"People who keep coming back to see me," he says, "deserve something different each time." And this season's difference really burns the old candelabra at both ends. Liberace's bejeweled 185-pound bulk dramatically arpeggios 20 feet above his see-through Steinway into a breath-stopping exit finale. The old cocktail tinkler is, at 56, still the hottest two-armed bandit on the casino circuit. Right up there with Sinatra and Presley, he commands $125,000 a week.
It isn't all take-home (Liberace owns seven of them), for he pays for all those gem-studded costumes and wears six a show costing up to $60,000 per. Actually, it was one of his phantasmagoric capes which inspired his current aerial gimmick. "I lifted my arms to show the audience the lining," he recalls, "and suddenly I felt airborne. My manager, Seymour Heller, said I could really fly if I wanted to, and we got the local expert." Then, to complement that circus wire-rigger, Liberace had his friend Debbie Reynolds, who once played a levitating ghost in a stage musical, "coach me so I wouldn't hang there like a slab of beef."
Liberace's other obsession these days is the museum he created out of his 26-room Hollywood Hills mansion and such toys as the piano on which George Gershwin composed Rhapsody in Blue. For a month, a tour limoed in so many loads of rubberneckers at $5.95 apiece (his cut is earmarked for a Liberace Foundation for young musicians) that neighbors' petitions shuttered the operation. A zoning fight is next.
Wladziu Valentino Liberace, as his Polish-Italian parents christened him, as usual took comfort from his cabaret proceeds and the counsel Mary Pick-ford once gave him: "Never read what the critics write, just check the box office." As Lee (which only his friends call him) smirks, "You know that bank I used to cry all the way to? Well, I finally bought it."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
