Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace Read Online Free PDF Page A

have patented it.
    In his early twenties, buoyed by local success, Lee decided to leave home. His goal: the bright lights of New York. He felt sure that fame and fortune waited for him on the East Coast.

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    In the early 1940s big bands and swing dominated the music scene. Harry James, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, or the Dorseys, and their respective orchestras, could fill a supper club or dance hall for weeks on end. Stand-up comics like George Jessel, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, and Edgar Bergen dominated the live entertainment scene, playing all the best clubs when they weren’t working in radio or in the movies. Elegant night spots dotted the Manhattan scene, including the ultra-exclusive 21 Club, El Morocco, Sardi’s, and the Stork Club. All the great New York hotels, from the Waldorf to the Pierre, had plush rooms where the nation’s greatest performers appeared regularly. The entertainment world bustled with well-known stars whose activities filled the pages of Variety . Lee remembered that his arrival in New York, predictably, failed to stir a single ripple of enthusiasm in that world.
    At home in Milwaukee he’d been the proverbial big fish in a little pond. In New York the people he contacted about potential bookings said, “Liberace who?” His fame hadn’t extended beyond the borders of Wisconsin. Agents and managers had never heard of him, and they failed to be impressed by the long string of credits he’d acquired on the Wisconsin circuit. Lee said he faced the eternal show-business dilemma: he couldn’t get an agent until he played local bookings, and he couldn’t get local bookings until he had an agent.
    For a while he actually went hungry. He unhappily recalled going to Horn and Hardart, a cafeteria chain, and eating tomato soup that he made, gratis, from packets of ketchup and cups of water. After a couple months of near starvation he had two choices. He could go home and listen to his mother say “I told you so,” or he could continue struggling with the loneliness, poverty, and hunger that the East Coast offered.
    It took guts to stay on—but stay on he did, Lee told me proudly. He finally landed a job in West Orange, New Jersey. It was on the wrong side of the Hudson but he had steady work for six months. Every night after coming back from New Jersey, he mailed out résumés inviting and ultimately begging agents to come hear his music. When he wasn’t booked at clubs he supported himself by playing at private parties in the greater New York area. Lee had uncomfortably vivid memories of those parties: the luxurious homes and the self-assurance of the people who lived in them. He’d take a bus or commuter train to his destination and be admitted through the servants’ entrance. The handsome tip he received at the end of the evening merely fueled Lee’s resentment.
    “Most of those people treated me like a waiter or a cab-driver,” he later complained, still smarting from injured pride. Lee dreamed of the day when he’d be rich and able to live in a mansion in a ritzy neighborhood. Ironically, years later, when he had a seven-figure yearly income, Lee found that he was uncomfortable in places like Bel Air and Rancho Mirage. His enormous homes were located in more humble areas.
    A few families, such as the ultra-rich Gettys, treated Lee well, sending him home in their limousine rather than obliging him to rely on late-night transportation. But people like the Gettys were the exception. From what Lee said, his frustration and ambition played leapfrog as he schemed and slaved to create the career and the life of his dreams.
    Lee was playing a club on the Jersey side of the Hudson River when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and America went to war. A cyst on his spine would make him ineligible for service. Had his homosexuality been known it would have excluded him from the draft too, but Lee was so paranoid about concealing his sexual identity by then that I doubt he would have