These sociosexual problems did not define the extent of the couple’s difficulties. Indeed, perhaps the greatest difficulty of all lay in the young boyfriend’s accelerating drug use after 1979. Thorson himself discusses his growing drug habit as a descent into hell. He tends, however, to justify his drug use as an effect of his difficulties at home. Thorson relates that by 1980, his patron was simply tiring of him, searching for occasion to drop the “aging” twenty-one-year-old for a new, younger boy. He was “a Dracula who never wearied of the taste and touch of youth.”80 Drugs soothed Thorson’s jealous pain, he explains. This response does full justice neither to his patron’s motives nor to his own addiction.
If Liberace preferred young men to old, a source of this preference lay in his desire for control and order. In this regard, he might have experienced less anxiety about Thorson’s being long in the tooth by 1981 than about his being out of his mind on drugs. Thorson’s own summary of Liberace’s breakup with Vince Cardell confirms this assessment. In the first place, Cardell was not an adolescent but a twenty-five-year-old man when he moved in with the showman in the mid-seventies. He neither looked nor acted boyish. It was not his age that strained the relationship, according even to Thorson himself; it was rather Cardell’s drinking and fighting that put the boss off. If Cardell’s behavior distressed the showman, Thorson’s was much worse.
After 1981, Thorson lurched toward disaster. He possessed a virtually unlimited amount of money and no constraints: a disastrous combination for almost any adolescent male, especially one who had been undisciplined by family, church, or social institution. His excesses were becoming public, too. It was reported that he came to shows drunk; the Las Vegas Hilton management objected to Thorson driving onto the stage any more.81 If his drinking was escalating, his drug habits were worse still. Thorson himself blamed his habit on the plastic surgeon, Dr. Jack Startz, who had first prescribed him diet pills and painkillers in 1979. Thorson insisted that he kept his cocaine habit at “a manageable level for two years,” but he also suggests that his addiction absorbed all of his enormous allowance—and more. Thus, he related how he bought jewelry on a credit card “and then turned the jewelry over to the doctor in return for prescription bottles full of pills.”82 Quaaludes, amphetamines, and pharmaceutical cocaine soon turned to regulation cocaine. According to later testimony, his use of coke had become habitual by late 1980.83 He was still far from the lowest rung of hell, however. Soon enough, snorting became freebasing. He became a crack addict.84
He was out of control. Nothing Cardell had done could match his capriciousness. His memoirs record a measure of his irresponsibility; even fragmentary data in legal depositions hint at more. Liberace himself left evidence of his lover’s state of chaos. One evening, in January 1982, he said, Thorson disappeared. The showman and a friend discovered him at 933 Laramore. They could see him through the window. His stupor was so profound, they could not determine if he was still breathing. The showman was frantic, but publicity, always his nemesis, lurked in the background. “If you break a window (and he’s alive) he can accuse you of breaking and entering and you’ll get in the newspapers and it will be bad publicity,” insisted the friend, Fred Favorite. Therefore, they resorted to the Las Vegas fire rescue squad.85
By Christmas 1981, things had been going on like this for months. Thorson had new masters. He had plunged himself into an underworld of sex and drugs, corruption and exploitation, excess and illegality. The scene evokes the fictional cosmos of the 1997 movie Boogie Nights, which chronicles the world of pornographic film, illicit sex, uncountable cash, unlimited drugs, violent crime, corrupted norms, and, not least, incalculable hubris. Indeed, the film was specifically inspired by the very drug-addled hell into which Thorson had descended.
Of its nature, this world is murky, its actors obscure. Thorson’s deposition named some of its chief protagonists. Chris Cox ran the Odyssey—“a homosexual night club,” and Odyssey Restaurant. Cox was also Lee’s former lover, Thorson said. Liberace had introduced them.86 Nick—a.k.a. Anthony—Papadakis managed the Odyssey; he became Thorson’s sometime lover or sexual partner. Still more critical was Eddie Nash, legally Adel Nasrallah, who “owned a chain of strip joints and punk-oriented nightclubs in LA.” Nash dealt drugs: “Eddie was Scott’s cocaine connection,” pronounced the Los Angeles Times.87 Just as Thorson was beginning his legal wrangle with Liberace, in April 1982, Nash was being convicted of drug trafficking; authorities suspected him of still more violent crimes. These people and their circle had become Thorson’s closest associates as 1981 closed. They supplied him with drugs, friendship, sex, and other connections—like the lawyers he would use to attack his old patron after their split.
If his deposition and news reports offer one window on this world, his memoir left another, although he veiled the characters with pseudonyms. Chief among these underworld figures was “Mr. Y, someone I met through Lee.” This character generally corresponds to Chris Cox of the depositions. Thorson detailed the relationship in his book. “Y was an easterner from the Boston area. He and Lee went way back; they’d tricked around when Lee was scrounging a living playing small East Coast Clubs. Mr. Y was one of the more unsavory characters in Lee’s life. He ran a gay nightclub in Hollywood and openly boasted of his underworld connections. At one time, after a publicized gangland-style killing Y even hid out in one of Lee’s properties.”
A man he called “Joe” in the text, “one of Mr. Y’s close friends,” was equally disreputable. This character appears to represent the real-life Eddie Nash. “Joe” had been charged with “equally serious crimes” to those committed by “Mr. Y.”88 The two “must have thought of me as the perfect mark, a guy with a drug problem and, through Lee, the means to support it,” he averred. “For the next year Y, while pretending to be my friend, served as my supplier. He and Joe systematically stripped me of my savings and some of my cars, and Y introduced me to freebasing, the most dangerous form of cocaine addiction.”89
If he considered Nash the source of his problem before 1982, Thorson had changed his mind by the time he published Behind the Candelabra. He named Ed Nash in his preface and thanked him for his “personal support and understanding.” This corresponds to his tribute to “Joe,” who “in a totally ironic twist of fate,” he wrote, “has become a sort of mentor to me, and has more than made up for things that happened in the past.”90 History and the courts proved the shallowness of Thorson’s devotion to Adel Nasrallah.
As Behind the Candelabra was going to press, complete with its commendation of Nasrallah, Thorson was preparing to reveal Eddie Nash’s sins and crimes, even as he exposed the involutions of the whole Odyssey drug/sex scene. By this time, Thorson was mired even deeper in his addiction. By 1987, he found himself in desperate straits. An initial settlement with Liberace from 1982, which included various automobiles, was long gone. Ed Nash had gotten the Rolls, Chris Cox the others. It was a trade for which Thorson never saw any cash.91 Money from a second settlement of January 1987 vanished just as quickly. He still had his habit. He turned to theft. In 1988, he was in jail awaiting sentencing “for a drug-related armed robbery in which he pleaded guilty.” To reduce his time, he snitched on his old sometime mentor, Eddie Nash.92 His revelation recreated the insidious world of 1981 in which he had lived for a year or more. It hinged on coke, sex, and murder.
In 1981, four people had been bludgeoned to death in a home in Laurel Canyon. Police fingered the Odyssey group. They did not get exactly what they wanted. They settled for John Holmes instead. Like the Mark Wahlberg character, Dirk Diggler, in Boogie Nights, Holmes had founded his huge pornographic reputation on an equally huge sexual organ. A colossus, as it were, of the 1970s pornographic scene, Holmes had moved in the same circle as Cox, Nash, and Thorson. He, like the protagonists of the film, also succumbed to drugs, sex, and violence. He died in March of 1988 of HIV-related infections. In 1982, the state charged him with the Laurel Canyon murders. The jury acquitted him. Later, police insi
sted that they had known all along who had actually committed the crime but lacked evidence for an arrest. In his own trial, Holmes had fingered the Odyssey characters. “The porn actor,” according to news reports, “told police that he had led killers to a home in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles at the behest of a revenge-crazed Nash, who two days earlier had been robbed of cocaine and $10,000 by two of the murder victims.”93
During the time of the Holmes trial, Chris Cox had told Thorson that the wilds of Laurel Canyon could absorb more victims. Whereupon, Thorson retorted, “Chris, if you were smart you would pull my teeth”—in reference to dental identification.94 If Thorson could make morbid jokes about such things, he also professed to know what was going on. Had the cops gotten the wrong man in Holmes? Thorson now set them right. In September 1988, the Los Angeles Times carried the headline, “Scott Thorson Testifies against Convicted Cocaine Trafficker Adel (Eddie Nash) Nasrallah and Gregory D. Diles at Their Pretrial Hearing for the Drug-Related 1981 Murders of Four People.”95 The boy from La Crosse, not yet thirty, had seen the last of fame and notoriety. His name and face vanished from the news. His old patron was two years in the grave. He hadn’t been a prisoner in paradise for seven years when he confronted incarceration someplace rather short of the pearly gates in 1988.
The idyll was long gone. The relationship had become something very different well before the two broke up. As 1981 came to a close, Thorson said, “we had terrible fights, instigated by me when I caught Lee paying attention to a younger man, or by Lee when he thought I was stoned. We’d wind up in a shouting match that always ended with Lee calling me a ‘monster.’”96 Notwithstanding his conflicted protests of love and affection in his memoir, depositions in the palimony suit confirm that Thorson was thinking about splitting in January or February—splitting and getting his due, as well. At that time, he consulted a lawyer about confirming the agreements he had reached with his old mentor.97
The confrontations between the two men turned nastier still. Thorson towered over his mentor by perhaps half a foot, and if cocaine encourages mania, Thorson, clean and sober, was also capable of violence and destructiveness. Hyped by cocaine, his jealousy careened toward violence. While he professed shock that his lover might fear him, he described himself smashing everything in sight when he discovered the older man’s infidelity. His patron’s anxieties were well founded. This state of affairs continued for perhaps six months. It ended—and with it the relationship—more or less officially around the first day of spring, 1982.
Out of town for the funeral of one of his favorite foster mothers, Rose Carracappa, he said, Thorson returned to Lake Tahoe to discover that his fantasies about his lover’s faithlessness had finally materialized. As he described it in his memoir, he confirmed that in his absence Lee had bedded Cary James, a tall, blond, eighteen-year-old member of the Young Americans, a singing-dancing troupe in the Liberace show. Thorson went ballistic. With the showman cowering downstairs, he destroyed the Tahoe condominium bedroom. Still raging, he flew back to Los Angeles, where he holed up in the penthouse apartment at the Beverly Boulevard building. “Mr. Y” visited him the first night. He brought coke. They snorted; Thorson ranted.98 Papadakis, from the Odyssey, appeared too. He brought himself. They had sex.99 After a couple of days of this, Thorson said, he flipped again when he received news from the Cloisters that Lee had appeared in Palm Springs and “‘had two French kids here with him in bed.’” “The anger I’d felt in Tahoe,” Thorson responded, “was child’s play compared to the rage that shook me after learning that Lee had been tricking around as he’d done before we met.” He called the Cloisters. “How dare you? How dare you do that to me?” he ranted to his old lover. “I could kill you!”100 “He shouted all sorts of obscenities at me,” Liberace himself confirmed under oath. “He threatened to kill me. ‘I will kill you,’” he repeated. He was very disturbed about the French houseguests, the showman explained demurely.101
This impossible state of affairs ended on March 25. That very day, the pianist was scheduled to play for the fifty-fourth annual Academy Awards ceremony. He planned to stay at Beverly Boulevard. The apartment was, of course, occupied. He instructed Heller to resolve the matter. With an entourage that included Wayne Johansen, the half-brother; Tracy Schnelker of Tracy International, a private detective agency; and three of Schnelker’s employees, Heller appeared to evict the deposed favorite. In a wild melee that ensued in the penthouse, Thorson managed to get a call through to Mr. Y, who sent over four men “led by the manager of his gay nightclub.” Heller accused Thorson of threatening blackmail. Thorson shouted about the agreements he and Lee had made. Heller replied, according to Thorson, “that there was never no contract of some sort.”102 The disorder became either comic, surreal, or both when Thorson’s real-estate agent showed up in the middle of the fracas with papers for Thorson to sign for a condominium in Los Angeles.
Still in his nightclothes, and clutching his jewelry box, Thorson finally left the free-for-all in the parking lot and headed home with Papadakis, the Odyssey manager. Using Lee’s credit card, the two of them soon took off on a two-week excursion to Hawaii. Back by April 10, Thorson initiated a legal confrontation with his old lover. Within half a year, their private affections and domestic hatreds had been splashed across newspapers around the world, but Thorson was exiting history even as he was entering it. As for his lover of nearly five years, Liberace, at sixty-three, faced, one more time, the nightmare of having his sexual life scrutinized by the public. His handling of this horror during the last five years remaining him suggests both how little and how much his life had changed after Stonewall.
Fourteen
PETER PAN
He’s so unlike the rest of us. He doesn’t much care for the real world, you know.
ANGIE LIBERACE
Liberace was not a reader. He left no evidence at all of devotion to the written word. In the numerous photographs of his homes, books appear nowhere. In his nearly seventy years, he mentioned only one book by name. This one, however, he considered a semi-sacred text, and Claude M. Bristol’s The Magic of Believing offers a nice guide to the entertainer’s values, not least in the distracted last five years of his life. It does more. It illuminates significant aspects of popular culture in the United States; just so, it offers additional insights into the sources of Liberace’s extraordinary appeal in the American heartland.
Born around the turn of the century, Bristol formulated a theory of success in the interwar years. It might have been based on F. D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural maxim, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The guiding principle was that nothing was real except what we willed to be so; this was true of both success and failure. By this measure, we willed fear; the anxiety itself produced the Great Depression—or as Bristol himself consistently referred to it, “the so-called depression.” The usage suggests much. He eschewed any negative expression whatsoever. “Fear”? The mere use of the term actualized the anxiety and hence exacerbated the problems of economic recession.
With an evangelical’s faith, Bristol testified about how he proselytized as a public speaker at social and business meetings. He promulgated his ideas in brochures or pamphlets, too. The Magic of Believing, first published in 1948, summarized his system. A hugely popular volume, by the time Liberace discovered the book in the mid-fifties, it had gone through seventeen editions in less than four years. It appeared with a whole raft of related volumes after the war. Between 1946 and 1954, the New York Times bestseller lists had included Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Liebman’s Peace of Mind, Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, A Guide to Confident Living, and How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling. Most notably, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking remained on the Times bestseller list for over four years between 1952 and 1956.1 If less polished and sophisticated than any of these, even, Bristol’s volume still fits the pattern. Indeed, its very vulgarity virtually caricatures American valu
es in these years.
The book’s fundamental premise assumes the power of the mind to shape all reality. By this measure, the external, physical world (Bristol never mentions “nature”) is completely plastic and malleable. In outlining one of the more extreme versions of the idea, he cites “a distinguished British scientist” for proof. Dr. Alexander Cannon, he says, had declared “that while a man today cannot grow a new leg (as a crab can grow a new claw), he could if the mind of man hadn’t rejected the possibility. . . . I know that such a statement may sound absurd or at least incredible,” Bristol avers, “but how do we know that it will not be done some day?”2
According to Bristol, we get what we imagine or crave. The problem, he continues, is that most folks do not want much. Rather, a man simply accepts the social, institutional, or traditional definition of what he should desire. Failing to exercise self-conscious will, most people are governed by their unconscious. Their unconscious minds determine, in the most haphazard fashion, what is true or what they derive from life. Magic proposes a way to change this. It proposes that individuals can seize the potential of mind power and lay claim to the authority inherent in the mental process to shape the material world.
Bristol presents all this as science, literally. Thus, he insists that the brain generates magnetic waves that govern the external world. He offers other kinds of proof of the power of positive thinking. His evidence is mostly commonplace and traditional. All religion, for example, arises out of the power of belief to shape reality, he proclaims. He identifies faith healers and miracles at Lourdes as self-evident proof of his argument. More frequently still, he cites authority. The number of authorities he draws on is virtually incalculable. He marshals “psychic researchers” like Thomson Jay Hudson and Richard Maurice Bucke, authors of such tomes as Law of Psychic Phenomena and Cosmic Consciousness, to prove his point. Physicians, engineers, and academics dance across his pages—the likes of Thomas Alva Edison, “Dr. Frederick Kalz, noted Canadian authority,” “the late Charles P. Steinmetz, famous engineer of the General Electric Company,” Sir Arthur Eddington, “the famous English physicist” and “the late Sir James Jeans, who was equally famous in the same field.” The actress Marie Dressler dashes on and off the book’s pages; so do novelists like Marie Corelli and Louis Bromfield. Paracelsus, the medieval alchemist, appears. So does Pythagoras, also “Hermes Trismegistus and the ancient Hermetic philosophers.” In one of the best examples of Bristol’s proofs, he refers to Cato the Elder. The Roman statesman ended every speech with the phrase, “Carthage must be destroyed!” and sure enough, by golly, Carthage was destroyed!
Liberace: An American Boy Page 49
