Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  A part of me had been waiting for that phone call since the Academy Awards ceremony in 1982, and now that it was finally happening, I didn’t know how to handle it. So many things ran through my mind. Had Lee called, after all that time, to say he was sorry about everything? Was he going to make a personal appeal to me to settle out of court? Did he hope to be friends again in spite of everything? None of those ideas sounded likely and yet I couldn’t help hoping those were his reasons for telephoning. Hearing his voice made me realize how much I’d missed him.

  “How have you been?” Lee asked, as if he’d been calling me every day and this was just another in a series of friendly conversations.

  “Fine, just fine,” I replied, knowing that he hated a kvetch, that he wouldn’t want to hear I couldn’t seem to get my life back together without him.

  “And your health,” Lee continued, with a tinge of anxiety elevating his voice, “how’s your health?”

  “I’m fine,” I said again, although that wasn’t quite true. I still used cocaine despite a dozen attempts to kick the habit. It kept me thin, nervous, and broke.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” Lee persisted.

  “Sure, Lee, I’m fine,” I reiterated, wondering why, after four years of silence, he would call to inquire about my health.

  Then it hit me: the unspoken fear that hides in the dark corners of every gay’s mind. Please, God, no, I thought, let me be wrong. Not Lee! Don’t let it be happening to Lee. So far, unlike so many other members of the homosexual community, I’d been lucky. None of my friends had died of AIDS, even though the obits in Variety reported an increasing number of deaths among young, single, show-business males. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines and figure out that many of those deaths were related to AIDS.

  I’d even heard a few rumors about Lee. He’d lost weight in the last couple of months and gossip within the gay community had it that AIDS was the cause. But I’d ignored the gossip. Hollywood is often more successful at creating rumors than it is at making movies. There are always stories making the rounds. And Lee, by denying his homosexuality, had certainly alienated the gay community. No wonder they talked about him. But the stories were, I’d reassured myself, just vicious lies.

  I could hear Lee clearing his throat. “Well,” he said, “I guess you’ve heard that I haven’t been feeling too well.”

  “Sure,” I replied. “But I didn’t take it seriously. Are you all right?”

  Silence. The wire hummed with it. It seemed to last forever. My God, I thought, it’s true!

  Finally Lee said, “I just wanted to be sure you’re okay, Scott. And I’m glad you are.” He sounded genuinely relieved. We talked a little about mutual friends. I had a hard time keeping any hint of emotion out of my voice while we chatted. I knew that Lee had called me for a reason. I also knew he’d never be able to spell that reason out. We were still locked in a court battle and no matter what changes occurred in his life or mine, he’d never forgive me for suing him and publicly branding him as gay. But legal battles and personal vendettas aside, Lee wasn’t a big enough bastard to let me go on living my life without warning me about his condition. It didn’t take any special brilliance on my part to figure out what that condition was. I believe that Lee called me because he wanted to do the right thing, to warn me that he had AIDS. Then, despite his good intentions, he couldn’t go through with it. So he’d concentrated on making sure I wasn’t sick, knowing I’d put two and two together and go see my own doctor.

  I sat still as a stone for a long time after hanging up, turning the brief conversation over and over in my mind, desperate to come up with some other reason for Lee to call. After all, I reassured myself, he hadn’t really come out and declared, “I have AIDS.” Maybe I was making too much of it, reading things into what he’d said that weren’t there.

  I felt scared, more scared than I’d been the day Lee had me evicted from the penthouse. God! I didn’t want to think about Lee having AIDS because that meant there was a chance—a very good chance—that I had it too. I sure as hell didn’t want to die, not at twenty-seven. Like most gay men, I’d read everything there was to read about AIDS. It didn’t seem possible that Lee could have contracted it during the years we’d been together.

  As far as I knew, we’d been faithful to each other right up until the last week. I had no proof of Lee’s infidelity prior to our breakup. We were both too jealous to go along with the open relationship that Lee had proposed. There’d been a lot of flirting but I didn’t think it had gone any further. While the AIDS virus had been leapfrogging through the gay community, Lee and I had been in a seemingly monogamous relationship—so how the hell, I asked myself, could we have gotten AIDS? No matter what, I still cared about him a lot; I always would. Lee had been my best friend, my mentor; we’d had some good times. I missed those times and I always will. I didn’t want him to die.

  I don’t know how long I sat quietly, trying to deal with that phone call. Deep down, I knew Lee had AIDS. I couldn’t help remembering the two Frenchmen who’d been a brief part of Lee’s life back in 1982 when we broke up. During that period I’d heard other stories about the way Lee used his newfound freedom—stories of excessive behavior on his part. There’d been more than enough time in the years since we parted for him to have contracted it and, from things I’d heard, he’d been sexually active enough to have put himself at extreme risk. Damn Lee and his libido, his philosophy that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

  I knew he wouldn’t have called for any other reason. But, as long as Lee continued to fight the suit, as long as he pursued his career, I couldn’t be absolutely positive about his illness. It was easier to think Lee had called because of a whim, because he suddenly got lonely for old times and old friends. Nevertheless, I began to follow his career more closely, to check to see if he was playing Vegas or Tahoe or L.A. And I saw my own doctor.

  Getting a clean bill of health was an enormous relief and reinforced my hope that I’d been way off base about Lee’s call. At first, Lee’s work schedule seemed relatively normal: he continued to play enough dates to allay my worries. More important, his attorney, Marshall Grossman, continued to pursue the case. Within a couple of weeks I’d almost managed to convince myself that I’d completely misinterpreted the phone call. When I heard, via the grapevine, that Lee would be making his long-dreamed-of appearance at Radio City Music Hall sometime in the fall of 1986, I felt sure he was fine.

  Then one night in June 1986, I ran into him at a restaurant in the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills and, after getting a good look at him, denial was no longer possible. I hadn’t seen Lee for a year and his appearance came as a shock. Lee had always been a stocky man with a barrel chest. He’d gotten increasingly overweight during the years we’d been together and we’d laughed about how much he loved food and hated dieting. Occasionally, he’d give lip service to the idea of losing weight but, when the time came, he just couldn’t do it. There was always a new restaurant or a new recipe to try, or a favorite meal served up by Gladys. Lee couldn’t deny himself the pleasures of the table any more than he could deny himself the pleasures of the bed.

  Yet that night at the Beverly Center, it was obvious that he’d lost a lot of weight. I didn’t believe the stories his people had been broadcasting about the famous “watermelon diet.” Lee should have looked terrific, the way most people do when they drop an unwanted thirty or forty pounds, but he didn’t! Under his makeup he looked pale, sick, and old.

  We stood and talked briefly. I lied and said he looked great, that being thin became him. He asked about my health again and then again, staring at me almost as hard as he had the night we first met. The message was plain, if I had the guts to deal with what he meant rather than what he said. I didn’t need to hear a doctor’s diagnosis to know what ailed Lee.

  In response to his queries I told Lee I’d seen my own doctor and felt great. I knew Lee would get my meaning. He smiled, told me he was happy for
me, and we parted. By then the entire world knew that Rock Hudson had died of AIDS. I expected it would just be a matter of months before the public knew Lee had the same disease. Poor Lee. He’d spent a lifetime denying his own homosexuality in public, fighting the papers, the tabloids, fighting me for daring to tell the truth. Soon everyone would be able to judge his personal honesty for themselves. Heller couldn’t handle this problem for him. The best medical minds in the world couldn’t. It would take a miracle to help Lee now.

  Sometime in early autumn 1986, Ernst Lipschutz called to say he’d been advised that Lee had dismissed Grossman as his attorney of record. A new attorney, Toni Bruno, had been hired in Grossman’s place. “In my opinion,” Lipschutz said, “that can only mean one thing. I think they’re going to try and settle out of court. They know Grossman and I have become adversaries, in every sense of the word. So they’ve brought in someone else to work out an agreement.”

  Lipschutz’s intuition turned out to be right on the money. Toni Bruno raised the topic of an out-of-court settlement almost at once. I asked Lipschutz to try to find out if the offer was motivated by Lee’s deteriorating health, but Bruno stonewalled the question. According to her, Liberace had never felt better. When asked if there was a special reason why the settlement offer came this late in the game, she replied that Lee just wanted to put an end to our dispute.

  I didn’t believe Bruno for a minute and neither did Lipschutz. I’d told him about the phone call and the chance meeting in the restaurant. He knew what I suspected. The offer to settle out of court merely confirmed my suspicions. But three more months would pass before the scheduled court date for a voluntary settlement conference.

  Meanwhile Lee was making preparations for his appearance at Radio City Music Hall. The show, which climaxed his career, would run more than two hours and Lee had agreed to do a total of twenty-one performances. The demanding routine would have taxed the strength of a young entertainer. But for Lee, sixty-seven years old and suffering from AIDS, it was damn near suicidal. Common sense dictated that he cancel the appearance. I’m told he didn’t consider it, not for a second. He came from the “show must go on” school of entertainers. Lee had a brush with death back in 1963, but he’d continued performing during his Hershey, Pennsylvania, Holiday Inn booking despite the fact that his kidneys were shutting down. His will was as strong in October 1986 as it had been twenty-three years earlier. Lee had dreamed of appearing at the Music Hall for years and made his first appearance there in 1984. Now nothing, not even the grim reaper, would be allowed to keep him from repeating the success he’d had in 1984.

  Lee hadn’t told any of his people that he suffered from a fatal illness. He talked about being overtired and anemic instead. To this day, some of them refuse to accept the fact that he died of AIDS. I understand their reluctance. He seemed larger than life to everyone, filling our hearts and minds as easily as he filled a stage. He’d become a living legend—and legends don’t die. It seems impossible, even now, that anything could have killed him.

  But he was already a dying man when he stepped on the Radio City Music Hall stage that October. Doing so took great courage on his part. He had no way of knowing if he’d be able to complete the agreed-on number of shows. If he faltered, in front of John Q. Public, he must have known how hard it would be to go on keeping his final secret. With nothing more than his own fighting heart, Lee held his illness at bay and put on the show of his lifetime. Although I wasn’t fortunate enough to see his final appearances, friends tell me Lee was at the top of his form, full of energy and good spirits, for each performance. He held the sophisticated New York audiences in the palm of his hand from the overture to the final curtain.

  The show opened with motion pictures of Lee’s homes projected on a screen at the back of the stage. Their opulent luxury set the tone for the entire show. Then the scene dissolved to a picture of the New York skyline at night while wisps of smoke billowed over the stage, creating an atmosphere of beauty and mystery. Lee made one of his more spectacular entrances, flying across the stage wearing a harness under his costume that enabled him to soar as easily as Superman. Such apparently effortless flying is in fact one of the most physically taxing theatrical tricks, requiring great stamina and agility. Lee could have conserved his energy by being driven on stage in one of his many Rolls-Royces. But this was to be his swan song as an entertainer and he wanted to give his unqualified best.

  I still shudder when I think what that cost him, flying across that stage night after night. He’d land in the wings, get out of the harness, and make his entrance on foot to thunderous applause. Knowing him, I suspect it was the applause that kept him going, that fed his soul after his body had begun to fail. No matter how bitterly we’d fought in the tabloids and then in court, there are no words to express my admiration for what he did in those twenty-one magical shows at the Music Hall.

  No one guessed that he was terminally ill, not his audience, not his closest associates. Ray Arnett, a man who’d been a part of the entourage for years, later told me he didn’t suspect. Perhaps he didn’t want to. Lee put on the act of his life for all of them. He was living his final dream and he intended to live it full throttle. That takes one hell of a man.

  He made his final entrance near the end of the show in a red, white, and blue Rolls while the Rockettes marched in perfect precision, banners swirling, and the orchestra reached a crescendo. The two-hour performance concluded with patriotic flag waving. Night after night, Lee took his final bow to a thunderous ovation. No performer deserved it more.

  It was nothing short of a miracle that Lee made it through all twenty-one shows. I’ve been told he couldn’t have made it through a twenty-second. His strength gave out as he took his final bow on November 2, 1986. It was the last time any audience would have a chance to share the special fun and wonder of a Liberace show. Had Lee been able to choose the time and place of his final curtain call, I think he would have chosen the one God or fate or whatever power you believe in gave him.

  He came home in November to celebrate his last holiday season. Lee invited his closest friends, the nearest and dearest of his people to share Thanksgiving and Christmas. But I’m told that he still refused to share the truth about his health. Lee always hated a complainer. It’s to his eternal credit that he didn’t permit himself to be one either. As far as anyone knew, he was suffering from a combination of overwork and excessive dieting. Because they all wanted to believe it, they did. It’s that simple and that sad.

  While Lee prepared for the season of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men,” our legal drama was playing out its final scenes. On December 3, 1986, the interested parties, or their attorneys of record, met in Los Angeles Superior Court to work out their differences. A compromise met, we signed an agreement a few days later. Lee and I were finally finished with our war.

  Knowing what I did about his health, I could have refused the settlement and fought on in the future against Lee’s estate. And I might have won. In refusing the many motions to dismiss the case, the courts seemed to indicate that it had some merit. But my argument was with Lee; my anger had been directed at him. I could not, would not, battle it out with a dying man—or his heirs. And, to be honest, I needed the money the settlement gave me. It’s always been that way with me and I’m afraid it always will.

  Bit by bit, from 1982 to 1986, I’d been saying good-bye to Lee. Signing the agreement meant the relationship had ended. I’d loved him and lost him. Now the world would lose him too.

  28

  On Tuesday, December 20, 1986, on page 14 of the Los Angeles Times a headline declared PALIMONY SUIT AGAINST LIBERACE SETTLED. Five years of litigation had gone by and the media still couldn’t seem to get the facts straight. It was not—I repeat, not—a palimony suit! Had the headlines been required to read correctly CONVERSION OF PROPERTY SUIT AGAINST LIBERACE SETTLED, I doubt the paper would have bothered to publish the story.

  I never expected to hear from Lee after we signed
the agreement. The last tie between us had been severed; he would go his way and I would go mine. My biggest concern was to stay off drugs, to build a new life. I’d been angry at Lee for a long time, feeling he’d cheated me out of whatever happiness I could hope for. But now, feeling gut sure he had AIDS, I couldn’t help being grateful that we’d broken up when we did. Fate had dealt me a better hand, in March 1982, than I’d realized at the time. Leaving Lee in 1982 may have saved my life.

  Despite a stipulation that the parties to the final settlement would never reveal its terms, the Los Angeles Times printed an accurate estimate of the financial arrangements. But stories about the settlement would soon be replaced by stories about Lee’s health as rumors ran wild through the entertainment communities in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Lee had taped an interview with Oprah Winfrey for her 1986 Christmas show, and makeup couldn’t hide the fact that he looked almost as bad as Rock Hudson had during Hudson’s final public appearances. One of the tabloids had already learned that, for the first time in Lee’s forty-three-year show-business career, he had no future bookings. It didn’t take the media long to put two and two together and, in this case, it added up to AIDS.

  While the rumors about his health escalated, Lee remained in seclusion in his Palm Springs home. He no longer felt well enough to see his closest associates, men such as Ray Arnett and Bo Ayars. They would not be permitted to share his last weeks, a fact that makes them, in my opinion, the lucky ones. I never expected to see Lee again either. After all, we’d settled our suit and I didn’t think we had anything more to say to each other. But Lee had one last surprise in store for me.

  He telephoned a few days after Christmas and, just as with the call months earlier, his prime concern seemed to be my health. I did my best to reassure him; however, he couldn’t or wouldn’t take my word for the fact that I was in the best of health. Lee, who’d always been so unflappably even tempered, sounded agitated as he repeated his questions. Then, almost abruptly, he said he had to go but that he’d call again.