While ultimately nothing came of all this legal media excitement, it seemed critical at the time, and Thorson had pressed his lawyer to take up the matter. Schmerin discouraged him.37 Indeed, Schmerin instructed him that a court of law would not uphold the legality of a contract between two homosexual men to guarantee their affair.38 Schmerin had little confidence in the case; he had less in Thorson himself. His doubts grew with time. They had met through Thorson’s old drug connection. They first deliberated in Ed Nash’s living room, and Thorson was snorting cocaine during their interviews, according to press reports. Schmerin thought Thorson “edgy and goofy” and figured he was “bound to get caught in his lies” if the case went to court and he had to testify.39 If skeptical of his own client, he admired his legal antagonists. In sworn testimony, he related how he and Strote had “talked about how kind and generous and benevolent and—I can’t think of other adjectives to describe Mr. Liberace’s treatment towards Mr. Thorson.”40
Thorson’s later advocates insisted that Schmerin gave poor counsel. In any case, Schmerin did advise Thorson against going to court. He also counseled him to sign the settlement he had worked out with Strote. “He suggested that I could go on and lead a normal life and I should just sign it and get it over with,” Thorson himself testified. “He just felt that I should just sign the release and mutual agreement and that I could go on in life, a completely normal life, I wouldn’t have threats.”41
On April 22, 1982, Thorson did sign the agreement. The document stipulated that he forfeit the title to three of his six cars and surrender the Laramore Street house in Las Vegas and all its contents. He also waived any other claims against his former patron. Even more critical, he promised never to reveal the nature of his relationship with the performer. In return, Liberace pledged him his three remaining cars, three of their dogs, and seventy-five thousand dollars—although the showman tried to get the three thousand Thorson had spent on the Hawaii trip deducted from the total. The agreement also stipulated that as soon as practical after the signing, Thorson could collect “all the clothes and personal belongings now in the possession or control of Liberace.”42
Liberace had won. Not least, the commitment of silence confirmed the entertainer’s credo to speak no evil. He had won, but the fuse still smoldered. Thorson was bitter. The cars and cash vanished almost immediately in the maw of his drug dependency and his debts to Cox and Nash. By summer, he possessed little but vengefulness and spleen. Time increased his rancor. He fired his lawyer. Schmerin was glad to go. He engaged new counsel. Michael Rosenthal sympathized with him. Together, Rosenthal and Thorson plotted a new strategy as summer waxed. They detonated the powder keg in early fall.
On October 14, 1982, Thorson filed a twelve-point formal complaint with the Los Angeles Superior Court against his former lover and a host of co-defendants. These included, among others, Seymour Heller, Joel Strote, and Tracy Schnelker, the private detective from the penthouse raid. Rosenthal had advised waging a two-front war, and Thorson initiated a publicity campaign to coincide with the legal proceedings. With news having been leaked to the press, the two men entered the courthouse to the light of flashing cameras and television spotlights as an army of journalists and reporters thrust microphones into their faces. Had the showman sworn Thorson to speak no evil? The October 14 show marked only the beginning of Thorson’s violation of the April 22 agreement’s silence clause.
Along with directing the media blitz at the L.A. County courthouse, Rosenthal had been negotiating an exposé in the National Enquirer. Less than three weeks later, that journal headlined the story, “Boyfriend Tells All about Their 6-Year Romance.”43 A week later, the second installment ran: “Superstar’s Boyfriend of 6 Years Reveals Liberace’s Secret Life.”44
The war had just begun.
David Schmerin had warned Thorson about the depth of his adversary’s pockets; he anticipated Liberace’s willingness to litigate. He might just as easily have advised against the publicity campaign Thorson and Rosenthal had mounted. However deeply Liberace might have dreaded public exposés, he was, as has already been shown, a public-relations genius, and he was willing to fight on this second front as hard as he would in the courts. The showman’s entourage limbered up their cannons immediately.
If the Enquirer had effectively taken Thorson’s side, the Liberace camp got its publicity licks in through the competing tabloid, the Globe. “GAYS OUT TO ASSASSINATE ME, SAYS LIBERACE,” blared the banner head on November 2. “This is not the first time Liberace has been the victim of slander at the hands of the gays,” a spokesman told the journal. “It’s a battle he has had to fight throughout his career. Every time it’s happened before, we’ve fought it and won. And we’ll win this time—and every other time—too.” The article described Thorson as “a former disgruntled employee” who “was fired because of excessive use of drugs and alcohol, and because he carried firearms.” The article concluded with the revelation that the showman had hired a hypnotist to help him heal a broken heart. The quotation rings completely true. “When negative people are around me, I say to them, kvetch, kvetch, kvetch—and they usually snap out of it. If they don’t I avoid them in the future and keep them out of my life.”45
As one manifestation of his hatred of “kvetching” and “negative people,” Liberace exerted every effort to distance himself from the affair entirely. He left the struggle to his minions. “He was a pussycat,” Thorson judged about their breakup. “He doesn’t like to handle messy situations, and I think it was arranged by someone else.”46 Thorson indicated Seymour Heller. Heller had managed the Joanne Rio affair; along with Joel Strote, he had done the same with Thorson. The “disgruntled employee” fingered Heller as the source of the antigay references in the November 2 Globe story. Although the episode is especially murky, Thorson also identified Heller with the second installment of the tabloid wars in December, when once more, with feeling, the Globe weighed in on the Liberace side. “Wicked Past of Gay Suing Liberace” ran the headline. This piece contained Wayne Johansen’s revelations about his half brother’s turning tricks for pay as an adolescent and his carrying on with a foster father. From the time of the Beverly Boulevard raid, the Liberace camp had counted Johansen as an ally. The other revelations came from a shadier source but one who also had connections to the entourage, Dirk Summers, who had supported the allegations that Thorson had once been a boy prostitute.47
Beginning with the original court case of October 14, 1982, and accelerating with the tabloid wars, the litigation spread like a cancer, producing an almost endless sequence of court cases. Thorson sued the Globe over the “Wicked Past” article. David Brummet’s widow, Marie, took up legal cudgels as well. Liberace’s attorney, Joel Strote, brought his own case against Thorson and his attorney, Rosenthal. Rosenthal, in turn, formally charged Strote with slander. Meanwhile, Tracy Schnelker, who helped evict Thorson from the penthouse apartment, got in the action with a case against Liberace, while Liberace sued Dirk Summers, the éminence grise behind the second, “Wicked Past,” Globe article. This was not the end.
The threats and actual suits proliferated into 1984. On December 15, 1983, Lee appeared on Good Morning America. The showman’s answer to one of host David Hartman’s questions about the case set more legal millstones grinding. Hartman’s January 26 on-air apology satisfied the Thorson camp; no formal suit was filed. The scorned lover sought formal damages, however, following a similar episode that took place later that year. On May 7, Newsweek had interviewed the showman about the case. “I could have stopped the whole thing before it started by paying off,” the star protested, “but that would have been blackmail, and blackmail never ends.” The statement defined more Liberacean fantasy, for he had, of course, already paid Thorson off, and Thorson was, indeed, greedy for more. In any case, Thorson filed an additional multimillion dollar lawsuit against Liberace and an altogether new suit against Newsweek. It was October 1984. The legal wrangling had been going on two years.48
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p; In the middle of the fight, other difficulties struck. For one thing, Liberace’s elder brother died on October 16, 1983. This left only Lee and Angie. Rudy had virtually killed himself almost thirty years before. They had buried their father, at ninety-one, in 1977; he had left the world a senile old man in an old folks home in Sacramento. Their mother fought to the last and survived to 1981, when she died at age eighty-seven. Lee had supported them all, but their passing did not seem to grieve him. Indeed, Thorson remember his lover’s relief on hearing of Frances’s death rattle. He appeared dry eyed at George’s memorial, too. His brother was seventy-two. While they had never completely reconciled after the rupture in 1957, the showman had demonstrated his old family loyalty by appointing George as the director of the museum in 1977, when the older brother had little else. Whether Liberace liked his brother or not, George’s funeral marked a milestone. Liberace was next in line. He delayed his deposition in the Thorson suit to attend to his brother’s last affairs.
That case, meanwhile, continued to twist its way through the legal system. Earlier in ’84, the showman had won a significant victory when the courts rejected the palimony clause in the lover’s suit.49 The clause was as hollow as it was predictable. Indeed, Thorson’s first lawyer, Schmerin, had anticipated this result early on. So had Thorson’s most recent counsel, Ernst Lipschutz. Engaged in 1983, Lipschutz had actually recommended dropping the ninth clause of the original twelve-point suit before the court had a chance to reject it. This was the heart of the case: it was founded on Liberace’s commitment to adopt and take care of Thorson financially. Lipschutz, like Schmerin, had instructed him that such an agreement was an extralegal and therefore unenforceable contract for sexual services. The basis for two lovers’ understanding? No, it was an agreement for prostitution. Thorson rejected the advice. His personal, private motives superseded the legal objectives: “Exposing Lee to public ridicule, holding him up to the world as a liar was more important,” he related. “I wanted to punish Lee and the best way to do that was to go right on reminding the public, through the palimony portion of the case, that Lee was gay.”50
After this, the questions remained purely legal and traditional, dealing with issues of assault and battery, extortion, conversion, and the like, and having nothing formally to do with love, rejected love, homoeroticism, or extralegal unions.51 Eroticism, however, still framed the case like a lurid mandala. The love that dare not speak its name remained unspeakable; so, too, did the passion that replaced it. Five years after the first suit was filed, innumerable legal hours later, countless depositions later, one heart attack later, one death later, and more ill will than could ever be calculated later, at least one of these cases still festered in the courts. If the legal wrangling went on for almost five years, now it played as a dumb show for the hard motives and reckless passion that inspired the action back in 1982 and 1983. “I’d never anticipated that so much time, energy, and talent would be consumed by what had started out to be nothing more than a lover’s quarrel,” wrote Thorson.52
The suit consumed Thorson himself. Besides wanting revenge, he also stuck with the case for the money, as his drug debts were soaring, along with his financial obligations to his lawyers. But other forces beyond either Thorson or Liberace drove them on, too. “As Lee said in one of his depositions,” Thorson recalled, “he was caught in a ‘war he never made.’ There were times when I too wished I could forget the whole thing. But we’d long since passed the point of no return. The suit had developed a life of its own. By then our attorneys had an interest in winning that was so consuming that at times it seemed as if they were the injured parties.”53
This legal malignancy reflected the temper of the times. Vince Cardell had not litigated against his mentor, but the world had shifted in the interval since 1977, and, ten years Cardell’s junior, Scott Thorson belonged to a different generation. His America reflected the erosion of deference and discretion. It also represented Bristolian democratic extremism multiplied twice over. The era’s radical egalitarianism encouraged every individual to celebrate his—or her—own privileges and prerogatives and to assume that any restraints or limits violated some intrinsic right. This opened the way for the most private, personal, and domestic issues—otherwise defined—to become the subject of political, public, or legal action. With the concurrence of the courts and judicial system, there followed the further disintegration of distinctions between public and private, which even fastidiously worded congressional legislation failed to restore. Indeed, the Right to Privacy Act actually multiplied causes for litigation. With the collapse of public-private distinctions, legal rights merged subtly with assumptions about human rights; human rights, in turn, became simply another element in human interest. Human interest, in due and necessary measure, merged with the public’s desire—now defined as rights—to know anything and everything about anyone it chose, the more intimate the data, the better. Lines between news, gossip, and entertainment disintegrated. By this means, body-bag journalists and paparazzi reporters became essential or critical arbiters of social value, even as this very form of human-interest information became equated with the intrinsic concept of news itself.
Within this frame of reference, it was perfectly appropriate for Scott Thorson to have used the legal system—as he himself confessed to doing—for purely personal, psychological reasons. He sued, he insisted, “because it was the only way I could continue to be a part of [Liberace’s] life, the only way I could ensure that he wouldn’t forget me. . . . I didn’t care if the suit made Lee hate me, just so long as he didn’t forget me. Anyone who has ever been rejected by someone they still love will understand my motivation.”54 Within the same value system, it was equally logical and appropriate that he and his attorneys would use the press and broadcast journalism to make his case, as well. As Socrates anticipated 2,500 years ago, the court of public opinion is as potent as, if not more potent than, the actual law itself in radical democracies.
If Thorson’s case represents all the vagaries of his particular era as the twentieth century wound down, it also reaffirms other deeper themes having to do, once again, with names and relations and the fundamental difficulties of these issues in homosexual liaisons. If exaggerated by contemporary social order, the chaos of Thorson’s case also underlines other, more profound questions in homoerotics: What is the nature of homosexual love? How do men love each other? What is the responsibility or relationship of the lover to the beloved, the beloved to the lover? What, in sum, does a companion call his lover?
Through all the proceedings of Scott Thorson’s case against his old benefactor, Liberace himself, in the parlance of the day, stonewalled it. He never altered his line. He admitted nothing about homosexuality. He was not Thorson’s lover. Thorson was a disaffected associate. He vowed to fight to the finish. He had his minions, too, to carry out the struggle when he himself would not see evil, nor hear it, much less speak it. Meanwhile, despite his obstinacy, the showman continued to live with his new lover, Thorson’s replacement, Cary James, to be seen with him in public, and even to be photographed with him and other homosexual men in gay settings. This was the dichotomy that had initiated George Liberace’s admonitions back in 1957—and that won his dismissal from his brother’s inner circle. Lee had won that match. He determined to win this one in the same way—on his own terms: he’d do it his way. He would carry on as normal, despite the abnormality of his circumstances after 1981. More abnormalities loomed as well. The disparities increased almost yearly. He acknowledged none of them. Will, work, and energy had always resolved his difficulties. Will, work, and energy would provide a solution one more time to the contradictions of his life.
On the very day of the Thorson donnybrook at the Beverly Boulevard penthouse, Liberace drove up from the Cloisters for an engagement that satisfied him profoundly. He had been invited to perform a very elaborate production number for the fifty-fourth annual Academy Awards presentations in Los Angeles that evening. Diffident, standoffish, and
a little ill at ease among most of his showbusiness peers, he still craved their recognition, and the invitation to play all the musical nominations for the ceremonies in 1982 was an affirmation that he had “arrived” in a way that his millions of fans and millions of dollars could not have proved, exactly.
With four Godzilla-sized candelabra as a backdrop for his Lucite-topped Baldwin, he appeared in poofy hair, heavy makeup, and spangled tails to recap all the musical nominations of the year, the themes from Chariots of Fire, On Golden Pond, Dragonslayer, Ragtime, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Introduced by the master of ceremonies, his old fan from the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, Lee offered a little speech off the TelePrompTer that was virtually normal, if a little wooden and grotesque in the context of the upheaval in his life over the preceding weeks that had culminated in the horrors of that very day only miles away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown.
As at the Academy Awards, in the rest of his life, work and performance equaled salvation. There was no help but self-help. The Thorson affair did not affect Liberace’s work schedule or public life at all. He played as if nothing disastrous whatsoever were happening in his private life. Actually, he played enthusiastically to even more and broader audiences. His reputation grew during this time. His performance in Chandler Pavilion on the evening of March 25 signaled a new departure in his work. Even as he danced on the cusp of his dotage, he was coming into his own in a way even he might hardly have imagined ten or even five years before. As Time writer William Henry judged with some astonishment, “He survived the 1960s as a cheery anachronism, and during the last three decades averaged a gross income of $5 million a year.”55 If he had wept his way to the bank for a quarter century, he shed still bigger tears on the trip in the Reagan years. The world of the 1980s, folks and critics alike, was more ready than ever before to take the showman to its gaudy heart.
Liberace: An American Boy Page 52