by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened Charles a 1954 episode of The Jack Benny
Program featuring Liberace as guest star.
Originally aired January 17, 1954, and written by Sam Perrin, George Balzer,
Milt Josefsberg and John Tackaberry, the episode has a typically simple plot —
Liberace’s violin-playing and bandleading brother George (Our Hero’s original
name was Wladziu Valentino Liberace and he Anglicized the first name to
“Walter” — the name on his first film, a “Soundie” of “Tiger Rag” — before he
dropped his given name altogether) can’t make it to a benefit concert Liberace
is playing, so he’s inviting Jack Benny to stand in for him. Benny learns of
this when his valet Rochester (Eddie Anderson, given such heavy lighting that
when we first see him he doesn’t look all that Black) takes Liberace’s phone
message, and there’s a great scene when Benny’s attempt to return Liberace’s
call gets sidetracked by two gloriously funny character actresses, Bea
Benaderet and Shirley Mitchell, who play switchboard operators making catty
remarks as Benny tries to get through. Unable to reach Liberace by phone, Benny
drops in at him at home — and Liberace’s home is a palatial living room lit
entirely by candelabra. Benny meets Liberace’s manservants, including butler
Geoffrey (Rex Evans), chef Pierre (Rolfe Sedan) — who has prepared an entrée of
“frog’s legs à la José Ferrer,”
meaning that the legs are permanently bent at the knees (a reference to
Ferrer’s starring role as the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the film Moulin
Rouge, in which to simulate the artist’s
diminutive stature he had a special frame made so he could go about on his
knees throughout the film and look like a real little person — indeed, as I
recall the most spectacular scene was a confrontation between Toulouse-Lautrec
and his father, also played by Ferrer but standing up normally) — and at least
two of the four people Liberace has detailed to change the candles when they’re
about to burn out. It’s an illustration of how Liberace managed to be a Gay celebrity
at a time when homosexuality was almost unheard of and the big concern of the
Gay community, such as it was, was to keep from getting arrested instead of
winning the right to marry each other: instead of staying closeted and playing
the big, buff straight guy the way Rock Hudson did, Liberace ramped up the camp to such a level that people thought, “He
acts way too much like one to
actually be one!” (Amazingly, in
1959 Liberace filed a libel suit against a British columnist who had hinted he
was Gay — and won.)
At the scene
representing the concert, Liberace plays a medley of Chopin pieces — and plays
them surprisingly well; for all his affectations, Liberace as a musician was
genuinely at home with the classics, and when he could resist his temptation to
add orchestral parts to pieces whose composers had written them for solo piano
(which he doesn’t do here until the very end of the medley), he could play
standard piano repertoire quite well. Not surprisingly, his tastes ran to the
dreamier parts of the classical piano canon, particularly Chopin and Debussy (I
have a late Liberace recording of “Clair de Lune,” blessedly free of orchestral
interjections, and he’s quite good —not at the level of Gieseking or Arrau, but
still quite good.) Then Jack Benny emerges with a miniature three-candle
candelabrum glued to the body of his violin. “I think you’re taking this a bit
too far,” says Liberace, the Master of Excess! Benny agrees to fetch his other,
unadorned violin, and the two play Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” with Benny
excruciatingly out of tune as usual (when Liberace sounds A on the piano and
suggests, “Why don’t we tune up?,” Benny says, “That’s a great idea.” Liberace
says, “No, why don’t you tune
up?”). In one of the great Benny-as-terrible-violinist sequences, he plays
“September Song” with full visual panache, as if he thinks he’s making the greatest music of all time
even though what we hear is the usual Benny screeching. (According to Joe
Venuti, Benny could really play well — the two jammed together and Venuti said
Benny would have made a great jazz violinist — but he couldn’t risk playing
competently for audiences because it would have blown his carefully crafted
image of being terrible.) It’s a wonderful little program and a souvenir of a
bygone age in entertainment when you could have a mass following as a comedian
without being rude, offensive or scatological.
