Born May 16: Liberace

Denial wears many faces, and six gaudy rings. Liberace’s titanic flamboyance and volcanic success as a popular pianist — his tv show outranked I Love Lucy, he sold more than two million albums in 1953 alone, the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as the world's highest paid musician and pianist, and he has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — was punctuated by his repeated protestations, in court, that he was not a homosexual and had never engaged in a homosexual act. In 1957, he sued a British tabloid for libel for implying he was gay and won $22,000. In 1982, when his live-in boyfriend/chauffeur Scott Thorson sued him for $113 million in palimony, Liberace continued to claim he had never had sex with a man. Thorson got around $95,000. Even as Liberace was dying of aids in 1987, he stridently denied he had aids (instead blaming his drastic weight loss on a watermelon diet) and he still maintained he had never had gay sex. In his final months, somehow still believing that his fans were ignorant of his homosexuality, he worried to his manager that if they knew, “that’s all they’ll remember about me.” Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, has been downgraded from a feature to an HBO movie next year. Filming begins this summer with Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Thorson.

Comments

[Richard Kramer]

I had the strange experience of seeing him once at DIsneyland, of all appropriate places. He had two bodyguards, was wearing a jumpsuit (not sequined) and seemed to be covered by a thin layer of plastic, like a piece of your grandmother's furniture. Does kitsch know it's kitsch? Is it laughing? The Industrial Revolution, with its invention of the masses and hence of Masscult, has a lot to answer for.

[Duncan]

Michael Douglas as Liberace? Oh man, I got a bad feeling about this...