Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (7 page)

Lee wasn’t political in any way. His first thought was “What a tragedy,” but his second was “Thank God, I won’t have to go on tonight.” Lee had never felt sicker in his entire life.

The country came to a halt that day as grieving, stunned Americans sat in front of their television sets watching the tragedy unfold. Millions would forever mark that date in their lives by where they happened to be when they got the news. An entire nation sat, transfixed, as they watched a stunned Jacqueline Kennedy, in a suit stained with her husband’s blood, setting an example of dignity and courage.

But Lee was too ill to feel anything except his own growing discomfort. He was planning to spend the next twenty-four hours in bed until one of his people—he was too ill to remember which one—told him the show would have to go on after all. The Holiday Inn’s entire showroom had been booked weeks in advance for that particular night, and the group that had booked the room wanted to see Liberace despite the day’s tragic events.

Lee was astonished. He couldn’t believe anyone would want to go to a show the very day the president had been shot. But Lee was a trooper. Shaking with weakness and fatigue, he dragged himself out of bed and laboriously made his way to his dressing room to prepare for his act. By then the performances depended on costumes as much as they did on piano playing. That night Lee attempted to make his normal lightning quick changes in a makeshift dressing room in the wings while the singer, Claire Alexander, entertained the audience. Lee didn’t remember how much of his act he managed to complete but, during one of his changes, he collapsed. His powerful will couldn’t drive his failing body back onstage.

“I can’t go back on,” he told Ray Arnett, his producer.

Ray, who’d been with Lee for years, knew something was terribly wrong. Lee lived for his act and his audiences; he’d never missed a performance before, let alone walked out in the middle of one. A simple case of flu wouldn’t be able to sideline him, Ray thought. But he had no idea just how sick his boss really was. It was a day for ill omens and unpredictable events; a day in which the stars seemed malevolently misaligned.

Lee had been felled by the most bizarre set of circumstances. During his act he worked under blazing lights which caused him to sweat profusely. Consequently, his costumes required frequent cleaning. Before arriving in Pittsburgh one of his costumes had been cleaned with tetrachloride. Sweating heavily on opening night, Lee absorbed the deadly chemical through his pores. Lee wore that costume for part of each performance on all the ensuing evenings, absorbing more and more of the lethal chemicals. By the time he collapsed, his kidneys had shut down completely.

The doctors at St. Francis Hospital diagnosed his ailment as uremic poisoning. Their prognosis sounded ominous. Waste fluids had already collected in Lee’s tissues. His feet and legs were already swollen. If the swelling couldn’t be halted before it reached his vital organs, Lee would literally drown in his own body fluids. Kidney dialysis, a relatively new treatment, was the only thing that could save him. Lee, expecting to die, began spending money from his hospital bed. “What the hell,” he told me later, “you can’t take it with you.”

He ordered jewelry from Tiffany’s, furs and many other things he hadn’t yet gotten around to buying. He also made arrangements to give away many of his possessions. It must have been weird in that hospital room, as he bought things and gave others away in frantic haste to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure from all the money he’d earned.

His worst fears were realized when the first dialysis treatment failed to improve his condition. The doctors told him he’d die if they couldn’t get his kidneys working again. But they didn’t dare administer another dialysis treatment for thirty-six hours. During those hours Lee’s life would be hanging by a thread. He was given the last rites.

Said Lee, “I knew prayer was the only thing that could help me, so I began to pray harder than I ever had in my life.”

Barely conscious, he directed his prayers toward St. Anthony, whom he described as the patron of the underdog. Sometime during the thirty-six hours between treatments, Lee woke to find a nun dressed all in white seated by his bed. The nun, whom he assumed to be one of the nursing sisters at the Catholic hospital, told Lee that he mustn’t waste his strength worrying because of his illness. She assured him that he was going to live.

Twelve hours after the second dialysis Lee’s kidneys began to function again. Afterwards the doctors told Lee they’d almost given up hope for his recovery. In their opinion he was a living, breathing example of a miracle. He owed his life, not to their skills, but to divine intervention. As soon as Lee was feeling better he asked to see the wonderful nun who had given him so much faith and courage. He could describe the woman in detail, but none of the nuns in the hospital fit his description, none of them wore all-white habits.

Six weeks after he’d been taken to St. Francis, Lee was released, weighing twenty pounds less than he had on the day he’d been rushed there by ambulance. He looked like a new man. More important, he had a new view of himself and his position in the scheme of things. Despite the church’s position on homosexuality, Lee firmly believed he wouldn’t have been spared if being gay was the sin Catholic dogma held it to be. He believed he’d been saved because God, and most particularly St. Anthony, looked on him with special favor. As for the mysterious nun, nothing could convince him she wasn’t God’s messenger.

Knowing God loved him filled Lee with peace and well-being. He’d done things the church regarded as sins—sodomy, homosexual acts with multiple partners—but God had spared him anyway. From 1963 on, Lee, believing there was no sin too great for God’s forgiveness, would stop at nothing in his pursuit of pleasure.

When I first met Lee in the summer of 1977 I was an eighteen-year-old kid who thought, like most eighteen-year-olds, that I had all the answers. Living with Lee would eventually teach me I didn’t have any of them. I was born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a couple of hundred miles from Lee’s birthplace in Milwaukee, a coincidence he often remarked on. Like him, I am also the product of a broken home and, like him, I am gay. My mother suffered from manic-depression, a chemical imbalance that resulted in emotional problems, and, consequently, most of my early memories are unhappy ones. She married three times but her illness prevented her from settling down with any of her husbands for the long haul.

I have two sisters, Annette and Carla, and one brother, Jimmy, plus four half brothers and sisters: Gary, Wayne, LaDon, and Sharon. Wayne and Sharon grew up with their father, Nordel Johansen, while Gary and LaDon lived with my father, Dean Thorson. Those of us who stayed with Mother had a rough life. There were times when she’d disappear for days, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Once, when we’d been left with nothing to eat, I begged our landlady for food. She gave us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and called the authorities.

When the police came, we children were turned over to a welfare agency and Mom was hospitalized. For the next year we lived first in St. Michael’s Orphanage and then in the La Crosse Home for Children. After her release, Mom reclaimed us and headed for California to make a new start. But she was far from cured. She spent a great deal of time in California state hospitals and we spent most of our childhood moving from one foster home to another. One of them, the home of Rose and Joe Carracappa, was memorable for the love and kindness they gave. Unfortunately, my stay with them would be all too brief. My mother soon reclaimed me, and the round of brief stays with her, and then in foster homes, continued. It was a hard, loveless life most of the time. But kids survive. We went to school and did our best to support each other along the way.

Back then the state paid foster parents three hundred dollars a month to care for a child and that didn’t cover any luxuries. Foster kids soon learn to earn their own spending money. I worked at odd jobs from the age of ten. By my thirteenth birthday I’d grown tall enough to lie about my age and hold down part-time jobs.

Somewhere along the way I picked up an intense love for animals, maybe because I trusted them more than people. The happiest memories of my youth began when I bought a dog and a horse with money I’d saved. Leonardo was a two-hundred-pound St. Bernard and, like me, in bad need of a home. Beauty was a half Shetland, half Arab horse that no one seemed to want—except me. It didn’t matter that my current residence had no place to keep animals; I just had to have them to love and care for—or I’d shrivel up and die.

I was fourteen then and living in a state-run home awaiting permanent placement, while the animals were in a boarding facility. Finding a permanent place for us to be together seemed like a hopeless task, but I decided to try phoning all the ranches and stables listed in the yellow pages, asking if they could take a foster kid with a horse and a dog. Halfway through the listings, I called the Pacheco Ranch, owned by David and Marie Brummet. They amazed me by saying they’d be willing to consider my proposition. The next day I hitched a ride to their two-thousand-acre spread in Marin County. With its green rolling hills and five hundred horses, Pacheco looked like paradise.

For a year and a half the Brummets were my family. I went to school, worked on the ranch, and began to put down roots, thinking I’d stay with the Brummets until I was old enough to be on my own. We shared an almost idyllic life until David Brummet was told he had cancer. His illness forced him to sell the ranch, and I was homeless again. When my welfare worker told me I’d be placed in another group home I offered an alternate plan. My half brother Wayne Johansen, a man fifteen years my senior, lived in the San Francisco area and I’d lived with him before, briefly. Wayne agreed to take care of me again. Our tie was tenuous but I grabbed at the lifeline he extended.

The next few months were difficult. Wayne made his living as a bartender, and had a wide acquaintance with California’s gay community. When I’d stayed with him before, some of his friends who were gay upset me with their propositions. Returning, with the infinite wisdom of my fifteen years, I knew more about myself and felt I could handle the gay environment.

After a couple of fumbling, adolescent sexual encounters with girls while living on the ranch, I admitted feeling equally attracted to men. In my brother’s home, I would have a chance to explore that attraction. Defining my sexual identity in the mid-seventies didn’t traumatize me the way it had Lee in the mid-thirties. San Francisco gays had come out of the closet and built a strong political base. They were in the process of becoming a power to be reckoned with in those gloriously naive pre-AIDS days.

I didn’t think that being bisexual was a fate worse than death. In fact, after I recognized it, my bisexuality didn’t seem like much of an issue. I accepted it the way I accepted being blond and blue-eyed, as part of the package called Scott Thorson. I had my first sexual encounter with a man while living at Wayne’s in San Francisco. That man is still my very good friend and trusted adviser, a part of my support system.

On the ranch, I’d decided to be a veterinarian. But I knew that goal would never become a reality if I permitted myself to become trapped in the gay lifestyle. Wayne and I came to a mutual parting of the ways, and I moved into another foster home and, eventually, to Southern California. As soon as I was settled I went job hunting and found work as a veterinarian’s assistant with a Dr. Tully, who had an office in the San Fernando Valley. He specialized in cropping dogs’ ears. I learned a lot of practical, everyday remedies from him, but cropping ears and taking care of poodles wasn’t very exciting work for an adventurous kid. By then I had decided I wanted to train animals. On the advice of a contact at Walt Disney Studios, I called Shumaker Animal Rentals.

Mr. Shumaker invited me out to Sunland to see how he and his crew did things. He had a big place where he kept forty dogs. One look and I was hooked; I thought I’d found my life’s work. From then on I went to Sunland every weekend, acting as an unpaid gofer. One day Mr. Shumaker phoned to tell me an employee had quit without notice. Shumaker was preparing to go on location with thirty dogs to film
The Pack,
starring Joe Don Baker. He said the job was mine if I could be ready to leave in two days.

I loved working for Mr. Shumaker, learning how to make up the dogs with Vaseline, mud, and phony blood so they’d look crazy-mean. Learning how to handle them, train them, and care for them seemed like a worthwhile life’s work. For the next year and a half I worked for Shumaker off and on. Despite my unhappy start in life I felt things were working out for me—my goals were set and, although I knew they’d be tough to achieve, I thought I was on my way.

My personal life continued to revolve around a few gay friends I’d made while living in northern California. It was through them that I met a man I will call Bob Black. Black was about twenty years older than I, extremely good-looking in a blond, Nordic way, nicely dressed, well-spoken, and easy to talk to. During our first conversation he told me he was a choreographer-dancer who’d worked on various TV shows. I was attracted to him and intrigued by his show-business background. We met often during the next few months, building a friendship that lasts to this day. In July 1977, he asked me to go to Las Vegas one weekend to catch a few shows. Black owned a sporty Mercedes 450 SL and the idea of driving it cross-country appealed to me. Black also promised to take me backstage and introduce me to a few of the celebrities he knew.

I loved Vegas on sight! The neon glitter and nonstop nightlife were intoxicating. Bob and I went to see
Hallelujah Hollywood
our first evening in town. The next night we caught Juliet Prowse’s act and afterward Bob took me backstage to meet her as he’d promised. Liberace’s show at the Vegas Hilton was last on Black’s agenda. I’d heard of Liberace for the first time a few weeks earlier when I’d seen a magazine article about him. From what I read, I didn’t think I would enjoy his performance. But Black, who knew Lee’s production manager, was determined to see the show and go backstage afterward to renew old acquaintances.