‘Waterford Glass for Liberace’ read a small headline in the Evening Herald back in November 1956.

The story beneath told how employees of Waterford Glass Ltd were engaged in hand-engraving the monogram of the American entertainer on a suite of a couple of hundred pieces of cut crystal which, while on his recent visit to Ireland, he had purchased from Messrs. West and Son. Ltd., jewellers, Grafton St., Dublin.

Then 37, the flamboyant Władziu Valentino Liberace, who was drawing TV audiences of 30 million at a time in his native USA, had his first international engagement in 1956, in Havana, Cuba. He followed up with a European tour later that year, including a date in Dublin’s then Theatre Royal, landing here from Manchester.

While on this side of the pond, the Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra (William Connor) described him in print as “the summit of sex — the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.”

Liberace successfully sued the newspaper for libel, testifying in a London court that he was not homosexual, as implied by the ‘fruit-flavoured’ term. He sent the paper a telegram, which famously read: “What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.”

Top image: Liberace and Elvis Presley trade jackets and instruments in an impromptu jam session at the Riviera on Nov. 14, 1956. [Las Vegas News Bureau]