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

relationship with his brothers and sister seemed to be aggravated by his growing success.
    Two years after Pearl Harbor Lee had achieved modest renown as an entr’acte performer. It was a living. According to him, he was eating, but his soul was starving. He craved recognition. In a continuing effort at self-promotion Lee expanded his practice of advertising his talents via the mail. It was eventually to pay off. Lee loved to tell people just how that happened. One night in 1943, after performing at the Mont Royal Hotel in Montreal, he scribbled out a new group of cards bearing the plaintive query, “Have you ever heard of Liberace?” Few of the recipients recognized his name and most of them failed to respond to Lee’s query. But one man, the entertainment director of Howard Hughes’s Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, took the trouble to call Lee. He offered a six-week contract, which Lee accepted at once.
    Lee recalled his shock on arrival in Las Vegas a few weeks later. Back then the city looked more like a cow town than the entertainment mecca it would become. He stared at the cactus-studded landscape, thinking he’d made the mistake of his life, that six weeks in Vegas would be the equivalent of six weeks on the moon. He was feeling thoroughly disgruntled and put upon when the cab he’d taken from the train station delivered him to Howard Hughes’s hotel. Lee looked up at the marquee, saw Sophie Tucker’s name, and broke into a toothy grin. Tucker was a big star, the kind who could pick and choose her bookings. If Vegas was good enough for Sophie Tucker, he knew it would be good enough for him.
    Despite his initial misgivings, Lee was in the right place at the right time, geographically and musically. Vegas, fueled by the public’s passion for gambling, was slated for unprecedented expansion. And classical music, thanks to films that romanticized the lives of Chopin, Liszt, and Grieg, was becoming part of the popular idiom. Couples were dancing and making love to tunes like “Til the End of Time,” a beautiful melody lifted from the music of Chopin. Lee decided to put a candelabra on his concert grand, an idea he borrowed from that Chopin film. He added a few easily recognized etudes to his act and rode the wave of popularity Hollywood had unwittingly created for someone just like him. His absolute genius as an entertainer took care of the rest.
    Lee blossomed in Las Vegas. He negotiated a $750-a-week salary and, when his booking was extended beyond the initial six weeks, he demanded and got $1,500 a week. Over the years, he would play a total of twenty-four different dates at the Last Frontier and his salary would be increased each time. Vegas loved Lee and he loved it back. The wide-open, anything-goes atmosphere of the gambling halls suited his style perfectly. It also suited the needs of a less desirable element of society.
    In 1946 a new hotel appeared on the strip. The Flamingo had been financed by Mafia money, and its owners were Al Capone and Meyer Lansky. Their lieutenant and on-site manager was none other than the infamous Bugsy Siegel. All three men were Liberace fans. According to Lee, Lansky and Capone ordered Siegel to get Lee to sign a contract with the Flamingo.
    Siegel put in a call to Lee, who was working nearby in Los Angeles, and asked him to come to a meeting in Vegas. He told Lee he was prepared to make an offer Lee couldn’t refuse. But Liberace didn’t want to have any dealings with the Mafia because, as he later said, “Once you’re in with those boys—you never get out.”
    However, common sense dictated his next action. He agreed to meet with Siegel at the Flamingo. Lee was in a no-win situation. If he agreed to perform at the Flamingo, he’d be delivering himself into Mafia hands. If he refused, he suspected he might wake up one morning wearing cement overshoes. So Lee did what he always did when faced with a difficult choice. He stalled for time by telling Siegel