On the day before Lee’s surgery I drove him into Los Angeles and we stayed at the penthouse overnight. The plan was for him to have his operations first because he wanted me to help with his postoperative care. Once he was on the road to full recovery it would be my turn. The actual operations would be done in Dr. Startz’s own operating room, adjacent to his offices on San Vicente Boulevard. Lee wanted his wig to remain on during the procedure and had relented only when Startz said he’d have to resign from the case if Lee forced him to operate under those circumstances. Strangely enough, Lee seemed more apprehensive about the fact that the doctor and his assistants would see his bald head than he was about going under the knife.
Although I wasn’t crazy about the idea, Lee insisted I be by his side during the entire procedure. Thank God, the doctor had vetoed that idea too. No way did I want to see Lee cut up, his skin sliced and stitched. However, I was permitted to stay with him while he was prepped and sedated. I even accompanied him into the operating room. Not until he was completely unconscious did I leave his side.
In those days, Lee didn’t like me to have large blocks of free time. He wanted to know where I was and who I was with every minute. Since he’d been told he’d be unconscious for hours he’d arranged to have Seymour Heller keep me company. According to Lee’s previous instructions, I drove to Seymour Heller’s house to wait out the operation. My relationship with Heller had improved from the early days when he’d been obviously antagonistic toward me. Heller had grudgingly accepted my place in Lee’s life and now treated me with a forced friendliness that was endurable if not enjoyable. All Lee’s people had started treating me that way after he’d insisted on it.
I picked Heller up and we went to a delicatessen to eat before returning to Startz’s offices. Lee’s operation took seven hours, the longest seven hours of my life. By the time the doctor came into the waiting room to tell us that everything had gone well, I was convinced Lee had died. Although Startz explained that he’d just finished stitching Lee and hadn’t yet bandaged him, I demanded to see him.
The doctor agreed and escorted me to the room where Lee lay on the operating table, his bruised face covered with blood and tiny black sutures, looking like an accident victim. “Oh, my God,” I said, turning to Startz, “are you sure he’s all right?”
“Positive,” Startz replied. “Why don’t you talk to him.”
I walked up to Lee and bent over him. “Booberloober,” I said, using my most loving nickname for him, “are you okay?”
“Yeah, Boober, I’m fine,” he responded, sounding relatively normal despite the way he looked.
My stomach churned and I could feel that deli sandwich threatening to come up as I squeezed Lee’s hand, trying to smile reassuringly. Hell; if this was what plastic surgery did to you, I didn’t want any part of it. Lee looked like he’d been hit by a truck. Once I’d made certain he was still alive, nothing in the world could have persuaded me to stay in that room. I totally freaked out. Lee looked like a piece of bloody meat. I just couldn’t imagine that anything good would result from that surgery.
Startz had rented a fully furnished apartment for us under an assumed name, part of the covert operation. A couple of hours later Lee had been bandaged and was ready to leave. The doctor had canceled all his other appointments in order to be with us during Lee’s postoperation recovery period. As I pushed Lee’s wheelchair across the busy street, I couldn’t help thinking that Lee needn’t have been so worried about secrecy. He looked like he’d dressed up to play the invisible man, with his entire face swathed in bandages and just tiny slits to permit him to see, breathe, and eat. At that moment he looked more like a mummy in a cheap horror film than a world-renowned entertainer. Five days after the face-lift we wheeled Lee back across the street to Startz’s office for the deep skin peel.
Once again, Lee emerged swathed in mummylike bandages. After spending a final night in the apartment we drove to Palm Springs, still accompanied by the doctor. Lee was in great pain but, even worse, those bandages made him feel horribly claustrophobic. In fact, they almost drove him out of his mind. Startz had the solution to the problem. He kept on shooting Lee full of Demerol. Meanwhile, he revealed his plan for my transformation.
First, he wanted me to slim down and put me on what he euphemistically called the California Diet. The diet consisted of a prescribed course of oral medication that would completely kill my desire to eat. Startz guaranteed a loss of at least fifteen pounds in the four weeks preceding my own surgery. I didn’t know it at the time, but the medications he gave me included pharmaceutical cocaine, amphetamines, and Quaalude. Before then my drug intake had been limited to the nicotine in cigarettes, the alcohol in liquor, and an occasional aspirin. Unlike many kids of my generation, I’d never turned on to drugs. I’d tried marijuana and hadn’t enjoyed it, and I’d tried Lee’s amyl nitrite and hadn’t liked that any better.
But I had no hesitation about taking the pills that Startz prescribed, never realizing that a medical doctor would be handing out highly addictive drugs as if they were no more than placebos. My first day on the California Diet, I was in a total fog, off in a little world of my own. I had a mild case of the shakes and a massive case of unreality. It seemed like a powerful effect from what I’d been told were just diet pills. As promised, I had no appetite at all. Startz spent the next few weeks drinking heavily, feeding me pills, and shooting Lee full of Demerol. The only sane person in the house, aside from the help, was Angie. She had volunteered to come and stay throughout Lee’s recuperation.
During the years, a few alterations had occurred in the way Lee treated his family. When I discovered that he preferred to put them up at hotels rather than let them stay with him during their visits to Vegas or Palm Springs, I’d become very upset. “For God’s sake, Lee,” I had argued, “they’re your family. How can you ask them to stay in a hotel when we have so much room?”
I don’t know if I changed Lee’s way of thinking or if he was simply growing older and mellower, but he now permitted members of his family to stay in his homes. The tensions that kept the family divided for so many years had slowly dissipated. I was genuinely fond of Angie, George, and Mama Liberace, and delighted to see the Liberaces draw closer together. It made me very happy to think that I’d played some small part in making that happen. So Angie was with us during Lee’s recovery. She would play an even greater role in his life in the years to come.
A few days after we arrived at the Cloisters Lee’s dressings were removed. He looked awful. His face was badly swollen, the skin mottled with black-and-blue marks and covered with scabs from the peel. Lee refused to have anyone see him in that condition. His closest associates, Heller and Arnett, were barred from the house. For the next few weeks, while Lee healed, he and I and Angie and Startz were holed up in the Cloisters. Seeing how bad Lee looked sure gave me second thoughts about my own impending operation. But, in view of the fact that Lee had his heart set on having me transformed into a Liberace look-alike, it was too late to back out.
The Hollywood Diet was working. Although I couldn’t eat at all, Startz encouraged me to drink with him. We partied all day. I was in a complete fog from the time I took my first pill in the morning until I fell into bed at night. The old Scott Thorson was beginning to emerge from the blubber I’d acquired over the last few years. I could see the growing approval in Lee’s eyes every time he looked at me, and that encouraged me to continue with the regimen. Ultimately, I dropped more than the promised fifteen pounds in the weeks between his surgery and mine. My goal was to lose sixty.
Meanwhile, Lee felt and looked better every day. First, the swelling and discoloration receded. Then one day he came out of the shower and all his scabs had washed away. His skin looked pink, shiny, new and unlined. Lee could easily be taken for a man in his late forties rather than a sixty-year-old. As far as he was concerned, Startz had worked a miracle. For the first time in years Lee looked as good as he felt. He wasted no time ordering several n
ew wigs, with dark hair instead of gray, to match his youthful appearance. He began seeing people again and everyone complimented him on the way he looked.
One unfortunate problem resulted from his operation. Lee’s eyes had changed, in appearance and function. He couldn’t close his lids completely. They remained slitted open even when he struggled to keep them shut. At night, when he slept, his eyes would open slowly and that’s the way they would stay. Even worse, they had always been one of his nicest features but now they had a slightly sinister appearance. Lee feared that Startz had cut out too much skin while attempting to remove all the sags and bags around Lee’s eyes. But Startz assured Lee the problem was temporary. He prescribed drops to keep Lee’s eyes from drying out at night and told him time would take care of the rest.
The drops made Lee more comfortable, and he stopped worrying. But it was odd to wake up at night and see him in bed beside me sleeping soundly, his eyes half open—odd and a little frightening. My face would soon be entrusted to the man who had done that to Lee. I’d get up in the morning determined to tell Lee that I’d changed my mind, that I didn’t want to have an operation, but then I’d take that first pill and nothing seemed important afterward. I was cocooned in a dream world, all cares erased by the drugs—suspended in an exotic, pleasurable dreamland. While using drugs I didn’t think of myself as a prisoner in paradise or as Lee’s shadow. In fact, I didn’t think at all.
When it was my turn to be driven to the doctor’s office in Beverly Hills I went happily, like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter.
18
My surgery took place about a month after Lee’s. The day before, we drove back to Beverly Hills and checked into a luxurious suite at L’Hermitage, a posh hotel that caters to the superrich. That night we went out for a fabulous dinner, Lee’s first public appearance after his operation, to celebrate the way he now looked. He was equally excited about the prospect of my becoming a Liberace look-alike.
“Ooh, Scott,” he said, bubbling with enthusiasm, “I can’t wait to see what Startz is going to do with you.”
The next morning he accompanied me to the doctor’s now familiar San Vicente office. My surgery was slated to be a two-step procedure. First, Startz would work on my cheekbones and chin, using silicone implants to reshape my round face into a reasonable facsimile of Lee’s heart-shaped one. Five days later I’d have the more traumatic procedure, a nose job to narrow and lengthen my nose. At the last minute, in a brief rebellious moment, I asserted myself enough to ask Startz to give me a dimple in my chin—even though Lee didn’t have one. After all, it was my face!
The first surgery didn’t take more than an hour and a half. Lee stayed with me until the anesthetic took effect. When I woke up a few hours later my face, with its silicone implants, looked and felt like it belonged to someone else. Late that afternoon I returned to the hotel, where my steady intake of drugs, all prescribed by Startz, ensured I would feel no pain before the second surgery. The drugs were so powerful that I floated through the next few days, as compliant as an aging lapdog. Then back we went to Startz’s office for my nose job.
When it was over I had difficulty breathing and felt horrible in general. The doctor assured me that this was perfectly normal and gave me some new pills to alleviate my anxiety. The first time I saw myself in a mirror, all swollen and black-and-blue with horribly bloodshot eyes, I felt certain I’d made the mistake of my life. We stayed in the hotel for another week and Startz casually doled out pain pills and his own special brand of diet pills every day, as if they were nothing more than aspirin instead of a dangerous combination of highly addictive drugs. Several years would pass before I learned from some of his other patients that Startz was responsible for addicting many of his own clients. Before, during, and after my surgery, I took my medications without asking a single question about what they were and why he’d prescribed them. I floated in and out of reality until it was time to leave for an engagement at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks, Nevada.
All Lee’s acquaintances had been told that he had been on vacation. Lee was elated at the prospect of appearing onstage for the first time in two months with his new youthful look. He couldn’t wait to get John Ascuaga’s reaction.
His old friend didn’t disappoint him. “You look terrific!” Ascuaga told Lee. “The rest must have been just what you needed.”
The Nugget’s stage couldn’t accommodate the Rolls or the other elaborate props that were part of Lee’s Vegas act. Basically, it was just Lee, the piano, the candelabra, and a series of costume changes. Although the Nugget’s audiences didn’t know anything about Lee’s surgery, they reacted enthusiastically to his buoyant, vigorous performances. I didn’t have to appear with him, a good thing considering how lousy I looked. While I continued recuperating, Lee was at the top of his form off- and onstage: exuberant, full of energy and enthusiasm. His new look had given him a new lease on life. Birthdays didn’t count; looking young was the same as being young! He couldn’t have been happier.
By the time the Sparks booking drew to a close, the swelling and discoloration that marred my face had faded. A totally new Scott Thorson was emerging from the postoperative trauma. As Startz had promised, I looked like a younger, Nordic version of Liberace, with high cheekbones, a narrower nose, and a pointed chin. Often, when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I’d find myself wondering who that stranger was. I literally didn’t recognize myself. I remember taking time to stop and stare in fascination at the Liberace look-alike I’d become. Anyone who has ever colored their hair, worn new glasses, or transformed their appearance in any way will know what I mean when I say it takes time to get used to the change.
Lee loved my metamorphosis. He’d look at me and say, “A beauty—a star is born.”
When I looked well enough to work in the concession booths at the end of his shows it wasn’t unusual to have women come up to me and ask if I was Lee’s son. Not exactly, I thought to myself. But those remarks did get us to thinking. Lee was thrilled every time someone suggested a blood kinship between us. Over the years, I’d changed from being his lover or companion to become a perfect reflection of Lee himself—flamboyant, a little crazy. Lee had often talked about how much he would have liked to have a son. Even before my surgery it wasn’t unusual for him to say that in many ways I’d become a son to him. We felt psychically connected to each other in ways that had nothing to do with sex.
When we established our relationship Lee had talked about adopting me, but we’d never taken the trouble to find out what it would take legally. Now the constant comments about how much I looked like Lee made him seriously consider the idea.
“You know, Scott,” he said, “no one’s ever been closer to me than you. I want to make sure that you’re cared for forever, no matter what happens to me.”
In the past Lee had discussed giving me one of his homes, making sure that I’d always have sufficient funds to take care of myself and all the dogs in case anything happened to him, and, ultimately, we signed a document guaranteeing it. He’d also named me a beneficiary in his will. But those were just pieces of paper tucked away in a file; they didn’t reflect the deep emotional bond between us. Adoption would. We both recognized that other people, even those in Lee’s organization, wouldn’t understand our motives for wanting to formalize our status. I warned Lee that Heller and Strote would probably tell him he was making a terrible mistake, that I was after his money. It was their standard complaint when it came to me.
But they would have been wrong, dead wrong. Sure, I enjoyed Lee’s money. Anyone would. Everyone associated with him benefitted from his earnings in one way or another. The more Lee made, the more Heller and Strote and Troulman and Cunningham all made. They were all tied to Lee financially. He used it to control them just as he used it to control me. But his wealth was not the prime motivation in my wanting to be adopted. All through my childhood, I’d been tormented by the feeling that I didn’t belong to anyone—except maybe state welfare
agencies. I wanted to be loved, to be cared for, and to give all those things in return. To belong. Adoption would have accomplished all of that and more, fulfilling both Lee’s needs and mine.
Lee had a deep desire to pass his name on to someone else, while I wanted us to be legally bound so that Lee would always be part of my life. More than my lover, he was my mentor—the rock on which I’d built my entire existence. I was wet behind the ears when we met, untutored and unsophisticated, and I’d grown up under his guidance. My view of the world had been shaped by his interests, my opinions formed by things he’d told me. I shared his love of animals, of cooking, of decorating. Mentally—and physically, following the plastic surgery—I was Lee’s creature. He’d been my Pygmalion. Although it sounds crazy now, I’d begun to think of myself as an extension of Liberace, a part of him rather than a full-fledged individual. Even now, looking back, I sometimes feel that my life began the day Lee and I met and ended the day we parted. Adoption sounded like the logical culmination of everything we’d been to each other.
We agreed not to tell anyone what we were contemplating. None of them, from Heller to Strote to Cunningham, had ever shown a genuine liking for me. As long as Lee loved me they had no choice but to treat me well, but that’s as far as it went. I didn’t think they had my interests in mind. When it came to my possible adoption, Lee didn’t think so, either.
We decided to consult John Mowbray, a Las Vegas attorney, about the paperwork. Lee invited Mowbray out to the house, explaining that he wanted to keep the adoption proceedings quiet until it would have to be a matter of public record. Mowbray discussed the legal ramifications and said he’d be back in touch after drawing up the preliminary papers. I was on cloud nine after he left. Once Lee formally adopted me I’d finally belong to someone. In all the years of living in foster homes no one had ever loved me the way Lee loved me, no one had offered to make me a part of their family. I wanted to belong to Lee in the eyes of the whole world and know that he belonged to me.
Behind the Candelabra Page 16
