Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  Lee also purchased four condominiums in Vegas, just for the sheer pleasure of decorating them. Later, in The Wonderful Private World of Liberace, he told his readers that he’d been commissioned to decorate those condominiums as models. Like many of the statements he made in the book, it wasn’t so. Lee bought those condos and decorated them for the fun of it. Of all the properties purchased during our relationship, his favorite was my little house in Vegas. We spent a great deal of our free time there.

  When Lee and I had been together for a year he said he wanted me to start investing my money. For Lee, that meant buying a house. At the time I couldn’t afford much. I bought a little tract house at 933 Larrimore Street in Las Vegas—six rooms crammed into fourteen hundred square feet—and Lee helped me make the down payment in exchange for my giving him a third mortgage on the property. I made all the mortgage payments from day one, but that proved to be a drop in the bucket compared to what we actually spent on the house. Lee insisted on redoing it in his customary opulent style. I paid $58,000 for the property but we ran up a $40,000 bill for structural changes, $25,000 on landscaping (which included using cranes to lift huge palm trees over the roof so they could be planted by the new Jacuzzi in the back), and $40,000 on furniture. When the job was done Lee loved that house more than any of his mansions and took more satisfaction in it.

  When we were in Vegas we’d go back to his mansion after a show, pick up the meal that Gladys had prepared for us and head straight for my place. No one, other than Gladys, knew where we were and she was the only person in Lee’s entourage to have my phone number.

  Lee seemed to enjoy playing hooky from the demands of his fame. In my home, he played at being a hausfrau. He cooked and cleaned and fussed over me like a bride. My best, happiest memories of him come from the time we spent there. Pushing a vacuum, dusting furniture, fixing lasagna, Lee and I pretended to be equals. But the pretense never lasted long. Sitting in the Jacuzzi as the sun came up, he’d say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing?”

  The longer Lee and I were together, the more I understood his sense of isolation, his need to have a confidant and full-time companion. From Heller to Frances to Angie to George, he felt that everyone’s motives were suspect because everyone had something to gain from their association with him. For years his wealth had sequestered him, made him suspicious of even the best-intentioned offers of friendship. Before long I found myself caught in the same trap. Suddenly I was Mr. Popularity, pursued by my own relatives and even some of my former foster families. They all wanted to meet Liberace, be invited to his homes, go for a ride in his limos, hit him up for a loan or a job. One afternoon one of my sisters telephoned and in the course of our regrettable conversation, suggested that I get Lee to buy her a diamond ring. Little did she realize that Lee, who monitored many of my phone calls, was listening on another phone. After I said good-bye he came racing into the room. “Now you know what I’ve been going through for thirty years,” he said triumphantly. “See! You can’t trust anyone. They all want something!”

  Lee exercised complete control over my life. He told me what to wear, where to go, who to see once I got there. There were times when he acted more like a father than a lover. Once, when we were in Fort Lauderdale, he had the hotel manager move us to a new suite because he couldn’t see the beach where I planned to sit in the sun for an hour that afternoon. Another time, Seymour Heller offered me a ride from Las Vegas to Los Angeles so I could take care of some personal business. When Lee heard about the offer he came unglued. He didn’t want me out of his sight for a minute. We did everything together. Fortunately it was fun most of the time.

  There were times when I resented and rebelled against his smothering affection. When I felt low, shopping usually cheered me up. Although Lee didn’t raise the salary I reported to the IRS, he was always giving me cash, a thousand dollars or more every week. I used some of it to buy him surprise presents. His favorite surprise was getting a new dog. By the time Lee and I parted, we had accumulated a grand total of twenty-six.

  At first we had a mixed pack of large and small breeds. But one horrible day they got into a fight and some of the big ones actually killed a couple of the smaller ones. Lee almost fainted. We’d never anticipated anything like that happening. After that we kept small dogs only, poodles, mixed breeds. Lee’s favorites—seven or eight of them—slept with us every night. And Lee never complained when one of them had an accident, even though there were days when the house, and especially our bedroom, smelled like a kennel.

  One of Lee’s favorite projects, established before I appeared on the scene, was the foundation he’d created to give college scholarships to needy music students. The foundation, and St. Francis Hospital, where Lee had made his miraculous recovery from uremic poisoning, were Lee’s only charities. He did one benefit show a year for St. Francis but the scholarships were a continual project.

  Lee chose which colleges to endow and the colleges chose the recipients of the scholarships. Lee, who always liked to champion underdogs, didn’t give his money to well-known music schools like Juilliard. Instead he chose small schools where he knew his contributions would reach students whose lives could be altered dramatically by the gift.

  The foundation was an ambitious project and could have been a considerable drain on Lee’s resources. But he never permitted the situation to get out of hand. In Lee’s fortieth-anniversary souvenir pamphlet, he boasted of the foundation having given $50,000 to schools across the country. Since Lee was the foundation, and he personally earned millions of dollars a year, that wasn’t much to brag about. I think he would have been appalled if someone had suggested that he could afford to be as generous as Paul Newman, who gives all profits from his food company to charity.

  Although Lee didn’t plan to equal Newman’s phenomenal generosity, Lee was deeply interested in the foundation. He wanted it to be self-sustaining, so it could go on providing scholarships whether he continued to work or not. Early in our association he got a brainstorm. He’d create a nonprofit organization to open and run a Liberace museum, and the funds generated by the museum could support the scholarships. At the time, the only other entertainer to have his own museum was Roy Rogers. Lee’s plan sounded audacious but, knowing the loyalty of his fans, I didn’t doubt it would succeed.

  To those faithful followers who saw him perform year after year, Lee had an appeal that transcended ordinary star power. His charismatic quality can better be compared to the television evangelists than to his own show-business peers. Lee was the Jim Bakker of the nightclub circuit, with his own devoted group of fans. They gave, gave, gave—and Lee spent, spent, spent.

  He took full advantage of their devotion by setting up Liberace concession booths wherever he appeared. The booths sold his albums, autographed pictures, Liberace piano books, jewelry, pillboxes—anything Lee and Seymour Heller thought the public would buy. If no one else in the entourage was available to man those booths, Heller would preside over them himself.

  Lee used to call the income produced by his concessions “funny money.” The only funny thing about it was that fans so willingly shelled out so much cash for those trinkets and that Lee told me he never reported the income, although he boasted of banking up to $20,000 a week in “funny money.”

  If people would stand in line to buy Liberace souvenirs, he saw no reason why they wouldn’t stand in line to tour a museum where his most treasured possessions would be on display. He’d had a small prototype museum in the house on Herold Way but the neighbors complained about its being a commercial enterprise and, in any case, Herold Way was too out of the way to attract a steady flow of tourists. Vegas, on the other hand, doesn’t attract much else. Lee decided it would be the ideal place to create a monument to his own career.

  A six-month gestation period passed from the idea’s conception to the actual opening of the museum. During that time Lee and I devoted every free minute to turning his dream into a reality. Scotty Moore, Lee’s real estate
agent, found a suitable property on Tropicana Avenue: an old shopping center that held about fifteen small stores. The architecture was pseudo-Spanish, the size right, the location excellent.

  Lee paid in the neighborhood of three million dollars for the property. That sounds like a fortune but, since Lee was donating the land and building to his own nonprofit organization, he’d given himself a terrific tax writeoff. Another half million went to renovating the space. In addition to the museum, it would also hold Liberace’s antique store—to be replaced in a few years by Liberace’s restaurant, the Tivoli Gardens—and a Liberace gift shop that sold the same things as the concession booths.

  When the renovation was well under way, Lee and I went through all his houses systematically, picking items to put in the museum. First, of course, there were costumes he could no longer wear. Then there were paste replicas of his enormously valuable jewelry collection. Over the years the jewelry, like the pianos and the cars, had become Liberace trademarks. I can still hear him saying, when asked how he could play the piano with so many huge rings on his fingers, “Very well indeed!”

  Many of Lee’s cars, including the piano-key station wagon, the patriotically custom-painted red, white, and blue Rolls, the Auburn he used in the act, his first limousine, his ’57 T-Bird, would also be on display in the museum. Many of the things Lee had been unable to part with, though they crowded even his vast homes, were slated for the museum. We stayed up three nights straight just going through the Vegas house, and the task had to be repeated in all the other homes. Rare antiques were slated for permanent exhibit as well as some of Lee’s more unusual pianos. He had one that had reputedly belonged to Chopin and another that was supposed to have been played by Liszt, which Lee said gave him goose bumps to play. The value of each of the items was duly noted and added to the figure to be written off Lee’s taxes.

  Lee was in seventh heaven all the while. He’d managed to have his cake and eat it too. First, his ego got a maximum stroking by the creation of a museum devoted to him. Second, he was actually going to help a lot of gifted kids. Third, he’d finally found a place for all the stuff he’d been accumulating. Fourth, as the vans began taking major items from each of his properties, the gaping holes they left created a need to buy new things. Fifth—but far from last—Lee had the tax shelter to end all tax shelters.

  He asked George and his wife, Dora, to move down from Sacramento to manage the museum. George seemed like the natural choice. Despite their past problems, he was family and Lee, with his Polish-Italian roots, still believed in family even if he complained that they were an occasional pain in the neck. George had also been very closely associated with Lee’s early career and many fans still asked Lee, “How’s your brother George?” Now, when someone asked, Lee could tell them to visit George in the museum.

  Managing the museum was a golden opportunity for George, who was getting old for life on the road. He accepted the offer and Lee bought him a condominium in Vegas. The Liberace family was getting closer, geographically if not emotionally. Although the brothers didn’t socialize often, I had a chance to get to know George better. He was a gentle, kind, considerate, unassuming man—the kind of man Lee might have been if he hadn’t been so driven.

  The museum proved to be a smashing success from the day its doors opened. It generated an enormous income for those scholarships. At the end of the first year Lee told me it had earned a million dollars. Although I suspect he greatly exaggerated the actual figure, no one had expected the museum to do as well as it had. From Lee’s standpoint, the unexpectedly large profit should rightly have been his to control, to spend as he saw fit. Of course he would have given a portion of the money to his foundation—but so much? Did he need to be that generous?

  It began to eat away at him, the thought of all that money he’d allowed to slip out of his control. Even the tax shelter he’d created failed to cheer him. He made up his mind to dismantle the nonprofit organization so he could take advantage of the money-making machine he’d created. But this time Lee wasn’t slated to have his way. He told me that disbanding the nonprofit organization proved impossible. Today, Lee’s foundation appears to be a major beneficiary of a will that Lee signed just a few weeks prior to his death. In the future, dozens of students will complete their arts education because Lee miscalculated the depth and breadth of his fans’ loving support.

  14

  When I first moved in with Lee, I was both ignorant and relatively innocent. I didn’t understand his lifestyle, his need for secrecy. I’d grown up thinking being a homosexual was neither good nor bad, but simply a fact of life. By contrast, Lee was determined to keep his sexual preferences from his fans. It was only after living in the entertainment community, and learning something of the history of gay performers, that I began to understand Lee. To understand Lee’s life, and therefore my own, the reader has to know what I learned.

  First of all, the entertainment industry is like no other business in the world. People who work in movies or on television are often extraordinarily attractive, creative, and talented. They are also the most foul-mouthed group I know. Imagine a business where new projects are commonly referred to as a “piece of shit,” and you’ll get the idea.

  In Hollywood’s early days, before the Hays censorship office helped the community clean up its act, the town was known as a sinkhole, fueled as much by booze, sex, and drugs as by talent. The industry has struggled to overcome that reputation ever since, with varying degrees of success. Despite the best efforts of studios, agents, and most stars, memorable scandals have been easier to create than memorable films—and many of those scandals have involved stories of homosexuality. In a homophobic society like ours being gay is often traumatic, but being secretly gay while burdened with public celebrity can be sheer hell. It was a hell Lee knew all too well. And he was just one of a long line of celebrity “closet gays.”

  In 1922 the first of Hollywood’s homosexual scandals, the murder of handsome, successful William Desmond Taylor, rocked the film industry. The noted director’s corpse was discovered by his houseboy, Henry Peavey, when Peavey came to work early one morning. Taylor had been shot to death in his Alvarado Street bungalow. Peavey, a very discreet employee, chose to call Paramount Studios, where Taylor worked, before he notified the police. The executives at Paramount had good reason to be concerned. They knew that Taylor was gay, a fact they didn’t want to have revealed in a murder trial. George Hopkins, a set director and Paramount employee who was an intimate of Taylor’s, made a hurried trip to the Taylor bungalow, where he was met by people from the studio. Working in haste, they picked up photographs and letters that might have helped the police to identify the murderer, simply because the letters and photographs attested to Taylor’s homosexuality. Apparently the studio thought an unsolved murder would cause less of a scandal than public revelations about the dead man’s sexual preference.

  Like Liberace, most of Taylor’s closest associates (men such as Peavey and Hopkins) were homosexual, part of Taylor’s network of friends who supplied him with a steady stream of young male bedmates. Like Liberace, Taylor also used titles such as houseboy or chauffeur for his companions. The loyal Peavey had been jailed once for soliciting boys intended for his master’s bed. But when the studio applied political pressure on the newspapers and the police, these scandalous events were successfully hidden from the general public. Taylor’s murder was destined to go unsolved for decades. (To my surprise, after being told this story, I learned that the mystery of Taylor’s death was solved in a book called A Cast of Killers.)

  If the happenings of the twenties sound bizarre, consider the actions of Liberace’s people who helped Lee to conceal his homosexuality from his fans. While Lee lay dying of AIDS, his personal physician announced to the press and public that Lee’s illness resulted from a watermelon diet and anemia. To this day his people cling to that story. When the end came the same loyal doctor wrote a death certificate listing, in layman’s terms, heart failure a
s the cause of Lee’s death.

  Their protection continues to obscure the truth, even now. On May 12, 1987, as reported in the Orange County Register, the estate of Liberace filed a claim for unspecified damages against Riverside County, California, alleging that Liberace’s reputation had been damaged when the county coroner gave a nationally televised press conference at which he revealed the presence of the AIDS virus in Lee’s body. Apparently Joel Strote, Lee’s attorney, is still trying to suppress information about the true cause of Lee’s death. I can only assume Strote is misguided by loyalty.

  The homophobic society that breeds extreme behavior on the part of gays and their friends has existed for a long time. Lee once spoke of Oscar Wilde, as clever a playwright as ever wrote in the English language. Wilde, who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, had a flair for drawing attention to himself, a passion for flamboyant dress that bears comparison to Lee’s. The public tolerated Wilde’s eccentricities until he flaunted his affair with a male member of the aristocracy. Then Wilde was put on trial for breaking the law that prohibited homosexual relationships. Today, in America, many states still have such prejudiced and unfair laws on their books. After a stormy, highly publicized court case Wilde was sentenced to two years at hard labor. The Wilde trial took place in the same London where Lee defended his own reputation in a court of law. And, in Lee’s opinion, the fifty years that had passed since Wilde’s trial had done nothing to soften or temper public dislike of homosexuals.

  I hope that someday one of Hollywood’s super-macho studs, at the peak of his career, will have the courage to step forward and say, “I’m gay.” If his career survives the controversy that is sure to follow, the world and the entertainment industry will be forever changed for the better. But until that someday comes men like Lee will pay a heavy price for a sexual preference they cannot control.