Behind the Candelabra – the Liberace biopic as sordid as its subject
“We, as gay people, we get to choose our family,” said RuPaul Charles in a frequently cited line from a 2013 episode of Drag Race. On a different channel that year, HBO aired Steven Soderbergh’s TV movie Behind the Candelabra, a film adaptation of Scott Thorson’s memoir of the same name. Published in 1988, a year after Liberace’s death, the memoir was a haunting account of Thorson’s relationship with the spangled, mononymous pianist – an unusual chosen family just begging to be depicted on screen.
Brought to life by an extravagantly eyelinered Matt Damon, Thorson was Liberace’s live-in lover turned chauffeur. They dated for five pyrotechnic years before Thorson’s so-called “employment” was terminated by his celebrity boyfriend.
What really took place behind the candelabra? With his account Thorson invited the public on to the stage and into the bedroom of one of the most adored closeted homosexuals of the 20th century.
The film introduces Thorson – who died at 65 last August – as a “lost babe in the woods”. When he meets Liberace (a flashy, effete Michael Douglas), he’s an impressionable 18-year-old who has spent his childhood in orphanages and foster homes, and his burgeoning adulthood pretending to be bisexual. “It’s funny that this crowd would like something this gay,” says Thorson, witnessing the magic of Liberace for the very first time.
But the audiences of Liberace’s time were not equipped with today’s gaydar. In fact, Liberace litigiously fought to ensure that they remained unaware of his private life even as he was considered a sex symbol of his time. In the film, we are asked to suspend our disbelief as Douglas’s head is digitally composited on to the body of actual piano player Philip Fortenberry. The illusion becomes a perfect inversion of Liberace’s performance: a straight actor playing a gay man playing straight. According to Liberace: people only see what they want to see.
As the story goes, Thorson and Liberace go on to have a great love affair where everything is fabulous and too much is never enough. Before long, Thorson finds himself in the lap of luxury, parading his hot bod around the many rooms of Liberace’s kitschy Las Vegas mansion in his rhinestone bathers.
But the candelabra begins to dim when Liberace proposes adoption to his boy toy during pillow talk: “I want to be everything to you, Scott. I want to be father, brother, lover, best friend, everything.” And so the two choose to start a family the only way they can: with Liberace the adoptive parent of his orphaned boyfriend Scott, 40 years his junior.
“I think I’d be a good daddy,” Liberace remarks unironically. Is it perverse to desire parenthood so desperately? To add insult to injury, Liberace strips Thorson of the last vestiges of his individuality: his face. After a consultation with a plastic surgeon (a wonderfully stiff Rob Lowe), Liberace casually requests that his adoptive son undergo a transformation to look just like his father.
With this, Behind the Candelabra quickly evolves into a gothic horror story rivalling Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde. Liberace’s obsession with youth bleeds into his obsession with the self in a grotesque portrait of imitation and flattery.
It is a carnivalesque, psychosexual feast. Liberace’s strange ventriloquy act – with Thorson his puppet – only further intensifies the enigma of his stagecraft and his life. Most of all, the film lives up to its subject in its pure spectacle, brimming with stage excess in its sordid tale about the showman who loved to give people a good time.
The film suggests that Liberace was the first person to look directly at the camera on TV. His stardom coincided with the advent of television; from the 50s to the 70s, he was the highest paid entertainer in the world. It’s fitting, then, that Behind the Candelabra was produced for the small screen. Rest in peace Liberace; you would’ve loved SBS On Demand.
Behind the Candelabra is available to stream on SBS On Demand in Australia, Sundance Now in the UK, and Max in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
