I was really lucky too to experience him on stage before he died.
Liberace owed a great deal of his success in the United Kingdom to Her Majesty Queen. On Sunday afternoons in the mid Fifties, he used the same TV sets originally, bought for the 1953 Coronation to seduce a huge new audience with his extravagant clothes and flamboyant manner.
His father wanted him to be an undertaker, HE wanted "to be the piano what Bing Crosby is to the voice". One columnist called him "a cross between movie star Cary Grant and Robert Alda"> The music critics attacked him for fiddling around with the serious compositions of the masters. Liberace,on the other hand, said, "he was only leaving out the dull bites.
His TV show ran non-stop for five years, after which he toured the USA and the rest of the world extensively. He made a fortune... and never tried of telling his fans it was all due to them.
They, in turn, loved the furs, the sequins and the stories about his piano-shaped swimming pool and his bedroom with its reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. With his high-camp style, he was even credited by some as a forerunner of glitter rock.
The selections on his different sets in my music library represent the cream of popular music from Strauss to Streisand, Beatles to Bacharach - all played in Liberace's own inimitable style. This is the music with which he was still thrilling audiences in the early 1980s. And this was the music which ensured that, despite his death in February 1987, the Liberace legend would endure.
.jpg)
