53. Bersani, Homos, 5–6.
54. The king’s sister-in-law herself actually referred to homosexuality as a “horrible depravity.” She noted the other term in quoting one of the court ladies who had mentioned the French noblewomen with loose morals: “When people tell Madam Cornuel what a shameless life these ladies from the Faubourge Saint-Germain lead, she says, ‘Good Heavens, you mustn’t blame them. They have undertaken a mission to reclaim the young men from the fashionable vice’!”
55. The issue of naming the activity or divining the relationship between names and actions initiates virtually all contemporary discussion of sex and gender. Besides Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1989), see also, among others, Katz, Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Plume, 1996); also Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. John Boswell offers the richest history of the word “gay” in his Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Rictor Norton’s Myth of the Modern Homosexual is equally good. If many, like Bersani, object to the desexualization of the term “gay,” Edmund White considers it a source of the term’s virtue: see his collection of essays, The Burning Library, David Bergman, ed. (New York: Vintage International, 1995).
56. Norton, Myth of the Modern Homosexual. This historian takes a very hard line, not only in repudiating the abstraction and theorization of homosexuality by modern academics, chiefly, but also in insisting on the essential qualities of being queer. Thus, in this regard, he repudiates bisexuality as a category as “a fig leaf” for being gay. He does the same with “the libertine’s” sexual free for all, which is only homosexuality by another name, according to him.
57. Liberace could serve as a model of a homosexual type as analyzed in Richard A. Isay, Being Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989). His discussion of men with insatiable sexual appetites, numerous partners, and problems with peers—like Liberace, also entails his analysis of family structures that mirror, almost uncannily, the circumstances of Wally Liberace’s household in West Milwaukee and West Allis. Isay repudiates the antihomosexual biases of contemporary Freudian analysis and defends homosexuality against charges of pathology and deviance. He insists that the homosexual is born, not made. At the same time, he suggests that certain homosexual practices are pathological. In this regard, he shifts his grounds somewhat to argue that homosexual promiscuity itself is not natural but is a product of social pressure rather than itself being another manifestation of natural impulses. Just so, he offers an example of health and a resolution of pathologies in longterm, “good marriage”-like homoerotic unions. Beyond this, Isay’s arguments about homosexual boys and their relations with their fathers, who serve as the central icons in the sons’ lives, confirms my own reading of Liberace’s biography.
58. Richards, “Liberace, Laughing Last.”
59. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 90.
60. Ibid., 74–75.
61. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
62. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 66. This also marks the first place in which Thorson slips, revealing that Vince Cardell is the fictitious Jerry O’Rouke.
63. Ibid., 67.
64. Rechy, Sexual Outlaw, 88.
65. “Still Some Skill behind the Glitter,” Aug. 2, 1978, Liberace File #34, Milwaukee Public Library; also Doerschuk, “Vince Cardell: Liberace’s Piano Protégé.”
66. Liberace, The Things I Love, 184.
67. “Liberace Again Theft Victim,” Apr. 24, 1975; and “Liberace Loses Gems to Burglars,” Apr. 24, 1975: both Liberace File #26, Milwaukee Public Library. Also, “Liberace’s $28,000 Necklace, $5,000 in Other Gems Stolen,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 30, 1975.
68. Peter H. King, “Liberace’s Last Agony,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 19, 1988.
69. Thorson v Liberace.
70. King, “Liberace’s Last Agony.”
71. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 56. Also, 62, 69.
72. See Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson, passim.
73. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 62.
74. Ibid., 70.
75. Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson, is also good on the intrigue that dominated these households.
76. Patricia Towle, “Liberace Died in My Arms,” National Enquirer, Nov. 1, 1994.
77. Calling one another by the same nickname was not unique to Thorson and Liberace. Edmund White offers fictional accounts of the same phenomenon taking place between two of his friends, first in his collection of stories, Skinned Alive, and then again in his novel, The Farewell Symphony (New York: Knopf, 1997).
78. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 57.
79. Ibid., 57–58. While the episode is important enough in that it introduces Liberace’s relation with his father and his lovers, it also establishes in almost caricatured Freudian language what men do: play horn in the hole.
80. Beginning with a Freudian definition of character formation, Richard Isay, in Being Homosexual, innovates the model by arguing that a homosexual boy will attach to his father as his first love object. This new model offers peculiar insights into the traditional definition of the “distant” father among many homosexual memories. It offers the most useful model of all in understanding Liberace’s troubled attachment to his own father and his sense of fatherhood as the model of lover. Edmund White’s autobiographical fictions illuminate the same eroticized tension of the boy for the father.
81. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 143.
82. Ibid., 151, 153.
83. Some disparity exists between his legal testimony and Thorson’s published memories of this affair. Thus for example, he insisted that he wanted a dimple in his chin, despite the absence of this feature in his mentor. It was a demonstration of his own will: “At the last minute, in a brief rebellious moment, I asserted myself enough to ask Startz [the physician] to give me a dimple in my chin—even though Lee didn’t have one. After all, it was my face!” (Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 152). In his deposition, he insisted, “Liberace instructed his plastic surgeon to put that in there as a—he wanted me to have a cleft in my chin.” The showman instructed the surgeon, he continued, “to put a cleft in my chin along with an insert in my chin and along with silicon injections to make my cheekbones more outstanding. Facial structure, bone structure come out more. . . .” (Thomas, Liberace, 229–30).
84. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 144.
85. Ibid., 154.
86. Ibid., 77.
87. Ibid., 154–55.
88. Ibid., 108.
89. Ibid., 196.
90. Ibid., 154–55.
91. See deposition, Thorson v Liberace. Thomas, Liberace, 228–29, also offers a slightly altered version of this original testimony.
THIRTEEN
1. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 90.
2. Ibid., 47–48.
3. Ibid., 48–49. In his deposition, Thorson offers a rather different chronology of his foster homes. He says he lived with his brother Wayne, then with Marie Brummet, after her with Tammy Cranwell, and finally with Rose and Joe Carracappa, before moving in with Liberace.
4. Ibid., 49.
5. Mike Snow with Wayne Johnson, “Wicked Past of the Gay Suing Liberace,” Globe, Dec. 7, 1982.
6. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 49.
7. Ibid.
8. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
9. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 49–50.
10. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
11. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 50–51.
12. Ibid., 51.
13. Ibid., 59.
14. Ibid., 72.
15. See, for example, ibid., 162; also Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography. passim.
16. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 88.
17. Ibid., 65.
18. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 122.
19. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 77, 123.
20. Ibid., 176.
21. Ibid., 108.
22. Towle, “Liberace Died”; also King, “Liberace’s Last Agony.”
23. Isay, Being Homosexual, 89.
24. While Richard Isay, for example, is completely sympathetic to the homosexual condition, supportive of stable, long-term homosexual unions, and defensive about gay promiscuity, he also considers any homosexual union “a long-term relationship” if it lasts even a year. For all those couples that last ten, twenty, even thirty years or more, the average length of what might be inexactly termed “really long-term relations” is probably closer to five years. One observer of the gay scene described this tendency with the witticism: “One gay year is equal to seven straight ones.”
25. While he mentions the 1981 tour of the continent, with various shows in different countries, he ignores the earlier tour altogether. That is strange for various reasons, not least because his “rival,” Vince Cardell, was still a part of Liberace’s act at this time. Just so, Thorson ignores the domestic tours in 1978, for example, the trip to Milwaukee, where Cardell also figured centrally in the Liberace show as much as one year after Thorson became a part of Liberace’s domestic ensemble.
26. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 89.
27. Ibid., 98.
28. Ibid., 88.
29. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
30. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 98–99.
31. Ibid., 123.
32. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 77–78.
33. Ibid., 73.
34. Liberace, The Things I Love, 184
35. Ibid., 187.
36. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 73.
37. Other men and women have shared this attitude toward animals. The Southern writer Ellen Glasgow offers another illustration of a devotion to dogs that transcends eccentricity: see Susan Goodman, Ellen Glasgow: A Biography, (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1998.
38. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 99.
39. Ibid., 88.
40. “Maid Tells What It Was REALLY Like in Private Life,” National Enquirer, Feb. 24, 1987.
41. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
42. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 106–7.
43. Ryon, “Liberace Called Tune.”
44. Ibid.
45. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 55, 57–58.
46. Ibid., 58–59. See also photographic illustrations of the house in Liberace, Wonderful, Private World.
47. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 123.
48. Ibid., 77.
49. Thorson v Liberace. Thorson consistently spelled the street name wrong, as “Larrimore” instead of “Laramore.”
50. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 107. For David Schmerin’s remarks, see Thorson v Liberace. “If you are asking me what I would have paid for them, I wouldn’t have given you a thousand dollars for everything,” he concluded.
51. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 107.
52. Ibid., 76.
53. Ibid., 79.
54. Ibid., 146.
55. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
56. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 177.
57. Ibid., 148.
58. Ibid., 80.
59. Ibid., 85.
60. Ibid., 97.
61. Ibid., 126.
62. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 223.
63. Thorson v Liberace.
64. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 55.
65. Thorson v Liberace.
66. White, The Burning Library, 149.
67. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 114, 50.
68. Ibid., 183. Thorson does not identify the couple, but his general description suggests that he is referring to Vince Fronza and Ken Fosler in Palm Springs.
69. Thorson, Candelabra, 73.
70. Ibid., 79.
71. Ibid., 122.
72. Ibid., 79, 180, 73.
73. Ibid., 176.
74. Ibid., 163.
75. Ibid., 178.
76. Ibid., 39–40.
77. Ibid., 144, 177. He was not, of course, the first of the celebrity’s lovers to suffer thus. The 1950s “lover-bodyguard” of John Rechy’s memory steamed in public over his patron’s flirting, too.
78. Ibid., 124.
79. Ibid., 181.
80. Ibid., 38.
81. Thorson v Liberace.
82. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 156, 157.
83. Thorson v Liberace.
84. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 147.
85. Thorson v Liberace.
86. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
87. “Liberace Lover Is Key in Crime Probe,” Milwaukee Sentinel, Sept. 16, 1988.
88. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 157.
89. Ibid., 157, 158.
90. Ibid., 157.
91. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
92. “Liberace Lover”; “New Testimony Linking Drug Trafficker Adel (Eddie Nash) Nasrallah and Ex-employee Gregory De Witt Diles to 1981 Beating Murders in Laurel Canyon Reportedly Comes from Deceased Pianist Liberace’s Then-Lover Scott Thorson,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 16, 1988; and “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,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 11, 1989.
93. “Liberace Lover.”
94. Thorson v Liberace.
95. “New Testimony” and “Scott Thorson Testifies.”
96. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 183.
97. Thorson v Liberace.
98. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 186.
99. Thorson v Liberace.
100. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 187.
101. Liberace deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
102. Ibid.
FOURTEEN
1. I am indebted to my student Carlos Reyes for this information, which comes from his essay, “Postwar America: Visible Trends in Literature and Society.”
2. Claude M. Bristol, The Magic of Believing (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1955; originally published 1948), 15.
3. Bristol, Magic, 8.
4. Ibid., 36.
5. It is critical to note here that Bristol himself uses gender-specific language but that he opens all this self-actualization, traditionally associated with Western masculinity, to women. He devotes an entire chapter, “Women and the Science of Belief,” to the subject.
6. Bristol, Magic, 3.
7. Liberace did not need Bristol to inform his politics, but this sense of foreboding about becoming “serfs” is just the sort of stuff that influenced the performer’s pronouncements about the Communist menace when he was on his Australian tour in 1958.
8. Johnson, Liberace: A Collecting Guide, 41.
9. Liberace, preface to Bristol, Magic, viii.
10. “StarLine Sightseeing Tours, Inc.: Visit Liberace’s Hollywood Museum,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Feb. 24, 1975; “Liberace’s Lair, at $5.90 per Person,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 30, 1975; and “People,” Time, May 24, 1975.
11. “Come Fly with Lee: It’s Not Lucy but Liberace in the Sky with Diamonds,” People Weekly, July 28, 1975; also “Liberace’s Home Museum Proposal Sparks Neighbors’ Promise of Suit,” Hollywood Reporter, Oct. 21, 1976. Cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 217.
12. “Liberace May Buy Mansion in Tosa,” July 2, 1977, File #31; “Lawsuit Threatens Liberace Museum,” Aug. 2, 1978, File #33; “Liberace Planning Tour of Mansion,” July 30, 1978, File #32; all Milwaukee Public Library.
13. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 111.
14. “A Grand Opening for the Liberace Museum,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 17, 1979.
15. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 111–13.
16. “Glitter Museum,” Look, June 11, 1979.
17. Liberace Opens Museum,” June 27, 1979, File #35, Milwaukee Public Library.
1
8. Liberace, The Things I Love.
19. Liberace, as told to Carol Truax, Liberace Cooks! Recipes from His Seven Dining Rooms (Doubleday: Garden City, N.Y.: 1970).
20. Brochure in the possession of the author.
21. Liberace deposition, Barr v Liberace.
22. “Currently One of the Biggest Hits in the History of the Las Vegas Hilton,” Las Vegas Sun, Mar. 8, 1974.
23. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 7. While this statement seems a clear and forthright reversal of his legal testimony, it is no less suspect, because he might have judged that the pronouncement would sell more copies of Wonderful, Private World, which he declared to be newer and better than the earlier volumes.
24. Liberace, Liberace: An Autobiography, 9–10.
25. Ibid., 10.
26. “By the Light of the Silvery Candelabra,” Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25, 1973, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 234.
27. Liberace deposition, Barr v Liberace.
28. “Currently One of the Biggest Hits.”
29. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 148.
30. Ibid., 128.
31. Liberace deposition, Barr v Liberace.
32. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 82.
33. Thorson v Liberace.
34. David Schmerin deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
35. “Palimony Proves Elusive Pot of Gold,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 30, 1986.
36. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 198.
37. Schmerin deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
38. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
39. See references in Thorson v Liberace.
40. Schmerin deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
41. Thorson deposition, Thorson v Liberace.
42. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 184–87, 190–95, 202.
43. National Enquirer, Nov. 2, 1982.
44. Ibid., Nov. 9, 1982.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 66
