Unlike the 1984 and 1985 shows, reviewers were not so enthusiastic as before. “The thrill is gone,” intoned Variety. “Maybe not for some of his adoring fans, but certainly for the less-than-committed and apparently for the performer himself.”21 Stephen Holden, the Times critic who had celebrated him as “a musical monument” two years before was less happy still. “His heavy-miked pianism is at once metallic sounding, exaggeratedly florid in ornamentation and unbendingly rigid in tone and phrasing.” It wasn’t fresh anymore.22
Holden detected the problem, not its source. The showman was running on pure will. That will remained astonishing. He had lost perhaps fifty pounds, yet still he hoofed with the Rockettes in his old hot-pants outfit. The physical feat of flying onto the stage would have taxed the stamina of a young, healthy actor. At sixty-seven, Liberace was not young. He was definitely not healthy; he had only three months to live. The wonder is not that his performance was wooden and contrived, but that he was on the stage at all.
Despite the energy, hype, and hoopla, people had begun to notice. Robin Leach of television fame visited the performer backstage at Radio City Music Hall. The star’s condition horrified him. “What alarmed me most was that every time he left the stage, he would take massive gulps from an oxygen tank kept in the wings,” he wrote. Still, he noted, at a distance everything looked normal; that was the wonder. “From the audience, you could not even tell he was sick—it was like watching a different person clumping around the stage in those incredible costumes, and flying in on a trapeze. That’s why his nickname is Mr. Showmanship. I think that the most startling thing was having just seen him perform brilliantly for two and a half hours, then going backstage and seeing how frail he was.”23
He was both Tinkerbell and Peter Pan, imploring applause and then reviving to the cheers. The applause did not banish the virus. Tinkerbell’s light was dimming; Peter Pan could hardly move his feet.
Leach had also interviewed the showman before the New York show. He had suspected that something was wrong even then. Liberace’s energy had always amazed him, Leach professed, “But this time I was disturbed and upset at how gray he looked. As if to disguise how frail and thin he had become, Liberace wore a caftan that covered him to the neck, but it could not quite conceal how much weight he had lost.” He was speaking to a very sick man, he thought. “The spirit was still there, and the friendship and the warmth, but I was looking at a man who was not well, even if he refused to admit it.” He did indeed refuse to discuss any illness; at the same time, he spent much of his interview time discussing death. Liberace devoted half the conversation to reflecting on his own mortality—even if his ruminations were couched in his recollecting his near-death experience in 1963, when his kidneys had shut down for two weeks. At the time, Leach had considered the interviewee’s preoccupation with that event odd. Only later, the interviewer insisted, did he put two and two together to make sense of the affair.24
About the same time that Leach interviewed him, the showman made another television appearance for Merv Griffin to celebrate Phyllis Diller’s thirty years in show business. He loved and admired Diller the same way he respected Debbie Reynolds. Diller had the distinction, too, of being another devotee of Claude Bristol. He would not have turned down the invitation for anything. His appearance dismayed the comedienne. Even beside the octogenarian Bob Hope, he looked dreadful. It was her revelation: “Dear God, he has AIDS!”25
The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace had appeared in the autumn, and he toured with the book as a part of his contractual obligations after the New York show closed on November 3. “He was signing at the national booksellers convention in New Orleans that fall,” one publicist recalled. “He looked awful.”26 He would not quit. A friend from Palm Springs encountered him in November and “scarcely recognized him,” by one account. “‘He had lost about 75 pounds,’ she says. ‘I had never seen an upright human that thin before.’”27
The cadaver tried to keep up appearances. Over Seymour Heller’s objections, Lee honored his commitment to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Christmas Show, which was to be prerecorded around Thanksgiving. And, once again, as he had with Robin Leach, he turned the subject to his own mortality, discussing his brush with death in Pittsburgh twenty-five years before.
He was dying. Sometimes he admitted it; mostly not. Indeed, he still talked of cures and miracles, better still, miraculous cures. This was one context for his repeated references in these days to the miracle of his restored health in November 1963. The Bristolian wish would father the man; the prayers of the righteous would avail much.
The Magic of Believing suggests that people might be like crabs and restore their missing claws if only they wished to do so deeply enough. Claude Bristol had insisted that prayer and religion arose in the same self-help, Christian Science sort of logic. Indeed, he offered religious miracle cures as primary evidence of “mind power.” The Midwestern self-reliance of West Allis, Wisconsin, had inculcated such mainstream American principles in Wally Liberace long before he opened The Magic of Believing for the first time. But still more primal forces encouraged him to put his faith in miracles: he believed in saints and wonders, as of old. Wladziu Valentino Liberace had been baptized in churchly miracles and supernatural intervention. Catholic mysticism, religious faith, and the simple piety of Italian and Polish immigrants provided a still more potent source of his holy confidence. Faith had saved him once; faith might save him once again.
On the surface, Lee Liberace was no orthodox Catholic. Not least, his sexual proclivities put him at odds with religious dogma. From another perspective, however, his life derives its meaning from his deepest commitment to Catholicism. Even his unorthodoxy makes certain sense within the Church tradition. If institutional, ritual orthodoxy of Polish Catholicism—daily mass, confession, and the like—might have led him in one direction, the mystical piety of that same tradition led him in another. His Italian heritage had made anticlericalism and even opposition to ritual performance another potent element in his religious life, but, even so, Neapolitan and Sicilian religious practices celebrated the world of supernatural appearances and metaphysical phenomena, the world of magic and marvels, superstition and wonders.
Completely aside from Bristolian admonitions to wish himself well, then, Liberace, in full confidence, believed a miracle had occurred in December 1963 when he did not die when he was dying. Indeed, in specific contrast to Claude Bristol’s admonitions, he had actually surrendered to death, settling his estate and making his peace with the world. Just then, he had experienced an apparition. He often repeated the miraculous story of the unidentifiable nun who had appeared in his hospital room and told him to pray to St. Anthony, which he had done. Cary James got one version. “A priest had given him the last rites,” James repeated. “But he bounced back, and had always attributed his recovery to his faith in God.”28
His life changed afterwards. “I think the experience of finding I was going to live after expecting to die was inspirational to a degree. My first reaction when I was told I was going to make it was that I must have done something right in my life, because I was being spared and given another chance. That’s the way I looked at my new life—and it absolutely was a new life.”29 As a believer, the crisis helped convince him that God had chosen him for a special purpose, that he had been singled out from among all the faithful for favor. Not least, even if he never admitted it, it seemed to have eased his conscience to some degree, if not completely, about his homosexuality. If the divine had chosen to redeem him, lusting after men and all, he could not be completely wrong, and even church dogma could not be completely right on this matter. He seemed to see no contradiction in displaying the large portrait of him kissing Cardinal Cushing’s ring in the very bedroom on Shirley Street where he romped with his lovers. The nun episode also confirmed other manifestations of his unorthodoxy, otherwise defined. He rarely attended mass after that incident, and he avoided, in general, institutional faith, even as his person
al piety, if anything, grew. His death sentence in 1985 brought out all the old devotion.
He needed double miracles now, too. Guilt as well as HIV gnawed his vitals: he had infected his young companion. On returning from the physician with his own news of infection, James had found his patron sobbing in the lavatory. “As I held him and comforted him, Lee said over and over: ‘Boo, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How could I have done this to you?’”30 Where was the little nun in the hour of extremity? Not in Las Vegas, Lee determined. Palm Springs seemed a more likely place to find her. The couple moved there in the fall. The Cloisters seemed more conducive of miracles.
When he had bought the Cloisters, Liberace had created his own private chapel. Had the angel in disguise admonished him to pray to St. Anthony? The chapel became a shrine to his new patron, complete with a rare, three-hundred-year-old polychromed wood representation of the saint. The chapel and the presence of St. Anthony comforted him. “Liberace’s a very religious man,” Scott Thorson told an interviewer in these days. “That’s why he is dying in his own home, because in Palm Springs he has his own private shrine, his own private chapel that the bishop blessed. Palm Springs is his sacred house. It’s a very sacred home to him. The chapel is right off the master bedroom.”31 Thorson’s successor confirmed the same characteristics. “Lee was an old fashioned, very religious man,” Cary James noted, who “prayed regularly at a chapel he had built at his Palm Springs, Calif., home.” If he had frequented the chamber often before, from 1985 on it became a special refuge. “Everyday Lee kept believing a miracle would once again pull him from the jaws of death,” James remembered. “He still faithfully believed that a miracle would save him.”32
In addition to praying to St. Anthony, the showman looked to home remedies to quell the virus. He and James began a regimen of health foods and megavitamins.33 “‘He’s taking multitudes of vitamins, sleeping 10 to 14 hours a day, and flushing his system with fruit juices, mineral water and health foods,’” reported one source. Saints and vitamins, not physicians, medicine, and conventional practice, would save him.34 Indeed, he conceded nothing to convention in his distress. He refused the doctors. When he finally allowed himself to be admitted to the hospital in January, it was only at his sister’s insistence. He had told her nothing. She had heard rumors of AIDS. As the silences and rumors increased, however, “she called demanding that I immediately take him to the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, California,” Cary James reported.35 She appeared soon after. If less skeptical than her brother about medical science, Angelina also kept up the family faith. She offered prayers for her brother, according to the source, “in a small room of the Palm Springs estate that contains religious artifacts blessed by a Roman Catholic priest.”36
In Liberace’s mind, silence was as critical as self-help and prayer. Denial imposed its own regimen. He spoke of his illness to almost no one, not to doctors and not even to Angie, except in extremis. Indeed, on the day he was diagnosed as being HIV positive, he swore his twenty-one-year-old companion to silence. “That night Lee and I made a pact never to tell another soul about our AIDS. His worst fear was that his fans would find out he was gay.”37 “‘I don’t want to lose my fans’ respect,’” he told another friend. “‘I don’t want them ever to know.’ He felt that a public admission of homosexuality would destroy his fans.” He was “devastated over his plight, a source close to Liberace revealed,” according to one reporter. “‘But his worst fear is that he will be remembered not as a great entertainer but as a homosexual,’ the source said.” The nightmare of Rock Hudson’s illness and death loomed perpetually in his mind. “Liberace fears that public reaction to his illness will be similar to the fire storm that surrounded Rock Hudson,” one friend reported. “Liberace is tortured by the thought that his genius will be forgotten and his name sullied forever,” revealed the associate. “When Rock Hudson died, Liberace was very distressed and told me: ‘The only thing people will remember Rock for is the fact that he was gay and died of AIDS.’” “I’ll never go public with the revelation that I have AIDS,” he wept to another friend. “I’ll take my secret with me to the grave.”38
Was his oath of silence to protect his fans? Other skeletons rattled in his closet. Robin Leach quoted another associate’s observation about the showman’s religious anxieties that the miracle of 1963 had not absolved completely: “According to a friend, Liberace’s religious fervor was behind his denials that he was gay and was dying of AIDS. ‘The Church looks upon homosexuals the way it does on divorce,’ says the friend. ‘And Liberace always had a great fear of being excommunicated and falling out of grace.’”39
The silences coupled with his rapidly deteriorating physical condition led to a predictable conclusion: he became a complete recluse. In 1986, for the first time in anybody’s memory, he ignored Christmas. He had always turned the season into an orgy of decorating, spending, gift giving, and celebrating. The festival lasted for days. It cost a fortune. Scott Thorson had said that for Christmas of 1977, which was not atypical, they had spent twenty-five thousand dollars on decorations alone. It involved “eighteen huge Christmas trees, more than 350 red and white poinsettias, table decorations, greenery, wreaths—enough candles, lights and tinsel to stock a department store.”40 No more. Nineteen eighty-five witnessed no celebrations. There was no joy. There was, effectively, no Lee. He barely communicated with even his closest associates. At Shirley Street, Gladys Luckie, his faithful retainer for almost forty years, got only a printed card. It was the same story for Jamie James, his old publicist, and Ray Arnett, who had been with him twenty-five years. Both were charter members, according to Thorson, of Liberace’s homosexual inner circle. He saw almost no one now but Dorothy McMahon, his Cloisters housekeeper; Cary James; and two of his oldest friends and nearest neighbors, Vince Fronza and Ken Fosler, a gay couple who had been together for decades.
He tried in his own way to make his peace with the world. For one thing, he called Scott Thorson. Early in 1986, completely out of the blue insofar as the scorned lover was concerned, his old patron rang him up. After the most conventional pleasantries, he continued: “And your health, how’s your health?” Rumors were already circulating about Liberace’s own condition. Thorson had heard them; he had rejected them. The conversation altered his perception. “He wanted to do the right thing,” Thorson judged, “to warn me he had AIDS. Then, despite his good intentions, he couldn’t go through with it. So he’d concentrated on making sure I wasn’t sick, knowing I’d put two and two together and go see my own doctor.” A few months later, in June, the two ran into one another at the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills. The showman had dropped thirty or forty pounds, Thorson said, and “under his makeup he looked pale, sick, and old.” That was not all. “He asked about my health again and then again, staring at me almost as hard as he had the night we first met. The message was plain,” thought Thorson, “if I had the guts to deal with what he meant rather than what he said. I didn’t need to hear a doctor’s diagnosis to know what ailed Lee.”41
In 1986, the two men had been locked in legal combat for four years. In September, Liberace declared peace. He appointed a new attorney who immediately began negotiating a settlement with Thorson’s people. The four-year-old donnybrook ended in mid-December. Although the Liberace entourage still demanded silence, the press gained the information, and on December 20, the Los Angeles Times published the details. One more time, Lee’s camp rumbled about lawsuits. None followed. It was not quite over, however. Liberace had more peace to make. Some time after Christmas, he called Thorson one more time. He requested that Scott visit him at the Cloisters. Thorson drove to Palm Springs a little later. “Lee was in a deep depression,” Thorson related. “He was very scared. He never mentioned the word AIDS, but he kept asking ‘Why me? Why me? I didn’t do anything wrong.’”42 His conversation rambled, Thorson said. “It took him a while to get to the point. But he finally looked at me and said, ‘I’m not going to make it.” He wept. He
gave Thorson small presents as of old, some jewelry—“to remember me by” and a giant panda. He told him, too, that he was still “a boy in a million,” according to Thorson. “You made me the happiest,” Thorson quoted him. And one more time, he swore Thorson to silence about their meeting.43
Despite the oaths of secrecy, the silence had begun to roar by the time of Thorson’s visit. The rumors grew irresistible. On January 14, Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, wrote an editorial on the paper’s front page directed at the ailing recluse, who, for the time being, remained anonymous. An Orwellian combination of sympathy, concern, and morbid curiosity, the article condemned Liberace’s silences on the grounds that he should be seeking professional medical attention. “In lonely desperation one of entertainment’s brightest stars has sealed himself from the rest of the world because he cannot or will not face the fact that he might be dying of AIDS,” the publisher intoned. “We urge the victim to face reality with courage and determination to lick the disease if there is a way.”44 Ten days later, the Sun dropped the sympathetic pose—and with it the anonymity. “World-renown pianist Liberace, a longtime show-stopper on the Las Vegas Strip, is terminally ill with AIDS and has been diagnosed as having less than a year to live,” the paper told its readers—and the world.45 The vultures were circling.
Only hours before the story broke, the showman had been wheeled into the Eisenhower Medical Center for a blood transfusion to bring up his dangerously low hemoglobin count.46 He refused further diagnostic evaluations. “He told the doctors that he had AIDS, and that further tests are useless,” one source told journalists.47 He wanted to die at home. By the 26th, he was in his own bed at the Cloisters again.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 56
