Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (21 page)

One unfortunate problem resulted from his operation. Lee’s eyes had changed, in appearance and function. He couldn’t close his lids completely. They remained slitted open even when he struggled to keep them shut. At night, when he slept, his eyes would open slowly and that’s the way they would stay. Even worse, they had always been one of his nicest features but now they had a slightly sinister appearance. Lee feared that Startz had cut out too much skin while attempting to remove all the sags and bags around Lee’s eyes. But Startz assured Lee the problem was temporary. He prescribed drops to keep Lee’s eyes from drying out at night and told him time would take care of the rest.

The drops made Lee more comfortable, and he stopped worrying. But it was odd to wake up at night and see him in bed beside me sleeping soundly, his eyes half open—odd and a little frightening. My face would soon be entrusted to the man who had done that to Lee. I’d get up in the morning determined to tell Lee that I’d changed my mind, that I didn’t want to have an operation, but then I’d take that first pill and nothing seemed important afterward. I was cocooned in a dream world, all cares erased by the drugs—suspended in an exotic, pleasurable dreamland. While using drugs I didn’t think of myself as a prisoner in paradise or as Lee’s shadow. In fact, I didn’t think at all.

When it was my turn to be driven to the doctor’s office in Beverly Hills I went happily, like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter.

My surgery took place about a month after Lee’s. The day before, we drove back to Beverly Hills and checked into a luxurious suite at L’Hermitage, a posh hotel that caters to the superrich. That night we went out for a fabulous dinner, Lee’s first public appearance after his operation, to celebrate the way he now looked. He was equally excited about the prospect of my becoming a Liberace look-alike.

“Ooh, Scott,” he said, bubbling with enthusiasm, “I can’t wait to see what Startz is going to do with you.”

The next morning he accompanied me to the doctor’s now familiar San Vicente office. My surgery was slated to be a two-step procedure. First, Startz would work on my cheekbones and chin, using silicone implants to reshape my round face into a reasonable facsimile of Lee’s heart-shaped one. Five days later I’d have the more traumatic procedure, a nose job to narrow and lengthen my nose. At the last minute, in a brief rebellious moment, I asserted myself enough to ask Startz to give me a dimple in my chin—even though Lee didn’t have one. After all, it was my face!

The first surgery didn’t take more than an hour and a half. Lee stayed with me until the anesthetic took effect. When I woke up a few hours later my face, with its silicone implants, looked and felt like it belonged to someone else. Late that afternoon I returned to the hotel, where my steady intake of drugs, all prescribed by Startz, ensured I would feel no pain before the second surgery. The drugs were so powerful that I floated through the next few days, as compliant as an aging lapdog. Then back we went to Startz’s office for my nose job.

When it was over I had difficulty breathing and felt horrible in general. The doctor assured me that this was perfectly normal and gave me some new pills to alleviate my anxiety. The first time I saw myself in a mirror, all swollen and black-and-blue with horribly bloodshot eyes, I felt certain I’d made the mistake of my life. We stayed in the hotel for another week and Startz casually doled out pain pills and his own special brand of diet pills every day, as if they were nothing more than aspirin instead of a dangerous combination of highly addictive drugs. Several years would pass before I learned from some of his other patients that Startz was responsible for addicting many of his own clients. Before, during, and after my surgery, I took my medications without asking a single question about what they were and why he’d prescribed them. I floated in and out of reality until it was time to leave for an engagement at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks, Nevada.

All Lee’s acquaintances had been told that he had been on vacation. Lee was elated at the prospect of appearing onstage for the first time in two months with his new youthful look. He couldn’t wait to get John Ascuaga’s reaction.

His old friend didn’t disappoint him. “You look terrific!” Ascuaga told Lee. “The rest must have been just what you needed.”

The Nugget’s stage couldn’t accommodate the Rolls or the other elaborate props that were part of Lee’s Vegas act. Basically, it was just Lee, the piano, the candelabra, and a series of costume changes. Although the Nugget’s audiences didn’t know anything about Lee’s surgery, they reacted enthusiastically to his buoyant, vigorous performances. I didn’t have to appear with him, a good thing considering how lousy I looked. While I continued recuperating, Lee was at the top of his form off- and onstage: exuberant, full of energy and enthusiasm. His new look had given him a new lease on life. Birthdays didn’t count; looking young was the same as being young! He couldn’t have been happier.

By the time the Sparks booking drew to a close, the swelling and discoloration that marred my face had faded. A totally new Scott Thorson was emerging from the postoperative trauma. As Startz had promised, I looked like a younger, Nordic version of Liberace, with high cheekbones, a narrower nose, and a pointed chin. Often, when I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I’d find myself wondering who that stranger was. I literally didn’t recognize myself. I remember taking time to stop and stare in fascination at the Liberace look-alike I’d become. Anyone who has ever colored their hair, worn new glasses, or transformed their appearance in any way will know what I mean when I say it takes time to get used to the change.

Lee loved my metamorphosis. He’d look at me and say, “A beauty—a star is born.”

When I looked well enough to work in the concession booths at the end of his shows it wasn’t unusual to have women come up to me and ask if I was Lee’s son. Not exactly, I thought to myself. But those remarks did get us to thinking. Lee was thrilled every time someone suggested a blood kinship between us. Over the years, I’d changed from being his lover or companion to become a perfect reflection of Lee himself—flamboyant, a little crazy. Lee had often talked about how much he would have liked to have a son. Even before my surgery it wasn’t unusual for him to say that in many ways I’d become a son to him. We felt psychically connected to each other in ways that had nothing to do with sex.

When we established our relationship Lee had talked about adopting me, but we’d never taken the trouble to find out what it would take legally. Now the constant comments about how much I looked like Lee made him seriously consider the idea.

“You know, Scott,” he said, “no one’s ever been closer to me than you. I want to make sure that you’re cared for forever, no matter what happens to me.”

In the past Lee had discussed giving me one of his homes, making sure that I’d always have sufficient funds to take care of myself and all the dogs in case anything happened to him, and, ultimately, we signed a document guaranteeing it. He’d also named me a beneficiary in his will. But those were just pieces of paper tucked away in a file; they didn’t reflect the deep emotional bond between us. Adoption would. We both recognized that other people, even those in Lee’s organization, wouldn’t understand our motives for wanting to formalize our status. I warned Lee that Heller and Strote would probably tell him he was making a terrible mistake, that I was after his money. It was their standard complaint when it came to me.

But they would have been wrong, dead wrong. Sure, I enjoyed Lee’s money. Anyone would. Everyone associated with him benefitted from his earnings in one way or another. The more Lee made, the more Heller and Strote and Troulman and Cunningham all made. They were all tied to Lee financially. He used it to control them just as he used it to control me. But his wealth was not the prime motivation in my wanting to be adopted. All through my childhood, I’d been tormented by the feeling that I didn’t belong to anyone—except maybe state welfare agencies. I wanted to be loved, to be cared for, and to give all those things in return. To belong. Adoption would have accomplished all of that and more, fulfilling both Lee’s needs and mine.

Lee had a deep desire to pass his name on to someone else, while I wanted us to be legally bound so that Lee would always be part of my life. More than my lover, he was my mentor—the rock on which I’d built my entire existence. I was wet behind the ears when we met, untutored and unsophisticated, and I’d grown up under his guidance. My view of the world had been shaped by his interests, my opinions formed by things he’d told me. I shared his love of animals, of cooking, of decorating. Mentally—and physically, following the plastic surgery—I was Lee’s creature. He’d been my Pygmalion. Although it sounds crazy now, I’d begun to think of myself as an extension of Liberace, a part of him rather than a full-fledged individual. Even now, looking back, I sometimes feel that my life began the day Lee and I met and ended the day we parted. Adoption sounded like the logical culmination of everything we’d been to each other.

We agreed not to tell anyone what we were contemplating. None of them, from Heller to Strote to Cunningham, had ever shown a genuine liking for me. As long as Lee loved me they had no choice but to treat me well, but that’s as far as it went. I didn’t think they had my interests in mind. When it came to my possible adoption, Lee didn’t think so, either.

We decided to consult John Mowbray, a Las Vegas attorney, about the paperwork. Lee invited Mowbray out to the house, explaining that he wanted to keep the adoption proceedings quiet until it would have to be a matter of public record. Mowbray discussed the legal ramifications and said he’d be back in touch after drawing up the preliminary papers. I was on cloud nine after he left. Once Lee formally adopted me I’d finally belong to someone. In all the years of living in foster homes no one had ever loved me the way Lee loved me, no one had offered to make me a part of their family. I wanted to belong to Lee in the eyes of the whole world and know that he belonged to me.

About the time that Lee and I were looking into adoption I asked Joel Strote, Lee’s attorney and mine, to draw up my will naming Lee as my beneficiary. Lee seemed more like family to me than my half brothers and sisters or my mother and father. I wanted to be sure that in the event of my death all the things I owned as a result of Lee’s extraordinary generosity—my house, my cars, my furniture, my dogs, the things I’d bought with my salary—would be his. Although the will, the proposed adoption, the promises of lifetime support would all loom large in the future when Lee and I broke up, back in 1980 they seemed like nothing more than small pieces of the wonderful future we would share.

Lee seemed to love the new me even more than he had the old. By the time I recovered from my surgery I’d dropped over twenty pounds, a satisfying weight loss for so short a time. But I had gained more than sixty in the years Lee and I had been together. His favorite foods—pasta, fried chicken, meat loaf, gravies and sauces and breads—had turned me into a tank. Lee wanted me to really slim down and I was only too happy to try. So I stayed on the Hollywood Diet. It proved to be the mistake of a lifetime. Slowly but surely, I became addicted to the drugs Startz prescribed. They helped me lose weight, alleviated my postoperative pain, but, more important, they made me feel relaxed and confident.

Startz renewed my prescriptions on request. Addicted to drugs himself, he seemed to have no compunctions about prescribing addictive drugs for his patients. Who knows? Maybe misery loves company. There’s certainly no more miserable human being than a doctor like Startz. I blame him for an addiction that would eventually make my life a hell on earth. It is absolutely no consolation that Startz was in that hell with me, and that he ultimately blew his own brains out.

By the time I’d been on the California Diet for six months and lost fifty pounds I was hooked on pharmaceutical cocaine. At that time Lee began to voice some concern about my health. “You’re getting too thin,” he said, adding that some of his people were saying I was anorexic and emotionally unstable. “I want you off that diet,” he insisted.

How I wish it had been that easy. I was beginning to realize how dangerous Startz’s drugs were and I wanted to stop taking them. God knows, I tried hard. I could go days, sometimes weeks, without taking anything. But every time I felt unhappy or unsettled, every time Lee and I had a disagreement, every time some of his people made me aware of how much they disliked me, I’d soothe myself, help myself over the rough spots by taking drugs. And Startz didn’t hesitate to go right on supplying them. Since I seldom had the cash to pay for them, I’d buy jewelry on a credit card that Lee and I shared and then turn the jewelry over to the doctor in return for prescription bottles full of pills. Lee, who had an almost uncontrollable passion for jewelry himself, never questioned those purchases the way he would have questioned me if I needed large amounts of cash.

Taking pharmaceutical cocaine had one other obvious advantage. It was perfectly legal. I could take it with me when we toured and not have to worry. Startz kept me supplied for six months after I formally went off the diet. During that time I made every effort to control my cocaine usage and to gain back a little weight. And, to a great extent, I succeeded. By the time that Startz, fearing discovery, cut me off completely, my small drug need could easily be supplied by casual friends.

In those days cocaine was the drug of choice in the entertainment industry. I could purchase it from the stagehands or even have some given to me, gratis, at parties where it was used openly. By now most people are familiar with the stars who have admitted to a drug problem. Boy George, Stacy Keach, Richard Pryor, Larry Gatlin, Tony Orlando, Richard Dreyfuss, Liza Minnelli, have all been courageous enough to talk about their addiction. But they are just the tip of the iceberg. Coke was everywhere early in the eighties. Even today, after all the negative publicity, anyone who wants cocaine can find it; and it is cheaper than ever.