Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  Why me? Lee asked himself, feeling like a condemned man. Why am I different? He’d look at himself in the mirror, wondering if his appearance betrayed his true nature. In fact, photographs reveal that he looked more like a choirboy than a potential social outcast in those days. But realizing he was gay devastated him. He had to be crazy, sick, out of his mind, he thought, to be attracted to men. He tried ignoring his homosexuality, denying it. He tried forgetting about sex completely. But no matter how hard he tried, curiosity about the mysteries of sex, and his own sexuality, obsessed him.

  In those days no one believed you could be born a homosexual. It had to be something that happened to you in early childhood, like measles or mumps; something that could be cured if the victim, helped by a competent doctor, really tried to change. Freudian theory ascribed homosexuality to a boy’s overattachment to his mother and hostility to his father. Freud believed it caused the boy to mold his personality on his mother, thereby acquiring feminine reactions and behavior. In Lee’s opinion, that set of circumstances described his own background perfectly. He recalled his mother’s love as “completely suffocating and damn near incestuous.” And his dislike for his father—after he left home—bordered on hatred. If, as the psychiatrists claimed, homosexuals were really created by the circumstances of their childhood, Lee said he had the perfect parents to blame. In the past he’d learned to keep his family’s secrets. Now he would keep his own just as carefully.

  Frances would never have to confront her son’s true nature. Nor would she ever discover that Lee both hated and loved her. He continued to be her favorite. She was always touching him, kissing him, unaware that he almost gagged during those unwanted intimacies. He escaped by playing the piano. No one, including Frances herself, interrupted Lee’s practice sessions.

  In the morning he attended the Wisconsin College of Music, where he was a scholarship student, before going off to his regular public school classes. He’d be home by three, get in a few hours at the piano, have a hurried dinner, and rush back to school, where he played piano for silent movies shown in the auditorium. Lee had already started to make a local name for himself as a musical prodigy. If he couldn’t be normal, he decided to make a virtue of being different. Perhaps, he thought as he began to achieve local notoriety, some good might be gained from all those long, lonely hours spent practicing.

  When he was fourteen years old, Lee was approached by a group of older musicians who had a band that worked local night spots. They were looking for a good piano player. Lee was thrilled. He saw their offer as a chance to earn some real money rather than the nickels and dimes the school paid. By then Lee was sick and tired of being poor. He wanted good clothes, his own car, a better place to live.

  Frances, whom I later came to know very well, recalled being furious when Lee told her about the opportunity. She didn’t want her baby hanging around older men, playing in speakeasies or even worse places. There was no telling what went on in dives like that, she warned Lee. She had set her heart on seeing him become a great classical pianist, and great pianists didn’t get their start playing in honky-tonks.

  But, as Lee later wrote in his memoirs, the Liberaces were always broke. They all worked at odd jobs to help make ends meet. When Lee argued that the family needed the money he’d be earning, Frances relented. She gave him permission to join the band on two conditions. First, he mustn’t ignore his classical studies. She expected him to practice as long and hard as he had before. Second, she didn’t want the Liberace name soiled by Lee’s appearances in saloons.

  Lee began his career in saloons using the alias Walter Busterkeys. He loved the job, the free and easy atmosphere; he loved escaping his mother’s watchful eye. He remembered feeling comfortable with the band and their music from the beginning. The boy who’d cut his musical teeth on the classics discovered an insatiable appetite for popular music. His ability to play by ear served him well during the brief time he could devote to rehearsals.

  When he accompanied silent movies the audience concentrated on the film rather than his music. In bars, the audience listened to the music and was intent on having fun. Lee liked that; he liked giving people pleasure. More important, Lee was enjoying himself too. The older band members became his role models. He struggled to achieve their nonchalant attitude toward liquor, cigarettes, and sex. The boozy, smoky atmosphere of the bars and honky-tonks seduced Lee completely. He was playing in a bar when he met his first adult homosexual—and, according to Lee, that man seduced him too.

  2

  By the time we met in 1977, Lee was one of the most successful entertainers in the world. Along the way he’d come to accept and enjoy his own sexuality. But, he told me, it wasn’t always that way. In his mid-teens, being gay made him feel alienated from his family and his peers. He experienced terrible guilt, as if he’d committed an unspeakable crime that must forever be hidden. It was, he recalled unhappily, the worst period of his life.

  His homosexuality also alienated him from his church. In the thirties, as I believe it still does today, the Catholic Church regarded homosexuality as a mortal sin. If a gay wanted to stay in the church and partake in all its sacraments, he had to admit that homosexual acts and desires were wrong. Then he would be expected to give them up forever—pretty strong medicine for a teenager with all the sexual desire of his “normal” peers.

  Lee, who had no way of expressing his inner turmoil, felt torn between devotion to his church and his own emerging sexual identity. He couldn’t stand the thought of not being able to go to mass on Sunday, but he couldn’t bring himself to swear an eternal vow of chastity either. Lee told me that he prayed for a miracle, something to alter him so that he could look at girls with the same lust they inspired in other boys.

  When his father walked out, Lee had turned to his religion for consolation. His mother’s unusual living arrangement didn’t keep him from going to confession or taking communion. But he felt that admitting his homosexuality would. According to Catholic dogma, the failure to confess a sin is also a sin—a sin of omission. Lee said he felt he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  The only solution to his dilemma seemed to be an all-out effort to transform himself into a heterosexual. Lee tried hard. He would look at a shapely bosom or a rounded female rear and will himself to feel desire. But then his eyes would stray to a pair of broad shoulders or well-muscled arms and the battle would be lost. He couldn’t help being attracted to men. Their bodies, their scent aroused him in a way no female could.

  He had to face the truth. He couldn’t change, no matter how hard he tried. Being gay was as much a part of him as the color of his eyes or his hair. But that idea was unacceptable to the church. Lee felt cut off from Catholicism although he would remain a devout Catholic in his heart and, ironically, one day he would have an audience with the Pope.

  By his mid-teens Lee had survived three major traumas: his father’s desertion, the discovery of his own homosexuality, and conflicts with his religion. One more serious disappointment lay ahead. Lee had come to the realization that he’d never have a concert career. Even if he could believe in his own genius—and deep down he had some doubts—he knew it would take years to build a name and a following as a classical pianist. By his own admission he was a young man in a hurry. He was tired of being poor, of making do with worn clothes and a two-bedroom house that wasn’t big enough for its five occupants. He said that he wanted to get away from his mother and the sad playacting imposed on the family by his father’s desertion. He was worn out by the slavery the classical piano demanded, the hours spent practicing until his arms and shoulders ached and his eyes burned.

  Lee was a very good pianist, too good not to realize that he’d never be a truly great one in the classical sense. According to him, he’d reached a high level of competence and, after that, no amount of additional practice improved his playing. God had given him perfect pitch and large, powerful hands that easily spanned an octave and a half. Years of hard work had
given him excellent technique, but he knew a concert career demanded more than polished skills. God had given him everything, he believed, but the rare spark of genius that would set him firmly above his peers.

  Lee told me that the realization was a painful one. Music had been his life, his retreat, his source of happiness in an intimidating world. He admired the great classical pianist Paderewski, a man he would later lay claim to as his mentor, more than any other man on earth, and hoped to be like him. Seated at a piano Lee was neither man nor boy, gay nor straight, but simply a vehicle for the creation of music. Again, I think Lee rationalized his situation. He had to look no further than his own father, still scrimping and counting change to make ends meet, to confirm the fact that he didn’t want a life of classical music for himself.

  Although his mother never stopped talking about her son’s glorious future in concert halls around the world, Lee continued to head in a direction that would help establish him as a pop musician. His weekend performances as Walter Busterkeys continued and, in addition, he joined his high school dance band. While playing at school dances Lee first experienced the thrill of manipulating audiences, bringing them to their feet with a wild boogie beat or lulling them into a romantic mood with a love song. Music, he discovered, gave him control. He’d been thinking of himself as a victim, a loser trapped in a world he never made, unable to change his fate. Now he began to see music as a path to popularity and power.

  But Frances Liberace couldn’t let her dreams go; and, in those early days, her dreams were very different from Lee’s. She proudly recounted the story of his concert debut with the Society of Musical Arts in Milwaukee, describing it as a triumph. Lee recalled it as the kind of debut every aspiring young performer endures early in his career. According to him, his performance failed to arouse more than mild enthusiasm on anyone’s part, including his own. Frances remained undeterred by her son’s lukewarm reception. As far as she was concerned he was going to be the next Paderewski—or else. All he needed was a little more exposure, a little more experience concertizing, which she set about arranging. For the next two years she conned Lee into playing benefit concerts for every charitable organization in need of an inexpensive fund-raising. In the 1930s hundreds of Milwaukeeans had the pleasure of hearing Liberace perform—gratis. It would never happen again. Years later, when his Hilton contract alone was said to be worth three million dollars a year, Lee still laughed about having to give all those free concerts.

  He had paid lip service to his mother’s dream while privately moving closer to defining the kind of music he wanted to play and the world in which he would play it. Under his leadership, his high school band grew increasingly popular. Determined to pass as straight, Lee admired girls from his position onstage, praying no one would guess that he wasn’t dying to date some of the hot little numbers on the dance floor—if only he had the time and the money.

  Adolescence can be agony for anyone, but it was a special hell for Lee. Still struggling to deal with his own sexual identity, he had to live through the torture of hearing his classmates making crude jokes about “homos.” Every time it happened he recalled dying a little inside. The prejudice against gays seemed more intense than the prejudice against any other minority group. Lee knew he’d be ostracized, or worse, if anyone in school discovered he was a fag. He would go to any extreme to keep that from happening. If it meant lying, he’d do it. If it meant telling “homo” jokes himself, he’d do it. If it meant dating he’d do that too, even though the thought of getting physically close to a girl made him nauseated.

  Fortunately, he never had to carry his pretense that far. Everyone knew he was holding down a job, going to the College of Music, and keeping up his high school studies. No one, not even his family, expected him to have time for girls. Lee didn’t need to keep up a pretense of normalcy in the honky-tonks where he worked on weekends. No one cared what he did as long as he showed up on time. At first he was quiet and withdrawn in that adult world. He did his job and he did it well. In fact, he soon realized that he was by far the best musician in the band.

  Once he felt relaxed and confident, he began to take in his surroundings. Eventually he noticed men coming in together, men who weren’t the usual after-work blue-collar crowd. They were quieter and better dressed, he recalled, and, although he couldn’t pinpoint what made them different, he felt their difference strongly. It took a while, but the still naive Lee finally realized that they were homosexuals. The revelation came as a pleasant surprise. Knowing he wasn’t alone, seeing that other men like him were capable of enjoying their lives helped to relieve his sense of isolation.

  Lee was anxious to talk to them. There were so many things he wanted to know. His peers’ sex talk didn’t extend beyond girls’ bodies and what could be done with them. Lee burned with curiosity about his own sexuality. Now he knew there were men who could give him the answers he wanted. But he was far too naïve and unsure of himself to dare approach them.

  Frances continued to be upset by her son’s weekend jobs, but he ignored her concern. In those dark, smoky bars, he hoped to find the answers to who and what he was. Brother George, who had developed into a competent violinist, often played the same gigs as Lee. His presence helped allay Frances’s worries. Lee was seeing a side of life few boys his age get to know. He was growing up fast, but not fast enough to suit him. He later remembered that he didn’t like having George constantly around, playing chaperone. Fortunately, George wasn’t around the night a football hero from the Green Bay Packers came to hear Lee play.

  “I could hardly miss the guy,” Lee told me, reminiscing about his first lover. “He was the size of a door, the most intimidating man I’d ever seen. Every time I looked out in the audience there he was, smiling at me. From then on, he showed up wherever I worked. He’d buy me drinks during our break and tell me how much he liked listening to my music. One night he asked to drive me home. That’s the night I lost my virginity,” Lee told me privately.

  The story he told for public consumption was very different. In his book The Wonderful Private World of Liberace, published by Harper & Row in 1986, Lee wrote a chapter titled “I Lost My Virginity at Sixteen.” In this chapter Lee, who already knew he had AIDS, claimed to have been seduced at the age of sixteen by a stripper. As you will later see in the pages of this book, Lee was determined to the very end to deny and conceal his homosexuality.

  The truth is almost every gay has someone like that football player in his past. An older man usually gives a boy his first experience. In the gay community they say, “First you sell it (most young gay men have older lovers who act as mentors), then you give it away (with a sexual partner your own age), and then you buy it” (by having a younger lover). That football player became Lee’s lover, an experience that made an indelible impression on Lee.

  “I realized,” Lee said, “that a strong masculine body next to mine gave me a sense of security I’d never known before.”

  He continued to see his new friend for the next few months, sometimes sneaking out of the house after his mother was asleep. According to Lee sex was a part of the relationship, but not the most important part. He’d never been able to share his deepest feelings with his family and he felt he couldn’t trust anyone in the straight world. The football player became Lee’s first confidant. He also introduced Lee to other gay men. Many of them came from other cities and they told Lee to look them up if he ever visited their hometowns. Although Lee didn’t realize it at the time, he was laying the foundation for his own gay network, a group he remembered turning to for companionship, understanding, and sexual gratification in the years to come when so much of his life would be spent on the road.

  Few minority groups are as conditioned to a ghetto mentality as gays. Lee was no exception. He soon learned to depend on his homosexual friends for everything. By his eighteenth birthday, Lee was leading a double life. At home he was still Mama’s pride and joy, continuing to study the classical repertoire, to practice every s
pare moment. But weekends, when he played in bars and strip joints, Lee abandoned all pretense.

  Frances continued to push a concert career with every ounce of energy and influence she possessed. The woman was a pit bull when it came to Lee’s future. He knew he’d have no peace until he made a serious try for the goal she had set. At the age of nineteen Lee made his last appearance as a classical musician, playing Liszt’s Concerto in A Major with the Chicago Philharmonic under the baton of Frederick Stock. Lee felt his talents were ideally suited to the piece. In fact, in the years to come, Lee would toy with the idea that he was Franz Liszt, reincarnated. He would make comparisons, not only to Liszt’s technique but to his style, his glitter, his showmanship.

  Like Liszt, Lee had huge, powerful hands with a tremendous stretch. They gave him the virtuoso technique a Liszt concerto required. He spent months in dogged preparation for the last concert. When it was over he didn’t want anyone to say he hadn’t given it his all. If he succeeded, if the critics responded enthusiastically, Lee said he would have taken it as a sign and pursued a concert career. If not, he made up his mind to lead his own life and choose his own future.

  By the evening of the concert, Lee told me he knew the Liszt concerto so well he could have played it backward. His performance was received exactly as he had anticipated. He didn’t set the concert hall on fire—but he didn’t disgrace himself either. A warm wave of applause greeted the end of his performance. The critics were kind, in view of his obvious youth, but Lee hadn’t indelibly impressed any of them with his brilliance. He felt a mild depression that quickly passed. And then, without looking back, he returned to the world he loved—the world of saloons and nightclubs.