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

admitted the truth, even to avoid the draft.
    The war proved to be a lucky break. It thinned the ranks of Lee’s competition. By 1942 the Music Corporation of America, one of the country’s leading talent agencies, had lost many of its performers to the war effort. Lee was pleased and surprised when Mae Johnson, an MCA agent, contacted him and signed him to a contract. Thinking all his dreams were about to come true, Lee said he went out and celebrated with a bottle of champagne he could ill afford.
    He fully expected to be playing in all the best places within the year. But he soon discovered that his name appeared at the bottom of MCA’s booking list. Despite Mae Johnson’s personal faith in him, celebrity and security seemed perpetually out of reach. He was on the road week after week, playing the small towns, staying in grimy third-rate hotels, eating in greasy-spoon restaurants. When he played dates in or near New York, Lee made extra money by working as a rehearsal pianist. Those experiences in cold, drafty halls gave him a healthy respect for the dancers and singers, the “gypsies” of Broadway. As he played he watched, judging the individual performers, developing an eye for talent that would serve him well in the years to come when he would choose acts for his own shows.
    Lee’s work in those rehearsal halls also contributed to his knowledge of the entertainment industry’s extensive gay community. Many of the dancers and singers he met were homosexual. He said that his earlier loneliness evaporated as he found new friends, new lovers. With a regular income and an assured social life, he devoted himself to the pursuit of fame and fortune.
    Lee hated his first name. “Maybe Walter sounded all right with Pidgeon,” he told me, “but it sounded awful with Liberace.” Following the example of his idol Paderewski, Lee decided to be booked under a single name. In his opinion, “Liberace” sounded important, unique, fabulous!
    But abbreviating his name didn’t make any difference: MCA still didn’t give him the big push he’d hoped for. Although he worked regularly, he was still appearing in the dingier clubs and hotels, playing to an almost exclusively working-class clientele. He didn’t realize it then, but they would always dominate the ranks of his fans. However, in those days, Lee’s dreams were more grandiose. When, oh when, he wondered, would he finally get his big break?
    Throughout the war years, Lee told me, the straight world was even more hostile to gays than it had been during the depression. Every man out of uniform was suspected of being unpatriotic, a draft dodger, a coward, or a queer. To protect himself and his reputation Lee went deeper into the closet, making sure only his closest associates knew his secret. Onstage, he developed a flirtatious patter with the mature women in his audiences. All he had to do was tease them gently, treat them like ladies, and, to his surprise and delight, they responded warmly. Lee discovered that he had a gift for pleasing older women and he began to play to them exclusively. His act was expanding, becoming a combination of patter and piano.
    During this period Lee saw very little of his family. He said he returned for visits only when his mother, newly widowed after a brief marriage to Alexander Casadonte, threatened to join him in New York. By the end of the war the Liberace homestead was relatively empty. George and Angie had married, to the first of their multiple spouses. But Rudy still lived at home and he and Lee shared a bed on Lee’s rare visits. It was an awkward situation which Lee later said he preferred to avoid. However, his brother Rudy would tell a very different story in the years to come, complaining that Lee had made sexual advances when the two of them shared a bed. Whatever the truth may be, Lee felt uncomfortable at home, distanced from his family by new experiences and new friends. The jealousy that had always been a part of his