The lawsuit over Liberace’s extravagant 10,000 rhinestone-clad piano turned into a 28-page saga of contract law, with even a federal judge saying it lacked pizzazz.
“The case involves a rhinestone-decorated piano, now-deceased entertainer Liberace, a giant blizzard, and a collapsed roof. But the appeal before us is much less dramatic: the ins and outs of Massachusetts bail and contract law,” a federal judge for the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a decision released Monday.
In 2019, the Gibson Foundation, the charitable arm of instrument maker Gibson Brands Inc., sued Robert Norris, owner of Piano Mill, a musical instrument store in Gloucester, Massachusetts, which allegedly gifted Liberace a piano. Gibson alleged that he had a storage agreement with the store to keep the piano. Meanwhile, Mr. Norris claimed that Gibson only remembered that such a piano existed when he read media reports that a store that housed one of Liberace’s famous performance pianos had collapsed under the weight of an ice storm.
After much bargaining over who gets to keep the piano, a symphony that legally made its way through three courts, a federal appeals court ruled that Gibson failed to prove that he owned the famous instrument. The ruling was “Because we conclude that it is true that Norris and the piano were found, the record evidence would permit a reasonable fact-finder to determine that the piano was given to him as a gift.”
