Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Born Today In 1919, 'Mr. Showmanship,' Pianist Liberace

Władziu Valentino Liberace was born today, May 16, in 1919. He was known as Liberace, an American pianist, singer, and actor. A child prodigy and the son of working-class immigrants, Liberace enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame, from the 1950s to the 1970s, Liberace was the highest-paid entertainer in the world, with established concert residencies in Las Vegas, and an international touring schedule. Liberace embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage, acquiring the nickname "Mr. Showmanship."

Liberace (known as "Lee" to his friends and "Walter" to family) was born in West Allis, Wisconsin. His fatherwas an immigrant from Formia in the Lazio region of central Italy. His mother was of Polish descent. He had a twin, who died at birth. He had three siblings: a brother George, a violinist, and his sister Angelina, and younger brother Rudy.

Liberace began playing the piano at age 4. Liberace's prodigious talent was evident from his early years. By age 7, he was capable of memorizing difficult pieces.

In childhood, Liberace suffered from a speech impediment, and as a teen, from the taunts of neighborhood children, who mocked him for his effeminate personality and his avoidance of sports, and his fondness for cooking, and the piano. He gained experience playing popular music in theaters, on local radio, for dancing classes, for clubs, and for weddings. In 1934, he played jazz piano with a school group called "The Mixers" and later with other groups. Liberace also performed in cabarets and strip clubs.

A participant in a formal classical music competition in 1937, Liberace was praised for his "flair and showmanship." He played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on January 15, 1940, in Milwaukee, for which he received strong reviews. He also toured in the Midwest.

Between 1942 and 1944, Liberace moved away from straight classical performance and reinvented his act to one featuring "pop with a bit of classics" or as he also called it "classical music with the boring parts left out." In the early 1940s, he struggled in New York City, but by the mid- and late-1940s, he was performing in night clubs in major cities around the United States, largely abandoning the classical music altogether. The transformation to entertainer was driven by Liberace's desire to connect directly with his audiences, and secondarily from the reality of the difficult competition in the classical piano world.

In 1944, he made his first appearances in Las Vegas, which later became his principal venue. He was playing at the best clubs, finally appearing at the Persian Room in 1945, with Variety proclaiming, "Liberace looks like a cross between Cary Grant and Robert Alda. He has an effective manner, attractive hands which he spotlights properly, and withal, rings the bell in the dramatically lighted, well-presented, showmanly routine. He should snowball into box office."

During this time, Liberace worked to refine his act. He added the candelabrum as his trademark. He adopted "Liberace" as his stage name, making a point in press releases that it was pronounced "Liber-Ah-chee." He wore white tie and tails for better visibility in large halls. He moved to the Los Angeles neighborhood of North Hollywood in 1947 and was performing at local clubs for stars such as Rosalind Russell, Clark Gable, Gloria Swanson, and Shirley Temple.

Liberace created a publicity machine which helped to make him a star. Despite his success in the supper-club circuit, where he was often an intermission act, his ambition was to reach larger audiences as a headliner and a television, movie, and recording star. Liberace began to expand his act and made it more extravagant, with more costumes and a larger supporting cast. His large-scale Las Vegas act became his hallmark, expanding his fan base, and making him wealthy.

His New York City performance at Madison Square Garden in 1954, which earned him a record amount (equivalent to $1,260,000 in today's money for one performance). He was mentioned as a sex symbol in The Chordettes 1954 #1 hit "Mr. Sandman." By 1955, he was making $50,000 per week at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and had more than 200 official fan clubs with a quarter of a million members. He was making over $1 million per year from public appearances, and millions from television. Liberace was frequently covered by the major magazines, and he became a pop-culture superstar, but he also became the butt of jokes by comedians and the public.

In the next phase of his life, having earned sudden wealth, Liberace spent lavishly—incorporating materialism into his life and his act. He designed and built his first celebrity house in 1953, with a piano theme appearing throughout, including a piano-shaped swimming pool. He leveraged his fame through hundreds of promotional tie-ins with banks, insurance companies, automobile companies, food companies, and even morticians.

His first show on local television in Los Angeles was a smash hit, earning the highest ratings of any local show, which he parlayed into a sold-out appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. That led to a summer replacement program for Dinah Shore.

The 15-minute network television program, The Liberace Show, began on July 1, 1952. The widespread exposure of the syndicated series made the pianist more popular and prosperous than ever. His first two years' earnings from television netted him $7 million and on future reruns, he earned up to 80% of the profits.

Liberace learned early on to add "schmaltz" to his television show and to cater to the tastes of the mass audience by joking and chatting to the camera as if performing in the viewer's own living room. He also used dramatic lighting, split images, costume changes, and exaggerated hand movements to create visual interest. His television performances featured enthusiasm and humor.

The show was so popular with his mostly female television audience, he drew over 30 million viewers at any one time and received 10,000 fan letters per week. His show was also one of the first to be shown on British commercial television in the 1950s. This exposure gave Liberace a dedicated following in the United Kingdom. Homosexual men also found him appealing. According to author Darden Asbury Pyron, "Liberace was the first gay person Elton John had ever seen on television; he became his hero."

On July 19, 1957, hours after Liberace gave a deposition in his $25 million libel suit against Confidential magazine, two masked intruders attacked his mother in the garage of Liberace's home in Sherman Oaks. She was beaten and kicked, but her heavy corset may have protected her from being badly injured. Liberace was not informed about the assault until he finished his midnight show at the Moulin Rouge nightclub. 

On November 22, 1963, he suffered renal failure, reportedly from accidentally inhaling excessive amounts of dry cleaning fumes from his newly cleaned costumes in a Pittsburgh dressing room, and nearly died. He later said that what saved him from further injury was being woken up by his entourage to the news that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Told by doctors that his condition was fatal, he began to spend his entire fortune by buying extravagant gifts of furs, jewels, and even a house for friends, but then recovered after a month.

Re-energized, Liberace returned to Las Vegas, and upping the glamor and glitz, he took on the sobriquet "Mr. Showmanship." As his act swelled with spectacle, he famously stated, "I'm a one-man Disneyland." The costumes became more exotic (ostrich feathers, mink, capes, and huge rings), entrances and exits more elaborate (chauffeured onstage in a Rolls-Royce or dropped in on a wire like Peter Pan), choreography more complex (involving chorus girls, cars, and animals), and the novelty acts especially talented, with juvenile acts. Barbra Streisand was the most notable new adult act he introduced, appearing with him early in her career.

Liberace's live shows during the 1970s–80s remained major box-office attractions at the Las Vegas Hilton and Lake Tahoe, where he earned $300,000 a week.

The massive success of Liberace's syndicated television show was the main impetus behind his record sales. From 1947-51, he recorded 10 discs. By 1954, it jumped to nearly 70. His most popular single was "Ave Maria," selling over 300,000 copies.

His albums included pop standards of the time, such as "Hello, Dolly!" and also included his interpretations of the classical piano repertoire such as Chopin and Liszt, although many fans of classical music widely criticized them (as well as Liberace's skills as a pianist in general) for being "pure fluff with minimal musicianship." In his life, he received six gold records.

Liberace's fame in the United States was matched for a time in the United Kingdom. In 1956, an article in the Daily Mirror by columnist Cassandra (William Connor) described Liberace as "…the summit of sex—the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love", a description which strongly implied that he was homosexual.

Liberace sent a telegram that read: "What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank." He sued the newspaper for libel, testifying in a London court that he was not homosexual and that he had never taken part in homosexual acts. He won the suit, partly on the basis of Connor's use of the derogatory expression "fruit-flavoured." The case partly hinged on whether Connor knew that 'fruit' was American slang implying that an individual is a homosexual.

Liberace fought and settled a similar case in the United States against Confidential. Rumors and gossip magazines frequently implied that he was gay. A typical issue of Confidential in 1957 shouted, "Why Liberace's Theme Song Should Be 'Mad About the Boy!'"

In 1982, Scott Thorson, Liberace's 22-year-old former chauffeur and live-in lover of five years, sued the pianist for $113 million in palimony after he was let go by Liberace. Liberace continued to deny that he was gay, and during court depositions in 1984, he insisted that Thorson was never his lover. The case was settled out of court in 1986, with Thorson receiving a $75,000 cash settlement, plus three cars and three pet dogs worth another $20,000.


Liberace was secretly diagnosed HIV positive in August 1985 by his private physician in Las Vegas, 18 months before his death. Liberace kept his terminal illness a secret until the day he died and did not seek any medical treatment. In August 1986, during one of his last interviews, which was with the TV news program Good Morning America, Liberace hinted of his failing health when he remarked, "How can you enjoy life if you don't have your health?" He was hospitalized for pneumonia from January 23 to January 27, 1987, at the Palm Springs county hospital.

Liberace died of cytomegalovirus pneumonia as a result of AIDS on the late morning of February 4, 1987, at his retreat home in Palm Springs, California. He was 67 years old.

Liberace was recognized during his career with two Emmy Awards, six gold albums, and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Liberace released a book on his life and performed 56 sold-out shows at Radio City Music Hall, which set box-office records a few months before his death in Palm Springs, California, on February 4, 1987.

1 comment:

Sooo-this-is-me said...

People forget how bad it was to be thought of as gay. I think this is a good example, imagine a time where even someone like Liberace had to pretend to be straight to keep working.