Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (3 page)

Lee was a very good pianist, too good not to realize that he’d never be a truly great one in the classical sense. According to him, he’d reached a high level of competence and, after that, no amount of additional practice improved his playing. God had given him perfect pitch and large, powerful hands that easily spanned an octave and a half. Years of hard work had given him excellent technique, but he knew a concert career demanded more than polished skills. God had given him everything, he believed, but the rare spark of genius that would set him firmly above his peers.

Lee told me that the realization was a painful one. Music had been his life, his retreat, his source of happiness in an intimidating world. He admired the great classical pianist Paderewski, a man he would later lay claim to as his mentor, more than any other man on earth, and hoped to be like him. Seated at a piano Lee was neither man nor boy, gay nor straight, but simply a vehicle for the creation of music. Again, I think Lee rationalized his situation. He had to look no further than his own father, still scrimping and counting change to make ends meet, to confirm the fact that he didn’t want a life of classical music for himself.

Although his mother never stopped talking about her son’s glorious future in concert halls around the world, Lee continued to head in a direction that would help establish him as a
pop
musician. His weekend performances as Walter Busterkeys continued and, in addition, he joined his high school dance band. While playing at school dances Lee first experienced the thrill of manipulating audiences, bringing them to their feet with a wild boogie beat or lulling them into a romantic mood with a love song. Music, he discovered, gave him control. He’d been thinking of himself as a victim, a loser trapped in a world he never made, unable to change his fate. Now he began to see music as a path to popularity and power.

But Frances Liberace couldn’t let her dreams go; and, in those early days, her dreams were very different from Lee’s. She proudly recounted the story of his concert debut with the Society of Musical Arts in Milwaukee, describing it as a triumph. Lee recalled it as the kind of debut every aspiring young performer endures early in his career. According to him, his performance failed to arouse more than mild enthusiasm on anyone’s part, including his own. Frances remained undeterred by her son’s lukewarm reception. As far as she was concerned he was going to be the next Paderewski—or else. All he needed was a little more exposure, a little more experience concertizing, which she set about arranging. For the next two years she conned Lee into playing benefit concerts for every charitable organization in need of an inexpensive fund-raising. In the 1930s hundreds of Milwaukeeans had the pleasure of hearing Liberace perform—gratis. It would never happen again. Years later, when his Hilton contract alone was said to be worth three million dollars a year, Lee still laughed about having to give all those free concerts.

He had paid lip service to his mother’s dream while privately moving closer to defining the kind of music he wanted to play and the world in which he would play it. Under his leadership, his high school band grew increasingly popular. Determined to pass as straight, Lee admired girls from his position onstage, praying no one would guess that he wasn’t dying to date some of the hot little numbers on the dance floor—if only he had the time and the money.

Adolescence can be agony for anyone, but it was a special hell for Lee. Still struggling to deal with his own sexual identity, he had to live through the torture of hearing his classmates making crude jokes about “homos.” Every time it happened he recalled dying a little inside. The prejudice against gays seemed more intense than the prejudice against any other minority group. Lee knew he’d be ostracized, or worse, if anyone in school discovered he was a fag. He would go to any extreme to keep that from happening. If it meant lying, he’d do it. If it meant telling “homo” jokes himself, he’d do it. If it meant dating he’d do that too, even though the thought of getting physically close to a girl made him nauseated.

Fortunately, he never had to carry his pretense that far. Everyone knew he was holding down a job, going to the College of Music, and keeping up his high school studies. No one, not even his family, expected him to have time for girls. Lee didn’t need to keep up a pretense of normalcy in the honky-tonks where he worked on weekends. No one cared what he did as long as he showed up on time. At first he was quiet and withdrawn in that adult world. He did his job and he did it well. In fact, he soon realized that he was by far the best musician in the band.

Once he felt relaxed and confident, he began to take in his surroundings. Eventually he noticed men coming in together, men who weren’t the usual after-work blue-collar crowd. They were quieter and better dressed, he recalled, and, although he couldn’t pinpoint what made them different, he felt their difference strongly. It took a while, but the still naive Lee finally realized that they were homosexuals. The revelation came as a pleasant surprise. Knowing he wasn’t alone, seeing that other men like him were capable of enjoying their lives helped to relieve his sense of isolation.

Lee was anxious to talk to them. There were so many things he wanted to know. His peers’ sex talk didn’t extend beyond girls’ bodies and what could be done with them. Lee burned with curiosity about his own sexuality. Now he knew there were men who could give him the answers he wanted. But he was far too naïve and unsure of himself to dare approach them.

Frances continued to be upset by her son’s weekend jobs, but he ignored her concern. In those dark, smoky bars, he hoped to find the answers to who and what he was. Brother George, who had developed into a competent violinist, often played the same gigs as Lee. His presence helped allay Frances’s worries. Lee was seeing a side of life few boys his age get to know. He was growing up fast, but not fast enough to suit him. He later remembered that he didn’t like having George constantly around, playing chaperone. Fortunately, George wasn’t around the night a football hero from the Green Bay Packers came to hear Lee play.

“I could hardly miss the guy,” Lee told me, reminiscing about his first lover. “He was the size of a door, the most intimidating man I’d ever seen. Every time I looked out in the audience there he was, smiling at me. From then on, he showed up wherever I worked. He’d buy me drinks during our break and tell me how much he liked listening to my music. One night he asked to drive me home. That’s the night I lost my virginity,” Lee told me privately.

The story he told for public consumption was very different. In his book
The Wonderful Private World of Liberace,
published by Harper & Row in 1986, Lee wrote a chapter titled “I Lost My Virginity at Sixteen.” In this chapter Lee, who already knew he had AIDS, claimed to have been seduced at the age of sixteen by a stripper. As you will later see in the pages of this book, Lee was determined to the very end to deny and conceal his homosexuality.

The truth is almost every gay has someone like that football player in his past. An older man usually gives a boy his first experience. In the gay community they say, “First you sell it (most young gay men have older lovers who act as mentors), then you give it away (with a sexual partner your own age), and then you buy it” (by having a younger lover). That football player became Lee’s lover, an experience that made an indelible impression on Lee.

“I realized,” Lee said, “that a strong masculine body next to mine gave me a sense of
security
I’d never known before.”

He continued to see his new friend for the next few months, sometimes sneaking out of the house after his mother was asleep. According to Lee sex was a part of the relationship, but not the most important part. He’d never been able to share his deepest feelings with his family and he felt he couldn’t trust anyone in the straight world. The football player became Lee’s first confidant. He also introduced Lee to other gay men. Many of them came from other cities and they told Lee to look them up if he ever visited their hometowns. Although Lee didn’t realize it at the time, he was laying the foundation for his own gay network, a group he remembered turning to for companionship, understanding, and sexual gratification in the years to come when so much of his life would be spent on the road.

Few minority groups are as conditioned to a ghetto mentality as gays. Lee was no exception. He soon learned to depend on his homosexual friends for everything. By his eighteenth birthday, Lee was leading a double life. At home he was still Mama’s pride and joy, continuing to study the classical repertoire, to practice every spare moment. But weekends, when he played in bars and strip joints, Lee abandoned all pretense.

Frances continued to push a concert career with every ounce of energy and influence she possessed. The woman was a pit bull when it came to Lee’s future. He knew he’d have no peace until he made a serious try for the goal she had set. At the age of nineteen Lee made his last appearance as a classical musician, playing Liszt’s Concerto in A Major with the Chicago Philharmonic under the baton of Frederick Stock. Lee felt his talents were ideally suited to the piece. In fact, in the years to come, Lee would toy with the idea that he was Franz Liszt, reincarnated. He would make comparisons, not only to Liszt’s technique but to his style, his glitter, his showmanship.

Like Liszt, Lee had huge, powerful hands with a tremendous stretch. They gave him the virtuoso technique a Liszt concerto required. He spent months in dogged preparation for the last concert. When it was over he didn’t want anyone to say he hadn’t given it his all. If he succeeded, if the critics responded enthusiastically, Lee said he would have taken it as a sign and pursued a concert career. If not, he made up his mind to lead his own life and choose his own future.

By the evening of the concert, Lee told me he knew the Liszt concerto so well he could have played it backward. His performance was received exactly as he had anticipated. He didn’t set the concert hall on fire—but he didn’t disgrace himself either. A warm wave of applause greeted the end of his performance. The critics were kind, in view of his obvious youth, but Lee hadn’t indelibly impressed any of them with his brilliance. He felt a mild depression that quickly passed. And then, without looking back, he returned to the world he loved—the world of saloons and nightclubs.

The year 1940 found him playing two or three gigs a week, making a circuit from Green Bay to Sheboygan to La Crosse and then back to Milwaukee. On the road, Lee said, he made use of the telephone numbers he’d been accumulating. His knowledge of the gay world expanded with each new contact and sexual encounter. In those days most of his lovers were older, a situation that would change in the near future. By his thirtieth birthday, Lee would have developed a decided taste for younger men.

As Lee traveled from town to town, away from his mother and his family, his lifestyle and his music were changing, forming a pattern that would prevail the rest of his life. Lee’s classical repertoire was replaced by the music of Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and the Gershwins. Family and friends would later tell me that Lee, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo, had an ingratiating stage presence, even in his twenties. He was anxious to please, to make audiences remember him. But something was missing and Lee, with his superb showman’s instincts, knew it. The way things were going he feared he’d be just another nameless, faceless piano player for the rest of his life, growing old and tired as he drove from one forgettable booking to another. He was just twenty-one but, Lee later remembered, he often felt like a fifty-year-old failure.

Lee didn’t like talking about his childhood, his youth, or those early years on the road. There was, however, one story he really enjoyed telling. One night after he’d played his usual set, someone in the audience requested “The Three Little Fishies,” a nonsense song that was riding high on the hit parade back then. The song had almost no melody, and it didn’t challenge Lee’s ability, so he decided to have fun with it. He gave it a standard rendition first. But then, in a moment of inspired genius, he played it as if it had been composed by Bach. The audience responded by applauding as loudly as if he’d just invented the piano.

Lee knew he’d hit pay dirt. He finally had the schtick that would set him apart from every other piano player on the circuit. From then on he closed every performance by asking for requests, which he’d interpret in the style of one or more of the classical composers. Audiences loved his new gimmick. The idea proved to be so popular that he later wished he could have patented it.

In his early twenties, buoyed by local success, Lee decided to leave home. His goal: the bright lights of New York. He felt sure that fame and fortune waited for him on the East Coast.

In the early 1940s big bands and swing dominated the music scene. Harry James, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or the Dorseys, and their respective orchestras, could fill a supper club or dance hall for weeks on end. Stand-up comics like George Jessel, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Edgar Bergen dominated the live entertainment scene, playing all the best clubs when they weren’t working in radio or in the movies. Elegant night spots dotted the Manhattan scene, including the ultra-exclusive 21 Club, El Morocco, Sardi’s, and the Stork Club. All the great New York hotels, from the Waldorf to the Pierre, had plush rooms where the nation’s greatest performers appeared regularly. The entertainment world bustled with well-known stars whose activities filled the pages of
Variety
. Lee remembered that his arrival in New York, predictably, failed to stir a single ripple of enthusiasm in that world.

At home in Milwaukee he’d been the proverbial big fish in a little pond. In New York the people he contacted about potential bookings said, “Liberace who?” His fame hadn’t extended beyond the borders of Wisconsin. Agents and managers had never heard of him, and they failed to be impressed by the long string of credits he’d acquired on the Wisconsin circuit. Lee said he faced the eternal show-business dilemma: he couldn’t get an agent until he played local bookings, and he couldn’t get local bookings until he had an agent.