A Synonym for Glorious Excess

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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."