Scott Thorson, Liberace’s most public lover, died from cancer and heart disease on August 16. He was 65. Thorson was 18 in 1977 when he met Liberace, and was hired to be his onstage chauffeur and offstage companion (Liberace paid for plastic surgery to make Thorson look like him; he wound up looking like a $5 Liberace Halloween mask). They split in 1982. Thorson filed a $113 million palimony suit, which was settled in 1986 for $75,000, three cars, and three dogs. Thorson’s post-Liberace life was a downhill slide: he was tangentially involved in the 1981 Wonderland drug murders; he was in and out of jail (drugs, credit-card fraud). In 2013 Thorson published Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, which became a TV movie starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. Thorson said in 2021 of his relationship with Liberace, “here’s a 17-year-old kid that came from Wisconsin, in and out of foster homes, dirt poor, and all of a sudden I’m taken into the arms of Liberace—all that fame, all that money, and he’s the first person that ever paid attention to me. Once he wanted my face changed, he wanted me thinner. He had the doctor prescribe me pharmaceutical cocaine, Quaaludes, and Demerol, and got me hooked. He started all this, and then, as he would say, ‘I created a monster’ and then he wanted to throw me out on the street.”
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