Son of Liberace

Rating: Null/10 (1 June 2013)

The film "Behind the Candelabra" covers the last ten years in the life of the great piano playing Valentino Liberace, Michael Douglas, or known as just plain Lee to his friends who at the time was pushing 60 and looking for some new companionship in his life. Liberace found it with 18 year old veterinarian assailant Scott Thorson played by an almost unrecognizable with his hair bleached blond and puffed up cheeks, "like Marlon Brando in The Godfather", Matt Damon. It was in fact Scott curing Liberace's pet dog "Baby Boy" that really turned him on to Scott who was flattered by the, what he was known at the time and all throughout his adult life, Worlds Greatest Entertainer's personal attention.
Rplacing Lee's two top houseboys Billy Leatherwood and Carlucci, Cheyenne Jackson & Bruce Ramsey, Scott now became his bosses Liberace or Leiber-Archie as his step mom Rose Carracappa, Jane Morris, called him main man in the Liberace household. Things were going great for a while for both Scott and Lee until Liberace like some crazed 1930's and 1940's movie mad scientist decide to make Scott, through cosmetic surgery, into his own image. Liberace hires quack doctor Jack Stantz, Rob Lowe, to work on the very reluctant Scott who was very satisfied with his already God-given good looks to make him look more like himself. The crazy Doc Stantz in fact got Scott addicted on drugs, legal & illegal, that tuned him almost overnight into a street corner drug addict.
Liberace who refused to take responsibility in what he turned his #1 houseboy Scott Thorson into soon got tied of him and the hot and heavy, in and out of bed, relationship between the two started to cool of. After a five year live-in relationship Scott now on the brink of becoming homeless sued his former boss and lover Liberace for 113 million dollars, just a drop in the bucket in Liberace far flung assets, in a ground breaking palimony suite. As things sadly turned out for Scott he ended up getting a meager $95,000.00 together with two beat up cars and two of Liberace's pet dogs in an out of court settlement instead.
It's later when Liberace came down with the deadly AIDS virus that the two former lovers got together for the last time and kissed and made up with Scott promising the dying Liberace that he'll keep his some five year relationship with him secret and out of the public eye. From what I got from all this is that either Liberace was too ill or Scott too hooked on drugs to realize that if the two came to some financial understanding, like having taken care of Scott's money needs, that book written about Liberace's secret lifestyle "Behind the Candelabra" by an almost destitute money strapped and drug addicted Scott Thorton, which the film is based on, would have never been written in the first place!
P.S Liberace's fame never wavered even for a moment with his both old and new fans alike. Even in the last year of his life in Liberace having sold out to standing room only every show, some 50 of them, that he did in the fall of 1986 just months before his death. As for his using a candelabra as a prop on his piano that became synonymous with the great Liberace he got that idea from watching the 1945 movie, when he was at the time a completely unknown, "A Song to Remember" with Paul Muni Merle Oberon & Cornel Wilde. In fact it was Liberace not the movie that inspired him to put it into his act that made the Candelabra famous!