhibition: It would still be on when we visited in April! Hoosen said ok. What would I do without this man, willing to drive across hundreds of miles of Nevada desert so his wife could see a Liberace exhibit? 😍 Big round of applause for Hoosen, folks!
Now, of course I'm not a Liberace fan any more than Hoosen is. So why did a Liberace museum exhibit appeal to me? Because, like Everest, it was there. Because it just had to be a hoot. Because we were headed to Vegas, baby, in a convertible Honda, and there's not much else in that city that was calling my name, not even a wee flutter at the slot machines: If I'm gonna donate at the casino, I would rather give to Indian tribes than billionaires.
The Nevada State Museum, although pretty pricy as museums go, is a lot cheaper than playing slots, even by my stingy low roller standards, and cheaper than tickets to see Donny Osmond (sorry, Donny, I really am, Puppy Love forever, mwah 😘)
Time for me to get all sentimental (or should I say schmaltzy?) and go pay a call on Mr. Showmanship himself.
Liberace: Real and Beyond
Yes, Liberace: Real and Beyond was the title of the exhibit at the Nevada State Museum at Las Vegas (there’s another branch in Reno). It’s perfect. I love the little play on words: This exhibit was about Liberace’s real life, and also about his performance, and how the two couldn’t really be separated. It also means that while Liberace was a real person, he was also totally beyond, meaning outrageous. And the exhibit was a combo of all these things. It had its flaws, but this exhibit also had some serious thinkiness going on behind the glitz, if you read the labels.
I don't know if we came in through in the entrance or the exit of this small exhibit, but we definitely came in the right way. Big sparkly piano with candelabra on top (no candelabra!?! what??) Check! ✔️ Empty sequined and rhinestone suits (gosh, that's loaded with symbolism)? Check! ✔️ Bored blokey security guard gamely trying to look casually non-homophobic from his assigned perch, but clearly a teensy bit embarrassed to be parked right across from huge photo of a naked Liberace holding up champagne from his bath? Yeah, that too.
Oh, and how about his insane Fabergé Cape from 1985, the centerpiece of the whole exhibit?
Think that’s outrageous? Here's what the cape is made from: “Pink turkey feathers, cotton duck fabric, lamé, silver bugle beads, crystal rocaille beads, crystal rhinestones, pearls.”
I didn't know turkeys came in pink, or that ducks are made from cotton, did you? Hey, I may not know a thing about fashion, but I say just slap some glow in the dark paint on this thing, and it's perfect.
The Fifties: The Liberace Decade
Sure, a photo in the exhibit showed Liberace performing to a packed lounge in the mid-forties. But post-war prosperity and TV were the making of his celebrity. After spending World War II on a strict budget and stuck at home (unless going off to fight), Americans were ready to hit the road for a fun time, and Vegas expanded to meet them. Television, a luxury for the superrich before the War, was now coming into every home. Liberace was standing by to be a star. I learned that he ignored radio because he knew that his piano playing, good though it was, wasn’t the attraction: He was.
By the early Fifties, Liberace was a big star of stage and TV.
How Big?
According to the exhibit, Liberace mentored Elvis Presley in 1956. Elvis was not yet a star, and he was dying on stage every night in Vegas. His manager asked the famous Liberace to come evaluate the show. He did, and pronounced that Elvis needed “more glitz”. A gold lame jacket was added to the act, and Elvis kicked into high energy: “Like Liberace, he continuously upped the ante with props, costumes, and soul-baring bravado. He left nothing offstage.” Elvis the Pelvis was a Liberace creation? Who’da thunk it?
Even as his own career was sputtering, Liberace launched Barbra Streisand in 1963.
Liberace discovered a very unfamous Barbra Streisand, and chose her as his warm-up act at the Riviera. He was old enough to be Streisand’s father. Barbra was part of the advance guard of Sixties youth: She was not into glamor, glitz, sequined frocks, or loads of make-up. The twenty-three year age gap between Streisand (b. 1942) and Liberace (b. 1919) wouldn’t have mattered in ages past, when young people typically dressed as miniature versions of their parents. But that wasn’t happening now, in this post-World War era, as it hadn’t in the Twenties, after the First World War. World Wars disrupt everything.
When Streisand died a death on stage several nights in a row, the Riviera’s management pressured Liberace to ditch her. Instead, in the interests of making the show work, he did something Big Stars don’t normally do: He became the warm-up for his warm-up act. He walked onstage, and introduced the then-unknown singer to his adoring audience. After that, it was standing ovations galore and (forgive me the reference to Streisand’s later movie) a Star is Born.
Annette’s Aside: I’m not arguing or even buying that Liberace pumped up Streisand’s struggling opening act just to be nice. He had plenty of motives. He had picked her himself. He would have had to find someone talented to replace her, but without overshadowing him. He wanted the show to work. And going out on stage for his young warm-up act certainly made him look kind to his adoring audience. I’m not ruling out the niceness factor. But still.
This is also a reminder that, in this modern age, we are always in desperate search of something to replace the traditional elders and institutions we’ve shunted off stage. We’re suckers for celebrity.
We take our cues for practically everything now from famous people: Purchases. Opinions. Whole packages of ideas. Listen, I’m a born hero-worshipper myself. But I also learned the hard way to have a “wait a minute . . .” skepticism that kicks in, sooner or later. You have to be someone pretty darn special to pass my hero test these days. And most of my heroes are neither rich nor famous.
Of course Barbra Streisand was talented. But she wasn’t going anywhere until a celeb (and a celeb of Liberace’s stature no less) gave her the thumbs up.
Keeping It Real
If something happens on a stage, it’s almost certainly a performance. So what’s real in this exhibit titled Liberace: Real and Beyond?
Good question. I’m certain people visited this exhibit expecting fluff. Why else? You don’t expect deep philosophy from a Liberace show. But as fluff, the exhibit disappointed: Not enough glitz, and too small a space for a subject who was—-sorry for the cliche— larger than life. Yet the exhibit was more enlightening than this historian expected, so long as I thought about it, and didn’t rely entirely on the museum’s labels.
There was a big display of photos of Liberace cooking. Yes, he loved to cook, but so what? Hey, a lot of us cook without expecting or getting applause. Yes, I’m prepared to believe that Liberace had a busy touring schedule, and that he cooked on the road with a hotplate. His contemporary, pioneering woman comedian Phyllis Diller, also cooked in hotel rooms. In an interview, she explained that you can’t just live on hotel and restaurant food all the time.
What I’m not prepared to believe is that Liberace normally cooked with a professional photographer snapping away, and while wearing a silly chef’s hat. So that’s a performance. And I’m sure it helped sell his cookbook. I have never been impressed by recipes from celebrity cookbooks, and that includes those by famous chefs. Give me a mostly self-trained home cook who gets it, like Ina Garten or
, over a celeb chef, or, even worse, a celeb flogging a cookbook.There really weren’t a lot of candid photos in this exhibit. Everything was carefully staged. And no wonder, because Liberace’s entire life was staged, and it had to be. At a time when homosexuality was illegal and shunned, Liberace was a gay man hiding in plain sight. He pretended, possibly even to himself. His audience pretended not to see what they saw, just as, a few decades earlier, millions of Americans who regarded disability with horror pretended not to notice that their President (FDR) couldn’t walk.
Easier to make exceptions than to admit that maybe our whole worldview needs an overhaul. Reminds me of small-town Georgia, where it was easier for white locals to categorize a friend, family member, or neighbor an eccentric than it was to admit that they were a liberal they loved. I think we’re more open to talking about stuff now. Or we will be, if we could just stop shouting at each other. And being afraid of each other. Easier said than done, I know.
In Liberace’s day, a sudden “ah-ha” about his sexuality would have destroyed his life.
From Liberace to Liberace
Liberace was always Liberace. It’s his real name: Władziu Valentino Liberace, the son of a working-class Italian immigrant and an American of Polish descent. His family always called him Walter. And he was born in 1919 in boring, ordinary unglamorous suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about an hour from where I’m sitting.
But, at four, little Walter Liberace taught himself to play piano, and everything looked up from there. By his mid-teens, Liberace was a soloist with the Chicago Symphony. And then he joined a national orchestra funded by (you guessed!) FDR’s New Deal in 1939. When he got playful, knocking out a bit of popular music in classical style, the audience went nuts. He had discovered a new career, partly funded by government support for the arts. If you’re looking for someone to blame or praise for Liberace, we could, I guess, blame FDR.
A New Era
Lord love him, Lee Liberace did his absolute best to keep up with the times in which he lived. He was nearly fifty at the time this next video was made (back when fifty was definitely considered old, but at least old meant grown up and respectable). He grins cheesily as he sings, dances, and hammers at the keyboard, in his ultracringe 1968 performance of Paul Simon’s Feelin’ Groovy. He’s backed by singers/dancers credited as (I kid you not) The Young Folk. I warn you, you cannot unsee this. It may make your eyes bleed.
Also, it’s kind of addictive. Or maybe that’s just me. Feel free to sing along.
The Young Folk look wholesome, don’t they? Oh, yes. But that was just TV at the time, with grannies as the target audience. The reality behind the screen was way less schmaltzy. I remember a live jazz concert I attended in Sacramento, California, in about 1981, performed by a big band made up of alumni of the painfully squeaky-clean Lawrence Welk Show. After a particularly sexy swinging number, one of the veteran musicians said loudly, “We couldn’t play that shit on Lawrence Welk!” And got laughter, cheers, and applause.
Arriving in the US in the early 80s, I very quickly got the sense that the shock and disillusionment of the Sixties and Watergate were still sinking in, and also being fiercely resisted all the way, which helps explain the popularity of President Ronald Reagan. Or maybe that’s too simple a take: When I returned to the UK from the States a couple of times in the early 80s, everything was also in flux on British television: The lovely, warm gentle humor of Morecambe and Wise, much-loved national treasure comedy duo performing in dinner jackets, was giving way to raucous “alternative” comedy like The Young Ones and Blackadder. I loved both these new shows, but I loved Morecambe and Wise, too, and I reckon Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise have turned out to have more sticking power. Audiences eventually get punch drunk, tired of always having to be cynical, and feeling expected to laugh knowingly at clever jokes or seem stupid and unhip. Sometimes, we just want to be entertained, and to feel loved back. Liberace was really good at that.
Old-Time Religion
Famously, when a British columnist implied in 1956 that Liberace was gay, the performer sued for libel, and won. He always denied his sexuality. His ability to compartmentalize his life was extraordinary, but necessary. After Scott Thorson, his chauffeur and former lover, sued for financial support (“palimony”) in 1982, Liberace eventually settled out of court. He never admitted he was gay. Look, this was how things were: The culture was very much “don’t ask, don’t tell”. But things were already changing in the 80s, and Liberace, I am certain, helped ease the way for straight people’s acceptance of LGBT people. If you were a fan and decided to hate Liberace because you could no longer pretend he was not gay, then that meant you lost him, that man you adored who whisked you away from reality. Ok, so both you and he were dealing with that by pretending he was not gay. But it was a start.
It may surprise some readers that, although he was a gay man at a time when gay people were forced to stay in the closet, Liberace was very conservative, politically and culturally. But why not? Regardless of their sexuality, people hold a wide range of beliefs and views: We didn’t always insist everyone pick a team, like we do now. Liberace loved capitalism, loved what money could buy. Like this fancy marble table and painted portrait of his mum:
Liberace was raised Catholic. He was also very religious. No wonder: In 1963, for reasons best known to himself, he tried to do a bit of amateur drycleaning in his dressing room. He accidentally inhaled the chemicals, and almost died of kidney failure. As he fought for his life, he had a vision of a nun who told him to pray to St. Anthony (patron saint of lost causes). He did, and began to recover. Later, he set up a shrine to St. Anthony in his house in Palm Springs. A wall of the museum exhibit was full of photos of Liberace posing with nuns, priests, cardinals, and popes. The Catholic Church/Liberace connection made sense to me: A shared love of flashy campy costumes, ceremony, and spectacular performance. But observations like these will get me in trouble, so, moving right along . . . Liberace being a man of faith certainly didn’t hurt his appeal to his matronly audience, either.
In the religion exhibit was a framed certificate of Apostolic Blessing with Lee Liberace’s name on it, from Pope John Paul II, in 1986. By then, Liberace was dying from AIDS. He never discussed his illness or sought treatment for it. The horrific fear and silence around that terrible disease is hard to imagine for young people now, but it was very, very real at the time, and it attached another stigma to being gay, because it was assumed at first to be a disease of gay men. Liberace died on February 4, 1987. An info panel in the exhibit read:
“His spokesman announced that Liberace had died of congestive heart failure. A coroner's autopsy later showed that he died of AIDS an illness that would soon galvanize a drive for LGBTQ rights that continues today.”
Notice the careful wording: It was not Liberace who galvanized the campaign for gay rights. It was AIDS.
The Gift Shop
Only now, looking at my photos from the Nevada State Museum gift shop, do I remember that alongside the feather boas and whatnot for sale, was a book about Liberace. I was amazed to discover it was an academic history published by no less than the University of Chicago Press: Liberace: An American Boy, by historian Dr. Darden Pyron. I'm kicking. myself right now, because I meant to buy a copy and write about it along with the museum. Ah, never mind. Maybe one day. Sadly, the Liberace exhibit is now closed, as was always intended. The performance is finally over. But it was fabulous while it lasted.
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!
This just came to my attention! You too can see Liberace treasures, and all the stuff you can cope with! The vaults are open. That's the good news. The bad news? The tickets are currently $179 each. Yeah… no.
From the Atlanta Massacre to Liberace, and a whole heap of historical thinking, all written for real people like you, there’s nothing else like Non-Boring History. Join us as a Nonnie, an annual or monthly subecriber, and don’t miss out!
Lovely piece - full of wisdom and affection. There's a direct line from Liberace to Barry Manilow, I suppose: also much loved ...
I once told my parents that Liberace was their generation's Elton John. They were not amused. 😆