Posted on 10/15/2010 8:39:25 PM PDT by Borges
Before Lady Gaga, before Elton John, there was Liberace. People of a certain age will remember the candelabra on his piano, the flamboyant costumes, even the self-deprecating humor in his distinctive voice.
"My clothes may look funny but they're making me the money," he once said.
At one point, thanks to Las Vegas, Liberace was the highest-paid entertainer in the world. That's where he created the museum that bears his name. It was one of the most-visited attractions in Vegas, but so few people come nowadays that the Liberace Museum is closing Sunday.
Maybe this is just one more story about how Vegas is constantly changing, but maybe not. After all, Sinatra is still Sinatra. Elvis still has impersonators performing here. So what happened to Liberace?
Marion Blank saw him decades ago and still remembers his charisma, personality and showmanship.
"It was really a spectacular show," she recalled. "He came on in a car and all glitzed up as he usually is. It was just a wonderful experience."
She came from Indiana for one last visit to the Liberace Museum to see the outrageous costumes like a black mink cape lined with 40,000 Swarovski crystals; the over-the-top cars, including a Rolls Royce covered in little mirrors; and the piano collection featuring a mirror-encrusted Baldwin grand.
Liberace was a classically trained pianist, but he wanted to please the masses. He said he played classical without the boring parts.
Museum archivist Jerry Goldberg calls it classi-pop. It made Liberace famous.
"The biggest problem was you didn't leave humming or singing his music because he played other people's music," Goldberg said. "His name more or less has died out because there's nothing to associate him with except the bling and showmanship."
Liberace's biggest fans were middle-aged women in the 1950s through the 1970s a shrinking demographic. He might have become a gay icon.
Goldberg says many people, including his own mother, knew Liberace was gay.
"But back then it would have been a catastrophe for his career, so he never admitted it up to the day he died, never came out of the closet," he said.
The biggest problem for the Liberace Museum may be its location. It's more than 2 miles off the Vegas Strip, and visitors just don't want to make the trip.
But now that it's closing, locals like Katie Driscoll are coming.
"My mother watched Liberace all the time when I was growing up, played the piano, so did I," she said. "I moved here, became a showgirl and heard that it was closing and I didn't want to miss it."
Then there's Philip Balian. When he heard the Liberace Museum was closing, he got on a plane to Vegas from London.
"I watched him as a child on television and saw him play, and I said to my parents, 'I want to learn to play the piano. I want to be like that guy with the sparkly jacket.' "
Balian learned to play the piano, but he doesn't wear a sparkly jacket. He's on his first trip to the U.S., and was thrilled that the museum staff let him play Liberace's mirror-encrusted grand piano for some of the final visitors.
After Sunday, the piano and the other artifacts at the museum will go into storage, and Liberace's fame will fade a little further.
Look at this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq6dy53OPj8
Liberace was a great entertainer, and a kind and gentle human being.We could use more "bread and circus" like him around these days...
That was nice.
Not long ago in Discount Firearms I was told a woman was robbed at gun point on the busy sidewalk on Maryland Parkway in broad day light near the university. It’s hard to imagine tourists wanting to venture to the edge of the ghetto to go to the museum. We recently drove past a government housing project under construction only a couple blocks away. It was obvious the museum was doomed. When my husband visited the museum in the 70s he said there was only one other person there. I’m surprised it lasted so long. I wasn’t a fan, but as a piano player I appreciated his talent. It’s too bad the contents can’t find a home in another museum.
I agree. I'll miss the museum, too.
My mom was a skilled pianist, and never missed him on TV. I have no recollection of a mention of his sexuality, but that was the 50s for you.
I suspect his crew was selected from a certain "special interest group", who would reject many people who needed jobs.
No AIDS ribbons, no homophobic lawsuits, nothing to remember him by but the sound of crickets and references in Warner Bros. cartoons...
Whatever shall America focus on now?
Seriously now, the real tragedy was the sell-off of the Roy Rodgers museum. Now *that* guy was an American hero.
Robert Walker(1918-1951), from Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," also bears a resemblance.
Undoubtably he was extremely talented. Always was a gentleman as well. I wish I had heard him live, performing the classics.
Cool story.
Wladziu Valentino Liberace (May 16, 1919 February 4, 1987), from West Allis, Wisc. His mother was Polish and his father Italian. I remembered being about 7 and walking into my grandfather’s parlor where the grownups were watching some piano show and I saw Liberace for the first time. I had never seen a homosexual or even knew what that was but I knew I’d just seen one.
I went to Los Angeles when I was 19 and got a job delivering sheet music to many TV and movie studios. At one, a receptionist looked weird at me and waved me into a setting room. A few minutes later, Liberace walked in and sat down next to me. I was cracking up and I told him, no, I didn’t want to go to dinner. I said thank you and left. He was very nice to me, like some else said here, but right after I flubbed my Army physical, I was driving to California to see all those blondes I heard about.
Liberace was the second famous person to die, in 1987, from AIDS. Rock Hudson was the first, in 1985.
Liberace had a very good show. When he performed it was like he was a living Baroque museum piece, clothes, music and all. Think Louis the XIV. Everyone, and I mean everyone knew he was gay but no one cared, even then. He was very civil, eloquent and put his audience, the show and the music first. That’s a class act no matter what a person’s private sexual preferences are. My guess is he’d have been very offended being considered gay first before a pianist, philanthropist and performer. I doubt few who saw one of his shows would be willing to deny his talent as an accomplished concert pianist based upon his (unstated) sexual preference or demeanor. That just ain’t right.
“Indeed. The Roy Rogers museum also closed because Rogers has been forgotten by younger generations.”
The restaurant chain keeps the name alive, for now:
http://www.royrogersrestaurants.com/#/home
Also, there’s the Roy Rogers website:
http://www.royrogers.com/
Perhaps physical museums are like snail mail: on the way to the dustbin of history. For those who have to be near the physical objects that one could view in a museum, there was an auction - - - which will scatter the contents of the one museum into the private collections and museum collections that are not as topic-specific. So the heritage will not be gone, simply more diffused.
Liberace was not in the same ball park as Van Cliburn, in terms of technique, accomplishment, and excellence.
thanks for the video link....
..another 'confirming' word is "Divine".
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