Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  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 attitude toward his profession. He not only believed the show must go on; he believed every show and every audience deserved his very best. And that’s what he gave those few people on that stormy night: his very best. According to Lee and others, Don Fedderson listened carefully—and he returned to the Beach Bar every night for the rest of his vacation, striking up a friendship with Lee in the process. Television was just a baby in those days, but it was a voracious baby that demanded a steady diet of new talent. Thanks to Don Fedderson, Lee starred in a local television show and that led to his engagement as a summer replacement for “The Dinah Shore Show.”

  That fifteen-minute, two-month show proved to be so popular that NBC offered Lee a thirty-minute variety show. It premiered in 1953 and lasted three seasons. Those were the days of Uncle Miltie, “I Love Lucy,” Jackie Gleason’s “Honeymooners,” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” By the end of the 1953 season, Lee was part of that exalted company, and he loved it. He proudly recalled being dubbed “television’s first matinee idol.”

  From then on, Lee had it made; no more greasy spoons, run-down hotels, and second-rate clubs for him. He moved to California and built his first home in Sherman Oaks, a town that later made him its honorary mayor. With his developing genius for public relations, Lee had a piano-shaped pool installed in the backyard, a novelty that was soon featured in many national magazines. Overnight, Liberace had become a household name and everything he did was newsworthy. The more extravagant his lifestyle, the more media attention he received. Lee got the message. Offstage, the opulent way he lived would become as much a part of his persona, his legend, as anything he did onstage.

  Lee loved being in the limelight and was thrilled by his new celebrity status. California was paradise—until his mother moved in with him. Liberace was an old-fashioned man and he felt an old-fashioned obligation to care for his aging mother. But Frances, who sometimes treated him like a ten-year-old, really cramped his style. She wanted to meet all his friends, to revel in her son’s acclaim. But Lee’s closest friends were gay, not exactly the kind of men you bring home to mother when you’re pretending to be a heterosexual male.

  Lee told me that she wanted him to act like the superstar he’d become, to give large parties attended by Hollywood’s elite. Frances didn’t understand her son or the world in which he now lived. She knew nothing of things like “A lists” or “power lunching.” In comparison to Hollywood’s true elite—the studio heads, directors, and major stars—Lee was still a very small fish in a big pond. Frances cajoled, pressured, and manipulated Lee just as she had when he was in his teens, trying to get him to do what she thought he should.

  Lee needed an escape—and he found one in a rented apartment in North Hollywood. It became his hideaway—another item on his growing list of secrets.

  Movie stars seldom experience the kind of overnight fame that envelops a television personality. Lee always referred to the fifties as the “white heat” period of his life. He’d spent years dreaming of, striving for that kind of recognition. Now he finally had it. But Lee would soon learn that sometimes you have to be careful of what you wish for. By the time his first show was canceled, Liberace was a household name. He couldn’t go out in public without having someone come up and ask him for his autograph. People recognized his trademark toothy grin and wavy locks wherever he went.

  It wasn’t long before Lee realized that anonymity had its virtues. He told me that, before his television show, no one had questioned his sexual preference. It had never been an issue as long as he didn’t flaunt his lifestyle. He’d been able to quietly patronize known homosexual bars and clubs without attracting undue attention. In the gay vernacular, he’d “tricked around” with a series of lovers, many of them struggling performers too. After ten years on the circuit, he was familiar with gay hangouts in every city where he appeared—and he had frequented them all.

  Overnight fame altered his freedom of movement. The “matinee idol” didn’t dare risk being discovered in a gay bar or bathhouse. Lee felt absolutely certain that the vast majority of his fans—middle-aged woman, working-class families—would drop him in a minute if they learned who and what he really was. He couldn’t risk being found out, having his homosexuality become public knowledge.

  Fortunately he’d developed widespread contacts in the gay community over the years as well as building a personal staff, many of whom were gay men. From the late fifties on, Lee would turn to these men when he needed companionship or an evening’s recreation. Lee met his gay friends or had assignations with potential lovers in his North Hollywood apartment, a place whose existence his mother never suspected. Although he tried to keep his homosexuality completely hidden from her, other members of the family told me he used the apartment a lot. No one knows if Frances guessed why Lee spent so much time away from home.

  By the time Frances had entrenched herself in the Sherman Oaks house, the rest of the family had moved to California too. Lee’s enormous success was the catalyst that reunited them. Other family members recall this as the happiest period of their lives. George, a talented violinist in his own right, was an intrinsic part of Lee’s act in those days. On the whole, the Liberaces had never done better. Their prospects seemed excellent. But it didn’t take long for all the old jealousies to resurface.

  According to Lee, George took advantage of Lee’s hard-won fame. Angie, although married and raising a family, joined the show as well. On the road, he remembered being under Angie’s and George’s watchful eyes and at home he had Frances to contend with. He felt he’d sacrificed his personal happiness, his need for a private life, for his family. Inevitably, Lee rebelled. Regardless of the publicized image of saccharine familial bdev
otion, Lee said he wasn’t close to any of them. He resented their constant presence, their interference in his life, and he resented his mother most of all. From the “white heat” years until her death in 198o, he would never feel free of his obligation to her.

  Lee was the kind of person who didn’t like to dwell on the negative aspects of any situation. Back in the 1950s, his troubling family relationships were easily overshadowed by his booming career. Every entertainer who has given numerous interviews comes to dread being asked the same questions over and over. There was, however, one question Lee never tired of answering. If reporters didn’t ask, “How did the outrageous costuming start?” he prompted them.

  Liberace’s popularity on television led to a flood of offers asking him to do concerts all over the country. One of the most exciting, from Lee’s point of view, was an opportunity to give his first concert at the Hollywood Bowl. For those who have never been there, and that included Lee himself back in 1952, the Bowl is a breathtakingly beautiful outdoor amphitheater that seats twenty thousand people. Before the concert date Lee drove out Hollywood Boulevard and up Highland to look the place over. He arrived, paced the stage, feeling an uncharacteristic anticipatory stage fright, and then he walked to the back of the huge amphitheater. It was a long climb to the top.

  “From that distance,” Lee told me, “the stage looked like a toy. I pictured myself playing a black Baldwin concert grand, surrounded by a symphony orchestra all dressed in black. And I knew I’d fade into the woodwork if I wore black too.” Lee made up his mind to break with tradition. Instead of the conventional black tuxedo, he planned to wear a set of white tails on stage. No one could have anticipated the enormous response to that simple decision.

  Black entertainers, including the great Cab Calloway, were already appearing in white tails. But Lee was the first white musician to walk out on a concert stage in a getup like that. Television had given him popularity. The Bowl appearance gave him notoriety. Afterward everyone had something to say about Liberace. The critics used so many words to comment on Lee’s clothes that they barely had column space to critique his performance. The resulting furor gave Lee millions of dollars of free publicity. If white tails were worthy of headlines, Lee wondered what would happen if he wore something really flashy. They say clothes make the man. In Lee’s case, clothes helped make the performer.

  In the years to come, he would often complain that the clothes had become an insatiable monster, consuming a lot of money and creative energy. But Lee had no idea that he would be creating a runaway show-biz Frankenstein in 1955, when he opened the new Riviera Hotel. His salary would be $50,000 a week, the highest fee ever paid to an entertainer; and, for the first time, his contract specified that he had to top any outfit he’d worn in the past. From then on, all his contracts would contain a similar clause. No problem, thought Lee. He’d been wearing white tuxedos or romantic, Edwardian velvet jackets for a few years. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with something a little more spectacular. How, he wondered, would audiences respond to gold lamé, furs, and jewels? Lee was about to find out.

  5

  When Lee opened the Riviera in the mid-fifties his $50,000 weekly paycheck made him the world’s highest paid nightclub performer. His glittering gold lamé tuxedo made him the most talked about. The reaction from the audience was instantaneous and powerful. Some people were offended by the way Lee had dressed, some were amused, some stunned; but no one was indifferent. His fans rewarded his audacity with a thundering round of applause. His detractors stayed and watched the act, mesmerized by the opportunity to dislike, ridicule, and feel superior to the strutting peacock onstage. For some, Lee’s appeal lay in the fact that they loved to hate him. But most of Lee’s fans, those little ladies from the small towns, adored him for daring to be different.

  Today, when rock stars glitter brighter than the Milky Way, it’s hard to realize just what an innovator Lee was three decades ago. When they burst on to the scene, the Beatles, who were more daring than most other entertainers, did their act wearing sedate little suits, white shirts and ties, and Dutch-boy haircuts. No one—at least, no man—had ever done an act dressed the way Lee dressed. His show required several costume changes, and the costumes grew progressively more outrageous. By the end of that opening night he’d started a revolution that would culminate, decades later, in the incredible flash and glitz of a Michael Jackson or a Prince.

  Although Lee was blissfully unaware of it that night, for the rest of his career his costumes would be as important, or more important than the man who wore them. Lee, who so feared having his homosexuality discovered, had unwittingly placed himself in a position where he would appear onstage dressed like a queen, night after night and year after year. Sometimes, after he made his stage entrance, he’d actually hear someone in the audience hiss, “Oh, my God! Look at that fag.” Those were dreadful moments. Lee’s popularity, his success, seemed to depend on his wild clothes, but the clothes themselves could get him in serious trouble. They gave birth to rumors, gossip, and innuendo.

  The fifties, like the decades leading up to them, were an intensely homophobic period. Muscle cars and macho men were the order of the day. Although Lee knew that many of Hollywood’s most famous and desirable men were gay or bisexual, none of them dared reveal the truth. Lee confessed to me that he began dating women to suppress the growing rumors about his own sexuality. If anyone dared to question his masculinity he needed to be able to flaunt pictures of his latest girlfriend. He had no trouble getting all the dates he wanted and he gloried in escorting well-known entertainers to parties, getting his picture taken with Susan Hayward, Gale Storm, Rosemary Clooney, Mae West, and Judy Garland. He later boasted of having close relationships with many of these women, but Mae West was the only one of his so-called lady friends I actually met. As they say in Texas, Mae was a hoot! She and Lee were an unpredictable twosome who enjoyed trying to outdo each other’s outrageousness. Mae was one of the few people in the world who had the courage to speak up to Lee—and he loved her for it.

  The girl he almost married didn’t compare to Mae when it came to nerve. JoAnn Del Rio, a Las Vegas dancer, had good looks and a sweet personality. Undoubtedly the entire Liberace family heaved a sigh of relief as they watched her relationship with Lee progress. For a while, it must have seemed as if Lee would finally settle down to a “normal” life and have a family. Lee and JoAnn became engaged in 1953 and even set a date for a wedding—a year away. From all reports, Lee liked JoAnn a lot, a first for him when it came to women. He courted her with gifts of flowers and perfume, gifts that foreshadowed the truly extravagant presents he would later give his male lovers.

  When it came to JoAnn, the problem was not that he didn’t like her; it was that he still loved men. After Lee’s death, JoAnn’s father was reported to have claimed responsibility for ending the engagement because he knew Lee was gay. But Lee told me he never planned to walk down the aisle, with JoAnn or anyone else. His engagement served to squelch the rumors about his sexuality—period!

  Many homosexual men enjoy relationships with women. There are a few who even come to love them, as friends or as temporary sexual partners. Not Lee! He had to forcibly control his dislike and distrust of most of the women he dated. He complained that all of them were too demanding, an opinion of females that he’d formed in childhood. When I asked if he’d ever had sexual relations with a woman he told me he’d had a couple of experiences, but complained that the way women smelled revolted him. While dating JoAnn publicly, he confessed that he continued to have secret dates with young men. By the end of 1955, JoAnn Del Rio was just a footnote to Liberace’s history.

  A man in Lee’s position—famous, wealthy, a star—never lacks for companionship. When he felt lonely he had only to ask one of the gay members of his staff to get him a companion and one would soon be delivered to his doorstep. The older Lee got, the more younger men appealed to him. In that regard, he was a Dracula who never wearied of the taste and touch of
youth. By his fifties he preferred dating boys in their teens.

  There have been rumors that Lee had an affair with Rock Hudson early in their careers. But Rock wasn’t any more Lee’s type than Lee was Rock’s. The supposed affair never happened. However, the books I’ve read about Hudson’s life reveal startling parallels to Lee’s. Both men had been abandoned by their fathers and dominated by their mothers. As adults the two of them devoted a great deal of time and energy to creating a fictional personal history for public consumption. Neither man could deal with anything distasteful—an argument, the illness of a parent, getting rid of a lover—and both used others to do their dirty work.

  Most important, they both had giant egos; they were stars and the rest of the world (friends, lovers, family) damn well better not forget it. That alone would have negated any possibility of those two having a relationship. Men like that cannot tolerate equals. Had Lee and Rock actually met, I think they would have disliked each other on sight. They were much too much alike to fulfill each other’s needs and too egocentric to want to try. Such an encounter would have been more the clash of rutting stags than the true meeting of minds. In the years we were together, Lee never mentioned knowing Rock. Although hundreds of celebrities came to Lee’s shows, Rock never made an appearance. The two men moved in completely different circles, socially and professionally.