There's nothing more intriguing than a movie star wrapped like a mummy playing someone just emerging from plastic surgery. Think Humphrey Bogart in Dark Passage, Elizabeth Taylor in Ash Wednesday. And now, in HBO's Behind the Candelabra, Michael Douglas playing Liberace, the swishy but closeted Las Vegas piano player. Matt Damon, bleached blond for the role, costars as Liberace's stoned and rhinestoned boyfriend, Scott Thorson, who was almost 40 years younger.

The biopic, directed by Steven Soderbergh and airing May 26th, is based on Thorson's book Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace, published a year after Liberace's death in 1988. The book itself recounts the events of the couple's five-year relationship—and serves as an act of revenge for the abrupt way the performer ended it and replaced his lover the same day with a younger boy toy. Liberace's henchmen hustled Thorson out of the star's penthouse wearing only his pajamas and a fur coat, Thorson writes.

His and His Face-lifts: Rolls Royces, lavish real estate, and dozens of pet dogs were not the only things the lovers enjoyed during their happier days together. Cosmetic surgery played a major role in their relationship. According to Thorson, after Liberace, then 59, glimpsed his aging face on a Tonight Show interview in 1979, he decided he needed a second face-lift. "I look like hell. Why hasn't anyone told me how old I look?" he said.

On the advice of Guy Richard, the hairdresser who styled Liberace's wigs, the entertainer called Jack Startz, a Hollywood ear, nose, and throat specialist. Played in the movie by Rob Lowe—in high-camp hair and makeup bearing no resemblance to his actual suave appearance—Startz was a brilliant surgeon who was eventually brought down by drugs and alcohol, financial problems, and the consequences of doling out silicone injections that left the face of at least one denizen of the movie colony looking like a melting candle. In the words of his oldest son, Jon Startz, "He was charismatic, skilled, innovative—and tragic."