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show varied, depending on his mood and the feedback he got from the people who came to hear him. He might announce that he intended to play all the Chopin or all the Gershwin he knew, and then add, with a deprecating little laugh, that it wouldn’t take more than five minutes. Despite his vast repertoire and his solid grounding in the classics, Lee never talked down to his listeners—he never forgot his own lower-middle-class roots. Stepping down from the stage and shaking hands suited him better than setting himself up on a pedestal.
    Lee may have sinned in private but he made a point of keeping his act clean and wholesome in public. Since families could always attend his performances, Lee had access to audiences not available to most other entertainers. When children came to his shows he capitalized on their presence. He’d ask a kid to come up onstage, spend a few minutes teaching him or her to play chopsticks, and then they’d play a duet. It was pure magic, another of Lee’s great schticks—listening to a little kid tentatively pick out chopsticks while Lee’s nimble-fingered accompaniment made the child sound like a musical genius. Everyone loved it; the children, the parents, and the club managers who saw their revenues blossom. Before Lee permitted a child to leave the stage he gave him or her an autographed miniature piano. Those pianos became coveted mementos of Lee’s performances and, along with the candelabra, the piano became his personal insignia.
    Before the 1950s Lee enjoyed a secure if unspectacular niche in the entertainment industry. In addition to his Vegas appearances he was under contract to the Statler Hotel chain. Other bookings included the luxurious Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, New York’s famous Roxie Theater, and the Palmer House in Chicago, where he was the favorite performer of entertainment director Muriel Abbott. He’d also done some radio work in New York, but Lee claimed that radio was a sterile medium. Instinctively, he knew he needed to be seen by an audience in order to woo them.
    He had what he called a “comfortable career,” but he wanted so much more. He told me he dreamed of being a movie actor, of leaving his handprints in the cement of Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, of winning an Oscar. The newly popular medium of television, with its barely explored possibilities, intrigued him as well. More than anything, Lee longed to be a star. But that seemed increasingly unlikely. At the age of thirty his hair was thinning and his waist thickening. He’d been on the road for ten years and he was still waiting for the lightning bolt of fame to strike. That lightning would finally single him out one night in the middle of a California thunderstorm.
    In 1949 San Diego’s Del Coronado Hotel, featuring the subdued Beach Bar, was a famous landmark. Like a former beauty past her prime, the old ornate building had an antiquated dignity and served as an ideal vacation spot for families with children. That year, television executive Don Fedderson was vacationing at the hotel with his wife, Tido, and their children. One evening a severe storm swept up San Diego Bay and the Feddersons canceled their plans to explore San Diego’s livelier night spots. They decided to dine in the hotel and spend the rest of the evening at the Beach Bar. The entertainment would be supplied by Lee on the piano and his brother George playing the violin.
    The brothers came out for the first show in their customary black tuxedos looking more like morticians than entertainers. Neither the Feddersons nor the Liberaces could know that it would be a momentous night in their lives. Lee, recalling that all important evening in his career, told me how he surveyed the small audience with a sinking heart. It was going to be another quiet, unspectacular night. He sat down at the piano and began to banter with the crowd and when they all felt at home he began a set of show tunes.
    Lee had an old-fashioned