Features THE BIGGEST HITS AND NOTHING ELSE
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
October 2013 | Total Film | 2
Features THE BIGGEST HITS AND NOTHING ELSE
firearms through airports in his luggage, and possessing a Jekyll and Hyde personality. In April 1982, when Thorson caught Liberace with an 18-year-old boy, there was a violent altercation that resulted in Thorson being forcibly evicted from the pianist’s home and the locks being changed. gushing personal style conveyed reassurance to closet gays in an age of homophobia. One biographer informs us: “Liberace was the first gay person Elton John had ever seen on television. He became his hero.” The only problem was that for his army of adoring female fans, he wasn’t supposed to be gay. Ostensibly a devout Catholic, he was received in audience by Pope Pius XII. Publicists frantically linked his name with a number of women, including Elizabeth Taylor’s stand-in, Joanne Rio; Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie, seven years his senior; the notorious American transsexual Christine Jorgenson; and, most preposterously of all, the ageing Hollywood icon Mae West, 26 years his senior. But Liberace’s real sexuality was an open secret in showbusiness. By the time of his visit to London in 1956, comment on his lifestyle was becoming overt. On the day after his arrival, the Daily Mirror columnist William Connor, writing under his pen name, Cassandra, launched a vitriolic attack, describing him as “the summit of sex – the pinnacle
of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want… this deadly, winking, sniggering, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruitflavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love… This appalling man.” Liberace sued for libel. In court, he denied he was a homosexual, and Connor insisted he had not intended to suggest this. The jury did not believe Connor. They awarded Liberace £8,000 in damages and £14,000 in costs. He had lied on oath to save his career. It was not until 20 years later that his cover was finally blown for ever. That process began on the night in 1977 that a friend brought the 18-year-old Scott Thorson into Liberace’s dressing-room at the Las Vegas Hilton. The two men lived together for four years, but the relationship between ‘’Libby’’ and ‘’Boober’’ – their names for each other – soon became acrimonious. Thorson blamed this on Liberace’s promiscuity and his obsession with pornography. Liberace accused Thorson of addiction to cocaine, carrying
Thorson responded by bringing a ‘’palimony’’ suit against Liberace for $380 million. In the court hearings and articles Thorson wrote for the National Enquirer, shocking details emerged that stripped away Liberace’s legendary glitter. The pianist, Thorson revealed, was almost totally bald, but was so vain that he wore his toupé to bed. He dressed “like a slouch” at home, and had had two major facelifts. Thorson also alleged that Liberace had forced him to undergo plastic surgery, including a cleft inserted in his chin, and silicone injections to make his cheeks more outstanding. The pianist wanted to adopt him, but planned to keep having sex with him. The legal battle dragged on until December 1986, when Thorson settled for a payment of $95,000 plus two dogs, a 1977 White Auburn car and a 1960 gold Rolls-Royce. By then, Liberace had a mere two months to live. After his final stage appearance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on November 2 1986, and his last TV appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Christmas Day 1986, Liberace returned to his winter home in Palm
“ 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.” 3 | Total Film | October 2013
Springs, where he died on February 4 1987, at the age of 67. Shortly before his death, he asked Scott Thorson to see him, and there was a limited reconciliation. It was stated that Liberace had died from congestive heart failure brought on by subacute encephalopathy, a general term for degenerative brain disease. But when Forest Lawn cemetery applied for a permit to bury him, the Riverside County coroner, Raymond Carillo, demanded tissue tests, even though the body had been embalmed. Carillo then announced that Liberace had “died from cytomegalovirus pneumonia due to, or as a consequence of, human immunodeficiency virus disease… In layman’s terms, Mr Liberace died of an opportunistic disease caused by acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” All his life had been a gigantic cover-up of the one truth he was unwilling to share with his vast and idolising public. But in death, the mask was stripped away. And the secrets of one of the world’s richest but most complex entertainers were finally laid bare. As Behind the Candelabra premiered in Cannes this week, Scott Thorson, now 54 and suffering from cancer, was nowhere to be seen. He is serving a prison sentence in Reno for credit card theft.
John Lloyd interviews Matt Damon Q. You can pick and choose the projects you work on - what interested you about this one? A. Steven had told me about it in 2007. And so I knew I was going to do it, because I’ve done seven movies with him, and I basically just work with him whenever I get a chance. And then the script came, and it’s really one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. Richard (LaGravenese) did such a beautiful job. I’d read Scott Thorson’s book, and Richard just seemed to nail a really interesting dynamic. And I think for Michael and I - that was a way in. We’re both married. We’ve both been in relationships awhile, so we could relate. But Richard wrote such a human script that it was really easy for me to just connect to the character, and the relationship. And another reason I wanted to do the movie was I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play opposite Michael Douglas. I didn’t want to miss having a front row seat to Michael playing Liberace.
Q. You’ve worked with Steven Soderbergh many times. Tell us a little about his directing style, and how you collaborate with him. A. I’ve never really worked with anybody like Steven. Spielberg is similar, in the sense that, he’s cutting in camera, and making decisions in as decisive a manner as you could ask, which comes from an understanding of how things cut together. We really wanted to do it justice. But it would’ve been really tough to do take after take of some of these more intimate scenes. It’s a challenge, as an actor, and one that I really wanted to take on. And knowing it was Steven, and knowing that there’s a scene where I have to walk out of a pool, and straddle Michael on a chaise lounge, and start making out with him. We didn’t rehearse it. I just came out in a white, bejeweled, man-kini with a big blonde wig and sunglasses, and we did it in one take.
Q. And I understand that Steven also operates his own camera? A. Steven is the director, but he’s also the cinematographer, which means he sets all the lights. He’s the camera operator as well, which means he’s the guy holding the camera. So those three jobs that normally three different people do, he does all of them. And he edits the movie as well. So, every night I’d go home, I’d have dinner with my wife and kids, get them to bed, and by the time they were asleep, Steven would’ve uploaded to a website not only what we had shot that day, but the scene, completely cut together. Normally you’re making a movie in a vacuum. You have a rough idea of how things are going. But with Steven he actually shows you the entire scene, cut, which is a huge advantage as an actor. So when you have someone like Steven, who’s as decisive and inclusive, you really get a better handle on your role.
Q. What was the difference between Liberace’s public persona and his private life? A. Well, his private life bore no resemblance at all to his public life. He was always petrified that he was going to be found out as a gay man. He thought his fans weren’t going to forgive him. I can’t imagine how hard it would’ve been to live in that kind of fear.
Q. Once you put on the costumes, did you feel transformed? A. This was the first movie I ever enjoyed wardrobe fittings on. I did probably eight, ten wardrobe fittings? And we really got into it; it was really fun. The clothes were so different from anything that I’d ever put on. They changed me so much, the way they make me stand, or walk, or move a different way. I really got into it.
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