{"id":4780,"date":"2011-04-11T13:22:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T13:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/?p=4780"},"modified":"2011-04-11T13:22:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T13:22:00","slug":"struth-liberace-museum-a-fading-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/2011\/04\/struth-liberace-museum-a-fading-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Struth! Liberace Museum a Fading Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

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IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas is hoping to re-open on a new site in Las Vegas, after closing its doors late last year after 31 years honouring the flamboyant star.<\/p>\n

“In some ways, the museum was the last vestige of an entertainment icon,” said a spokesman for The Liberace Foundation for the Performing and Creative Arts, that ran the museum and its priceless displays of the entertainer’s out-of-this-world costumes, gold-plated cars, rhinestone-encrusted pianos, candelabra, and jewelry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“He was Mr Las Vegas for almost 40 years,” said Darden Asbury Pyron, author of ‘Liberace: An American Boy.’<\/p>\n

“It was a sell-out house every time he went on the stage. He was one of the first entertainers to understand the potential of television: he was Mr Showmanship who would say\u00a0 ‘I don’t give a concert \u2013 I put on a show.'”<\/p>\n

“The museum’s been a very popular attraction,” added Alicia Malone, a public relations manager for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “It was a very unique part of Las Vegas cultural history for 31 years, a one-of-a-kind experience you couldn’t find in other cities.”<\/p>\n

Las Vegas was hard hit by the global recession, with visitor numbers to the Liberace Museum dropping from a high of 450,000 a year 15 years ago, to just 50,000 last year.<\/p>\n

The Liberace Foundation, however, recently finalized a deal for a national USA tour of its Liberace collection, and says it hopes to one day reopen the museum in a more central location in Las Vegas \u2013 it was previously eight kilometres off the main “Strip,” and so missed much impulse passer-by trade.<\/p>\n

Liberace, full name Wladziu Valentino Liberace, was born in 1919 in Wisconsin to working class Polish-Italian immigrant parents. He was a child prodigy, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the time he was 20, but cut his classical concert pianist career short for a life in show business.<\/p>\n

From the 1950s to the 1970s he was the highest-paid entertainer in the world performing on stage, TV and in several movies.<\/p>\n

And when British newspaper columnist Cassandra inferred he was homosexual, Liberace successfully sued the newspaper and sent the columnist a personal telegram denying the inference (and continually denying he was homosexual until his death in 1987,) finishing with the telegram with the now-famous line: “What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.”<\/p>\n

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IN his continuing search for the more weird, wacky and wondrous in the world of travel, David Ellis says the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas is hoping to re-open on a new site in Las Vegas, after closing its doors late last year after 31 years honouring the flamboyant star. “In some ways, the museum […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[376,377],"class_list":["post-4780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-david-ellis","tag-struth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveloscopy.com\/travel-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}