Depression 2.0: Sunday in Kerouac Alley

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Liberace & Thorson

The Man with Liberace’s Face

The story that Scott Thorson offered for sale that April afternoon in 2004 was, as expected, a sordid tale, this one involving his ongoing love affair in the ‘80s with a pop music superstar long-rumored to be gay. I briefly flirted with the notion of writing the article myself, weaving the True Confessions element into a profile of Thorson and his peripatetic outlaw lifestyle that I would title The Man with Liberace’s Face.

“Just sell the damn story to the National Enquirer,” a colleague suggested. “It’s a quicker sale and the money will be better.”

I was provided by another colleague, a brand name internet gossip columnist, with a solid and reliable contact at American Media, the parent company of supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer. (Thorson, I would later learn, had brokered a $30,000 deal with the Enquirer in 1988 for a tell-all about his five year affair with Liberace, who died at the age of 67 in 1987 due to complications from AIDS).

In the interest of brevity, let it be said that I have negotiated apartment leases that were more complicated than the deal with American Media for Scott Thorson’s celebrity mud slinging. I was offered a rate to carry back for Scott’s approval and the finder’s fee that American Media offered me, for bringing them the tawdry story was more than enough to compensate for my recent financial losses in the freelance sector.

American Media dispatched a polygraph expert to Falmuth, Maine, within days of my initial phone call to their reporter. Scott passed not one but three polygraph tests, more than enough for the publishing company to trust the veracity of his story, which ran a few short weeks later as a front page banner headline.

“I lost all the money, Rodger,” Scott wept into the telephone one morning just days after his Enquirer confession hit supermarket news stands. He had recently filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, he explained, and the government seized his proceeds from the Enquirer sale mere moments after he deposited the check into his personal account – this is what happens when the chemicals that fuel greed, bad luck, and stupidity are mixed in the same test tube.

Thorson was feral. He had no resources to fall back on after his brief windfall crumbled to dust. He began phoning me several times a day, often under the influence of God- knows-what narcotics that slurred his speech so badly he sounded like a drunken drag queen doing a bad impression of Liberace. Scott offered me more mud to sell about forgotten Las Vegas entertainers and yesterday’s movie and TV stars, most of the stories involving sexual scandal of one shape or form, trivia I never wanted to know, trivia I carry in my head to this day like a lingering hangover five years after the party that, in retrospect, didn’t seem like a good idea at the time anyway.

The windfall that I had enjoyed from the Enquirer sale was a mirage, a brief stalling of an inevitable looming disaster, not unlike governments bailing out ailing financial institutions doomed to fail.