45. Quoted in Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 208–9.
46. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
47. Globe, Dec. 2, 1982. See also Thorson v Liberace for Summers’s connection to Heller; also Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 210–11.
48. “Liberace Facing Lawsuit for Libel, Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 31, 1984, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 207–8.
49. “Palimony Claims against Liberace Tossed Out,” Los Angeles Times, Mar. 1, 1984. In discussing this action, Thorson gets his year wrong, listing it as 1983.
50. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 214–15.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 222.
53. Ibid., 222–23.
54. Ibid., 206.
55. Henry, “Synonym for Glorious Excess.”
56. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, offers fresh insights on consumerism, commercialism, and homosexual culture, too. See 131–81.
57. Henry, “Synonym for Glorious Excess.”
58. Thomas, Liberace, 253.
59. “Charm, Poise at Center Stage as Liberace Plays Entertainer,” July 30, 1982, and “All That Glitters . . . ,” July 30, 1982, both Liberace File #39, Milwaukee Public Library.
60. “Liberace Heading for Home, July 6, 1984, and “Liberace’s Concert Glitter is Pure Fun,” July 12, 1984, both Liberace File #42, Milwaukee Public Library; “Liberace Still Dazzles Fans after 40 Years,” July 12, 1984, Liberace File #43, Milwaukee Public Library.
61. “All That Glitters . . . ,” July 30, 1982, Liberace File #39, Milwaukee Public Library.
62. “Liberace’s Concert Glitter,” July 12, 1984, Liberace File #42, Milwaukee Public Library.
63. “Liberace Still Dazzles Fans after 40 Years,” July 12, 1984, Liberace File #43, Milwaukee Public Library.
64. “Liberace: His Lord High Excellency,” July 24, 1985, File #47, Milwaukee Public Library.
65. Lewis, “More and More.”
66. See, for example, Margaret Thompson Drewel’s discussion of the hall’s history in “The Camp Trace in Corporate America: Liberace and the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall,” in Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp.
67. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 164–65.
68. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 21.
69. See Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 165; and Thomas, Liberace, 235–36.
70. Liberace, Wonderful, Private World, 22.
71. Ibid., 22–23.
72. Quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 86.
73. Leslie Bennetts, “Liberace Out to ‘Top Himself’ at Music Hall Show,” New York Times, Apr. 13, 1984.
74. Neal Karlen, “Liberace: Still a Hot Ticket,” Newsweek, May 7, 1984.
75. William E. Geist, “About New York,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1985.
76. Stephen Holden, “Pop: Liberace, a Piano, Rockettes and Rolls,” New York Times, Apr. 7, 1985.
77. Drewel, “The Camp Trace,” in Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 160. See also Carr, “Astonish Me,” for a similar response to this almost irresistible appeal as treated above, in chapter 9.
78. For a survey and summary of Variety‘s notices, see Faris, Bio-Bibliography, passim. That its reviewers changed over time and that the notices were not uniformly flattering makes the general consensus about his genius even more compelling. Ray Mungo, Liberace (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994), in this volume of the series of “lives of notable gay men and lesbians,” errs significantly, then, in maintaining that Liberace received few good reviews.
79. For an another version of the conversion of the hardnosed critic at this same juncture in the performance, see Edward Rothstein’s New Republic review, as treated below in the epilogue.
80. “All That Glitters . . .,” July 30, 1982, File #39, Milwaukee Public Library.
81. “Come Fly with Lee.”
82. Carr, “Astonish Me.”
83. See Garber, Vested Interests, 165–85, for the complexities of Barrie’s work.
84. William Glover, “Liberace Puts Punchline First,” n.d., Liberace File #16, Milwaukee Public Library.
85. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 247.
86. John Waters, “Why I Love Liberace,” Vogue, Nov. 1986, 270.
FIFTEEN
1. Hemming Interview.
2. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
3. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 184.
4. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
5. Ibid.
6. George McCabe, “Friends Claim Liberace Upset with Attorney,” Las Vegas Sun, May 4, 1988, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 227.
7. For the photographs, see Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, Thomas, Liberace, and Towle, “Liberace Died.”
8. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
9. The image comes from my dear friend John, comic to the last, in our last conversation in the spring of 1991, three months before his death. His T-cell count had fallen so low that he had named the cells remaining, he insisted.
10. Again, for the social anxiety relative to any legitimizing of homosexuality, see the reference in Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 60, quoted above.
11. Kaiser, in Gay Metropolis, charts the conversion of the Times, for example, from a decidedly antigay position to this new, receptive orthodoxy. While Kaiser himself offers the justification, in effect, of new enlightened editors and managers simply seeing what was true and right, in contrast to the bad old days in which the homophobic Stanley Kauffmann, Howard Taubman, and A. M. Rosenthal reigned, the same evidence from a different political viewpoint demonstrates the degree to which the newspaper simply changed its biases and politics to favor a gay agenda.
12. In one of the wittier exchanges on this subject, a hospice nurse, my friend Marguerite Geer, was lecturing on AIDS in rural Kentucky to a group of local nurses. A hand rose cautiously in the rear, and a timid voice asked about AIDS being divine retribution. “If AIDS is God’s curse, lesbians are God’s chosen people,” came the response.
13. See Abraham Verghese, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), for a elegant rendering of the disease’s actual course from New York, Washington, and Atlanta to this provincial city in East Tennessee.
14. Evidence for oral infection is hard to come by, but the writer Andrew Sullivan, for example, affirms he contracted the disease orally, as he never had unprotected anal intercourse.
15. “Maid Tells What It Was REALLY Like in Private Life.”
16. “Liberace Released after Tests,” Las Vegas Sun, Nov. 7, 1985.
17. “Liberace’s Desperate Battle with AIDS,” National Enquirer, Feb. 10, 1987.
18. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
19. Hadleigh, Conversations.
20. See Hudson and Davidson, Rock Hudson.
21. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 257.
22. Stephen Holden, “Concert: Liberace and the Rockettes,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 1986.
23. Robin Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story: A Stunning Interview by Robin Leach,” Star, Feb. 17, 1987.
24. Ibid.
25. Quoted in Thomas, Liberace, 257.
26. Jane Pasenen, interview with the author.
27. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
28. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
29. Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story.”
30. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
31. Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story.”
32. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
33. Ibid.
34. Quoted from the Las Vegas Sun in “Liberace’s Desperate Battle with AIDS.”
35. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
36. Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story.”
37. Towle, “Liberace Died.”
38. “Liberace’s Desperate Battle with AIDS.”
39. Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story.”
40. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 100–102.
41. Ibid., 223, 225, 227.
&n
bsp; 42. “Liberace’s Last Words: ‘I’ll Be with You Soon, Mother,” National Enquirer, Feb. 24, 1987.
43. Thorson, Behind the Candelabra, 235; also “Liberace’s Last Words.”
44. Quoted in “Liberace’s Desperate Battle with AIDS.”
45. “Liberace Victim of Deadly AIDS,” Las Vegas Sun, Jan. 24, 1987.
46. “Nurse Recalls Liberace’s Condition,” Las Vegas Sun, Apr. 28, 1988, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 178.
47. “Liberace’s Desperate Battle with AIDS.”
48. “Liberace Manager Says Sun AIDS Story Untrue,” Las Vegas Sun, Jan. 25, 1987, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 212.
49. “Liberace’s Manager Threatens Libel Suit over AIDS Report,” Variety, Jan. 28, 1987.
50. “Liberace Told Manager He Did Not Have AIDS,” Las Vegas Sun, May 3, 1988, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 228.
51. “Liberace Called Gravely Ill, but Publicist Denies AIDS Report,” The Detroit News, Jan. 28, 1987, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 205.
52. “Liberace Hospitalized with Watermelon-Induced Anemia,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 1987.
53. “Liberace’s Mental State Questioned,” Las Vegas Sun, Aug. 9, 1998.
54. “Nurse Recalls Liberace’s Condition,” Las Vegas Sun, Apr. 28, 1988, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 178.
55. Thomas, Liberace, 269.
56. “Public Services for Liberace to Be Next Week in Las Vegas,” Feb. 5, 1987, Liberace File #58, Milwaukee Public Library.
57. Leach, “Liberace’s Own Story.”
58. “Liberace Lapses into Coma,” Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 4, 1987, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 234.
59. For the various accounts of the deathwatch, see Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman”; Towle, “Liberace Died”; “Liberace’s Last Words”; and Thomas, Liberace, 270.
60. “AIDS test ordered for liberace,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Feb. 5, 1987.
61. “Liberace’s Last Words.”
62. “Liberace Friends Maintain Vigil,” Feb. 3, 1987, Liberace File #57, Milwaukee Public Library.
63. “Liberace in Coma; Priest Called,” Feb. 4, 1987, Liberace File #57, Milwaukee Public Library.
64. “Liberace: Musical Showman Dies,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1987.
65. Green, “Liberace the Gilded Showman.”
66. “Liberace: Musical Showman Dies.”
67. Dean Murphey and David Haldane, “Liberace Entombed: Autopsy Tests for AIDS Are Incomplete,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 8, 1987; “Coroner Cites AIDS in Liberace Death,” New York Times, Feb.10, 1987.
68. “Family, Friends Gather to Remember Liberace,” Feb. 7, 1987, File #72, Milwaukee Public Library.
69. Quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 25.
70. Quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 19.
EPILOGUE
1. “Coroner Ties Liberace Death to AIDS,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 10, 1987, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 184–85.
2. US News and World Report, Feb. 2, 1987.
3. Brian Greenspun, interviewed on Nightline, quoted in Las Vegas Sun, Feb. 6, 1987, and cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 181.
4. “Liberace AIDS Story Debated,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Feb. 11, 1987, quoted in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 203.
5. Los Angeles Times, Mar. 13, 1987.
6. “Liberace’s Grieving Fans Distressed by Autopsy,” Feb. 9, 1987, File #74, Milwaukee Public Library.
7. Conconi, “Personalities.”
8. Hadleigh, Hollywood Gays, 146–47; Smith, “Storm over Author’s Claim; and Eva Fellows, “Liberace’s Secret Affair with Rock Hudson,” Star, Mar. 3, 1987.
9. Pauline Bell, “Attorney Strote Refused Funeral for Dying Liberace, Las Vegas Sun, May 6, 1988, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 178.
10. “Liberace’s Mental State Questioned,” Las Vegas Sun, Aug. 9, 1988.
11. “Liberace’s Sister Says She’s Penniless,” Las Vegas Sun, Aug. 11, 1988, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 220.
12. King, “Liberace’s Last Agony.”
13. Robert Maxy, “Attorneys Introduce Sleaze,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, Aug. 11, 1988, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 225.
14. “Liberace Kin Says Executor Robbing the Grave,” Las Vegas Sun, Apr. 19, 1988, cited in Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 227.
15. King, “Liberace’s Last Agony.”
16. Hemming Interview.
17. Personal recollection of the author.
18. Harriet Miller, I’ll Be Seeing You (Las Vegas, Nev.: Leesson, 1989). The book lacks any sort of documentation about the relationship, but the assertion that both Miller and Liberace had moved to California by Feb. 1943, when their child was born, is not borne out by data. All evidence confirms that the showman did not move to California—or even visit there—until 1946. See above, chapter 5.
19. Some of Thomas’s sources are evident from standard newspaper articles, notably the collection of Liberace clippings at the Milwaukee Public Library. He also credits a variety of personal interviews. The book documents nothing. In the complete absence of any formal sources, one uses this biography with caution.
20. Boze Hadleigh, Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World (New York: Barricade Books, 1997).
21. Johnson, Liberace: A Collecting Guide.
22. Ibid., 16.
23. See Faris, Bio-Bibliography, 226.
24. Stephen Farber, “2 Networks Vying on Liberace Films,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1988.
25. “Rival TV Treatment,” People Weekly, Sept. 19, 1988.
26. Quoted in Gays and Lesbians in Films, 223.
27. John J. O’Connor, “Second Look at the Liberace Legend,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 1988.
28. Quoted in Gays and Lesbians in Films, 225, 220.
29. Diane Wakoski, Why My Mother Likes Liberace (Tucson, Ariz.: SUN/gemini, 1985), and Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987 (Santa Rosa, Calif: Black Sparrow Press, 1988). Kopelson treats these at some length in his Beethoven’s Kiss.
30. Johnson, A Collecting Guide, 121.
31. Taubman, “A Square Looks at a Hotshot.” For a fuller rendering of this essay, see above, chapter 7.
32. Kopelson, Beethoven’s Kiss, 148–49, 150.
33. Samuel Lipman, “Success without Respect,” July 19, 1987, Liberace File #90, Milwaukee Public Library.
34. Edward Rothstein, “The Franz Liszt of Las Vegas. Liberace, The King of Kitsch,” New Republic, July 2, 1984, 25–29.
35. Rothstein was not alone among “hard-nosed critics” whom the pianist charmed and convinced even against their will: See Margaret Thompson Drewel’s account of the same performance, in “The Camp Trace,” in Meyer, ed., The Politics and Poetics of Camp, 160, as treated above in chapter 14.
36. Holden, “Pop.”
37. Kopelson, Beethoven’s Kiss, 151.
38. Ehrenstein, Open Secret, 118.
39. One source of Hadleigh’s otherwise-disputed credibility about the Hudson-Liberace sexual coupling lies in his own incredulity that someone he admired, like Hudson, would deign to mate with Liberace, whom he loathed.
40. Although he allows the possibility that the contemporary sin of “ageism”—prejudice against the old—might influence opinion, his reference to “the Polident generation” rather obviates the insight. His reference, just so, to Liberace as an inspiration to one young gay man in the 1950s, the pseudonymous “Rick Shaw,” is more anomalous. His judgments about Liberace and the young also tend to cancel out this testimony.
41. Hadleigh, Hollywood Gays, 155–56.
42. Ibid., 47, 57.
43. Quoted in Gays and Lesbians in Films, 225, 220.
44. Epistemology of the Closet, 248.
45. Jorge and Elizabeth Reynardus, interview with author.
INDEX
Numbers in italic refer to the photographs
Abzug, Bella, 296–97
Academy Awards ceremony of 1982, 353, 377
Acuna, Ray, 268
adolescence,
L’s. See under Liberace, Wladziu
Agee, James, 29
AIDS, 210, 392–410; and infection of L, 397–98; Angie Liberace’s denial that L died of, 306, 404; and L’s death certificate, 409–10, 413–15, 416; L’s silence about, 369, 404–5; medical and social aspects of, 392–97, 398; and movies about L, 418–19; and positive thinking, 369–70; publicity regarding L and, 406–7
Ali, Muhammad (Cassius Clay), 248
Allen, Steve, 133
Allis-Chalmers Corporation, 2–3, 6
American Guild of Variety Artists, 207
Angeletti, Richard, 206
Anthony, St., 46, 243, 250, 402–4
appeal, L’s. See under Liberace, Wladziu
Arnett, Ray, 333, 405
art: as escapist and illusionist, 286–87; and playing with margins, 285–86; potential cheapening of, x, 116
Asner, Ed, 297
Astor Hotel (New York), 99–101
Athenaeum concert of 1940, 76, 82
audiences, L’s: as blue-collar folk, 7, 143–44; empty versus full, 138–39; gender of, 161, 169–70; L’s intimacy with, 48, 96, 142, 143, 144, 155–56; L’s love for, 116, 274; L’s relationship to, 81–82, 96, 144; requests from and L’s interaction with, 66, 81–82, 86, 144, 384, 423
Australia tour (1958), 196–98; and My Fair Lady performance rights controversy, 197–98; and negative press, 196–97
automobiles, 37, 43, 268, 313
“Ave Maria” (recording), 153
Bacchants, The (Euripedes), 285
Barnett, Marilyn, 370
Barnum, P. T., 116, 359
Barr, Joanne (Rio), 31, 206–11, 213
Bassey, Shirley, 192
Becker, Sylvia, 35
Beethoven’s Kiss (Kopelson), 421
Behind the Candelabra (Thorson), 351, 417; and L’s homosexual history, 234–38; vagueness of facts in, xi–xii. See also Thorson, Scott
Benny, Jack, 15, 119, 134, 158, 159, 250; The Jack Benny Show, 133–34
Berle, Milton, 132, 291
Berlin Wall, L’s visit to, 198
Bersani, Leo, 276, 277, 318
Bettray-Kelly, Florence. See Kelly, Florence
Beyfus, Gilbert, 224, 229
Bigelow, Otis, 97, 101, 305
Bio-Bibliography (Faris), xii, 417
Blanke, Henry, 184–85
Blumberg, Nate, 123, 127
Blüthner, Julius, 114
Blüthner grand piano, 12, 114, 115–16, 152
Liberace: An American Boy Page 67
