While this sort of imaginative reconstruction of the other or of lover-as-self permeated Liberace’s attitude toward Scott Thorson, Cary James, and perhaps his other companion-love objects, it figured most literally in his relations with Thorson. Who was lover to the beloved? Who was Scott Thorson to Liberace, Liberace to Thorson? And, by extension, who was Liberace to himself? Beyond the naming evidence, a particularly revealing, even grotesque episode affirms the complexity of their bond. When Thorson and Liberace had lived together for about a year, Liberace determined to undergo a round of cosmetic surgery. On this occasion, however, he did not submit alone; Thorson underwent the surgical procedure as well. It was certainly not to make him look more youthful, as he was only nineteen or twenty at the time. It was, instead, to reshape his face to resemble his patron/lover’s. Thorson describes the incident in his book. In a session with the plastic surgeon, the showman had exclaimed, “I want to talk to you about doing some surgery on Scott.” When the physician quizzed him, according to Thorson, “Lee jumped up and ran into another room returning with a large oil portrait of himself. ‘I want you to make Scott look like this,’ he said, propping the painting up in front of the doctor. . . . It was a full-face portrait of Lee and one of his favorite paintings of himself, clearly showing his prominent cheekbones, slightly arched nose, and pointy chin the most flattering way.81
This was exactly the look the physician imposed in a two-step operation. He first used silicone implants, Thorson recounted, “to reshape my round face into a reasonable facsimile of Lee’s heart-shaped one.” Five days later, the doctor lengthened and narrowed his nose to the same end. The result? “I looked like a younger, Nordic version of Liberace.” He could hardly recognize himself, he insisted, “I remember taking time to stop and stare in fascination at the Liberace look-alike I’d become.”82 Thorson’s palimony suit summarized the event, too. “You went along with it?” the lawyer queried with some incredulity. “Are you happy you did it?” he pressed. “Yes,” Thorson concluded, “because I thought I was making him happy.”83 He elaborated on the incident in his memoir. “The truth is it never occurred to me to oppose Lee. My future was completely in his hands, as it had been from the day I accepted his offer of employment,” Thorson related. “Lee was much more than my lover, from the beginning. If he wanted me to spend the rest of my life with a new face, one that looked like his, that’s exactly what I would do.”84
Embedded within the silliness of a pet name and the physical trauma of restructuring bone and skin, the complex, multilayered relationship of the homosexual bond between Thorson and Liberace manifested itself in still other ways. Just as likely, it influenced Lee’s affair with Cary James as well, the other recipient of the nickname if not the knife.
In his memoir, Thorson related that after his surgery, people often asked if he were Liberace’s son. “Lee was thrilled every time someone suggested a blood kinship between us,” Thorson said. “Over the years, I’d changed from being his lover or companion to become a perfect reflection of Lee himself—flamboyant, a little crazy. Lee had often talked about how much he would have liked to have a son. Even before my surgery it wasn’t unusual for him to say that in many ways I’d become a son to him. We felt psychically connected to each other in ways that had nothing to do with sex.”85
Behind the Candelabra offers additional explanations of this other level of bonding. “He spoke of his love of children and how saddened he was at never having his own. ‘I want to be everything to you,’ Lee said, ‘father, brother, lover, best friend.’”86 The feeling was mutual and reciprocal.
Lee had a deep desire to pass his name on to someone else, while I wanted us to be legally bound so that Lee would always be part of my life. More than my lover, he was my mentor—the rock on which I’d built my entire existence. I was wet behind the ears when we met, untutored and unsophisticated, and I’d grown up under his guidance. My view of the world had been shaped by his interests, my opinions formed by things he’d told me. I shared his love of animals, of cooking, of decorating. Mentally—and physically, following the plastic surgery—I was Lee’s creature. He’d been my Pygmalion. Although it sounds crazy now, I’d begun to think of myself as an extension of Liberace, a part of him rather than a full-fledged individual. Even now, looking back, I sometimes feel that my life began the day Lee and I met and ended the day we parted.87
“Lee exercised complete control over my life,” Thorson related. “He told me what to wear, where to go, who to see once I got there. There were times when he acted more like a father than a lover.”88 After the disruption of their union, Thorson could still talk about the complex bonds that linked them: “He had been my lover, my father, my confidant, and my best friend while I grew to manhood. He’d meant more to me than anyone in the world.”89
For both of them, then, the perfect resolution of this bonding seemed to reside in formalizing and institutionalizing their union. Liberace would find a name for his companion; he would legitimize his affection. He would confirm the underlying sources of his longing in the process. Thorson summed it up: “Adoption sounded like the logical culmination of everything we’d been to each other.” When they had first began living together, the older man had often spoken of adoption, but after the plastic surgery, the option became still more attractive. “When we had established our relationship Lee had talked about adopting me, but we’d never taken the trouble to find out what it would take legally. Now the constant comments about how much I looked like Lee made him seriously consider the idea. ‘You know, Scott,’ he said, ‘no one’s ever been closer to me than you. I want to make sure that you’re cared for forever, no matter what happens to me.’”90
In a different context, Thorson offered another version of the bonding. His lawsuit against his old lover revealed some of the facts of the case, even as the lawyers tugged at the mysterious threads of the homoerotic bond. Just as the transcript preserves his lack of polish and his incorrect use of language, his deposition also reveals his uncertainty about what was going on between him and the showman. The attorney pushed relentlessly.
“He wanted me to think of him as a father-type image,” Thorson muttered, when questioned by the lawyer.
“Are you telling me that the sexual relation with Liberace stopped at a point in time?”
“It never stopped,” Thorson replied. “It wasn’t as often as it was in the beginning.”
Lee’s attorneys ran with the lure: “Is what you are telling me, then, that you contemplated having sex with your father? You contemplated a sexual relation with an adopted father relation didn’t you, as a part of this oral agreement?”
“I still don’t know how to answer that. I am sorry.”
Mr. Showmanship’s lawyers were not paid excellent money to be sympathetic to their client’s enemies. Son? Brother? Father? Sex? they queried. “When you put those together you have incest, don’t you?”91
Scott Thorson was not trained in the intricacies of the law nor in the beauties of language. He wasn’t trained in much of anything. His only half-articulate answers, however, come closer to the enigmas of his old affection than does the lawyers’ logic. Employer, boss, teacher, mentor, patron: Liberace’s response to his lovers played on all of these, but underneath the labels and superimposed on them were other images in the world of men and of homoerotic desire—brothers, lovers, fathers, sons, and self; a shadow in a mirror—rippled reflections on water.
Thirteen
THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY PLEASURES
Between 1978 and 1982 we had a loving and intimate relationship. We shared fully on and off the stage. Liberace was to me, like a father and lover in one. We had great times together and enjoyed each other’s company very much.
SCOTT THORSON
“You look like an Adonis,” Lee told him. “My own blond Adonis.”1 Actually, Scott Thorson looked more like a Viking prince than a Greek demigod. He was classic Nordic. He stood just under six foot three and weighed a rather soft 190 pounds in 19
77. He brushed a longish shock of yellow-blond hair away from his clear blue eyes and pale, round face. His skin ruddied quickly in the sun—or under tanning lamps. He was striking.
Scott Thorson’s looks were his chief asset. He had little education, and less culture and polish. He had weathered more than his share of difficulties by the time he graduated from Walt Whitman High School in the spring of 1977. He had been born eighteen years before, on January 23, 1959, in Liberace’s old stomping ground in the upper Midwest, indeed, in the city that changed the pianist’s life—La Crosse. The boy’s Wisconsin years were disastrous, his family life chaotic. He had seven brothers and sisters. His mother’s first marriage to Nordel Johansen produced four children: Wayne, Sharon, Gary, and LaDon. Upon leaving her first husband, she wed another Scandinavian, Dean Thorson, who gave her four more kids: Annette, Carla, Scott, and Jimmy. She had brought two of the children from her first marriage into her second. The two she abandoned were the lucky ones. Highly unstable, even psychotic, according to Scott, “she’d disappear for days, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Once when we’d been left with nothing to eat, I begged our landlady for food. She gave us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and called the authorities.” When the mother was institutionalized for a year, the state put the children in orphanages. After her release, she reclaimed her brood of blond kids and headed for California, where the pattern repeated itself: erratic behavior, disappearances, hospitalization for her, orphanages and foster homes for the kids. Thorson described it, perhaps in understatement, as a “hard, loveless life.”2
The six children were shuttled between a variety of foster homes and state-run public facilities. Scott Thorson did not even recall them all. He loved Rose and Joe Carracappa, but his mother reclaimed him shortly after he moved in with them. Marie and David Brummet stood out, too. They took in him as well as his pets on their Marin County ranch. When doctors diagnosed David Brummet with cancer a year and a half later, however, the idyll ended. Now going on sixteen, Thorson once again faced the possibility of returning to a public facility for homeless children. Desperate, he worked out an arrangement to live with his much older half brother Wayne Johansen, one of “the lucky ones” who had remained with his father. Johansen lived in San Francisco.3 It was 1975, Stonewall plus six. The teenager was headed for San Francisco, Stonewall Nirvana.
Scott Thorson does not claim that his brother was homosexual, but as a bartender in heavily gay San Francisco, Thorson related, Wayne Johansen knew the scene and “had wide acquaintance with California’s gay community.” Thorson professed not to particularly like living with his brother, in part because his sibling’s friends put the make on him. Nor, he claimed later, did he particularly care for Johansen himself, who was fifteen years his senior.4 The bad blood grew worse. When the Thorson-Liberace feud went furiously public in the fall of 1982, Wayne Johansen allied himself effectively with the Liberace team against his kin. Later, he assumed an even larger role in the affair, when he claimed that his sibling had been a boy prostitute in his teen years and had carried on a sexual relationship with one of his foster fathers, David Brummet.5 Thorson denied the allegations, but he did admit to having his first homosexual experience while living at his brother’s apartment. He was around sixteen.6
Although Thorson described himself as being bisexual in his teens, girls figure nowhere in his memoir. By his own account, his adolescence was exclusively homosexual. From this time, his personal life, he wrote, revolved “around a few gay friends I’d made while living in northern California.”7 His legal deposition in the palimony suit elaborates upon this picture somewhat. During high school, he related, he had lived with another gay man, Louis Barraza, but they had never had sex. Indeed, he insisted that he had little sexual experience at all before the fall of 1977. How many men? “Less than 10? Less than 5?” the lawyers queried. Yes, he finally agreed, less than five.8 One of these men was Robert Street, as Thorson identified him in his deposition, or Bob Black, as he named him in his memoir. He had met Street through his Northern California circle of friends. A choreographer-dancer, Street was pressing forty when they met, but Thorson described him as “extremely good-looking in a blond, Nordic way, nicely dressed, well-spoken, and easy to talk to.”9
Deposed in the palimony case, Thorson left testimony that not only suggests elements of his relationship with Street but also offers insights into male-male sexual relations in general. Had you and Street been lovers? the deposing attorneys inquired. Thorson said no. They rephrased the question: Had you had a sexual relation? they asked. Now he said yes. The lawyers seemed incredulous. This is not being lovers? they demanded. “What does ‘being lovers’ mean to you?” they pressed. “When you want to be lovers? In other words, a permanent, exclusive relationship?” “Yes,” he said. “Without anybody else on the side?” “Right.” “That is being lovers to you?” “Well,” Thorson mulled the question over, “there’s many different terms of being lovers. I wouldn’t know.” Others? they demanded. “Living together and committing themselves to each other and no one else,” Thorson concluded.10
If the older, well-established Street was a model of stability in the gay teenager’s chaotic life, he was otherwise important in the Liberace story, too. Street drove a flashy Mercedes sports coupe, and after a few months’ acquaintance, in July 1977, he invited the boy to make a road trip with him. Their destination: Glitter Gulch in the Mojave Desert.11 Thorson liked the car. He liked Bob Street. He had never visited the showy gambling casinos. Hobnobbing with Street’s star acquaintances excited him. A greater excitement, of course, awaited him.
Once in Las Vegas, the two men attended a variety of shows, including Liberace’s. The younger man had never heard of the entertainer, he admitted, until a couple of weeks before. From what he knew, he expected to dislike the show. He didn’t. “I was spell-bound,” he conceded. “The man seemed to be having such a good time that I couldn’t help being caught up by the fun. His humor sounded so fresh and spontaneous and he did such a terrific job of poking fun at himself that I got the impression he was ad-libbing all the way. . . . It was pure camp and great fun.”12
As a dancer, Bob Street had a variety of connections, not least with Ray Arnett, Lee’s stage manager, who had broken into the Liberace show as a young hoofer over twenty years before. According to Thorson, Arnett figured centrally in the showman’s gay inner circle. This connection got the visitors great seats at the show; it won them a backstage interview as well. An invitation to have brunch with the showman the next day followed. That invitation prompted another exchange. “Here’s my unlisted telephone number,” burbled the showman, as he passed the young Viking a piece of paper.13
Two weeks later, back home, Thorson retrieved the scrap of paper from his pants pocket. He called the number. The showman issued another invitation, to return to Vegas. The boy accepted. And then, once Thorson returned, came Liberace’s proposal that he join the entourage, be a secretary, “a companion, a bodyguard, someone to keep Vince off my back.” The boy agreed. Thorson’s “okay” unleashed the showman’s libido. They spent the night together for the first time. It was late July or perhaps early August. The showman now had a new bodyguard, companion, chauffeur, protégé—and lover. Did the blond Wisconsin boy know what he had? He knew he had a diamond ring straight off the maestro’s finger, and he knew he had three crisp hundred-dollar bills in his pocket. Beyond that, the big teenager professed to having had only inklings of the shape of his future.
After a trip back to L.A. to gather his small collection of goods, Thorson moved into the Shirley Street mansion in Las Vegas, and into Liberace’s bed as well. The exotic intricacies of the household distressed him, he related. Cardell’s jealousy, the former boyfriend’s relationship with his own valet, and Carlucci’s hovering made him crazy, he insisted. After only a few weeks in Las Vegas, he threatened to leave. His warning provoked a histrionic confession from his patron. He had been smitten from the first time he’d seen him backstage with Bob S
treet all those weeks before, the showman cried. “I couldn’t take my eyes off you. I felt something grabbing my guts, something that said this kid is one in a million. It killed me, those two weeks hoping and praying you’d call. And when you did, I can’t tell you how happy it made me. You see, Scott, I love you.”
Lee had certainly felt Cupid’s sting before. The showman fell in love easily. He had made plenty of attachments like this during his career. There was the young hustler John Rechy; there were Hans and Bobby and Chris and Vince and the buffed-up country boy. Maybe, in his own way, he was in love with each of them. But did he see something else when he looked at the strapping boy who, a generation earlier, could have been a farmhand on his grandfather Zuchowski’s place? Was he looking at Scott Thorson and seeing the moon? One in a million, he had told Thorson. Maybe it was so.
Scott Thorson might have been created to fit Liberace’s special qualifications. Did the showman adore the shoddy? Love the abandoned and obscure? Celebrate the neglected and unwanted? Thorson had been even more untended and uncared for as a child than Lee had been, more disregarded than any pup the pianist had ever brought in off the street. Thorson had been one of eight struggling for an afflicted parent’s affection. While his father played no apparent role in his life, Thorson failed even to give his mother a name in his memoir. He had lived a hardscrabble life since he was born; in his youth, economic deprivation had coincided with psychological poverty. He was perfect human material for a patron, guide, protector. That he shared the showman’s love of dogs and animals added to the attraction.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 46