'He wanted to maintain an illusion of agelessness': The secret life of outrageous US showman Liberace

The glitzy pianist, who famously hid his sexuality, was dismissed as a "vulgar joke" in his lifetime. But a new play gets to the truth of who he was, in private as well as in public.

The outlandish pianist and singer Liberace was such an accomplished purveyor of glitzy escapism that he famously called himself a "one-man Disneyland". During his heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s, he was also regularly described as "the world's highest paid entertainer", a claim that is impossible to verify and may well be untrue.

Still, there is no doubt that he liked to project outrageous wealth on stage. When he performed his final live residency, at New York City's Radio City Music Hall in 1985, Liberace made a grand entrance by stepping out of a giant recreation of a Fabergé egg, wearing a cape made of hot pink turkey feathers.

The man born Władziu Valentino Liberace – but who achieved global fame as a fabulous mononym – died in February 1987 from an Aids-related illness. He had learned around 18 months earlier that he was HIV positive, but never spoke publicly about his diagnosis, just as he always refuted rumours that he was gay. Since his death, however, it has become common knowledge that he enjoyed several long-term relationships with men.

Now a new stage play about Liberace, I'll Be Seeing You, which opens this month in Scotland, explores the apparent disconnect between his private and professional lives, as well as the flamboyant piano man's most immaculate deception. In 1959, three years after the Daily Mirror published an article heavily insinuating that he was homosexual, Liberace successfully sued the British newspaper for libel.

The actor who portrays Liberace in the play, revered British Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale, tells the BBC that Liberace made a significant "gamble" by taking the case to court – had he lost, his career could have been ruined. But Beale also observes that the "specific lie that Liberace told" under oath, when he insisted that he was "against the practice [of homosexuality] because it offends convention and it offends society", was "merely part of [his] continuum of lying" – or at least being evasive about – his sexuality. As it transpired, the court ruled in Liberace's favour and awarded him £8,000 in damages – the equivalent to £167,000 ($225,000) today.

Vincent L Stephens, the author of Rocking the Closet: How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music, believes this victory was an emboldening turning point for the nascent showman. "After he won, he gradually became a lot more flamboyant and outgoing in his public persona," Stephens tells the BBC, pointing to the succession of "handsome chauffeurs" that Liberace hired to drive him on stage in his signature Rolls Royce.

One of these, Scott Thorson, sued Liberace for $113 million in palimony in 1982. He claimed that the entertainer had left him penniless after abruptly ending their five-year relationship. Liberace vehemently denied that he was gay and stated in court depositions that Thorson was never his lover. The case was settled in 1986 with Thorson receiving $75,000 in cash as well as three cars and three valuable pet dogs. 

The former driver's 1988 memoir, Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, was later adapted into an Emmy-winning TV film starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Thorson. Conductor and arranger Bo Ayars, who served as Liberace's musical director from 1973 to 1986, tells the BBC that 2013's Behind the Candelabra succeeded in "really showing [Liberace's] idiosyncrasies" as a person and performer.

Directed with affectionate irreverence by Steven Soderbergh, it doesn't shy away from showing Liberace's determination to maintain a different kind of façade – foregrounding his penchant for cosmetic surgery and showing him undergoing a facelift so extreme that it allegedly left him unable to close his eyelids completely.

Ayars says Liberace believed unwaveringly in "keeping up appearances" as he grew older and increasingly bald. "I never saw him without his hairpiece, though it did change in colour and style," he notes. To Stephens, Liberace's fondness for plastic surgery was entirely "in keeping" with his rigorous approach to image management. "Since his initial appeal was tied to a certain boyish innocence, it seems likely that he wanted to maintain an illusion of agelessness for his audience," he suggests. 

I'll Be Seeing You has enough pedigree to kickstart another revival in interest around Liberace. And in a serendipitous coincidence, it arrives hot on the heels of Liberace & Liza, a musical comedy tribute show in which David Saffert and Jillian Snow play affectionate parodies of Liberace and Liza Minnelli. The cabaret-style romp, which has toured extensively on both sides of the Atlantic while building a healthy following on TikTok, hinges on the irresistible fiction that the two entertainers, who probably never met, were great friends and collaborators.

"As I looked into his career, I started to realise that he was rarely given enough credit as a musician," Saffert tells the BBC. I'll Be Seeing You star Beale says he is especially interested in "how we regard Liberace" as a cultural figure because he was often dismissed as a "vulgar joke" in his lifetime. "I think there's a huge amount of snobbery surrounding him," Beale adds. "Nobody ever mentions that he must have worked at being such an extraordinary piano player." 

In fact, Liberace worked incredibly hard from the start. Born in May 1919 to parents with Italian and Polish roots, he grew up in a working-class household in Wisconsin where his father, Salvatore, did manual labour in addition to playing the French horn in local bands. His mother, Frances, had been a concert pianist before she was married, but it was Salvatore who determined that the young Władziu – or Walter, to friends – should begin piano lessons at just four years old. 

At 13, he started playing professionally at weddings, dance classes and even strip clubs to supplement the family's income during the Great Depression. Still, despite the odd insalubrious gig, the prodigiously gifted Liberace seemed destined to become a serious classical musician. On 15 January 1940, around six months before his 21st birthday, he made his debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, billed as the soloist during a performance of Liszt's Piano Concerto No 2.

However, by this point, Liberace's head was already being turned by the power of popular music. As he perfected his act at nightclubs and hotel lounges throughout the 1940s, Liberace began to blend classical compositions with seemingly incongruous contemporary songs like the sentimental folk ballad Home on the Range and energetic jazz standard Tiger Rag. Reflecting on his decision to eschew a career as a traditional concert pianist, Liberace told TV interviewer Michael Parkinson in 1973: "I love classical music, but I think I would have been a much lonelier person if I'd been a strictly classical pianist, because you play to a different audience of people." The audience he targeted with gusto, Liberace added shrewdly, were "truly the working-class people" who would "really let go" at his shows.

In the 1950s, Liberace found the ideal medium to cultivate this mainstream fanbase when his weekly TV series, The Liberace Show, became a ratings sensation in the US and UK. Remarkably, his popularity flourished in the face of thinly veiled homophobia from TV critics, who made what Stephens describes as "veiled comments about him not being a 'regular' or 'traditional' guy". However, Liberace's core demographic of mainly middle-aged and older women "rallied behind him" and remained loyal until his death in 1987, ensuring he remained an enormous live draw long after The Liberace Show ended in 1959. 

From this point on, Liberace maintained his profile with witty guest spots on TV chat shows and honed his showy yet homely persona right down to his signature stage prop, a candelabra perched on the piano, which struck the right note of aspirational suburban glamour. "He understood what his female audience wanted, which was a well-groomed, amusing man who was not unlike an unthreatening brother or [platonic] companion," Beale says. 

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In 2026, when gay people enjoy greater visibility than Liberace could have imagined in his lifetime, it would be easy to perceive him as the archetypal "tragic homosexual" – how could he be happy when he hid a huge part of himself? However, this reductive view fails to factor in his sizable appetite for life. "All his friends seemed to like him and he was never accused of lacking generosity, so I think he was probably quite a simple man with simple desires," Beale suggests. "If he'd said, 'yes, I'm gay' [on record], he would have lost his career, so he chose not to. What's complex about that?"

Ayars roundly agrees with this assessment: "He always seemed genuinely happy and would laugh off comments about his private life". He believes the real Liberace was a performer of rare stamina – they racked up around 5,000 shows together, often performing twice a night – who loved to dazzle audiences while accruing the glamorous trappings of success. "His piano technique was great, though I never saw him practise," Ayars says, "but in terms of showmanship and entertaining people, he really was a king." 

I'll be Seeing You is at Scotland's Pitlochry Theatre from September 22 until October 11.

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