William Connor (Cassandra) William Connor (Cassandra) ▼ Primary Sources ▼ William Connor (Cassandra) William Connor was born in Muswell Hill , London , on 26th April 1909. After being educated at a local elementary school and Glendale Grammar School in Wood Green . He left school at sixteen and tried to join the Royal Navy but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Connor had a series of clerical jobs before finding work as a copywriter for J. Walter Thompson . He worked with Philip Zec and together they developed a strip cartoon to advertise Horlicks . After six years at the agency he was recruited by H. G. Bartholomew , the editorial director of the Daily Mirror . Bartholomew and Cecil King , the advertising director, had noted the success of newspapers such as the Daily News in New York . In 1934 Bartholomew and King decided to follow its example and turn the Daily Mirror into a tabloid newspaper. Connor, who wrote under the name Cassandra, had what was described as having a "polished-up barrack room style" helped to shape this new approach to journalism.

According to his biographer, John Beavan : "Bartholomew asked Connor to try his hand at a column.... The column appeared two or three times a week as and when there was room. Connor soon showed a talent for robust invective... The column varied. It could contain hard-hitting political comment, attacks on government departments and individuals, lavish praise of individuals, and dithyrambic essays on cats or on homely dishes such as cabbage and herring cooked in a particular way. Whatever it was, it was always Connor and it had a tremendous audience." Connor held left-wing political opinions and was a strong opponent of fascism. After visiting Nazi Germany he wrote about the dangers of Adolf Hitler : "Before this visit to Germany I always had a sneaking feeling that there was a strong undercurrent of opposition to Hitler. I am now certain that I was wrong. I now know that this man has the absolute unswerving confidence of the people. They will do anything for him. They worship him. They regard him as a god.

Do not let us deceive ourselves in this country that Hitler may be dislodged by enemies within his own frontiers." In the 1930s he wrote several powerful articles against Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policy. He wrote in the Daily Mirror on 21st March, 1939: "There are two ways of losing a war. One is to be defeated in the field. The other is to lose the war before it begins. We have indicated this peril for months past. It is now obvious. It has to be admitted. Why is so plain a peril - plainly revealed in Hitler's book - why, we ask, is it only now recognised by our rulers? Simply because, even if they have read Hitler (which is still doubtful) they have not believed what he has said in Mein Kampf. Not believing him, not knowing the sort of lucid lunatic with whom they have had to deal, they have believed it possible to disarm him by smiles, handshakes, pacts and scraps of paper." On the outbreak of the Second World War , Connor introduced his friend, Philip Zec , to H. G. Bartholomew and Cecil Thomas, the editor of the Daily Mirror .

Bartholomew liked Zec's work and commissioned him to do a daily cartoon. Connor often supplied Zec with the ideas and captions. On 5th March, 1942, the two men produced a cartoon on the government's decision to increase the price of petrol. The cartoon showed a torpedoed sailor with an oil-smeared face lying on a raft. The message was "Don't waste petrol. It costs lives." The price of petrol has been increased by one penny." Official Philip Zec , The Daily Mirror (5th March, 1942) Winston Churchill believed that the cartoon suggested that the sailor's life had been put at stake to enhance the profits of the petrol companies. In the House of Commons , Herbert Morrison , the Home Secretary, called it a "wicked cartoon" and Ernest Bevin , the Minister of Labour, argued that Zec's work was lowering the morale of the armed forces and the general public. The government considered closing down the Daily Mirror but eventually decided to let the newspaper off with a severe reprimand. On 27th March 1942 Connor wrote: "I campaigned for Churchill, and my support was early and violent.

But since he came to power I have distrusted many of his lieutenants - and I have said so with scant respect either for their position or their feelings.... The government are far too glib with the shameful rejoinder that those who do not agree with them are subversive - and even traitors… I cannot and will not change my policy... I, who have not transgressed, am shortly following the Prime Minister's advice. I am still a comparatively young man and I propose to see whether the rifle is a better weapon than the printed word." Connor joined the British Army . and served in Italy with Hugh Cudlipp where they produced the forces paper Union Jack. On his return to the Daily Mirror in September 1946. John Beavan has argued: "Connor's journalism became deeper and more mature. He drove himself hard, travelled widely, went regularly to the United States, and covered in his highly personal style some historic events: the trials of Eichmann, General Salan, and Jack Ruby, who shot J. F. Kennedy's assassin; the enthronement of Pope John; Churchill's funeral; the Korean War.

He interviewed, among many others, President Kennedy, Senator McCarthy, Billy Graham, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson, Ben-Gurion, Archbishop Makarios, and Marilyn Monroe. Of course the writing had to have more splashes of melodrama and sentiment than the fastidious writer of later years would have wished. But that was the limitation of popular journalism. He only once ran into serious trouble, when he was successfully sued for libel by Liberace in 1959." In 1965, Harold Wilson , the Labour prime minister, granted him a knighthood. Connor, who had developed diabetes and was forced to retire from journalism. William Connor died in London on 6th April 1967, at St Bartholomew's Hospital . The Daily Mirror The Daily Mirror ▼ Primary Sources ▼ The Daily Mirror In 1887 the journalist Alfred Harmsworth formed a new publishing business. Early publications included Answers (1888) and Comic Cuts (1890) and in 1894 went into newspapers when he acquired the London Evening News for £25,000.

Harmsworth revolutionized Fleet Street when he began publishing Britain's first tabloid, Daily Mail in 1896. One of the popular innovations of the Daily Mail was a woman's section that dealt with issues such as fashions and cookery. In 1903 Harmsworth decided to establish the Daily Mirror, a newspaper "for gentlewomen". Kennedy Jones was put in charge of the project and spent £100,000 in publicity, including a gift scheme of gilt and enamel mirrors. On its first day, the circulation of the Daily Mirror was 276,000. However, sales dropped dramatically after the initial launch and by January, 1904, circulation was down to 24,801 and the newspaper was losing £3,000 a week. Alfred Harmsworth decided to change his original plan. The editor, Mary Howarth, was replaced by Hamilton Fyfe , who changed it to a picture paper for men as well as women. As Harmsworth later recalled: "Some people say that a woman never really knows what she wants. It is certain she knew what she didn't want. She didn't want the Daily Mirror.

I then changed the price to a halfpenny, and filled it full of photographs and pictures to see how that would do." Within a month sales had increased sevenfold. Hamilton Fyfe also experimented with using different types of photographs on the front-page. On 2nd April, 1904, the Daily Mirror published a whole page of pictures of Edward VII and his children, Henry, Albert and Mary. This was a great success and Harmsworth now realised the British public had an intense interest in photographs of the Royal Family. Another successful innovation was the sponsorship of special events. In June, 1904, the Daily Mirror paid D. M. Weigal to drive a twenty-horse power Talbot on a 26,000 mile motor run. A month later the newspaper offered a hundred guinea prize for the first person to swim the Channel. In August 1905, the Daily Mirror began to pioneer the idea of the "exclusive". The first example was the "exclusive" interview with Lord Minto, the new Viceroy of India. This approach was popular and later that year the circulation of the newspaper had reached 350,000.

Despite the success of the Daily Mirror, Alfred Harmsworth was more interested in his other newspapers, The Times and the Daily Mail . In January 1914 he sold the newspaper to his brother, Harold Harmsworth , now Lord Rothermere. In the First World War the Daily Mirror became the most popular newspaper on the Western Front . The soldiers particularly liked the fact that the newspaper included so many pictures of life back home. The newspaper also published pictures of the war. Probably the most dramatic example was the German daylight air raid over London in 1917. Lord Rothermere disposed of his shares in the Daily Mirror in 1931. By this time the circulation of the newspaper had reached 800,000. Whereas Rothermere's newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Evening News , gave support to Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley , the Daily Mirror, under the editorial director, H. G. Bartholomew , moved the newspaper to the left. Richard Jennings, deeply influenced by the ideas of William Morris , was employed to write the editorials.

Jennings took a keen interest in foreign affairs and his lucid editorials helped to explain to the readers the dangers being posed by Hitler's regime. On the advice of Cecil King , the advertising director, H. G. Bartholomew , decided to make the Daily Mirror a tabloid newspaper. Batholomew, who hated the arrogance and snobbery of the upper classes, encouraged the editorial staff to develop an anti-establishment tone. Batholomew also employed radical journalists such as Hugh Cudlipp and William Connor , who wrote under the name of Cassandra. According to Connor's biographer, John Beavan : "Bartholomew asked Connor to try his hand at a column.... The column appeared two or three times a week as and when there was room. Connor soon showed a talent for robust invective... The column varied. It could contain hard-hitting political comment, attacks on government departments and individuals, lavish praise of individuals, and dithyrambic essays on cats or on homely dishes such as cabbage and herring cooked in a particular way.

Whatever it was, it was always Connor and it had a tremendous audience." When Germany and Italy gave support to Franco during the Spanish Civil War , the Daily Mirror began a campaign for Britain to increase defence spending. Stanley Baldwin was attacked for his complacency and Winston Churchill was praised for his calls for the government to rearm. Whereas newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Evening News had given support to the right-wing governments in Germany, Italy and Spain, the Daily Mirror consistently exposed the image of a harmless Hitler put out by some newspapers sympathetic to fascism. In July 1938 Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King visited Winston Churchill at his home in Kent when together they planned the attack on Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement. The result was a series of articles by Churchill that appeared in the the Daily Mirror during the following month. In one article Churchill warned that the "unaccountable delay - whoever is to blame for it - in concluding an all-in alliance between Britain, France and Russia, increases the danger of a wrong decision by Herr Hitler." William Connor held left-wing political opinions and was a strong opponent of fascism.

After visiting Nazi Germany he wrote about the dangers of Adolf Hitler : "Before this visit to Germany I always had a sneaking feeling that there was a strong undercurrent of opposition to Hitler. I am now certain that I was wrong. I now know that this man has the absolute unswerving confidence of the people. They will do anything for him. They worship him. They regard him as a god. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this country that Hitler may be dislodged by enemies within his own frontiers." Connor wrote in the Daily Mirror on 21st March, 1939: "There are two ways of losing a war. One is to be defeated in the field. The other is to lose the war before it begins. We have indicated this peril for months past. It is now obvious. It has to be admitted. Why is so plain a peril - plainly revealed in Hitler's book - why, we ask, is it only now recognised by our rulers? Simply because, even if they have read Hitler (which is still doubtful) they have not believed what he has said in Mein Kampf.

Not believing him, not knowing the sort of lucid lunatic with whom they have had to deal, they have believed it possible to disarm him by smiles, handshakes, pacts and scraps of paper." Soon after the outbreak of the Second World War , the recently employed journalist, William Connor , introduced the cartoonist, Philip Zec , to H. G. Bartholomew and Cecil Thomas, the editor of the Daily Mirror. Bartholomew liked Zec's work and commissioned him to do a daily cartoon. Zec's cartoons were an immediate success with the readers. Zec, who was Jewish , felt passionately about the need to defeat Hitler, produced a series of powerful cartoons on the war. Donald Zec pointed out: "He (Philip Zec) presented Hitler, Goering, and others in the Nazi hierarchy as strutting buffoons. Replacing ridicule with venom, he often drew them in the form of snakes, vultures, toads, or monkeys." When Hitler heard about these attacks on his regime, he added Zec's name to the Nazi Black List of people to be executed after Britain's defeat. Zec sometimes upset the British government with his cartoons.

On 5th March, 1942, the Daily Mirror published a cartoon on the government's decision to increase the price of petrol. The cartoon showed a torpedoed sailor with an oil-smeared face lying on a raft. Zec's message was "Don't waste petrol. It costs lives." The price of petrol has been increased by one penny." Official Philip Zec , The Daily Mirror (5th March, 1942) Winston Churchill believed that the cartoon suggested that the sailor's life had been put at stake to enhance the profits of the petrol companies. In the House of Commons , Herbert Morrison , the Home Secretary, called it a "wicked cartoon" and Ernest Bevin , the Minister of Labour, argued that Zec's work was lowering the morale of the armed forces and the general public. Churchill arranged for MI5 to investigate Zec's background, and although they reported back that he held left-wing opinions, there was no evidence of him being involved in subversive activities. H. G. Bartholomew and Cecil Thomas were ordered to appear before Morrison at the Home Office.

Zec's cartoon was described as "worthy of Goebbels at his best" and turning on Thomas, Morrison told him that "only a very unpatriotic editor could pass it for publication". Morrison informed Bartholomew that "only a fool or someone with a diseased mind could be responsible" for allowing the Daily Mirror to publish such material. When Anueurin Bevan heard that the government was considering closing down the Daily Mirror he forced a debate on the issue in the House of Commons . Some MPs were appalled when Herbert Morrison suggested that the newspaper might be part of a fascist plot to undermine the British Government. Several pointed out that the Daily Mirror had been campaigning against fascism in Europe since the early 1930s. Bevan argued in the debate that: "The Government are seeking to suppress their critics. The only way for the Government to meet their critics is to redress the wrongs from which the people are suffering and to put their policy right." On V.E. Day Donald Zec produced the extremely powerful cartoon, Here you are! Don't lose it again. The same cartoon was used on the front page of the Daily Mirror on the morning of the 1945 General Election .

Next to the cartoon the text suggested that the best way to preserve peace was to vote for the Labour Party . After the war Hugh Cudlipp returned to the Sunday Pictorial, but was sacked after a dispute with H. G. Bartholomew in December, 1948. Lord Beaverbrook , had been waiting for this opportunity and promptly employed Cudlipp on the Sunday Express. Cecil King was furious when he heard the news, and he joined up with fellow director, Philip Zec , to remove Bartholomew as editorial director. Soon afterwards, Cudlipp was brought back as editor of the Sunday Pictorial, and later as editorial director of the Daily Mirror Newspapers Group. Cudlipp and King ensured that the Daily Mirror remained a loyal supporter of the Labour Party . Now established as the newspaper of the working-classes it became Britain's best-selling newspaper and on the morning of the Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, sold over seven million copies. In the 1950s Cecil Thomas, the editor of the Daily Mirror, and William Connor , led a passionate campaign against capital punishment.

This was a brave policy as at that time the vast majority of the British public was in favour of hanging. Cecil King , the managing director of the newspaper did not agree with Thomas and Connor on this issue: "I personally didn't agree with the End Hanging campaign of the Mirror, but I allowed the overwhelming consensus of office opinion to prevail." During the investigations of Royal Commission on the Press in June, 1961, Cecil King admitted that Cudlipp and himself decided the editorial strategy of the Mirror Group. Cudlipp added that: "Mr. King and I meet frequently; we know each other's minds and the policies of our papers have been settled for many years." According to Cudlipp this did not restrict the freedom of more left-wing members of staff such as Cassandra and Vicky .

"When Vicky drew cartoons for us, I can't remember a single occasion on which he agreed with the policy of the paper, and Cassandra, might be miles away from it, but both are given freedom of action." What Liberace reveals about the march of gay rights - BBC News BBC News What Liberace reveals about the march of gay rights By Jon Kelly BBC News Magazine, Washington DC 16 April 2013 Read more about sharing. Close share panel A film tells the story of Liberace's relationship with his lover, but the flamboyant pianist stayed in the closet all his life. How did he maintain this fiction, and what does it say about America's rapidly changing attitude to gay rights? A handsome young valet helped Wladziu Valentino Liberace step from his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce on to a stage shimmering with candelabra, and the man who called himself Mr Showmanship showed off his 16ft-long rhinestone-studded fox fur cape. "Well, look me over," he told the audience before sitting down to play his mirror-bedecked piano.

"I didn't get dressed like this to go unnoticed." His grand entrance at New York's Radio City Music Hall in April 1984 was as cheerfully, flamboyantly camp as his fans had come to expect from his 50-year musical career. But until his death in 1987, Liberace insisted he was not gay. He staged relationships with women and repeatedly asserted his heterosexuality in interviews, once talking about his ideal female partner. He even famously took the Daily Mirror to court when it hinted otherwise. His fans - typically suburban middle-aged women - seemed happy enough to accept his story. Thousands were outraged during his brief engagement to a younger woman. It was a fiction. Behind The Candelabra, a forthcoming film starring Michael Douglas, tells the story of Liberace's long-standing relationship with his former chauffeur, played by Matt Damon. While modern audiences are familiar with a diverse range of gay and lesbian personalities, Liberace rose to prominence at a time when camp and homosexuality were commonly and erroneously seen as synonymous. He grew up in a conservative, working-class, Polish-Italian mid-western household, at a time when homosexuality was punishable by up to 10 years in prison in some US states.

As a result, he had good cause to fear that exposure of his private self would almost certainly have meant the end of his career. But paradoxically, his camp, over-the-top performance style appears to have been key to his appeal to middle America. Shortly after his television programme, The Liberace Show, launched in 1952 he attracted up to 30 million viewers an episode. Liberace Born Wisconsin, US, 16 May 1919 Began playing the piano aged four Subsequently built up a following playing "classical music with the boring parts left out" Critically mauled, his television programme The Liberace Show was a huge hit and he was a millionaire by the mid-1950s Successfully sued the Daily Mirror for libel in 1959 when it described him as a "giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love" Died of Aids-related illness in 1987 A decision by the pianist during the late 1950s to adopt sober Brooks Brothers suits and jettison the candelabra coincided with a sharp downturn in his popularity.

His career bounced back after he adopted his Mr Showmanship persona during the early 1960s, declaring that "it was a shame to waste [his] mother-of-pearl trimmed suits". According to his biographer, Darden Asbury Pyron, Liberace carefully constructed every aspect of his image to maximise his public appeal, and that included allusions to his sexual orientation. "He always played around the edges of it, and that's part of the story of his success," says Pyron. "But the gay stuff is only one context for understanding Liberace. It's secondary to the fact he was a great performer, he was extremely fastidious about his presentation and he gave his audiences exactly what they wanted." More importantly, his performance style was constructed to be as non-threatening as possible. While camp, it was shorn of any suggestion that he might ever want to actually have sex. Kevin Kopelson, professor of English at the University of Iowa, who analysed the Liberace phenomenon in his book Beethoven's Kiss, compares the pianist's public persona to that of Michael Jackson. Both men, he says, portrayed themselves as childlike and innocent.

"Liberace tried to come across as pre-sexual, non-sexual or asexual," says Kopelson. "He presented himself as a girly boy, not a gay man." It was not enough to prevent rumours circulating, however, and Liberace felt obliged to take legal action against publications which suggested he might be gay. Most famously, he sued the Daily Mirror over an innuendo-laden article by William Connor, who wrote under the pen-name Cassandra, which described the musician as "the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter... a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love". The Cassandra article might be considered too homophobic to be published in a national newspaper today, and the 1959 trial that followed reveals much about the very different social attitudes of the time - not least in the repeated use of the term "homosexualist" during the case. Nothing about him speaks to a modern gay man Darden Asbury Pyron, Biographer Under oath, Liberace testified that he was not gay and had never taken part in homosexual activity.

The jury found in his favour, awarding damages of £8,000. "I don't think the trial either helped the cause of gay rights or hindered it," says Revel Barker, author of Crying All The Way To The Bank, which tells the story of the case. "People like my parents, who were big fans of Liberace, didn't really think of him as a homosexual before or after - they just thought he was a great performer." But the Cassandra trial, coupled with his repeated denials of his homosexuality, was one reason why sections of the fledgling gay rights movement increasingly viewed Liberace with antipathy. Aged 50 by the time the Stonewall riots kicked off the modern fight for gay and lesbian rights in the US, he displayed scant desire to demand recognition or equality for the community even though as time passed "he was living in a glass closet", according to Kopelson. Many younger activists, fighting to challenge stereotypes about their sexual orientation, resented the way he constructed a neutered, effeminate persona designed not to frighten or challenge the mainstream, argues Pyron. "Nothing about him speaks to a modern gay man," Pyron adds.

"He's a political conservative, he goes to the Ronald Reagan White House - he's very sympathetic to the values of mid-western America." Despite his huge fame at the peak of his career, Liberace - unlike contemporaries like Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra - has few dedicated followers today. In 2010 the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas closed its doors, although it is due to reopen at a new location in 2014. Likewise, says Kopelson, some modern gay men find it difficult to relate to him - in contrast, he says, with the actor Rock Hudson, another famous closeted celebrity of the era. Hudson's image as a ruggedly masculine romantic lead was far more significant in terms of challenging stereotypes and changing attitudes, the author argues. Still, Liberace's supporters say he can and should be remembered as a gay icon, nonetheless - not one that represents liberation, but a none-too-distant era when sexual minorities had to communicate via coded language and innuendo. And he continues to function as a marker of the limits of the entertainment industry's tolerance.

Behind the Candelabra's director Steven Soderbergh provoked a fierce debate when he said he had to take the film to the cable station HBO because Hollywood's studios believed it was "too gay". Mr Showmanship, it appears, is still capable of kicking up a storm at the box office. You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on Facebook Cassandra Quotes, Famous Quotes by Cassandra | Quoteswave Journalist About Sir William Neil Connor was an English journalist for The Daily Mirror who wrote under the pseudonym of "Cassandra". He wrote a regular column for over 30 years between 1935 and 1 February 1967 with a short intermission for World War II, his column restarting after the war with the words "As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time." He took his pen-name from Cassandra in Greek mythology, a tragic character that is given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but is then cursed so that no one will ever believe her.

Related Authors The lonely Liberace I knew - Telegraph Film The lonely Liberace I knew As critics praise Behind the Candelabra, a new film about the flamboyant pianist that premiered at Cannes this week, I recall a charming and generous friend Liberace pictured in 1969: 'He invited me to call him Lee, which I did until the day he died’ Photo: Rex Features By Michael Thornton Comments I shall never forget being ushered to a ringside seat at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1977 as the guest of the star of the show. Into the blinding spotlights trained on the vast stage, and beneath a giant neon logo of a shimmering grand piano, glided a gleaming white and gold Rolls-Royce Phantom V Sedanca Coupé. As it purred to a halt, out jumped Scott Thorson, a 6ft 3in, 18-year-old blond Adonis, clad in a pale blue braided chauffeur’s uniform with cap and silver boots.

He threw open the passenger door and out swept the most outrageous, over-the-top and flamboyant entertainer of all time, an ageing 57-year-old man I had known for some years, who was both the boy’s employer and his lover, wearing a pompadoured hair-piece and enveloped in a voluminous white fox fur coat with a 16-foot train: Liberace, king of the keyboard, and the self-styled Mr Showmanship of Sin City. That spectacular entrance is one of many outlandish scenes in the lives of the men recreated in a new film, Behind the Candelabra, based on a book published by Thorson in the year after Liberace’s death from Aids. The film was the runaway hit of this week’s Cannes Film Festival, winning rave reviews for Michael Douglas as the pianist and for Matt Damon as his opportunistic lover who would deliver the death blow to Liberace’s reputation as the darling of middle America. The Liberace I knew was kind and absurdly generous. I first met him in 1960, when I was a 19-year-old undergraduate. He was playing the London Palladium and I was introduced by Noël Coward.

He was heavily made up and overly tactile, with a tendency to put his hands where they ought not to be. It was clear that he was sexually predatory, but he was also friendly and charming, and immediately invited me to call him “Lee”, which I did until the day he died. Related Articles First-date sex still only results in disdain for women 30 May 2013 To be truthful, I was not an admirer of his style on the piano, or the way in which he tended to murder the classics. What was clear was that he was a great showman and audiences adored him. If he got a bad notice, he would shrug and say: “I laughed all the way to the bank.” And, in later years: “I no longer laugh all the way to the bank. I bought the bank!” I never paid to see one of his shows. He always sent me tickets. In the interval, iced vintage champagne would arrive. He once bought me a ring and a designer jacket. I never wore either. The ring was huge and could have stopped traffic. The jacket was encrusted with bugle beads.

Whenever I went to America, I used to visit him at The Cloisters, his home in Palm Springs. Its décor was glitzy, garish and incredibly vulgar, a bit like a high-class bordello, but his hospitality was legendary. In spite of his huge wealth and massive fame, however, I always sensed an air of deep loneliness, as if his life was somehow hollow. Born Wladziu Valentino Liberace, the son of a Polish mother and an impoverished Italian emigrant, he began playing the piano at four, was adjudged a prodigy able to memorise difficult pieces by the age of seven, and studied the technique of the great Polish pianist Ignacy Paderewski. At 20, he was soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and by 1950, with his giant-sized, gold-leafed Bluthner Grand piano, topped by the candelabra that became his trademark, he was entertaining President Harry Truman at the White House, and earning gigantic fees at private parties for the super-rich, such as J Paul Getty. But it was television that made him a millionaire matinée idol.

The Liberace Show, which first aired in 1952, drew more than 30 million viewers, mostly women, and he received 10,000 fan letters a week. His first two years’ earnings from television totalled $7 million. His intimate, familiar and sometimes gushing personal style conveyed reassurance to closet gays in an age of homophobia. One biographer informs us: “Liberace was the first gay person Elton John had ever seen on television. He became his hero.” The only problem was that for his army of adoring female fans, he wasn’t supposed to be gay. Ostensibly a devout Catholic, he was received in audience by Pope Pius XII. Publicists frantically linked his name with a number of women, including Elizabeth Taylor’s stand-in, Joanne Rio; Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie, seven years his senior; the notorious American transsexual Christine Jorgenson; and, most preposterously of all, the ageing Hollywood icon Mae West, 26 years his senior. But Liberace’s real sexuality was an open secret in showbusiness. By the time of his visit to London in 1956, comment on his lifestyle was becoming overt.

On the day after his arrival, the Daily Mirror columnist William Connor, writing under his pen name, Cassandra, launched a vitriolic attack, describing him as “the summit of sex – the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that he, she and it can ever want… this deadly, winking, sniggering, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother-love… This appalling man.” Liberace sued for libel. In court, he denied he was a homosexual, and Connor insisted he had not intended to suggest this. The jury did not believe Connor. They awarded Liberace £8,000 in damages and £14,000 in costs. He had lied on oath to save his career. It was not until 20 years later that his cover was finally blown for ever. That process began on the night in 1977 that a friend brought the 18-year-old Scott Thorson into Liberace’s dressing-room at the Las Vegas Hilton.

The two men lived together for four years, but the relationship between ''Libby’’ and ''Boober’’ – their names for each other – soon became acrimonious. Thorson blamed this on Liberace’s promiscuity and his obsession with pornography. Liberace accused Thorson of addiction to cocaine, carrying firearms through airports in his luggage, and possessing a Jekyll and Hyde personality. In April 1982, when Thorson caught Liberace with an 18-year-old boy, there was a violent altercation that resulted in Thorson being forcibly evicted from the pianist’s home and the locks being changed. Thorson responded by bringing a ''palimony’’ suit against Liberace for $380 million. In the court hearings and articles Thorson wrote for the National Enquirer, shocking details emerged that stripped away Liberace’s legendary glitter. The pianist, Thorson revealed, was almost totally bald, but was so vain that he wore his toupé to bed. He dressed “like a slouch” at home, and had had two major facelifts.

Thorson also alleged that Liberace had forced him to undergo plastic surgery, including a cleft inserted in his chin, and silicone injections to make his cheeks more outstanding. The pianist wanted to adopt him, but planned to keep having sex with him. The legal battle dragged on until December 1986, when Thorson settled for a payment of $95,000 plus two dogs, a 1977 White Auburn car and a 1960 gold Rolls-Royce. By then, Liberace had a mere two months to live. After his final stage appearance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall on November 2 1986, and his last TV appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Christmas Day 1986, Liberace returned to his winter home in Palm Springs, where he died on February 4 1987, at the age of 67. Shortly before his death, he asked Scott Thorson to see him, and there was a limited reconciliation. It was stated that Liberace had died from congestive heart failure brought on by subacute encephalopathy, a general term for degenerative brain disease.

But when Forest Lawn cemetery applied for a permit to bury him, the Riverside County coroner, Raymond Carillo, demanded tissue tests, even though the body had been embalmed. Carillo then announced that Liberace had “died from cytomegalovirus pneumonia due to, or as a consequence of, human immunodeficiency virus disease… In layman’s terms, Mr Liberace died of an opportunistic disease caused by acquired immune deficiency syndrome.” All his life had been a gigantic cover-up of the one truth he was unwilling to share with his vast and idolising public. But in death, the mask was stripped away. And the secrets of one of the world’s richest but most complex entertainers were finally laid bare. As Behind the Candelabra premiered in Cannes this week, Scott Thorson, now 54 and suffering from cancer, was nowhere to be seen. He is serving a prison sentence in Reno for credit card theft. Start your free 30 day Amazon Prime trial» JOY OF A PENNY DELIGHTFUL JOY OF A PENNY DELIGHTFUL THIS ISLAND LIFE WE all have our heroes. Mine include, in no particular order, John Betjeman, John Wayne and William Connor.

The first two everyone has heard of; the third is well known to those who take pleasure from seeing the written word deployed by a master. He wrote a regular column in the Daily Mirror under the name of Cassandra until his death 40 years ago and I was reminded of the great man when the County Press featured an interview recently with Anne Springman. She was secretary to a succession of managing editors at the newspaper at the time Connor was in his pomp. She even typed the statement to counsel used in the famous libel action Liberace took out against the columnist and the Mirror in the fifties. Mrs Springman said: “Bill Connor was one of the real columnists. There’s not many people of that quality now.” I beg to differ. There’s nobody remotely of that quality now. Forget your Waterhouses, your Littlejohns and your Will Selfs. They’re not worthy of refilling Bill Connor’s fountain pen. He first came to my attention when I was about 14. We always used to take the Mirror at our house (there were few working-class families who didn’t in those days). One morning it didn’t flop on to the doormat as usual, and my father wondered why.

“I had to cancel it,” said my mother. “It’s that Cass-andra. Some of the things he writes frighten me — but I can’t help reading it.” Can any newspaper columnist ever have received a greater accolade? Even at that age I knew I wanted to be a journalist, so it seemed sensible to study the doyen of his craft. He died in 1967 at the grievously young age of 57 and a couple of years later somebody loaned me a copy of his book, Cassandra At His Finest And Funniest. I never gave it back, and you can see what remains of it in the photograph on this page. I read it and read it and read it — and I still read it. As you can see, it is now held together by duct tape and the cover has long gone. But the words have come thundering down the years and have lost none of their ability to move, shock, amuse and concern.

Connor wrote articles full of foreboding about the detonation of the first atom bomb, he reported on the Nuremberg trials with a cold fury and he made excoriating observations about the guilt he felt the nation should share over the execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in this country. Yet the following day he could have you chortling over your cornflakes as he chuntered on about the best strategy to adopt when attempting to annoy people by sending them inappropriate Christmas cards. He was said to be a perfectionist and would follow his column from the moment it left his typewriter to the minute the presses began to roll — and woe betide any sub-editor rash enough to alter even a comma. I can quote whole sections of the book verbatim and I roll certain phrases around my tongue, savouring the quality and drawing every last piece of pleasure out of them. When my daughter, Sam, saw the tatty state of my Cassandra book recently she decided enough was enough and ordered me another copy on Amazon. She acquired it for the princely sum of 1p plus £2.75 postage. The insult of it! The callous cheapening of a wonderful talent.

One penny for the collected works of a master wordsmith. If you harbour ambitions to enter journalism (there must be something they can give you for it) or simply appreciate the written word at its most delicately honed and regally inspired, then get yourself off to Amazon. There’s a bargain to be had. DID WE REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT? FROM next week this column will be starting a new feature called The Fashions That Time Forgot. The idea is to embarrass all the dads and even granddads on the Island who thought evidence of their days of perms, flares and sideburns had been consigned to distant memory or the photo album in the attic. Ransack your homes and send me group photographs taken in the sixties and seventies. They could be sports teams, works outings, annual dinners, school photos — anything that shows how we used to look and dress when we thought it was the height of chic and style. Original photographs can be sent to The Editor, IW County Press, 123 Pyle St, Newport, IW, PO30 1ST. They will be scanned and returned. Or you can e-mail them to editor@iwcp2.demon.co.uk marked FAO Alan Marriott.

Include as many names as you can then sit back and enjoy the strangulated cries of mortification when your nearest and dearest open page 2 of the Weekender in the weeks to come. More News Behind the Candelabra: the true story of Liberace - Telegraph Film Behind the Candelabra: the true story of Liberace Liberace was once one of the most famous entertainers in the world, as celebrated as Elvis. Now it will take a new film starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon to bring him back into the spotlight, says David Gritten. Behind the Candelabra should put Liberace back in the spotlight Photo: Handout By David Gritten 7:00AM BST 02 Jun 2013 It’s 26 years since the flamboyant American pianist and entertainer Liberace died from an Aids-related condition. Most people in Britain under 40 would have little more than a hazy idea of who he was, or the extent of his fame. From the vantage point of today, it’s hard to explain the sheer magnitude of his celebrity or to account for his astonishing success.

Yet in his four-decade heyday he was a household name (pronounced, as everyone knew back then, ‘Libber-AH-chef’) - and from the 1950s to the 1970s he was the world’s highest paid entertainer, outstripping Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, all of whom now live on in much more vividly in our collective memory. This is hardly surprising. His fame – outside America, at least – was almost totally dependent on his live shows. He recorded albums of piano music, but they are rarely heard today on radio. He never had a Top 20 single in Britain. In the 1950s he tried film acting, but thought better of it after starring in the flop Sincerely Yours, playing a pianist stricken by deafness. These days there is not much to remember Liberace by. All that is about to change. Behind the Candelabra , a film about Liberace, has just had its world premiere in Cannes , where it was received with wild enthusiasm by festival-goers and critics alike.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it stars Michael Douglas as Liberace in the final years of his life, and Matt Damon as Scott Thorson, a young man who became his lover and moved in with him for five years. It’s a candid, touching, funny portrait of a gay relationship. Ironically, Liberace’s identity as a gay man was something he tenaciously fought to keep secret. Behind the Candelabra brilliantly conveys what it was like to see Liberace live. He often insisted: “I don’t give concerts. I put on a show.” That he certainly did. His appearances were monuments to gaudy excess, though he light-heartedly joked and winked about his sequin-drenched outfits, his furs and jewellery. In one routine, he arrived on stage in a mirrored Rolls-Royce, driven by a handsome young man in a white chauffeur’s outfit, complete with peaked cap. Liberace might typically be draped in a $300,000 virgin fox-fur cape with a 16-foot train. When he decided to discard the cape, a miniature Rolls appeared on stage to transport it off. He did all he could to justify his self-imposed nickname “Mr.

Showmanship.” Related Articles Cannes 2013: Heli, review 16 May 2013 He called his music “pop with a bit of classics”, and played it on a grand piano, complete with candelabra - an idea stolen from the 1944 Chopin biopic A Song to Remember, starring Cornel Wilde and Merle Oberon. He played only the most melodic best-known passages from pieces by such composers as Rachmaninov, Liszt and Grieg — “Readers Digest versions,” as critics complained. His pop offerings ranged from warm, sentimental tunes (‘I’ll be Seeing You’, ‘As Time Goes By’) to a bit of boogie-woogie. But the music wasn’t the half of it. Between playing, he chatted at length to his audience; middle-aged matrons were his most fervent constituency, and he wooed them assiduously, telling them how great they looked and how much he loved them. A round-faced man with wavy hair and a cheesy smile, he said all this in tones of eager sincerity. He also invariably mentioned how much he loved his mother; and if she was there at a concert, he always blew her a kiss.

This confirmed him to the matrons as an ideal son: they loved him right back and would not hear a word against him. Despite the camp sensibility of the show, Liberace’s sexuality never crossed their minds - a sign that awareness of gay culture in the mid 20th century was far lower than it is today. Behind the Candelabra is based on a ghostwritten 1988 book of the same name, by Thorson, a former animal trainer whose tasks in the Liberace household included being his personal assistant as well as his onstage ‘chauffeur.’ When they first embarked on their relationship, Thorson was 18 and Liberace 57. During their time together, Liberace persuaded Thorson to undergo extensive plastic surgery, so he would look more like him. A thin, dated memoir, it fails to live up to its terrific title. But the film is first-rate; Damon, 42, is remarkably convincing (with the help of make-up and judicious camera angles) as a teenage boy. And Douglas gives a sensational performance as Liberace.

He would almost certainly have been a strong Oscar contender next year, but to Soderbergh’s dismay, no Hollywood studio wanted to make a film whose appeal seemed mainly confined to gay audiences. Instead it was financed by the TV channel HBO. It will be seen in cinemas in most territories across the world, but only on pay-cable TV in the States. The most hostile public criticism of Liberace came in 1956 when he and his entourage arrived in Britain; he would perform at the Royal Festival Hall, the London Palladium and in Manchester as the first part of a European tour.After his first British show, the press reviews were less than complimentary, but William Connor, who under the pen-name Cassandra wrote a hard-hitting column for the Daily Mirror, went a few stages further. He wrote of Liberace as “this deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” This outburst, especially his use of the terms “fruit-flavoured” and “mincing,” was clearly homophobic. But it was also the equivalent of throwing down a gauntlet.

Over the years, Liberace had consistently denied being gay, and Connor was effectively challenging him. A month later, Liberace sued the Mirror and Connor for libel; when the case finally came to court, in 1959, it made headlines every day. Liberace returned to Britain, spent two whole days being cross-examined, and firmly repeated his denials. The jury found in his favour, and he was awarded £8,000 in damages — a considerable sum in those days. Those denials of his homosexuality continued to the end of his life. Even two weeks before his death, when he entered hospital for a short spell looking gaunt, his publicity team reported he was being treated for emphysema, heart disease and anaemia; he had lost weight, they insisted, through being on a watermelon diet. But the coroner’s findings confirmed he had been infected with Aids, and two biographies — Thorson’s and a superior, more comprehensive attempt by Associated Press showbiz journalist Bob Thomas — posthumously blew the whistle on Liberace’s private life.

Thorson admitted he was one of a series of male companions for Liberace; he briefly met his predecessor, who he saw being shipped out of Liberace’s mansion — and by the time his own turn for the exit came, and he was struggling with drug addiction, he already knew who his successor would be — a blond singer-dancer named Cary James. Thorson’s claims for ‘palimony.’ for palimony went nowhere and finally he agreed to a modest settlement. In his book, Thomas noted that “for a dozen years, Liberace had taken on live-in lovers, usually blond, blue-eyed young men with strong physiques.....inevitably each liaison ended, usually because of Lee’s boredom with his empty-headed lover.” Liberace was born Wladziu Valentino Liberace in 1919, the third of four children in a Catholic family. He was raised in a working-class suburb of Milwaukee, where money was scarce. His Italian father Salvatore was a jobbing musicianand when Liberace was only four, he started picking out tunes on the family piano. It was clear he was a prodigy.

As he entered his teens, the talented young pianist was leading a double life, practising études and sonatas with his music teacher, but playing pop tunes and boogie-woogie with a four-piece band in beer halls and roadhouses by night — a means of supplementing his family’s meagre income. But he felt he fell just short of what it took to be a concert pianist; in contrast, he loved the reaction he could elicit from audiences with his versatile playing and breezy patter. So he decided to become Mr. Showmanship. He left Milwaukee and developed his unique act throughout the 1940s, first in New York, then Las Vegas and Hollywood. By 1950 he was a star live attraction and his national TV show that first aired in 1952 sealed his fame. He deliberately broke an established TV rule by looking directly into the camera as he played; he knew he could convince each one of his fans that he was playing specifically for her. In material terms, he was an extraordinary success; he amassed more cars, pianos, jewellery, antiques and houses than one man could possibly need. But there’s a sadness in his story too.

He was reputedly kind, generous and hospitable, but being born at a particular time meant that he never felt able to reveal his sexuality, which was crucial to his identity. He and his handlers found it necessary to fabricate an engagement (to Joanne Rio, a would-be young actress and former North Hollywood neighbour) as well as a supposed ‘romance’ between him and figure skating champ Sonja Henie. Asked, as he often was, why he had never married, he had to fall back on the old cliché: he simply hadn’t found the right girl. There’s a sadness in his insistence on staying closeted, though given his strict Catholic upbringing and the social mores of the post-war era in which he first attained stardom, maybe his caution was understandable. Would his career have been ruined? We’ll never know. But beyond doubt the film of Behind the Candelabra shines new light on this unique, larger-than-life character with all his contradictions – and makes him even more intriguing.

Question: Which Daily Mirror journalist wrote for many years under the pen name of Cassandra?
Answer: William Connor