Entertainers: What Ever Happened To Buster Keys?

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Liberace believes in carrying his style all the way. His custom Cadillac is fitted out with TV, stereo, and a bar with monogrammed silver goblets; lest it be mistaken for anyone else's, his town car is topped with twin diamond-studded chandeliers. Then "for marketing and around town," he uses a porcelain-white Rolls-Royce.

All the Elements. A designer on the side, he has spent $450,000 revamping his 28-room house in Hollywood Hills. Salient features: a gymnasium (where he does daily calisthenics), a swimming pool completely surrounded with green carpeting, five pianos including a white upright encrusted with gold, silver, red and green brilliants. There are also 20-odd portraits of Liberace (including one painted from a photo of his audience with Pope Pius XII), fighting for wall space with some 30 mirrors.

Onstage, he ostentatiously kids himself, "I'm no good," he says, "I've just got guts." But offstage, he adds: "I consider myself an entertainer. There are very few people in show business I consider entertainers—people who can in the course of an evening draw all the elements of emotion from the audience. When I perform, I don't just play. I like to make people happy."

* So did Director Tony Richardson, and in the upcoming film version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Liberace portrays a casket salesman to unctuous perfection.

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