Liberace: An American Boy
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More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall still stand. Arguably the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless kept more than a few secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the acclaimed and bestselling Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, leads us through the life of America's foremost showman with his fresh, provocative, and definitive portrait of Liberace, an American boy.Liberace's career follows the trajectory of the classic American dream. Born in the Midwest to Polish-Italian immigrant parents, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Abandoning the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs, celebrities, and television, Liberace became America's most popular entertainer. While wildly successful and good natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservativism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secretive homosexuality. Even so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of ferocious aggression and ambition. Pyron relates this private man to his public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of twentieth-century America.Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of American culture, with its shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyroncomplicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé. Publishers Weekly "Don't be misled by this flamboyant exterior. Underneath I remain the same--a simple boy from Milwaukee." Thus spake Liberace in one of his more modest moments. Even as a child, Liberace was well liked and, well, bigger than life; when he came to a high school party dressed as Greta Garbo, he received no flak from classmates. Born Walter Liberace in 1919, the pianist and entertainer began playing clubs in the 1930s, and by the early '40s began cultivating the extravagant performance style (e.g., a Strauss waltz version of "Home on the Range") and the unrestrained costumes for which he became famous. He soon became a cultural icon who attracted adoration from middle-brow, usually female audiences as well as overt antagonism, often fueled by homophobia. In this absorbing and insightful biography, Pyron (Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture) charts more than the life of the performer; he uses that life to reflect on how artifice, camp, gender, homosexuality, gay sensibility and homophobia shape American popular culture. Drawing on Liberace's autobiography, other biographies, queer theory, reviews, scandal sheet accounts of his private life and court records (Liberace was always suing or being sued), the book makes an original contribution in its complex examination of the intersection of homosexuality with private lives and public culture. Pyron's interests are far-ranging and illuminating--from the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture to the aesthetics of television and the social importance of self-improvement books in the 1950s. Finally, he achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment. (July) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\|
ContentsPreface1: Wisconsin Rhythm and Blues2: The Great Escape3: Sows' Ears/Silk Purses4: Chico and Chopin5: The Successful Unknown6: Lucky Channel 137: Music for a Mama's Boy8: The Shoals of Fame9: You Can Be Sure If It’s Westinghouse10: Getting Back11: Trompe l'Oeil12: An Image in the Water13: The Garden of Earthly Pleasures14: Peter Pan15: Et Lux PerpetuaEpilogueNotesIndex
