Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  This raises another point. Liberace left no evidence of preferring equals as sexual partners. Hudson, for example, wound up with Tom Clark, a professional man roughly his own age, and his other companions often had comparable claims to professional or at least middle-class status. No one like this appears among Liberace’s old paramours. On the contrary, the stories are of cruising Mexican boys on Sunset Boulevard, picking up weightlifters, or taking on young people out of a chorus line, or in the case of Thorson himself and his successor, Cary James, latching onto unsteady teenagers. Liberace preferred inequality. This was not, incidentally, unusual. Serial flings with handsome young men more or less of the lower orders also characterized George Cukor’s sexual habits. John Rechy chronicled a couple of such men in City of Night, and elaborated on the picture in other writings and interviews.88 Not coincidentally, either, Cukor auditioned potential boyfriends much in the same way Liberace did.89 Beyond the definition of the showman’s ego and his sexual tastes—and the fact that Liberace had sex with Rock Hudson—what do these revelations demonstrate? They suggest something about the nature of sexual affairs between men in general, for one thing, and about Liberace’s affections, in particular: that neither the showman nor, for that matter, Rock Hudson, stuck to types; that “a meeting of minds” is not critical when two randy men turn each other on. Indeed, the absence of natural compatibility can even encourage and intensify a relationship, even as it dooms it, too. The image of stags in heat takes on a new light in this context.

  The Hadleigh interview coupled with Thorson’s recollection suggests still other things about Liberace’s private life. Even though Thorson affirms repeatedly his lover’s instinct toward concealment and dissembling, he still insists that he would have known of the liaison had it actually occurred. Liberace’s faithful servant Gladys Luckie used the same justification for rejecting the tale. The showman could not have been that closed, they assume, that secretive. Evidence suggests their error. In effect, then, for all the length and intimacy of the Thorson-Liberace relationship and for all Thorson’s awareness of Liberace’s character, the younger man still underestimated the showman’s secrecy. As a young, handsome man who matured after Stonewall, perhaps Scott Thorson was incapable of conversing with his elders—and vice versa, of course—about the strictures and standards of homosexuality when Rock Hudson and Liberace were young. He lived in a different social order. A later generation of young gays had less desire or need for camouflage and concealment. That was simply not the case before the Stonewall riot. In this regard, Hadleigh’s interview reveals still another side of the generational demand for masks and pretense. Thus, when Hadleigh asked Hudson about his relation with the piano player after their affair, he replied: “We’re on good terms but not friends. For instance, if I went to one of his concerts or he came to see me in a play I’m doing, people might talk. Certainly it would be noticed.”90 Feed no new rumors. Bar the closet door. These defined the assumptions of the Hollywood gay world. It was just as Rechy described Cukor, “Beyond that circle of friends, Cukor was incredibly closeted. Of course everybody knew. But that was another kind of closetry, because he kept the two worlds so separate.”91 It was the open secret.

  And other significance of the Hudson-Liberace liaison? If other evidence were necessary, finally, Boze Hadleigh’s interview with Rock Hudson affirms that Liberace indulged in sex with other men. Other fragmentary evidence confirms the fact as well.

  One critical fragment comes from the Liberace family itself. It relates not only to homosexuality, but to the complex of difficulties the entertainer experienced in the mid-fifties. It begins with the violent separation of the two elder Liberace brothers. Their conflict underlines the depth of the piano player’s crises as the fifties wore down, and the way his career crises intertwined with family, personal, and even legal crises.

  On December 3, 1957, the Las Vegas Review-Journal printed an obscure notice stating that the two brothers had split.92 With benign references to their desire to pursue their own career goals, the notice resembled the innocuous explanations for the disruption of celebrity marriages. As in those cases, the blandness of the announcement masked the depth of the major players’ animosity. Thus, missing from the public announcement was the showman’s expulsion of his brother from his business enterprise. In 1954, when Liberace had incorporated himself as International Artists, Ltd., he had made George one of the three stockholders, and had given him twenty-seven of the one hundred shares issued. In 1957, he redeemed all these, simultaneously eliminating his brother from his inner circle and cutting him off financially.93

  They stopped speaking. Telltale references in the press in the next year bear testament to the ill will that characterized their separation. On his television show, which had begun that fall, the showman had made an offhand remark about his brother going into the pizza business. His sibling had gone into the business and was trading on the Liberace name with his restaurant, “Liberace’s by George.”94 George bristled: “Everybody knows that I am no longer with my brother. But let it not be said I make my living selling pizza pies. Music is my life and shall always be.” From his new residence in Palm Springs, the showman patronized his older brother right back. “George left me of his own volition. I wish him all the success in the world and I am happy he is doing so well. I am sorry about the pizzas,” he added, “but I thought George was still in that business. By the way, I ate some and they were good.” Even their mother was drawn into the maelstrom. The rumor circulated that she had locked her son out of his own house on Valley Vista. She denied it. She did volunteer, however, that she was boycotting his shows and refused even to watch his daytime television program. “I love both my boys,” she told a reporter. “They have both been wonderful to me. But I cannot watch either until they are back together again.”95 Contributing to the family’s disorder, also, was the death of Rudy, the youngest, most beautiful, and most ill fated of the Liberace sons who had literally drunk himself to death in a sleazy motel on April 30, 1957. He was only twenty-six.96

  The split was extraordinary. In the first place, professionally, George Liberace had been his brother’s strong right arm since they had exchanged clothes and performed together at Sam Pick’s Club Madrid in Milwaukee almost twenty-five years before. Second, it violated the entertainer’s deepest commitments to family and domestic harmony; such values had been a constant in his life. Third, it reflected a revolution in his professional career, as his brother and mother had been a critical component of his public image. Was he scorning the candelabra? The pianoshaped swimming pool? The gold lamé jackets, sheared beaver coats, and sequins? He also jettisoned his family props. He sacked his brother. He eliminated him in the same way he had eliminated his father and other unpleasantness from his life. Although the entertainer dwelt at considerable length on the rupture of his relations with Heller—including his eating crow and taking his old manager back by 1961—his memoirs ignore completely the break with George. At that writing, in 1973, the two remained unreconciled. Only later in the decade did they make peace and establish an unsteady truce. As late as 1977, without any knowledge of the earlier feud, Scott Thorson chronicled the distance that still separated the two men. While Lee groused about his brother taking advantage of him, otherwise, “the brothers treated each other with a distant, uncomfortable politeness.”97

  The breach was as private as it was wide. The memoirs’ silences suggest its involvement with literally “unspeakable” things. Mrs. Casadonte herself suggested what things. The source loops back to “Mad About the Boy.”

  On October 23, 1958, when Frances Liberace Casadonte had gone public with her family’s domestic dissension, she had noted that her showman son no longer made his home with her on Valley Vista. He only visited at the Sherman Oaks house. She explained: “Lee lives in Palm Springs most of the time surrounded by a gang of what I call hillbillies and freeloaders.” She did not identify these rowdies, but she insisted that they were mostly responsible for the breakup
with George. “Lee is too trusting. He doesn’t know who his true friends are,” she concluded.98 Lee had found new associates. Palm Springs was where he felt free to entertain them. It had become his retreat from work, from family, and from traditional sexual mores, too. “Hillbillies and freeloaders”? They were the saucy young men and the trade of Lee’s cruising, the “hooligans” of Quentin Crisp’s comparably named British ideal.

  By 1950, Liberace had moved his mother to Camellia Street to live with him. He was just thirty-one. Her scruples—not to mention his own—prohibited his bringing dates home with her there. While casual “public” sex might have solved a part of the problem, he found another solution, he told Scott Thorson, in maintaining the separate apartment in North Hollywood. His mother never suspected, he said. “Although he tried to keep his homosexuality completely hidden from her, other members of the family told me he used the apartment a lot,” recollected Thorson.99

  With the exaggeration of his fame after 1952 and the move to the piano-pool house in 1953, the complications of his personal life multiplied. The presence of his mother, all his siblings, and all his siblings’ children in the neighborhood cramped his freedom, too. The apartment solution to his private desires seemed less tenable even as he discovered Palm Springs.

  Palm Springs lies about 120 miles east of Los Angeles. Although still served by rail in the fifties, the automobile trip was already becoming standard. While only two or three hours separated the desert resort from bustling downtown Los Angeles, the barren desert that lay between them made the distance seem more than geographical or chronological. Everything about the place suggested a different world. The origins of the town lay in the water that separated it from the surrounding badlands, and the oasis previewed itself to drivers on the highway in the tall, spiky, lollipop-like Washingtonian palms that became visible down the road. Otherwise, the town sprang from nowhere in the wasteland. Dead flat, the desert floor beyond the springs sprouted inhospitable mountain ranges more forbidding than the desert itself, yet their red-brown hues against the painful blue of the moistureless sky were awesome, too. With all these contrasts, the place, no chiaroscuro, was strikingly theatrical, stunningly dramatic. It was a Liberacean setting.

  It was an oasis, but it offered more than geographical sanctuary to its denizens.100 Controlled by the rich and powerful and catering to celebrities desiring to obscure their celebrity for a time, the town provided a respite from stardom and the vigilance of the public media. A contemporary refugee here, the old superstar Loretta Young summarized the motive that has characterized the residents for almost three quarters of a century. It is a “personal little haven,” she reflected. “You can do whatever you want to do, if you want to do it. Or you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to do it. And they really don’t squash you the way they do in Beverly Hills.”101 It was the perfect asylum for indulgence. “Palm Springs is the most boring place on the face of the earth. There is nothing to do except to live comfortably and to seek your own pleasure,” observed a modern resident of the community. Others were explicit about the nature of that pleasure: “What did people come out here to do? They came out here to drink, to lie in the sun and fuck each other crazy. It was all about hedonism.”102

  It was—and is—also a happy homo-hunting ground. Angelenos of a certain persuasion “would go to Big Bear or Laguna or Lake Tahoe, or Palm Springs,” according to Harry Hays, to look for men. “They were all ‘getaways’ for a time, but some of them—like Palm Springs—became too obvious.”103 Very little was too obvious for the fancy pianist. Palm Springs looked different. It felt different. It both encouraged and ignored difference. The showman loved it on first encounter.

  Duke Goldstone, the director of The Liberace Show, had introduced the performer to the Springs probably in the summer of 1953.104 He related that the owner of the Lone Palm Hotel had closed his lodgings for the summer, given the keys to Goldstone, and invited him to use the place at his leisure. Goldstone and his wife had then driven the performer to the desert and put up in the empty hotel in the almost-deserted town, which enchanted the star. Immediately, he determined to have a residence there.105

  He bought first the house at 1441 North Kaweah Road.106 As was his wont, he decorated and remodeled, so that one visitor, years later, could refer to it as “a little jewel.”107 He restyled the place after a French Country house, with some major modifications. Thus, while the place boasted a Louis XIV room and another in French Provincial style, it also contained an Olympic-sized swimming pool connected to the living room, in whose center burbled a fountain.108 In another pattern that characterized his later life, he also began buying up nearby houses, making a kind of compound. By the mid-sixties, he owned almost a neighborhood of four or five dwellings.

  As the decade turned, he determined to change the site of his Palm Springs compound. Not far from the Kaweah house, he discovered an abandoned inn that delighted him. “The Cloisters,” he explained, “was an exclusive, small hotel, built almost like a monastery with high walls and lovely sequestered gardens surrounding it.” Built in “Spanish-Mexican” style, the place in the mid-sixties sat on a large, palm-filled tract of gardens, with patios and a pool. It had been intended as a hideaway for Hollywood celebrities, but had attracted none and had been effectively abandoned. It was desolate when Liberace decided to buy around 1967.109 The owners asked $210,000, but they took $25,000 less; “he considered it too cheap to pass up,” one friend remarked. He then spent $136,000 to fix it up. He celebrated New Year’s Eve there for the first time in 1968 with a coterie of gay friends and coworkers, according to one of them, his old associate Jamie James.110

  The bougainvillea-crowned, head-high walls of the Cloisters provided the privacy the piano-playing entertainer needed to live the life he chose, protected from publicity by the town itself, with its own conspiracies of silence, and from his family by distance and the desert. He loved the place. In the most paradoxical ways, it embodied his own conflicting views of life and virtue. Although the house lay just across an open lot from Our Lady of Solitude—where his sister and mother attended mass when in residence—he clung to the place as much as anything because of the chapel and shrine he created within the Cloisters. Yet, even so, he used and intended the house as a homosexual retreat, and furnished the place accordingly.

  The Cloisters was Casa Liberace. It is where he chose to die. He did his share of living here as well, and he lived as intensely as he performed, even if only echoes of that life survive. Silence persists almost fifty years after Liberace first moved to the Palms, and over a decade after his death in the huge master bedroom at the back of the house. However faint, those echoes suggest the meaning of Casa Liberace for the performer, and, before he bought it, of Palm Springs in the fifties and sixties.

  The present owner of the mansion has maintained Liberace’s touches after a decade. The archaic Greek-inspired wallpaper depicting amorous men survives; so does the shower curtain, with its humorous takeoff on that icon of gay culture, Michelangelo’s monumental sculpture of David. In this version, the image is doubled, so as to create the illusion of two identical figures holding hands. It is not a straight man’s bathroom.

  The voices of the rowdy times sound elsewhere. Liberace gave great parties even at the Kaweah house. One young man had driven in from San Francisco in the mid—sixties with friends—men the likes of which Frances Casadonte dismissed as “freeloaders and hillbillies.” The entertainer was treating the crowd to a sumptuous brunch when the very handsome young man from San Francisco caught his eye. The visitor was not a hillbilly but a cultivated Swede on his way to making an American fortune. “Although I understood he liked younger men, at the time I could have passed for an adolescent; I looked ten years younger than I was,” the man recollected. The entertainer invited him to stay, they spent the weekend together, the young man returned home, and that was that. After the homoerotic fashion, they indulged in decent talk, had friendly sex, parted amicably, and never saw each
other again.111

  There were other parties, luncheons, and receptions for handsome men and youths over the years. Decades later, as the showman himself lay dying, another man recalled similar affairs and more. “He once held great parties in his home, and regularly frequented a popular gay bar in Palm Springs. He would often make a grand entrance late in the evening, surrounded by a group of male friends and looking splendid in extravagant outfits and heavy makeup and an incredible array of jewelry.”112

  Jamie James, Lee’s longtime publicist, also sounded other memories of these days. A consultant for one of the television movies made about the showman after his death, he was responsible for some of the homoerotic scenes in the film, the reality of which he had shared. There were the gay spas in the Springs, like “the famous Chi Chi Club (which Jamie James remembers Liberace once had the wild impulse to buy as a lark, as a place for him and his boys to frolic and ‘play for free’).” The pretty boys came and went up Palm Canyon Drive. They caroused at Ruby’s Dunes, “even in the produce aisles of the local supermarkets.”113