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The lonely Liberace I knew
Behind the Candelabra Scott Thorson, a young bisexual man raised in foster homes, is introduced to flamboyant entertainment giant Liberace and quickly finds himself in a romantic relationship with the legendary pianist. Swaddled in wealth and excess, Scott and Liberace have a long affair, one that eventually Scott begins to find suffocating. Kept away from the outside world by the flashily effeminate yet deeply closeted Liberace, and submitting to extreme makeovers and even plastic surgery at the behest of his lover, Scott eventually rebels. When Liberace finds himself a new lover, Scott is tossed on the street. He then seeks legal redress for what he feels he has lost. But throughout, the bond between the young man and the star never completely tears... ETA | 2013 Behind the Candelabra premieres in Cannes this week.
MICHAEL THORNTON | As critics praise Behind the Candelabra, a new film about the flamboyant pianist that premiered at Cannes this week, I recall a charming and generous friend.
I
shall never forget being ushered to a ringside seat at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1977 as the guest of the star of the show. Into the blinding spotlights trained on the vast stage, and beneath a giant neon logo of a shimmering grand piano, glided a gleaming white and gold Rolls-Royce Phantom V Sedanca Coupé. As it purred to a halt, out jumped Scott Thorson, a 6ft 3in, 18-year-old blond Adonis, clad in a pale blue braided chauffeur’s uniform with cap and silver boots. He threw open the passenger door and out swept the most outrageous, over-the-top and flamboyant entertainer of all time, an ageing 57-year-old man I had known for some years, who was both the boy’s employer and his lover, 2 | Total Film | October 2013
wearing a pompadoured hair-piece and enveloped in a voluminous white fox fur coat with a 16-foot train: Liberace, king of the keyboard, and the self-styled Mr Showmanship of Sin City. That spectacular entrance is one of many outlandish scenes in the lives of the men recreated in a new film, Behind the Candelabra, based on a book published by Thorson in the year after Liberace’s death from Aids. The film was the runaway hit of this week’s Cannes Film Festival, winning rave reviews for Michael Douglas as the pianist and for Matt Damon as his opportunistic lover who would deliver the death blow to Liberace’s reputation as the darling of middle America.
say: “I laughed all the way to the bank.” And, in later years: “I no longer laugh all the way to the bank. I bought the bank!”
legendary. In spite of his huge wealth and massive fame, however, I always sensed an air of deep loneliness, as if his life was somehow hollow.
The Liberace I knew was kind and absurdly generous. I first met him in 1960, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate. He was playing the London Palladium and I was introduced by Noël Coward. He was heavily made up and overly tactile, with a tendency to put his hands where they ought not to be. It was clear that he was sexually predatory, but he was also friendly and charming, and immediately invited me to call him “Lee”, which I did until the day he died.
I never paid to see one of his shows. He always sent me tickets. In the interval, iced vintage champagne would arrive. He once bought me a ring and a designer jacket. I never wore either. The ring was huge and could have stopped traffic. The jacket was encrusted with bugle beads. Whenever I went to America, I used to visit him at The Cloisters, his home in Palm Springs. Its décor was glitzy, garish and incredibly vulgar, a bit like a highclass bordello, but his hospitality was
To be truthful, I was not an admirer of his style on the piano, or the way in which he tended to murder the classics. What was clear was that he was a great showman and audiences adored him. If he got a bad notice, he would shrug and
“ All his life had been a gigantic coverup of the one truth he was unwilling to share with his vast and idolising public.”
Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, the son of a Polish mother and an impoverished Italian emigrant, he began playing the piano at four, was adjudged a prodigy able to memorise difficult pieces by the age of seven, and studied the technique of the great Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski. At 20, he was soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and by 1950,
with his giant-sized, gold-leafed Bluthner Grand piano, topped by the candelabra that became his trademark, he was entertaining President Harry Truman at the White House, and earning gigantic fees at private parties for the super-rich, such as J Paul Getty. But it was television that made him a millionaire matinée idol. The Liberace Show, which first aired in 1952, drew more than 30 million viewers, mostly women, and he received 10,000 fan letters a week. His first two years’ earnings from television totalled $7 million. His intimate, familiar and sometimes
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