Liberace brought back to lavish life
WLADZIU Valentino Liberace (played by Michael Douglas, right) was born in 1919 and died in 1987, his death being attributed, initially and inaccurately, to heart disease; a subsequent autopsy revealed the cause was HIV/AIDS. Thus what had been an open secret became public knowledge as the carefully hidden truth about his sexuality was exposed as a cynical tactic designed to defend an image that had taken a mediocre pianist to international fame and a great deal of money.
Rumours and gossip held that his effeminate stage persona, tonal inflections and extravagant costumes were clear indications of his sexual orientation. Far from admitting to being gay, let alone proclaiming it proudly as would be the case today, Liberace vehemently denied it and sued anyone who dared print that his camp manner was a deliberate attempt to attract matronly audiences prepared to accept it as a meretricious construct.
The most famous lawsuit involved William Connor, writing as Cassandra in 1956 for the London Daily Mirror, who included the term “fruitflavoured” in a list of unfavourable comments. Liberace’s case rested on the fact that “fruit” was used in the US as a derogatory substitute for homosexual, even though, as the court found, it had no similar meaning in the UK. Liberace was awarded damages and emerged with his reputation intact and his lie unexposed; he continued to maintain the illusion by talking about marriage if he could find a suitable match, presumably one approximating the perfection of his mother, whom he idolised.
The flamboyance he displayed on stage was reflected in his various homes — one had a copy of the Sistine Chapel with himself as the centrepiece reaching out to a naked Adam, which rather gave the game away — where any object that could be shaped to resemble a piano, from a swimming pool to a dining room table, was on show to selected guests, who were suitably impressed.
As a pianist, however, he got away with murder and, possibly, plagiarism in one instance: Behind the Candelabra opens with him playing his own boogie-woogie number, which turns out to be his interpretation of a piece by Pinetop Smith from the 1920s. He boasted that he eliminated the dull bits from such classics as Chopin’s Minute Waltz (he cut it to 37 seconds) and a Tchaikovsky piano concerto (cut to four minutes).
But Liberace will never be remembered, if at all, for his musicianship; instead, it was his showmanship and private life, both of which are faithfully reproduced in the film, that made him a unique, controversial figure of fun, reverence or sympathy.