Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (15 page)

To my knowledge Lee never invested in stocks or bonds or other aspects of the financial marketplace. He bought, decorated, and sold houses instead with an extravagant disregard for cost. When we began living together he owned the property on Herold Way, the Cloisters in Palm Springs, a condominium in Malibu, and the two houses in Las Vegas. Lee loved to invest in real estate for two reasons. First, property was tangible, something he could see, touch, live in. Real estate, particularly luxurious real estate, held a powerful appeal for the man who’d grown up in that drab, tiny house in West Allis. Second, and perhaps even more important, buying houses gave Lee an excuse for exercising his dual passion for decorating and for spending vast amounts of money.

Every time Lee bought another piece of property, there’d be unhappy rumbles from his business manager, Jay Troulman, and his accountant, Lucille Cunningham. But he shrugged aside all their well-meant advice. “If I’d have listened to people like that,” he said, “instead of following my instincts, I’d have gone broke years ago.”

After bringing Gladys to Vegas, Lee put the Herold Way house on the market and sold it for $1.2 million. He gleefully confessed to having paid $80,000 for the house when he bought it years before. With the large amount of capital thus freed, he wasted no time buying a house in Tahoe. We were appearing in Sparks, Nevada, at John Ascuaga’s Nugget (an annual booking) when the deal closed. Every night after the last show we’d pile into the car at two in the morning. I’d play chauffeur and drive the sixty miles back to the house while Lee slept. Once we got home we’d both catch a few hours sleep, getting up before noon to go shopping.

Lee wanted to finish the decorating before his six-week Sparks engagement ended. Spending money was a fever in his blood while he worked on the house, a desire even more compelling than sexual hunger. He just couldn’t stop buying things. After four weeks on that schedule, I gave up—totally exhausted—and told Lee he’d have to shop by himself. He was shocked at my refusal to continue with what he considered a
fun
project. Not even appearing onstage energized him the way spending money did. He was forty years my senior but he had incredible energy.

He often hired decorators, only to fire them because he enjoyed doing the job himself. Lee knew what he wanted—excess, excess, excess. After becoming successful enough to indulge himself, he jumped from project to project. Our years together marked the zenith of his spending. His next major purchase was a five-story building on Beverly Boulevard in Beverly Hills. He renovated and refurbished the first four floors of offices, installing huge aquariums to add the luxurious Liberace touch. The parking lot was repaved and glamorized by the addition of large trees in planters. But Lee hadn’t bought the building because he wanted to rent out office space. He intended to turn the entire fifth floor of the building into a penthouse for his personal use. And he had only a four-week hiatus from work to do it.

We spent the entire time shopping, spending more than $100,000 a week for the entire four weeks in a mind-blowing demonstration of his personal wealth. The fifth floor, which had been a disaster, was transformed into a magnificent private hideaway. The sad thing is that Lee rarely spent time in his various homes after he finished decorating them. We occupied the Tahoe house only when he worked there, three to six weeks a year. The penthouse was a terrific place but Lee treated it more like a hotel suite than a home, rarely living in it for more than a few days at a time.

Lee also purchased four condominiums in Vegas, just for the sheer pleasure of decorating them. Later, in
The Wonderful Private World of Liberace,
he told his readers that he’d been commissioned to decorate those condominiums as models. Like many of the statements he made in the book, it wasn’t so. Lee bought those condos and decorated them for the fun of it. Of all the properties purchased during our relationship, his favorite was my little house in Vegas. We spent a great deal of our free time there.

When Lee and I had been together for a year he said he wanted me to start investing my money. For Lee, that meant buying a house. At the time I couldn’t afford much. I bought a little tract house at 933 Larrimore Street in Las Vegas—six rooms crammed into fourteen hundred square feet—and Lee helped me make the down payment in exchange for my giving him a third mortgage on the property. I made all the mortgage payments from day one, but that proved to be a drop in the bucket compared to what we actually spent on the house. Lee insisted on redoing it in his customary opulent style. I paid $58,000 for the property but we ran up a $40,000 bill for structural changes, $25,000 on landscaping (which included using cranes to lift huge palm trees over the roof so they could be planted by the new Jacuzzi in the back), and $40,000 on furniture. When the job was done Lee loved that house more than any of his mansions and took more satisfaction in it.

When we were in Vegas we’d go back to his mansion after a show, pick up the meal that Gladys had prepared for us and head straight for my place. No one, other than Gladys, knew where we were and she was the only person in Lee’s entourage to have my phone number.

Lee seemed to enjoy playing hooky from the demands of his fame. In my home, he played at being a hausfrau. He cooked and cleaned and fussed over me like a bride. My best, happiest memories of him come from the time we spent there. Pushing a vacuum, dusting furniture, fixing lasagna, Lee and I pretended to be equals. But the pretense never lasted long. Sitting in the Jacuzzi as the sun came up, he’d say, “I wonder what the poor people are doing?”

The longer Lee and I were together, the more I understood his sense of isolation, his need to have a confidant and full-time companion. From Heller to Frances to Angie to George, he felt that everyone’s motives were suspect because everyone had something to gain from their association with him. For years his wealth had sequestered him, made him suspicious of even the best-intentioned offers of friendship. Before long I found myself caught in the same trap. Suddenly I was Mr. Popularity, pursued by my own relatives and even some of my former foster families. They all wanted to meet Liberace, be invited to his homes, go for a ride in his limos, hit him up for a loan or a job. One afternoon one of my sisters telephoned and in the course of our regrettable conversation, suggested that I get Lee to buy her a diamond ring. Little did she realize that Lee, who monitored many of my phone calls, was listening on another phone. After I said good-bye he came racing into the room. “Now you know what I’ve been going through for thirty years,” he said triumphantly. “See! You can’t trust anyone. They all want something!”

Lee exercised complete control over my life. He told me what to wear, where to go, who to see once I got there. There were times when he acted more like a father than a lover. Once, when we were in Fort Lauderdale, he had the hotel manager move us to a new suite because he couldn’t see the beach where I planned to sit in the sun for an hour that afternoon. Another time, Seymour Heller offered me a ride from Las Vegas to Los Angeles so I could take care of some personal business. When Lee heard about the offer he came unglued. He didn’t want me out of his sight for a minute. We did everything together. Fortunately it was fun most of the time.

There were times when I resented and rebelled against his smothering affection. When I felt low, shopping usually cheered me up. Although Lee didn’t raise the salary I reported to the IRS, he was always giving me cash, a thousand dollars or more every week. I used some of it to buy him surprise presents. His favorite surprise was getting a new dog. By the time Lee and I parted, we had accumulated a grand total of twenty-six.

At first we had a mixed pack of large and small breeds. But one horrible day they got into a fight and some of the big ones actually killed a couple of the smaller ones. Lee almost fainted. We’d never anticipated anything like that happening. After that we kept small dogs only, poodles, mixed breeds. Lee’s favorites—seven or eight of them—slept with us every night. And Lee never complained when one of them had an accident, even though there were days when the house, and especially our bedroom, smelled like a kennel.

One of Lee’s favorite projects, established before I appeared on the scene, was the foundation he’d created to give college scholarships to needy music students. The foundation, and St. Francis Hospital, where Lee had made his miraculous recovery from uremic poisoning, were Lee’s only charities. He did one benefit show a year for St. Francis but the scholarships were a continual project.

Lee chose which colleges to endow and the colleges chose the recipients of the scholarships. Lee, who always liked to champion underdogs, didn’t give his money to well-known music schools like Juilliard. Instead he chose small schools where he knew his contributions would reach students whose lives could be altered dramatically by the gift.

The foundation was an ambitious project and could have been a considerable drain on Lee’s resources. But he never permitted the situation to get out of hand. In Lee’s fortieth-anniversary souvenir pamphlet, he boasted of the foundation having given $50,000 to schools across the country. Since Lee
was
the foundation, and he personally earned millions of dollars a year, that wasn’t much to brag about. I think he would have been appalled if someone had suggested that he could afford to be as generous as Paul Newman, who gives all profits from his food company to charity.

Although Lee didn’t plan to equal Newman’s phenomenal generosity, Lee was deeply interested in the foundation. He wanted it to be self-sustaining, so it could go on providing scholarships whether he continued to work or not. Early in our association he got a brainstorm. He’d create a nonprofit organization to open and run a Liberace museum, and the funds generated by the museum could support the scholarships. At the time, the only other entertainer to have his own museum was Roy Rogers. Lee’s plan sounded audacious but, knowing the loyalty of his fans, I didn’t doubt it would succeed.

To those faithful followers who saw him perform year after year, Lee had an appeal that transcended ordinary star power. His charismatic quality can better be compared to the television evangelists than to his own show-business peers. Lee was the Jim Bakker of the nightclub circuit, with his own devoted group of fans. They gave, gave, gave—and Lee spent, spent, spent.

He took full advantage of their devotion by setting up Liberace concession booths wherever he appeared. The booths sold his albums, autographed pictures, Liberace piano books, jewelry, pillboxes—anything Lee and Seymour Heller thought the public would buy. If no one else in the entourage was available to man those booths, Heller would preside over them himself.

Lee used to call the income produced by his concessions “funny money.” The only funny thing about it was that fans so willingly shelled out so much cash for those trinkets and that Lee told me he never reported the income, although he boasted of banking up to $20,000 a week in “funny money.”

If people would stand in line to buy Liberace souvenirs, he saw no reason why they wouldn’t stand in line to tour a museum where his most treasured possessions would be on display. He’d had a small prototype museum in the house on Herold Way but the neighbors complained about its being a commercial enterprise and, in any case, Herold Way was too out of the way to attract a steady flow of tourists. Vegas, on the other hand, doesn’t attract much else. Lee decided it would be the ideal place to create a monument to his own career.

A six-month gestation period passed from the idea’s conception to the actual opening of the museum. During that time Lee and I devoted every free minute to turning his dream into a reality. Scotty Moore, Lee’s real estate agent, found a suitable property on Tropicana Avenue: an old shopping center that held about fifteen small stores. The architecture was pseudo-Spanish, the size right, the location excellent.

Lee paid in the neighborhood of three million dollars for the property. That sounds like a fortune but, since Lee was donating the land and building to his own nonprofit organization, he’d given himself a terrific tax writeoff. Another half million went to renovating the space. In addition to the museum, it would also hold Liberace’s antique store—to be replaced in a few years by Liberace’s restaurant, the Tivoli Gardens—and a Liberace gift shop that sold the same things as the concession booths.

When the renovation was well under way, Lee and I went through all his houses systematically, picking items to put in the museum. First, of course, there were costumes he could no longer wear. Then there were paste replicas of his enormously valuable jewelry collection. Over the years the jewelry, like the pianos and the cars, had become Liberace trademarks. I can still hear him saying, when asked how he could play the piano with so many huge rings on his fingers, “Very well indeed!”

Many of Lee’s cars, including the piano-key station wagon, the patriotically custom-painted red, white, and blue Rolls, the Auburn he used in the act, his first limousine, his ’57 T-Bird, would also be on display in the museum. Many of the things Lee had been unable to part with, though they crowded even his vast homes, were slated for the museum. We stayed up three nights straight just going through the Vegas house, and the task had to be repeated in all the other homes. Rare antiques were slated for permanent exhibit as well as some of Lee’s more unusual pianos. He had one that had reputedly belonged to Chopin and another that was supposed to have been played by Liszt, which Lee said gave him goose bumps to play. The value of each of the items was duly noted and added to the figure to be written off Lee’s taxes.

Lee was in seventh heaven all the while. He’d managed to have his cake and eat it too. First, his ego got a maximum stroking by the creation of a museum devoted to him. Second, he was actually going to help a lot of gifted kids. Third, he’d finally found a place for all the stuff he’d been accumulating. Fourth, as the vans began taking major items from each of his properties, the gaping holes they left created a need to buy new things. Fifth—but far from last—Lee had the tax shelter to end all tax shelters.