Born Wladziu (Walter) Valentino Liberace in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Liberace was interested in music from the age of four and won a scholarship to the Wisconsin College of Music at the age of seven, studying there for 17 years. Reputedly at the advice of family friend and renowned pianist Paderewski, the youngster decided that he too would someday be known by just one name. Although he was classically trained, he began to perform pop hits in local clubs as a teen. By the early 1940s, he was establishing himself in New York night spots; ads offered a phonetic guide for his fans ("Libber-ah-chee"). Playing cocktail lounges and intermissions for big bands, he received a rave Variety notice in 1945 while appearing at the Persian Room, which led to strings of dates across the United States. He won a small role in the film South Seas Sinner (1950).

     In 1950 Don Fedderson, the general manager of Los Angeles station KLAC-TV, saw Liberace perform before a small audience at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California, and immediately offered him a chance to appear on the new medium of television. The resultant series was so popular that it drew network attention, and when Liberace appeared on NBC as a summer replacement for Dinah Shore in 1952 ( 15- minute shows twice a week in prime time), he began 10 create a sensation. For a subsequent series, he wisely accepted what was at the time an unorthodox format of filming programs for syndication. As a result, when Liberace became a television fixture throughout the country by the mid- 1950s, he also became very rich. The program was one of several shows featuring KLAC talent produced by Fedderson and syndicated by Guild Films. (Betty White was in another KLAC production, starring in Life with Elizabeth from 1953 to 1955.) Fedderson would go on to produce many successful television series, often for CBS, including My Three Sons and Family Affair.

     Liberace's TV shows were famous for offering a range of popular and classical standards, and featured tributes to composers, musicians, and genres of m11- sic-everything from "The Beer Barrel Polka" to "September Song" to "Clair de Lune." Visually, they showcased Liberace in direct address to the audience and in flamboyant performance, always smiling and often winking. No one in early television worked harder to create a star persona. Ever-present candelabras, piano-shaped objects large and small, and especially his outrageous and glamorous costumes defined Liberace's celebrity. Sentimental but ostentatious, the title program also featured his elder brother George as violin accompanist and orchestral arranger, plus regular and affectionate mentions of their mother, Frances. The show was immediately successful, appearing on 100 stations by October 1953 (more than any network program) and nearly 200 stations a year later. Liberace quickly sold out the Hollywood Bowl, Carnegie Hall, and other venues for live performances. A series of hit albums and a brief resumption of his movie career followed.

     Liberace soon experienced the effects of overexposure: some local stations, desperate for programming, played his shows twice a day, five days a week. His career suffered a considerable slump after only a few years. In response, a short-lived daytime series in the late 1950s tried and failed to feature a scaled-down, tempered Liberace. A change of management and a return to extravagance in a series of Las Vegas venues restored his notoriety, and he made many guest appearances on TV variety and talk shows through the 1960s and 1970s. In a memorable film cameo, he played a quite earnest casket salesman in the black comedy The Loved One (1965). In the late 1960s, one last TV series was briefly produced in London.

     Liberace's popularity was typically met in the press with equal parts disbelief and disdain. The arrangements of his classical pieces were noted as simplifications, and his mix of classical and popular styles raised hackles about an encroaching middle-brow aesthetic. His personal eccentricities were detailed at length. More tellingly, the size and devotion of his following was seen to be problematic. That his audience was largely female, and often middle-aged, wrought cliched anxieties about insubstantial and wayward popular culture; it even was suggested that he was not providing quality performances but rather represented for his fans an object to be mothered. In response to his critics, he uttered a still-famous retort: "I cried all the way to the bank." In two instances, however, he responded with successful lawsuits-one against London Daily Mirror columnist "Cassandra" (William Neil Connor), and another against the infamous scandal magazine Confidential. Each had discussed his behavior or his appeal in terms that inferred homosex­uality.

     In retrospect, Liberace's career seems due for recon­sideration as a kind of "queer" open secret. The concern that his audience was mostly female, the regular speculation about his love life (When would he marry?), and the criticism of his attention to his mother all can be seen as touchstones for social anxieties of the time about appropriate gender roles and definitions. Indeed, if Liberace's appeal was grounded in a decidedly unthreatening masculinity, marked by good manners and simplistic pieties, it also inspired a range of critical attention that often revealed a tendency to sexualize him. The libelous incidents were the culmination of this tendency and perhaps revealed more than they intended about "normative" attitudes about post­ war male behavior. To be sure, there was nothing about Liberace that corresponded to "queer" underground culture or the avant-garde of the 1950s-no one appeared to be more mainstream. However, the contradictions within his very successful career and persona raise further questions about postwar society and culture. Liberace died of AIDS-related complications on February 4, 1987.