Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  The liberation of the homosexual libido, however, was only one effect of the Stonewall movement. Another one moved in a different direction. If homosexuality were normal, then normal monogamy should apply to homosexuals as well. The appeal for male-male marriage, marital benefits for homosexual unions, and the like came after the rawer sexual liberation, but it flowed logically from the normalizing movement. As the twentieth century winds down, thirty years after the Christopher Street raid, the two tendencies still figure in debates within the homosexual community, with the more radical, libertarian types attacking the more conservative types, who advocate discipline and monogamy. Both camps arose, however, from the same source: the normalization of the homosexual impulse. The difficulty lay in determining the proper outlet for that desire.

  In the sixties and early seventies, these issues hardly affected Liberace’s life. According to Scott Thorson, most of Liberace’s closest professional associates were gay. They fell mostly within his own age cohort. This was his informal, subterranean cosmos. He separated it from the rest of his life. Even when the two worlds overlapped, he failed or refused to acknowledge the tangent. He hewed, practically, to the line that homosexuality was an activity, not an ideology. In his memoir of their life together, for example, Scott Thorson makes regular if incidental references to his mentor’s failing or refusing to identify himself sexually at all. “Although the family never discussed Lee’s sexual identity, they had to know he was gay,” Thorson postulated. “His mother may have known too. But she undoubtedly thought there was nothing wrong with her son that the right woman couldn’t cure. . . . Frances seemed utterly unconcerned by my presence in her son’s life. She knew we lived together, went everywhere together; she may even have suspected that we shared a bed. But, like Lee she had an extraordinary ability to close her mind to anything that might have been unpleasant. She always greeted me warmly, with the same welcoming embrace she gave her son.”7

  Liberace’s family’s failure to acknowledge his homosexuality outlived the showman. After his death, his sister repeated flatly that her brother had not died of AIDS; he had not been gay either, she testified. “He was just unique. He was special because he was born with a caul,” she said.8 She had not seen what she had seen. Homosex was everywhere, but it was nowhere, too.

  Sexually, the fifties foreshadowed the outline of the last three decades of Liberace’s life. He seems to have indulged in mostly pickup sex or short-term affairs. The sexual encounter with the young actor Rock Hudson around 1952 or ’53 suggests the pattern. Beyond Hudson, John Rechy has been the most famous of Liberace’s pickups to reveal the steps of the showman’s sexual minuet. The two former Liberace protégé-employees had arranged a dinner, and Rechy described his first encounter with the showman during their meal. “He put his hand on my crotch right under the table. This was rude. You don’t want to say anything, because it’s a dinner. So when he left, he wanted me to go with him, and there was this big fuss because his bodyguard was with him and saw what was going on. Later he called back. He was crying ‘Please come, I’m so lonesome. Please, please come!’” This was the same line he would feed Scott Thorson a decade later, and, like the blond teenager, the light-eyed, dark-haired young hustler was actually moved. He accepted the invitation to visit the house on Valley Vista Boulevard. “I thought I was being humane. But I was being naive, too,” he mused. “So I went into that incredible black-and-white house he had in Los Angeles. He had these poodles that were black and white. They were running all over, and suddenly I was running all over because he was actually quite aggressive. He was an incredibly, incredibly aggressive man. He was just determined to get sex. He offered to show me the house, and every time we turned around it was another bedroom. Finally there was his big one. I had to run out.”9

  Ever horny, he put the make on almost anyone. There was, for example, the handsome young Swedish luncheon visitor from the pre-Cloisters Palm Springs days. The Miami-based theatrical manager of the Danish piano comic Victor Borge told a story of another such encounter. “Whenever Lee came to Florida, he’d call me up and I’d drive up to see him in Palm Beach. On one of these visits, it must have been in the late sixties, I took a young friend with me,” the impresario related. “Frank must have still been in his teens. Liberace insisted we go to dinner with him. We hadn’t dressed so he provided some clothes for us for eating out—they were really garish with ruffles and piano-shaped cuff links. Really vulgar stuff. He was also taken with Frank. I came home alone that night. I didn’t hear hide nor hair from that boy, and I was worried about what his parents would say. But after his ‘night of bliss,’ he made it home safe and sound that Sunday evening.”10 The young man was tall, slender, with dark Italian good looks. Thirty years later, the former teenager still guarded the confidences of his evening with the celebrity. “He was a very aggressive gentleman is all I will say,” the man recalled.11

  There are other such stories of still more casual encounters. “I lived really close to his house on Valley Vista Boulevard. His mother and mine were friends. I was just a teenager and not his type at all—I’m Indian! He liked blonds! We didn’t do anything serious, but we just messed around and made out,” reported a trim, swarthily handsome real-estate salesman of his sexual adventure with the showman in the late fifties or early sixties. The same man, before his marriage, also made similar alliances with Rock Hudson and a raft of other L.A. types.12

  Cruisy encounters and boy pickups became a part of the Liberace underground lore. A gay Hollywood insider reported similar episodes. “In the ’60s, you could often see Liberace cruising the Akron store on Sunset Boulevard with his little doggie in hand, dressed all in white—Lee I mean—trying to pick up Mexicans in the store’s parking lot,” the television producer chuckled. “He wasn’t discreet, he was daring and rather outrageous about it. He’d stand in the lot and try and pick up young men parking their cars. Most didn’t recognize him!”13 None of this is very different from the gossip sheets’ earliest stories in 1954 about Liberace picking up strangers in bathrooms and hitting on weightlifters. Nor, of course, does it fail to fit with the particulars of the episode chronicled by Hollywood Confidential in the spring of 1957.

  What was the nature of these affairs when they actually panned out? An afternoon or evening tryst might have stretched into a weekend liaison or even—as the one with Rock Hudson did—to a couple of weeks; some extended even longer. In the absence of hard empirical evidence, to say exactly how much longer is problematical, as is determining the number of men the showman took in after 1970. Lucille Cunningham, the performer’s longtime accountant, was in charge of disbursing cash, including paying Lee’s companions’ bills. By the time Scott Thorson came along in 1977, she was pressing seventy-five years old. She had been around; she had seen plenty of Lee’s tricks. They came, they went; she stayed. She had little patience any more. Thorson, who was only a teenager then, dropped by Cunningham’s desk one day to instruct her about paying some charges. His vanity offended the septuagenarian bookkeeper. To put the boy in his place, she attacked him with a list of his predecessors. “‘You really think you are something,’” she hissed. “Well let me tell you, Mr. High and Mighty, Lee’s had a string of boys like you. Has he told you about Bobby or Hans or the male stripper who used to live with him? We called that one ‘the country boy’ because he was such an ignorant hick! I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go. You won’t be any different. One of these days Lee with tell Seymour Heller to get rid of you and then you’ll be out on your ear too!”14

  Scott Thorson had come into the showman’s life in 1977. He was eighteen. Before him, according to the bookkeeper’s account, there had also been “Bobby,” “Hans,” and “the country boy.” Thorson left no information about them other than their names. John Rechy knew others, but he assigned them no names. His tryst with the showman in the late fifties turns up the presence of the jealous, nameless “bodyguard-lover” who interrupted the star’s vulgar groping at Rechy’
s audition dinner.15

  Others crop up here and there. While being deposed in his palimony suit against the showman, Thorson mentioned in passing some of his predecessors in Liberace’s bed. He did not describe the duration of the relationship, but he mentioned that Lee had tricked around with one man, Chris Cox, years before on the East Coast. They remained friends afterwards when the old lover operated the Odyssey, a gay club in Los Angeles. Indeed, Cox himself came to figure in the palimony suit as one of Lee’s allies against Thorson.16 This suggests still another aspect of Lee’s relationship with his sexual partners. His liaisons might have been as short as they were numerous, but he split without rancor and took care of his companions afterwards. His loyalty to the “underworld-type” figure Chris Cox, as Thorson described him, repeated itself with others. “Liberace was tougher than people imagine. I saw how he worked,” reported John Rechy. “I saw the bodyguards he had to protect him. But he did take care of people who stopped being his main boyfriend. He would hire them to work for him.” Pondering the showman’s character further, he concluded: “He was a nice man.”17

  Who were Liberace’s boyfriends? What were they like? What do their mostly ephemeral forms reveal about the showman’s desires and needs? What was the nature of his relationships with these men? Lucille Cunningham’s description of “the country boy” as an ignorant and uncultivated male stripper offers a clue to the showman’s taste. So does the presence of the hustler Rechy in the entertainer’s retinue—insofar as the budding writer-intellectual studiously proletarianized himself and artfully disguised his intelligence and creativity.18 So, too, of course, does the showman’s cruising the Mexican parking-lot attendants off Sunset Boulevard.

  A pattern emerges from this fragmentary data of the entertainer’s sexual proclivities: tricks, tricking around, one-night or weekend stands, temporary or transient relationships, an attraction to younger men, a devotion to inferiors. This pattern implies other sexual elements: libidinousness, aggressiveness, and promiscuousness. Other data, already mentioned, supports the conclusion. “He was an incredibly, incredibly aggressive man,” repeated John Rechy. Another old associate put the showman’s aggressiveness in clearer focus still: “Oh, Lee was a top! He liked to fuck.”19

  Scott Thorson had access to none of this information. Indeed, consciously or unconsciously, Liberace tried to keep all of it from him. Thorson, however, confirmed and elaborated on these accounts through his own observations of the entertainer, with whom he lived for almost five years.

  Upon their first meeting, the showman put the make on the teenager almost immediately—echoing the style John Rechy had described. Not incidentally, the approach also resembled Confidential‘s 1956 reconstruction of the pianist’s encounter with the “handsome young press agent.” According to Thorson, Liberace possessed “an insatiable sex drive.” Reflecting on his early career, Liberace told Thorson about “spending more time thinking about sex during those years than he spent thinking about his act.” Nor had his appetites diminished with time and age. They were “at an all-time high,” his boyfriend repeated of his sixty-year-old patron. With Thorson, “he wanted sexual encounters a couple of times a day.”20

  In the popular parlance, Lee was “oversexed.” Besides admitting that he thought about sex all the time, he satisfied his craving with pornography, again according to Thorson. “He used pornography to become aroused and ready for sex,” Thorson wrote. “Each time Lee viewed one of his tapes he’d want to have sex.”21 In a somewhat different context, however, Thorson related that Liberace loved the material for itself. He described his mentor’s pornographic films as a “consuming interest.” “His collection was extensive and well used,” he said. “Before my arrival he’d watched hard-core pornography as a steady diet.” Although he apparently stopped doing this upon Thorson’s arrival, the young man also declared that Liberace used to share his films “at all-male parties.” Particular sex scenes turned him on. “The variety of sexual acts he saw in the screen fascinated him. Nothing made him hotter than watching a three-way.”22 Liberace relished live pornography where it was available. In 1981, on international tour, Lee took his young companion sightseeing through the European sexual underground. “We’d been told that Hamburg had the most outrageous night life—porno palaces—and Lee was determined to see them for himself.” The city fulfilled his patron’s expectations with nightclubs “where the entertainment consisted of a variety of sex acts performed on stage. . . . He sat, riveted by the action, as a series of acts—homosexual and heterosexual unfolded in front of us.” While Thorson found it distasteful, he said, the show transfixed his lover.23

  Stateside, the showman satisfied his desires, again according to Thorson, with visits to porno emporiums and “adult book stores.” These functioned not only as merchandising outlets for pornographic material, but as assignation spots as well. Indeed, visiting them was a kind of sexual experience in itself. Lee’s young friend described a trip to one of these places in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1981. Since 1980, because of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, pornography has become a legitimate industry, and supermarketlike emporia with names like Pleasure Palace II sprout their meters-high pink neon signs across freeways in all major cities. Nevertheless, the old form, as described by Thorson, persists in small-town America still. In “one of Lauderdale’s sleazier neighborhoods,” the porno market “presented a blank, windowless face from the street,” he related.

  Inside, racks loaded with pornographic books and magazines lined the front of the store, while shelves of merchandise—whips, chains, other objects used in sadomasochistic sex acts, even dildos and other things . . . were near the back. . . .

  There was a series of viewing machines, like old-fashioned nickelodeons, where you could watch sex flicks to your heart’s content—heterosexual, homosexual, sex acts featuring animals or children; they had it all. . . . The bookstore also had private cubicles in the back with what are known in the gay world as “glory holes.” For a small fee a man could rent one of the cubicles, put his penis through the “glory hole,” and wait for a response.

  The scene, the younger man insisted, transfigured his mentor. “Lee’s eyes gleamed as he took it all in,” Thorson remembered. He “was soon going from viewer to viewer, grinning all over the place.”24

  Scott Thorson insisted he had accompanied his lover here under duress. Moreover, he considered it dangerous for his patron to have visited the shop. The next morning, he hectored him about the transgression. “About last night,” he admonished. “You’re a well-known star and you’re out of your fucking mind to go in a place like that! What the hell would you have done if someone, a reporter, had seen you in there? How would you explain that to all the little old ladies?”25

  For all Thorson’s outrage, Liberace’s visit to the Ft. Lauderdale porn shop is perfectly consonant with his cruising boys on Sunset Boulevard in broad daylight in full Liberacean regalia. They sprang from the same preoccupations. If a part of Liberace’s indulgence arose from egomania and out of a disregard for getting caught—as suggested by Thorson—he may also have been driven by the opposite motive: the excitement of the illicit. In snappy gay parlance, “Danger Queens” flirt with risk and peril as a source of sexual arousal. Along the same lines, the forbidden-fruit aphorism applies. In this regard, sexual expression that is generally unaccepted offers a double dip of the forbidden—since homosex is illicit of its nature, participation in illicit homosexual activity makes for an extra rush. Even so, the illicitness—the source of danger—also provided limits. Those limits were the social sanctions against such forms of sexuality. Every decade after Stonewall brought a reduction of those social constraints. Whether Liberace liked it or not, whether he approved or not, the gay scene—political and social—was developing aggressively through the mid-sixties. The self-consciousness increased afterwards. After Stonewall, it acquired more legitimacy with each passing year. Liberace participated in this new world, in part, as an extension of his old values. We
re gay clubs more numerous and more open, for example? He visited them. As one associate from the Springs recalled, he would sweep in, bedecked in his extravagant outfits, covered with glittering jewelry and heavy makeup, and surrounded by beefcake. Although he steadfastly refused to make a statement about his sexual preferences, he did loosen up a bit publicly. By the mid-seventies, he had gone from an absolute denial of his homosexuality to a professed lack of interest in the topic. “I hate it when people whisper things and think they’re giving me a juicy bit,” he grumbled, “Like, ‘I just heard something about someone you know. It’s so-and-so. He sucks cock.’ I say, ‘Great! Fantastic!’ It’s all a lot of shit. Who cares?” He no longer cared, he insisted; nobody cared. The Cassandra trial, he ruminated in 1975? “Now people couldn’t care less about that sort of thing. I kid about it on stage in my shows, talk about my balls and all that kind of thing. People love it. They couldn’t care less how I swing.”26 While he never owned up to the specific nature of his relationships, he was playing around the edges of admission by the mid-seventies, when he introduced his chauffeur(/lover) on the stage as “my friend and companion.” By 1982, he was acknowledging “the gay drift of his show and speaking sympathetically of all sexual preferences” even while admitting that his own audiences would never “accept people who are totally gay or come out on Johnny Carson. . . . But with a name like Liberace, which stands for freedom,” he added, “anything that has the letters L-I-B in it I’m for, and that includes gay lib.”27

  If Gay Liberation encouraged his openness, Stonewall affected him in other ways. Perhaps especially because of his age—he was plunging into his mid-fifties—he evidenced notions of regularizing his unspoken relationships. Aspects of his own character pulled him in this direction, too. He loved family. He treasured domesticity. If this is very clear from his relationship with Scott Thorson and with Thorson’s successor, Cary James, his relationship with Vince Cardell foreshadows some of it as well, even as it draws more on the zippier old tradition.