Known as Mr. Showmanship, Wladziu Valentino Liberace made millions of dollars entertaining audiences with his flamboyant performances. In honor of what would have been his th birthday on May 16, here are 13 facts about the entertainer. If YouTube existed in the s, videos of a young Liberace expertly playing the piano would definitely have gone viral. Born in Wisconsin on May 16, , Liberace started playing the piano when he was just 3 years old , and began proper lessons soon after.
He quickly learned to play by ear, replicating the songs his older siblings were playing. It became obvious that he was a prodigy, and by the time he was 7, his father—himself a professional musician who once toured with John Philip Sousa's concert band playing the French horn—enrolled him at the Wisconsin College of Music. As a teenager, Liberace played piano in clubs, movie theaters, symphonies, and classical music competitions around Wisconsin and the Midwest.
But around , he decided to go mononymous—he told people that it was because his idol, the Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski, only went by his last name. Liberace described his songs as classical music without all the boring parts. And because his shows relied heavily on showmanship and spectacle—gimmicks, costumes, and jokes—critics disparaged his talent as a pianist, arguing that he opted for easy piano trills and showy techniques rather than artistry.
In , Liberace wrote a letter to a critic who had written a scathing review of his show. His Sherman Oaks, California home, which he lived in with his mother in the s, was no exception. His career bounced back after he adopted his Mr Showmanship persona during the early s, declaring that "it was a shame to waste [his] mother-of-pearl trimmed suits". According to his biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, Liberace carefully constructed every aspect of his image to maximise his public appeal, and that included allusions to his sexual orientation.
It's secondary to the fact he was a great performer, he was extremely fastidious about his presentation and he gave his audiences exactly what they wanted. More importantly, his performance style was constructed to be as non-threatening as possible.
While camp, it was shorn of any suggestion that he might ever want to actually have sex. Kevin Kopelson, professor of English at the University of Iowa, who analysed the Liberace phenomenon in his book Beethoven's Kiss, compares the pianist's public persona to that of Michael Jackson.
Both men, he says, portrayed themselves as childlike and innocent. It was not enough to prevent rumours circulating, however, and Liberace felt obliged to take legal action against publications which suggested he might be gay. Most famously, he sued the Daily Mirror over an innuendo-laden article by William Connor, who wrote under the pen-name Cassandra, which described the musician as "the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter The Cassandra article might be considered too homophobic to be published in a national newspaper today, and the trial that followed reveals much about the very different social attitudes of the time - not least in the repeated use of the term "homosexualist" during the case.
Under oath, Liberace testified that he was not gay and had never taken part in homosexual activity. But the Cassandra trial, coupled with his repeated denials of his homosexuality, was one reason why sections of the fledgling gay rights movement increasingly viewed Liberace with antipathy. Aged 50 by the time the Stonewall riots kicked off the modern fight for gay and lesbian rights in the US, he displayed scant desire to demand recognition or equality for the community even though as time passed "he was living in a glass closet", according to Kopelson.
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.
It has been widely quoted in all parts of the world and has been reproduced exactly as it appeared in the Daily Mirror. It was beside the point, of course, that Hush-Hush had said that the British were only preparing to answer questions "which have bothered Americans for years. Well before William Conner attacked Liberace's reputation, the American media—scandal sheets and even mainstream press—had described him as a sissy, a mama's boy, and even a homosexual.
It was not necessary. American writers saw the same thing William Conner did, whether or not they knew the Englishman's piece. Was Liberace a man? 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. Liberace and Queen Elizabeth II, following a royal command performance. Lee Liberace presumed the same connections.
Ideologically and culturally, he defaulted to the social definitions of maleness and to the asexual identification of that category with work, achievement, control, public authority. If homosexuals were not men, according to this definition, his commitment to the public definitions of masculinity required his public repudiation of homosexuality.
The logic was infallible. Conner's essay, he declared, had "cost me many years of my professional career by implying that I am a homosexual.
It has caused untold agonies and embarrassment and has made me the subject of ridicule. It hurt me. People stayed away from my shows in droves. I went from the top to the bottom in a very short time, and I had to fight for my life. 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 were a fruitcake, and destined to be that all your life.
Such a remark would have caused an earthquake at the Studio. Rock Hudson's behavior mirrored Perkins's. 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. Denying one's homosexuality, then, equaled defending one's manly prerogatives of earning a living. In denying his homosexuality, he confirmed his career. Beyond this, he intended the Daily Mirror case to resolve the matter permanently once and for all.
He had beaten Confidential 's claims of his homosexual adventure the year before, but he had done so on a technicality—that in one, only one, of the three encounters with the handsome young press agent, he was not where the scandal sheet said he was. He wanted to kill, now and forever, the claims that he was homosexual.
Far away from America, where he had "tricked around," the London courtroom offered a nearly perfect place to make his argument.
0コメント