“Tricking around,” as Thorson called it, did not require either names or commitment; even so, it also introduces another element in Liberace’s sexual character. It is important for itself. He was the aggressor; he called the shots; he determined the length and duration of the act. His sissy persona notwithstanding, he was the pursuer, the hunter, the initiator—the “man,” as traditionally defined—in relationships. Indeed, there is actually something of a rule, here, suggested in the maxim of the gay underground, “butch on the streets; queen in the sheets.” If this suggests one truth, the inversion also applies: the more feminine appearing a man, the more likely he is to be a “top.” Homosexual relations are not so rigid as to preclude playing off one role against another, so the character of the “butch bottom” emerges, an aggressive partner who demands to be serviced sexually. Especially post-Stonewall, all sexual categories within the gay community became more fluid, and while these shifting models might have affected Liberace’s sexual attitudes and practices, his impulse to control a relationship never altered.
With his relentless ambition, driving will, and furious pace, elements of his own character suggest his predisposition toward domination well before his celebrity. Fame exaggerated the trait. He was only thirty-four in 1953 when he had his fling with the fledgling actor Rock Hudson, who was just six years his junior. According to the actor, however, “Lee was very patronizing . . . and he treated everybody like his protege.” Over three decades later, his last lover, Cary James, could still have offered the same generalizations about Liberace’s manner, although James voiced no objections to being patronized.
In reflecting on the love affair between himself and Liberace, Scott Thorson assumed that the homosexual convention is founded in equality and in “the true meeting of minds.” Thorson, however, offers only one example of the things that link men; elsewhere, even in his own memoir, he gives vivid evidence of inequality as the essential, defining component of Liberace’s love for him, not to mention his own love of Liberace. Liberace himself never betrayed any evidence that “a meeting of minds” was a part of his own romantic calculus. On the contrary, he did not want equals in bed with him and expressed no longing for a “meeting of minds.” Indeed, he did not particularly like dealing with his own mind, much less with the minds of others. As a very function of his ego, not to mention the peculiarities of homosexual affection, Liberace’s greater impulse was to chose partners not despite but because of their inferiority.
Equality and give-and-take relations with peers, sexual or otherwise, played little role in Liberace’s life. Despite his own celebrity, he called himself a stargazer who worshipped the famous. Just so, in his social or business relations, he liked men like Clarence Goodwin, John Jacobs, or even Seymour Heller, who were older or authoritative or both. Growing older, he replayed this role of patron/protector to a host of young performers. Although he certainly did not have sex with all the theatrical upstarts in his act over the years, his making of Vince Cardell’s career after 1975 offers a case in point to illustrate Liberace’s adopting the ordinary and making it special. The motive informed his romantic affairs as well.
Seeing the world in relentless terms of superiors and inferiors satisfied various needs in Liberace’s sexual as well as his social life. They echo the debilities of his youth, even as they anticipate his difficulties in establishing loving relations with others.57 When he was younger, he told Scott Thorson, he preferred older men as sexual partners. As he matured, he reversed the order. He needed to play one role or the other. In addition, he always loved the shoddy, the secondhand, the raw, the unpolished, the unfinished. He preferred things the world rejected—run-down houses, broken furniture, stray dogs, and, not least, human flotsam. One reporter captured the quality. “‘I’ve always liked to take something that is ready to be destroyed, decadent almost, and prove that it can have another life by restoring it,’” he told the journalist. “‘Some of my furniture that people admire most was wrapped in rope when I found it. It had to be glued back together. It’s much more of a satisfaction for me, if it’s really broken down.’ He has saved houses, pianos, vintage automobiles, old movie props. He has saved a pound’s worth of canines. . . . If, you find yourself thinking, he’s had his occasional troubles with people, it’s probably because he’s wanted to save them, too.”58
Was the Harold Way house an abandoned wreck when he bought it? Did he made it sparkle? He did the same with people. Was Vince Cardell driving a diaper truck to supply food for his wife and babies, leaving no time for him to cultivate his career? Lee would save him and make him shine, too. The model applied best of all to Scott Thorson.
Speaking to crucial needs in Liberace’s life, the protégé-as-lover model also entailed a self-defeating logic. What happens when the protégé outgrows his status, tires of dependence, and wants to stand alone or to acquire equality? This transformation suggests some of the problem that Liberace eventually had with Vince Cardell. The performer needed neediness; he did not need success, even if he himself had cultivated Cardell’s budding celebrity. Liberace possessed no obvious ability for making the jump to a new understanding. There were, meanwhile, always new boys to nurture, even as his loathing of conflict and confrontation predisposed him against dealing directly with a mate’s growth and need for independence. This was certainly the pattern he followed in his relationship with Scott Thorson; as Thorson described it, it also corresponded to Liberace’s relationship with other lovers and protégés. Men make poor protégé’s; youths make good ones.
Issues of equality versus inequality, superiority versus inferiority, or refinement versus roughness influenced Liberace’s sexual bonding in still other ways and also helped make up for the gaps in the language of homoerotics. He was his companions’ patron; he was also their boss and their employer, even if he had to invent jobs for them to perform.
As suggested in his inclusion of virtually his entire family on his payroll at one time or another, economics represented a means by which the showman both bonded with but also formalized, objectified, and, effectively, distanced and controlled his loved ones—whether they were siblings or bedmates. By virtue of the exchange of cash and the semiformal and sometimes formal contractual basis of his affairs, Liberace, willy-nilly, affirms a Lockean principle that permeates American cultural history, that all human relations, however intimate, are, ultimately, based on the reasonable exchange of goods and services. That exchange is a means of rationalizing and organizing, of limiting and controlling—even denying—the mindless vagaries of love and passion.
While the seventeenth-century English philosopher developed his theory of human understanding to apply to all traditional institutions—from government to family, he might well have balked at the application of contractual values to homoerotic exchanges. At the same time, the fluidity of those associations implies a comparably greater demand or need for order. Liberace’s effort to formalize his love affairs through contracts and money, then, reveals his own attempts to regularize the affair as well as to dominate his lovers. It offers resolution to fundamental problems within homoerotic relations and returns to the issue of what to call a lover.
“I’d like you all to meet my friend and companion, Scott Thorson,” the showman purred to his audiences during the time of this chauffeur’s tenure.59 What to call a lover? “During my years with him I was variously described as a chauffeur, bodyguard, and secretary/companion,” wrote Scott Thorson. “My predecessors had been called valets, proteges, yardboys, or houseboys, depending on their individual talents. Some, like me, wound up in the act.”60 When they split in 1982, Liberace dismissed Thorson publicly as “a disgruntled employee.” Lover and employee: what defines the relationship?
“He always thought love was about buying.”61
From the beginning of their affair, Liberace worked to pin down his relationship with Thorson through a cash or commercial nexus. “How would you like to go to work for me?” beamed the showman. “You could be my secr
etary.” When Thorson protested that he had no typing skills, the patron-to-be ran through a list of things the boy could do. “Hell, Scott, I can pay people to type. But I need a companion, a bodyguard, someone to keep Vince off my back, someone I can talk to the way I’ve talked to you tonight.”62 For such general duties of providing companionship, Lee promised him three hundred dollars a week, plus expenses. The boy agreed. Almost immediately, the older man took advantage of the situation. “One minute we were talking, and the next he grabbed me. . . . Lee wanted sex then and there!”63
Thorson had no secretarial skills, nor could he have been a bodyguard in any but the loosest, most inexact construction of the word. Others had filled this bill. John Rechy provided the evidence. When Rechy had first met the showman, Liberace’s “bodyguard-lover” had caught his boss redhanded at Rechy’s zipper.
Alerted by other similar times, he stands abruptly behind the star and looks down. The star withdraws his stumbling fingers.
“I knew it,” says the bodyguard-lover.
“Piss,” says the star.64
Scott Thorson was no secretary or bodyguard; he was, however, a chauffeur, if only a fake one. He drove Liberace on and off the stage in the various “prop-mobiles” of the showman’s performances. He also sold programs and concessions, later on, at concerts. What was true for Thorson applied to Liberace’s other companions before and after the big blond boy became a member of the pianist’s entourage. Liberace employed his last lover, Cary James, as a private secretary. Like Thorson, James was also the performer’s stage chauffeur. Vince Cardell began his tenure in the entourage as chauffeur as well, before he graduated to playing duets on stage with his boss.65
“Protégé” was another term that suggested both a homosexual bond and a protector-employer connection, although it meant neither, necessarily. The first meaning applies to the young people Liberace encouraged in his act through theatrical employment, but the expression is also used, ambiguously, to suggest a sexual or quasi-sexual relationship in other contexts. Thus, while Liberace applied the word without sexual overtones to a variety of young performers in his act, for example, to the banjoplunking Scottie Plummer, it conveys something else when applied to Vince Cardell, Thorson, and Cary James.
And then there was the term “houseboy.” The word connoted some erotic bonding sublimated in an employee-employer relationship, too. Liberace kept a series of these men in his entourage. Who was Gregory Scortenu? In The Things I Love, Liberace identified his houseman of the Cloisters as Gregory and Rumanian.66 He made the news scene, too. Papers described him as Liberace’s houseboy in 1975. This information made the press because Liberace was spending the night at the houseboy’s $100,000 Bel Air home when thieves broke in and lifted an expensive necklace. What was their relationship? What was a houseboy doing in such expensive digs? What was he doing with expensive jewelry? What was Liberace doing there? The newspaper article’s superficial objectivity hinted at answers, even as it failed to ask the questions.67 Lee had a whole gaggle of such men. They came. They went. Liberace’s numerous houses each required management. There was always a good-looking man to do the job. With his heavy French accent and sexy looks, George Llinares ran the house in Palm Springs from the late 1970s to the early eighties. When Liberace sacked him, he raged “that God would get him and, worse, that he would tell all to the National Enquirer.” He did not get his revenge until after his patron died.68 Depositions in Thorson’s palimony suit revealed that the “houseman” at Las Vegas was named Flynn.69 Was this the same clucking, intrusive Las Vegas houseboy that Thorson identified as “Carlucci” in Behind the Candelabra? Whether or not Flynn equals Carlucci; whether or not Liberace had sexual relations with the one, the two, or none, the majordomo at the Las Vegas establishment, as described by Thorson, still fulfilled the general role as defined in homoerotic culture. The houseboys and house managers, for one thing, were all exotics. A string of them appeared after Liberace’s death to testify at court hearings about his will, and the reporter for the Los Angeles Times recorded his amused wonder at the flashy assembly and unnatural behavior: “There was an uncommon amount of weeping on the stand, an uncommon number of male witnesses who arrived with shirts unbuttoned far down their chest, an uncommon seasoning of invective.”70 Thus he described the bitchy, weeping homos on parade for the delectation of the newspaper-reading Los Angelenos.
Although gay himself, young Scott Thorson had not experienced anything like this before moving into Shirley Street, and he memorialized his own astonishment at the types and forms. Carlucci, insisted the boy from the provinces, resembled no servant he had ever imagined. “He wore conspicuously tight jeans, a shirt open to the navel, and a thick gold chain around his neck. He had a narrow face, a beaked nose, dark olive skin, and eyes that darted about with lively curiosity. I later learned that he’d been a maitre d’ before being discovered by Lee and becoming a member of Lee’s household.”71
Carlucci failed to act like any servant the teenager had ever heard of either, although the pattern of bossy, patronizing, and fey valets, butlers, and other such characters appears elsewhere in homosexual culture, for example, in Rock Hudson’s entourage.72 According to Thorson’s description, Carlucci the houseboy played the gender-inverted role of good wife or solicitous mother in the Liberace household. He behaved like a protective former lover. At meals, he hovered like “a mother hen,” clucking at the diners to eat more of this, less of that.73 “Carlucci seemed to be in charge of every phase of his master’s private life,” Thorson mused. “He monitored Lee’s spending, his intake of food and drink. He laid out his clothes in the morning, ran his bath, and even tucked him into bed at night, oblivious of my being in the bed too. . . . Acting as if I wasn’t there, he fussed with the bedcovers, making sure Lee was comfortable and had everything he needed.”74 Carlucci also oversaw Vince Cardell’s removal from the Shirley Street house in Las Vegas. Just so, Thorson engineered Carlucci’s own removal from the household only a little later. The house-folk came, the housefolk went. Boys and men arrived; they vanished soon enough. Lovers came; they disappeared as inevitably, just as Lucille Cunningham had predicted. With access to the patron’s power, however, the favorite exercised imperium, as in late Rome.75
Employer, boss, teacher, mentor, and patron all defined Liberace’s role within his homoerotic relationships. The solution worked on a day-to-day basis. He got what he wanted and needed out of such men. Like the slippery stuff of naming, contractual obligations satisfied the most immediate obligations of his desire. Long term, however, they failed to fill the bill. Again, perhaps as a function of his age or of the legitimizing of homoerotic affection after Stonewall, after the sixties, such liaisons no longer fully satisfied the piano player’s longings. There’s the rub. What was the nature of his desire? What is the meaning of one man loving another? What does the nature of Liberace’s attraction suggest about homoeroticism in general, and about men loving each other in contrast to loving women? Who or what was the lover to the beloved, the beloved to the lover? Names, again, this time informal nicknames, offer clues to what was going on. If Liberace’s lovers might have been “protégé,” “chauffeur,” “houseboy,” “secretary,” or “bodyguard,” they were something else, too, and he assigned them names to match. These hint at the deepest longings in his character.
His last lover, Cary James, describing his relationship with the showman, told a reporter, “‘I called him Lee. His pet name for me was “Boo,” a name he just pulled out of thin air.’”76 Unbeknownst to the eighteen-year-old dancer in 1982, or even twelve years later, when the young man broke his devotion-imposed silence, the air was not actually so thin. The nickname had its own history. The showman had used a variation of the term for Thorson, calling him “Boober” or “Boober-loober.” More interesting still, Thorson and Liberace shared the nickname: they were both Boober and Boober-loober to each other.77 But the name is freighted with deeper meaning from Walter Liberace’s childhood. As a toddler, he hims
elf had been “Boo,” or “Boo-Loo.” Sam Liberace had bestowed the nickname. In discussing its origins in his memoir, Liberace repeated what Cary James had said when asked about the name by which Liberace referred to him: “That was dad’s nickname for me,” the showman said. “Why he called me that even he couldn’t remember.” He had just picked it out of the blue.78
Besides the fact that it alluded to mysterious intimacies between fathers and sons, the name possessed other significance. Liberace associated it with his first memory, when he was two or three years old—a memory he also linked with both his father and with the abandonment of or separation from his father. He also associated it with a triumphant discovery of his own identity. He repeated the sequence in his memoir. Sam, significantly enough, had reversed gender roles, and he was playing mother or first caregiver to the toddler. “But there were times when conditions were such that Dad couldn’t take ‘Boo-Loo’ with him,” he continued, notably writing in the third person. Abandoned by this father/mother to another’s care, the child wandered off to discover the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds, where the police then discovered him. Who are you? they quizzed the child. He was just the generic “kid” to his mother, he said; to his father, he was Boo-Loo. He is explicit: as the father’s son and with his father’s signifier, he had discovered the world. With this Boo-Loo identity, too, he did not merely discover the glittering world of the fairgrounds, but he won the attention of the world as well—in the police motorcycle ride home. Still further, once home, he dominated his family’s life, even as his mother, finally, moved back into the picture. He had triumphed on every front as his father’s Boo.79 And this was the variant of the name he applied to both of his last two lovers.
What did the entertainer have in mind? Names and naming were extremely important to him. This name was especially critical. It defined his earliest identity. In choosing it for his two adolescent lovers, he replicated his father’s role for him, so that he became, effectively, father to these later sons. Just so, as namer, he could become Salvatore himself—literally, savior. As Salvatore, in turn, he could be father to himself; he could father—make—himself. The name suggests even more complex issues. In some labyrinthine, narcissistic way, he was still his own father’s Boober to these men, so that they could play his father. If evoking fathers and sons, however, the name also tends to collapse the very distinctions it affirms. As simultaneously father, son, brother, and lover, Boo/Boober/Boober-loober denotes undifferentiated maleness.80
Liberace: An American Boy Page 45
