Twenty-three years ago, on Feb. 4, 1987, Vladziu Valentino Liberace had his final curtain call. According to the original death certificate, signed by his personal physician, Dr. Ronald Daniels, the cause was cardiac arrest.
However, the county medical examiner ordered an autopsy, which concluded that America’s beloved Mr. Showmanship had died of cytomegalovirus pneumonia -- due to the AIDS virus. His estate’s executors filed a libel suit against the coroner’s office. They lost.
Combating rumors about the star’s declining health, Daniels had told the press that his patient was on a “watermelon diet” and suffered from emphysema and anemia. It was later revealed that, two years prior to his passing, Liberace had tested positive on an “anemia” test -- for HIV.
After the diagnosis, “Lee and I made a pact never to tell another soul about our AIDS,” his lover, Cary James, would confess. “His worst fear was that his fans would find out he was gay.”
Only a month before the diagnosis, another Liberace lover, Rock Hudson, died of the disease. The pianist was terrified that, should his condition be revealed, he would be subject to the same media circus. Moreover, a devout Catholic whose fondest memory was his meeting with Pope Pius XII, he feared excommunication.
On his deathbed, the star confided to another former lover, Scott Thorson, that he would take his secret with him “to the grave” because, “I don’t want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS.”
Thorson had filed a $113 million palimony lawsuit against him in 1982. “By trying to conceal his AIDS rather than going public as Rock Hudson had done, I felt Lee had set the entire gay movement back a decade,“ his stage assistant later wrote in his memoir "Behind the Candelabra."
Others echoed the sentiment.
Congressman Henry Waxman, on "Good Morning America," expressed his regret that the star had concealed his condition, unlike Hudson, whose confession he asserted “had been a great benefit to educating the public.”
The feature article for that week’s U.S. News and World Report was: “AIDS: How Wide the Cover-up?”
Meanwhile, Ted Koppel weighed in with his "Nightline" discussion: “Why Liberace did not reveal his gay lifestyle.”
“In a homophobic society … being secretly gay while burdened with public celebrity can be sheer hell,” Thorson went on to write. “Poor Lee. He’d spent a lifetime denying his own homosexuality in public, fighting the papers, the tabloids.”
In 1956, the showman had sued the U.K.’s Daily Mirror for depicting him as “a scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." Soon afterward, he took on Confidential for its headline "Why Liberace's Theme Song Should Be 'Mad About the Boy!'"
The star won both libel suits, inspiring his famous quip: “I laughed all the way to the bank!”
Liberace had a brief affair with Rock Hudson in 1952 when the latter filmed "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" Later when Confidential threatened to out the heartthrob actor, he married his agent’s secretary.
