Rubbery Wally

For a while in the early 1950s, some of the animation in the Walter Lantz looked like it came from Terrytoons. Thick ink lines, cross-eyes, rubberised body parts. Here are a couple of examples from What’s Sweepin’, directed by Don Patterson.



And another scene.



Some of the poses, especially during about the first 90 seconds of the short, are very good. Ray Abrams, La Verne Harding and Paul Smith get animation credits and, perhaps, Patterson did some animation as well.

The Feud Ends

On March 14, 1937, Fred Allen and Jack Benny were to end their 2½-month-long feud on a Benny broadcast from New York City. It never happened. The feud was so popular, Benny and Allen took shots at each other for years afterward (it even found its way into a 1940 movie called Love Thy Neighbor).

The feud got better with time. The early days were filled with a lot of childish name-calling “Town Hall Buddah!” “Waukegan Whippersnapper!” Jack spent one show picking on a ten-year-old violinist who had inadvertently started the whole thing. On the broadcast, Benny comes across as mean and petty, not funny. But when the ‘40s rolled on, the material got sharper on both programmes; the feud’s best moment may have been on Allen’s “King For a Day” broadcast on May 26, 1946 where the stage crew apparently removed Benny’s pants live on the air. After Allen’s radio show ended in 1949, the feud still continued, but Jack softened a bit. Allen’s health problems were well-known, as was his lack of a success on television; Benny perhaps didn’t want to seem like he was beating a man when he was down. Instead, routines made them out to be old vaudeville compatriots who snipped at each other. It still works really well, especially in an April 26, 1953 programme where Allen and Benny butcher “Tea For Two” on a clarinet and violin for agent Mickey Rockford (played by Mel Blanc, though Rockford really was an agent at MCA).

Allen appeared on Benny’s TV show a week earlier. The show was, like a number of Jack’s television broadcasts, a reworking of a radio show, this one from October 1, 1944. Since this was the first appearance of the two feudsters together on TV, it was a perfect opportunity for publicity. Here’s what the Associated Press wrote in a story published April 15, 1953.

Benny and Allen Feud Pays Off At Boxoffice
By BOB THOMAS
HOLLYWOOD (AP) -- The feud that launched a thousand quips is still going strong after 18 years.
Fred Allen and Jack Benny have been mining pay dirt from their alleged dislike for each other for nearly two decades, and the end is not in sight. The comics will continue their tiff when they appear on Benny's TV show Sunday.
It will mark their first TV appearance together.
I dropped in at CBS for the first reading of the show. My purpose was twofold: 1. To see the inception of the TV program; 2. To observe what happens when these two terrible-tempered men meet.
Pleasantly Sour

Allen was there when I arrived. He looked as pleasantly sour as ever, so I asked him how he felt.
"Pretty good," said the Boston wit, who suffered a relapse in his battle with health a few months ago. He was forced to give up his proposed TV show to Herb Shriner. Allen indicated he would resume the helm of the show next fall.
"It's a quiz-type show," he explained. It's not the comedy kind of show that is killing comedians. You don't have the lines to memorize or the machines to contend with. The machines have taken over the comedy business. They'd better watch out if the actors ever get control again."
Allen was kidding about his current estate. "This shows you how far I have fallen," he remarked. "I used to have my own show and was on a par with Mr. Benny. Now I'm working for him!"
Despite his own comments, Allen is the envy of his fellow comics. He has been playing the guest-star circuit and raking in much moola without the headache of having his own show. Allen claimed, however, he was merely the middleman in the transfer of the checks to the U.S. Treasury.
How long has he known Benny?
"About 30 years," he remarked. "We go back to the vaudeville days. We never played the same bill, because we both had a monologue act. Vaudeville was better organized than TV."
The origin of their feud? He couldn't remember. "I'd have to consult my files," he said.
Benny breezed in, accompanied by his three writers and others. He and Allen exchanged greetings that would indicate their feud is only script-deep. Allen mentioned that he would have to rent a clarinet for their show.
"I don't usually carry my clarinet from coast to coast, hoping someone will ask me to play," he commented.
Plays Role to Hilt
Benny played his role as the stingy comic to the hilt: "Well, don't rent one until we find out if we really need it in the show."
I dutifully asked Benny how he felt. "Fine," he replied. Illness forced him to cancel a telecast six weeks ago.
Benny had a better memory on the feud's origin.
"It was 18 years ago," he recalled. "Allen had a boy prodigy on his show, and the kid played 'The Bee.' Allen made a slighting remark about my violin playing. I answered him back on my show, and that started it."
Far from, cutting down his activities, Benny is stepping them up. Next Tuesday he opens a three week stand with a vaudeville show at San Francisco's Curran Theater. He is now doing one TV show every four weeks, plus his radio program. Next fall, he'll be on TV once every three weeks and continue on radio. "But I'll be able to film five of the TV shows this summer," he added. "That will help relieve the load."
They sat down and started to read the script. Benny droned on while Allen looked over his material. If the audience laughs as much as the writers, the show should be a wow.

One critic—and I can’t find a copy of the review now so I don’t know who it was—was unhappy with TV show, feeling the feud was part of the past, considering Allen was no longer a major force on the networks, and that some of the dialogue was demeaning to him. You can see for yourself. The show below is missing the commercials, has a whistle on the audio track and is victimised by some uploading thing that treats the picture like it’s on a rocking boat. But you can see for yourself. As far as I know, this was the only time the two old friends appeared on TV together and their radio appearance a week later was the last time they were on the air together. The feud had finally come to an end.

The Past, Present and Future of Animation, 1936

History books on animation were few and far between when I was watching cartoons mornings, afternoons and Saturdays in the 1960s. But, as you’ve seen from postings on this blog, the subject was touched on in newspapers back when cartoons were still appearing on theatre screens (along with newsreels, travelogues, and musical, comedy or sports shorts). And a chap named Disney didn’t get all the ink.

Screen and Radio Weekly was among the many supplements which graced weekend newspapers years ago. A good one, too. In the edition of August 23, 1936, it gave a two-broadsheet-page history of the animation industry. The author had some assistance from Walter Lantz who, as you likely know, ran his own studio for years and started in animation in the 1910s.

A number of photos and artwork accompanied the original story. Unfortunately, the copies I have are poor photocopies of scanned microfilm. So the pictures you see here are from various editions of Universal Weekly from 1936. The publication did its part to push the Lantz cartoons that Universal released.

Out of the Inkwell
By CHARLES WALES
THIS is the story of three little pigs, of Oswald the rabbit and Mickey the mouse, of Elmer the elephant, of Bosco and Minnie, of Scrappy and Donald and a Kat that is Knuts.
It is the story of the most popular characters on the screen—and probably the most human.
They have survived time, tide and double bills. They have even survived censorship in Fascist Italy arid Communist Russia. And after each joust with fickle public fancy they have gone on to better things, on toward what a small group of earnest artists believes is the greatest future development of motion pictures.
Walt Disney, the supreme opportunist of the animated cartoon trade, is already reaching into the future.
AS to the cartoon's past, efforts to animate drawings go back far beyond the first motion picture camera.
One hundred and ten years ago a French scientist named Peter Mark Roget discovered persistence of vision—the fact that images remain momentarily On the retina of the eye after the tangible object has been removed. Five years later another Frenchnian, Joseph Antoine Plateau, put motion into pictures, arranging 14 drawings in sequence to produce the illusion of one picture of an object in motion.
In 1834 one William George Horner, in England, invented the Daedaleum, “Wheel of the Devil,” so named because its first "movies" were of the devil waving his trident. A variation of this appeared in the United States in 1867.
These first devices were no more than toys, or apparatus for laboratory experiments. But in 1877 a Frenchman, Emile Reynaud, projected little plays on a screen in his Optical Theater. Audiences paid to watch the great-grandfather of Mickey Mouse, Pauve Pierrot. Here was the start of an industry.
Pierrot was a primitive progenitor, but he was significant. He moved on a screen, so that more than one person could see him at a time. And he was drawn on a transparent substance—Reynaud called it crystaloid—which presaged the modern motion picture film. A strip of it 30 feet long was used for the picture. Then came the invention of the motion picture and, in the tremendous enthusiasm over the fact that human beings could be photographed in motion, animated cartoons were forgotten.
IT WAS 1906 when the first cartoon was made in anything like the modern method, with film and camera. J. Stuart Blackton, a cartoonist, created his “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.”
Winsor McCay, a well known editorial cartoonist of his time, next appeared on the cartoon scene. Working alone in his studio in Flushing, he spent a large part of the year 1910 turning out more than 4,000 drawings which eventually were photographed and released by Vitagraph under the title, “Winsor McCay Makes His Cartoons Move.”
In 1911 McCay made a second picture, “How a Mosquito Operates.” He sold this to Carl Laemmle. William Fox bought the third, “Gertie the Dinosaur.”
The picture which first gave cartoons their place in the sun was “The Artist's Dream,” drawn by John R. Bray. It started as a regular motion picture showing an artist at his drawing board. Then, when the artist had fallen asleep, his drawings came to life and there was an animated cartoon.
Bray created the first great cartoon character and the first extended cartoon series. The character, Colonel Heeza Liar, started in Africa in the first of the series — December, 1913 —, and for five years rambled all over the world and through all manner of titillating circumstances. He disappeared during the World War, but was revived in 1922. No cartoon character had such popularity as the Colonel's until Mickey Mouse appeared in 1928.
But there were many other characters which were successful in this period. Earl Hurd, who perfected the modern technique of making animated cartoons, came out with the Bobby Bump series. Sidney Smith (of the Gumps) did Old Doc Yak for the Selig Polyscope company in Chicago. Paul Terry created Farmer Al Falfa and Leslie Fenton (now an actor and husband of Ann Dvorak) made the Hodge Podge series.
MAX FLEISCHER began his “Out of the Inkwell” cartoons, in which a cartoon character is added to a regular motion picture. Gregory La Cava, now one of Hollywood's leading directors, and Walter Lantz, who now produces Oswald the Rabbit for Universal, turned out one series after another for Cosmopolitan.
Technique was gradually perfected, until Earl Hurd's invention of the system in use today. Hurd made his background drawings on opaque paper and put his characters on celluloid with ink and opaque paint. In photographing, the celluloids were placed on top of the backgrounds. In 20 years this method has been refined, but there have been no important changes. Walt Disney holds many later patents, but they apply mostly to the use of sound with cartoons.

CHANGES for the most part have been of personnel and purpose. I talked of this with Walter Lantz, who (though he is now only 36 years old) has been through almost the entire development of modern animated cartoons. He started 21 years ago with Raoul Barre, who animated Mutt and Jeff of the comic strip.
“When we started,” he said, “we had a makeshift studio on the top floor of a loft building in Fordham, N. Y. There weren't enough people in the organization to make the story department of a cartoon studio today. But we didn't bother with stories. Our only object was to turn out five or six hundred feet of film. “This was true for years. Even after Oswald was started (1927) there was no connection between scenes. It was a case of every man for himself. We were learning how to animate characters. If one artist figured out how to make a character jump, he'd do a jumping sequence.
“When we were all through, we'd get together and see how much we needed to finish the picture. Then we'd toss up to see who would do the last scene. We might start with the idea of having to go to the North Pole, but that was as far as we would go in working out the story.”
COMPARE this with the modern method — with stories carefully worked out by well paid writers and gag men; scores of artists; weeks or even months of production. The most common audience reaction to an animated cartoon is; “How does anybody think of all those things?” You'll hear it every time a cartoon is on the bill. The answer is: Anybody can't think of all those things.
Walt Disney, as an individual, does not create a Mickey Mouse comedy or a Silly Symphony. Walt Disney is an organization of more than 400 workers. Disney would have difficulty in drawing Mickey Mouse.
Hugh Harman of Harman-Ising, second to Disney in the cartoon industry, said: “I probably couldn't draw Bosko. But I have plenty of good artists who can.”
Here, specifically, is how an animated cartoon is created.

WALTER LANTZ has a garden. Like other Californians who have gardens, he has gopher trouble. He decides that gopher trouble can be made the basis of a cartoon. Having so decided, he meets with his story department — in this case, four writers. They develop a synopsis. The story starts with a rich old hen, a spinster, whose pride and joy is her beautiful garden. She has a gopher. She cannot get rid of the gopher, so she calls in Oswald the Rabbit; Oswald, in this picture, operates an exterminator company.
Oswald appears with his assistant, Elmer the dog. They are armed with numerous contraptions for the extermination of gophers. One by one the contraptions are tried, but in each case the gopher outwits his pursuers. And with each effort to capture the gopher, more of the garden is destroyed until it looks like the Argonne sector at the end of the war.
Finally the old hen gives up hope. She plants dynamite in a last attempt to kill the gopher. But the dynamite wrecks her home and the picture ends with the gopher unharmed and unregenerate. It takes five people to produce this synopsis. Then a copy is given to every person connected with the production of an Oswald the Rabbit cartoon—about 60. On the synopsis are indicated spots in which gags seem called for.
When gags have been collected and selected (in most studios a bonus is paid for turning in a gag which is used), an artist and layout man prepare sketches of the gags, characters and situations. These sketches are arrayed on a wall and there is another conference. Here the final continuity is worked out.
THEN a director, in this case Lantz, prepares a scenario. The scenario includes sketches which give a key to each scene. It includes a complete description of all action. It tells how many frames of film can be used for each scene. It tells where there shall be music, and sets the tempo of the music. Sound effects are indicated and dialog is given.
There is no allowance for error. The scenarist works with a metronome and stopwatch, and he goes through much of the action to be sure that he is right. If a character is going to lie down on the floor, the scenarist starts his stopwatch and lies down. He then knows how many seconds the action takes.
He knows that film goes through the projector at the rate of 90 feet a minute, and that there are 16 frames to a foot. He knows how many beats a minute the musical score will have. From this he figures out how many frames of film and how many bars of music each action will cover.
When the scenario is finished, dialog is recorded. This is necessary so that artists can synchronize facial expressions with words. And then the music is written—exactly the number of bars indicated on the scenario.
Then the scenario goes to the animators. They, with their assistants, make the drawings, 12,000 or 15,000 of them. A good animator may make 50 drawings a day and as much as $250 a week. If he is also a good gag man, he may add to his income with bonuses for helping to create pictures. Some of Disney's animators go as high as $15,000 or more a year.
The drawings, with the exception of backgrounds, are traced in ink on celluloids, and filled in with opaque paint. Then the celluloids are photographed, over the backgrounds, with an ordinary motion picture camera suspended over a table. It takes 60 workers three weeks of production time and costs $12,000 to $15,000 to produce the film.

THESE figures are minimum. Lantz makes black and white pictures and he works economically. Disney, with a force of 400, makes about 26 pictures a year. Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, with 125, make about one a month. Charles Mintz, with 125, turns out eight Krazy Kats, eight Scrappy cartoons and 16 Color Rhapsodies a year.
A one-reel cartoon can cost as much as $65,000. “Three Little Wolves” ran this high. The average for a cartoon in color is about $30,000, or maybe $25,000; exact figures are elusive in Hollywood.
“Three Little Wolves” and other Disney cartoons cost more largely because Disney will not O. K. a scene until he is satisfied that it cannot be improved. Obviously, it costs more to do a job two or three times than to do it once.
Disney became an important factor in motion pictures on Sept. 19, 1928, when “Steamboat Willie” was presented at the Colony Theater in New York. This was the beginning of Mickey Mouse and the beginning of sound in animated cartoons.
Disney had been struggling for several years and had created two cartoon series—the Alice cartoons in 1923 and Oswald the Rabbit in 1927 for Charles Mintz—but he had been just one of a number of young men who were trying to keep life in a dying industry.
The combination of Mickey Mouse and sound revived a flagging public fancy. The Silly Symphonies helped, when the first of them, “The Skeleton Dance,” was released late in 1929. The national psychology following the black days of October, 1929, put people in a very receptive mood for the fantasy and comedy of Disney's new characters.
BUT Disney is more than an opportunist. He not only made the first sound cartoons (and later the first in color). He reformed the industry. The cartoon of today, artistically beautiful, bears little relation to the crude concoctions of gags of earlier days. Characters have been given personality. They express emotions. They are human and lovable.
For this change Disney is apparently responsible.
It was his effort to improve cartoon technique which produced the first Silly Symphony in color, “Flowers and Trees.” Here was a complete departure from precedent. Instead of gags there were beauty and fantasy, elements which Hugh Harman says will produce the ultimate in cartoons and bring the greatest development we can look for on the screen. (Harman and Ising have been close to Disney in the recent great advance in cartoons; they gave cartoons music. They were, incidentally, associated with Disney in his first cartoon ventures in Kansas City.)
How great this development will be cannot be predicted. But Disney is staking a lot on its success. When “Snow White,” his eight-reel cartoon on the famous fantasy, is completed a year or so hence, he will have three quarters of a million dollars and three years' work invested in it. It should be beautiful; if it is also entertaining, the future of feature-length animated cartoons can be limitless.
If “Snow White” is not successful, the future will be merely uncertain. There are about a dozen cartoons being made now and they cost as much as the traffic will bear, as result of improvements. The income of a one-reel cartoon is pretty definitely limited; the income of a feature can be almost anything.
So, if “Snow White” succeeds, we can look for a new era-of entertainment and new development of the medium. If not, or unless some other solution is found, cartoons are likely to continue pretty much as they are as long as human ingenuity can give them new quirks and as long as audiences will hire them.

Clementine a la Avery

Several years before Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera put the song “Clementine” in the mouth of a televised blue hound inspired by Tex Avery’s Southern wolf, Avery put the song in the mouth of opera singer Poochini (Spike) in the great cartoon Magical Maestro.

Avery’s mastery of timing is in full view in this wonderful short as a revengeful magician, disguised as a conductor, uses his magic wand, disguised as a baton, to transform Spike into all kinds of things in mid-performance on the stage.

In one sequence, Spike is turned into a nasally cowboy singer, whining out “Clementine.” Here are consecutive frames.



Cowboy Spike walks around on the stage as he sings. Evidently, he’s in cowpoke ecstasy as his eyes are closed. Note the high leg kick. These drawings are consecutive but were shot on twos, with the background moved slightly in the second shot.



In mid syllable, Spike realises he’s been transformed. These are consecutive frames. Look how subtle the expressions are. None of these big-eyed takes that Avery was known for. Avery knew they wouldn’t work in this cartoon. All the changes in character/costume had to be organic so as not to interrupt Spike’s performance.



While the main plot is going on, Avery and storyman Rich Hogan toss in a continuing element—the magician’s rabbits keep popping up. And always when you least expect it. Consecutive frames again. You can see from the mouth and body language that Spike’s annoyed his performance keeps getting screwed with.



Spike needs six drawings on twos before he realises the rabbits are back. He tosses them away elegantly, befitting someone in the high-brow profession of opera singer.



Avery and Hogan had to find new ways to get Spike back into his evening clothes after each transformation. They’re all imaginative. Here’s what they did in this scene.



My wild guess is the scene was animated by Grant Simmons. I’ll accept any correction.

I can’t say this is my favourite Avery cartoon but I’ve posted at least a half dozen times about it and there’s always something to admire.

The Cats Bah In-Betweens

Ben Washam and Lloyd Vaughn are the only credited animators on the Pepe Le Pew cartoon The Cat’s Bah. There are more smears than animators.



As was mentioned in an earlier post, Chuck Jones temporarily split up his unit at the Warner Bros studio some time in 1952 and had his animators work on different cartoons. Dick Thompson and Abe Levitow animated Feline Frame-Up (Production 1278), Ken Harris handled No Barking (Production 1282) while Washam and Vaughn drew The Cats Bah (Production 1285). All were released in 1954.

Liberace, Man of Letters

Was anyone in the 1950s indifferent about Liberace? Women gurgled over him. Men were disgusted by him. Columnists teed off of him in various levels of ridicule.

Liberace was around during World War Two—the ad to the right is from March 1945—and played nightclubs with some success before Don Fedderson of KLAC put him on prime time on January 19, 1952. KLAC’s billings jumped. Fedderson sold Liberace’s shows into syndication for $1,500,000 by year’s end, and the pianist became a national phenomenon.

John Crosby of the Herald Tribune syndicate was a respected columnist. But not to Liberace fans. Crosby had little time for the banal and didn’t mind telling his readers. And then he didn’t mind telling his readers about the avalanche of letters he received from Lee’s overly-ardent admirers (Liberace, in turn, cattily gave his feelings about Crosby’s reviews, both in public and on stage). Newspapers even commented about it in the editorial section. So did Crosby’s fill-in columnists.

Here’s the column that started it all. It appeared on February 13, 1954. Tony Wons, in case you’ve never heard of him, read poetry on the air in the 1930s.

Hard Round Pebbles
By John Crosby
Well, radio had Tony Wons and survived. I confidently predict that television will survive Liberace, too. These are just growing pains, kiddies. Sometimes, a man wonders, though, whether the women of this fair land are people or whether some other designation ought to be given them—say, plips—to distinguish them from the rest of us.
The things women go nuts over resist rational interpretation and way up on the head of the list—strenuously resisting any form of explanation—is Liberace. Still, there’s no arguing that the dames go for this guy. His audience is two-thirds female. (I don’t know how the one-third males got in there. Dragged, I expect. You notice it took two gals to drag each man in.)
If women vote for Liberace as a piano player—and they sure do—it raises grave questions about their competence to vote for anything. I’m not suggesting that we repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, exactly, just that maybe we think about it a little bit.

Liberace—his dimples, his flowing curls, his flashing teeth, and (only incidentally) his piano—are now on 134 television stations, delighting heaven knows how many elderly and teen-age plips and infuriating heaven knows how many men. The program opens with Liberace banging away on his piano in almost total darkness; then the lights come up gradually and there is Liberace, bathed in illumination like a minor revelation. If you think he can play the piano any better with the lights on than with them off, you’re kidding yourself, chum. He does just as well in the dark as he does in the daylight which is to say not very well.
The Liberace repertoire deserves special mention of its own. It isn’t true, as an embittered friend of mine once said, that Liberace just plays “Lady of Spain” over and over again in different keys. He has lots of other numbers, most of them “The Warsaw Concerto.” He plays them heavily with little theatrical flourishes and rills and usually ending with one finger scampering the length of the keyboard.
Bless my soul, if it didn’t bring back memories of a dear departed auntie of mine who played that way. Auntie had almost as much hair as Liberace but no dimples and she died, unfortunately, before television was invented. Auntie would have loved Liberace.
While he’s playing other dim figures float around him—a girl with a tambourine, or men with violins, or what have you. Liberace’s counterpoint to an electric guitar reminds me of a statement Joseph Conrad made about another piano player in “Victory” who, he said, rained notes like hard round pebbles on the defenseless skulls of the onlookers.
Once in awhile, Liberace raises his lungs—he has a voice like an unsuccessful contestant on the Amateur Hour—in song and on these occasions you are thankful that nobody has written words to “The Warsaw Concerto.” He does comedy numbers, too, horrible enough to drive Victor Borge right back to serious music and in these he is likely to do great violence to some of the finest music Wagner ever wrote by affixing silly lyrics to them.
Still, he’s on 134 television stations as millions of plips swoon from New York to Amarillo. Just after he faded back into the darkness singing that he’d be seeing me when the night is new (Like fudge he will!), I got out some of the records of Buddy Weed, a pianist who has more talent in his index finger than Liberace in all ten, and played them. They were wonderfully soothing.

In came the letters. A week later, Crosby was out with another column.

Fans Stand By Liberace
By JOHN CROSBY
I don’t usually pay much attention to letters. The letter writers, it is my considered opinion, wield entirely too much influence in our fear-ridden society already. This is the age of letter-writing. Never before in recorded history have so many people leapt to their escritoires to pen a missive to someone they don’t know, expressing an opinion on the letter receiver’s act at the Palace or his yesterday’s column in The Daily Bladder or his appearance on the Milton Berle show.
The world, I’ve arbitrarily decided, is divided into two classes of people—those who write letters and those who receive them. If you have a column or a television show, you receive letters. If you haven’t, you write ‘em.
I’M A LETTER receiver and we letter receivers get to loathe mail, even the nice mail, simply because there’s so much of it. How do so many people have so much time? Every time Arthur Godfrey opens his mouth 30,000 letters pour in. Just think of the man-hours—or more probably woman-hours.
Of course, there is a good deal of polite lying about the amount of mail anyone receives. If an entertainer says he gets 10,000 letters a week, you may assume that on a good week, he gets maybe 2,000.
The letters fall into two categories. Category 1: You are a prince among men. Category 2: You are a louse. Both opinions are wildly exaggerated. The general idea of the game is to keep category 1 well ahead of category 2. This isn't hard. When I first started this column about eight years ago, I kept a count of the mail and it ran anywhere from 5 to 1 to 8 to 1 in my favor. I haven’t done that in some time, but I should guess that ratio hasn’t changed much.
That is, until I wrote a column about Liberace. Then the roof fell in. Brother, there hasn’t been vituperation like that since Cicero delivered the Philippics in the fifth century B.C. The nicer letters started out: “Drop dead.” The not-so-nice ones—well, never mind.
OUT IN INDIANA, The Indianapolis News printed the Liberace column on page 1 and then sat back to await the storm. It struck. The News switchboard was inundated with calls from infuriated women and the letters started arriving the next day. (“John Crosby is the most terrible writer I have ever read. He is rotten, disgusting.” That’s one of the more restrained letters.)
The Indianapolis ladies dug up the telephone number of a local resident who was unfortunate enough to be named John Crosby and his telephone rang through the night with calls from irate Liberace fans. (From the New York John Crosby to the Indianapolis John Crosby, a heartfelt apology.)
Last night The South Bend Tribune—the Indiana girls seem to be madder than the others, though they’re pretty mad even in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love—called long distance to say the tempest had engulfed them, too.
WHAT’S WITH these girls anyhow? It isn’t just the quantity of indignation (which is prodigious), but the intensity of it which bemuses me. You can't tell me that many women get that furious over a matter of disagreement as to the merits of a piano player, any piano player. (In that regard, I still think Liberace plays piano as if he were wearing boxing gloves. I could phone local 802 of the musicians’ union and dig up 100 piano players I’d rather listen to.)
YOU THINK MAYBE it’s the maternal instinct this man arouses? I give up. I just think it’s news that a piano player—any piano player and especially THIS piano player—can evoke such a furious defense.
You suppose maybe in 10 or 15 years, I could venture into Indiana without being torn to pieces? I like Indiana.

The brutal criticism Liberace received in the press never affected his popularity. He connected with, and pandered to, his audience, through careful choreography. Boy bands today do the same thing to girls, who become as ridiculously and irrationally vitriolic as Liberace’s fans 60 years ago if you stoop to ridicule their fantasy lads. Lee moved from syndicated TV to Las Vegas where audiences added to his incredible wealth. Indeed, there’s still a fascination about him. In the end, people (critics notwithstanding) found nothing wrong with his combination of classics, camp and corn, and discovered it could even be entertaining.