Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace by Scott Thorson, Alex Thorleifson Read Free Book Online Page A

white tails on stage. No one could have anticipated the enormous response to that simple decision.
    Black entertainers, including the great Cab Calloway, were already appearing in white tails. But Lee was the first white musician to walk out on a concert stage in a getup like that. Television had given him popularity. The Bowl appearance gave him notoriety. Afterward everyone had something to say about Liberace. The critics used so many words to comment on Lee’s clothes that they barely had column space to critique his performance. The resulting furor gave Lee millions of dollars of free publicity. If white tails were worthy of headlines, Lee wondered what would happen if he wore something really flashy. They say clothes make the man. In Lee’s case, clothes helped make the performer.
    In the years to come, he would often complain that the clothes had become an insatiable monster, consuming a lot of money and creative energy. But Lee had no idea that he would be creating a runaway show-biz Frankenstein in 1955, when he opened the new Riviera Hotel. His salary would be $50,000 a week, the highest fee ever paid to an entertainer; and, for the first time, his contract specified that he had to top any outfit he’d worn in the past. From then on, all his contracts would contain a similar clause. No problem, thought Lee. He’d been wearing white tuxedos or romantic, Edwardian velvet jackets for a few years. It shouldn’t be hard to come up with something a little more spectacular. How, he wondered, would audiences respond to gold lamé, furs, and jewels? Lee was about to find out.

5
    When Lee opened the Riviera in the mid-fifties his $50,000 weekly paycheck made him the world’s highest paid nightclub performer. His glittering gold lamé tuxedo made him the most talked about. The reaction from the audience was instantaneous and powerful. Some people were offended by the way Lee had dressed, some were amused, some stunned; but no one was indifferent. His fans rewarded his audacity with a thundering round of applause. His detractors stayed and watched the act, mesmerized by the opportunity to dislike, ridicule, and feel superior to the strutting peacock onstage. For some, Lee’s appeal lay in the fact that they loved to hate him. But most of Lee’s fans, those little ladies from the small towns, adored him for daring to be different.
    Today, when rock stars glitter brighter than the Milky Way, it’s hard to realize just what an innovator Lee was three decades ago. When they burst on to the scene, the Beatles, who were more daring than most other entertainers, did their act wearing sedate little suits, white shirts and ties, and Dutch-boy haircuts. No one—at least, no man —had ever done an act dressed the way Lee dressed. His show required several costume changes, and the costumes grew progressively more outrageous. By the end of that opening night he’d started a revolution that would culminate, decades later, in the incredible flash and glitz of a Michael Jackson or a Prince.
    Although Lee was blissfully unaware of it that night, for the rest of his career his costumes would be as important, or more important than the man who wore them. Lee, who so feared having his homosexuality discovered, had unwittingly placed himself in a position where he would appear onstage dressed like a queen, night after night and year after year. Sometimes, after he made his stage entrance, he’d actually hear someone in the audience hiss, “Oh, my God! Look at that fag .” Those were dreadful moments. Lee’s popularity, his success, seemed to depend on his wild clothes, but the clothes themselves could get him in serious trouble. They gave birth to rumors, gossip, and innuendo.
    The fifties, like the decades leading up to them, were an intensely homophobic period. Muscle cars and macho men were the order of the day. Although Lee knew that many of Hollywood’s most famous and desirable men were gay or bisexual, none of them dared