The Las Vegas Sun article prompted a chain reaction in the Liberace camp. Although the showman was already moribund, it set Lee’s bulldog snarling one more time. Seymour Heller had been doing the same thing for nearly forty years. He reacted automatically. “The Las Vegas Sun has printed a story based on gossip and false information stating that Liberace has AIDS,” he growled. “We are categorically denying that Liberace has AIDS. We are demanding a retraction and if this is not done, we intend to immediately file a libel suit.”48 He repeated the fiction contrived much earlier that his client was suffering from anemia brought on by a watermelon diet.49 Later, by way of apology, Heller related that Lee had insisted to him that he did not suffer from the disease. By that time, however, Heller was out of the loop. Even his entry into Lee’s sick room had been prohibited.50 The emperor was dying, and new voices interpreted his desires.
Despite Heller’s formulaic denunciations of the Sun’s disclosures, the next day, other Liberace sources issued a formal statement confirming the showman’s state, without reference to its cause. Under instructions from Palm Springs, Lee’s publicist in New York issued the following, unelaborated statement carried by the papers on January 26: “It is my great regret to inform you that Liberace is gravely ill with pernicious anemia, complicated by advanced emphysema and heart disease.” Heller still rumbled in the background.51 The same day, news flashed across the papers and television screens about the showman’s just-ended hospital stay. Heller still stuck to the watermelon-diet story.52
The hall was darkening. On January 22, Joel Strote, who had been Lee’s attorney for seventeen years, presented him a new one-hundred-page will to sign. Most critically, the new document made Strote the chief guardian and director of the Liberace estate, estimated to be worth fifteen to twenty million dollars; by the same token, it eliminated Heller from any management position after Lee’s death. The dying man scrawled his distinctive signature at the bottom. The next year, the courts ruled that he had been fully cognizant of what he was doing.
Whether he was in control of his faculties or not, he did not have long left to live. His loyal housekeeper at the Cloisters, Dorothy McMahon, described his enfeeblement. He was depressed, she related, “shuffled instead of walked because he couldn’t bend his knees, had difficulty holding his head up when he sat on a couch and spoke very little. ‘He wasn’t talking in normal sentences,’ she said. ‘The most he would usually say was “Ok.” Sometimes he didn’t talk. He just smiled.’”53 “He was a dying man, he needed a lot of tender loving care,” his nurse Norma Gerber insisted. “He was so childlike—like he didn’t know what he was saying.”54
On Sunday, February 1, his dear friend and neighbor, Vince Fronza, came over from next door. “Angie and I are going to mass. Wanna come along?” he asked. No, the invalid smiled. He was still sentient.55 In the bedroom, while the television played videos of The Golden Girls, he lapsed in and out of consciousness. On Tuesday, Jamie James, who had been his L.A. publicist for decades, appeared. “He was lying there, his eyes open. His nurse told us to talk to him. She said, ‘Maybe he can hear you.’” Recalling the Pittsburgh miracle that Lee had repeated so often, James continued, “I found myself looking down at him and thinking, ‘God, I wish that little nun would come in and solve his problem again.’”56 No nun appeared.
Later, someone called a priest. He administered the rites of extreme unction. “Through the holy anointing, may the Lord in his love of mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit, Amen,” he recited. “May the Lord who frees you from sin, save you, and raise you, Amen.” Another priest in Pittsburgh had given him the church’s last rites almost twenty-five years before. Liberace had survived the anointing. It was not to be this time.57 He was already comatose.
On Wednesday, the morning of the third, his nurse recognized the death rattle. Joel Strote held a press conference in the driveway at the Cloisters. “Mr. Liberace’s condition has worsened. He is very pale. He is obviously resting comfortably and is not in any pain. He is comatose. He has a low pulse and rapid breathing. Death is imminent.”58
He was dying. His intimates had been gathering, although records of the visitors conflict. His sister and Dora, George’s widow, took turns staying with him in the room, along with Angie’s daughter and son-in-law, Diane and Don McLaughlin. Seymour Heller and Jamie James came and went. Gladys Luckie and Dorothy McMahon stood by with Tido Minor, Don Fedderson’s former wife, whom Liberace had known for thirty-five years. She had been nursing him for days. His oldest friends Vince Fronza and Ken Fosler grieved nearby. The favorite of his “children”—his sharpei, Wrinkles—was in the room. His lover of five years, the twenty-three-year-old Cary James, said he lay in the same bed with the older man.59 Someone, probably his sister, wrapped a rosary around his right hand, according to Jamie James. “There was no jewelry. The rosary beads were his jewelry.”60 His pulse stopped at 11:31 on the morning of Wednesday, February 4.
A dreadful little ceremony followed. Just after he drew his last breath, the nurse replaced his toupee, which he had not worn in his last days. She wanted “to give the man a little dignity,” said an anonymous source. She combed the hairpiece, washed his shrunken body, and tied a hospital gown around the emaciated form. The attending physician arrived three hours later and signed the death certificate. He listed cause of death as “cardiac arrest and congestive heart failure brought on by subacute encephalopathy (degenerative disease of the brain).” Angie’s son-in-law, Don McLaughlin, announced the death at 2:50. A half hour later, the Forest Lawn hearse arrived.61
When Joel Strote had announced his client’s imminent passing, he had also called the assembled company to which he spoke “a circus.” Bedlam defined the scene better. So it had been for a fortnight. The Cloisters and Our Lady of Solitude Church around the corner fronted a large, vacant lot. For the past two weeks, hundreds of people had been swarming there like flies to road kill. This space and the surrounding streets were now thronged with trucks, cars, and electric generators—reporters and paparazzi doing their duty. Security guards caught one reporter scaling the wall. Cops arrested him.62 They charged a National Enquirer photographer with trespassing, too.63 Scores of people milled about, and every time they detected movement at house, the mob rushed the door. The melee ruined the flowerbeds.64 Gawkers and drive-bys increased the tumult. Occasionally the whop-whop-whop-whop of helicopters broke the desert air. There were still other monstrosities. In the evening, each new car approaching the security guards at the gate set off the mechanical roar of the engines that powered klieg-like lights that drowned the stars and shattered the darkness.65 Between these explosions of noise and light, the bored journalists found solace in interviewing fans and gawkers, who themselves had their own moment of fame. Some sounded more sincere than others. “‘He loved us. We loved him,’ said Sara Hempling, who had taken a week’s vacation from her job in Seal Beach to join the crowd. ‘He’d want friends around.’”66
It was the very disaster Liberace had dreaded. More followed, the likes of which he would have refused to imagine.
The hearse carrying Liberace’s body had sped away from the Cloisters at 3:20 on February 4 toward the peace of Forest Lawn, but even a police escort did not deter the reporters and photographers weaving in and out of traffic behind the vehicle, much less the TV-station helicopter breaking the smoggy air in hot pursuit. As an additional indignity, traffic jams made the trip last three hours. The circus continued. Had the showman over and over sworn family, friends, and lovers to the oaths of silence? The tradition persisted, but facts were clogging up his system. His death certificate made no reference to AIDS and his contagion. It violated the law. The state of California intervened. The media fury over AIDS prompted Raymond Carrillo, the Riverside County coroner, to investigate. He subpoenaed hospital records. He challenged the death certificate. He demanded an autopsy. Soon the showman’s pitiful remains were speeding back east to Palm Springs on the interstate. Already embalmed, the body resisted
the probe. Finally, though, science won. On February 10, Carrillo published the results to media flashbulbs: death had resulted from cytomegalovirus pneumonia—“AIDS pneumonia”—which had indeed resulted from an HIV-related infection.67
At the very time the coroner was sectioning the showman’s withered flesh, mourners were gathering at Our Lady of Solitude for the first of the memorial services. The little church overflowed. Among the grieving, Scott Thorson found a pew and heard Vince Fronza deliver the eulogy. Thorson had once said that the relationship between Fronza and Ken Fosler, his companion of decades, was exactly what he had wanted for himself and Liberace. The officiating priest, Father William Erstad, reminded the congregation of God’s benevolence not least “to those who used his gifts as generously as Liberace did.”68 He read a telegram from the president and the first lady: “Lee was a gifted musician, a man who truly earned the title ‘superstar’ and a caring individual who time and again responded generously when called upon to benefit those in need. . . . He will be remembered in many ways, but most importantly as a kind man who lived his life with great joy. We are grateful that he has left us such a rich legacy of memories, and they will be our joy.”69
Six days later, Las Vegas had its chance to remember the showman one last time. A thousand gathered at St. Anne’s Church to celebrate his life. Perhaps they found solace in the priest’s admonitions about Lee standing naked before God and “all of the accolades, all of the tributes in a lifetime of entertaining . . . all of these things [paling] and [fading] in the presence of truth and justice.”70 Father John McVeigh offered rather Irish, puritan consolation. If theologically true, the homily would have rung flat for the Christian primitive who had loved pungent incense and silky chasubles, who fantasized about flickering votive lights and raptured saints, who believed in miracles and apparitions, and who knew the transforming power of both piety and art.
EPILOGUE
I don’t want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS.
LIBERACE
Between the first memorial service in Palm Springs and the second in Las Vegas, Lee’s body itself finally won its long-deferred entombment. He was laid to rest alongside his brother George and their mother at the Liberace mausoleum in a very small, very brief service on February 7. He left other memorials besides the elaborate, inscribed marble tombstone at Forest Lawn. He could not have predicted everything his legacy would be.
The showman had always wanted to control everything. He planned every gesture, calculated every move. If he wanted mastery even beyond the grave, it did not work out exactly as he’d figured it would. The medical autopsy and religious memorials resolved the issues of Liberace’s flesh and soul, but the social and legal beasts his death released were only just stretching their thick limbs at the beginning of February 1987. The fracas outside the Cloisters barely introduced the disorder.
The clamor over the showman’s HIV infection had grown steadily louder since the Las Vegas Sun‘s revelations of January 16 and January 24. The rumors inspired a carnival of speculation. Official notice on February 10 that Liberace had indeed died of AIDS-related infections did nothing to calm the ruckus. On the contrary, the coroner’s report set off more shock waves, even as it created a new media hero for a few days, Riverside County Coroner Raymond Carrillo. Journalists achieved new heights of investigative journalism. They faithfully reported Carrillo’s warnings to Dr. Ronald Daniels, who had signed the death certificate. The latter would be reported to the California Board of Medical Quality Assurance, the corner insisted. The papers publicized Carrillo’s threats to sanction even the venerable institution of Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery.1
Liberace’s death now provided every pundit in print and broadcast journalism the opportunity to issue pronouncements about the most arcane social topics and difficult legal questions. “AIDS: How Wide the Coverup?” pontificated US News and World Report after the showman’s death.2 Talking heads bobbed now, not merely about medical confidentiality but about rights to privacy in general, to homosexual confidentiality in particular. In heroic seriousness, Ted Koppel and his Nightline guests pondered the depths of “why Liberace did not reveal his gay lifestyle.”3 Politicians lumbered onto the scene. Representative Henry Waxman of California, chairman of a House health subcommittee, furrowed his brow dramatically for an audience of millions on Good Morning America about the same issue. “It was very sad that Liberace in his final days felt that he had to hide his illness from the public . . . when he could have taken the role that Rock Hudson had taken and been a great benefit to educating the public,” he intoned.4 The other side weighed in as well. “Did Anyone Really Gain from Disclosures about Liberace?” queried E. H. Duncan Donovan, “a civil liberties activist,” in the Los Angeles Times.5 The commonfolk might have had little tolerance for such formal categories of debate, but they had their own opinions—which also found voice in the national press in the wake of all this fury. By the lights of the Globe, the National Enquirer, and the Star, the disclosures set many a tooth on edge. Without necessarily any affection for the American Civil Liberties Union, the folks tended to share the biases that Liberace’s illness was nobody’s business but his own. “I think they should just leave him alone. That was his personal life. He hurt nobody,” complained one fan. “It just made me sick when I heard all this digging up dirt,” echoed another. “I resent anyone going into anyone’s private life.” Wept another: “They should let the man rest in peace. I don’t care what he had. That’s his private business.”6
In the middle of this uproar, newspapers around the country broadcast the titillating news of the showman’s sexual alliance with Rock Hudson. The author of the story, Boze Hadleigh, had committed himself not to out any of his subjects against their will—at least as long as they were living. The entertainer’s passing freed the journalist from his oath of silence.7 The revelation provoked a frenzy. The information qualified as legitimate news at many newspapers, but the tabloids and talk shows reveled in the story. The television personality Larry King featured a show on “the late, flamboyant, and controversial Liberace,” for example, with Hadleigh as a special guest, and for weeks, the National Enquirer and the Star offered their readers new tidbits, pro and con, about the affair, which merged with the pandemonium over AIDS.8
Autopsies? AIDS? Homosexuality? Gay rights versus gay responsibilities? Individual rights to privacy? Public rights to know? Freedom of the press? It was hunting season. The dead showman was weapon as well as target. His death had created a media free-fire zone. So it continued for years. Liberace was not there to charm and reassure the audience. He was not there to protest and to threaten litigation. He was not there to sic Seymour on the enemy. Indeed, Heller himself slogged into the fray, this time not against Lee’s enemies but against his friends, otherwise defined. The deathbed will proved the issue of contention—and more cause of media attention. A little over a year after Liberace’s entombment, a clutch of his intimates sued to reduce or eliminate Joel Strote’s power over the estate. The plaintiffs included Cary James, Angie Farrell, Gladys Luckie, and Dorothy McMahon, and, of course, Seymour Heller, whom Strote’s management cut out more completely than he had any of the others. They filed suit on April 18, 1988; the case did not conclude until August.
The suit shredded Lee’s well-constructed order still further. For months, the litigants’ acrimony reverberated through the Clark County Courthouse in downtown Las Vegas. The charges and countercharges recognized few limits. Cary James claimed Strote insisted that the body must be cremated immediately, without waiting for the funeral—even while the family stood in the same room in which the showman was still breathing.9 McMahon attacked Strote with the revelation that he offered naked midnight swims as his client lay expiring nearby. She also insisted that the lawyer hoodwinked the debilitated Liberace because her boss was too far gone to have any idea what he was signing on January 22. “Mr. Strote was saying ‘He looks fine, he looks good.’ I was thinking, ‘This guy’s nut
s.’”10 Insisting she was penniless, Angie claimed Strote was bilking her by charging illegitimate items against her trust fund—like her brother’s Palm Spring funeral the year before.11 Meanwhile, in all apparent sincerity, she insisted that she had pursued the suit against Strote at the direct instruction of her dead brother from beyond the grave.12
While Strote’s counsel kept more to the issue of proving good management, the defendant fought as he was fought. Thus the defense introduced George Llinares, the former domestic manager, who reviled the whole household of plaintiffs, excepting only the kindly Gladys Luckie. Without saying the word “homosexual,” he discussed Scott Thorson’s and Cary James’s relationships with his boss, characterizing them as being “of a sleazy nature.”13 There were other strategies. “They have made their living off of Liberace,” Strote’s people railed. They “have attempted to sensationalize [the evidence] in order to continue to bask in the glory of Liberace.”14
The judge ruled for the defendant in August. Was the estate settled? The trial failed to solve other problems of Liberace’s legacy. Odd silences still permeated the proceedings. Despite the occasional allusions to “sleazy relationships,” the terms “homosexuality,” “gay,” and, more curious still, “AIDS” appeared nowhere in the court proceedings. As the Los Angeles Times writer covering the trial noted, “for all the graphic intimacies they volunteered, the plaintiffs always balked when the subject was AIDS.” He continued: “Liberace, they said outside court, had known he had the disease for more than a year, but never came fully to terms with impending death. Denial was a practice in the house of Liberace, and it continued into the court.”15 The denial went far beyond the court.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 57
