Top Secret magazine / April 1959
Top Secret Bombshell!
The Liberation Of Liberace's Libido
Here's how the Candelabra Kid was weaned from his Mom - at the tender age of 39
By Mike Gotram
Is Liberace - whose exaggerated devotion to his mother become an international joke - finally breaking loose from her apron strings?
That's what there asking in Hollywood today, on the heels of reports that the piano player's beloved "Mom" locked him out of his own expensive mansion in Sherman Oaks during one of the family squabbles.
There are strange doings in the Liberace family these days, and even the protective screen of bodyguards and forbidding fences can't conceal the facts.
The pianist's mother, Mrs. Francis Liberace, shows traces of the bitterness behind the family differences when she says her famous son "is too trusting." The trouble, she says cryptically, can be blamed on the fact that Liberace ""doesn't know who his true friends are."
What she means, TOP SECRET can now reveal, is that Liberace has been spending more and more time with new friends - friends who have been urging him to escape the overwhelming influence of his mother.
And Liberace, who's been nursing a wounded ego ever since the newspapers called him, as he put it, "an unmanly man" two years ago, has been listening to the advice of those friends.
He rarely spends time in his own home with his mother, as even she admits. "Lee lives in Palm Springs most of the time," she says unhappily, ""surrounded by a gang of hillbillies and freeloaders" - a jealous, venomous reference to those who are helping Liberace, at the age of 39, to wean himself from his dependence on "Mom."
Mrs. Liberace, as you might expect, denies she's ever actually locked Lee out of the house - and he denies it, too. But she can't deny that a split has taken place in the family.
Liberace used to mention her constantly during his shows and even had her appear on them from time to time. However, this practice has been discontinued, she admits.
In fact, she concedes, she doesn't even watch his current network television program.
She insists that the reason for all this is the friction between Lee and his brother George, who used to conduct the orchestra for Liberace''s show (and play the violin) until he decided, a year or two ago, that he was unwilling to go on playing second fiddle.
"I love both my boys," Mrs. Liberace says. "They have both been wonderful to me. But I cannot watch either until they are back together again."
That's what Mrs. Liberace says for publication. But the real fly in the ointment, TOP SECRET has discovered, is Liberace's blatant attempt, with his friends encouragement, to break loose from his mother complex.
"My heart belongs to Mom," he used to say, but his friends have managed to open his eyes to the realization that a son's love must change with maturity if he's to develop as a whole person.
Liberace himself has noted publicity that he's engaged to be married three times but, despite the wide publicity, each engagement has finally died. "I guess I'm looking for a girl like Mom,"" he once said, "and one Mom would have to approve of."
But he apparently has come to understand lately that she couldn't be expected to approve of any girl who might disturb his unusually close relationship with his mother. It would be more than could be expected of any woman.
Consider what Liberace's success has meant to her. When he was still an infant, his parents separated, and he and George were brought up by their mother. "We had it tough in those days," she recalls. She had a grim struggle to rear her boys the way she thought was right, but it was a struggle she waged gladly for their sakes.
"I'll never forget what Mom did," said Liberace after he reach the top. "That's why everything is for her."
"There was no Poppa to keep us so I ran a grocery store to keep myself and the children,"" she says. "This went on for twenty-one years, though I guess that if it hadn't been for the way the kids helped in the store during the few hours they got away from their studies, I couldn't have made it at all."
LONDON FLOORS LEE
Without a husband to love, Mrs. Liberace lavished all her affections on the children. Lee, as she calls him, had to be a substitute for everything that frustrated women missed in her life. And he responded to that adoration from his mother so naturally that it was inevitable, in the end, that his greatest appeal on television should be to the millions of middle-aged women who saw him as a kind of combination son and lover.
Even Mrs. Liberace, before the family split developed, used to acknowledge the emotional problem.
"'She mothers him too much,' I've heard whispered," she once told a friend. "If mothering a boy is looking after him when he's been working hard, and seeing that he gets rest and quiet, then sure I mother him."
But it was more than that. Liberace's income had jumped to six figures a year, and "Mom" still insisted on cooking for him, ironing his shirts, and so on. Hers was an overwhelming presence. One London newspaper was so fascinated by her attitude that they ran a composite photo - half Liberace, half his mother and it looked as though it were one face, half of which had been transfigured slightly by a makeup man.
It was London that set in motion the Change of circumstances in the Liberace family. Liberace had gone to England expecting to be welcomed with open arms, but the London newspapers are a lot tougher than the American counterparts.
One paper described him as "a plump piano player who talks sibilantly through his teeth and has a come-hither smile as comforting as a neon light over an undertaker's establishment."
But the most comic comment came from a columnist who called Liberace a "deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing heap of mother-love" and said that Liberace "reeks with emetic language that can only make grown men long for a quiet corner, an aspidistra, a handkerchief, and the old heave-ho."
On his way to England, Liberace had said, "I want to find out if what they say is true -- that England is a man's country, unlike America, where the women rule." He found out. In the U.S., most men had muttered about him, but their voices were drowned out by the shrieks of hysterical, middle-aged women. In England, Liberace got the truth -- like a cold, wet cloth slapped across the face.
His beloved"Mom," he said, had to be put to bed under a doctor's care because of the English criticism. Liberace himself filed suit against the writers. But he kept thinking about what they had written.
Maybe that's why nothing has been heard about those lawsuits.