At age 50 Liberace was quite content with the way his life was going. His movie and TV days were really over by then, but he was still the No. 1 draw in Las Vegas. That was why at his 50th birthday celebration, on May 16, 1969, Mr. Showmanship optimistically announced that he was at ”the halfway mark in my life. In the next 25 years they will make new discoveries about longevity, and I think it will be possible to live to be 100.” As quoted by writer Bob Thomas in ”Liberace” (St. Martin`s), the piano virtuoso, who died last year, also made the following bittersweet observation: ”Funny-older people want to live longer, and the younger ones are trying to kill themselves with pot and worse.”
What does the woman who has everything want? More. Much, much more. Case in point: Elizabeth Taylor. She`s got money she hasn`t even unfolded yet. But when she was presented with a check for $400,000 at an AIDS benefit from art dealer Leo Castelli, La Liz, Forum magazine reported, cooed, ”I just love a man with checks.”
The first gathering of the Algonquin Hotel`s famous writers` Round Table, in June, 1919, is recorded in ”Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This?”
(Villard). Author Marion Meade writes: ”Dorothy, content to observe, had scarcely uttered a word. She looked meek and fragile in every way, childlike, not quite 5 feet tall with a mop of dark hair demurely tucked under the brim of her embroidered hat and huge dark eyes that seemed to plead for the world`s protection.” How she changed! A few short years later she had been dubbed
”the wittiest woman in America, her quips preserved, repeated and printed so that by 1927 scarcely a snappy line uttered anywhere was not attributed to her.” Yet at the end of her life she described herself as ”just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute.”
