This was only the entrance. There was also the expansive main salon, “huge and even more ornately decorated than the entry,” the awed Thorson related. In the summer of 1977, Liberace had toured Bob Street and his young, blond friend through the fancy dining area and another chamber called the Moroccan Room. This latter, Thorson said, “featured a peacock-blue tiled floor covered with Persian rugs, mirrored and tiled walls, a soaring glass roof, and more Lucite furniture. The decor combined potted plants in wicker baskets, assorted candelabras, and antiques. Matched sculptures of pantalooned harem boys, each carrying an electrified candelabra on his head, flanked a mirrored bar. A breakfast table had been set with priceless oriental porcelain, as though Lee were expecting a second group of brunch guests. The room’s pièce de résistance was a stuffed peacock on a mirrored stand above the bar.”45
Finally, there was the master bedroom. This is where the two of them had bedded down for the first time, surrounded by the yapping dogs. This was the most outrageous room in the house, according to Thorson. Larger than most people’s houses, he said, it “could have held a football scrimmage.” Beside the huge canopied bed with its ermine spread, sofas, cocktail tables, a secretary, bureaus, chests of drawers, mirrors, chairs, the ever-present candelabra, and the like, the room also boasted a ceiling painted after the fashion of the Sistine Chapel, complete with its languid Adam in the center. The image of Liberace himself flitted among the sibyls and cherubs. It was not the only way in which the room’s decor hinted at the church: one wall held a large painting of the kneeling entertainer kissing the ring of (then Archbishop) Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston—whom Thorson identified as the pope. It had been painted by a loyal fan. The painting did not hinder the homoerotic devotions that occurred regularly in the huge bed across the room.
The master bath returned to pagan influences. From his first full flush of fame, the showman had had a thing for bathing grandeur. A Roman movie set had inspired the Valley Vista bath. He had posed repeatedly in that sunken tub for publicity stills. The Las Vegas bathroom was more of the same. “A gigantic oval tub circled by marble pillars stood in the center of the room. Hot and cold water came from gold fixtures in the shape of swans. There was enough marble on the ceiling and floor to restore a Roman bath,” Scott Thorson wrote.46 The showman scrubbed here cheerily for flashing cameramen; the lovers never appeared inside the frame.
For all the excesses of the Shirley Street and other residences, it was still a narrow life for Scott and Lee. “We might as well have been stranded on another planet instead of living just blocks from the glittering, twenty-four-hour-a-day world that is Vegas,” mused Thorson.47 Domesticity defined their lives completely. Insulated from the world, Liberace liked playing house. He and Scott both loved cooking, for example, “and when we had time,” Thorson recalled, they “dismissed the chef so we could prepare our own meals.”48
The Shirley Street mansion provided only one locus of their domestic reclusion. After they had been together a year, around Christmas 1978, according to Thorson, Liberace bought still another house, this one for Thorson himself, five blocks south of the Shirley Street complex, at 933 Laramore.49 It became their special secret hideaway, insisted the younger man. Its fourteen hundred square feet cost $58,000, but the showman poured over $100,000 into the little house, including $40,000 for furnishings that one of Thorson’s later lawyers dismissed ungenerously as “early Levitz.”50 After the last show at the Hilton, they fled here together in a complete escape from the world. No one knew of their whereabouts, and only the faithful Gladys Luckie even had the telephone number, according to Thorson. “Lee loved that house more than any of his mansions and took more satisfaction in it,” Thorson insisted. Here, according to Thorson, Lee lived out his domestic fantasies. “In my house, he played at being a hausfrau. He cooked and cleaned and fussed over me like a bride. My best, happiest memories of him come from the time we spent there. Pushing a vacuum, dusting furniture, fixing lasagna, Lee and I pretended to be equals.”51 The star derived pleasure from playing equal to Thorson, but likewise from Thorson’s playing his superior. He had “a corny sense of humor [and] loved to be teased, to have me make fun of his superior status. At night when he prepared for his performance, I joked that he was better dressed than Queen Elizabeth. ‘But I am an old queen,’ he quipped back.”52
From 1977 to 1979, the two delighted each other. Liberace told Thorson he never wanted another lover, “I saved the best til last,” he said.53 They planned wills that would include each other as beneficiaries. They discussed the adoption issue at this time. As the capstone of their bonding, in 1979, Liberace dreamed up the notion of plastic surgery for his young lover. He was twenty, Lee sixty. That was 1979, 1980. Trouble was already brewing in paradise.
For one thing, Thorson rankled under the isolation and control Liberace imposed. “In those days,” Thorson wrote, “Lee didn’t like me to have large blocks of free time. He wanted to know where I was and who I was with every minute.”54 If Thorson grumbled at the isolation of their lives, there were always presents to compensate. The “happy-happies,” as the celebrity called them, ranged from dogs to diamonds, unlimited clothing to Rolls-Royces. Thorson’s closet held many of these gifts: besides fur coats, he counted 200 shirts, a couple of hundred pairs of slacks, 50, 60, or 75 sports jackets, 15 to 20 pairs of leather pants, leather jackets, and 200 pairs of shoes.55
When the presents failed, Lee nagged about his young companion’s “kvetching.” If he was ravenous for the very bonding Liberace also needed, Thorson was only a teenager when they met, and presents, however costly, could not compensate him for his lack of contact with the outside world. Conversely, the showman himself resented his protégé’s longing for a larger society than Shirley or Laramore Streets, or the Cloisters.
Sequestration and power were only two complaints that marred their union. Did Thorson joke about inverting their status? How much he did so is difficult to calculate, as it seems that he himself was only half aware of the problem, but the young man was arrogant, possessive, and demanding in his own right. If, in his memoir, he returns repeatedly to his patron’s authority, his offense came in part from the same tendency in his own character. Neither modesty nor humility numbered among his virtues. “I was probably the only person in the world who didn’t treat him like a star twenty-four hours a day, kissing his behind at every opportunity,” he boasted.56 If he joked with his patron, he also scolded him, for example, about visiting porn shops. Did the millionaire put his family up in hotels when they visited? “For God’s sake Lee,” Thorson stormed, “they’re your family. How can you ask them to stay in a hotel when we have so much room?”57 Angie stayed with them from then on.
“I’ve been told I was the only one of Lee’s lovers to insist on playing more than a passive role in his life,” Thorson reflected.58 He recounted how he altered Lee’s staff—getting this houseboy sacked or transferring another one he liked. While he engineered Carlucci’s removal, he oversaw Gladys Luckie’s transfer from Hollywood to Las Vegas, for example. He demanded salary changes among the staff. His aggressiveness set others’ teeth on edge. “Evidently I intimidated some and made others jealous,” he said.59 Lucille Cunningham’s explosion about all the boys who had preceded him confirms his judgment. Innocently enough, he himself offered other evidence of agitating the Liberace faithful. Looking for proof of his mentor’s willfulness, he produced evidence of his own. After six months with Lee, he mentioned, incidentally, that he was “still having trouble with some of the staff.” His complaint prompted a meeting in which the star declared: “The most important person in my life is Scott! His job is to make me smile and keep me happy.”60 If the Liberace people snapped to at their boss’s veiled threat, it was not the kind of pronouncement calculated to curb Thorson’s vanity.
The boy’s arrogance offended others beyond the staff. Thorson glowed over Debbie Reynolds’s visit to Shirley Street, insisting she was more like a peer than a famous star.61 Reynolds he
rself, however, found her friend’s companion irritating, obtrusive, and thickheaded: “Why do you keep interrupting?” she exploded to Thorson on one occasion. “I came here to talk to Lee, not you. Why don’t you go walk the dogs?” After the boy left, Liberace thanked her. “He doesn’t understand when he should just listen.” She then admonished the showman about having such people in his entourage. “I know, I know, but you know how lonely it is on the road,” he offered.62 If Thorson’s aggressiveness appealed to one part of Liberace’s character, it offended another. The showman’s hatred of confrontation—as indicated by the Reynolds story—suggests another difficulty that plagued the relationship. It would have its own consequences later.
If Thorson was hardly sensitive to the way his own ego aggravated the showman, he did describe other problems more clearly. Sex was not the least of them. While the difficulties increased with time, Thorson zeroed in on two problems at the outset, his patron’s effeminacy—“queeniness”—on the one hand, and his sexual appetites on the other.
The first is important in Thorson’s memoir, although it is not the most critical problem he discusses. He himself showed up at one of his legal depositions wearing makeup, but he describes his initial offense at the showman’s mascaraed eyes when he memorialized his first visit to the Shirley Street mansion.63 “Liberace not only looks like a queen, he lives like one,” he protested.64 Just so, his patron’s full makeup revolted him at first, he said. “I was unaccustomed to a 58—or whatever—year old, 59 year old man seducing me with a full face of make-up on, to go bed with hands full of diamonds, wearing his make-up.”65
However calculated or even hypocritical his objections, Thorson’s skepticism about a feminized gay style reflects one standard opinion within homoerotic discourse, particularly among men of his generation. While the Stonewall riot actually began with a revolt of drag queens, men in female attire, what quickly followed was a shift in homosexual sensibility, which favored the “macho,” “butch,” or even a caricature of traditional masculinity. Cowboys, cops, leathermen, and stevedores came to represent the visual norm, what was termed the “clone look” at the time. “When I was a boy, gay men were always mooning over straight GIs; now we lust after each other. Perhaps that’s the origin of the Clone,” wrote the critic Edmund White of the phenomenon: “We’ve become what we always wanted.”66 The gay musical combo of the times, the Village People, with their macho costumes and “Macho Macho Man” lyrics, got it just about right. If the peroxided queen never disappeared completely, she was subtly displaced by old images of “trade,” or, better still, “rough trade”—straight men of the working classes who periodically favored sex with men. The celebration of this form of masculinity dominated the gay world Thorson considered standard. Being gay was no big deal to him, he insisted. Thorson protested that “I’d grown up thinking being a homosexual was neither good nor bad, but simply a fact of life.” Liking men or liking men as well as women was no big deal: it “didn’t seem like much of an issue. I accepted it the way I accepted being blond and blue-eyed, as part of the package called Scott Thorson.”67 The only difference between gay and straight men was that the former desired men, not women. “Fagginess,” effeminacy, and queeniness embarrassed Thorson, he insisted. Men should be men; they should look and act like men regardless of their sexual orientation.
By this logic, if gay men should look like normal fellows, their culture should also resemble that of traditional men. Thus, Thorson expressed appreciation for homosexual unions that replicated those of heterosexuals. “Two of Lee’s oldest and dearest friends served as a role model for the relationship I hoped he and I would share,” he related. “They’d been together two and a half decades.” He encouraged Lee to bring them out West. “I hoped their obvious stability, so different from most of the gay behavior that we saw day in and out, would rub off on us. Most of all, I hoped that Lee and I would have a long-lasting relationship like theirs.”68
Thorson’s preference for manliness and his desire for a heterosexualized gay culture, however, was only part of his problem with his new patron. A second category related: Thorson disliked his mentor’s sexual style. Lee’s randiness created various tensions between the two men, according to Thorson.
For one thing, his mentor’s desire for constant sex irritated him. “I’d completely underestimated Lee’s sex drive,” Thorson grumbled.69 Had the star attempted, to Thorson’s dismay, to bring him off during their first private encounter? He would put the make on his companion almost anywhere. “I was scared to death the staff would catch us,” Thorson reflected. “Lee didn’t share my concern. His sex drive was at an all-time high and it made him reckless.”70 He was “the world’s happiest most amorous drunk,” Thorson insisted. Fellow airline passengers got a Liberace Special when the entertainer had downed a couple of drinks. “I often found myself having to fend off his advances on the plane,” Thorson reflected. “We’d made a pact that I would treat him like a superstar in public but that was a little hard to do when he got high and started patting my leg and calling me ‘Boober’ in front of some wide-eyed stewardess. It was embarrassing and humiliating. I’m not ashamed of being gay, but I hated being groped in public. At the same time, I couldn’t help laughing. We must have been quite a sight.”71
Liberace’s insatiable sex drive created secondary issues that came between them. For one thing, his body failed to keep up with his desire. Suffering a problem of impotence, he underwent surgery for “a silicone implant that made him semierect all the time.” It did not always help. “Although his interest in sex was at an all-time high, his ability to achieve satisfaction had greatly decreased. Despite the silicone implant he had difficulty achieving full arousal.” If he had sex-related problems, his additional attempts at solutions, according to Thorson, caused more difficulties. Amyl nitrite—“poppers” in gay parlance—snorted during sex radically intensifies orgasmic sensations; according to Thorson, Liberace used the drug to heighten or achieve orgasm, and this offended his boyfriend, who refused to share the contents of the little vials.72
Thorson identified a second and still more intense source of conflict between them in Liberace’s affection for pornography. In Thorson’s mind, the predilection related to Liberace’s demanding sex to begin with. “I hated those films, hated the fact that Lee like them so much and wanted me to watch them with him. They aroused him, while they turned me off. Each time Lee viewed one of these tapes he’d want to have sex,” he fumed. But he also disliked the films because he associated them with another of his preconceptions. He considered them “sad” or “boring,” but he also complained “that homosexual pornography seemed embarrassingly faggy. . . . Lee’s porn films often starred men who in the vernacular would be called ‘flaming fags.’ There are guys like that out there but they’re not representative of the homosexual population as a whole,” he reiterated.73
Thorson named still other sex-related issues between them. For his patron, Thorson objected, sex was essentially kinky sex. Sexual experimentation turned him on, “the kinkier the better.”74 If Lee’s eyes had glowed at the dildos and other sexual paraphernalia in the Ft. Lauderdale porno shop, Thorson insisted it all left him cold. Although anal sex was a standard form of homosexual intercourse, the young man also considered it “kinky,” unfortunate, or even sick—a manifestation of the post-Stonewall gay licentiousness he eschewed. Although Liberace himself was reputed to be a top man who favored this particular mode of sexual expression, he and Thorson lived together for five years, without, according to Thorson’s memoir, indulging in the activity. If Thorson found the mere desire for the act unsettling, Liberace, conversely, found in his companion’s refusal to indulge him a source of complaint as well. The conflict increased with time. “If you loved me you’d do what I want,” the patron insisted. Anal sex was not low on his list of desires. “If you really cared about me you wouldn’t ask me to do things I hate,” the adolescent shot back. Anal sex? “I hated even the thought,” fumed the protég�
�.75
As another manifestation of his kinkiness, Lee, insisted his lover, “preferred to have a variety act—on stage and behind closed doors.”76 Liberace liked a lot of sex from his lover, but he was used to a lot of sex from a lot of men, as well. The entertainer was always on the prowl. His eye roved constantly. Although Thorson believed that his companion had been sexually faithful up to the very end of their relationship, the showman flirted outrageously. “He’d always been flirtations towards other attractive young men, but now his flirting became so obvious that it embarrassed me. When he had a few drinks he’d come on to teenage boys as though I wasn’t even there.”77 Thorson professed his hatred of promiscuity and his devotion to monogamy. By his own reckoning, he was intensely jealous. Early in their relationship, they accepted an invitation to attend a dinner with the comic Dom DeLuise. While the host seated Thorson next to him, he put the guest of honor next to a strikingly handsome fellow, and Thorson steamed throughout the meal, fretting about whether his lover “was attracted to his handsome companion.”78
Both miserable, they reached an impasse in 1981. They agreed to try an “open relationship,” Thorson said. While providing the showman with the opportunity to indulge in the sexual experimentation he craved, according to Thorson, it allowed the younger partner, in turn, to keep a home of his own. “We would continue to live together as friends and companions. . . . We’d just be sharing a part of ourselves with other people.” The experiment foundered because of mutual jealousy, and their romance became even more sour. They stopped having sex at all, which fueled Thorson’s suspicions that Liberace was seeing someone else. “I knew Lee too well to think he’d gotten hooked on celibacy.”79
Liberace: An American Boy Page 48
