25 For all his jazzy public—even private—shenanigans, Liberace remained deeply conservative. Profoundly if unconventionally Catholic, he never strayed from his faith. His audience with Pope Pius XII at the end of his 1956 European tour marked a high point in his life. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
26 Playing a Boston venue in November 1954, Liberace requested an audience with Archbishop Richard Cushing. The honor of meeting the prelate so pleased him that when a fan turned the photograph of the occasion into a large painting, he hung the picture in his otherwise eroticized bedroom at the Shirley Street house in Las Vegas. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
27 No less than his faith, his devotion to family affirmed Liberace’s conservativism. Family tradition for the Liberaces centered on cooking and eating. Extending a tradition he associated with both his parents, he boasted his own culinary skills when he was in high school, publicized his talent during the early years of his fame, and published a collection of recipes as his first book. Here, he celebrates a meal with his handsome and ill-fated younger brother, Rudy. Rudy’s wife and son appear on the left; between them and Frances stands Seymour Heller, Lee’s respected manager and oldest professional associate. George and his then wife, Jayne, (number three) occupy the right. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
28 For all Liberace’s primitive devotion to family, the family unit was chiefly mother and sons, rarely mother and daughter, and even more rarely still father and sons. Despite the smiles of the three surviving Liberace men in this 1956 photo, Lee never completely reconciled with his parent after the La Crosse/infidelity crises of 1939. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
29 While he cherished family, even his own flawed kin, he loved children especially. Having none proved a singular regret of his homosexuality. He compensated by including kid acts in his performances, and he founded the Liberace Foundation to assist talented youth. He ad-libbed children into his show at every opportunity, too, as when he interrupted his 1955 performance at San Francisco’s Cow Palace to encourage three-year-old Linere Pruitt of Oakland. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
30 The afflicted, the marginalized, and the outcast always attracted Lee. When this predilection coincided with his devotion to children, his sympathies knew no bounds. Here, he assists polio-stricken four-year-old Debra Stone in inaugurating the Los Angeles Emergency March of Dimes campaign on August 16, 1954. Courtesy of CORBIS/Bettmann.
31 Although Lee longed for children of his own, only once does he seem to have genuinely considered marriage. Joanne Rio resembled no other woman he associated with. Eleven years his junior, she danced at Hollywood’s Le Moulin Rouge and would double, appropriately enough, for Elizabeth Taylor in films. She had been his neighbor when he lived on Camellia Street between 1947 and 1953. She reappeared in his life only weeks after the first rumors of his homosexual exploits hit the press in the late summer of 1954. Photo: TV & Movie Screen Magazine. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
32 In the late winter of 1955, after the difficult conclusion of the Rio affair, Lee began dating the wealthy, aging ice-skating queen Sonja Henie. Photographers snapped them together at such classy clubs as El Morocco in Manhattan and L.A.’s Mocambo and Ciro’s, where Lee had led the bill a few years before. According to Scott Thorson, Lee claimed a sexual relation with the star, an assertion never made for Rio or any of the other women he dated publicly. He himself compared the relationship to something out of the Gloria Swanson film, Sunset Boulevard. Courtesy of CORBIS/Bettmann.
33 Liberace’s association with Mae West spoke still more profoundly to his taste in women. He admired her; they got along famously. Much, much older than he, she was already an icon in homosexual culture, and no gay man could have missed the subtext of his connection with the witty old star who resembled nothing more than a drag queen. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
34 Like his romantic linkage to Mae West, Liberace’s dating Christine Jorgenson, the famous transsexual of the age, offered other clues to his sexuality. In July 1956, she confessed to the scandal rag Exclusive that they weren’t really serious. “He’s nice,” she said, “but a little strange.” Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
35 Personal and professional crises marred Lee’s life in the late fifties and early sixties: declining popularity, decreased revenues, the nonrenewal of his Las Vegas contract, homosexual scandals, the “Cassandra” affair and trial, and, not least, the estrangement from his family. Striving to recoup his fortunes, he jettisoned his old managers, altered his image, and sought, for the first time in his life, to make a conventional impression. On June 17, 1959, he could have passed for almost any English gentleman, even if the bobbies and autograph hounds knew his real identity as he departed victorious from the London courtroom after his libel trial against the Daily Mirror. Courtesy of CORBIS/Bettmann.
36 When Lee renounced his conservative phase after 1961, he did so with a vengeance. His homes became an inseparable part of this new, outrageous public persona. He made his bathrooms, tubs, and even toilets objects of public glamour. Although he had posed in bubble baths as early as the Valley Vista days, the marble and gold of the Las Vegas house provided an even more exotic setting for publicity shots. Bejeweled and bewigged for the cameras, he bathed like a king or a Roman emperor—or at least the way he imagined such a scene. While demonstrating his own fantasies, such publicity also touched on another American fascination: bathrooms and cleanliness as well as over-the-top luxury. Courtesy of CORBIS/Bettmann.
37 Liberace’s triumphant return to the Las Vegas casinos in 1963 sealed his commitment to “calculated outrage.” Indeed, what he called “topping himself” became a contractual obligation after 1963. Every year brought some new trick. At the opening of his June run at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1972, he drove onto the stage in a fancy custom car, a gimmick he was to repeat many times thereafter. The innovation underlined the old American obsession with the automobile and the new. He was living Everyman’s fantasy pushed to its limits with the cars, the jewels, and the furs, and he was having so much obvious fun that folks encouraged the profligacy. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
38 Two years after he first drove onto the stage, he came up with an even more spectacular exit—flying off. He loved the trick; so did audiences, even when they knew what was coming, and even when the wires showed all too clearly. Photo: Las Vegas News Bureau. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
39 Always looking to exceed his own fabulousness, Liberace supported a cottage industry of furriers, sequin makers, and designers. Mostly inspired by picture-book or moving-picture history, his outfits—like his life—occasionally echoed his personal dramas. His “heaviest costume,” for example, which weighed in at forty-three pounds and was electrified with four thousand miniature light bulbs, produced a spectacular effect, but it also parodied, intentionally or not, the Sousa-type band uniforms his own father wore even into his dotage. Photo: Las Vegas News Bureau. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
40 Royalty delighted in Liberace’s spectacle as much as the folks did. In 1953, he predicted he would play for the queen of England. Within three years, he was scheduling his first command performance. Over the next twenty years he played over and over for royalty, from the queen mother and Elizabeth herself to the other crowned heads and heads of state around the world. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
41 Liberace played for American royalty, too. Indeed, his invitations to the Reagan White House were particularly appropriate. The president and the performer were both conservative Midwesterners who had captured the American dream from a base in Hollywood. They both played style and performance. With their dual promise of tradition and prosperity, the Reagan years were made to order for the gaudy showman. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
42 While dining with kings and heads of state in public, in private Lee kept his own compan
y. Described by Scott Thorson as Lee’s old lover, Vince Cardell was around twenty-five when he first appeared in the showman’s life in the mid-seventies. As was the showman’s wont when he took a shine to a young man, he offered the darkly handsome lounge pianist a job at their first meeting. Cardell graduated from chauffeur to playing the piano in the act, and moved into the showman’s house soon after. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
43 Despite Cardell’s continued residence at the Shirley Street mansion, eighteen-year-old Scott Thorson moved into the house—and into Liberace’s bed—in the summer of 1977. The young man had various sources of affinity with the showman, like his love of dogs, affection for cars, and desire for the limelight. By 1979, Lee spoke of adopting his new companion, and at the showman’s insistence, Thorson underwent cosmetic surgery to make him resemble his patron. Here, recovered from the cosmetic operation, Thorson appears with Lee and Michael Jackson indulging in one of their common passions—shopping. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
44 Although the showman called him “my blond Adonis,” Thorson’s neediness attracted Liberace as much as his beauty. The two remained together almost five years, but the elements that brought them together drove them apart as well. Thorson’s cocaine addiction and crack habit, and Lee’s roving eye, doomed the relationship. They were on the skids when this photograph was made in Boston in 1981. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
45 Cary James was nineteen, Lee sixty-four, and brother George, on the right, seventy-two when this picture was snapped only months prior to the elder Liberace’s death. It was about a year after James took Thorson’s place in the showman’s life. James lacked Thorson’s mania, and the performer might have anticipated a peaceful conclusion to his randy, hectic life. AIDS ruined the idyll by 1985. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
46 Lee bought his first house in Palm Springs around 1953. Fifteen years later he purchased the Cloisters, his favorite residence. The house was semi-sacred to him, in part because it contained his shrine to St. Anthony, whom he credited with saving his life in the fall of 1963. In devotional appreciation he transformed the old concession area of the Cloisters into a shrine to his patron. It was a Liberacean mishmash of religious brick-a-brack, modern church windows, and late-Renaissance statuary. He resorted to the shrine increasingly after 1984, as the virus destroyed his immune system. Photo: Twin Circle Magazine (12/31/78). Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
47 By 1980, playing Radio City Music Hall had become Liberace’s oldest unmet ambition. He finally achieved it when he played there three times in 1984, ’85, and ’86, setting records that remain unmatched. He was mortally ill with only three months to live during the last engagement. Emaciated and sucking oxygen at every break, he demonstrated anew the will that had driven him all his life, offering a performance that would have exhausted a much younger, healthy man. He allowed no photographs. The strain caused by the virus showed even in 1985, when he was sixty-six. Courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos.
48 From the earliest days of his act, Liberace had touched his audiences. Later, he made physical touching a part of his performing ritual. But there were other forms of touching. To the last of his days, he could make even skeptics misty-eyed with his nostalgic versions of old songs and new. Even death did not completely vanquish that power. Courtesy of the Liberace Foundation, Las Vegas, NV.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 71
