Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Confidential‘s sales and profits sustained the publisher’s lavish style. Chauffeured in his custom-made Cadillac, garbed in white polo coat and white fedora, and sporting an easy woman on his arm, Robert Harrison lived high. The publisher had friends in high places, too. Indeed, he and Walter Winchell established a virtual partnership before 1955.18 The profits also funded FBI-like investigations. The scandal detectives used regular cameras, as well as infrared and ultra-rapid film, high-powered tele-photo lenses, and even sensitive listening devices.19 In addition, Harrison maintained a stable of lawyers and private detectives to confirm the accuracy of his reports. The novelist James Ellroy used one of these characters as both source and inspiration for his novels L.A. Confidential and Hollywood Nocturnes, the former of which became an Oscar-winning film in 1997. Before going to work for Hollywood Confidential, Fred Otash had been a “leg breaker for the LAPD,” said Ellroy. “Freddie was the guy you went to if you wanted a picture of Rock Hudson with a dick in his mouth.” “The thing about Confidential is, it had the run that it had ’cause everything in Confidential was true,” Ellroy testified. Otash confirmed it.20

  Call girls provided a standard source for standard male dalliances, according to the author of Hollywood Babylon. Getting the goods on Hollywood homosexuals proved more problematic. The difficulty the scandal sheets had nailing gays illustrates the profound differences between homo- and heteroerotics during Liberace’s career.

  For one thing, male prostitution did not work the same way female prostitution did. Where were the call boys and male escorts when Rave demanded them? They were out there, certainly. As detailed in John Rechy’s autobiographical novel, City of Night, “rent boys”—to borrow the quaint English term—peddled their wares in standard locations like Times Square in New York, Pershing Park in Los Angeles, or New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet, unlike the Polly Adlers, Heidi Fleisses, and Sidney Barrows of female prostitution, few males came forward to identify their clients. Peculiar elements within heterosexual prostitution actually encouraged such revelations. Within a traditional gender community, a man hires a woman as the “other.” He uses her, effectively, for himself. Antagonism and betrayal, revelations and exposés, revenge and retaliation grow naturally out of the opposition. In contrast, homoerotic coupling occurs within an effective community that generally blurs or even transcends such distinctions between the one and the other, the buyer versus the seller. In homosexual transactions, “I” and “you” elide easily to a “we” that becomes “we” versus “they.” The sameness of the partners displaces “other”; the opposition is to the world, rather than between the partners, and it is an opposition the world has generally relished and returned in full measure. Sometimes the traditional sort of exchange effects homosexual prostitution, but even there it does so with a twist. John Rechy’s protagonist’s clients include a high percentage of married men, straights, or “trade.” But even when a man bought a boy’s services the way he might a woman’s, something of this homosexual mutuality still kicked in. While the threat of blackmail hung ominously over such men’s heads, a boy who disclosed what had gone on risked disaster for himself as well. In this context, in exposing all, the sellers, as it were, had as much to lose as their customers did.21 They revealed not only their scores’ secrets but their own. They were, in effect, partners in the larger social crime of homosexuality in general. Few rent boys ever came forward with lists of names and dates. When they did, the circumstances seem profoundly different from situations in which women ratted on their johns.

  Public prejudice and homoerotic mutuality produced their own effects to resist public inquiry. As David Ehrenstein has written, “Homosexuality has always been viewed . . . as an ultimate piece of knowledge. To know who’s gay is to ‘get their number.’”22 As a consequence, homosex of any kind, commercial or otherwise, has remained profoundly more subterranean, secretive, and unspoken than illicit heterosexuality. Partners swore tacit oaths of secrecy about both the personnel involved in and the specific activity of their couplings. While, in private, the boys and men might trade stories about the celebrities they had done, they tended to circle the wagons against the inevitable straight antagonists. “She’s family,” ran the gay expression about a fellow who lusted after other males. For all the incoherence within that family, the tribal lines generally held against outsiders.23 “We had only one security—silence,” explained Harry Hays, a founder of homosexual activism in the Mattachine Society. “My security was your silence. That was understood always.”24

  Homosexuality proved otherwise resistant to outside inquiry. Where were the call boys when Whisper roared? Who was the call boy and who, indeed, was the caller? The categories blurred. Underlining the overlap between homosexuality in general and homosexual prostitution in particular, the scholar Rictor Norton has argued that much homosexual language originated in the street talk of ordinary prostitutes. The terms “trick” or “tricking,” for example, originated among female streetwalkers, but they came into general usage in the gay demimonde to describe a nonpaying date or having sex of any sort.25

  More specifically, among men the lines between professional and non-professional sex were blurred. The “score,” or customer, in one context, might be the seller in another. A seller, not uncommonly, too, might not exact a fee when the circumstances were especially pleasant for him. In addition, an ordinary gay man might take to prostitution almost on a lark and then return as easily to his normal life.26 Along the same lines, any boy or man might turn a cash trick more or less on whim. A man cruises another. They go home together or retreat to some private spot. They have sex. Getting dressed, the one might say something like, “Do you have any cash on you? I need a bus ride home”; Or: “Man, I’m really short right now; could you spot me?” If the partner refuses, the other is no worse off, essentially, for the wear. If the partner is generous, bills change hands, not necessarily with the sense of goods sold but rather in the context of favors traded.

  These kinds of transactions were part of Liberace’s life. Perhaps the 1954 Rave story about Liberace offering his telephone number to the bodybuilder who had appeared on television with him was apocryphal or simply fabricated. Whether or not it was true in its particulars, however, it described a real pattern. A man strikes up a conversation with another. A casual and seemingly innocent invitation to share a drink might follow, or one might say to the other, “We should get together sometime; give me a ring.” Telephone numbers are scribbled and swapped. If the other party had no homosexual inclinations, the incident could pass innocently enough. If he did, he could laugh it off if the suitor was not to his taste; otherwise a bodybuilder could find himself a new sexual partner that evening. It might cost the suitor a dinner or a night on the town. If the liaison was particularly pleasant and the pickup partner generous, there might be more nights and more dinners. The cost might rise a bit, say, to the level of an engraved silver cigarette case. No one is selling anything, however.

  The randiness of men and the availability of male-male sex constitutes another critical element in understanding the problems of straight culture with the gay world. If the lines between fun and profit were narrow, so were those between sex and society, a contrast that one critic explains as the homosexual versus the homosocial motive.27 The categories smudged easily. Society threw men together constantly, and randy men were everywhere. Most might have resisted the homoerotic impulse, but many—whether gay, straight, or somewhere in between—did not. Male-male sex was available everywhere, and, not least, it was usually free. Who was the trick? Where did one find “scores”? Tricks and scores could be any man, and men were everywhere. A Brooks Brothered businessman on a crowded morning subway? A bicycle courier between runs? A UPS man delivering packages? A garbage man collecting trash? The rep-tied stockbroker on a lunch break? The fellow admirer of the Velázquez at the museum? The two horny soccer players at the back of the team bus? The bookbagged adolescent on the bus bench? Two drivers caught in a traffic j
am? Anywhere. Any man. Everyman. A fellow had only to linger in a public restroom, hang around a bookstore magazine rack, or stroll through a park to find a willing partner whose name he might never even know and who, of course, might never know his name. The courtship could be over in a nanosecond and consisted of the merest glance, grin, or nod; the sexual activity itself might last hardly longer. Sex was free in more ways than one; it was casual, endlessly repeatable, generally forgettable, and completely gratifying after the manner of men.28

  This form of coupling, which came complete with anonymity and danger, was the sex of choice for many men; its risks and namelessness was an aphrodisiac.29 However incredible it may seem, the most famous celebrities could and did indulge in such anonymous sex, and more often than not went unrecognized by their equally anonymous partners.30

  Rock Hudson’s career illustrates many of these issues. He became extremely famous after the 1954 premier of Magnificent Obsession; he was also intensely sexual, and lived more or less openly with various men even in the fifties. As early as 1953, journalists knew about his sexual anomalies; the water hardly rippled.31 Although his wife, Phyllis Gates, was steaming, Hudson returned from Europe after A Farewell to Arms with a new lover in tow. Problems with this same boyfriend prompted the star to engage the notorious “legbreaker”—and homophobe—Freddie Otash to hasten this fellow’s departure back home shortly after. If it was common knowledge among the gossips, no exposés revealed such delicious goings-on.32

  “The amazing thing is that Rock, as big as he became, was never nailed,” mused his friend George Nader. “It made me speculate that Rock had an angel on his shoulder, or that he’d made a pact with the devil, because he seemed under supernatural protection.”33 His homosexuality was an open secret among Hollywood insiders. Robert Harrison was an insider. Confidential longed to “tell the facts and name the names” about the megastar’s sexual affairs. Harrison knew Hudson’s former boyfriends. The sleuths contacted Bob Preble and Jack Navaar, since estranged from the movie star, and offered them big money to tell all. The fraternal conspiracy kicked in. Harrison got nothing out of either man. One story did circulate that the magazine found a Hudson partner willing to confess for cash: the magazine was bought off, however, not to publish. “Every month when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to turn. Which of us would be in it?” wrote one of the gay actors in Rock Hudson’s set of friends.34 Few appeared, even so.

  The greatest threat to celebrity homosexuals lay not in fraternizing with queers but in crossing over to straight boys who had no vested interest in silence but who, on the contrary, might even relish the opportunity to prove their manhood by fingering a libidinous homosexual star who had come on to them. Perhaps Rock Hudson managed to avoid starring in a Hollywood Confidential exposé by virtue of his general discretion, of keeping his appetites within the “family.” Liberace had other tastes. If the 1954 Rave exposé was true in its particulars, the man with the engraved cigarette case was family and suffered his loss in silence. The bodybuilder might have been different. From the surviving fragmentary evidence of Liberace’s sex life and sexual appetites, he would have hit on the bodybuilder, whether the man were gay or not, without much compunction. “He wasn’t discreet, he was daring and rather outrageous about it,” a gay television director had recalled the entertainer’s escapades in the sixties.35 Unlike Rock Hudson, Lee was as reckless as he was lusty, and he preferred trade. Scott Thorson affirmed this when the showman was in his sixties. Liberace would hit on almost any man, regardless of the circumstances. If this much is true according to memoirist’s accounts, the Hollywood Confidential exposé sustains it.

  The July 1957 issue of Confidential had actually hit the drugstores and tobacco shops during the first week of May. Its cover story shrilled, “Exclusive!” “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy’!” In the sardonic mode that typified the magazine’s style, the story inside also brimmed with photographs and telling details. Its author, writing under the name of Horton Streete, summarized the scandal at the essay’s beginning: “In one of the zaniest plots in theatrical history, this comedy of errors rang up the curtain in Akron, Ohio, played a crazy act two in Los Angeles, and closed in Dallas, Texas, with the wildest finale since ‘Hellzapoppin.’ The show had everything: unrequited love . . . conflict . . . mob scenes . . . low comedy. And through it all throbbed the theme song, ‘Mad About the Boy’”36

  This was the story. A young New York publicity agent had flown in from Manhattan to Akron, Ohio, to promote a Fourth of July celebration that featured the famous pianist. Having organized a huge welcoming ceremony at the airport on July 3, the young man then accompanied the performer back to his hotel suite. According to the story, when he declared that, “whatever you want, I’m your boy,” it set the entertainer in high mettle. The showman took it as an invitation and made physical moves on the man, who resisted. “Once during the scuffle, the press agent let out a yelp of pain, and no wonder. . . . For Luscious Libby, it was strictly no-holds-barred. Finally with a combination of wristlock and flying mare, the publicity man wrenched loose from his host’s embrace and fled from the suite, leaving Liberace sprawled on the floor.”

  The encounter had two more installments, according to Confidential. For legal reasons, the press agent needed to obtain a release from the pianist, and when he flew to Los Angeles to obtain Liberace’s signature, round two ensued. Round three occurred when the publicist, still seeking the legal releases, followed the performer to Dallas, where he was performing in The Great Waltz. The reporter described the Dallas match as a virtual replay of that in the Akron hotel suite. “The floor show reached its climax when Dimples, by sheer weight, pinned his victim to the mat and mewed in his face: ‘Gee, you’re cute when you’re mad.’” This time, however, the press agent had instructed his associates to check on him, and they leapt to the rescue at a critical moment.37

  The Confidential crisis broke in the middle of Liberace’s preparation for a three-week run at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas that spring. Almost immediately, on May 7, he announced his intention to sue.38 He joked about the case to the gamblers, but John Jacobs filed his twenty-million-dollar legal suit on May 14.39

  Although hardly apparent at the time, the days of Confidential and its ilk were numbered. Times were changing, but the stars were fighting back as well. Liberace was not the first. In February, Dorothy Dandridge had sued Harrison’s enterprise for two million dollars. A suit filed by Errol Flynn was pending from 1955. Other celebrity lawsuits followed, and the trend produced its own shock waves. In March 1957, the magazine had moved its corporate headquarters to Massachusetts, for example, as an apparent means of avoiding a California venue for these cases. Studio chiefs became involved. They feared that the courts would issue blanket subpoenas and force scores of celebrities to testify about their private doings.40 The apprehension was justified. “I love it,” Robert Harrison gloated. “I’ve already told my lawyers to be prepared to subpoena every big-name star who ever appeared in the magazine. Can you picture that parade up to the witness stand?”41 Soon enough, another front opened as well, when grand juries in New Jersey, Illinois, and California began investigating scandal sheets, in general, and Confidential in particular. A California state senator had initiated his own inquiry simultaneously. With pressure from Hollywood, the state government won an indictment against Confidential for libel and obscenity.42 From the time of the McCarthy and Kefauver committee hearings, such weighty political inquiries had been the rage, and the scandal-sheet investigations continued the pattern.

  The extremely complicated case—or rather cases—wound through the Los Angeles judicial system for a year beginning in August 1957. A grand jury heard evidence for two months on the allegations that the magazine had engaged in libelous, slanderous activity, but it deadlocked for two weeks over Liberace’s complaints. A long, second trial threatened. On the defensive, Harrison retreated. On July 2, 1958, papers broadcast the out-of-court settlement w
ith Maureen O’Hara; the next week, Confidential settled with Errol Flynn. Finally, on July 16, the magazine reached an agreement with Liberace. He settled for damages of forty thousand dollars. He carried the day on something of a technicality—that he was not in Dallas on the day he supposedly molested the hapless press agent.43

  The thirty-nine-year-old showman had escaped by the skin of his teeth. He was forty thousand dollars richer, but he could hardly savor the victory. In the summer of 1958, as he walked away from the Los Angeles County Courthouse, his life was a mess, his career a shambles. He was looking forward to launching his television show in the fall, but the disaster of his Australian tour that spring marred that pleasure. Meanwhile, his management crisis was going full tilt, he was turning his image upside down and inside out, and, not least, the queer issue still haunted him. He had hardly put to rest the stories of his homosexuality; indeed, they seemed to fade only with his waning popularity and declining income. All these woes and troubles found a focus in the Cassandra case that had bedeviled him since 1956.