Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA: MY LIFE WITH LIBERACE
Copyright © 1988, 2013 by Scott Thorson and Alex Thorliefson

This electronic format is published by Tantor eBooks, a division of Tantor Media, Inc, and was produced in the year 2013, All rights reserved.

“Too much of a good thing is
wonderful
,” Liberace used to say when commenting on a flashy new costume or a wild idea for his act. He loved being known as the most outrageous entertainer in show business and went to outrageous lengths to perpetuate and reinforce that image. Predictably, his passing was outrageous too. From January 24, 1987, the day when front-page headlines in the
Las Vegas Sun
revealed that Lee had contracted AIDS, his illness and death became a media event.

Television reporters camped in front of the Palm Springs mansion where he lay dying, subjecting every arrival and departure to intense scrutiny. Was it true, they ghoulishly asked cornered delivery boys, doctors, and family members alike, that Liberace was dying from AIDS? Lee’s staff, under instructions from Lee and others, created an impenetrable wall of denial. Lee had spent his lifetime building what he fondly called “the legend of Liberace.” He’d go to hell before he’d see that legend destroyed.

“I don’t want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS,” Lee told me, clinging to my hand with failing strength when we met for the last time a few weeks before his death.

But Lee, whose every wish had been scrupulously obeyed during his lifetime, would be denied this final one. The zealous Riverside County coroner, investigating the cause of Lee’s death, would reveal the truth at a nationally televised press conference. A commemorative service held in Palm Springs two days after Lee died attracted fifteen hundred irreverent curiosity seekers, carloads of press, but few genuine mourners. In celebrity-saturated Palm Springs only two stars—neighbor Kirk Douglas and actress Charlene Tilton—took the trouble to pay their last respects. To avoid another media extravaganza, the time and place of Lee’s funeral were kept a closely guarded secret.

February 7, 1987, was a beautiful, sunny, almost smog-free day, just the kind of day Lee would have chosen to make his final curtain call. The service was scheduled for one-thirty in the afternoon and I arrived right on time. But security guards kept all but a select few from entering the chapel, and I wasn’t on their list. I stood outside during the brief service. When the mourners came out I realized that they couldn’t have numbered more than twenty. I may have been mistaken, but to me they seemed embarrassed at being seen in that place at that time, as though grieving for Liberace was something to be ashamed of. I recognized most of their faces. All of them had been on Liberace’s payroll. He referred to them as “his people,” as if paying their salaries conveyed ownership. That’s the way he was. Lee had millions of devoted fans, hundreds of acquaintances, fanatically loyal employees, but few real friends.

As they filed away I entered the empty chapel and looked around, surprised by the drabness of the room. I saw no floral tributes, nothing to indicate that people had gathered to mark the passing of a remarkable man. As a memento of the occasion, the mourners had been given a simple card that bore a prayer to St. Anthony, Lee’s personal patron saint. At its top there were the words, “Liberace; May 16, 1919–February 4, 1987.” I looked at it for a while, unable to believe that he was gone. His coffin had been whisked away so quickly, with so little pomp, that there’d been no time to say good-bye.

This isn’t the way Lee would have wanted it, I thought sadly. He’d have arranged to bring this final curtain down in a spectacular way. I took a seat in the empty room and bowed my head, imagining the funeral Lee would have planned. I’d been with him during the staging of so many shows that I felt I knew exactly how he’d do this one. The entire funeral would be vintage Liberace, a facsimile of the thousands of performances he’d given during his lifetime. Lee loved an audience and he always left them feeling good. I couldn’t imagine that he’d have wanted to do less when he took his final bows.

He’d have wanted to make his entrance in an expensive Rolls-Royce, just the way he made the entrance for his Vegas act. The Rolls hearse would come to a stop center-stage and be bathed in blazing spotlights while soaring trumpets and thundering timpani heralded its arrival. The sarcophagus would be draped in Lee’s favorite fur, a $300,000 virgin fox cape with a sixteen-foot train. Then Lee’s valet would appear and remove the cape from the coffin, just as he’d removed it so many times from Lee’s shoulders. The valet and the cape would be driven off in a miniature Rolls. Lee loved telling an audience that “the damn coat was the only piece of clothing in the world to have its own car and driver.”

The chapel would be full to overflowing with all the great Vegas stars and Lee, aided by Ray Arnett, his production manager, would have arranged to keep them entertained. They’d have hired a big chorus and a symphony orchestra. Lee would be resting in a jewel-encrusted, gilded coffin designated by Bob Lindner, the man who designed all his spectacular jewelry. The coffin would be surrounded by a floral display that would put the Rose Parade to shame. Little boys dressed as cherubs would descend from the ceiling and fly across the chapel, just as Lee had so often flown above the Vegas Hilton stage, looking like a phantasmagoric Peter Pan.

Lee loved opulence—flashy jewels, sumptuous furs, luxurious cars, fabulous homes. These were as much a part of him as his trademark smile. He could afford and always demanded the best. His burial service should have been an event, a last hurrah to mark the passing of the man who called himself “the greatest showman on earth.” In sad reality, the occasion was sterile and devoid of color. No matter how or why he died, Lee deserved to be ushered out properly, to be mourned and buried with his habitual opulence rather than with secrecy and haste.

Alone in that gloomy chapel, I experienced an overwhelming feeling of regret and loss. It just shouldn’t have ended this way. Lee’s people had seemed to be in an almost indecent hurry to put the funeral behind them. Six pallbearers, employees of Forest Lawn rather than devoted friends, had whisked the coffin away after the brief service. Then the handful of mourners had scattered quickly, like the fans of a losing team.

Driving home that afternoon, I couldn’t still the questions racing through my mind. After all the triumphs, why had Lee’s life ended as a tawdry bit of gossip for the tabloids, a footnote to the medical history of the disease called AIDS? Images of Lee flashed through my mind, as diverse as if he’d been a split personality. In many ways, despite our long relationship, he remained an enigma. Who was he, I asked myself—glittering entertainer or petty despot, generous giver or self-gratifying spender, devoted lover or promiscuous thrill seeker? I had lived intimately with Lee as his lover, friend, and confidant. No one knew him better than I; no one else could give me the answers.

The search for answers would be long and sometimes painful. Lee and I had met for the first time in 1977 when he was a fifty-seven-year-old man and I was an eighteen-year-old kid. I’ve never forgotten that night, seeing my first Liberace show, my curiosity and awe at meeting the legendary entertainer. But that was not the place to start looking for answers. The place to begin is the beginning.

On November 11, 1918, headlines around, the globe trumpeted: PEACE! World War I, the war to end all wars, had come to an end. American doughboys were headed home and with them came a new sophistication, a new worldview. A popular song posed the question, “How’re you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”

There would be no keeping the boys who fought their way across Europe “down on the farm.” America was poised on the brink of an urban explosion that would be fueled by a technical revolution. Women abandoned their hobble skirts, became flappers, and emerged as a new social force. A booming economy and increased leisure time helped popularize new diversions like movies and radio. Flickering figures on a theater screen and electronically amplified voices coming from crystal tubes right in the living room pushed vaudeville to the brink of extinction. The entertainment industry would never be the same. All these events would have an effect on Liberace’s future.

His birthplace, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a quiet backwater which didn’t respond quickly to the great events at home and abroad. Local farmers and men who worked the Great Lakes shipping trade still counted the weather more important than events overseas. The majority of the people descended from German immigrants; God-fearing, churchgoing, hardworking Lutherans who relaxed on weekends drinking the beer for which their city was famous. In the early years of the twentieth century, Milwaukee was a quiet, conservative community, an unlikely birthplace for the man who would call himself “Mr. Show Business.” Lee would never feel he belonged there.

His birth foreshadowed the immoderate man he would become. Lee tipped the scales at more than thirteen pounds when he was born on May 16, 1919, in the suburb of West Allis. His tiny shriveled twin, an apparent victim of Lee’s greed in the womb, was stillborn. Lee’s mother, Frances, named her enormous surviving infant Wladziu for his Polish ancestors and Valentino for the era’s reigning movie idol. But he would grow up being called Wally or Walter, names he detested until, in his twenties, he anointed himself as “Liberace” (his actual surname) on stage and as “Lee” to his friends.

He was the third Liberace offspring, having been preceded by George and Angelina. Brother Rudolph wouldn’t be born for a decade. The four of them inherited their mother’s short, stocky build, her pointed chin and prominent nose. But their musical talent came from their father. Salvatore Liberace was a classical musician who played French horn with the Milwaukee symphony. Lee recalled sounds as his earliest memories—the lush music of a symphony orchestra pouring from an expensive record player counterpointed by his parents’ angry voices arguing over the family budget. Lee told me that the excitable Salvatore and the more practical Frances were ill suited to each other.

Other than music the Liberaces had no cultural interests. Lee recalled no mention of art, literature, theater, ballet, politics, world or national affairs in the household unless they were directly related to music. He would have no interest in these things as an adult. In fact, when he became a superstar, Lee would heartily disapprove of other stars, such as Ed Asner and Jane Fonda, who used their fame to champion a political cause or candidate.

Catholicism was the tie that held the Liberaces together. Frances was devoted to three things: her church, her children, and, most of all, Lee. She adored him. George and Angelina had inherited some of their father’s musical ability but Lee, who began playing the piano by ear at the age of four, was clearly a prodigy. His mother would later claim that his talent confirmed her instinctive knowledge that Lee was
special.

“You never saw a more beautiful baby,” she later told me. From the time of his birth she cherished Lee more than the others. As a little boy Lee remembered being happiest sitting on her lap. Frances soon decided he’d be better off sitting on the piano bench, practicing.