TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/87/87mil.lib

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 6KB | 115 lines

                                                                                February 16, 1987

A Synonym for Glorious Excess

Wladziu Valentino Liberace:  1919-1987


At the heart of every great show-business career is an enigma.
No matter how manifest a performer's talent, no matter how
assiduously he courts his fans, there remains a puzzlement:  In
a fragmented and fickle world, what accounts for enormous,
enduring popularity?

Among postwar American entertainers, none provoked that question
more often than a kitsch pianist with a scullery maid's idea of
a regal wardrobe, who for more than 40 years attracted stalwart
Middle Americans to romps that he himself once characterized as
"just that far away from drag."  As a musician, Liberace was a
panderer:  he edited classics down to four to six minutes
because, he said, his audience would not sit still for anything
longer. He sang and tap- danced competently, no more. From the
early 1950s, when his syndicated TV show appeared ten times a
week and won two Emmy awards, to the 1980s, when he set
box-office records at Radio City Music Hall, Liberace was a
visual rather than an acoustic phenomenon. He charted a path
followed by the unlikeliest of proteges, from Elvis Presley to
Elton John and Boy George:  the sex idol as peacock androgyne.

Liberace spoke reverently to his fans of motherhood, country
and religion--in earlier days his act featured a woman dressed
as a nun outstretched in spiritual ecstasy as he played the Ave
Maria--but he poked constant fun at himself. His little-boy
smirkiness brought out maternal feelings in women twice his age
and eventually in women half his age. So did his soulful,
unmacho sentiment:  long before liberation, he offered the
female public a man as romantic, as house proud and as
appearance conscious as any of them. They envied his tightly
curled hair, his industrial-size dimple, above all, his
floor-length furs, sequined suits, neon-color satins and
clusters of rings. They delighted, too, in his see-through
glass-topped piano, his electric candelabrum that he brightened
or dimmed by means of unseen controls, his houses (one decorated
with a knockoff of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling), and
other evidences of exuberant materialism that he celebrated in
a Liberace Museum in, of course, Las Vegas.

Fellow performers often giggled at the persona, but they liked
the man. Said Shirley MacLaine:  "Lee's a hoot. He always
gives a good show."  Edie Adams concurred:  "He was outrageous
when outrageous wasn't cool. He was a little kid and nice to
be around, on or off the stage."  He often suggested that he
enjoyed special spiritual grace, and some fans concluded he had
faith-healing powers. But when he died at home last week after
a brief hospitalization, he was best known as a synonym for
glorious excess. After an aborted attempt in 1958 at a
button-down, close-cropped, low-key look, Liberace came to
understand that in the heartland where he found his audiences,
less remained less and only more was more.

Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace to a classic stage mother of
Polish descent and an Italian immigrant father in West Allis,
Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, he used the youthful stage name
Walter Busterkeys and was playing piano in a speakeasy before
he reached his teens. His father Salvatore, a musical purist
who eventually played French horn in the Milwaukee Symphony,
disapproved of the songs his son was playing as much as the
company he was keeping, but his mother noted that the boy's jobs
supported the family. Trained at the Wisconsin College of
Music, Liberace appeared as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony
at 14 and prided himself on his oft-repeated claim that as a
child, he received the blessing and guidance of Paderewski.
Still, he kept finding himself drawn to pop music--and the
rewards that went with it. Said he in 1951:  "There's more
money in being commercial."

Like many an oddball performer, Liberace appeared fated to fade
into obscurity just a few years after his meteoric rise. His
first starring film role, as a cross between himself and
Beethoven in Sincerely Yours (1955), was a flop. His once
ubiquitous TV shows were canceled. But he found lucrative
audiences in Europe, in Las Vegas and at Midwest state fairs.
He survived the 1960s as a cheery anachronism, and during the
past three decades averaged a gross income of $5 million a year.
He also dabbled in businesses ranging from antiques to real
estate and construction, the latter specializing in piano-shaped
swimming pools. Much of the money went to pay for a life-style
that was inseparable from his performance: capes that weighed
up to 150 lbs. and incorporated as much as $60,000 worth of
chinchilla, a jacket of 24-karat gold braid, a tuxedo with
diamond buttons spelling out his name.

Flamboyant in every other way, Liberace remained coy to the end
of his life about his sexual orientation. He had a few dates
with an actress as a publicity stunt in 1954. Thereafter, he
said he was waiting to find a woman who measured up to his
mother Frances, with whom he lived most of the time until she
died in 1980. In 1959 Liberace won a libel judgment against a
London Daily Mirror columnist who described him as
"fruit-flavored" and "masculine, feminine and neuter."  On the
witness stand, Liberace testified that he opposed homosexuality
because it "offends convention and offends society." But years
later he spoke for sexual freedom:  "If you swing with chickens,
that is your perfect right."  Yet he vehemently denied
allegations in a 1982 palimony suit that he had paid for the
sexual services of a former valet, Scott Thorson; the suit was
resolved before trial. After Liberace fell ill late last year,
his manager Seymour Heller said his client had pernicious anemia
induced by a watermelon-only diet for weight reduction. When
he was hospitalized in mid-January, that explanation was amended
to include emphysema and heart disease. But the Las Vegas Sun
reported that he had AIDS, a diagnosis that the Riverside
County, Calif., coroner's office decided to investigate at
week's end. Said Dr. Elias Ghanem, his personal physician:
"Liberace always lived a very private life. I hope the world
will remember him as Mr. Showmanship."

--By William A. Henry III