Biography:

Władziu Valentino Liberace^{[nb 1]} (May 16, 1919 – February 4, 1987) was an American pianist, singer, and actor.^[2] He was born in Wisconsin to parents of Italian and Polish origin and enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame from the 1950s to 1970s, he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world^[3] with established concert residencies in Las Vegas and an international touring schedule. He embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess both on and off stage.

Early life and education

Władziu Valentino Liberace (known as Lee to his friends and Walter to family)^[4] was born in West Allis, Wisconsin on May 16, 1919. His father, Salvatore (“Sam”) Liberace (1885–1977), was an immigrant from Formia in central Italy. His mother, Frances Zuchowski^[5] (1892–1980), was born in Menasha, Wisconsin of Polish descent.^[5] Liberace had an identical twin who died at birth.^[6] He had three surviving siblings: a brother George (who was a violinist), a sister Angelina, and younger brother Rudy (Rudolph Valentino Liberace, named after the actor due to his mother’s interest in show business).^[7]

Liberace’s father played the French horn in bands and cinemas but often worked as a factory worker or laborer. While Sam encouraged music in his family, his wife Frances (despite having been a concert pianist before her marriage)^[7] believed music lessons and a record player to be unaffordable luxuries. This disagreement caused family disputes.^[8] Liberace later said “My dad’s love and respect for music created in him a deep determination to give as his legacy to the world, a family of musicians dedicated to the advancement of the art.”^[9]

Liberace began playing the piano at the age of 4. While Sam took his children to concerts to further expose them to music, he was a taskmaster demanding high standards from the children in both practice and performance. Liberace’s prodigious talent was evident from his early years. By the age of 7, he was capable of memorizing difficult pieces. He studied the technique of the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski. At the age of 8, he met Paderewski backstage after a concert at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. “I was intoxicated by the joy I got from the great virtuoso’s playing”, Liberace said later. “My dreams were filled with fantasies of following his footsteps…Inspired and fired with ambition, I began to practice with a fervour that made my previous interest in the piano look like neglect.” Paderewski later became a family friend^[10] as well as Liberace’s mentor, to whom the protege never missed any opportunities to pay tribute.

The Depression was financially hard on the Liberace family. In childhood, Liberace suffered from a speech impediment; as a teen, he was taunted by neighborhood children, who mocked him for his effeminate personality, his avoidance of sports, and his fondness for cooking and the piano.^[11] Liberace concentrated on his piano playing with the help of music teacher Florence Kelly, who oversaw Liberace’s musical development for 10 years. He gained experience playing popular music in theaters, on local radio, for dancing classes, for clubs, and for weddings.^[12]

In 1934, he played jazz piano with a school group named The Mixers and later with other groups. Liberace performed in cabarets and strip clubs. Alhough Sam and Frances did not approve, their son was earning a living during hard times. For a while, Liberace adopted the stage name Walter Busterkeys.^[12] He showed an interest in draftsmanship, design, and painting, and he became a fastidious dresser and follower of fashion. By this time, he was displaying a penchant for turning eccentricities into attention-getting practices, and he earned popularity at school despite some making him an object of ridicule.^[13]

Career

Early career

A participant in a formal classical music competition in 1937, Liberace was praised for his “flair and showmanship”.^[14] At the end of a traditional classical concert in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1939, Liberace played his first requested encore, the popular comedy song “Three Little Fishies“. He later stated that he played the popular tune in the styles of several different classical composers.^[15] The 20-year-old played with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on January 15, 1940 at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, performing Liszt‘s Second Piano Concerto under the baton of Hans Lange, for which he received strong reviews. He also toured in the Midwest.

From 1942 to 1944, Liberace moved from straight classical performance and reinvented his act to one featuring “pop with a bit of classics” or as he 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 and “gained national exposure through his performance contracts with the Statler and Radisson hotel chains”,^[16] largely abandoning classical music. He changed from a classical pianist to an entertainer and showman, unpredictably and whimsically mixing the serious with light fare, e.g., Chopin with “Home on the Range“.^[17]

For a while, he played piano along with a phonograph on stage. The gimmick helped gain him attention. He added interaction with the audience—taking requests, talking with the patrons, making jokes, giving lessons to chosen audience members. He began to pay greater attention to such details as staging, lighting, and presentation. The transformation to entertainer was driven by Liberace’s desire to connect directly with his audiences, and secondarily from the reality of the difficult, top flight competition in the classical piano world.

In 1943, he began to appear in Soundies (the 1940s precursor to music videos). He recreated two flashy numbers from his nightclub act, the standards “Tiger Rag” and “Twelfth Street Rag“. In these films, he was billed as Walter Liberace. Both Soundies later were released to the home-movie market by Castle Films. In 1944, he made his first appearances in Las Vegas, which later became his principal venue.^[18]

He was playing at the best clubs, finally appearing at the Persian Room in 1945, and Variety wrote “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.” The Chicago Times was similarly impressed: He “made like Chopin one minute and then turns on a Chico Marx bit the next.”^[18]

During this time, Liberace worked to refine his act. He added the candelabrum as his trademark, inspired by a similar prop in the Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (1945).^[19] He adopted Liberace as his stage name, making a point in press releases that it was pronounced “Liber-Ah-chee”.^[20] He wore white tie and tails for better visibility in large halls. Besides clubs and occasional work as an accompanist and rehearsal pianist, Liberace played for private parties, including ones at the Park Avenue home of millionaire oilman J. Paul Getty. By 1947, he was billing himself as “Liberace—the most amazing piano virtuoso of the present day.”^[21]

He had to have a piano to match his growing presence, so he bought a rare, oversized, gold-leafed Blüthner Grand, which he hyped up in his press kit as a “priceless piano”.^[22] Later, he performed with an array of extravagant, custom-decorated pianos, some encrusted with rhinestones and mirrors. He moved to the Los Angeles neighborhood of North Hollywood in 1947 and was performing at local clubs, such as Ciro’s and The Mocambo, for stars such as Rosalind Russell, Clark Gable, Gloria Swanson, and Shirley Temple. He did not always play to packed rooms, and he learned to perform with extra energy to thinner crowds to maintain his enthusiasm.^[23]

Liberace created a publicity machine that 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 $138,000 (equivalent to $1,500,000 in 2022) for one performance, was more successful than the great triumph his idol Paderewski had made 20 years earlier.^[24] He was mentioned as a sex symbol in The Chordettes 1954 No. 1 hit “Mr. Sandman“. By 1955, he was making $50,000 per week (equivalent to $546,211 in 2022) at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and had over 200 official fan clubs with a 250,000 members.^[25] He was making over $1 million per year from public appearances and millions from television.^[24] Liberace was frequently covered by the major magazines, and he became a pop-culture superstar, but he became the butt of jokes by comedians and the public.

Liberace appeared on the March 8, 1956, episode of the TV quiz program You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx.^[26]

Music critics were generally harsh in their assessment of his piano playing. Critic Lewis Funke wrote after a Carnegie Hall concert, Liberace’s music “must be served with all the available tricks, as loud as possible, as soft as possible, and as sentimental as possible. It’s almost all showmanship topped by whipped cream and cherries.” Even worse, to said critics, was his apparent lack of reverence and fidelity to the great composers. “Liberace recreates—if that is the word—each composition in his own image. When it is too difficult, he simplifies it. When it is too simple, he complicates it.” They referred to his as “sloppy technique” that included “slackness of rhythms, wrong tempos, distorted phrasing, an excess of prettification and sentimentality, a failure to stick to what the composer has written.”^[27]

Liberace once stated “I don’t give concerts. I put on a show.”^[28] Unlike the concerts of classical pianists that normally ended with applause and a retreat off-stage, Liberace’s shows ended with the public invited on-stage to touch his clothes, piano, jewelry, and hands. Kisses, handshakes, hugs, and caresses usually followed.^[29] A critic summarized his appeal near the end of Liberace’s life: “Mr. Showmanship has another more potent, drawing power to his show: the warm and wonderful way he works his audience. Surprisingly enough, behind all the glitz glitter, the corny false modesty, and the shy smile, Liberace exudes a love that is returned to him a thousand-fold.”^[30]

Early television work and The Liberace Show

Liberace mostly bypassed radio before trying a television career, thinking radio unsuitable given his act’s dependence on the visual.^[31] Despite his enthusiasm about the possibilities of television, Liberace was disappointed after his early guest appearances on The Kate Smith Show and DuMont‘s Cavalcade of Stars, with Jackie Gleason. Liberace was particularly displeased with the frenetic camera work and his short appearance time. He soon wanted his own show where he could control his presentation as he did with his club shows.^[32]

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.^[33] It led to a summer replacement program for Dinah Shore.

The 15-minute network television program The Liberace Show began on July 1, 1952, but did not lead to a regular network series. Instead, producer Duke Goldstone mounted a filmed version of Liberace’s local show performed before a live audience for syndication in 1953 and sold it to scores of local stations. 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.^[25]

Liberace learned early 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 used dramatic lighting, split images, costume changes, and exaggerated hand movements to create visual interest. His television performances featured enthusiasm and humor.

Liberace employed “ritualistic domesticity”, used by such early TV greats as Jack Benny and Lucille Ball.^[34] His brother George often appeared as guest violinist and orchestra director, and his mother was usually in the front row of the audience, with brother Rudy and sister Angelina often mentioned to lend an air of “family”. Liberace began each show in the same way, then mixed production numbers with chat, and signed off each broadcast softly singing “I’ll Be Seeing You“, which he made his theme song. His musical selections were broad, including classics, show tunes, film melodies, Latin rhythms, ethnic songs, and boogie-woogie.^[35]

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.^[36] His show was one of the early ones to be shown on British commercial television in the 1950s, where it was broadcast on Sunday afternoons by Lew Grade‘s Associated TeleVision. This exposure gave Liberace a dedicated following in the United Kingdom. Gay men found him appealing. Darden Asbury Pyron wrote “Liberace was the first gay person Elton John had ever seen on television; he became his hero.”^[37]

Credits:

Wikipedia