Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Unlike the mostly faceless names and nameless liaisons of Liberace’s romantic attachments before 1975, Vince Cardell has a name, a face, and even a history. He figures in Scott Thorson’s memoir under the name “Jerry O’Rourke,” but he crops up in Thorson’s later palimony depositions, too. Beyond this, he earned a small public reputation of his own. The dates of his coming and going are obscure, but he probably appeared in Liberace’s life in late 1974.28 Memorialized by photojournalists, he was a fixture in the entourage by March 1975, by which time he was helping his partner open his first museum. A part of the showman’s troupe, on stage and off, he was hardly a memory by ’79.

  According to the earliest published source on Vince Cardell, the young man was performing as a lounge pianist at a Ramada Inn club in New Jersey in 1975. Liberace was doing a big show ten minutes away. “I was hoping he would come in for dinner one night,” Cardell told the interviewer. Eventually, the showman did appear. Alas, it was the player’s night off. A friend called. Cardell rushed back to the dining room. He introduced himself. The star responded appropriately. “He invited me over to see his show, and while I was standing backstage watching, the guy that normally drove the cars onstage got a message that his father had just died. He had to go home and take care of his mother, so he asked me if I was interested in the job, and that’s how it all got started.”29

  Liberace had used fancy automobiles in his act for the first time in 1972. Chauffeured onto the stage in a Rolls-Royce limousine or a Mercedes Excalibur, he added various cars to his routine over time, including a VW Beetle done up special as a private vehicle for his fancy fur capes and coats. He made his chauffeurs a part of the act. It was a means, too, of integrating his lovers and companions into his stage show. This was how Cardell broke into the routine.30 Liberace named Cardell’s predecessor as Bob Fisher, the man apparently released at his father’s death.31 Most curiously, Cardell insisted that Liberace did not even know he made his living playing the piano. According to Scott Thorson, Cardell was actually not making much of a living off the piano and drove a truck for a diaper service during the day to support himself. The “trade” element would have added a special appeal for the showman.32

  Was Cardell waiting for Liberace? The star was ready to be ambushed. The young lounge entertainer was around twenty-five when they met. He was very handsome, dark, and sultry, with a distinctive dimple in his chin. He wore his hair fashionably long and sported thick sideburns.33 He was big, over six feet, although short of Thorson’s six foot three. Thorson, ten years his junior, found Cardell’s scowling looks and “mature, powerfully muscled body” more than a little intimidating.34 Did he look like a truck driver, too? This would also have counted in his favor with Mr. Showmanship. Did the pianist prefer blondes? No matter.

  What was the exact nature of Cardell’s relationship with the showman? In his published memoir, Thorson is coy regarding this matter. He insists that he will not call Cardell by his real name, for one thing, although two editorial slips reveal “O’Rouke’s” true identity.35 He calls Cardell “Lee’s former companion,” while he quotes his mentor referring to Cardell as “my protege.”36 Without being specific in his memoir, however, he leaves little doubt about the nature of the affair. When he first saw Cardell performing with Liberace, he describes the two of them “dressed in identical silver outfits, wearing the same jewelry. Their hair had been teased into identical, high pompadours and sprinkled with sequins. To me they looked like a matched pair of queens. Whether it was true or not, they appeared to me to be lovers.”37 The young man was bolder in his palimony deposition. Describing his initial meeting with Liberace, he noted that he had greeted him “in his dressing room with his present lover Vince Cardell.”38 The younger pianist certainly lived with Lee at the Shirley Street house. Cardell himself asserted that he had shared space for “six years” in the Liberace mansion.39 He continued to reside there after Thorson moved in. Liberace himself introduced Cardell to his Las Vegas audiences as “my friend and companion.”

  As he did with other protégés and lovers, Liberace also supported Cardell’s career. Not without talent, Cardell became a minor celebrity under Liberace’s aegis. He played major hotels in Las Vegas, performed at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and appeared with his mentor on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. His patron cut a disc with him in 1975, Liberace Presents Vince Cardell, and a second in 1976, Piano Gems.40 Liberace also sponsored Cardell’s solo album, Vince.41 Cardell toured extensively with the showman. In Milwaukee, in August 1977, a reviewer referred to Cardell as “Liberace’s handsome protege.”42 The following year, the good-looking young lounge pianist accompanied the performer on his extended European tour that included a performance at the London Palladium from April 23 through May 7, 1978.43 As late as August 1978, the two were performing on the same stage. The Milwaukee Sentinel affirmed the protégé’s presence at that time, even as it compared him invidiously to his patron. “Less effective was the star’s associate and protege, Vince Cardell,” began the this notice. “Once Liberace’s chauffeur, Cardell has developed a pleasant enough musical personality and sounded okay during a ‘Slaughter on 10th Ave.’ duet with his boss. But his solo rendition of ‘Ebb Tide’ was so overblown, that, lacking a gimmick, Cardell’s career potential seemed modest in comparison with Liberace’s.”44

  Perhaps the performer’s inadequacy at Milwaukee’s Alpine Music Theater in August of 1978 arose from his difficulties at home with his boss/companion. Scott Thorson had been Liberace’s “main boyfriend,” as Rechy termed it, for a year by this time. When Thorson had first come to Las Vegas in 1977, Liberace had complained that he could not get rid of Cardell because of a contractual obligation.45 That contract seems to have been expiring by midsummer 1978. After August, playbills no longer carried Cardell’s name. Long before this time, difficulties had corroded the relationship. Scott Thorson offers both first- and secondhand accounts of the problems. For one thing, Liberace had a competitor for Cardell’s affection: Thorson reported that Cardell was married with children, and the wife did not surrender her man without a struggle. She “came West to try to save her marriage,” reported Thorson. By Thorson’s lights, “Lee, still smarting years later from what he perceived as a rejection, was outraged because Jerry actually had the nerve to sleep with his wife.”46 The patron found still greater cause for alarm in Cardell’s personal behavior, according to Thorson. Taking his mentor’s objections at face value, Thorson related that Cardell was “drinking heavily, getting in fights.” One night he had driven off in an expensive Mercedes that belonged to John Ascuaga, the owner of the Nugget Casino in Tahoe. Pursued by police, Cardell had wrecked the vehicle and wound up in jail, to his patron’s complete horror. “Lee, afraid the press might find out what had happened and ambush him as he walked into the jail, had fearfully gone to bail Jerry out. Lee told me,” Thorson repeated, “it had taken all his influence to keep the incident out of the courts and out of the papers.”47

  In the summer of 1977, the air was thick with tension between the two even before Thorson appeared. Meeting Liberace for the first time with Cardell, the new boy smelled sulfur. Every time Thorson encountered them together, he sensed that he had just interrupted another argument. In retrospective analysis, he played his own history with Liberace back to Cardell: the showman was trying to get rid of this “monster” of ingratitude who no longer understood or cared about his needs but wanted only to take advantage of his bounty. “I’m surrounded by takers,” he wept to the boy about Cardell. “Do you know what it feels like to have no one you can trust? They’ve all got their hands out. Gimme, gimme, gimme! Everybody wants a piece of my action!” he protested to the eighteen-year-old.48

  Thorson’s joining Liberace’s entourage did nothing to relieve the difficulties. In his innocence, he expressed surprise that his presence might actually have exacerbated the tension between the two feuding males. “When we arrived at the house Jerry was there, looking upset. I’d been hoping he’d be
gone before I arrived. The incredibly awkward situation I’d gotten myself into finally hit me. I’d be sharing the house with Lee’s former companion, a man who saw me as his replacement and had every reason to hate me.”49 This arrangement persisted for months. The circumstances became more chaotic when Cardell himself took to sharing his bed with his companion, his valet, according to Thorson. With the two other men shouldering him aside and taking “delight in intimidating me,” Thorson described the Shirley Street house as a hotbed of intrigue and hostility—all of which, according to Thorson, the master blithely ignored until Thorson himself forced his patron’s hand.

  Behind the Candelabra describes the denouement with the glowering young piano player: “Tears, anger, coldness, had no effect on him. Saying he had no place to go, Jerry simply stayed on in the Vegas house on Shirley Street. So Lee did what he always did when he needed someone to play the heavy. He called in Seymour Heller. . . . According to Lee, they agreed that Jerry must be made to understand the jeopardy of his position. Lee didn’t want to risk rejecting Jerry and having him take his revenge by telling the world that Lee was a homosexual. In the past Lee had gone to great lengths to protect his name and his reputation, to keep the secrets of his homosexuality from the world. He was prepared to do so again—and he wanted to be sure Jerry knew it.” Lee and his hovering houseboy, identified as “Carlucci,” then found a house for the hapless former protégé and made a secret deposit. “Then Carlucci, acting under Lee’s orders, packed Jerry’s belongings. Jerry came home one afternoon to find his bag and baggage neatly stacked outside by the front door.” Carlucci instructed him to leave quietly or be removed physically. He vanished from Shirley Street forever, according to Thorson.50

  What were the personal dynamics of the relationship between the two piano players? How different was this affair from the ones that preceded it? How different was it from the two that followed? Cardell himself is silent. Before his death in 1997, Liberace’s last lover, Cary James, left fragmentary evidence of his five-year relationship with the showman. These shards offer clues about Liberace’s love life, his sexual relations, and the values that inspired his biography. Scott Thorson’s memoir offers a much fuller picture.

  Behind the Candelabra is no more the whole truth than what Liberace himself spun out as autobiography, but the former illuminates vast areas of Liberace’s furiously guarded person and persona. Indeed, it is the richest source of answers to questions that Liberace himself, or even Thorson, hardly contemplated. What do you call a lover? What is the nature of homoerotic desire? What is homoerotic bonding? What is the source of order in homosexual unions? How is it maintained? How do men love each other? What is life like between two men? What is family for gay men? Who, in short, does what, and when? The performer was silent about his love affairs, but they can be reconstructed, if partially, from his lover’s account. Beyond all this, especially in conjunction with James’s recollections and other still more fragmentary data, Thorson’s book offers essential material for understanding such questions as they apply to the Liberace.

  Where does the homosexual bond fit within modern life? Throughout the twentieth century, as individual desire has taken increasing primacy over social obligations and institutional restraint, issues of authority and governance have bedeviled even the most traditional family order in Western society. Liberace himself suffered from the disjunction between the individual and social order as applied to normal relations, otherwise defined, between men and women, husbands and wives, parents and children. Was the traditional male function first to spawn, then to defend and provide for his family, while the woman bore children, nurtured them, and ordered the hearth in deference to the husband’s defense of the sill? If so, Liberace’s parents were both disasters. Salvatore Liberace was inconstant as a provider or even as a presence in the household, while his wife bore the burden both of mothering and of providing income, even if she did neither particularly well. She lacked appreciation for her spouse and harped on his failures; he, meanwhile, responded in kind and added physical force to his rebuttals. Adding insult to injury, he then philandered, abandoned his own brood when his youngest was still in grade school, and left Walter, his second son, still in his teens, to act as the “man of the family.” This chaos followed the Liberaces into the next generation. Just as Liberace’s own parents divorced and remarried, his brother George wed five times, his sister Angie twice. Rudy’s life was a disaster from beginning to alcoholic end. The problems extended even into the third generation, when kinky, underground “‘zines” gossiped about Rudy’s daughter Ina subjecting the television star Kristy McNichol to a palimony suit.51

  While such chaos could disrupt even the more socially acceptable heterosexual union, what was to be made of homosexual transaction, beyond mere physical act or activity? Exterior to the laws of the state and religion, beyond the sanctions of custom and tradition, and, most critically of all, unrelated to bearing and raising children, the homosexual bond was still more vulnerable, fluid, and arbitrary, more subject to whim and fancy. Although mostly after Liberace’s time, some social critics and reformers have addressed the issue by advocating the legalization of homosexual marriage. Proposed at the very time when the formal sanctions for traditional marriage and family are disintegrating, such efforts seem almost quaint. The appeal, however, speaks to problems of stability and order within homoerotic desire.52

  If homoeroticism is a love that dares not speak its name, naming defines other difficulties within it. What to call men who couple with other men, men who prefer other men sexually, has always been something of a problem in discussing such activity. Indeed, the same problem applies to the activity itself. Gender studies in the last third of the twentieth century have multiplied these difficulties by emphasizing theory, language, or semantics over actual activity. By this measure, Michel Foucault and his deconstructing followers maintain that only with a name does an activity acquire meaning. According to this logic, there was no such thing as “homosexuality” before the term was invented in the late 1860s. Hence follows the raft of titles around the theme: Inventing Homosexuality, Inventing Heterosexuality, and even Before Sexuality, where intellectual manipulation of words supersedes, say, the physical manipulation of a penis. Leo Bersani offers a nice critique of what he calls these “desexualizing discourses”: “You would never know from most of [these] works . . . that gay men, for all their diversity, share a strong sexual interest in other human beings anatomically identifiable as male.”53 The academic preoccupation with categories of language has obscured not only anatomy but also the consistency of homoerotic desire over time. Every age—not to mention every culture—has had its own terms for same-sex sex and those who participate in it; these change about as often as clothing styles: pederast, pederasty, sodomite, sodomy, catamite, bugger, sissy, molly, fairy, fruit, faggot, queer, libertine, and “the fashionable vice,” as described by the Duchesse d’Orleans, the wife of the stableboy-loving brother of Louis XIV.54 “Gay” has come to be more or less standard usage, yet it, too, possesses liabilities for many: in the first place, it is so loose and vernacular as to lack exactitude, and is applicable to men as well as women, for example; at the same time (as with its cross-gender meaning), it is so closely associated with a political phenomenon and a cultural movement as to compromise its larger homoerotic and even sexual significance, even as many actually prefer it for these very reasons.55 Does any reality lurk beneath the changing language? The historian Rictor Norton, for one, argues yes. For all the variety of semantic usages, he argues, whatever the fellow calls himself or is called by society, the end—and even the form and process—of homoerotics changes little; the mincing Agathon in Aristophanes’ fifth-century Thesmophoriazusae, in this view, is still recognizable in any modern queer enclave from San Francisco to Berlin to Tokyo.56

  Difficulties in naming the activity or phenomenon of homoeroticism have still other manifestations. How does a man identify the object of his homoerotic affection? While
Gay Pride has stressed the legitimacy of introducing a mate as one’s “lover,” doing so does not come without its problems, as it emphasizes the emotional or passionate elements in a relationship rather than the social bonds. “Boyfriend” has some of the same liabilities and is also somewhat precious. “Partner” or merely “friend” possess powerful currency and work especially well in a particular context. “Companion” has its usage, even as it suggests more formal relations missing from “friend,” much less from “lover.” “Longtime companion” or “life companion” is the stuff of obituaries, but the terms get at something of the permanence lacking in “friend.” “Spouse” works, but it has little currency; “significant other” has a high descriptive quality even as it suggests a kind of jocular sociology. “Mate” works like “spouse,” and a mate, especially in the absence of that mate, is often referred to only half in jest as a “husband” or a “wife.” All of these naming problems—with their deeper implications for human relations and human bonding—thread through the lives and sexual affairs of men who love men, and they appear throughout Liberace’s sex and social life.

  The showman worked out his own solutions to such problems. For one thing, his sexual engagements generally seem to have been fleeting, at least prior to the 1970s. He solved the conundrum of homosexual bonding by failing to bond. He solved the problem of naming by not identifying sexual partners at all. The homosexual transaction became, then, essentially a “physical act or activity.” He made sex itself the end of a relationship, which, almost by definition, became transient, temporary, impermanent, and—in its own way—as unreal as it was illicit.