In Dave Hickey’s 1992 essay “A Rhinestone As Big As the Ritz,” the critic made a case for the neglected legacy of Wladziu (Lee) Liberace, superstar pianist and sometime cultural punching bag. Liberace’s joyful opulence, his disciplined showmanship, made him “a genuine rhinestone, a heart without malice,” Hickey argued. By spinning his flamboyant personality into fame, he managed to “Americanize the closet, democratize it, fit it out with transparent walls, take it up on stage and demand our complicity in his ‘open secret.’ ”
Steven Soderbergh’s fabulous bio-pic, “Behind the Candelabra,” on HBO, is a standing ovation for that argument, painting a nervy, empathetic portrait of a life style (a word that actually fits the bill here) that might easily be seen as macabre. “Candelabra” hardly skimps on the grotesqueries—there’s a scene in which a plastic surgeon rotates Liberace’s ear to a soundtrack of the pianist’s own ragtime music—but it’s rooted in a love story, not only between Liberace and his young partner, Scott Thorson (on whose memoir the film is based), but between the creators and the period they portray: Hollywood, post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS, a few years before any major star was “out.” It’s a culture teetering on extinction, first because “the gay plague” soon eroded the ability of figures like Rock Hudson to keep their sexuality private, and then because of what followed: the triumph of a social movement predicated on proud visibility. Yet there’s no room here for Boys-in-the-Band self-loathing: as the man who invented the convention of winking into the camera, Soderbergh’s Liberace is confident that, in some more significant sense, he’s got nothing to hide. His was a closet that had its own pleasures, particularly since he had the resources to decorate it to his specifications.
“I call this ‘palatial kitsch,’ ” Liberace declares as he shows off his home to Scott, a blond hunk played with dopey sweetness by Matt Damon. “Don’t you just love that?” Liberace sweeps through the mansion in a translucent ankle-length lounging robe with a Nehru collar, and he clearly gets a kick out of his stardom and everything he owns and controls—a confidence that is narcotic to Scott, who grew up in a series of foster homes. In many ways, theirs was a typical Hollywood marriage: a powerful star spots a young blonde, drapes her in jewelry, foots the bill for plastic surgery to suit his fetishes, and makes promises of security that ping all her daddy issues. To further amplify the May-December vibe, he’s her sugar daddy, the one who calls her Baby. She’s sweet on animals, and dabbles in music, but mostly she’s on call 24/7, at once his accessory and his pet. At first, they have a blast—cuddling, sipping champagne in a hot tub with solid-gold fixtures. But in the long run they have sexual issues: he wants it, she doesn’t. (She was never in it for his body, after all.) She gets hooked on diet pills. He proposes an open relationship. She hocks her jewelry. He calls her a gold-digger. The star finds himself a new blonde—this one colder-eyed—and it all blows up in court.
The difference, of course, was that, because they were two men, Liberace never called Scott his husband. He was his “chauffeur,” right through the humiliating tabloid headlines that mocked Scott’s post-breakup lawsuit as a case of “palimony”—and Liberace never came out. (When he won a lawsuit against a British paper for a review that implied he was gay, he adopted a catchphrase: “I cried all the way to the bank.”) One scene features an insane charade of a deposition, during which Liberace describes his lavish gifts as mere perks for an assistant. In happier days, he’d offered to adopt Scott, an idea that everyone mocked. (“Really, you can adopt someone you’re fucking? That’s a great law,” Scott’s drug dealer says.) But it had a poignant legal logic: without marriage, fatherhood could make their love public and official. “I want to be everything to you, Scott,” Liberace tells him, as the two snuggle in bed. “I want to be father, brother, lover, best friend. Everything. You know I love you. . . . Maybe all those years, all those foster homes, maybe I’m your real family.” Scott practically leaps into his arms.
There’s been a long, headache-inducing debate about the question of straight male actors “playing gay”—whether it’ll ruin careers, whether audiences will find the actor hot, and on and on. It’s a nonsense issue that social progress has begun to render irrelevant, and Michael Douglas’s spectacular performance as Liberace demonstrates a rarely discussed benefit. Freed from his trademark macho sulk, Douglas gains all sorts of unexpected charisma—he’s genuinely funny and surprisingly sexy, even with his toupee off, looking like an unshelled tortoise. His eyes lit with amused intelligence, Douglas’s Liberace is your classic “bossy bottom,” a gleeful narcissist who treats his hangers-on as a mirror (sometimes literally: he pressures Scott to get plastic surgery to look like a younger version of him). And yet the man’s a charmer. He’s playful, even when he’s selling the world a line. In bed, the two have loving, affectionate exchanges, candid about their histories. Liberace jokes with Scott about the rumors—ones he encourages, of course—that he’s engaged to the Olympic champion Sonja Henie. “As if I would marry an ice skater,” he scoffs. “Please. I mean, those thighs!”
The movie is frank, and often very funny, about Liberace’s sexual appetites, which he pursued without seeing any contradiction between them and his devout Catholicism. He has a penis implant, likes porn, and late in their relationship he pressures Scott to take risks that seem crazy for a closeted star, like sneaking into a sex store in ankle-length matching furs. When the camera captures Liberace peeking over a booth with a grin, the movie doesn’t pathologize his good time—from one perspective, he’s a sex addict; from another, a madcap adventurer. During an argument about what Scott will and won’t do in bed, Liberace does a hilariously profane imitation of the couple as a gay Ricky and Lucy. “Why am I the Lucy?” Scott complains. “Because I’m the bandleader,” Liberace explains, with impeccable logic. “With the night-club act.”
Damon is excellent as Scott, a vulnerable Rocky Horror, right down to the gold lamé skivvies. And I have no idea what Rob Lowe did to his pretty punim to turn himself into the sick Dr. Startz, an insidious plastic surgeon and pill-pusher, but he steals every scene he’s in. (One of the film’s best moments is a shot of his eyes blinking drunkenly, from above his surgical mask, as he slices into Scott’s face.) Cheyenne Jackson has a tiny, delicious turn as Scott’s bitter predecessor; the wonderful Scott Bakula lounges around in tight jeans and a mustache the size of a small dog. Soderbergh’s entire production is impeccable, from the makeup—which traces Liberace’s face-lift and illness as well as Scott’s transformation from young buck to Frankenstein’s-monster-with-a-chin-dimple—to the glittering cinematography, including re-creations of Liberace’s stage act. There are scenes, particularly during the breakup, that will be catnip for drag queens, but Soderbergh’s overriding perspective is neither arch nor cruel. The camerawork, peering from doorways down empty, opulent halls, captures the paradox of palatial kitsch, its blend of liberation and claustrophobia. For all that aesthetic razzle-dazzle, “Candelabra” has an underlying restraint. When Liberace’s much catered-to mother dies, Scott asks him how he feels. “I’m free,” Liberace snaps, then strides away—a moment that is undersold, not underlined.
Bret Easton Ellis recently published a screed in Out, a lament against the constrictions of what he calls “the Gay Man as Magical Elf”: the out celebrity who is so wholesome, so spick-and-span, that he’s a credit to his sexuality. Hollywood has an even stronger insistence on commercial heroism, to the point that Soderbergh couldn’t get funding to make this project at a movie studio; only cable television offered him the freedom to be fully adult. “Behind the Candelabra” succeeds precisely because it doesn’t care much about health or what constitutes a good role model—it shows respect for a complicated marriage simply by making it real. ♦
