Behind the Candelabra

by Scott Thorson

  The year 1940 found him playing two or three gigs a week, making a circuit from Green Bay to Sheboygan to La Crosse and then back to Milwaukee. On the road, Lee said, he made use of the telephone numbers he’d been accumulating. His knowledge of the gay world expanded with each new contact and sexual encounter. In those days most of his lovers were older, a situation that would change in the near future. By his thirtieth birthday, Lee would have developed a decided taste for younger men.

  As Lee traveled from town to town, away from his mother and his family, his lifestyle and his music were changing, forming a pattern that would prevail the rest of his life. Lee’s classical repertoire was replaced by the music of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and the Gershwins. Family and friends would later tell me that Lee, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo, had an ingratiating stage presence, even in his twenties. He was anxious to please, to make audiences remember him. But something was missing and Lee, with his superb showman’s instincts, knew it. The way things were going he feared he’d be just another nameless, faceless piano player for the rest of his life, growing old and tired as he drove from one forgettable booking to another. He was just twenty-one but, Lee later remembered, he often felt like a fifty-year-old failure.

  Lee didn’t like talking about his childhood, his youth, or those early years on the road. There was, however, one story he really enjoyed telling. One night after he’d played his usual set, someone in the audience requested “The Three Little Fishies,” a nonsense song that was riding high on the hit parade back then. The song had almost no melody, and it didn’t challenge Lee’s ability, so he decided to have fun with it. He gave it a standard rendition first. But then, in a moment of inspired genius, he played it as if it had been composed by Bach. The audience responded by applauding as loudly as if he’d just invented the piano.

  Lee knew he’d hit pay dirt. He finally had the schtick that would set him apart from every other piano player on the circuit. From then on he closed every performance by asking for requests, which he’d interpret in the style of one or more of the classical composers. Audiences loved his new gimmick. The idea proved to be so popular that he later wished he could have patented it.

  In his early twenties, buoyed by local success, Lee decided to leave home. His goal: the bright lights of New York. He felt sure that fame and fortune waited for him on the East Coast.

  3

  In the early 1940s big bands and swing dominated the music scene. Harry James, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or the Dorseys, and their respective orchestras, could fill a supper club or dance hall for weeks on end. Stand-up comics like George Jessel, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Edgar Bergen dominated the live entertainment scene, playing all the best clubs when they weren’t working in radio or in the movies. Elegant night spots dotted the Manhattan scene, including the ultra-exclusive 21 Club, El Morocco, Sardi’s, and the Stork Club. All the great New York hotels, from the Waldorf to the Pierre, had plush rooms where the nation’s greatest performers appeared regularly. The entertainment world bustled with well-known stars whose activities filled the pages of Variety. Lee remembered that his arrival in New York, predictably, failed to stir a single ripple of enthusiasm in that world.

  At home in Milwaukee he’d been the proverbial big fish in a little pond. In New York the people he contacted about potential bookings said, “Liberace who?” His fame hadn’t extended beyond the borders of Wisconsin. Agents and managers had never heard of him, and they failed to be impressed by the long string of credits he’d acquired on the Wisconsin circuit. Lee said he faced the eternal show-business dilemma: he couldn’t get an agent until he played local bookings, and he couldn’t get local bookings until he had an agent.

  For a while he actually went hungry. He unhappily recalled going to Horn and Hardart, a cafeteria chain, and eating tomato soup that he made, gratis, from packets of ketchup and cups of water. After a couple months of near starvation he had two choices. He could go home and listen to his mother say “I told you so,” or he could continue struggling with the loneliness, poverty, and hunger that the East Coast offered.

  It took guts to stay on—but stay on he did, Lee told me proudly. He finally landed a job in West Orange, New Jersey. It was on the wrong side of the Hudson but he had steady work for six months. Every night after coming back from New Jersey, he mailed out résumés inviting and ultimately begging agents to come hear his music. When he wasn’t booked at clubs he supported himself by playing at private parties in the greater New York area. Lee had uncomfortably vivid memories of those parties: the luxurious homes and the self-assurance of the people who lived in them. He’d take a bus or commuter train to his destination and be admitted through the servants’ entrance. The handsome tip he received at the end of the evening merely fueled Lee’s resentment.

  “Most of those people treated me like a waiter or a cab-driver,” he later complained, still smarting from injured pride. Lee dreamed of the day when he’d be rich and able to live in a mansion in a ritzy neighborhood. Ironically, years later, when he had a seven-figure yearly income, Lee found that he was uncomfortable in places like Bel Air and Rancho Mirage. His enormous homes were located in more humble areas.

  A few families, such as the ultra-rich Gettys, treated Lee well, sending him home in their limousine rather than obliging him to rely on late-night transportation. But people like the Gettys were the exception. From what Lee said, his frustration and ambition played leapfrog as he schemed and slaved to create the career and the life of his dreams.

  Lee was playing a club on the Jersey side of the Hudson River when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America went to war. A cyst on his spine would make him ineligible for service. Had his homosexuality been known it would have excluded him from the draft too, but Lee was so paranoid about concealing his sexual identity by then that I doubt he would have admitted the truth, even to avoid the draft.

  The war proved to be a lucky break. It thinned the ranks of Lee’s competition. By 1942 the Music Corporation of America, one of the country’s leading talent agencies, had lost many of its performers to the war effort. Lee was pleased and surprised when Mae Johnson, an MCA agent, contacted him and signed him to a contract. Thinking all his dreams were about to come true, Lee said he went out and celebrated with a bottle of champagne he could ill afford.

  He fully expected to be playing in all the best places within the year. But he soon discovered that his name appeared at the bottom of MCA’s booking list. Despite Mae Johnson’s personal faith in him, celebrity and security seemed perpetually out of reach. He was on the road week after week, playing the small towns, staying in grimy third-rate hotels, eating in greasy-spoon restaurants. When he played dates in or near New York, Lee made extra money by working as a rehearsal pianist. Those experiences in cold, drafty halls gave him a healthy respect for the dancers and singers, the “gypsies” of Broadway. As he played he watched, judging the individual performers, developing an eye for talent that would serve him well in the years to come when he would choose acts for his own shows.

  Lee’s work in those rehearsal halls also contributed to his knowledge of the entertainment industry’s extensive gay community. Many of the dancers and singers he met were homosexual. He said that his earlier loneliness evaporated as he found new friends, new lovers. With a regular income and an assured social life, he devoted himself to the pursuit of fame and fortune.

  Lee hated his first name. “Maybe Walter sounded all right with Pidgeon,” he told me, “but it sounded awful with Liberace.” Following the example of his idol Paderewski, Lee decided to be booked under a single name. In his opinion, “Liberace” sounded important, unique, fabulous!

  But abbreviating his name didn’t make any difference: MCA still didn’t give him the big push he’d hoped for. Although he worked regularly, he was still appearing in the dingier clubs and hotels, playing to an almost exclusively working-class clientele. He didn’t realize it then, but they would always dominate the ranks of his f
ans. However, in those days, Lee’s dreams were more grandiose. When, oh when, he wondered, would he finally get his big break?

  Throughout the war years, Lee told me, the straight world was even more hostile to gays than it had been during the depression. Every man out of uniform was suspected of being unpatriotic, a draft dodger, a coward, or a queer. To protect himself and his reputation Lee went deeper into the closet, making sure only his closest associates knew his secret. Onstage, he developed a flirtatious patter with the mature women in his audiences. All he had to do was tease them gently, treat them like ladies, and, to his surprise and delight, they responded warmly. Lee discovered that he had a gift for pleasing older women and he began to play to them exclusively. His act was expanding, becoming a combination of patter and piano.

  During this period Lee saw very little of his family. He said he returned for visits only when his mother, newly widowed after a brief marriage to Alexander Casadonte, threatened to join him in New York. By the end of the war the Liberace homestead was relatively empty. George and Angie had married, to the first of their multiple spouses. But Rudy still lived at home and he and Lee shared a bed on Lee’s rare visits. It was an awkward situation which Lee later said he preferred to avoid. However, his brother Rudy would tell a very different story in the years to come, complaining that Lee had made sexual advances when the two of them shared a bed. Whatever the truth may be, Lee felt uncomfortable at home, distanced from his family by new experiences and new friends. The jealousy that had always been a part of his relationship with his brothers and sister seemed to be aggravated by his growing success.

  Two years after Pearl Harbor Lee had achieved modest renown as an entr’acte performer. It was a living. According to him, he was eating, but his soul was starving. He craved recognition. In a continuing effort at self-promotion Lee expanded his practice of advertising his talents via the mail. It was eventually to pay off. Lee loved to tell people just how that happened. One night in 1943, after performing at the Mont Royal Hotel in Montreal, he scribbled out a new group of cards bearing the plaintive query, “Have you ever heard of Liberace?” Few of the recipients recognized his name and most of them failed to respond to Lee’s query. But one man, the entertainment director of Howard Hughes’s Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, took the trouble to call Lee. He offered a six-week contract, which Lee accepted at once.

  Lee recalled his shock on arrival in Las Vegas a few weeks later. Back then the city looked more like a cow town than the entertainment mecca it would become. He stared at the cactus-studded landscape, thinking he’d made the mistake of his life, that six weeks in Vegas would be the equivalent of six weeks on the moon. He was feeling thoroughly disgruntled and put upon when the cab he’d taken from the train station delivered him to Howard Hughes’s hotel. Lee looked up at the marquee, saw Sophie Tucker’s name, and broke into a toothy grin. Tucker was a big star, the kind who could pick and choose her bookings. If Vegas was good enough for Sophie Tucker, he knew it would be good enough for him.

  Despite his initial misgivings, Lee was in the right place at the right time, geographically and musically. Vegas, fueled by the public’s passion for gambling, was slated for unprecedented expansion. And classical music, thanks to films that romanticized the lives of Chopin, Liszt, and Grieg, was becoming part of the popular idiom. Couples were dancing and making love to tunes like “Til the End of Time,” a beautiful melody lifted from the music of Chopin. Lee decided to put a candelabra on his concert grand, an idea he borrowed from that Chopin film. He added a few easily recognized etudes to his act and rode the wave of popularity Hollywood had unwittingly created for someone just like him. His absolute genius as an entertainer took care of the rest.

  Lee blossomed in Las Vegas. He negotiated a $750-a-week salary and, when his booking was extended beyond the initial six weeks, he demanded and got $1,500 a week. Over the years, he would play a total of twenty-four different dates at the Last Frontier and his salary would be increased each time. Vegas loved Lee and he loved it back. The wide-open, anything-goes atmosphere of the gambling halls suited his style perfectly. It also suited the needs of a less desirable element of society.

  In 1946 a new hotel appeared on the strip. The Flamingo had been financed by Mafia money, and its owners were Al Capone and Meyer Lansky. Their lieutenant and on-site manager was none other than the infamous Bugsy Siegel. All three men were Liberace fans. According to Lee, Lansky and Capone ordered Siegel to get Lee to sign a contract with the Flamingo.

  Siegel put in a call to Lee, who was working nearby in Los Angeles, and asked him to come to a meeting in Vegas. He told Lee he was prepared to make an offer Lee couldn’t refuse. But Liberace didn’t want to have any dealings with the Mafia because, as he later said, “Once you’re in with those boys—you never get out.”

  However, common sense dictated his next action. He agreed to meet with Siegel at the Flamingo. Lee was in a no-win situation. If he agreed to perform at the Flamingo, he’d be delivering himself into Mafia hands. If he refused, he suspected he might wake up one morning wearing cement overshoes. So Lee did what he always did when faced with a difficult choice. He stalled for time by telling Siegel he’d have to check with his agent before signing anything.

  After their Vegas meeting ended, Lee learned that Siegel planned to return to L.A. Siegel offered Lee a ride but, knowing Siegel would use the six-hour trip to pressure him, Lee refused, saying he had other business to clear up in Vegas. Then, as part of his cover, he booked a room in a hotel for a one-night stay. That night Lee slept uneasily. By the next morning he’d made up his mind to call Siegel and sign the contract. But the headlines in the Vegas newspaper made the call unnecessary. Lee said that while driving back to Los Angeles, Siegel had been waylaid, and shot and killed in a gangland-style slaying. Had Lee been with him, he would undoubtedly have been murdered too.

  Whether by choice or necessity, Lee maintained a friendly relationship with the Mafia afterward. On two occasions, once in New York at an ultra-exclusive restaurant and once in Boston at a pizza joint in the heart of an Italian neighborhood, I accompanied Lee when he met a major Mafia don. Each time, I watched as Lee exchanged warm greetings, hugging the don and kissing his cheek. There was never any question in my mind that Lee had powerful and very dangerous friends.

  4

  Lee used to say, with uncharacteristic modesty, “I’m just a piano player.”

  In my opinion he was “just a piano player” the way President Reagan is “just a politician.” Both men are great communicators; Reagan with the public and Lee with a nightclub audience. From the very beginning, it was Lee’s ability to reach out to his listeners that set him apart from his competition. Whatever mistakes he may have made in his private life, he never took a false step professionally.

  “An audience can spot a phony a mile away,” Lee told me. “If you don’t enjoy going out there, if you don’t love what you’re doing, they’ll know it.”

  Lee was one of those lucky entertainers who adored performing in front of a live audience. “Onstage,” he said, “I know who I am. I’m sure of myself, in complete control.” He had the rare capacity of making each individual in the audience feel that Liberace was performing just for him or her. Whether he played to ten people or ten thousand, Lee gave every show the same effort—working so hard that he often lost five pounds during his act.

  When I began working with Lee he had an enormous following and played to crowded rooms. But he had bittersweet memories about his early career when he had played to many near-empty ones. As any nightclub performer can tell you, second shows in supper clubs are notoriously dead. Americans just won’t wait until ten or eleven for their evening meal. But playing those depressingly unpopular second shows helped shape Lee’s act.

  “When there are ten thousand people waiting to see you and hear you,” Lee told me, “it’s impossible to single any one of them out. With a small audience it’s natural to feel as if you can talk to them individuall
y.”

  Lee’s act was still in a formative stage in the late forties. It hadn’t yet acquired the glitz arid the giant production numbers for which he is remembered. He owned several sets of conservative black tails, a piano, and a few candelabras. These were his only props as, night after night, he entertained the small second-show crowds. Instead of using expensive props and extravagant productions, which he couldn’t afford, he made the audience a part of the act. Old-fashioned sing-alongs were one of his favorite ways of pulling them inside each performance so that they became participants in their own entertainment. It was corny, like many of Lee’s gimmicks, but it worked.

  In my opinion, he was an uncommon man with a common touch. He never lost the ability to relate to the blue-collar working couple, the family who saved for weeks to treat themselves to a night on the town. One of his credos was “Never let an audience wonder what you plan to do. Tell them!”

  Every night his show varied, depending on his mood and the feedback he got from the people who came to hear him. He might announce that he intended to play all the Chopin or all the Gershwin he knew, and then add, with a deprecating little laugh, that it wouldn’t take more than five minutes. Despite his vast repertoire and his solid grounding in the classics, Lee never talked down to his listeners—he never forgot his own lower-middle-class roots. Stepping down from the stage and shaking hands suited him better than setting himself up on a pedestal.

  Lee may have sinned in private but he made a point of keeping his act clean and wholesome in public. Since families could always attend his performances, Lee had access to audiences not available to most other entertainers. When children came to his shows he capitalized on their presence. He’d ask a kid to come up onstage, spend a few minutes teaching him or her to play chopsticks, and then they’d play a duet. It was pure magic, another of Lee’s great schticks—listening to a little kid tentatively pick out chopsticks while Lee’s nimble-fingered accompaniment made the child sound like a musical genius. Everyone loved it; the children, the parents, and the club managers who saw their revenues blossom. Before Lee permitted a child to leave the stage he gave him or her an autographed miniature piano. Those pianos became coveted mementos of Lee’s performances and, along with the candelabra, the piano became his personal insignia.