Liberace

I was originally planning of not including Liberace in our list. The reasons were the following:

a. He used and abused his lovers, which were usually financially and/or professionally dependent on him. I'd take Johnnie Ray's public restroom cruising anytime.

b. He made shitloads of money by playing on the most outrageous gay stereotypes, while on the same time going to the trouble of taking to court a newspaper that impied that he was gay, which he of course was. He won the case!

c. I'm not a great friend of his music, which is really meaningful almost exclusively to its target audience: middle-aged, middle class, white women of the 50s. Also, there hasn't been any recent reappreciation of his music that I'm aware of.

d. There was the recent Soderbergh film with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, which was good, seen by a lot of people and which offered most of the necessary information.

Today I revisited the question and I had a change of mind: not for the sake of Liberace, but for the sake of this list. My personal taste shouldn't really factor in, at least not to the point of exclusion. I have already included artists that are not really my cup of tea - and I'm sure there will be more. As long as they belong here, I will do my best to present them.

Liberace was born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in 1919, the third of four children in a Catholic family. He was raised in a working-class suburb of Milwaukee, where money was scarce. His Italian father Salvatore was a musician and when Liberace was only four, he started picking out tunes on the family piano. It was clear he was a prodigy.

As he entered his teens, the talented young pianist was leading a double life, practising études and sonatas with his music teacher, but playing Pop tunes and Boogie-woogie with a four-piece band in beer halls and roadhouses by night — a means of supplementing his family’s meagre income. He even adopted the stage name "Walter Busterkeys" for a time. But he felt he fell just short of what it took to be a concert pianist; in contrast, he loved the reaction he could elicit from audiences with his versatile playing and breezy patter. So he decided to become Mr. Showmanship.

He left Milwaukee and developed his unique act throughout the 1940s, first in New York, then Las Vegas and Hollywood. By 1950 he was a star live attraction and his national TV show that first aired in 1952 sealed his fame. He deliberately broke an established TV rule by looking directly into the camera as he played; he knew he could convince each one of his fans that he was playing specifically for her.

One of his early concert favorites, in the early 1940s, was his rendition of the 1917 hit Tiger Rag. Here he is, in 1969:

Another early hit for him was 12th Street Rag, a 1914 ragtime composition:

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. In 1950, he performed for music-loving President Harry S. Truman in the East Room of the White House.

His New York City performance at Madison Square Garden in 1954, which earned him a record $138,000 (equivalent to $1,220,000 in 2015) for one performance, was more successful than the great triumph his idol Paderewski had made 20 years earlier. He was mentioned as a sex symbol in The Chordettes 1954 #1 hit Mr. Sandman.

He was also mentioned in Nina Simone's classic My Baby Just Cares for me:

Liberace described his songs as Classical music without all the boring parts. Because he incorporated aspects of Pop music into his classical piano playing, Classical music purists didn’t like him. And because his shows relied heavily on showmanship and spectacle—gimmicks, costumes, and jokes—critics disparaged his talent as a pianist, arguing that he opted for easy piano trills and showy techniques rather than artistry.

Liberace was a conservative in his politics and faith, eschewing dissidents and rebels. He believed fervently in capitalism and was also fascinated with royalty, ceremony, and luxury. He loved to hobnob with the rich and famous, acting as starstruck with presidents and kings as his fans behaved with him. Yet to his fans, he was still one of them, a Midwesterner who had earned his success through hard work, and who invited them to enjoy it with him.

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. His dream home, with its lavish furnishings, elaborate bath, and antiques throughout, added to his appeal. He leveraged his fame through hundreds of promotional tie-ins with banks, insurance companies, automobile companies, food companies, and even morticians. Liberace was considered a perfect pitchman, given his folksy connection with his vast audience of housewives. Sponsors sent him complimentary products, including his white Cadillac limousine, and he reciprocated enthusiastically: "If I am selling tuna fish, I believe in tuna fish."

Here he is giving us a guided tour of his Hollywood Hills home from 1972:

One good thing that came from his live shows, and especially from his widely watched TV show, was that he introduced American people to music that they were not overly familiar with. Like Latin music and Classical music, albeit in his own, Pop versions. From the former, here's Malaguena:

... And here's La Cucaracha:

From the latter, here's the opening of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1 in B flat minor:

The above scene is from Sincerely Yours, a 1955 film starring Liberace as a successful concert pianist who goes deaf. But the movie, distributed by Warner Brothers, was a huge flop. It was so bad that at the 1982 Academy Awards, Liberace joked that “I’ve done my part for motion pictures—I’ve stopped making them.”

Here, Liberace performs the Warsaw Concerto, a single-movement piano concerto written for the 1941 film, Dangerous Moonlight (also known under the later title Suicide Squadron). It was composed by British composer Richard Addinsell (1904-1977). The orchestration was by another Briton, Roy Douglas, whose contribution is rarely acknowledged.

He and his handlers found it necessary to fabricate an engagement (to Joanne Rio, a would-be young actress and former North Hollywood neighbour) as well as a supposed ‘romance’ between him and figure skating champ Sonja Henie. Asked, as he often was, why he had never married, he had to fall back on the old cliché: he simply hadn’t found the right girl. There’s a sadness in his insistence on staying closeted, though given his strict Catholic upbringing and the social mores of the post-war era in which he first attained stardom, maybe his caution was understandable.

Scott Thorson was a former animal trainer whose tasks in the Liberace household included being his personal assistant as well as his onstage ‘chauffeur.’ When they first embarked on their relationship, Thorson was 18 and Liberace 57. During their time together, Liberace persuaded Thorson to undergo extensive plastic surgery, so he would look more like him.

Thorson admitted he was one of a series of male companions for Liberace; he briefly met his predecessor, who he saw being shipped out of Liberace’s mansion — and by the time his own turn for the exit came, and he was struggling with drug addiction, he already knew who his successor would be — a blond singer-dancer named Cary James. Thorson’s claims for palimony went nowhere and finally he agreed to a modest settlement. In his book, Thomas noted that “for a dozen years, Liberace had taken on live-in lovers, usually blond, blue-eyed young men with strong physiques... Inevitably each liaison ended, usually because of Lee’s boredom with his empty-headed lover.”

In a 2011 interview, actress and close friend Betty White stated that Liberace was indeed gay and that she often served as a "beard" by his managers to counter rumors of the musician's homosexuality.

Liberace was secretly diagnosed HIV positive in August 1985 by his private physician in Las Vegas, 18 months before his death. Aside from his long-term manager Seymour Heller and a few family members and associates, Liberace kept his terminal illness a secret until the day he died, and did not seek any medical treatment. In late 1986, during one of his last interviews, Liberace remarked: "How can you enjoy life if you don't have your health?" He was hospitalized from January 23 to January 27, 1987.

Even two weeks before his death, when he entered hospital for a short spell looking gaunt, his publicity team reported he was being treated for emphysema, heart disease and anaemia; he had lost weight, they insisted, through being on a watermelon diet.

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

A devout Roman Catholic to the end, he had a priest administer the last rites to him. The original cause of death was attributed variously to anemia (due to a diet of watermelon), emphysema, and heart disease, the last of which was attested to by Liberace's personal physician, Dr. Ronald Daniels. The Riverside County coroner conducting the autopsy stated a deliberate attempt had been made to hide the actual cause of death. The post mortem discovered that he had emphysema and coronary artery disease from years of chain smoking, but the real cause of death was pneumonia due to complications from HIV. Author Darden Asbury Pyron writes that Liberace had been "HIV-positive and symptomatic" from 1985 until his death.

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.