Liberace
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Liberace
Author: Darden Asbury Pyron
language: en
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Release Date: 2013-04-26
More people watched his nationally syndicated television show between 1953 and 1955 than followed I Love Lucy. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records he set at Madison Square Garden, the Hollywood Bowl, and Radio City Music Hall still stand. Arguably the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless kept more than a few secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the acclaimed and bestselling Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, leads us through the life of America's foremost showman with his fresh, provocative, and definitive portrait of Liberace, an American boy. Liberace's career follows the trajectory of the classic American dream. Born in the Midwest to Polish-Italian immigrant parents, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Abandoning the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs, celebrities, and television, Liberace became America's most popular entertainer. While wildly successful and good natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservativism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secretive homosexuality. Even so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of ferocious aggression and ambition. Pyron relates this private man to his public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of twentieth-century America. Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of American culture, with its shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lamé. "An entertaining and rewarding biography of the pianist and entertainer whose fans' adoration was equaled only by his critics' loathing. . . . [Pyron] persuasively argues that Liberace, thoroughly and rigorously trained, was a genuine musician as well as a brilliant showman. . . . [A]n immensely entertaining story that should be fascinating and pleasurable to anyone with an interest in American popular culture."—Kirkus Reviews "This is a wonderful book, what biography ought to be and so seldom is."—Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph "[A]bsorbing and insightful. . . . Pyron's interests are far-ranging and illuminating-from the influence of a Roman Catholic sensibility on Liberace and gay culture to the aesthetics of television and the social importance of self-improvement books in the 1950s. Finally, he achieves what many readers might consider impossible: a persuasive case for Liberace's life and times as the embodiment of an important cultural moment."—Publishers Weekly "Liberace, coming on top of his amazing life of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, puts Darden Pyron in the very first rank of American biographers. His books are as exciting as the lives of his subjects."—Tom Wolfe "Fascinating, thoughtful, exhaustive, and well-written, this book will serve as the standard biography of a complex icon of American popular culture."—Library Journal
The Dark Side of Liberace
During Liberaces trial in the late fifties, Lee, as he was familiarly called, was critically reviewed by Cassandra (a former colonel in the British army) in his daily column in Londons Daily Mirror. Cassandra wrote, He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want. This deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station! At the same time, Liberace had recently completed his ABC seven-year contract that had gone viral via international and national television, but he recognized a new and very popular confidential magazine that was beginning to create unimaginable curiosity in 1950s America, suggesting that he was homosexual. Liberace died in February of 1987, but the story of his estate was not settled until long after. His attorney, Joel Strote, managed to stuff the estate for his own, and that forced a very ugly trial both between the Liberace family both in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where Liberace made his home for tax benefits. The outcomes of the trials were in Strotes favor, though Ida Mae Liberace, Liberaces niece, claimed that there were hundreds of millions of dollars in the estate secreted in an account in Switzerland. Liberaces burial was in Forest Lawn overlooking Warner Brothers Studio and where Liberace filmed his disastrous film during the 1950s entitled Sincerely Yours.
Liberace
Author: Isabella Alston
language: en
Publisher: TAJ Books International
Release Date: 2014-05-19
When Liberace was just seven years old, he memorized the full 17-page score of MendelssohnÕsÒMidsummer NightÕs DreamÓ in one day. No matter your opinion of LiberaceÕs ostentatious and flamboyant style, his talent on the piano is unarguable. He learned the entertainment business as a teenager playing honky tonks and bars, moving after high school graduation to New York City, Òthe city that never sleeps.Ó He found moderate success there, but soon moved to California, staying only a year before returning to The Big Apple. To stand out in an extremely competitive market, Liberace practiced 12 hours a day and originated his unique style, combining the classic works, shortened to appeal to a mass audience, with the popular tunes of the day. It was at this time, in the early 1940s, that he plopped the infamous candelabra on his grand piano. The lavish, over-the-top costumes would come later. Soon, Las Vegas beckoned and Liberace did not look the other way. From 1945 until the end of his life in 1987, Liberace called Las Vegas homeÑalong with his mulitple other homes, all of which he decorated in the most lavish (some would say completely kitsch) way imaginable. Liberace was a force to be reckoned with, a very talented and original artist.