Show Business: A Synonym for Glorious Excess

At the heart of every great show-business career is an enigma. No matter how manifest a performer's talent, no matter how assiduously he courts his fans, there remains a puzzlement: In a fragmented and fickle world, what accounts for enormous, enduring popularity?

Among postwar American entertainers, none provoked that question more often than a kitsch pianist with a scullery maid's idea of a regal wardrobe, who for more than 40 years attracted stalwart Middle Americans to romps that he himself once characterized as "just that far away from drag." As a musician, Liberace was a panderer: he edited classics down to four to six minutes because, he said, his audience would not sit still for anything longer. He sang and tap-danced competently, no more. From the early 1950s, when his syndicated TV show appeared ten times a week and won two Emmy awards, to the 1980s, when he set box-office records at Radio City Music Hall, Liberace was a visual rather than an acoustic phenomenon. He charted a path followed by the unlikeliest of proteges, from Elvis Presley to Elton John and Boy George: the sex idol as peacock androgyne.

Liberace spoke reverently to his fans of motherhood, country and religion -- in earlier days his act featured a woman dressed as a nun outstretched in spiritual ecstasy as he played the Ave Maria -- but he poked constant fun at himself. His little-boy smirkiness brought out maternal feelings in women twice his age and eventually in women half his age. So did his soulful, unmacho sentiment: long before liberation, he offered the female public a man as romantic, as house proud and as appearance conscious as any of them. They envied his tightly curled hair, his industrial-size dimple, above all, his floor-length furs, sequined suits, neon-color satins and clusters of rings. They delighted, too, in his see-through glass-topped piano, his electric candelabrum that he brightened or dimmed by means of unseen controls, his houses (one decorated with a knockoff of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling), and other evidences of exuberant materialism that he celebrated in a Liberace Museum in, of course, Las Vegas.

Fellow performers often giggled at the persona, but they liked the man. Said Shirley MacLaine: "Lee's a hoot. He always gives a good show." Edie Adams concurred: "He was outrageous when outrageous wasn't cool. He was a little kid and nice to be around, on or off the stage." He often suggested that he enjoyed special spiritual grace, and some fans concluded he had faith- healing powers. But when he died at home last week after a brief hospitalization, he was best known as a synonym for glorious excess. After an aborted attempt in 1958 at a button-down, close-cropped, low-key look, Liberace came to understand that in the heartland where he found his audiences, less remained less and only more was more.