Spotlight

THE SHOWMAN COMETH

As Gordon "Greed is good" Gekko in Wall Street, Michael Douglas personified and immortalized money on the make. Now, improbably, inspiringly cast as the capering prince of the piano Liberace—I—in the (Scorning HBO Original film Behind thejC&ftdffpbra (produced by the legendary Jerry Weintraub and directed by Steven Soderbergh, hot off the beefcake sizzle of Magic Mike), Douglas plays money dolled up for an eternal night on the town. Like Elvis Presley, another poor boy and social outcast who was glory-bound (each had a twin who died at birth!), Wladziu Valentino Liberace, born in 1919, rocketed through the gray flannel of the 50s in a riot of color, pomade, and mascara. Elvis's gold lame suit and Liberace's sequined jackets could be spotted from outer space—"I'm glad you likfe it," he would say after modeling his latest outfit onstage. "You paid for it"—and exploded out of the postwar closet of Puritan repression. Only, in Liberace's case the closet held more than his wardrobe. Lee (as his friends called him) was a camping, vamping gay man who never "came out," inhabiting pop culture's orif^hal glass closet. As Dave Hickey writes in his essay "A Rhinestone As Big as the Ritz," "Liberace's closet was as democratically invisible as the emperor's new clothes... . Everybody 'got it.' But nobody said it." Until the shattering came. In 1982, Liberace's former livein chauffeur, bodyguard, secretary, and boy toy, Scott Thorson (portrayed by Matt Damon under a sandy thatch of 70s hair), sued for "palimony" and later wrote the memoir on which this movie is based. Liberace would die of AIDS in 1987, but his extravagant legacy lives on through Elton John, Lady Gaga, and the diamond skull of Damien Hirst.

JAMES WOLCOTT