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Economy Title: Mr. Showmanship’s Show Is Closing (Liberace Museum Closing) Mr. Showmanship’s Show Is Closing By ADAM NAGOURNEY LAS VEGAS — Bill Holt was gawking. At the room filled with ornate antique pianos, among them a Baldwin grand glistening with a coat of rhinestones that was Liberace’s favorite. At a 1962 Phantom V Landau Rolls-Royce, covered in mirrors, that looked like a disco ball on wheels. At Liberace’s collection of candelabras, rings, capes and boots. At, in short, the paraphernalia of a onetime star of the Strip who appears to have become a symbol of an era that is not only past, but forgotten, too. The Liberace Museum, once a tourist attraction on a par with the Hoover Dam — 450,000 people came every year to the strip-mall museum with a red neon piano on the roof — is closing its doors next month. The collection is being put into storage. “I’ve lived here for 40 years and this is the first time I’ve come,” said Mr. Holt, 71, a retired civil engineer, soft piano music tinkling above him. “I heard this place was closing, so I headed over.” Tanya Combs, the museum director and one of 30 employees about to be out of a job, glanced dolefully at Mr. Holt. “That is the problem,” she said. “You should have come more often.” Yet it is hard to blame Mr. Holt or any of the other hundreds of people who suddenly showed up over the past few days at the news of the Oct. 17 closing, filling a parking lot that had grown barren in recent years. “They used to come in droves,” said Jack Rappaport, the president of the Liberace Foundation and Museum. There can be no disputing that Wladziu Valentino Liberace once helped define this town that loves its glitz. He was Mr. Showmanship, if he did say so himself, and people, or at least older people, remember catching a Liberace show at the Riviera Hotel (a picture of the Riviera marquee shows Liberace with top billing over a singer named Barbra Streisand). With his costume changes, arch piano playing and desire to shock — yes, he played Radio City Music Hall in red, white and blue hot pants and knee-high boots, which you can see in all its garish glory if you hurry — Liberace was Lady Gaga before Stefani Germanotta was even born. There are millions of Americans who watched him on television in the 1950s, who swooned at his campy outfits and jewelry and blinding-white smile. “I want to look at Liberace!” Alice yelled at Ralph Kramden in a “Honeymooners” episode in which she pleaded with her cheap husband to buy her a television set. And Liberace’s fans followed with stunned sorrow when he died of AIDS in 1987, one more turning point in the nation’s perception of that disease and homosexuality. Yet unlike Frank Sinatra’s or Elvis’s, Liberace’s legacy has steadily faded as his audience has aged. A taxi driver taking a visitor to the museum got lost. His appeal failed to cross generational lines, despite the effort of museum officials to, as one put it, rebrand him. Poster Comment: I feel bad for the poor Tea Party people. This will devastate them.
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#1. To: Skip Intro (#0)
He was popular in his time.
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