Liberace: An American Boy - Softcover

Pyron, Darden Asbury

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226686698 ISBN 13: 9780226686691

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2001

Synopsis

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, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé.

"An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing. . . . [Pyron] persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well as a brilliant showman. . . . [A]n immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews

"This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph

"[A]bsorbing and insightful. . . . 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."—Publishers Weekly

"Liberace, coming on top of his amazing life of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."—Tom Wolfe

"Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture."—Library Journal

About this title

Review:

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

From the Inside Flap:

"Liberace . . . puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."-Tom Wolfe

In this fascinating biography, Darden Asbury Pyron leads us through the public triumphs, private struggles, and numerous secrets of the man known to generations as "Mr. Showmanship," deftly placing Liberace's remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the United States in the twentieth century, and providing the far-ranging, insightful analysis necessary to understand one of the most popular entertainers in the nation's history.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0226686698
• ISBN 13: 9780226686691
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512