Liberace: An American Boy

Historian Darden Asbury Pyron's engrossing biography of Liberace (1919-87) pays America's most popular and pilloried pianist the one tribute he probably never expected: it takes him seriously. "Liberace seemed to me a kind of emblem of modern America," Pyron writes in his preface, "overflowing with both [its] virtues and [its] vices." He makes a persuasive case for this idea in a text that smoothly blends critical theory, historical background, and a lucid narrative of his subject's life. Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, the youthful piano prodigy chose to become a showman rather than a serious musician, livening up the classical repertoire with pop favorites and attracting swooning female fans who adored his outrageous costumes and garish accessories like the famous candelabra. He was flamboyantly swishy yet never publicly admitted he was gay, even when dying of AIDS; he genuinely believed in the conservative, Catholic, Midwestern values of his immigrant parents, even as his private life belied them. Pyron dismantles the façade of lies and evasions behind which Liberace concealed his driving ambition as well as his sexual orientation, but this is a fundamentally sympathetic portrait. Refusing to acknowledge the boundaries between high and low culture, conducting his life with a weird mixture of hypocrisy and sincerity, Liberace, the author concludes, "was born and died an American boy." --Wendy Smith