LIAR, ALLEGED

A gay man looks back on innumerable sexual romps and a career as the sound and lighting director for A-list musical acts in this raucous memoir.

Vass begins with his boyhood growing up in Baltimore in the 1950s and ’60s in a family where his gay sexuality barely registered amid many colorful dysfunctions. (To get him over his teenage romantic awkwardness, his older sister bullied her husband into teaching him to French kiss.) But the squalor of his environment proved edifying when, in high school, the author got jobs as a sound and lighting technician at Mafia-run strip joints, where he learned how to make the women’s stripteases look and sound good. Upon graduation in 1968, he moved to New York City, where he basked in the blithe promiscuity of the pre-AIDS gay scene. (He claims to have had two to three thousand sex partners.) After several detours, including a stint in prison for draft evasion that was “filled with great sex and life lessons,” he began a career as a lighting and music director for singers at Manhattan nightclubs and on tour. Much of the book features vignettes about the stars he worked with. These include a number of torch singers such as Anita O’Day, who was like a mother to him; a nasty, drunken Frank Sinatra, whom he told to “kiss my gay ass!”; and an imperious Bette Davis. (“She looked at me and said, ‘Shut up,’ with that voice only she had.”) The story concludes in the ’80s, when the author lost many friends to the AIDS epidemic and settled down with his future husband.

Vass’ reminiscences are in part an exuberant sexual picaresque conveyed in cheerfully lewd prose. (“‘I’m a bottom, is that OK with you?’ he asked. I almost laughed—he had the butt of my dreams so I replied, ‘Perfect, I’m a top and I can’t wait to plow you until you’re sore!’”) It’s also an absorbing account of the art of lighting and sound mixing in stage acts, with many vivid details and acerbic commentary: Peggy Lee’s “face was very shiny; that kind of makeup reflects facial lighting, which makes a performer’s face look like a death mask…She wore a gauzy white muumuu with an empire waist, which she must have thought would hide her weight issues, but I knew that she would look like a billboard in search of an ad once onstage.” Vass’ writing is full of brilliantly revealing, nuanced profiles of celebrities, informed by his years of raptly studying their flaws so as to soften them with artifice. (He told Ella Fitzgerald “the second night that she looked very handsome onstage. I didn’t use the word pretty because I knew she was not that, and she was a very smart cookie….She would look to the floor when I said things like that—it was sweet, but it came from insecurity, not from being demure. Ella told me that when she was getting started, a famous big-band leader said to her manager, ‘You’re not puttin’ that on my bandstand.’ That was at the beginning of her career and she still remembered it.”) The result is a perceptive examination of the truth lying beneath the entertainment industry’s surface fakery.

An engrossing show-biz account, deftly mixing sexual energy with poignant character sketches.