Several years ago, an American servicewoman stationed in the Middle East wanted to see the birth home of the most famous person ever born in West Allis. Maybe it had been turned into a museum, she thought, or at least there would be a plaque. Figuring she would visit after returning to the U.S., she emailed the West Allis Historical Society.

Good thing she did.

Because there was – and is – nothing to see.

It doesn’t get much more American, or more Wisconsin, than blue-collar West Allis, named after a manufacturing magnate and home to the State Fair. Yet this city of 60,000, which has no surfeit of celebrities, has not erected one prominent sign, statue or even a plaque to remember Liberace.

The omission ignores singular success. A child prodigy and classically trained pianist, Liberace used musical talent, Midwest charm and unrivaled ostentation to become the highest-paid entertainer in the world. His weekly TV show drew 30 million viewers. He earned six gold records and not one, but two, stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1985, decades after his peak popularity, he set a record with 21 consecutive standing room-only performances at Radio City Music Hall.

“Arguably,” says UW-Milwaukee’s Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, no other area native “was as widely known in his or her lifetime as Liberace.”

Yet, Liberace’s hometown has nothing of note remembering him. The historical society’s museum has only a binder of newspaper clippings and such – in the basement.

Maybe it’s because West Allis is “meat and potatoes,” as the historical society president, Devan Gracyalny, puts it.

Not a place that could easily abide a flamboyant gay man.

But mores have changed since Mr. Showmanship dominated pop culture, and certainly since he died, of AIDS, in 1987.

It seems too obvious to even ask: Shouldn’t West Allis have something to remember Liberace?

Early Days

Władziu Valentino Liberace lived in West Allis for at least the first five years of his life before moving to West Milwaukee.

Walter, as he was known to some in his early years, was born to a Polish mother and Italian father in 1919, joining an older brother and sister. He weighed a whopping 13 pounds; a twin sibling was born dead.

The family lived in a bungalow built a year before Liberace’s birth at 635 51st St., an address later renumbered to the current 1649 S. 60th St. The house is still there, two doors north of the friendly Buzzard’s Nest tavern.

Liberace’s French horn-playing father was a professional musician but couldn’t make ends meet on that. The 1925 West Allis city directory changed his occupation from musician to grocer. By then, the family was running a grocery store in their second home, about a block south of the original.

West Allis, meanwhile, was becoming an industrial boom town. Milwaukee-based Allis Co., later known as Allis-Chalmers Corp., had opened a factory in West Allis, which is what led to the city’s name. The company became the largest builder of gas engines in the United States and later a manufacturer of tractors. After his family moved to West Milwaukee, Liberace honed his piano skills at the Wisconsin College of Music in Milwaukee and began to perform professionally, including at the Red Room Downtown. From there, it was New York, California and Las Vegas.

“Excuse me as I slip into something more spectacular” 

Liberace found success as much for accoutrements – such as his gold lamé, purple chinchilla and a $300,000, 137-pound fox fur with a 16-foot train – as for his music. “Because the rules for entertainment were so square and strict, I had no competition,” Liberace once told The Washington Post. “Nobody was doing what I was doing and I found myself in a class by myself. I dared to be different.”

The cooing and cloying Liberace – whose speaking voice sounded like his mouth was always stretched to the limit in a smile, which it seemingly always was – lapped up the attention.

“Excuse me as I slip into something more spectacular,” he would say onstage, with a trademark wink.

A Colossal Legacy

Part of Liberace’s genius was blending just enough classical music, to show off his prowess on piano, with popular tunes that his audience could relate to. Women in, or beyond, middle age adored him. As he put it, he played classical music “with the boring parts left out.”

During his peak popularity, starting in the 1950s, Liberace was judged the highest-paid entertainer in the world, according to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and other reports. In 1954, he was the highest-paid musician and pianist, according to the 1955 Guinness World Records, receiving more than $2 million for a 26-week stint at Madison Square Garden.

The superlatives go on.

• Liberace recorded six gold albums. His top-selling single, Franz Schubert’s 1825 prayer “Ave Maria,” sold 300,000 copies.

• In 1954, his syndicated TV show was televised in 217 U.S. cities and 20 countries, attracting some 30 million viewers per episode.

• At one time in his career, he received “over 7,000 fan letters and 12 marriage proposals a week,” according to the 2003 book Famous Wisconsin Musicians.

• Besides setting a record in 1985 for consecutive standing room-only performances at Radio City Music Hall, he sold out 56 straight shows at the hall between 1984 and 1986.

• His two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame include one for music and one for TV.

• His income averaged $5 million a year during the final three decades of his life.

• Little Richard even called himself the “bronze Liberace.”

“In the ’50s,” says documentary film producer Bill Povletich, who wrote about Liberace for the Wisconsin Historical Society’s magazine, “you could argue he was as big of an act as Sinatra or Elvis.”

Decades after his death, Liberace still gets love. He’s been name-dropped in songs by Billy Joel, Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga, Jay-Z and Tim McGraw, among others.

Even in the past year-plus, Liberace has continued to pop up in pop culture. Consider:

•   The Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas opened “Liberace: Real and Beyond,” a 10-month exhibit featuring “rarely seen costumes and his collection of religious items.”

• Liberace has found an audience on social media. A 1968 clip from “The Red Skelton Show” posted on Instagram attracted more than 46,000 likes. In the cringey video, Liberace looks every bit a middle-aged man except perhaps for his orange shirt, yellow vest, flower-patterned pants and white shoes. Surrounded on stage by youth, he sings a modified version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy”: “Hello, young folks/Whatcha shakin’/I’ve gotta try that scene you’re makin’/Liberace’s turnin’ on/Doodle-lee-do-do, feelin’ groovy.” Different versions of the clip on TikTok earned hundreds of thousands of views.

• The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre did a monthlong run of the one-man show Liberace!

• In Portland, Oregon, a tribute to Liberace and Liza Minelli ran for more than a month.

• In January 2024, the rock band Styx used an authentic Liberace piano at a concert in Las Vegas. In February, CNN used images of Liberace in a trailer promoting a special on “Sin City.” In April, on TNT’s NBA playoffs coverage, Charles Barkley ribbed Shaquille O’Neal over his outfit: “You look good, Liberace. We need a piano.” And in May, the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra in South Africa staged “A Pianistic Salute to Liberace.”

At Home, Crickets 

Despite all of that continued cultural relevance around the globe, Liberace remains virtually invisible in his hometown.

The West Allis-West Milwaukee School District doesn’t include Liberace in any of its curriculum.

A search of “Liberace” on the city’s website produced two mentions – in the oddest places: the Fire Department’s 2012 and 2013 annual reports. Both say the city “has the distinction of being the birthplace of one of the world’s most beloved pianists, Władziu Valentino, better known as Liberace.”

(The West Allis Public Library has four Liberace books, including Liberace Extravaganza!, which features a caped Liberace on the cover.)

There has been some interest over the years to memorialize Liberace – but nothing developed.

In early 1976, then-West Allis Mayor Urban Ganser wrote a memo to the city’s Bicentennial Steering Committee asking that bicentennial activities include “some formal recognition” of Liberace. “It might also be a wonderful gesture,” the mayor added, “to name a facility, specific location or day in honor of him.”

“Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

In a 1984 letter to Liberace, the West Allis Historical Society said the society “has been questioned many times about not having something on exhibit from you” in its museum. Two previous letters requesting something to show were unsuccessful, according to the writer, who wrote that she hoped her current letter “will warrant your consideration and that the museum will no longer suffer the neglect we feel.”

Dan Devine, West Allis’ mayor since 2008, says people have contacted the city over the years expressing interest in some kind of memorial, even a Liberace Plaza. But nothing ever took hold. Devine is open to a memorial, given that one “would be re-educating an entire generation.” He notes that for several years, the city has flown a rainbow flag each June for Pride Month.

In 2019, to mark the centennial of Liberace’s birth, Devine declared May 16 “Liberace Appreciation Day.” The proclamation notes that Liberace “continued to return home” to perform and support youth musicians and “never forgot his family and friends in the West Allis area.” But West Allis has also issued proclamations for things as mundane as National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week and Alcohol Awareness Month.

There are indications that Liberace could be prickly. “He always spoke very fondly of his hometown, but when he became famous, he moved out of Wisconsin and then didn’t really have much reason to return to West Allis,” Povletich says.

In the early 1980s, there were efforts to renovate the Zablocki Veterans Affairs Medical Center’s Ward Memorial Hall, a theater built a century earlier. The plan was to rename the hall, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, the Liberace Playhouse. “Unfortunately Liberace and, later, his estate were never forthcoming with the major donation hoped for,” according to a Veterans Administration memo. The building has remained vacant.

Yet, more due has been given to Liberace in West Milwaukee, the neighboring village of 4,000 people.

In 2014, West Milwaukee Intermediate School named its auditorium for Liberace after an effort initiated by Jeff Taylor, the principal at the time and a musician himself. The building had housed West Milwaukee High School when Liberace was a student there. “He’s been part of our lives forever,” says Taylor, 62, a West Allis resident. “It just made to sense to me.”

In February, a couple of months after reporting for this story began, the City of West Allis surveyed residents on what to name a new street. “West Liberace Lane” was one of 12 choices but was not chosen. 

Other communities have done more for what arguably were lesser lights.

In Waukesha, where the late legendary guitarist Les Paul was born and raised, there are exhibits at the Waukesha County Museum and Les Paul Middle School. South Milwaukee erected a statue for resident Reggie Lisowski, the late professional wrestler known as The Crusher. Milwaukee, of course, has a statue of a fictional character, the macho Fonzie from TV’s “Happy Days.”

Yet it’s worth noting that Las Vegas, perhaps the cultural opposite of West Allis, didn’t permanently recognize Liberace until renaming a street Liberace Avenue in 2022. That was more than a decade after the closing of the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.

“It took a few powerful people to get on board” to rename the street, says Jonathan Warren, chairman of a foundation that manages the museum’s collection.

The Gay Factor

One factor that limited the legacy of Liberace was his homosexuality, during a time when it was less accepted in America, as well as the stigma that surrounded AIDS at the time of his death.

“I just think the combination of those factors,” as well as Liberace’s flamboyance, might have prevented a memorial, says Gracyalny, the historical society president.

West Milwaukee native Brett Ryback, a 40-year-old actor-musician in Los Angeles who performed the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s one-man show Liberace! (and who is gay), says Liberace’s “queerness is part of the reason we don’t remember him as reverently as he might deserve.”

“What there’s a disconnect of, is how the personality traits of somebody who is queer/homosexual – how that actually aligns with the values of small-town America and blue-collar America,” Ryback says. “Once people are able to translate how those things create American excellence and small-town excellence, that’s when you’ll see more of an ownership.

“What people, I would imagine, don’t want to do is to simply honor someone because they are an LGBTQ icon or hero. But the more important point, he’s not simply impressive because he is an LGBTQ icon. He was a pioneer, a trailblazer, somebody who saw the world differently and cracked not only a lane for himself but a lane for all of these people to come after. Once that understanding is there, I think people are going to be much more apt to celebrate not only Liberace but people who are like Liberace.”

Liberace also didn’t have the advantage of a partner or children to preserve his legacy.

“What fuels a celebrity’s legacy beyond their deaths often has to do with the families and the loved ones and the fans who still believe in carrying on the celebrity’s legacy,” Povletich says.

Yet it’s puzzling that no one locally has taken up such an effort.

A memorial, Povletich says, would “remind the next generation that no matter where you grow up, no matter where you’re from, no matter the hardships you had as a kid, if you find something you love, you can achieve great things. That’s something Liberace personified.”

Liberace Timeline 

1900: Milwaukee-based Allis Co., later known as Allis-Chalmers Corp., opens a factory in West Allis that helps ignite an industrial boom. The company became known as the largest builder of gas engines in the United States and later a manufacturer of tractors. By the 1950s, the company employed 15,000 people.

1902: The area, then known as North Greenfield, becomes the village of West Allis, named after the company’s westward move from Milwaukee. 

1906: West Allis becomes a city on April 2.

1919: Liberace is born May 16 in West Allis. The first family home, which still stands today, was built a year earlier at 635 51st St., what is now 1649 S. 60th St., in the Six Points neighborhood. 

1924: The Liberace family lived at 709 51st Ave., about a block south of their original home, according to the 1925 city directory. Liberace’s father, Salvatore, was listed as a grocer.

1937: Liberace graduates from West Milwaukee High School, about a decade after his family moved to that community.

1952: “The Liberace Show” debuts on NBC. By 1954, the syndicated show is televised in 217 U.S. cities and 20 countries, attracting some 30 million viewers per episode. 

1957: Sonia Henie becomes the third woman to break off an engagement with Liberace.

1959: London’s Daily Mirror is ordered to pay Liberace $22,500 for libeling him with an article implying he was gay. 

1976: The Liberace Foundation for the Creative and Performing Arts is founded.

1985: Liberace dances with the Rockettes at the World Wrestling Entertainment’s first WrestleMania, a pay-per-view event that drew 1 million viewers.

1987: Liberace dies Feb. 4, of AIDS. Time magazine’s obituary called Liberace “a synonym for glorious excess” and “a visual rather than an acoustic phenomenon.” He’s buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills. Later that year, Allis-Chalmers declares bankruptcy before fully shutting down in 1999.

2009: Liberace is inducted into the College of Fine Arts Hall of Fame at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. One of his favorite songs was “The Impossible Dream,” his bio reads, “and because he had truly mastered the art of believing, he made his dreams come true.” 

2013: Some 2.4 million people watch the HBO movie Behind the Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace, on its premiere weekend – HBO’s biggest audience for one of its original movies in nine years.

2014: West Milwaukee Intermediate School names its auditorium after Liberace. The building had housed West Milwaukee High School when Liberace was a student there. 

2019: To mark the centennial of Liberace’s birth, West Allis Mayor Dan Devine declares May 16 “Liberace Appreciation Day.” The proclamation notes that Liberace “continued to return home” to perform and support youth musicians and “never forgot his family and friends in the West Allis area.” Gov. Tony Evers issues a similar state proclamation. The now-defunct Westallion Brewing Co. in West Allis brews The Candelabra, a strawberry rosé glitter beer, to mark the centennial.

2023: Milwaukee Chamber Theatre does a monthlong run of the one-man show Liberace! starring Brett Ryback.