Archive for the ‘Dead Dandys’ Category
Liberace
Wladziu Valentino Liberace better known by only his last name Liberace, was a famous American entertainer and pianist. When Elvis Presley and The Beatles were at the height of their popularity, Liberace was the highest paid entertainer in the world.
Unlike the concerts of classical pianists which normally ended with applause and a retreat off-stage, Liberace’s shows ended with the public invited on-stage to touch the maestro’s clothes, piano, jewelry, and hands. Kisses, handshakes, hugs, and caresses usually followed.
A critic summed up his appeal near the end of Liberace’s life: ” Mr. Showmanship has another more potent, drawing power to his show: the warm and wonderful way he works his audience. Surprisingly enough, behind all the glitz glitter, the corny false modesty and the shy smile, Liberace exudes a love that is returned to him a thousand-fold.”
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Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol began as a commercial illustrator in New York, doing artwork for ads and magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. Eventually he crossed from commercial work to fine art, blurring the line between the two along the way. In the early 1960s his huge and colorful silk-screen renderings of banal objects like Coke bottles and a Campbell’s Soup can were hugely popular and established him as the leader of the so-called Pop Art movement. (His multi-color, multi-image portrait of Marilyn Monroe is another famous image from this era.)
By the mid-1960s Warhol had become an icon of the psychedelic generation; he made strange and lengthy experimental movies, held famous gatherings in “The Factory,” his Manhattan studio, and surrounded himself with a court of fellow artists and adoring fans. He also worked closely with the experimental rock group The Velvet Underground and (in 1969) founded the influential celebrity magazine Interview.
Warhol’s attitude was summed up in part in his statement, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.”
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Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was an 19th century Irish writer whose works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is also one of the Victorian era’s most famous dandies, a wit whose good-humored disdain for convention became less favored after he was jailed for homosexuality.
In 1895, at the height of his popularity, his relationship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas was declared inappropriately intimate by Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde sued for libel, but the tables were turned when it became clear there was enough evidence to charge Wilde with “gross indecency” for his homosexual relationships. He was convicted and spent two years in jail, after which he went into self-imposed exile in France, bankrupt and in ill health.
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Truman Capote
Truman Capote was an American writer, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood.
Capote was well known for his distinctive, high-pitched voice and odd vocal mannerisms, his offbeat manner of dress and his fabrications. He often claimed to intimately know people he had in fact never met, such as Greta Garbo.
He traveled in an eclectic array of social circles, hobnobbing with authors, critics, business tycoons, philanthropists, Hollywood and theatrical celebrities, royalty, and members of high society, both in the U.S. and abroad.
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