‍LIBERACE: A ‘mincing heap of Mother Love’

‍Every journalist of a certain vintage – and it was a particularly good one, trust me – remembers the libel trial of Liberace versus the Daily Mirror.

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‍It had everything … sex, showbiz, drama, mischief and, for those days, huge sums of money.

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‍The 1959 case revolved around a piece written by Mirror columnist Bill Connor, better known as Cassandra.

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‍Connor was repelled by the sight of Liberace’s arrival at London’s Waterloo Station on the boat train from Southampton.

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‍Two thousand mostly middle-aged women flocked onto the platform and even the tracks. They screamed, some fainted, one pressed her lips to his carriage window and Liberace mirrored her passion on the other side of the glass.

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‍Liberace’s entourage leaves Waterloo Station

‍In the words of Donald Zec, who was to play a part in the subsequent trial: “If it was pure joy to the singer and his hysterical fans, it was stomach-churning stuff to my late colleague, Cassandra.

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‍“He turned a baleful eye on the hapless Liberace and threw the book at him.”

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‍Connor called Liberace “the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine and neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want …  the deadly, winking, sniggering, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of Mother Love”.

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‍Somehow, the flamboyant piano player mistook these words for an accusation that he was homosexual. He sued.

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‍Zec appeared as a witness for the defence, though presumably only to testify to Connor’s innate decency – because he did not actually agree with the words Connor had written.

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‍Zec writes in his memoir Put the Knife in Gently: “This was unquestionably the most calculated demolition job ever written about a performer, but a fairly inoffensive one at that.

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‍“He was a freakish but good-natured extrovert who sincerely preached mother love and confected a little happiness for millions of lonely wives or widows who hung on his every sigh or murmur.”

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‍As for his friend Connor, Zec says he was “kindly by nature and a supremely gifted writer whose columns were quoted throughout the world.

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‍“But his splenetic attack on Liberace was scarcely appropriate: it was a huge artillery barrage aimed at demolishing – a meringue.

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‍“Even Liberace, raised on the showbiz credo ‘There’s not such thing as bad publicity’ could not shrug this one off.”

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‍Zec called it the case of the decade for the legal giants involved, the astonishing scenes in court and Liberace’s own impressive performance in the witness box.

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‍But the most remarkable moment, he writes, came just before the verdict was delivered.

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‍“As the jury returned to their places, a woman among them who had been eyeing Liberace intimately throughout threw him a brazen wink, signalling an unmistakable ‘You’ve won’.”

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‍Liberace was awarded £8,000 in damages, close to £250,000 in today’s money. Two thousand pounds of the award was for the allegations of homosexuality. At the time, it was the biggest libel win in British legal history.

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‍Zec points out that the entertainer in his last years suffered from AIDS-related illnesses and was quoted as saying, “I don’t want to be remembered as an old queen who died of AIDS.”

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‍If the Liberace case teaches us anything, it is this: Never try to convince a jury that their hero is a flawed human being. They don’t want to hear it.

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‍Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie must have borne this in mind when his newspaper accused Elton John of consorting with rent boys. It wasn’t true and the singer – notoriously litigious – took umbrage.

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‍MacKenzie settled out of court, reportedly for £1 million. Then he splashed on an apology to Elton John (which, as a friend of mine, an old Sun hand, pointed out, probably flogged a few copies in its own right).

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‍Years later, MacKenzie told the Leveson Inquiry into Press ethics that Sun owner Rupert Murdoch was apoplectic when he heard of the defamation settlement.

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‍MacKenzie, Murdoch’s favourite editor, said: “I remember sending him a fax saying I’d sat down with Elton John’s people and we had agreed to pay damages in full and final settlement.

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‍“That went at 1.01pm, which meant it was 8am in New York. The phone rang at 1.01 and seven seconds and I received 40 minutes of abuse … it wasn’t the money, it was the shadow it cast over the paper.”

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‍The Daily Mirror journalist Revel Barker, who died recently, co-wrote and published a book on the Liberace case called Crying All the Way to the Bank, in which he skewered the arrogance of Mirror editorial boss Hugh Cudlipp.

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‍Cudlipp had no real plan to take on Liberace’s legal team but believed he could convince the jury that Connor did not mean to imply that Liberace was homosexual. He failed.

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‍Connor’s use of the word “fruit” in his Mirror rant did not help. The case largely revolved around its meaning as an American slang term, which is homosexual.

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‍The Mirror also faced ingrained middle-class hostility from the legal profession towards popular journalism, which still exists.

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‍So, the judge doesn’t like you, the jury doesn’t believe you and the public hates you for impugning the sexuality of their showbiz idol.

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‍And still you don’t settle?

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‍*****

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‍At last, the mystery of what happened to comedian Miranda Hart is solved. She hadn’t become a hermit, or a bag lady. She was ill.

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‍After 10 years trapped inside her own four walls, she could finally venture out to the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where she revealed that doctors had diagnosed myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). That stemmed from Lyme disease, which she got from a tick bite in Virginia, in the United States.

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‍She had it even while she was filming Miranda, the BBC sitcom that made her name, and she had felt as though she was “wading through treacle”.

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‍Not that you’d have known. Hart, 51, gurned, galloped and galumphed her way through three series of the comedy farce in which she played, semi-autobiographically, an awkward young woman in a perpetual quest for a husband.

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‍In fact, during her enforced lay-off, she met a builder who came to sort out some mould in her house. “I think I fell in love immediately,” she writes in her newly-released memoir, I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You. They married after he proposed in Kew Gardens.

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‍I’m glad she’s back, happy and well again. I hope she can resume her mission to make us laugh. I think Miranda, co-starring the marvellous Patricia Hodge and featuring Hart’s arch asides to camera, might have been the last genuinely funny thing on telly.

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‍*****

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‍I don’t like to speak ill of the dead but the fulsome tributes to Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister who almost convinced the country to leave the Union and embrace independence, don’t sit comfortably with me.

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‍Yes, he was a considerable political figure; that is indisputable. But he was a sex pest. Some of the revelations that came out of his 2020 trial for sexual misconduct were sleazy. Salmond himself admitted he was “no saint”.

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‍He was cleared in court of all charges against him but as his lawyer said, he left a free man but with his reputation irrevocably damaged.

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‍Salmond, who died in North Macedonia of an apparent heart attack aged 69, once visited the 10th floor of Richard Desmond’s Daily Express. I met him there and found him as slippery as a sporran full of eels.

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‍*****

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‍“I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.” – Woody Allen

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‍RICHARD DISMORE

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‍15 October 2024