Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (16 page)

He asked George and his wife, Dora, to move down from Sacramento to manage the museum. George seemed like the natural choice. Despite their past problems, he was family and Lee, with his Polish-Italian roots, still believed in family even if he complained that they were an occasional pain in the neck. George had also been very closely associated with Lee’s early career and many fans still asked Lee, “How’s your brother George?” Now, when someone asked, Lee could tell them to visit George in the museum.

Managing the museum was a golden opportunity for George, who was getting old for life on the road. He accepted the offer and Lee bought him a condominium in Vegas. The Liberace family was getting closer, geographically if not emotionally. Although the brothers didn’t socialize often, I had a chance to get to know George better. He was a gentle, kind, considerate, unassuming man—the kind of man Lee might have been if he hadn’t been so driven.

The museum proved to be a smashing success from the day its doors opened. It generated an enormous income for those scholarships. At the end of the first year Lee told me it had earned a million dollars. Although I suspect he greatly exaggerated the actual figure, no one had expected the museum to do as well as it had. From Lee’s standpoint, the unexpectedly large profit should rightly have been his to control, to spend as he saw fit. Of course he would have given a portion of the money to his foundation—but so much? Did he need to be that generous?

It began to eat away at him, the thought of all that money he’d allowed to slip out of his control. Even the tax shelter he’d created failed to cheer him. He made up his mind to dismantle the nonprofit organization so he could take advantage of the money-making machine he’d created. But this time Lee wasn’t slated to have his way. He told me that disbanding the nonprofit organization proved impossible. Today, Lee’s foundation appears to be a major beneficiary of a will that Lee signed just a few weeks prior to his death. In the future, dozens of students will complete their arts education because Lee miscalculated the depth and breadth of his fans’ loving support.

When I first moved in with Lee, I was both ignorant and relatively innocent. I didn’t understand his lifestyle, his need for secrecy. I’d grown up thinking being a homosexual was neither good nor bad, but simply a fact of life. By contrast, Lee was determined to keep his sexual preferences from his fans. It was only after living in the entertainment community, and learning something of the history of gay performers, that I began to understand Lee. To understand Lee’s life, and therefore my own, the reader has to know what I learned.

First of all, the entertainment industry is like no other business in the world. People who work in movies or on television are often extraordinarily attractive, creative, and talented. They are also the most foul-mouthed group I know. Imagine a business where new projects are commonly referred to as a “piece of shit,” and you’ll get the idea.

In Hollywood’s early days, before the Hays censorship office helped the community clean up its act, the town was known as a sinkhole, fueled as much by booze, sex, and drugs as by talent. The industry has struggled to overcome that reputation ever since, with varying degrees of success. Despite the best efforts of studios, agents, and most stars, memorable scandals have been easier to create than memorable films—and many of those scandals have involved stories of homosexuality. In a homophobic society like ours being gay is often traumatic, but being secretly gay while burdened with public celebrity can be sheer hell. It was a hell Lee knew all too well. And he was just one of a long line of celebrity “closet gays.”

In 1922 the first of Hollywood’s homosexual scandals, the murder of handsome, successful William Desmond Taylor, rocked the film industry. The noted director’s corpse was discovered by his houseboy, Henry Peavey, when Peavey came to work early one morning. Taylor had been shot to death in his Alvarado Street bungalow. Peavey, a very discreet employee, chose to call Paramount Studios, where Taylor worked, before he notified the police. The executives at Paramount had good reason to be concerned. They knew that Taylor was gay, a fact they didn’t want to have revealed in a murder trial. George Hopkins, a set director and Paramount employee who was an intimate of Taylor’s, made a hurried trip to the Taylor bungalow, where he was met by people from the studio. Working in haste, they picked up photographs and letters that might have helped the police to identify the murderer, simply because the letters and photographs attested to Taylor’s homosexuality. Apparently the studio thought an unsolved murder would cause less of a scandal than public revelations about the dead man’s sexual preference.

Like Liberace, most of Taylor’s closest associates (men such as Peavey and Hopkins) were homosexual, part of Taylor’s network of friends who supplied him with a steady stream of young male bedmates. Like Liberace, Taylor also used titles such as houseboy or chauffeur for his companions. The loyal Peavey had been jailed once for soliciting boys intended for his master’s bed. But when the studio applied political pressure on the newspapers and the police, these scandalous events were successfully hidden from the general public. Taylor’s murder was destined to go unsolved for decades. (To my surprise, after being told this story, I learned that the mystery of Taylor’s death was solved in a book called
A Cast of Killers
.)

If the happenings of the twenties sound bizarre, consider the actions of Liberace’s people who helped Lee to conceal his homosexuality from his fans. While Lee lay dying of AIDS, his personal physician announced to the press and public that Lee’s illness resulted from a watermelon diet and anemia. To this day his people cling to that story. When the end came the same loyal doctor wrote a death certificate listing, in layman’s terms, heart failure as the cause of Lee’s death.

Their protection continues to obscure the truth, even now. On May 12, 1987, as reported in the
Orange County Register
, the estate of Liberace filed a claim for unspecified damages against Riverside County, California, alleging that Liberace’s reputation had been damaged when the county coroner gave a nationally televised press conference at which he revealed the presence of the AIDS virus in Lee’s body. Apparently Joel Strote, Lee’s attorney, is still trying to suppress information about the true cause of Lee’s death. I can only assume Strote is misguided by loyalty.

The homophobic society that breeds extreme behavior on the part of gays and their friends has existed for a long time. Lee once spoke of Oscar Wilde, as clever a playwright as ever wrote in the English language. Wilde, who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, had a flair for drawing attention to himself, a passion for flamboyant dress that bears comparison to Lee’s. The public tolerated Wilde’s eccentricities until he flaunted his affair with a male member of the aristocracy. Then Wilde was put on trial for breaking the law that prohibited homosexual relationships. Today, in America, many states still have such prejudiced and unfair laws on their books. After a stormy, highly publicized court case Wilde was sentenced to two years at hard labor. The Wilde trial took place in the same London where Lee defended his own reputation in a court of law. And, in Lee’s opinion, the fifty years that had passed since Wilde’s trial had done nothing to soften or temper public dislike of homosexuals.

I hope that someday one of Hollywood’s super-macho studs, at the peak of his career, will have the courage to step forward and say, “I’m gay.” If his career survives the controversy that is sure to follow, the world and the entertainment industry will be forever changed for the better. But until that
someday
comes men like Lee will pay a heavy price for a sexual preference they cannot control.

Rock Hudson, who conveyed a superb sense of masculine self-assurance, would have been the ideal candidate for such a heroic deed. But Hudson was determined, up until a few weeks before his death, to keep his homosexuality a secret. Like Lee, Hudson dated starlets in public while romancing a string of male companions in private. He even married, at the age of thirty-five, when it seemed one of the tabloids was on the brink of publishing a story about his homosexuality. As his life drew to a close he took a possible chance with the health of his friends rather than admit to having contracted AIDS.

The entertainment industry has always offered mixed blessing to homosexuals. On the one hand gay men and lesbians are drawn to the freedom of artistic expression they find onstage or in film. But those who achieve success feel forced to walk a tightrope of secrecy to prevent public revelations about their sexuality from ruining their careers.

Lee and I used to speculate about the percentage of homosexuals in the business. We estimated that 20 to 25 percent of stage, screen, television, and nightclub performers are either gay or bisexual. That figure can safely be doubled when the estimate includes the people who work behind the scenes. From the lowliest extra on up through the ranks of dancers, chorus boys, musicians, makeup artists, set designers and decorators, writers, directors, and producers, the entertainment industry is home to gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. And even those who claim to be 100 percent heterosexual have often experimented, just for kicks.

But the still powerful studios and their coconspirators, the radio and television networks, manage to protect the people they have under contract. Those homosexuals who are not under contract are often less fortunate. Lee sometimes wondered if all the speculation and rumors about his sexuality kept him from having the number of television specials that his obvious success and popularity should have commanded. In view of the morals clauses that used to be part of network and studio contracts, he may have been right. The entertainment industry is a two-faced business. It thrives on scandal and yet its members fear being penalized if their private lives explode into the tabloids. Lee knew all too well the risks he ran and the price he paid for his choice of bedmates.

No less an international star than Burt Reynolds saw his career take a nosedive because of completely unfounded rumors that he had AIDS. The only way Reynolds could quiet these stories was to simply outlive their credibility. But his career has yet to recover its former luster.

People who are greedy to hear and believe the very worst about public figures will get all the genuine bad news they can handle in the future. AIDS is, by any measure, a new plague. And no one—gay or heterosexual—is immune to its scourge. To date as of this writing, aside from Hudson and Liberace, two major clothing designers, one U.S. congressman, and a major Broadway choreographer/director have died from AIDS. The
Hollywood Reporter
’s obituary column is full of the names of behind-the-scenes workers who have died from the disease. I hate to hear people speculate on who might be the next victim.

Despite the dangers and risks, the modern entertainment industry has a history of employing gay leading men. Friends in the business have told me of Ramon Novarro, a darkly handsome Latin lover of the silent screen, who was a well-known member of the homosexual community. Like William Desmond Taylor, Novarro was murdered. Rumor has it that his killer was an angry one-night stand. When the actor’s body was discovered, an art deco sculpture had been obscenely inserted in his rectum. In view of the ugly deaths of men such as Taylor and Novarro and the open persecution of gays (the gay bashing that is a weekly occurrence in Hollywood and other cities), it’s not surprising that gay male stars go to great lengths to conceal their sexual identity.

Like Liberace, many of the past’s superstars have been, are currently being exposed as gay or bisexual. It’s ironic that Lee, who so feared having his sexuality discovered, enjoyed gossiping about the sexuality of other stars. Errol Flynn, one of the most macho swashbucklers in the history of film, a womanizer who faced a scandalous paternity suit in his lifetime, was described as a bisexual in a recent book about him. Tyrone Power, who often competed with Flynn for roles, competes with him now for revelations about a supposedly bisexual lifestyle. There is even talk that Clark Gable, one of the most masculine men in film history, may have had a homosexual affair early in his career.

The industry has also attracted a number of lesbians, some of whom went on to become famous household names. Mae West, one of filmland’s most sensuous female stars under contract at Paramount in the 1930s, was plagued by rumors and gossip relating to her sexuality. At one time, there were stories that she was actually a man.

West, who built her career by flouting accepted standards, was one of Lee’s few close celebrity friends. In public and in private she surrounded herself with good-looking men. What the public has never known is that most of those handsome males were well-known members of the gay community. Why West preferred the constant company of gay men has never been explained.

The sexual identity of a handsome young man she helped up the ladder of stardom is also a topic of current speculation. It was to Cary Grant, in one of his first screen appearances, that West uttered the memorable line, “Come up and see me sometime.” Revelations in a recently published tabloid expose Grant as a supposed bisexual who had affairs with multimillionaire Howard Hughes as well as fellow actor and long-term roommate Randolph Scott.

Grant was a Liberace fan who came to Lee’s shows once or twice a year and always came backstage to visit. On one of these occasions I saw Grant with a good-looking, obviously gay male companion. But there was nothing in their behavior to indicate that they were lovers. As for Grant, the secrets of his sexual identity were buried with him. If he was gay, he certainly had good reason to conceal it.

Stage actress and star Tallulah Bankhead was another Paramount star in the thirties. She was that rare, rogue personality who broke all the rules and seemed to get away with it. One lady reporter, who relentlessly pressed Bankhead for sexually incriminating statements, found to her dismay that the actress could claw when cornered.