I was half hoping he wouldn’t. Lee hadn’t sounded well on the phone—mentally or physically. If I had my choice, I preferred to remember him as he’d been before we parted, not old and sick and failing as I feared he was now. His next call, about a week later, deepened my concern. He wanted to see me, he said, to make amends. I tried to tell him there was nothing to make amends for, that we’d both made mistakes and that I hoped he forgave mine as I forgave his. But he was insistent, he had to see me.
I didn’t want to make the trip to the Cloisters. For one thing, I knew Lee’s people would resent my presence. Lee might have forgiven me for suing him, but I felt damn sure they hadn’t. Going to see him on his home turf would be the equivalent of walking into the lion’s den, and I wasn’t that brave or that foolhardy. I told Lee I didn’t think seeing each other was a very good idea, but he kept on insisting. Sick or well, he had the tenacity of a bulldog when it came to getting his way. I made him promise that any meeting between us would be as private as possible, that no one else would be in the house beside Lee and the person who would let me in. He agreed to my terms and we set a time for our meeting.
It takes two hours to drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs and I almost turned around a half dozen times. I was still afraid of Lee’s power, his ability to hurt me without even meaning to. He’d sworn, again and again under oath, that he hadn’t meant me any harm when he’d told Heller to get me out of the penthouse all those years ago. No matter what Lee’s intentions, I’d been threatened, roughed up, and maced. To this day, I don’t think he actually asked anyone to do that to me. But when he gave the orders that set the wheels in motion, he must have known my eviction from the penthouse might turn nasty. And he hadn’t hesitated.
I had no idea what lay waiting for me at the Cloisters—reconciliation or renewed warfare. Lee could easily have people there who would be less than friendly when I showed up. Emotionally, I wanted to trust him, to believe him when he said he wanted to make amends. Logically, I felt that going to see him was one of the dumber things I’d done in the last five years.
The desert is spectacular in January—lush, warm, and sunny while L.A. is foggy and damp. But the gorgeous scenery and delightful weather didn’t calm my anxiety as I exited the interstate and headed toward Palm Springs. Would Lee keep his word, I worried, or would he take this last opportunity to make me regret suing him and publicizing his homosexuality? As I pulled up in front of the high stucco wall surrounding the Cloisters and got out of my car, the estate looked just the way it had the last time I’d been there. A wave of nostalgia washed over me as I took in the tiled CASA DE LIBERACE sign. I drew a deep breath, rang the bell, and waited for the heavy wooden gate to swing open.
A maid let me into the compound, and it soon became apparent that Lee had kept his word: no one else was there. The house looked deserted except for a few of the smaller dogs who greeted me ecstatically, cavorting at my feet and trying to lick my hands. The fact that they still remembered me after all that time brought tears to my eyes. Despite their enthusiasm it was a far different homecoming from the one I’d hoped for five years earlier when I’d dreamed of returning to this, Lee’s favorite house. The house looked the same but everything else, my life and his, had changed.
Lee was waiting for me in the bedroom and seeing him was a terrible shock. I don’t think he weighed more than a hundred forty pounds. With his gaunt face and wasted body, he looked like a scarecrow. A heartbreaking mixture of fear and despair filled his eyes. I walked over to him to give him a hug, but he stopped me. “I don’t want you to touch me,” he said.
If I’d had any guts, I’d have hugged him anyway. But seeing him like that scared the hell out of me. I backed off and concentrated on patting the dogs instead. Lee seemed to want to talk about the past, the good times we’d shared, and I let him reminisce while I struggled to get used to his frightening deterioration. It was one thing to hear stories about how terrible he looked, how sick he was. None of those stories prepared me for the reality. AIDS had a death grip on Lee.
I could see it wasn’t going to be a long visit; he just didn’t have the strength, and a part of me couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Seeing Lee like that had to be one of the most frightening experiences of my life. He told me that his sister, Angie, and his old friend Tido Minor (the ex-wife of Don Fedderson, who’d discovered Lee) were practically the only people he saw anymore. I could understand why. One look at him and you knew he was dying, no matter how many stories his publicist put out about his just needing a long rest. This rest was going to be permanent.
I wanted to cry but I knew that wouldn’t do Lee any good. Laughter would have helped both of us, but I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to matter. As we talked, there were times when I felt as if Lee’s illness had affected his mind as well as his body. He rambled, lost his train of thought, skipped from one topic to another. It took him a while to get to the point. But he finally looked at me and said, “I’m not going to make it.” Tears filled his eyes. “I don’t want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS.”
I tried to reassure him, to tell him he would always be remembered as a great entertainer. Nothing I could say seemed to help.
“Promise me you won’t talk to anyone about this visit,” he said, “or how bad I looked.”
Not trusting my voice, I nodded.
“Scott,” Lee said, “I asked you here because I wanted you to know you made me the happiest.” Then he gave me a ring that had belonged to his mother and one of his own that he always wore during his shows. “Just a little something to remember me by,” he said, smiling with something like the old sparkle in his eyes.
Lee knew I loved jewelry almost as much as he did. Nothing he could have given me would have pleased me more. I remembered his telling me how he’d given away so many of his treasured possessions back in 1964 when he thought he was dying, and a terrible feeling of longing and regret washed over me. This time there would be no miraculous recovery. Lee and I had been through a lot together, not all of it good. But I wouldn’t have wished AIDS on my worst enemy. Seeing him like that was rough. I just hope it gave him a little peace. Before I left he gave me one last parting gift—a big panda bear much like the one I’d seen on his bed ten years earlier, the first time I walked into his bedroom in Vegas. Then our brief visit was over. Driving back to L.A., I knew I’d never see him again.
On January 14 the Las Vegas Sun ran an editorial that was, in part, an appeal to “one of entertainment’s brightest stars—to face reality with courage and determination, to lick the disease if there is a way. He has all the money in the world and he should be experimenting, not only for his own life but for the sake of others.”
It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines and figure out that the paper was talking about Lee, even though they didn’t come right out and name him. Predictably, Seymour Heller rose to the challenge and immediately issued a vigorous denial, saying that Lee didn’t have AIDS, that he suffered from emphysema, heart disease, and anemia. That was to be the party line for the next few weeks.
When Heller was asked why Lee didn’t have any future bookings he quoted Lee as saying, “Seymour, I have these lovely places and I never take time to enjoy them. What’s the sense in having them if I don’t take the time?”
In reality Lee’s time had almost run out. His last few weeks would deteriorate into a Roman circus with the media playing the lions while Lee and his people played the Christians. The worst thing, in my opinion, is that the circus would never have happened if, at any time in the past, Lee had admitted to being homosexual. Instead of treating him sympathetically, the press seemed determined to catch Lee in the lie of a lifetime. They began to gather outside the Cloisters, where the death watch had begun.
Again the Vegas Sun scooped everyone when its January 24, 1987, edition bore the headline LIBERACE VICTIM OF DEADLY AIDS. The day before, Lee had checked into the Eisenhower Medical Ce
nter in Palm Springs, where he would spend three days in isolation. As he fought his deadly illness his worst fears were realized. He had lived his life flamboyantly and his final days would be equally attention-getting.
Liberace and AIDS were a major story, to be told and retold in the papers and on all the newscasts. Seymour Heller fought a last-ditch effort to keep Lee from being branded, on his deathbed, as an aging queen dying of AIDS. Heller built a solid wall of denial that the press didn’t breach until Lee’s death. Everyone associated with Lee, including his private doctor, told the same story. Lee had heart problems, complicated by anemia and emphysema. When Lee left the medical center, the people closest to him were quoted as saying he was feeling better. In fact, he left because he wanted to die at his beloved Cloisters rather than in unfamiliar surroundings.
He would not be alone during his final days. The man who lived his life surrounded by other gay men would spend his final days being ministered to by women. Angie, Gladys Luckie, and another housekeeper, Dorothy MacMahain, would keep a constant vigil by his side while round-the-clock nurses gave Lee the best medical care available. But all their efforts would prove useless against a disease for which there is no known cure.
Outside the Cloisters, the media maintained their own vigil. Curious bystanders, perhaps drawn by the television cameras, began to keep the vigil too. Any hope that Lee could die with dignity disappeared. Everything that happened during those final days became fodder for the tabloids. Lee’s last hours were described in infinite and often inaccurate detail. No element of the story seemed too personal to publish.
There were accounts of how Lee asked to say good-bye to his dogs, how the day came when he no longer recognized them, how he had conversations with his mother or his two deceased brothers as he lapsed in and out of a coma. Lee’s last words are contradictorily quoted as being “Babyboy, I’ll soon be there to feed you,” and “I’ll soon be with you, Mother.” Although the official death certificate places February 4, 1987, 2:05 P.M., as the date and time of his death, insiders are reported to have said that he died at 11:30 A.M. There would be other discrepancies.
Lee’s personal physician, Dr. Ronald Daniels, listed cardiac arrest due to cardiac failure as the cause of death. Technically, I guess he was correct, if not strictly forthcoming, in that everyone dies of heart failure. At 2:50 P.M. one of Angie’s sons-in-law stepped outside the Cloisters to announce that Lee was gone. At 3:20 P.M. a plain gray hearse was admitted to the Cloisters compound and Lee’s body, encased in a black plastic body bag, was placed inside. As the vehicle exited the grounds, heading for Los Angeles, where the body would be prepared for burial at Forest Lawn, cars full of reporters and even a television helicopter gave chase.
The next day, shortly after Lee’s body had been embalmed, the Riverside County Health Department formally rejected Dr. Daniels’s death certificate and ordered an autopsy. California law requires that an autopsy be conducted when there is a suspicion that someone has died of a contagious disease. According to the Riverside coroner, Raymond Carillo, there were more than enough grounds for suspicion. But Carillo would be handicapped by the efforts of Lee’s friends to protect his reputation. Heller and Strote vigorously protested the need for the autopsy, citing Dr. Daniels’s death certificate. They would deny Lee’s AIDS with their last breath if need be. Because Lee had already been embalmed, it would be necessary to take tissue samples and to get the medical records, including blood tests, from his recent stay at the Eisenhower Medical Center. Carillo would eventually be forced to subpoena them.
All of this kept Lee’s name on the front pages. Lee’s Palm Springs memorial service at Our Lady of Solitude served as a media event rather than a last farewell. Reverend William Erstad’s earnest plea: “Let us not judge our fellow man. . . . Everyone needs forgiveness,” went unheeded, as did a telegram from President Ronald Reagan saying that Liberace “will be remembered in many ways, but most importantly as a kind man who lived his life with great joy.”
I sat in the church that day, listening to the well-meaning words, knowing they would be ignored by the press. Lee, having spent so much of his life trying to conceal his homosexuality, would now be remembered as the second famous entertainer to die of AIDS. By denying his homosexuality, by trying to conceal his AIDS rather than going public as Rock Hudson had done, I felt Lee had set the entire gay movement back a decade. Back in 1982, during the tabloid wars, Lee had said, “The gays are out to assassinate me.” In a bizarre way that no one could possibly have foreseen—his prediction had come true.
Epilogue
Lee’s illness and subsequent death shook me up more than any other event in my life, made me take a serious look at where I was and where I seemed to be headed. A few months after I began to suspect Lee had AIDS, I finally managed to kick my chemical dependency. I joined an AA drug program where, coincidentally, my sponsor turned out to be a recovered addict who had also been introduced to hard drugs by Dr. Jack Startz. Staying clean is a battle I fight every day, and it’s never easy. But it’s essential to my survival.
Job-wise, I’m not doing as well. Being Lee’s former lover isn’t something I can put down on a résumé. Today, because of the AIDS epidemic in Hollywood, employers are reluctant to hire known gays. Sometimes I feel as if the deck is stacked against me, even though I’m the damn fool who shuffled the cards. I’ve been through tough times before and I’ve always survived. I plan to survive this one too. Putting this book together has helped me to see things—myself, Lee, the effect we had on each other’s lives—more clearly. In the months following his death Lee continued to be the subject of controversy, discussion, and legal action. He was mourned, lamented, hated, and loved, just as he had been in his lifetime—but not forgotten.
One day in April 1987, I got a pathetic phone call from one of Lee’s people, a man who’d been with Lee through thirty years of performances. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “and the damnedest thing happened. I completely forgot that Lee was gone. And you know, Scott, it’s the time of year when we always go on tour. So I picked up the phone to call Seymour Heller. I was going to chew him out for not telling me when Lee and I would be leaving town.”
The poor guy’s voice was quivering as he said, “Then it hit me. We’ll never be going on the road again; there won’t be any more tours.” Like me, this man couldn’t come to grips with the fact that Lee was dead. Like me, he seemed to be wondering what to do with the rest of his life now that Lee wasn’t part of it. I could sympathize with the guy but I couldn’t help him. I’d faced the same problem five years earlier and I still hadn’t come up with a good answer for myself.
Everyone associated with Lee had to learn to deal with his death. It affected them all differently. The first of several disputes over Lee’s estate made headlines in March 1987. Rudy’s four children, who’d been excluded as heirs by a new will written just weeks before Lee’s death, appeared in a Las Vegas courtroom to contest the will’s validity.
Then, on May 12, 1987, Joel Strote, now the executor of Lee’s estate, filed a claim for unspecified damages against Riverside County, claiming that Lee’s reputation had been damaged by the county coroner who publicly linked Lee’s death to AIDS. It would seem that Strote was prepared to fight one last futile battle on Lee’s behalf, to keep Lee from being identified, publicly and for all time, as a homosexual male. I admire Strote’s loyalty, although his actions were ultimately futile. Perhaps he too was having trouble accepting Lee’s death; perhaps he was trying to do what he thought Lee would have wanted. I’ve never been able to figure the guy out. In any case, the court denied the claim and, in July 1987, the Riverside County coroner made his final findings public. The coroner concluded that Lee had died of an AIDS-related cause.
While the survivors argued among themselves, Lee’s estate went into probate. Lee had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in his lifetime, but he’d spent lavishly. I have no way of knowing how much money he left, but the events that followed his
death seem to indicate that the estate is cash poor. On May 24, 1987, Christie’s of London, one of the world’s most prestigious auction houses, announced that it would hold a three-day auction in the Los Angeles Convention Center in mid-April 1988, to dispose of more than twenty thousand items belonging to Lee, ranging from dozens of trademark candelabra to mirrored pianos to Rolls-Royces. Bit by bit the things Lee loved, including most of his homes, are being offered for sale.
Lee’s sister, Angie, has made a public plea for funds to save Lee’s Vegas house from the auction block and turn it into yet another Liberace museum. As of this writing, the Shirley Street house is still on the market and I guess it will sell one of these days.
More recently, in August 1987, I heard that Angie, Gladys Luckie, housekeeper Dorothy MacMahain, and Cary James were all bringing suit because Lee’s new will, written by Joel Strote and signed just days before Lee’s death, didn’t fulfill the promises he’d made over and over to them during his life. It all has a terribly familiar sound. As they say, “What goes around comes around.” It’s sad but predictable that the people closest to Lee would quarrel now that he’s gone. He was the glue that held them all together.
The only thing that now seems to unite them is a determination to keep me from writing this book. With few exceptions, they have refused interviews, turned down requests for pictures, used Lee’s vestigial influence to keep places such as the Vegas Hilton from helping me, and threatened a suit should this book be published. Those who have cooperated, fearing reprisals from Strote and Heller, have asked that I never reveal their names. But I have two powerful reasons for writing this book. As you may have guessed, I need the money. The settlement I got at the end of the lawsuit went for legal fees and to set up my own apartment. More important, I believe that Lee’s story—his true story rather than a carefully concocted fairy tale—deserves to be told, for his story can teach all of us a lesson. It serves best as a cautionary tale whose moral is: Too much of a good thing, be it sex, booze, success, or fame, is not wonderful. In fact, it can kill you.
Behind the Candelabra Page 25
