What Ever Happened To Buster Keys?

It was show time in the Versailles Room at Las Vegas' Riviera. Out to stage center rolled an 8-ft. by 10-ft. cake, which parted to produce, in a blinding flash of red sequins--the headliner. "Well, look me over," said Wladziu Valentino Liberace, 46. "I didn't get dressed to go unnoticed." There was a wave of admiring laughter. His artist's hands reached forward to better display his ruffled shirt cuffs, his diamond studs, his jewelled butterfly bow tie. And lest anyone worry, he assured the house, "Actually, I never wear clothes like this offstage--oh, no, I'd be picked up for sure."

For the next few minutes he was everywhere. First, downstage to introduce and buss "Mom," who sat snowy-haired and demure, the envy of every mother in the club. He table-hopped along the ringside, began comparing diamond rings with the women. "My stones aren't as big," he conceded, "but then I didn't have to do anything to get mine." More gales of laughter and murmurs of "Isn't he cute?" But no one laughed when he sat down to the candelabra-lit piano with its plexiglass top and played "all the Gershwin I know" and "the music of the world's great masters."

When it came time for a break, he announced: "I like to get up from the piano once in a while--it straightens the shorts." And when he came back, it was in a new costume. He changed five times during the act. The most spectacular ensemble: beaded tie and tails, white moccasins with rhinestone buckles. The beads were silver, and why not? His engagement at the Riviera marked his 25th anniversary in show business, and his haberdasher needn't worry about payments. Liberace's annual take is now more than $800,000.

Gold Lame Trademark. When he debuted 25 years ago, Liberace was just the piano man (under the stage name Buster Keys) in a cocktail lounge in Wausau, Wis. His father, a French-horn player once in the Sousa band, thought that Wladziu might be better suited to undertaking.* But Liberace thought of himself as a prodigy, dropped his first two names in imitation of his idol, Paderewski, and within 14 years matched the Polish master in one respect: they are the only pianists in the world who have filled Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.

But with Liberace, it was manner and clothes that made the man. Playing the 20,000-seat Hollywood Bowl in 1952, he had a set of white tails made up "so they could see me in the back row." He had a little gold lame jacket added in Las Vegas and, says Liberace, "what started as a gag became a trademark."

Custom Caddy. Soon Elvis Presley was upping the ante, wearing a full suit of gold lame. So did Elvis' imitators, and now Liberace complains, "I really have to exaggerate to look different and to top them." He also has to spend. His suits run $10,000 apiece, and they tarnish so fast that he needs ten replacements a year. Even his economies come high--like his $8,000 diamond buttons, which, he maintains, "are very practical, because they're studded in and out, and I can wear them with any suit."

Liberace believes in carrying his style all the way. His custom Cadillac is fitted out with TV, stereo, and a bar with monogrammed silver goblets; lest it be mistaken for anyone else's, his town car is topped with twin diamond-studded chandeliers. Then "for marketing and around town," he uses a porcelain-white Rolls-Royce.

All the Elements. A designer on the side, he has spent $450,000 revamping his 28-room house in Hollywood Hills. Salient features: a gymnasium (where he does daily calisthenics), a swimming pool completely surrounded with green carpeting, five pianos including a white upright encrusted with gold, silver, red and green brilliants. There are also 20-odd portraits of Liberace (including one painted from a photo of his audience with Pope Pius XII), fighting for wall space with some 30 mirrors.

Onstage, he ostentatiously kids himself, "I'm no good," he says, "I've just got guts." But offstage, he adds: "I consider myself an entertainer. There are very few people in show business I consider entertainers--people who can in the course of an evening draw all the elements of emotion from the audience. When I perform, I don't just play. I like to make people happy."

* So did Director Tony Richardson, and in the upcoming film version of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, Liberace portrays a casket salesman to unctuous perfection.

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