Artist-Turned-Author Puts Life Into Show-Biz Legends

Six years ago, when sculptor Alex Thorleifson put aside her clay for a word processor, she didn’t anticipate becoming an instant supermarket sensation. Last month, however, the Irvine writer’s biographies of John Wayne and Liberace hit the pages of the National Enquirer and the Star.

Thorleifson found herself the toast of the checkout counter because of serializations of her two collaborative works: “John Wayne--My Life With the Duke,” written with Pilar Wayne, and the yet-to-be-released “Behind The Candelabra--My Life With Liberace.”

“As far as I know, it has never happened that one celebrity author has been competing against herself in the two top tabloids,” says Thorleifson, 52.

“It was a very funny moment when I came home with both issues and looked at them. I started out to write the great American novel and wound up being the queen of the tabloids.”

The hardcover Wayne biography, released in October by McGraw Hill, appeared in the Enquirer as a three-week condensation. The book is being considered for a miniseries by Warner Brothers and is a main January selection of the Literary Guild. Serialized in the Star, the Liberace book, written with Liberace’s former lover, Scott Thorson, is scheduled for release in April by EP Dutton.

Thorleifson’s “overnight” success is unusual in a profession in which writers usually come from a related field, such as public relations or screenwriting, according to her agent, Richard Curtis of New York City.

“I’ve never heard of anyone making the transition so suddenly from an unrelated field,” he says. “However, Alex is one of the most professional authors I’ve worked with. She’s a superb researcher and extremely precise, which is very important in this type of writing.”

An Arizonan for 20 years, Thorleifson moved to Southern California five years ago, after her husband accepted a job in Orange County. Staying behind for a year to sell their Tempe home, Thorleifson began writing to fight boredom.

Her first effort, “Graven Images,” was soon sidetracked. A classmate in a writing course at Orange Coast College told her that Pilar Wayne wanted to write a book and was looking for a writer. After sending a writing sample to Wayne, Thorleifson met with her. “We clicked, so I put the novel aside,” she says.

The biography took a year to write, Thorleifson says. “Since Pilar and the Duke didn’t meet until he was 45, there was a lot of research that had to be done. When you’re trying to get together with people . . . it isn’t every day that they’re feeling physically up to seeing you.”

Like shaping an anonymous clump of clay, Thorleifson found celebrity collaboration meant molding a cohesive portrayal from a mass of facts, recollections and experiences. She says she went from “knowing virtually nothing about his private life” to being immersed in intimate details of the Duke, both public and private.

“I knew John Wayne from his movies, but I had been brainwashed like most of America to seeing him as a knee-jerk conservative,” she says.

“The public had been led by the press to believe he was an ignoramous and a conservative’s conservative, when he was a very intelligent man with a tremendous amount of integrity who judged individual issues. That floored me. And that really interested me as I started to get into it.

“I began to get angry,” she says. “I began to feel a lot of what he must have felt. Imagine, this man went through his whole career dealing with people who had no idea of what he was all about. For me, it was a great lesson in the power of the media. They can make you seem to be anything.”

Controversy has arisen from both ends of the political spectrum since the book’s publication, Thorleifson says.

“It’s been crazy. On the one hand, the liberals are saying, ‘You whitewashed him. You made him too heroic.’ And then the conservatives are saying, ‘Why did you tell those things that aren’t flattering?’ ”

After finishing the Wayne book, Curtis suggested that she collaborate with Thorson on Liberace.

Moving from the macho hero of “True Grit” to the Las Vegas flamboyance of the King of Glitz was an abrupt switch, and having to work her way into her “subject’s mind” was another hurdle: “With Pilar, we’re close in age; we have children the same age. But I must admit that with Scott’s book, to find my way into the mind of a 28-year-old homosexual was a very interesting experience.

“This is probably the most candid book of its type that has ever been written,” she says. “Scott just opens up and lets you inside. Pilar was a much more private person.”

Motivation for writing the biographies also varied with her co-authors, Thorleifson says. “Pilar wanted to give a very honest portrayal of the Duke for her children and his fans. She wanted his fans to get to know him as a real man. She felt that if people got to know him, they would see that he really had great heroic qualities in his private life, not just on the screen.”

She says Scott had a different motivation. “I think he had a love-hate relationship with Liberace. While Rock Hudson was very open at the end of his life, Liberace concealed both his homosexuality and the fact that he had AIDS.

“Scott was very, very angry about that. He felt that Liberace helped push a lot of people who were scared and teetering right back into the closet.”

Thorleifson says Liberace’s credo was “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

“We end the book with the thought that too much of a good thing can be very dangerous. In fact, it can kill you. I think Scott wanted people to realize that. You can’t push everything to the limit all the time.”

Since working with Thorson, Thorleifson is constantly questioned by friends whether she’s concerned about having been exposed to acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

“Everyone seems to be convinced that Scott would have to have AIDS, which is a very good indication that people don’t really understand anything about this disease,” she says. “Scott has been tested many times and does not have AIDS.”

Thorleifson says she wonders what response she’ll receive to “Behind the Candelabra,” the release of which will coincide with the Christie’s auction in Los Angeles of the entertainer’s antiques.

“With the Wayne book, we’re getting three or four out-of-state calls a week from people who loved it enough that they took the time to track me down. But I’m afraid that when Liberace’s little old lady fans from the Midwest read this book, it may be very much the opposite.”

Celebrity collaborating is a challenge, Thorleifson says. “I try to get people to be so open with me that they tell me things that they haven’t told their best friends. If I’m going to understand their motivation and make them three-dimensional, I have to go and relive their lives with them.

“It’s strange in a way. I know their most intimate secrets, and they know virtually nothing about me. I’m the vehicle for them to say things.”

Sometimes Thorleifson is asked to write a biography but finds there’s no story to tell. For example, she says, Donna Rice approached Curtis several days after the Gary Hart connection became news.

“The press was more interested in her than the public (was). She was a creature of the media. I spent a total of five hours talking to her and turned her down because I felt she did not have a book,” Thorleifson says. “She was just publicity mad.”

Other times, Thorleifson would like to collaborate, but the subject won’t tell all. She was disappointed when Curtis’ suggestion for a biography of Academy Award-winning costume designer Jean-Louis had to be tabled.

“Jean-Louis is a walking history of Hollywood. He knew every major star. He knew the women so well that he knew their real bust sizes, their real ages and who they were sleeping with. But this man has so much integrity that he would not reveal anything that these people would not want told themselves,” she says.

“We couldn’t sell that book. In the celebrity book business, you can’t be a Donna Rice--a one-time, flash-in-the-pan thing. But on the other hand, if you’re going to ask people to pay $20 or $22, you have to tell it all. If you have sensational material to reveal, they want it.”

Celebrity biographies require secrecy. “For a normal book, the ancillary rights aren’t worth anything. But with this kind of book, the first and second serial rights are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Publishers guard them.”

Still, Thorleifson says there are some people she “wouldn’t interview for all the money in the world. Basically, I’m interested in people who go against the system. Wayne bucked the system all the time. Liberace also ran counter to the system. The flamboyance you see in today’s rock stars was invented by him.”

Thorleifson has completed another project, a biography of Ethel Barrymore for young adults, to be published in the spring by Chelsea House in its Women of Accomplishment series. Meanwhile, “Graven Images,” Thorleifson’s first venture in writing, is back on the front burner. A mainstream novel about the art world, it is scheduled for completion in February.

A proposed biography of Martin Sheen, however, may change that. “If he’s amenable to the prospect, I will once again throw aside my novel and get going as fast as I can,” Thorleifson says.