Liberace Museum Travel Guide

The finest of Las Vegas's handful of museums is, not surprisingly, the one most in keeping with the city's sheer exhibitionism. The Liberace Museum , two miles east of the Strip, is a fabulous romp through the life and times of the former Walter Liberace (1919-87), who changed his name to a single word on the advice of fellow-Polish musical maestro Paderewski.

Liberace originally wanted to have his museum in his hometown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, but couldn't buy the house he had in mind, and plumped for scattering it across three separate buildings in a small Las Vegas mall instead. A framed contract from 1940 shows how he started out, playing five hours a night, six nights a week for $45 in Milwaukee's Plankington Red Room . Yellowing newspaper cuttings and family photographs trace his subsequent progress from sensitive youth to a caped Dracula, concealed beneath layers of pancake makeup. Alongside pictures of Liberace with Elvis at the New Frontier in 1957 and of showbiz pals ranging from Cary Grant to Bill Cosby, hang a fine collection of images of the pope, the queen, and Charles and Diana not with Liberace. You can also enjoy film of Liberace on stage with Debbie Reynolds, performing a frighteningly soulless rendition of "Your Love Is Taking Me Higher," and admire the conviction with which he advertised Blatz Beer in 1951.

With success came scandal - he was ruthlessly hounded by the press - but also phenomenal wealth. His collection of pianos ranges from an instrument dating from 1788, via one thought to have been played by Chopin for Liszt, to a giraffe-shaped piano with an upright harp-like frame, and there's also a fine array of cars, including a white hounds'-tooth London cab driven by an oversized white teddy bear. Home furnishings on display include a horrendously vulgar desk that belonged to the last czar of Russia, and Liberace's personal bedroom suite, equipped with two single beds.

If Liberace is remembered for just one thing, however, it wouldn't be his music - which, piped into the scented restrooms, has sadly not improved with age - but his costumes. He called them "a very expensive joke"; confronted by rhinestone-studded stage furs valued at $500,000, $600,000, and even $750,000, it's hard to disagree. The pièce de resistance is the red, white, and blue hot pants set he wore for the Bicentennial in 1976. Said to have cost a million dollars, it looks worth ten bucks at the most