Jason Togyer has much to say about the story of Liberace and the cleaning fluid…
If I recall correctly, it happened in Pittsburgh. Liberace was playing at an popular nightclub/roadhouse called the Holiday House, east of Pittsburgh, when the incident happened. (The Holiday House has another important place in pop-culture history — the Three Stooges' frequent appearances at the Holiday House in the late 1950s helped resurrect the trio's performing careers. But that's another story.)
A couple of interesting footnotes: His life was saved by a technology that had just recently been introduced in the United States — dialysis. The news reports about Liberace's life-saving treatment, supposedly, helped spread the popularity of dialysis in the U.S. as a treatment for kidney failure.
Liberace was nursed back to health by the doctors and nuns of St. Francis General Hospital, and became a hospital benefactor (though apparently never as large as the hospital had hoped).
In 1986, St. Francis Hospital named its lobby after him, and Liberace performed at the dedication. I always found it a bit ironic that the lobby of a Catholic hospital was named for Liberace, given that the church has never looked kindly on gay people, but there you go.
The hospital closed a few years ago, and I have no idea what happened to the Liberace memorabilia in the lobby.
It always struck me as…well, bizarre that so much of America was long in denial that favorite performers like Liberace and Paul Lynde were gay — and not just gay but obviously gay. I mean, those gentlemen probably found it politically and socially correct to formally deny it — Liberace even sued reporters who alluded to it — but they sure didn't try to hide it on screen. If you were a gay pianist and you wanted to make your sexual orientation obvious, what would you do? You'd do an act like Liberace's. Yeah, it's odd that a Catholic institution would have been so respectful of him, especially given that there's never ever been a gay priest. The fact that they thought there'd be mega-donations from the guy explains a lot.
I feel bad for folks — Catholics, in this case — who support a faith in good faith and then face contradictions and double-talk and sometimes even criminal action from their leaders. The revelations of pedophilia and the attempts to cover it all up and protect the molesters had to have shaken any good Catholic to the core of his or her soul. And then you have things like the other day when Pope Francis said that atheists who do good in their lifetime will be redeemed by Jesus and he will meet them, apparently in Heaven. The Vatican quickly issued a clarification that said no, they don't get in unless they really, really renounce atheism and get with the program. In other words, doing good is not an EZ-Pass. Somewhere in The Vatican, there's probably a whole division whose job is to "clarify" (i.e., spin and rewrite) the words of the one man on the planet who is supposed to be infallible.
I have a friend — an older woman — who's about as devout a Catholic as you can be without becoming a nun…a career she still contemplates. She easily put the gay thing aside by pretending that, you know, Charles Nelson Reilly just had a colorful way of speaking. The child-molesting and the church's handling of the matter were very painful and injurious to her, given how much of herself and her emotions she had invested in her faith. We got to talking about that one time and she shook her head sadly and said, "I still haven't figured out why it suddenly became okay to eat meat on Fridays…and now they expect me to accept this!"