Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace (33 page)

One day in April 1987, I got a pathetic phone call from one of Lee’s people, a man who’d been with Lee through thirty years of performances. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “and the damnedest thing happened. I completely forgot that Lee was gone. And you know, Scott, it’s the time of year when we always go on tour. So I picked up the phone to call Seymour Heller. I was going to chew him out for not telling me when Lee and I would be leaving town.”

The poor guy’s voice was quivering as he said, “Then it hit me. We’ll never be going on the road again; there won’t be any more tours.” Like me, this man couldn’t come to grips with the fact that Lee was dead. Like me, he seemed to be wondering what to do with the rest of his life now that Lee wasn’t part of it. I could sympathize with the guy but I couldn’t help him. I’d faced the same problem five years earlier and I still hadn’t come up with a good answer for myself.

Everyone associated with Lee had to learn to deal with his death. It affected them all differently. The first of several disputes over Lee’s estate made headlines in March 1987. Rudy’s four children, who’d been excluded as heirs by a new will written just weeks before Lee’s death, appeared in a Las Vegas courtroom to contest the will’s validity.

Then, on May 12, 1987, Joel Strote, now the executor of Lee’s estate, filed a claim for unspecified damages against Riverside County, claiming that Lee’s reputation had been damaged by the county coroner who publicly linked Lee’s death to AIDS. It would seem that Strote was prepared to fight one last futile battle on Lee’s behalf, to keep Lee from being identified, publicly and for all time, as a homosexual male. I admire Strote’s loyalty, although his actions were ultimately futile. Perhaps he too was having trouble accepting Lee’s death; perhaps he was trying to do what he thought Lee would have wanted. I’ve never been able to figure the guy out. In any case, the court denied the claim and, in July 1987, the Riverside County coroner made his final findings public. The coroner concluded that Lee
had
died of an AIDS-related cause.

While the survivors argued among themselves, Lee’s estate went into probate. Lee had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in his lifetime, but he’d spent lavishly. I have no way of knowing how much money he left, but the events that followed his death seem to indicate that the estate is cash poor. On May 24, 1987, Christie’s of London, one of the world’s most prestigious auction houses, announced that it would hold a three-day auction in the Los Angeles Convention Center in mid-April 1988, to dispose of more than twenty thousand items belonging to Lee, ranging from dozens of trademark candelabra to mirrored pianos to Rolls-Royces. Bit by bit the things Lee loved, including most of his homes, are being offered for sale.

Lee’s sister, Angie, has made a public plea for funds to save Lee’s Vegas house from the auction block and turn it into yet another Liberace museum. As of this writing, the Shirley Street house is still on the market and I guess it will sell one of these days.

More recently, in August 1987, I heard that Angie, Gladys Luckie, housekeeper Dorothy MacMahain, and Cary James were all bringing suit because Lee’s new will, written by Joel Strote and signed just days before Lee’s death, didn’t fulfill the promises he’d made over and over to them during his life. It all has a terribly familiar sound. As they say, “What goes around comes around.” It’s sad but predictable that the people closest to Lee would quarrel now that he’s gone. He was the glue that held them all together.

The only thing that now seems to unite them is a determination to keep me from writing this book. With few exceptions, they have refused interviews, turned down requests for pictures, used Lee’s vestigial influence to keep places such as the Vegas Hilton from helping me, and threatened a suit should this book be published. Those who have cooperated, fearing reprisals from Strote and Heller, have asked that I never reveal their names. But I have two powerful reasons for writing this book. As you may have guessed, I need the money. The settlement I got at the end of the lawsuit went for legal fees and to set up my own apartment. More important, I believe that Lee’s story—his true story rather than a carefully concocted fairy tale—deserves to be told, for his story can teach all of us a lesson. It serves best as a cautionary tale whose moral is: Too much of a good thing, be it sex, booze, success, or fame,
is not wonderful.
In fact, it can kill you.

At the close of the time period covered by
Behind the Candelabra
, I was a young man, but a young man with the life experience of someone much older and more experienced than is typical for my age. Lee’s money, age and dominating role within our relationship had resulted in my meeting and coming to know people with considerable influence in a wide range of pursuits—movies, television, Vegas, nightclubs and organized crime, primarily the drug trade.

And I had possessions. My famous lawsuit against Lee was not terribly successful, but during my time with him, I accumulated considerable assets—not just hard assets like cars, houses and jewelry, but also investment in businesses. And the businesses with the biggest impact on my life going forward were nightclubs.

In the best of times, the nightclub business attracts investors with less than the most altruistic motivations. With my luck, I found myself in partnership in a number of clubs with a man who went by the alias “Eddie Nash.” Nash’s primary occupation was acting as kingpin of the drug trade for organized crime throughout Southern California, among other areas. In his overall enterprise, our nightclubs’ primary purpose was to launder money being thrown off by his drug business. We were scrubbing huge amounts of drug money. Nash’s success in the drug trade attracted the attention of and created envy in smaller, less disciplined drug traders, particularly a wild group known throughout the Southland as the Wonderland Gang because of the location of their operating headquarters on Wonderland Avenue in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles.

In one of the most sensational cases of the 1980s, Nash colleagues butchered four members of the Wonderland Gang in their hangout in retribution for their break-in at his mansion and theft of drug inventory, massive cash reserves, jewelry and other valuables. Nash gained knowledge of the perpetrators of the theft by torturing John Holmes, a pathetically drug-addicted porn star who frequented both Nash’s mansion and the Wonderland Gang hangout in his search for drugs. The federal government had leverage on me because of my shared ownership of the money-laundering clubs, so my testimony at trial about the torture of Holmes was regarded as very helpful in the conviction and sentencing of a major mob figure, and into the federal Witness Protection Program I went. But now I was penniless. Federal confiscation of my club ownerships was just the starting point. The government ended up with all my jewelry, real estate and other belongings of any value. But they gave me a new name, life history and social security number. Hello, Jess Marlow.

Witness Protection works by changing pretty much everything about you to hide you among the population. I was sent to rural Florida and became an employee of an evangelistic church with a significant outreach program. Only God could have arranged for me to meet Him under circumstances that I would truly respond to. It was here that I quickly became a born-again believer and developed a reputation for my “testimony.” In short order, the pastors learned that I could move an audience with my preaching and I became part of their itinerant preaching program. I was actually becoming something of a hot commodity in the television and radio evangelism scene, flying in private jets to speak at events held by respected preachers, including an appearance at a Billy Graham Crusade event. The Witness Protection marshals warned me, I will give them that. My service in sharing God’s Word was raising my profile throughout America, including prisons, and Eddie Nash was able to pierce my veil of protection.

I went to the door of the motel where I was staying in Jacksonville, Florida expecting a pizza. Instead I got five .38-caliber slugs—three in the abdomen (one striking my spinal column), one in the chest, and one in the head. The hit men left me for dead, and indeed I was technically dead for several minutes based on medical definitions. But I was rushed to University Hospital and revived, at least into a coma state. A coma that would last six months.

During my preaching career, my messages had particularly affected a young divorcee in Maine. She felt moved by the Lord to pray for me and visit me in the hospital. Due to the circumstances, my room was guarded and a number of similar-minded people were turned away by law enforcement. In one of those coincidences that make it hard to believe in coincidences, my soon-to-be benefactor found herself on a business trip to Florida and able to walk straight through the entire hospital and directly into my room without any contact whatsoever with any official personnel. And so we were reading Scripture, and praying, and eventually she offered me shelter in her home in Maine.

From 1991 to 2005, I lived in Maine with someone who had nothing but my best interests at heart. But my heart wandered continually, causing me to seek drugs and to leave her in Maine for more than just a few days at a time. For fourteen years, I always came back to Maine and to her and to the large group of dogs she had allowed me to bring into the house as pets. (To this day, I believe that, had I not met Liberace, a career with animals either as a vet or trainer would have been my best course.)

In any event, in 2005, I could no longer resist the temptation to return to something like the life I had had with Lee. The problem was there was no Liberace. I had to finance my own lifestyle, and all I knew from a practical standpoint was drugs. I threw myself headlong into the crystal meth scene. After three separate stints in Delano and Corcoran California state prisons, I now find myself on disability (the heritage of one of the .38-caliber slugs against the spine) with the added plague of the same type of anal cancer that recently took the life of Farrah Fawcett.

I hope to see the movie made based on
Behind the Candelabra
. Matt Damon plays me, and Michael Douglas is Lee.