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

reveal the truth. Lee confessed to me that he began dating women to suppress the growing rumors about his own sexuality. If anyone dared to question his masculinity he needed to be able to flaunt pictures of his latest girlfriend. He had no trouble getting all the dates he wanted and he gloried in escorting well-known entertainers to parties, getting his picture taken with Susan Hayward, Gale Storm, Rosemary Clooney, Mae West, and Judy Garland. He later boasted of having close relationships with many of these women, but Mae West was the only one of his so-called lady friends I actually met. As they say in Texas, Mae was a hoot! She and Lee were an unpredictable twosome who enjoyed trying to outdo each other’s outrageousness. Mae was one of the few people in the world who had the courage to speak up to Lee—and he loved her for it.
    The girl he almost married didn’t compare to Mae when it came to nerve. JoAnn Del Rio, a Las Vegas dancer, had good looks and a sweet personality. Undoubtedly the entire Liberace family heaved a sigh of relief as they watched her relationship with Lee progress. For a while, it must have seemed as if Lee would finally settle down to a “normal” life and have a family. Lee and JoAnn became engaged in 1953 and even set a date for a wedding—a year away. From all reports, Lee liked JoAnn a lot, a first for him when it came to women. He courted her with gifts of flowers and perfume, gifts that foreshadowed the truly extravagant presents he would later give his male lovers.
    When it came to JoAnn, the problem was not that he didn’t like her; it was that he still loved men. After Lee’s death, JoAnn’s father was reported to have claimed responsibility for ending the engagement because he knew Lee was gay. But Lee told me he never planned to walk down the aisle, with JoAnn or anyone else. His engagement served to squelch the rumors about his sexuality—period!
    Many homosexual men enjoy relationships with women. There are a few who even come to love them, as friends or as temporary sexual partners. Not Lee! He had to forcibly control his dislike and distrust of most of the women he dated. He complained that all of them were too demanding, an opinion of females that he’d formed in childhood. When I asked if he’d ever had sexual relations with a woman he told me he’d had a couple of experiences, but complained that the way women smelled revolted him. While dating JoAnn publicly, he confessed that he continued to have secret dates with young men. By the end of 1955, JoAnn Del Rio was just a footnote to Liberace’s history.
    A man in Lee’s position—famous, wealthy, a star—never lacks for companionship. When he felt lonely he had only to ask one of the gay members of his staff to get him a companion and one would soon be delivered to his doorstep. The older Lee got, the more younger men appealed to him. In that regard, he was a Dracula who never wearied of the taste and touch of youth. By his fifties he preferred dating boys in their teens.
    There have been rumors that Lee had an affair with Rock Hudson early in their careers. But Rock wasn’t any more Lee’s type than Lee was Rock’s. The supposed affair never happened. However, the books I’ve read about Hudson’s life reveal startling parallels to Lee’s. Both men had been abandoned by their fathers and dominated by their mothers. As adults the two of them devoted a great deal of time and energy to creating a fictional personal history for public consumption. Neither man could deal with anything distasteful—an argument, the illness of a parent, getting rid of a lover—and both used others to do their dirty work.
    Most important, they both had giant egos; they were stars and the rest of the world (friends, lovers, family) damn well better not forget it. That alone would have negated any possibility of those two having a relationship. Men like that cannot tolerate equals. Had Lee and Rock actually met, I think they would