Liberace, the biography, doesn`t do justice to the man

A scholarly biography of Liberace may seem like an oxymoron. Or just moronic. After all, such a study requires extensive research, probing analysis, a keen sense of social context and pages of footnotes - all indisputable proof of the seriousness of the subject.

But Liberace is hard to take seriously. He was not only Mr. Showmanship, he was the piano-playing prince of superficiality, a sequined icon of excess, complete with trademark candelabra.

Even now, 13 years after his death from AIDS at age 67, Liberace retains his campy allure. His old TV shows have been recycled for home video. His Las Vegas museum attracts visitors who are nostalgic or merely curious. And he`s the star of a deliciously kitschy Web site (www.liberace.com).

Yet that did not deter Darden Asbury Pyron, a history professor at Florida International University and author of "Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell." Give him credit for writing what must certainly be the most ambitious tome on Liberace, a book that chronicles his life in elaborate detail and includes 53 pages of footnotes.

What a pity the biography isn`t more pleasurable to read. Too often it`s puffed with pretension and padded with extraneous material.

"Don`t be misled by this flamboyant exterior," Liberace once said. "Underneath, I remain the same - a simple boy from Milwaukee."

Yet Pyron never really lets us know the sickly piano prodigy (born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in West Allis, Wis.) who metamorphosed into a prominent entertainer, thanks to pluck, luck and talent. It`s nowhere near as involving as such celebrity bios as C. David Heymann`s "Liz," about Elizabeth Taylor, or John Glatt`s "The Royal House of Monaco," which digs the dirt on Grace Kelly`s family with the literary equivalent of a backhoe.

Pyron had higher aspirations, viewing Liberace`s life as a metaphor for American culture. To that dubious end, the book contains references to Aeschylus` "Oedipus Rex," cultural critic Camille Paglia and, in perhaps the most mystifying tangent, modernism and the International School of Architecture.

But the author is not above delving into Liberace`s sexuality. When examining the entertainer`s closeted life, the writing is scholarly yet sordid, ponderous yet prurient. The more you learn, the less you want to know.

The book is best in recalling Liberace`s early years as the son of a controlling mother and financially struggling father, once a member of John Philip Sousa`s concert band. Liberace`s father was ultimately ambivalent about his son`s success - proud of his son`s fame but disapproving of the way in which it was achieved.

For Liberace, the pivotal moment came during a 1939 concert in La Crosse, Wis., which featured standard recital fare. An audience member requested the then-popular "Three Little Fishies" as an encore, and Liberace obliged by improvising the ditty in a quasi-baroque style akin to Bach. The audience loved it.

"Right then," he recalled, "I knew what people wanted."

What they wanted wasn`t necessarily "Three Little Fishies" but music made accessible and fun. Abandoning conventional repertoire, Liberace became a genial, joking performer in outlandishly showy costumes.

He added more rippling arpeggios to pieces than Franz Liszt ever dreamed possible. And his fingers remained fleet, even when wearing the gaudiest rings.

Not everyone adored him, however. As Pyron points out, famed TV newsman Edward R. Murrow found an interview with Liberace almost harder to endure than World War II and looked faintly nauseous by the end of his session with the entertainer.

"In your whole life did you ever see anyone so obnoxious?" Murrow muttered to an associate before retiring to a nearby bar and downing three scotches.

Yet in the 1950s, Liberace`s syndicated television program (which included his mother, wearing an enormous orchid corsage, and his brother George, the orchestra`s conductor) had a larger following than "I Love Lucy." And in glitzy Las Vegas he found his ideal domain, earning as much as $50,000 per performance.

"I don`t give concerts," Liberace liked to say. "I put on a show."

And quite a show it was.

- Valerie Scher

"The Photography of John Gutmann: Culture Shock," essay by Sandra S. Phillips Merrell; 144 pages; $40.

For many of us, the fabled "gut man" of San Francisco has been, of course, Dashiell Hammett`s Casper Gutman in "The Maltese Falcon," immortally depicted on screen as a monolith of menace by Sidney Greenstreet.

But there is another one: John Gutmann, a photographer whose best work has an almost blinding slap of illumination, braced by wit. Born in Breslau (now Wroclaw), Poland, in 1903, this tirelessly alert German Jew passed through the lens of vanguard Expressionism in Berlin, then fled Hitler`s nightmare to become a master of mainly Bay Area imagery, locally renowned as a teacher and a flinty prod at parties and openings.

Some of his photos were sold to magazines (German magazines had first shaped his vision), but most remained boxed until the `70s brought some into exhibitions. There is a wallop of both summary and discovery to "The Photography of John Gutmann: Culture Shock," a beautiful book with an informing essay by Sandra S. Phillips, linked to a traveling exhibit (arriving in Los Angeles this summer).

Gutmann died in 1998, after choosing these images. The first in the book`s main portfolio shows him in 1934, a tense looker not yet at home, hunched in a window frame with the city below and behind him. He made great views in Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities, and on the road, but San Francisco was the developing tank of his vision, his restless desire to catch America in the Depression `30s, his eye-jammed excitement with it, and his gratitude that never became sentimental slop.

The best Gutmanns are like wire-taut, often-ironic versions of the street, sign, working folk and local color snaps of the famed Farm Security Administration photographers of the New Deal era. A master of deep contrast, he is somewhere between those ramblers and the pouncing night bandit Weegee.

His torso of a swimmer (shirted as CAL) and his leaping divers are like acidic decodings of the famed Leni Riefenstahl movie athletes (he might not have liked that comparison). His shots of women often show a savvy, Weimar panache, and his "Texas Women" of 1937 is as crisply funny a pair of found fems as any camera has caught.

A sullen black man next to a painted polar bear behind a Works Progress Administration sign (1937) is utterly pure, formal but not forced. Ditto the blind man near a woman reading in 1938`s "Ham and Eggs." The 1935 view of a formal gathering at city hall, the German swastika flag hung near the American banner, still has the surreal chill of "it could happen here," and if you want the "reetcomplete" of the swing years, catch his views of Count Basie with strutting dancers.

Gutmann probably had dull days, but his camera kept a cutting edge. Like the Germanic filmmakers who came here - Lang, Murnau, Siodmak, Ulmer, Sirk, Lubitsch, Wilder, Sternberg and Stroheim - he embraced America as a woman to be captured by potency of vision.

- David Elliott

(C) Copley News Service

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Author: David Elliott