Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (25 page)

Lee didn’t have any answers. In the sober light of day he agreed he’d made a mistake. Never again would he insist on going into an adult bookstore, but his interest in pornography didn’t end.

By 1981 Lee had tumbled from the pedestal where I’d rightly or wrongly placed him. I still loved him, dreaded the thought of losing him, but I no longer idolized him. Even then I recognized the fact that we both had problems. In the years to come, I would be able to analyze them realistically. Mine had to do with drugs. Lee’s had to do with sex. Although his interest in sex was at an all-time high, his ability to achieve satisfaction had greatly decreased. Despite the silicone implant he had difficulty achieving full arousal. Our sex life was diminishing, in part because Lee was much too proud to discuss his virility, or lack of it, with me. Instead, he used pornography to become aroused and ready for sex. Since I had no way of knowing why he did it, I interpreted his constant viewing of pornography as a complete lack of consideration for my feelings. We’d reached an irreconcilable impasse.

I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. If I lost Lee—and I still refused to face that possibility—I’d be losing a lot more than a lover or a meal ticket; I’d be losing the person who meant more to me than anyone I’d ever known, the man who’d become my family. I knew Lee so well I could even hear a difference in the way he played piano as we grew further apart. He was more emotional; it showed in his eyes, his voice, but most of all in his performances. Looking back, I guess he too was going through some pain—and a lot of regret.

We still cared for each other, enough to try to resolve our problems. When Lee suggested that we experiment with an open relationship, I agreed. At the time I’d have agreed to anything that had a chance of stopping our arguments and keeping us together. An open relationship would have given Lee the sexual variety he needed, while we would continue to live together as friends and companions. It sounded reasonable. I wouldn’t be losing Lee and he wouldn’t lose me, we’d just be sharing a part of ourselves with other people.

Unfortunately, what sounded like a rational way to go on living together when we discussed it in the Jacuzzi turned out to be an emotional hell. I soon learned I couldn’t stand the thought of Lee seeing anyone else, and he blew his stack the first time he saw me with another man, even though I explained that the man was a friend, not a lover.

“It’s him or me,” Lee declared.

We both realized that an open relationship wouldn’t work for us. But we’d given each other one hell of a scare. For a while, it seemed we’d both learned a lesson. No matter what, we decided to stay together.

But, from then on, I felt I couldn’t trust Lee. My response to his ever roving eye was to retreat further and further into drugs, using them to escape reality. Like most addicts, I still believed I could handle drugs. When Tony Orlando tried to warn me that my habit was out of control, I refused to listen. It was a hell of a lot easier to rationalize taking drugs, to blame it on Dr. Startz or on Lee for causing my unhappiness, than it was to try to deal with my problems.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I’d become an out-of-control drug addict. That wouldn’t happen until I faced the reality of actually losing Lee. I could still go for days without taking as much as an aspirin. But gradually what had been a monthly habit became biweekly and then weekly. I continued to try concealing my cocaine usage from Lee, who—despite his own fondness for amyl nitrite, cigarettes, and liquor—professed to hate drugs. I never did coke around him, but he would have had to be blind not to know what I was doing.

At the same time, although I hadn’t caught him with another man, I was convinced he was seeing someone. Weeks would go by without Lee initiating a sexual encounter, and I knew Lee too well to think he’d gotten hooked on celibacy. The pattern of fighting and making up accelerated.

When friends like Tony Orlando tried to talk to me about how much coke I was using, denial was the name of the game. “I’m not addicted, I can handle it, take it or leave it,” I argued.

Then, of course, there were friends like Mr. Y, who were interested in seeing my addiction escalate so they could sell me more drugs. By late 1981 I was listening to all the wrong people. The more I used drugs, the more Lee pulled away from me. Although I didn’t realize it then, he’d already started looking for a new “
protégé
.” The casting call was out.

I’m not a psychologist, a social worker, or a doctor, but I believe that promiscuity is and always has been the most serious problem facing gay men and the gay community. Today everyone realizes that such behavior is a major factor in transmitting AIDS. But back in 1981 I was more concerned about what promiscuity might do to my relationship with Lee than about what it could do to my prospects for a long life. Too often gay men roam from partner to partner, indulging themselves in a series of one-night stands, acting like randy male dogs. Their code seems to be, “If it feels good, do it.” From my own observations and experiences, I’ve reluctantly concluded that the gay male sex drive is so strong, so powerful, that even today—confronted with the possibility of contracting AIDS—some gay men seem willing to die just to have a new experience. Lee was one of them.

We’d agreed to have a monogamous relationship, but Lee’s track record, coupled with his constant flirting, kept me from trusting him. I was always on the lookout for signs of trouble. Two of Lee’s oldest and dearest friends served as a role model for the relationship I hoped he and I would share. Fred and Bob were a dance team, retired from their many years with Lee’s show and living in Connecticut when I first met them in 1977. They’d been together two and a half decades and seemed completely happy. We visited them every time Lee had an East Coast engagement, and my esteem for them grew with each meeting.

When Lee decided to open an antique shop in his museum complex I immediately suggested Fred and Bob as prospective managers. They were well settled in their Connecticut home, and moving would mean a major upheaval in their lives, but they accepted Lee’s offer out of their affection for him. I hoped their obvious stability, so different from most of the gay behavior that we saw day in and out, would rub off on us. Most of all, I hoped that Lee and I would have a long-lasting relationship like theirs.

But that wasn’t in the cards. Lee’s desire to have sexual variety with a younger lover, coupled with my drug problem, continued to drive us further apart as 1981 drew to a close. We had terrible fights, instigated by me when I caught Lee paying attention to a younger man, or by Lee when he thought I was stoned. We’d wind up in a shouting match that always ended with Lee calling me a “monster.” Those words evoked memories of his final fights with my predecessor, Jerry O’Rourke. Lee had called him a monster too.

“I’ve created a Jekyll and Hyde,” he sobbed when our fights threatened to become physical. And he was right. My years with Lee had turned me into a spoiled, pampered, cocaine-using jerk who no longer liked himself. Lee and I stayed together for a complex variety of reasons: habit, mutual dependency, caring.

There were still happy times, among them the day Lee was asked to play all the nominated musical scores at the 1982 Academy Awards ceremony. For Lee, that was the culmination of a lifelong dream. He wanted to be an actor, a star, to win an Oscar. Being asked to play at the awards ceremony—not just one nominated song but all of them—was the next best thing. A jubilant Lee looked forward to the evening of March 25, 1982, when he’d make his appearance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before a star-studded audience. To Lee, it signified the acceptance he’d always wanted from Hollywood; at long last the film industry seemed to be taking him and his talent seriously. One of his last unfulfilled wishes was about to come true. I couldn’t help being happy for him, but that happiness didn’t last.

Early in 1982 Lee started paying a lot of attention to a kid named Cary James, an eighteen-year-old who was a member of the Young Americans, the singing and dancing troop that appeared with Lee. James was blond, blue-eyed; in fact, he looked a lot like me before my plastic surgery. James hung out around our dressing room all the time, and Lee often favored him with a private chat. Catching the two of them with their heads together, having what looked like an intimate conversation, drove me to a fury. But every time I brought up my suspicions Lee swore I was imagining things; his conversations with James were completely innocent.

Lee’s people seemed to realize that change was imminent. In private, Ray Arnett would tell me that James was the most boring kid he’d ever known, but Arnett praised James whenever Lee was around. When so-called friends told me that Lee was buying James small gifts, clothing and the like, I forced a major confrontation.

“What the fuck’s going on around here?” I shouted. “Why is that little son of a bitch hanging around our dressing room all the time?”

Lee played innocent. “Nothing’s going on,” he said. “The kid doesn’t mean a thing to me. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

I wanted to believe—how I wanted to believe him. I tried to take what Lee said at face value, but jealousy made me half crazy. I watched for any sign that he’d been lying to me. For the next few weeks James had the good sense to steer clear of Lee and me. Then, the third week in March, when we were appearing at the Sahara Tahoe, I got a phone call while Lee and I were in our dressing room resting between the first and second shows. My favorite foster mother, Rose Carracappa, had died.

The Carracappas were the first family to take me in when my mother had been hospitalized after we moved to California, and they were the last family I lived with before meeting Lee. If things had been different, if my mother had been willing to let the Carracappas keep me when I was little instead of reclaiming me, I probably wouldn’t be writing this book. They were a good, dependable couple who would have given me a solid background, people who cared for me as much as the law, the welfare workers, and my mother had allowed. They represented the best the foster-family system can offer a kid and I’d never stopped caring for them, even though I hadn’t followed their advice.

The news of Rose’s death, coming in the midst of my emotional problems with Lee, tore me up. I asked him if it would be all right if he made his entrance for the second show without the car. I was too upset to come out onstage, all smiles, and play chauffeur.

“Sure, Scott,” Lee said, patting me on the shoulder in his most fatherly way. “I understand just how you feel. You stood by me when Mom died and I’m going to stand by you now.”

Those were exactly the words I needed to hear. Without the Carracappas, Lee was all I had left in the world. I grabbed the emotional lifeline he seemed to be extending. He was as good as his word. He not only permitted me to sit out the last performance of the evening, he arranged for a Lear jet to fly me to the funeral the next day. I was so grateful for his understanding and support that it never occurred to me that he might have an ulterior motive for wanting to get me out of town. It would be one of the few times since we became lovers that Lee and I spent a night apart. Knowing how much he hated to be alone, I regarded it as a sacrifice on his part. We were both solicitous of each other’s feelings and needs as we said good-bye at the airport.

When I returned twenty-four hours later it was obvious that something had happened in my absence. Lee’s people were looking at me differently, treating me differently, refusing to meet my eyes. I didn’t trust any of them. But I did trust my sister Annette’s husband, Don Day, who had a job working the concessions in Tahoe and who was staying with us, to tell me the truth. As soon as Don and I had a minute alone, I asked him what the hell was going on.

Don told me that Lee had invited Cary James over to the house while I was away and that James had spent the night with Lee in our bedroom. There was no way I could stay in control after hearing that news. How, I asked myself, could Lee do that to me, to us, while I was at Rose’s funeral? The fact that I’d been away mourning the loss of someone I cared for doubled my sense of betrayal. Angry; God, I’d never been so fucking angry! If Lee had made the mistake of walking in at that moment, I think I’d have killed him then and there.

I cursed, shouted, tore our bedroom apart. I don’t even know how long I went on like that. By the time I regained control the room was a disaster area of broken glass and furniture. Meanwhile, Lee was hiding downstairs, terrified of facing me. No way could I stay under the same roof with him. I didn’t even want to be in the same state. I had to get away, try to cool down and think things through. So I tossed a few things in a bag and asked someone to drive me to the airport. The Lear jet was still there and I had the pilot fly me back to Los Angeles.

In L.A., not knowing where else to go or what to do, I took a cab to the penthouse. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my life was over. Lee had been my whole world; if I didn’t have him I didn’t want anything else. The darkest thoughts ran through my mind as my emotions seesawed between anger and self-pity. Unable to face being alone, I called Mr. Y, the man I considered to be my best friend. He came over; we shared some cocaine and talked for hours.

By the next day I’d made up my mind not to call Lee. I wanted him to make the first move, to apologize for what he’d done. Then maybe I’d be able to forgive him and we could start over. While I waited for the phone to ring a note arrived. It was from Lee and said, “Love me or leave me!”—not exactly the abject apology I thought I had coming.

I stayed holed up in the penthouse, licking my emotional wounds, while Lee left Tahoe for Palm Springs. A couple of days later I got a call from the man who functioned as the majordomo of the Cloisters.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “what the hell is going on with you and Lee? Last night he had two French kids here with him in bed.”

I couldn’t believe it. I’d been sitting around like an idiot, waiting for Lee to call and the whole time he’d been amusing himself with a three-way. The anger I’d felt in Tahoe was child’s play compared to the rage that shook me after learning that Lee had been tricking around as he’d done before we met.