Author Spotlight: Spero Pastos

During Liberace's trial in the late fifties, Lee, as he was familiarly called, was critically reviewed by Cassandra (a former colonel in the British army) in his daily column in London's Daily Mirror. Cassandra wrote, He is the summit of sex, the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want. This deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love has had the biggest reception and impact on London since Charlie Chaplin arrived at the same station! At the same time, Liberace had recently completed his ABC seven-year contract that had gone viral via international and national television, but he recognized a new and very popular confidential magazine that was beginning to create unimaginable curiosity in 1950s America, suggesting that he was homosexual. Liberace died in February of 1987, but the story of his estate was not settled until long after. His attorney, Joel Strote, managed to stuff the estate for his own, and that forced a very ugly trial both between the Liberace family both in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where Liberace made his home for tax benefits. The outcomes of the trials were in Strote's favor, though Ida Mae Liberace, Liberace's niece, claimed that there were hundreds of millions of dollars in the estate secreted in an account in Switzerland. Liberace's burial was in Forest Lawn overlooking Warner Brothers Studio and where Liberace filmed his disastrous film during the 1950s entitled Sincerely Yours.