Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  My first visit to Lee’s dressing room with Bob Black had been a rare exception to Lee’s hard and fast rule of no visitors between acts. In the years since, I’ve often wondered why he permitted two strangers like Black and myself to come backstage. Was he hoping that someone like me would come along? I’ll never know. Inviting us to the house the next day was even more out of character for Lee.

  He saw people in his dressing room after the last show, friends from out of town, visiting celebrities, people he couldn’t avoid seeing. He preferred playing host in his dressing room to inviting guests to his home. Describing him as an intensely private man doesn’t seem adequate. Once he left the theater he didn’t want anyone around him other than his lover. A “cross at your own risk” line divided his public from his private life. Even close associates like Arnett knew better than to drop in on Lee unannounced. If anyone called, fishing for an invitation, Lee made it instantly clear that they wouldn’t be welcome. He had a standard routine when Heller, who was Jewish, telephoned unexpectedly.

  “You can’t come over tonight, Seymour,” Lee would say with ill-concealed glee. “I’m cooking pork for dinner.”

  We usually got home between three or four in the morning. It might have been the crack of dawn to most people but for Lee the workday had just ended. We’d have a snack, watch movies, play with the dogs, or sit in the Jacuzzi smoking and having drinks until he unwound enough to go to sleep, usually about seven in the morning. The routine had been established long before I arrived on the scene and, although I often felt isolated and missed having other people around, Lee refused to alter his restrictive and reclusive life-style.

  Despite the crazy hours we led a very sedentary life. That came as an unpleasant surprise to me. I’d been expecting a private life that in some way matched the glitter and excitement of Lee’s onstage performances. But nothing could have been further from the truth. Lee had no hobbies, played no sports. He lived for his hours onstage and his lover at home. The routine was perhaps well suited to a man in his late fifties—but it soon bored the hell out of me. I cared for Lee deeply, but no single person can satisfy another’s every need. I craved other conversation, other viewpoints, the company of people my age. But if I voiced those desires, Lee would either call me a kvetch or accuse me of not loving him enough. Since he insisted I be with him every minute, I sometimes felt like a prisoner in paradise.

  True to his word, Lee made me part of the act when Jerry left. Even though I would participate in the show hundreds of times, seeing the house lights dim always got my adrenaline flowing. The stage would be completely dark when Ray Arnett, standing unseen in the wings, said, “And now ladies and gentlemen, the star of the show, Mr. Showmanship, Liberace, the man who is famous throughout the world for his candelabra . . .” At that moment a spotlight would illuminate a single golden candelabra that seemed to float, disembodied, in velvet darkness. After a meaningful pause Ray’s voice continued, “And his piano . . .” Then another spot would reveal a piano, not your everyday concert grand either. Lee’s stage pianos always glittered with gold leaf, mirrors, or rhinestones.

  The full orchestra would begin to play, a rose-colored spot would play over the wings, and I’d drive Lee onstage in his mirrored $250,000 Rolls-Royce. I wore a white chauffeur’s uniform liberally sprinkled with rhinestones, a white peaked cap, knee-length white boots, and full stage makeup. Lee loved the outfit. “You look like an Adonis,” he said the first time I wore it. “My own blond Adonis.”

  Lee would continue to sit in the car after his entrance, his demeanor as regal as a king’s, until I opened the door and helped him out. His most outrageous costumes were reserved for his entrances. They generally included floor-length coats or capes with long trains, many of them adorned with priceless furs. Lee spent half a million or more each year on his costumes, in part because he had to rotate them and could never wear at any engagement what he’d worn the previous year. He also owned the many cars he used in the act and most of the stage props. Set pieces, the least costly part of the production, could usually be rented.

  After stepping from the Rolls he’d walk to the edge of the stage and give his audience a brilliant smile. “Well, look me over,” he’d say. “I didn’t get dressed like this to go unnoticed!” One of his favorite coats was virgin fox with a sixteen-foot train. “Think how long it took to get the pelts,” he’d joke when he wore it.

  Lee could play a crowd even better than he played the piano. He’d look for someone wearing conspicuous diamonds and then, holding his own bejeweled fingers up for display, he’d jibe, “I didn’t have to do anything to get mine. What did you have to do to get yours?”

  It was his standard introductory patter and the audience never failed to respond by laughing in all the right places. Once his rapport with them had been firmly established, Lee would turn toward me, saying, “I’d like you all to meet my friend and companion, Scott Thorson.” I’d take a bow, salute, and drive the Rolls offstage. As far as I was concerned, Lee might as well have announced that we were lovers. To my amazement, his fans never seemed to draw the obvious conclusions.

  Next, Lee’s valet would make his entrance and remove Lee’s coat. I’d appear again, this time driving a Volkswagen that had been modified to look like a miniature Rolls. The valet would put the coat or cape in the car and I’d drive off while Lee explained that his was the only coat in the world to have its own car. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it worked. I’d exit to appreciative laughter.

  After the opener, Lee would get around to playing the piano. By the 1970s the music was almost an incidental part of his act. The real show was Lee himself, his clothes, his cars, his outrageous stage persona. He rarely played more than five minutes at a time before saying, “I have to slip into something more spectacular.” That never failed to elicit a laugh and applause.

  Early in his career, Lee’s costumes were made by Frank Acuna, a superb tailor. By the time I joined the act they were being created by Michael Travis, one of Hollywood’s most gifted theatrical designers. Travis, who looks more like a matinee idol than someone who works behind the scenes, made a great contribution to the success of Lee’s act in the seventies and eighties.

  The two men met through Ray Arnett, who was a long-term friend and associate of Travis. Travis’s credentials were outstanding. He’d worked for the Bell and Firestone television shows in New York during the fifties and moved to Hollywood in the sixties to do “Laugh-In.” Stars such as Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross, Neil Sedaka, and Wayne Newton were on his client list. More important, Travis had a genius for the spectacular that matched and complemented Lee’s. The first costume he created for Lee was a silver-blue chauffeur’s livery trimmed in mink, which Lee wore in 1976 when the mirrored Rolls became part of the act.

  Six months later Travis had, as he puts it, “ascended the throne”; from then on he made all Lee’s costumes. The two men had a terrific working relationship based on trust and respect. When it came to costumes they were on the same wavelength. Lee never quibbled about the cost of his costumes, his sole specification being that they be more eye-catching every year. The virgin fox coat with the sixteen-foot train, made at a cost of $300,000 by noted furrier Anna Nateece, was the most spectacular to date of Travis’s ideas. But he had an even more fabulous number on the drawing board for the 1987 season. The pièce de résistance was to be a cape the size of a stage curtain, adorned with an electrified candelabra embroidered in gold. The scenario called for Lee to open the act wearing the cape. At the strategic moment the hem would have risen slowly until the garment became the stage’s back curtain. The costume would have been a fitting climax to the highly successful collaboration between Travis and Lee, but, tragically, Lee didn’t live long enough to wear it.

  Like all stage entertainers, Lee faced his share of hecklers. I’ve never seen anyone handle them better. If his patter was interrupted he’d walk to the stage apron, his toothy smile never faltering. “Hey, who’s running things?” he’d ask.
“You or me?” If the interruption continued he’d put on his Jewish mother routine, scolding, “Don’t be a kvetch.” If that didn’t end the problem, Lee would raise the third finger on one hand and, still grinning, look directly at the heckler, asking, “How do you like the ring on this finger?” By then the audience would be roaring with laughter and ready to lynch anyone who interrupted the act again. Lee would get them laughing even harder by saying, “Oops! I really didn’t mean to do that.” He could do no wrong onstage.

  He made ten or more costume changes during a regular performance. Acts such as the Chinese Acrobats, Barkeley Shaw and His Puppets, or the Ballet Folklórico kept audiences amused while they waited to see what outrageous outfit Lee would wear next. He’d come to refer to his million-dollar wardrobe as “a very expensive joke”—although sometimes, I suspect, he thought the joke was on him. I’m sure he had no idea what would happen on the night when he wore that set of white tails at the Hollywood Bowl. The next thing he knew, he traveled with fifty-four trunks full of costumes and a full-time employee to care for them.

  Lee was justifiably proud of his ability to pick outstanding performers to be part of his show. He felt particularly proud of having introduced Barbra Streisand to Las Vegas. Streisand had just done I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway but, according to Lee, her reputation hadn’t traveled beyond the Greater New York area back then. In the early sixties Barbra had yet to achieve the celebrity and glamour of her later Hollywood years. Lee described her as an average-looking girl, given to wearing high-necked, drab dresses.

  “But she had the voice of an angel,” he said. “The first time I heard it, I got goose bumps.”

  He brought her to Vegas as part of his act. When the hotel’s entertainment director saw her rehearsing, he complained to Lee. “What the hell will our audiences make of a girl with a big nose and a neckline up to her chin?”

  Lee just laughed. “They don’t know what to make of me either, and it hasn’t hurt me a bit!”

  After seeing Barbra onstage, Barron Hilton came to Lee in a fury. “I want that girl out!” he said. Hilton was a powerful man, accustomed to having his way. But he’d more than met his match in Lee. “If she goes, I go too,” Lee said quietly. Hilton, not wanting to lose his most popular headliner, backed down.

  Lee’s instincts were dead right. Vegas audiences fell in love with Barbra’s magical voice. Her later glamour was just frosting on a very talented cake. After the Vegas appearance Lee took her to the Sahara Tahoe. While she was performing there, she got the offer to star in Funny Girl on Broadway. The rest is show-business history.

  Many performers who never worked with Lee were influenced by what he did onstage. In the fifties when Elvis Presley made his first Vegas appearance—which laid a giant goose egg—he sought Lee’s guidance. Lee gave him a gold lamé jacket, the start of Elvis’s glittering wardrobe, and some succinct advice on how to woo an audience. “Don’t be a phony,” he warned the young Elvis. “The audience can spot a phony in a minute. You’ve got to give one hundred and ten percent every time you go on stage.”

  Although Lee didn’t understand rock ’n’ roll, had no feel for it really, he was a staunch Elvis supporter. Then, near the end of Elvis’s life, Lee told me he went to see an Elvis performance and came home close to tears. “Elvis was just going through the motions,” Lee remembered sadly.

  That would never be said about Lee. Sick or well, happy or sad, he put his personal problems behind him the minute he stepped onstage. He gave everything he had to every audience he faced. Whether Lee appeared with the Young Americans or Streisand or the Rockettes, the heart of the act was always Lee himself. In the 1960s his Riviera show was called Come As You Are. The production revolved around the fictionalized story of Lee’s life, narrated by the then-famous horror-film hostess Vampira. It was a crazy concept but Lee loved it. “The wilder the better,” he used to say. Over the years he made entrances flying across stage in sequined hot pants looking like a superannuated cherub or popping out of an enormous replica of a Fabergé egg while dressed as a bunny.

  Lee went for laughs and seemed to delight in poking fun at himself. When the act called for him to dance with the Rockettes famous high-stepping chorus line he said, “I’m no good—but I’ve got guts!” He and Ray Arnett created a new act every few years, but certain tried-and-true schticks never varied. Flashing diamonds on every finger, he’d tell an audience to “Look all you like. After all, you bought them.” At the end of the act he’d walk to center stage, grin confidingly, and say, “I’ve had so much fun tonight, that honestly, I’m ashamed to take the money.” Following a perfectly timed pause worthy of Jack Benny he’d add, “But I will.” It was pure corn, but he made it sound fresh night after night.

  It’s almost impossible to describe his genius to people who never saw him perform. He closed every show by leaving the stage, walking between the tables, and singing, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” People would line up to shake his hand and I was always surprised by the many macho types who waited patiently until Lee got to them. Time and again the men would say, “My wife made me come—and I thought I’d hate your act. But you’re the greatest.”

  Lee never used security people or police to build a wall between himself and his fans. I often saw crowds surge toward him and felt certain he’d be trampled, only to hear his voice saying, “If you’ll all back off, I’ll shake hands with everyone.”

  Unlike many other celebrities he didn’t want to be protected by a phalanx of police or security when he dealt with the public. He claimed the protectors would cause more panicked pushing, shoving, and general pandemonium than the most eager fan. Lee spent ten minutes after each show talking to people, signing autographs—as he called it, “paying his dues.”

  By the time I joined the act Lee was coming dangerously close to revealing his homosexuality on stage. Wearing one of his most glittering costumes, he’d comment, “This is one of my sport coats. But don’t ask me what sport.” Part of his magic was the ability to make people like him, to accept him no matter how he looked or what he did. His middle-aged, conservative fans lapped up his performances like contented cats drinking cream.

  Lee was the only major entertainer I can think of whose entire career depended on live performances. He never understood Streisand’s refusal to appear in nightclubs after she became a superstar. He’d done television and made lots of records—he even made a few movies—but he lived for his stage act.

  “You can’t tell what an audience is thinking when you do television or work in a recording studio,” he explained. He might have added that you can’t feel their adoration either. The approval of a room full of living, breathing, applauding fans reaffirmed Lee’s sense of worth. His psyche demanded a steady diet of that kind of feedback. He loved what he did and felt so serenely confident of his ability as an entertainer that he never exhibited a trace of apprehension or stage fright, even when things went wrong. He was unflappable—the eye of calm in the center of the backstage hurricane.

  One night disaster seemed inevitable. After an absence of several years, Lee was debuting a new act at the Riviera Hotel. Everyone associated with him wanted him to have a dynamite opening. A new set, the most expensive and elaborate of Lee’s entire career, was being trucked up from Los Angeles, where it had been built to order. But the truck ran into a snowstorm on its way. One hour before the eight o’clock curtain the set had yet to arrive. Pandemonium reigned backstage.

  Arnett and Travis paced the floor, more nervous than expectant fathers, wondering how in the world to handle the sudden emergency. When they couldn’t delay any longer they went to Lee’s dressing room to advise him of the impending disaster. To their amazement, Lee was so relaxed that he’d fallen sound asleep. After being told he had no set and hence, no new act, Lee just smiled and said, “Don’t worry. It will all work out.” He’d started his career with a piano and not much more, and he wasn’t afraid of opening that night the same way. And the audience gave him an
enthusiastic reception after being told of the problem.

  Once Lee knew a particular line or joke worked, he refused to change it, no matter how much pressure the club owners applied. Some of them complained bitterly that he had been using the same opener for years. “I’ll change it when I stop filling rooms,” he said.

  The act worked, night after night and year after year. The costumes and the props and the sets changed, but the patter grew by accretion, like a pearl. Lee built his own career without the backing of a powerful agent, studio, or network. He knew, better than anyone else, what audiences wanted from him. He listened to people like Ray Arnett or Seymour Heller but, in the final analysis, he made all his own decisions.

  Lee told me that he and Heller were often at loggerheads because Heller wanted him to work more than thirty-two weeks a year. Heller, who, by contract, got 10 percent off the top of every dollar Lee earned, would present Lee with a proposed schedule, often one that would have kept Lee working steadily for months. Lee would glance at it, say, “I’ll do this, this, and this—forget the rest!” and toss it back.

  If Heller argued, Lee just said, “I’m not going to be the richest piano player in the grave.”

  Lee alone decided when and where he’d perform, which contracts to sign, how much he wanted to be paid. He’d sit through a business meeting while Heller explained the pros and cons of a particular deal. When Heller finished Lee would spell out the terms he was willing to consider. If the terms Lee insisted on didn’t bear any relationship to the contract under discussion, that was Heller’s problem. Lee didn’t negotiate. He knew his worth.