Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (24 page)

Being in Vegas and seeing her son every day did give Frances Liberace a new lease on life, but it proved to be a short one. By 1980 her stamina had decreased markedly. Clearly, her days were numbered. Lee, who’d always been uncomfortable during their visits, became even more nervous around her. He’d walk into her room, give her an obligatory hug, and spend the rest of the visit looking anyplace but at Frances. I think it was his way of blocking out the reality of her imminent death.

He’d gotten used to having his wealth and power shield him from life’s unpleasant realities. If he couldn’t buy his way out of a problem he used someone on the payroll, usually Seymour Heller, to deal with it. But no amount of money could prevent eighty-nine-year-old Frances Liberace from dying.

In view of his emotional distance from his mother, I thought Lee would have no trouble dealing with her imminent death. But he couldn’t handle it at all. Instead, he ignored the situation. He didn’t change his schedule to reflect his mother’s now seriously declining physical condition. In fact, we were in Hollywood on vacation, staying in the penthouse, when we received word that Frances had died.

“Let me talk to my brother,” Angie said abruptly when she called to give Lee the news. Angie was often abrupt with me so I didn’t think anything of it.

As Lee spoke to his sister he gasped and shrank back, as though he were trying to avoid an unexpected blow. “When did it happen?” he asked.

Within seconds, he’d regained full control of himself. After hanging up Lee turned to me and told me Frances was gone. Tears filled my eyes but Lee, although he looked shaken, remained dry eyed. The first thing he did was to pick up the phone and call Seymour Heller to ask him to put an obituary in the appropriate newspapers. He returned to Vegas early the next day to make the funeral arrangements.

Lee played the dutiful son to the end. He picked out his mother’s coffin—pink because it was her favorite color—had her properly laid out and prepared for burial, called Forest Lawn in Los Angeles where he’d purchased what was to be the family mausoleum, and made all the plans for the interment. It was a busy day and he wanted me by his side, giving what little support I had to offer, while he made those painful decisions. Lee, who had such an even-tempered disposition, showed very few signs of the stress he was under as he prepared his mother’s final farewell. But those fingers of his fluttered nonstop as he played a silent concerto.

The entire family, including Angie, her children and grandchildren, George and Dora, and Rudy’s seldom-seen widow and children, in addition to all of Lee’s people, Lucille Cunningham and her immediate family, the Strotes, Ray Arnett, the members of the band—everyone close to Lee was gathered at Forest Lawn for the funeral. Angie and Lee were stoical throughout the long day but George took his mother’s passing very hard. He wept uncontrollably when he saw the coffin.

All the surviving family members were showing the strain by the time we adjourned to the penthouse after the burial. The old wounds inflicted during their childhood seemed to resurface. Grief, instead of making them closer, seemed to push them apart. George was virtually silent, clutching his wife’s hand. But Angie, obviously distraught, began to boss me around. Lee intervened, saying, “For heaven’s sake, Angie, leave Scott alone. Can’t you see he’s taking Mom’s death as hard as anyone?”

As for Lee himself, he never shed a tear from the first phone call to the gathering after the funeral. He displayed emotion by snapping at people. Consequently, it came as a shock a few months later, when Lee wept buckets over the death of his favorite dog. Babyboy was the little poodle with the eye problem who’d played a part in bringing Lee and me together. Lee was absolutely inconsolable when the dog died of old age. For days afterward he moped around the house, breaking into uncontrollable fits of crying. I thought his heart would break. Seeing his distress, I couldn’t help concluding that Lee loved his dogs more than he loved his family.

When Lee buried his mother he buried all his unresolved feelings about her. He’d loved her and resented her; but he’d never dealt with those emotions. And now he never would. Sometime late on the evening of the funeral, after everyone had gone, Lee turned to me and made the only comment he would ever make about his mother’s death. “I’m finally
free
,” he said.

Although we would live together for two more years, Lee seldom spoke his mother’s name in my presence again. Liberace, the entertainer, made much of his
beloved
mother’s passing while Lee, the man, put it behind him as he’d put so many other unpleasant things behind him. His reaction to Frances’s death was a chilling example of his ability to close the door on the past, an ability that would one day serve him well with regard to me.

In 1977, shortly after I moved into the Vegas house with Lee, I came across a number of pornographic tapes that he’d left in the night table by our bed. When I questioned him about them he said he enjoyed watching porn and had a small collection of tapes and films. It was the only time I ever heard Lee minimize a situation. In fact, his collection was extensive and well used. Before my arrival he’d watched hard-core pornography as a steady diet.

During our first weeks together he showed me some of his films. They all depicted homosexual acts and, even at the age of eighteen, I found the movies offensive and boring. Sex, in the privacy of your own bedroom, can be thrilling, romantic—a real bond between two people. But sex on screen is just sad. The positions look awkward, the bodies unattractive, the photography poor. Worse, from my point of view, was the fact that homosexual pornography seemed embarrassingly
faggy
. The dialogue, what little there was of it, was so stereotypically gay as to be laughable. I believe a man should still act like a man, no matter what his sexual preference. But Lee’s porn films often starred men who in the vernacular would be called “flaming fags.” There are guys like that out there but they’re not representative of the homosexual population as a whole.

I hated those films, hated the fact that Lee liked them so much and wanted me to watch them with him. They aroused him while they turned me off. Each time Lee viewed one of his tapes he’d want to have sex. The variety of sexual acts he saw on screen fascinated him. Nothing made him hotter than watching a three-way—three men in bed going at it. At the beginning of our relationship I was afraid his fascination with hard-core porn would cause a real problem between us. Fortunately, back then Lee cared more about me than about watching those movies. Since I disliked them so much he stopped asking me to view them with him and, to the best of my knowledge, stopped watching them himself.

Although sex was important to Lee and he liked a variety of sexual acts, it was never the most important thing in our relationship. That was fine with me and for a long time, it was fine with Lee too. He hungered for companionship. He couldn’t stand to be alone and needed to know someone would always be there for him. That need fit perfectly with my desire to have a father figure. Lee became my father figure. I looked up to him; in fact, I put him on a pedestal. Considering the difference in our ages and his immense talent and charm, it’s no surprise that I came to admire him so much. The public Liberace, the great entertainer, deserved all the admiration I could muster.

But the private man had traits and tastes that were less than admirable—foremost among them his consuming interest in pornography. Although I cared for Lee more than anyone I’d ever known and saw him through rose-colored glasses, there were times—more and more of them as the years went by—when ignoring or excusing his faults came hard.

When things went well we laughed a lot. The thing I remember most from 1977 to mid-1981 is laughter. In the privacy of our home, I poked fun at Lee, saying scandalous things that no one else would have dared say. He didn’t mind me calling him an “old queen,” teasing him mercilessly about his makeup, his clothes. I was probably the only person in the world who didn’t treat him like a star twenty-four hours a day, kissing his behind at every opportunity.

But I began to sense a subtle difference in our relationship sometime in 1981. Lee didn’t laugh at my jokes as much as he had in the past. I had to be careful not to anger him. He’d always been flirtatious toward other attractive young men, but now his flirting became so obvious that it embarrassed me. When he had a few drinks he’d come on to teenage boys as though I wasn’t even there. I’m sure the other people who worked for him realized what was happening, even though I didn’t at first. Lee was tiring of me. The plastic surgery and the weight loss that had drastically altered my appearance helped maintain his exclusive interest in me for a while. But underneath, I was still the same old Scott and, at twenty-two, past my prime for a man who liked younger, more malleable companions. Lee was a chickenhawk and he would soon be searching for new prey.

At first I tried to ignore the symptoms of his growing restlessness. When I couldn’t we usually wound up fighting. Then I’d take a little cocaine to help me over the rough spots. As the frequency of our arguments increased, so did my drug usage. With the wisdom of hindsight I realize that my drug habit caused some of the difficulty between us. It made me less malleable and harder to reach. I’d been a kid when Lee and I met. His opulent lifestyle had been completely alien to me. So I followed his lead. By mid-1981 following his lead had lost its appeal. I’d become a man with opinions of my own, opinions I probably expressed too often. Now when Lee tried to tell me how to dress, what to eat, where to go, I often ignored him.

He resented it but, being Lee, he never openly expressed his resentment. Lee didn’t confront his problems head-on. That wasn’t his style. He kept quiet while his dissatisfaction ate away at our relationship. As a result he became more dictatorial and in turn, I became more rebellious. We were on an accelerating downward spiral and everyone seemed to know it but me. I kept on thinking, “This too shall pass.”

Lee, who’d insisted on my being with him morning, noon, and night, began to give me a little freedom. It started with my taking Frances Liberace to the Hilton to gamble. Sometimes Lee went with us but more often he said he had errands to run. After Frances died I continued to do a few things on my own. Having time to myself, after being what I still think of as a “prisoner in paradise,” made me so happy that I didn’t question what Lee was doing when we weren’t together. I made a few friends, tried my hand at songwriting with enough success to be encouraged. Looking back, I realize being Lee’s favorite had gone to my head. I’d been given too much too soon. I didn’t know how to handle my good fortune and my snorting coke didn’t help. I had begun to think of myself as Lee’s son, the power behind the throne, even as his
equal
. I felt I deserved to have my say and my way, at least part of the time.

That proved to be a mistake. Lee didn’t want an equal, he wanted a subordinate—someone who’d jump when he said jump. There were still good times, enough of them that I didn’t realize how close we were to playing out our string. Both of us were drinking more, smoking heavily; and we began to have serious disagreements about our sex life. Lee, who wanted more variety, tried to talk me into acts I found repugnant. “If you loved me, you’d do what I want,” he complained bitterly.

“If you really cared about me,” I replied, “you wouldn’t ask me to do things I hate.” The arguments became more acrimonious with every passing month. Lee wanted me to engage in anal sex and I hated even the thought. Our sexual encounters were creating even more tension between us.

During our last year together Lee and I made our annual pilgrimage to Fort Lauderdale, where he had a standing engagement. While we were there Lee renewed an old friendship. The two of them made me feel like a total outsider as they talked about the “good old days,” people and places and incidents I knew nothing about. The man owned a string of adult bookstores and had supplied Lee with many of his pornographic films and tapes. We became a threesome for the next few days. Lee’s pal kept on sniggering and telling me I ought to check out one of his bookstores. Obviously, Lee had already told him what I thought of porn.

“Try it, you’ll like it,” he insisted.

I didn’t have any desire to and told him so, rather graphically.

But Lee had other ideas. “Boober,” he said, “you’re a goddamn party pooper!”

One night after we’d all had too much to drink I finally agreed to check the place out. The three of us piled into a car and took off for one of Lauderdale’s sleazier neighborhoods, where the so-called bookstore presented a blank, windowless face from the street. Inside, racks loaded with pornographic books and magazines lined the front of the store, while shelves of merchandise—whips, chains, other objects used in sadomasochistic sex acts, even dildos and other things I’d never heard of and had no idea how to use—were near the back.

Lee’s eyes gleamed as he took it all in. There was a series of viewing machines, like old-fashioned nickelodeons, where you could watch sex flicks to your heart’s content—heterosexual, homosexual, sex acts featuring animals or children; they had it all. Lee was soon going from viewer to viewer, grinning all over the place. The bookstore also had private cubicles in the back with what are known in the gay world as “glory holes.” For a small fee a man could rent one of the cubicles, put his penis through the “glory hole,” and wait for a response.

I was drunk when we arrived, a circumstance that prevented Lee from staying longer and enjoying the full use of the facility. We weren’t there fifteen minutes before I threw up, making an unintended but valid commentary on my surroundings. Lee, who was thoroughly disgusted with my behavior, had no choice but to take me back to our hotel. The next morning I woke up with a killer hangover. But I made up my mind to have it out with Lee. A couple of aspirins later, I finally felt well enough to confront him.

“About last night,” I said, “you’re a well-known star and you’re out of your fucking mind to go in a place like that! What the hell would you have done if someone, a reporter, had seen you in there? How would you explain that to all the little old ladies?”