Article: LIBERACE: THE EVANGELIST OF KITSCH - TIME

Monday November 3, 1986

Liberace: The Show, the Book, the Legend

by Richard Corliss

The lights go down in Manhattan's deco dream palace, Radio City Music Hall, and Mr. Showmanship makes his entrance, flying across the huge stage in a cocoon of feathers, enough for a whole flock of purple ostriches. Did we hear someone say "Peter Pansy"? Go on and laugh. He doesn't care; he knows you'll soon be laughing with him. Perhaps by the first-act finale. A gigantic Statue of Liberty mock-up stands in center stage holding a candelabrum. Thirty-six Rockettes perform their automated scissors kick. Skyrockets flare on the back scrim. And then Glitter Beau Peep his bad self emerges from the stars-and- stripes Rolls-Royce in a red, white and blue hot- pants outfit and flourishes his baton like the most cunning majorette from Camp Camp.

At 67 every star has the fame he deserves. A lifetime of fabulation has honed his image; it matters little whether the public mask matches the private face, so long as it fits and pleases. The mask on Wladziu Valentino Liberace fits like a face-lift; it has evoked smiles and giggles for two generations. And it surely keeps the man busy. His current engagement at the Music Hall will bring Vegas glamour to more than 100,000 of the faithful, though ticket sales are lagging behind his two previous record-breaking Radio City gigs. In addition, Lee has a new book (his fourth), called The Wonderful Private World of Liberace. He is about to open a new museum in Las Vegas, filled with costumes and pianos. He will soon franchise his Vegas restaurant, Tivoli Gardens. The Liberace Foundation, which endows promising young musicians, ! provides the star with a string of proteges (like Eric Hamelin, the 14-year- old piano whiz who performs a featured solo at the Music Hall). Not bad for a fellow who might once have been laughed off as a novelty act, a Tiny Tim at the Baldwin.

From his first eminence in the early '50s as the rage of syndicated TV, Liberace was a vision out of a closet yet to be opened in mainstream show business. The silken singsong voice, the candelabrum, the welded dimples and fluty presence, the references to his sainted mother Frances, all made him a conversation piece, a figure of fun -- the Gorgeous George of mid-cult music. As Michael Herr observes in his new book The Big Room, "Never before, at least knowingly, had a man ever had the big steel balls to show himself like that, and on television." The slurs must have hurt Liberace, but his blithe heroism became a '50s catchphrase: "I cried all the way to the bank."

He did more: he exaggerated the very elements of his persona and performance that had earned him his early notoriety. The costumes were soon fit for a king -- King Frederick of Hollywood -- with their exotic plumes and freighted trains. He wore diamonds as big as the Ritz; his hair was not so much teased as taunted; his candelabra were large enough to light the Library of Congress reading room. The patter between numbers became bolder, dropping innuendos like anvils.

Finally it was impossible to make fun of Liberace because he was having too much fun making fun of himself. He was in on the joke; he may have created it. In doing so he exploited the show-biz principle that nothing succeeds like wretched excess. And soon members of the rock glitterati from Little Richard to Elton John, Alice Cooper to Patti LaBelle, were raiding the wardrobes Liberace had stocked. He gave audiences what they never knew they wanted: a polyester blend of classics and crass, of Van Cliburn and Van Halen. Oh, yes -- and their money's worth of high dazzle.

14 year old pianist Eric Hamelin with Liberace, 1986

Every appearance and artifact now buttress the Liberace pseudo story. The anecdotes in his new book are buffed beyond belief; there is nothing, for example, about the 1982 palimony action brought against Lee by his former companion-chauffeur-bodyguard, which was dismissed in 1984. He does reveal that 50 years ago he lost his virginity to a chanteuse at Milwaukee's Club Madrid named Miss Bea Haven ("Say it fast," Lee advises). He tells of a night "when I was very near death" in a Roman Catholic hospital and "a very young and lovely nun, wearing a white habit," visited him and sped him toward recovery; the mother superior later told him, "There are no nuns in this hospital who wear white habits." The rest of the book is less miraculous: lists of his favorite stars and soap operas, reminiscences of Elvis Presley and Ronald Reagan from the '50s, and the recipe for Liberace's Sticky Buns (feeds 18). It is a tell-nothing autobiography, but, as Lee jokes to his Music Hall devotees, "I figured I'd better write it before Kitty Kelley did."

They lap it all up, these ladies of a certain age and young gentlemen of a certain persuasion. They laugh when, as he sits down on his studded coattails, he says, "No kiddin', if the rhinestones are turned the wrong way it'll kill ya." They give Lee's new "friend, valet and chauffeur" three separate ovations. They sing along to Let Me Call You Sweetheart and You Made Me Love You. They cheer when he summons a woman from the audience to dance onstage with him. His duet with the mechanized Dancing Waters earns aahhs. And at the end, when he comes to the stage apron to shake hands with the audience, his elderly fans rush down the aisles with a fervor not seen since the last stampede at the Social Security office. This evangelist of kitsch takes one more bow, waves and vanishes. Friends, that's entertainment.

First published in TIME, November 3 1986

Review: LIBERACE AND THE ROCKETTES

  

Sunday October 19, 1986

by Stephen Holden

LIBERACE, the reigning monarch of American glitz, outdid himself in campy showmanship Thursday at the opening-night performance of his Radio City Music Hall engagement, which runs through Nov. 2. Instead of gliding onto the stage in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce limousine, as in past years, the pianist arrived in midair, attached to a wire like a puffed-up Peter Pan, in a hundred pounds of purple and white feathers.

''When I passed over Shea Stadium, the Astros looked up to see who was flying and the Mets won the pennant,'' he said after he alighted.

Though Liberace's current show is not entirely fresh, it boasts several lavish new production numbers. The biggest - and the silliest - is a belated tribute to the Statue of Liberty. As a cutout of the statue clutching a candelabrum rises at the rear of the stage, Liberace and the Rockettes, decked out in glittery red, white and blue, parade and kick to ''The Stars and Stripes Forever.''

But if Liberace's new show boasts grander, splashier decor, its musical segments remain essentially unchanged. As before, the pianist offers tributes to Chopin and Eddy Duchin and ''Mack the Knife'' arranged in settings that parody Mozart, Debussy and Johann Strauss. His heavy-miked pianism is at once metallic sounding, exaggeratedly florid in ornamentation and unbendingly rigid in tone and phrasing.

Musically, the most satisfying moment came not from Liberace but from his 14-year-old protege, Eric Hamelin. After a two-piano rendition of ''Slaughter on 10th Avenue,'' the young man played a solo medley of ''Malaguena,'' Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu and a Rachmaninoff-styled arrangement of ''Vesti la giubba'' from ''I Pagliacci.'' Beneath the fancy flourishes, one could detect a lyrical sensibility struggling to turn an unwieldy grand gesture into something more personal.

First published in The New York Times, October 19 1986

Hazel Hawke and the restoration of a Beale grand piano

A little story pertaining to the Beale piano marque. 

In 1985, our then First Lady, Hazel Hawke, (wife of the then Prime Minister, Robert Hawke) herself an accomplished pianist, was made aware of an old Beale grand in one of the student practice rooms at the Canberra School of Music. 

She arranged for a full restoration and had it transferred to the Prime Ministerial Lodge in Canberra. 

A launch concert was given in 1986 by Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer and another by Hazel Hawke herself. 

As it turned out, that Beale grand was purchased new and installed at the The Lodge in 1927, so the instrument came full circle. 

Photo of Hazel Hawke and the restored Beale, taken in 1986:

Australian First Lady Hazel Hawke (1929 - 2013) at the restored Beale piano, 1986.

Many Beale upright pianos had an unusual tuning system called “Vader”. 

The tuning pins were screwed directly into a metal pin-block (most pianos use a wooden pin-block, with the pins hammered in). 

Ideally the piano technician would remove the back wooden plate of the piano (at top, behind the tuning pins). Each pin was secured by an individual set screw. One would loosen each screw as you went, move the pin accordingly to set it to the pitch required, then tighten the set screw.

Having a helper on hand to loosen and tighten the set screws, whilst you did the pins from the front sped things up a lot. 

Once done, the pianos were generally very stable and lasted for many years without needing tuning. 

Because of the much longer process, some techs in Australia wouldn’t touch them. Others, particularly those with a sentimental attachment to Australian manufacturing history, embrace them with love and respect. 

I once shared a student group house in the early 1980s with Helen Beale. 

As I was playing the piano one evening, Helen remarked that my music remind her so much of the family history of piano manufacturing: “My great-great-grandfather was Octavius Beale.” I’d never made the connection.

The factory was at 45 Trafalgar Street, Annandale - a suburb of Sydney. Now it’s a block of apartments, but each wing of the block bears the name of a model of Beale piano.

Octavius Charles Beale (1850-1930), piano manufacturer, was born on 23 February 1850 at Mountmellick, Queen's County (Leix), Ireland, son of Joseph Beale, woollen manufacturer, and his wife Margaret, née Davis. In December 1854 he and his mother joined his father and brothers in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania). In Hobart Town Mrs Beale founded a small school, one of several which amalgamated into The Friends' School. Brought up as a Quaker, Beale was sent back to Ireland in 1859 to be educated for six years at Newton School, Waterford. 

At 16 he entered a Melbourne hardware firm, Brooks, Robinson & Co., and at 23 set up a branch in New Zealand; he returned to Melbourne and became a partner two years later. On 9 October 1875 at the Congregational Church, Woollahra, Sydney, he married Elizabeth Baily, who bore him thirteen children. She died in 1901 and Beale married her sister Katherine on 4 March 1903.

Octavius Beale in 1905. National Library of Australia 23193352

After a brief association with Hugo Wertheim in Melbourne as sewing-machine importers, he moved to Sydney about 1884 and established Beale & Co., Ltd, piano and sewing-machine importers; he was managing director until 1930. In 1893 at Annandale he established a large piano factory. Beale & Co. made all their own components and introduced a revolutionary improvement, the all-iron tuning system, patented in 1902.

 

He also made sewing-machines. With J C Watson he had been joint honorary treasurer of the Pitt Town Co-operative Settlement in 1894, and as a large employer of labour, maintained 'a friendly association' with trade unions.

In 1903 Beale was a member of the New South Wales royal commission on the decline of the birth-rate and on the mortality of infants. Believing that the inquiry had failed to stem the social change that disturbed him, he continued to pester the Commonwealth government about 'secret drugs' and abortifacients, the use of which was 'ruining the moral fibre of the nation'. Authorised by the prime minister Alfred Deakin in 1905-06 he collected information in the United States of America, Britain and Europe and on his return was appointed to act at his own expense as a royal commissioner into secret drugs, cures and foods. 

In 1908 Beale presented his report, which was chiefly distinguished by its moralistic tone and reliance on opinions rather than evidence, and had to be purged of some of its wilder claims before publication. 

He was criticised by some members of parliament, and legislation had to be enacted to give him the protection of retrospective privilege. His racialist and strongly pro-natalist population theories were aired again in his Racial Decay: A Compilation of Evidence from World Sources (Sydney, 1910), which merited its later description as 'quite the oddest book ever published in a field where there are many competitors'.

Beale was founding president of the Federated Chambers of Manufactures of Australia, and president later of the New South Wales Chamber of Manufactures and of the Chambers of Commerce of the Commonwealth of Australia. As State president of the National Protection League, he kept Deakin, an old ally, informed on political matters in Sydney and complained of Sir William Lyne losing himself 'in the torrent of his own invective'. 

As early as 1905 he was discussing a possible rapprochement with the free traders; and, an advocate of 'Empire preference', he lunched with Joseph Chamberlain in London in 1906. He encouraged the 'fusion' of the non-Labor parties, and was present at Deakin's meeting with (Sir) Joseph Cook on 24 May 1909.

A good linguist, Beale had revisited Europe and England in 1908 for the Franco-British Exhibition, of which he was a commissioner. He had three sons on active service and was often in London with his family in World War I. 

He became a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts; as a liveryman of the Company of Musicians he was admitted freeman of the City of London in 1918. Back in Sydney, Beale was a trustee of the Australian Museum and of the New South Wales Savings Bank. 

At his home, Llanarth, Burwood, he grew rare plants in his garden, particularly orchids; he was knowledgeable about botany and Australian timbers. 

Fascinated by the ritual and history of Freemasonry, he became an Anglican and joined the Christian Masonic orders. 

He combined the refinement of a classical education with the forcefulness of a successful man of affairs. While his letters suggest a quiet confidence, his family remembered him as a stern paterfamilias in the Victorian manner.

Beale was killed in a motor accident at Stroud, New South Wales, on 16 December 1930 and was buried in St Thomas's Church of England cemetery, Enfield. He was survived by six sons and four daughters of his first marriage and by his second wife.

Octavius Beale biography courtesy of Australian Dictionary of Biographies.