‘Behind the Candelabra’: Insincerely Yours

I’ve been going to Las Vegas regularly for 30 years, to play poker and gratify a lifelong fascination with raffish milieus. In the latter context, a visit to the Liberace Museum was inevitable. I visited it in 1997, a decade after the entertainer died of complications from AIDS.

I came to scoff, having deemed Liberace a sententious fraud of questionable talent, whose fulsome effusions of universal love concealed a narcissism that could gag a goat.

I also faulted Liberace for not using his enormous clout to help the 1970s burgeoning gay rights movement by coming out of his opulent closet. His persistent denial of homosexuality grew curiouser and curiouser, when so many celebrities were affirming their gayness after Rock Hudson bravely revealed that he had AIDS.

Touring the surprisingly restrained archive of Liberace’s career and collections, I awakened to an unexpected appreciation of the wacky humanism that coexisted with Liberace’s hyperbolic self-inflation. The pleasure he took creating his gaudy entertainments was matched by the delight he derived from his audiences’ delight.

His affection for fans, family, and friends was unstinting and unfeigned – of which more presently. He lavished luxury upon himself, but was as generous to many others. His foundation to fund needy artists has given away millions.

I also learned that Wladziu Valentino Liberace, also called Lee Liberace, was a gifted child musician, if not quite a Mozartean prodigy. At age 19, he played Liszt’s formidable “A Major Concerto” with the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra. An amateur musician, I could recognize the strength of his pianism, particularly evident in early videos. That he decided to employ his gifts toward other ends than competing on the concert circuit was no bad thing. I had known – and treated – worthy competitors on that unforgiving stage who had gone down into the dust.

Naturally, he trimmed and trivialized Beethoven and Chopin. But he made their music available to multitudes who might never otherwise have heard it. How many of his viewers became serious classical music devotees as a result of hearing him tart up Tchaikovsky?

Pondering the museum’s collections, I began to perceive a rowdy yet oddly refined aesthetic sensibility. Decades before European and American academics furiously anatomized the paradigms of kitsch, pop, and postmodern culture, Liberace embodied them in his persona and performances. (The Vegas casinos where he strutted his stuff have been notably caressed as postmodern cathedrals by French social theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.)

One discerns Liberace’s intriguing “pre-postmodernism” in his campy, carnivalesque spectacles, pastiches of high- and lowbrow entertainment. At center, always the spectacle of his exuberant, androgynous self, basking in his fans’ worship as he proclaimed his love for them.

Contemporary musical theater, kitsch or elegant, owes Liberace a huge debt – notably Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas extravaganzas. (The finest of these, “Love,” a deeply satisfying tribute to the Beatles, is available now and some part of forever at the Mirage casino.)

Liberace’s over-the-top costumes set the stage for brilliant fashion experiments conceived at the behest of future rock groups and divas, from Kiss to Cher. This screwball/sumptuous garb was the subject of a provocative exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art a decade ago.

Liberace’s lipstick traces also can be discovered in the work of artists like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst. Liberace would have gone gaga, both as a lover of wretched excess and an observant Catholic, over the sinister opulence of Hirst’s memento mori, “For the Love of God” – a skull recast in platinum, encrusted with 8,601 diamonds.

The museum predictably avoided any mention of controversy over Liberace’s sexuality altogether. One speculates that concern for his performing image might originally have dictated his urgent need to hide what was in plain sight, lest he be mocked out of his career. It’s likely that some of his older female fans intuited his gayness at some level, but denied it, lest their ideal be cast from his pedestal.

Liberace’s deception always threatened to unravel around its own false premises. He kept up his heterosexual showbiz disguise long after it was necessary, indeed until his demise. Still, whatever his rationale, what happened in his own private Vegas had every right to stay there.

It couldn’t and didn’t. A year after his death came “Behind the Candelabra,” the book that purported to blow the lid off Liberace’s id. Written by Scott Thorson with Alex Thorleifson, it recounts Scott’s 5-year love affair cum marriage that took place during the entertainer’s last decade. To give Thorson due credit, his description of Liberace’s past is for the most part plausible, even handed, and compassionate.

Lee Liberace’s Polish father left the scene early on. His family was dysfunctional and impoverished. He was both doted upon and dominated by an overweeningly, ambitious mother. One learns about the evolution of Lee’s musical career from classics to candelabra; his consummate professionalism and stringent work ethic; since youth, the searing angst about his homosexuality and its exposure.

Scott’s narrative descends into disingenuous, tawdry TMZ dirt-dishing once he meets Liberace. He describes himself as a 17-year-old naif from a broken family who, through the good offices of several foster parents, became a wholesome unlicentious bisexual.

In his book, Scott is working as a movie animal handler with vague ambitions of becoming a veterinarian. He’s introduced to Liberace by a friend, is instantly overwhelmed by Liberace’s charisma and charm, and seduced into becoming his personal assistant, duties unclear. He moves into Liberace’s garish mansion, a triumph of “palatial kitsch,” becomes his besotted lover, is showered with lavish duds, gems, cars, an apartment of his own. Lee even proposes to adopt him.

Then emerges that inevitable “dark side” so dear to the craven hearts of the TMZ vultures. Scott intimates that Liberace’s success was enabled by Mafia connections and whinges about being preyed upon.

But he’s a remorseless user and user-upper. His depredations even predated his birth at 14 pounds: Scott psychobabbles that Lee’s depredations even began in the womb. Liberace’s dead, shriveled twin was “an apparent victim to Lee’s greed.”