Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Circumstances fueled Thorson’s appeal for the showman too. Devoid of stability in his life, the young man needed security even more than Lee did. His affection for Bob Street suggested his attraction to older, established men, as well. If bedding a sixty-year-old man—complete with makeup and heavy jewelry—gave the adolescent pause, Liberace also made up for more than the economic deficiencies of his life. Lee’s declaration of love? “That was the first time in my entire life that someone had said, ‘I love you,’” he related. “When I was little I used to imagine my mother taking me in her arms, hugging and kissing me, and saying she loved me. But it had never happened. Not with her and not with anyone else.”14

  They went hand in glove, these two. But one in a million? There was more.

  Liberace believed in numerology, fate, and fortune, and the fact that he had met Thorson was actually a minor marvel in itself.15 He adhered strictly to a rule, for example, against receiving visitors between his first and second shows. But he had broken it this once; meeting Thorson resulted. “I’ve often wondered why he permitted two strangers like [Street] and myself to come backstage,” reflected Thorson. “Was he hoping that someone like me would come along?”16 Here appeared, then, miraculously, a needy boy, just as Liberace was feeling needy himself. This was not, however, just any needy boy. This one hailed from his neck of the woods, indeed, was a native of La Crosse, where the showman had experienced his epiphany. Here Liberace had discovered his own voice—or hands; it became clear to him that his future lay in his being an entertainer rather than a concert pianist. La Crosse represented much more to him, however. This was where he broke with his father. Here he declared both financial and aesthetic independence from his parent. Indeed, in La Crosse, he dismissed Sam Liberace as an active element in his life forever. And just as the boy from La Crosse, Wisconsin, appeared in his life in 1977, Sam left it. Salvatore Liberace, in his ninety-third year, had joined the symphonic orchestra in the sky on April 26. Walter had never made peace with him. He had never resolved the breach that separated them. Despite eliminating his father from his life, he had nursed resentment against his parent for years. If his bitterness, even, was love gone bad, the appearance of this boy, in some weird way, gave him the chance to do it right again, to take it from the top, to start from tow—from La Crosse again. He could play the good father to this son, but through the new boy from Wisconsin, he could also relive his own youth and redress his own old hurts. Scott was Boober to his dad’s old Boo.

  One in a million. Despite hyperbole and gush, perhaps his declaration of affection got it right after all.

  “I hate my life,” Liberace had unburdened himself to the eighteen-year-old. “He looked shrunken, vulnerable, and very alone,” Thorson recalled of their first intimate conversation. “I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. Here he was, the biggest star in Vegas, and yet, when the curtain went down, I would see he was completely alone. Logic told me that if had any real friends, anyone he could trust, he’d have confessed his problems to that person rather than to a comparative stranger.”17 Liberace had lain the identical spiel on John Rechy. “Please come, I’m so lonesome. Please, please come!,” he had cried. His plea had persuaded even the streetwise young hustler in 1967.18 Ten years later, it still worked. It was more than just a line.

  Liberace’s needs never waned. They remained a driving motivation throughout his five-year union with Thorson. Indeed, they dominated his relations with Thorson’s successor, Cary James, as well. “He demanded my constant companionship,” Thorson observed.19 “He hungered for companionship. He couldn’t stand to be alone and needed to know someone would always be there for him,” Thorson observed.20 “The longer Lee and I were together,” he wrote elsewhere, “the more I understood his sense of isolation, his need to have a confidant and full-time companion.”21 In keeping with this opinion, Thorson insisted that they parted company under almost no circumstances. His successor, Cary James, echoed this observation.22

  For three years, maybe four, it worked. According to Thorson’s published record, they were excellent together, at least early on. If their mutual needs and neediness drew them together, they helped keep them together, too. As for the forty-year difference in their ages, Thorson seldom returned to it after he described the initial shock of bedding an old man. This appears curious on the surface. While Liberace’s age would seem a striking liability, one of the most astute observers of homoerotic bonding has argued that such radical differences actually make for durability in homosexual unions. “Many successful gay relationships are based on a difference in the partners—a difference in age, race, social status, or personality,” writes Richard Isay. “Complementation is not so important to heterosexual relationships, because of the gender difference.”23

  Given the norm of “long-term” homosexual relationships, the Liberace-Thorson union not only worked, it worked well.24 Scott and Lee had a good life. It remained peculiar, however. If not unique in the gay world, it was notable because the two were strangers when they joined company. They had known each other a total of about an hour and a half when Lee invited Scott to live with him. Other curiosities distinguished their union.

  Besides Liberace’s personal eccentricities, his work dictated the shape of their life together. The showman still toured for over half the year. He, his lover, and his entourage lived out of suitcases and hotel rooms for much of this time. During the Thorson years, Liberace not only toured the United States but also played two major European engagements, in the spring of 1978 and 1981. Thorson’s memoir makes almost no reference to being on the road.25 Indeed, it reveals very little sense of place or locale, and its reflection of time or chronology is just as weak. Thorson’s life with Liberace, as the young man reconstructed it, lacked physiological or chronological milestones. For the adolescent companion, one place simply melded into another, one day into another, and indeed, day into night. When he was performing, Liberace’s day did not begin until the afternoon; his main meal was, effectively, a dawn “breakfast” that he consumed as he wound down from his show after 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. He slept until mid- or late afternoon, when he began preparations for the next performance.

  The showman’s inversion of the standard workday determined the same inversion for his lover. Their life was like swimming in mineral oil. “We usually got home between two or three in the morning,” Thorson remembered. “It might have been the crack of dawn to most people but for Lee the workday had just ended. We’d have a snack, watch movies, play with the dogs, or sit in the Jacuzzi smoking and having drinks until he unwound enough to go to sleep, usually about seven in the morning. The outline had been established long before I arrived on the scene and, although I often felt isolated and missed having other people around, Lee refused to alter his restrictive and reclusive life-style.”26

  The collapse of the distinctions between night and day represented—and guaranteed—the pair’s isolation from all normal patterns and associations and from conventional behavior. Normal markers lacked point in this world. If work separated the showman from conventional time, his people protected him from other normal constraints: “His loyal staff protected him from having to deal with the real world. In fact, Lee lived a sheltered existence, free from almost every worry,” Thorson observed.27

  Liberace himself professed to dread the alienation this isolation produced—hence his demand for a constant, ever-present companion, who would be like a window on the world. While Thorson chronicled the crystal bubble-like isolation of their lives, he notes, paradoxically, that his patron also actually disliked company. While photographs in Behind the Candelabra memorialize Scott and Lee socializing with a variety of folk, from Frank Sinatra to strippers and stagehands, Thorson insisted that Lee distrusted sharing either him or their world with others. He entertained visitors after his show, according to Thorson, but seldom otherwise. “To describe him as an intensely private man doesn’t seem adequate. Once he left the theater he didn’t want anyone around him other than hi
s lover. A ‘cross at your own risk’ line divided his public from his private life.”28 These strictures applied to everyone, including kin. “He didn’t really like to have his family or mine around much. He was very strange that wayhe liked the two of us to be alone.”29 Thorson observed that his lover’s “need for privacy bordered on paranoia. Even members of his inner circle, old and trusted friends like Ray Arnett, were restricted to a limited number of invitations to Lee’s home each year,” Thorson said. “After Lee’s performances ended and we went home, the world narrowed down to just Lee and me.” “When we went home after a show Lee locked himself away from the outside world.”30

  Thorson described their private life as being as sedentary and uneventful as it was solitary. They almost never entertained. Nothing like the exotic “white party” of Rechy’s memory occurs in Thorson’s memoir. “Lee preferred living like a hermit,” Thorson insisted. “Our socializing consisted of talking to salespeople in the various stores we frequented. When Lee wasn’t working he hated getting dressed and often spent the entire day unshaven, lounging around the house in an old terry-cloth robe so worn it was full of holes.”31 They seldom went out, never partied. They had no hobbies or interests outside of the house—and the ever-present pack of dogs. The dogs, actually, occupied a critical place in their lives together. A poodle had first gotten them together. Thorson was working in a veterinary office when he met the showman, and he offered advice about the ancient, ailing Baby Boy, Lee’s favorite pet. The animals remained a crucial source of their mutual pleasure, and they figured notably in their legal parting. They fought over the animals as a married couple might over children. While Thorson loved the pets, however, Liberace virtually obsessed over them. He always had, and his affection marks another curious episode in his biography.

  As early as 1947, as the surviving press kit from that year indicates, the pianist had touted his love for dogs—cocker spaniels in that particular instance. Soon came poodles—a white toy named Suzette who participated in the Joanne Rio affair, and a black standard, Jo-jo. The checkerboard pair together figured in John Rechy’s memory of his assignation at the Valley Vista house. While the showman never recovered from his poodle mania, he wound up with shar-peis and simply innumerable mutts and strays from the pound and off the streets. He preferred those with disabilities of one kind or another: “They were mixed breeds, or the runts of the litter, or had delicate health. Nobody else wanted them. I guess my first reaction is always to reach out to the underdog.”32

  He indulged the animals completely. He set places for them at dinners and fed them off the table to the amusement, horror, or disgust of his company. When he dined alone, his housekeeper set places for them. He slept with them nestled between him and his various bedmates. They had the run of all of his homes. His costliest carpets emitted the fragrance of a kennel, while the incessant yapping was music to his ears. His heart remained with the pack when he was on the road. “When I travel, I carry framed pictures of them to place around the hotel suites,” he related. “I call home long distance just to speak to them. When they hear the sound of my voice on the phone, they literally go ‘crazy,’” he rhapsodized.33 They even accompanied him on his cruising, pickup missions on Sunset Boulevard.

  While lovers came and went, the dogs, collectively at least, remained forever. He even provided for them in his will. He weathered his mother’s death without a tear; he wept for days over blind, deaf, Baby Boy’s demise, according to Thorson. He was the pianist’s “most favorite dog, because he needed me the most.”34 Over and over, he described his dogs as his only real, true family. The animals’ brute loyalty filled some void. “My dogs make me feel wanted,” he insisted.35 The intensity of his devotion speaks to the magnitude of that lack. “I won’t say I spoil them; it’s more the other way around. They spoil me with endless loyalty, love and fascination.”36 He was loyal, free, and uncalculating toward the animals in a way that he could not be toward human beings. The pets provided the impossible, ego-free family ideal he demanded of others and could never fulfill himself.37

  Thorson’s love of animals, then, provided an important affinity, even as the dogs helped focus their lives in the absence of other activities. They had little else. Except for the singular reference to Thorson’s swimming laps at the Cloister’s Olympic-sized pool, there was no exercise or sports. Except for watching soap operas in the afternoons—which Liberace adored, Thorson and his companion left no record even of the impact of television on their lives. There were no outings to films or theaters, although they watched old movies on video. They read no books or newspapers, and the only magazines that appeared seemed to be tabloids like National Enquirer, Globe, Star, and the like. Their only pastime was shopping. This hobby, however, compensated for the absence of all others. Lee lived to shop.

  Thorson suggested that buying came close to an addiction for his patron. “He transformed shopping into a quasi-religious experience,” Thorson said. “He reveled in spending, gloried in it, devoted a large part of his waking time and energy to it.”38 “Lee craved shopping the way an addict craves a fix. He felt the day was incomplete if he didn’t purchase something. Buying his own groceries and browsing in supermarkets would do if nothing more seductive and costly loomed on the horizon. He could wax ecstatic over imported cheese, fresh vegetables, prime beef. ‘Oooh, fabulous!’ he’d say in his benevolent whine when something pleased him.”39 The pattern continued after Thorson left. One of the showman’s later servants, Yvonne Dandurand, recalled that Lucille Cunningham, the old bookkeeper, allotted her boss ten thousand dollars a month in spending money, all of which he dispersed. “Expensive crystal, clothes, pants, and fresh-cut flowers,” he’d buy anything, related Dandurand. “One day it took us an hour and half to unload his car after he’d been out buying towels, bedspreads, cookware sets, coffeepots and baking dishes. He insisted on showing us everything he’d bought, like a child with a new toy!”40 Sometimes he bought more than geegaws and kitchenware. Interviewed at the time of his former lover’s passing, Thorson related how the two of them might “wake up in the middle of the day and go out and buy houses on a whim.”41

  Beyond shopping, however, for Liberace there was only work, home, and lover; for the lover, only Liberace and home. Home shaped their lives as much as work did. Always concerned with domesticity, the showman focused attention on his houses almost obsessively after the mid-seventies. The place of the lovers’ sequestration, Liberace’s multiple houses excited many of his shopping frenzies, too.

  During his years with Thorson, Liberace maintained various residences. Casa Liberace—the Cloisters—in Palm Springs was perhaps his favorite. Scott liked it best, too. The showman still owned the palace on Harold Way, but he had already determined to sell, and he turned a huge profit on its transfer in 1979. The year before, he had purchased a major office building on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, using profits from selling a block of commercial buildings on nearby La Cienega, near Santa Monica Boulevard, where he had sold antiques for a period after 1968. Liberace and his sidekick spent close to half a million dollars in a four-week frenzy to “fix up” the Beverly Boulevard building. The makeover included transforming its fifth floor into a typically gaudy, spectacular showplace of a penthouse apartment. They stayed there when visiting L.A.42 There was an oceanfront house in Malibu they visited occasionally, a condominium at Lake Tahoe they used hardly at all, and the place where they spent most of their time, the quite remarkable compound on Shirley Street in Las Vegas, where Thorson first slept with the entertainer.43

  This was Liberace’s main house after he moved his legal residence to income tax-free Nevada in the mid-seventies. Besides enabling him to take advantage of the state’s tax benefits, maintaining a Vegas residence was otherwise convenient, as he spent over half of his thirty-two working weeks each year performing at the casinos there.44 This house was pure Vegas. It was essential Liberace.

  The Shirley Street community lay on the extreme southern side of Las
Vegas, very near McCurran International Airport and conveniently close to Interstate 15. The development lacked any distinction, except that its mostly moderate-sized dwellings sometimes gave way to very modest houses, its well-kept lawns to junky yards and residents that might have stretched the definition of middle class. Its other streets bore names comparable to Shirley. There was Monika Street, Lulu Street, Merle Street, Carol, Jane, and Sara Lee Streets. The variants were male versions of these commonplace monikers—like Wilbur Street. Liberace first bought here in 1976, purchasing one of the larger, but still modest, dwellings in the neighborhood. He soon acquired the house in back, actually on Wilbur Street, and began an extraordinary remodeling campaign to link and glorify the two. The showman finally wound up with twenty rooms spread over 10,500 square feet of space. A wrought-iron fence, made up of elaborately scrolled and gilded “L’s,” went up around the compound. A new roofline was created in a classic seventies mode of shingles laid on in an abbreviated mansard style. The hodgepodge outside concealed nothing short of grotesque splendor inside. Knocking out the back walls of both houses, the showman had created a huge crystal passageway to join the dwellings. Interior walls came down to open up vast living spaces, although the failure to raise the ceiling heights made these enormous areas vaguely oppressive. Marble, prisms, mirrors, gold, glass, and crystal shone and sparkled everywhere. Thorson left only one description of the place. “The huge entry hall, much bigger than the living room in my current foster home, was guaranteed to make a first-time visitor gasp. Marble floors, mirrored walls, a curved stairway with clear Lucite banisters that looked as if it had been suspended in midair, and gushing fountains vied for the viewer’s attention. Millions of dollars’ worth of antique furniture, crystal, priceless china, objets d’art, fresh flowers, paintings, crowded every available surface.”