Attached is a five page interview with the always demure and introverted pianist Liberace (b. Wladziu Valentino Liberace: 1919 – 1987). When this article first appeared on the pages of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, no living performer was selling more records than he was, his television program was nearing its second year and American women had not yet figured out that he was gay. Life was good.
However music critics were at a total loss in trying to understand his popularity:
“These joy killers have pronounced him a ‘shining mediocrity’ whose ‘pianistic pretenses have lowered the national music standards’, and whose ‘bounciness, sweet smile…[and] my-oh-my-prose style’ have ‘incited thousands of rampant moms to violence’ in belief that he is ‘just a big little boy… and a good boy, too, who would never swear or drink or leave his poor old mother…'”
The article is a good deal of fun to read.
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