Liberace: An American Boy

by Darden Asbury Pyron

  Playing to fans and converting the hardest skeptics, he was doing the same thing he had been doing for almost half a century. Entertainment professionals—from fellow performers and stagehands to showbusiness journalists—had long conceded his talents. The writers at Variety, for example, freely and repeatedly acknowledged his performing skills from their first notice in 1945 to those at his death four decades later.78 As even ideological opponents sometimes admitted, he possessed an extraordinary ability to manipulate an audience. No small measure of this talent lay in his ability to appear spontaneous, natural, and sincere even when he was most calculating, artificial, and contrived. It was no accident or audience fluke, for example, that produced the old standby, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” in the “request period.” He managed to hear the title repeatedly in New York as well as in his Washington, D.C., performances, and he turned the exact same trick everywhere, reducing even foes to tears and cheers, while the devotees had hardly left his palm since his first appearance on the stage.79

  He had done it one more time. Liberace’s Radio City Music Hall engagement set a record that has not yet been matched, years after his death. Seventy thousand seats, every single potential space, were occupied for his fourteen performances in 1984. Since the theater’s inauguration in 1933, this had never happened. It was exactly the same story the next year, when he played the same Easter venue. He repeated the whole phenomenon, selling out all seats for the now expanded seventeen-performance run. A twenty-one-performance run in October 1986 produced the same results. Had earlier critics consistently reviled his audience as blue-haired women from the provinces? The thousands of people jostling one another for tickets and applauding enthusiastically represented a decent cross section of age, sex, and status: young people rubbed elbows with the aged; men competed with women for good seats; blue jeans were as well represented as furs. It was the same at other venues. The Washington reviewer summarized the scene: “Contrary to popular mythology, the Kennedy Center last night was not awash in ladies with blue hair; the audience was a broad cross-section of Middle America, clad in everything from black tie to T-shirts and sandals, covering a spectrum of age and economic status that was limited only by the steep ticket prices.”80

  All these people knew what they were going to get, and it was what they wanted: corny jokes, gaudy furs, glittering jewels, embellished arpeggios, and, not least, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” which was guaranteed to be comfortingly familiar, even if not everyone in the audience knew the words. The performer was still flying around the stage on invisible wires, too. Taking to the air had been a central part of his act since 1974. “Mary Poppins, eat your heart out!” he had cried to delighted audiences on first sweeping across the stage. “People who keep coming back to see me deserve something different each time,” he had explained the innovation, and People Weekly captured some of the excitement of the trick: “Liberace’s bejeweled 185 pound bulk dramatically arpeggios 20 feet above his see-through Steinway into a breath-stopping final exit,” the writer exclaimed. “The old cocktail tinkler is, at 56, still the hottest two-armed bandit on the casino circuit. Right up there with Sinatra and Presley, he commands $125,000 a week.”81 Audiences soon came to expect the aerodynamics as much as they did the costumes, sly patter, and musical drama.

  After more than a decade, the trick still never failed to elicit the crowd’s gasps. Liberace generally saved it for his grand exits. In 1986, however, he altered the act to open airborne. Actually, he gave this part of the performance a special twist by opening not by flying in first himself, but by sending his empty capes and gowns sweeping gloriously across the stage, alone. The furs had lives and personalities of their own. They had their own cars and their own chauffeurs; now they had their own airborne choreography. Horrified and disdainful, the Village Voice described the scene. Liberace, observed the critic, “got rich showing off, for knowing things like How To Make An Entrance. This time he flew. First, of course, he had an orchestra rise out of a pit and roll to the back of the stage and then a couple of his outfits flew through on wires—all praise to them—and then Mr. Showmanship himself sailed in like Peter Pan.”82

  He made soaring across the stage look easy and natural, like he really did belong not on earth but in the air. It was like his costumes. For all their outrageousness and impossibilities, he made them seem somehow plausible. And even though audiences now came expecting to see him airborne, the trick always provoked gasps and wonder. Here was Oz at the end of the yellow brick road. It was all humbug, but here, too, was the willing suspension of disbelief. It was humbug and genuine magic mixed indiscriminately. The magic came with a mythic penumbra, too, of course, of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell and pirates and lost children and Neverland. The magic of flying, just so, came with deeper mysteries, just as James M. Barrie’s original play flirted with the margins of gender, sexual identity, and transvestism, and explored the paradox of boys who never grew up.83 Flying in was perfect for the American boy from West Allis, who himself at sixty-seven retained his own boyish wonder of the world. Here was the magic of believing in action. I am flying! he demonstrated to his audiences. Soar with me! Inside the theater, it was Neverland. Peter Pan appeals to the audience: Clap, clap! Stay death! Tinkerbell doesn’t have to die! It’s Neverland!

  Tinkerbell and Peter Pan worked gloriously at Radio City Music Hall. They were less successful beyond the footlights. By the mid-eighties, Liberace was failing to distinguish Neverland from the mundane world. He had become the ever-youthful creature of his own imagination. And as parasites and germs—not to mention normal aging—made that creature resemble the real man less and less, he would see this through an increasingly fantastic lens of magic and believing. The man of flesh and bone, by this reasoning, became ever more subordinated to the cliché. “I’ve retained my entertainer image, because it was created by the public. If I destroyed it, I would no longer be me,” he had declared early in career.84 The pronouncement took on ominous overtones as he aged and sickened.

  The great showman had always scanted his interior life. He read no books, he cultivated little art beyond his own music making, he possessed no mind for the larger issues of the world. For all his personal genius, he expressed no appreciation for the profound psychological motives of his life. His neglect of the spirit was perfectly consonant with the Bristolian dream of material success and of reforming the world to his own image. Indeed, as he had always focused his ferocious energies on image, performing, and performance, he had little left over for an inner life at all. In his Wonderful, Private World, he promised to chronicle his private life. He didn’t; there wasn’t any. This defined his great strength, his awful weakness: the two combined almost inseparably throughout his career. With no interior life, he had no alternative but to press on, and then on more. He had just turned sixty-three when he compared being a “has been” to crucifixion. He was congenitally unable to do anything but continue and keep up pretenses. Offstage, the ruse seemed increasingly shallow.

  In 1985, Duke Goldstone, Lee’s old friend from The Liberace Show days, visited him for the first time in years. Despite the pall of his own mortality, the entertainer gushed as much as ever. “My God, how he has changed!” Goldstone reflected afterwards. “He really believes his own publicity!”85 This is the same sense that the filmmaker John Waters detected in The Wonderful, Private World of Liberace. Liberace’s fantasy reached such extremes that it astonished even this celebrant of American banality, the cinematic author of Pink Flamingos and the creator of its transvestite heroine, Divine. Liberace’s book painted a world with no apparent attachment to anything real. It was the purest version he had encountered of essential American qualities, he thought. “I’m convinced he’s so all American that he’s gone over the edge,” judged the filmmaker.86

  He was Peter Pan in Neverland in the theater. He was young forever. The world was not Neverland. The performer resisted the world. The world would not be permanently denied.

  Fifteen

&
nbsp; ET LUX PERPETUA

  He died at just the right moment: he was old enough to know that there was nothing more that he could achieve and young enough to avoid having been long forgotten.

  QUENTIN CRISP

  In 1982, with the manic Thorson out of his life, Lee Liberace expected to restore normality to his existence, or at least what passed for normality for a randy, reclusive, hyperactive, aging homosexual superstar. If he fretted over Scott Thorson, he never let on in public. Audiences, in turn, did not seem to care very much about Thorson’s charges or about the whole legal donnybrook going on under their noses. They continued to pay to laugh at the showman’s antics; he continued to maintain the arduous work schedule he had been following for the preceding forty years. If nothing changed at all on the public front, on the domestic front, calm returned straightaway. Liberace had moved almost immediately from old lover to new, and after the excitement of the Thorson relationship, he might well have breathed easier with his malleable new boyfriend, Cary James.

  Like Thorson, Cary James was tall and blond. He was only eighteen years old when the sixty-two-year-old performer plucked him from the chorus line in the spring of 1982. If he lacked Thorson’s presence, he possessed his own charms. According to one source, “He had a beautiful body, a dancer’s body that he let run all to fat after Lee died.”1 With his moon face, deep dimples, and pink complexion, he looked even younger than Thorson had five years before. His very fashionable, short mustache hardly obscured his boyishness. Everything about him radiated guilelessness. Indeed, he had met the showman while singing with the troupe the Young Americans, which had made youthful enthusiasm and simplicity its stock in trade. His innocence was sexual too: He had never had a lover before, he insisted. “Liberace was the first true love I’d had,” he related.2

  In the early winter of 1981–82, James began appearing backstage with the performer with some regularity. “James hung out around our dressing room all the time, and Lee often favored him with a private chat. Catching the two of them with their heads together, having what looked like an intimate conversation drove me to a fury,” Thorson related. The aging showman began gracing the teenager with small gifts. Thorson heard the rumor of the presents and went berserk. He forced a confrontation, Cary James disappeared, and the Liberace-Thorson household returned to its normal state of chaos.3

  Matters stood here in March when Thorson left for the funeral of one of his foster parents, Rose Carracappa. Returning to Tahoe, Thorson discovered through his sister Annette’s husband, Don Day, that Lee, in Thorson’s absence, had bedded the blond teenager from Florida. The discovery, of course, precipitated the series of events that began with Thorson smashing the Tahoe condominium and flying back to L.A. It peaked in the Beverly Boulevard raid and culminated in the legal wrangles of the years that followed. After March 1982, Thorson saw his old lover only once or twice, except through stacks of legal pads. He was out; James was in.

  In Cary James, Lee found a pliable companion in contrast to the mercurial Thorson; otherwise, their life together repeated the pattern Thorson described. “For five years,” James said later, “I lived the life of a superstar.”4 Liberace’s old munificence toward Thorson now directed itself toward James. Photographs of the new boy in the furs and jewels that once bedecked his predecessor bear out Liberace’s generosity. “I want you with me all the time, onstage and off,” Liberace had told Thorson. His life with James mirrored the same ambition. “Everything that Liberace did, I did,” recollected the new lover. “I traveled with him, shopped and dined with him and shared every facet of his life.”5 In the later legal suit over the showman’s will, James testified that they were together “seven days a week, 24 hours a day” from April 1982 until Lee’s death.6

  If Lee took James into his life and heart as quickly as he had Thorson, their liaison did not prevent his eyeing other pretty boys and handsome men. He did more than ogle. While Lee had spent one night with James in Thorson’s absence, within the week he had picked up two other young men who stayed over with him at the Cloisters, where he had fled after the Tahoe fracas. Indeed, the two French youths’ night with the performer had outraged Thorson even more than had his lover’s coupling with James. Perhaps Lee continued such extramarital carryings on after the spring of 1982. Thorson’s memoir affirms the lover’s libidinousness, delight in group sex, and affinity for promiscuity. Extremely stubborn and willful himself, Thorson curbed these tendencies during their relationship. James might have shared his predecessor’s biases against such goings on, but he left no evidence that he had any of Thorson’s determination to force the issue.

  James, indeed, left no evidence of much ego at all. As a Florida-born Southern boy, his reticence may have reflected the Yes Ma’am deference of the region. Thorson had possessed a vivid, even egotistical sense of self; not James. Thus, Thorson angled his own interviews long before the palimony suits were underway; he relished going public with his claims against his patron afterwards. In contrast, James kept the lowest profile. Completely silent in the five years he lived with Liberace, he spoke out only once in the decade after his lover’s death.

  While he left virtually no record of his time as Liberace’s lover, photographs suggest his character. They contrast vividly with Thorson’s images. Cameras lit Thorson’s fuse. Almost invariably, snapshots reveal him clowning, kicking up his heels, and mugging for the lens. He flashes a broad, toothy grin. He glitters even more than his mentor. James’s pictures reveal nothing of the sort. He inhabits the background. He stands behind his patron. He never mugs or clowns. Thorson’s images reveal high spirits, even if they were alcohol or drug induced. Not James’s; they suggest, actually, Thorson’s sedentary antithesis. Liberace stuffed both his lovers, but Thorson’s increased bulk made his presence more impressive. In addition, the photographs reveal Thorson’s effort to keep weight off, even if with amphetamines, while James appears rounder and rounder, softer and softer, as time passes.7

  The two men’s characters elicited different responses from their patron. Thorson’s force won a modicum of trust he withheld from the more passive James. His attitude about his baldness hints at the disparity. The showman was almost neurotic about his hair and hairpieces, according to Thorson’s record. It was as sensitive an issue to him as homosexuality was, and in an odd way was even more so. Thus, while he played publicly around the edges of his homosexuality and was frank about it within his inner circle, he lied relentlessly about having hair, even privately. Thorson related how the showman almost refused to undergo his facelift when the surgeon, Dr. Startz, said he would not operate unless Liberace removed his wig. In his final illness, he actually rejected medical services when doctors made the same demands. He argued the line of his “natural hair” so completely that even after his death, the otherwise levelheaded reporter for the Washington Post could claim the charges of toupees a dastardly canard. In the five years that James and Lee cohabited, the young man never saw him unwigged; he knew the truth only because of gossip. “I knew from his hairdresser Piny that Lee was totally bald, except for a small fringe of hair around his ears. He wore his wig to bed and even in the summer. It’s stifling hot in Las Vegas,” he continued, “and I know he must have suffered enormously.”8 If he failed to refer to his most intimate secret to James, he not only revealed himself as bald to Thorson, but, more telling, he made his lover from La Crosse the keeper of his hairpieces.

  Cary James was not created to be a reality check on his patron’s physical or sexual fantasies. He evidenced none of the strength necessary to limit Liberace’s randiness, even had he so chosen. These elements of the last lover’s character are triply important. They point up Liberace’s own character: his domineering will, his impulses toward control, his secretiveness even with his intimates. They suggest that his relationship with Scott Thorson was unique, that James’s predecessor was, in truth, “one in a million.” Not least, they offer clues to the showman’s morbidity and death.

  How did Lee contract the
AIDS virus?

  Cary James left no record of his and Liberace’s sex life. That information comes from Thorson. James and Lee had slept together at Lake Tahoe in March 1982, he says. Within days, however, the showman was apparently tricking with the two French boys who stayed with him at the Cloisters and accompanied him to the Academy Awards ceremonies. Did he have sex with others? Did he contract the virus from them? Was he already positive when he lived with Thorson?

  Despite scientific advances, HIV remains a strange ailment twenty years after its first appearance. Its agent is actually delicate, hard to transfer, and survives ill outside most peculiar environments. It is passed from person to person in blood-to-blood transfers or semen-to-blood exchanges. In the natural course of things, the human organism resists the infection, unlike, for example, during past epidemics such as the Black Death, the Bubonic Plague, the mass mortality chronicled by Thucydides in Periclean Athens of 430 B.C., and the influenza epidemic of 1917, which hit everyone in the general population. The ailment is otherwise curious. While medical researchers as of 1999 still lack absolute certitude about the illness’s course, they have determined that the virus seems to operate chiefly by killing the white blood cells that defend the organism from the infinite germs, parasites, and other infections that lurk everywhere in the environment. Once lodged, even, the ailment still follows an unusual, curious pattern. Some people infected note an immediate reaction on contracting the virus—seroconversion; others do not. Even those revealing immediate symptoms, however, virtually never move immediately into what is termed “full-blown AIDS,” that is, continued symptoms of secondary infections. Rather, the virus normally produces no outward signs of its presence. This defines its insidious nature. Without testing viral counts, one might have no notion of having contracted the malignancy, and might show no outward sign of having done so, yet otherwise healthy and completely asymptomatic men and women can pass on the virus as readily as can those whose white-blood count can be figured on one’s toes and fingers.9