Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Scotty Bowers, with Lionel Friedberg. Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. New York: Grove Press, 2012. 286pp.
33rd Edition.
In Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, his controversial memoir published a dozen years ago, Scotty Bowers describes how he spent much of his adult life providing sex partners to a clientele of Hollywood celebrities and others of every sexual persuasion—when he wasn’t servicing them himself. At its end, this insatiable hedonist, 89 when he wrote the book, looks back with pride and pleasure on what he’s accomplished. Usually providing his matchmaking services gratis (he says he just liked making people happy), he was often active 24/7 setting up 15 to 20 tricks a for day over four decades. He himself—a self-described sexual dynamo—often enjoyed intimate encounters several times every day, usually extra-maritally.
The good-looking Bowers happily celebrated the joys of sex without the slightest moral scruples. If no one was hurt, he argued, why should people feel guilty about fulfilling their natural urges? Even approaching 90, as he drove to tend bar at a party given by a wealthy, attractive widow in her 80s, he felt “a ripple of excitement” tingling in his loins as he pictured her. By this point in his life, though, he knew he’d not spend the night with her, having found contentment with his second wife, Lois, and his dog, Baby. His book, though, describes, often in raunchy detail, what his sexually hyperactive life until then had been like.
Bowers, originally an Illinois farm boy, who died at 96 in 2016, began arranging (and performing) tricks in Hollywood in 1945, after being demobilized from the Marines (in which he was a paratrooper). He describes his combat experiences fighting the Japanese, including being nearby when his 23-old-brother was slain on Iwo Jima.
Bowers’s activities from 1945-1950 were centered at a Richfield gas station on Hollywood Boulevard and North Van Ness Avenue, where, while working nights as a pump jockey, he created a network of attractive, horny young people, many of them former servicemen like him. Their role was to provide sexual favors to well-heeled movie stars and others, mostly in the film world, both male and female. The word was out about his stable of willing youngsters who needed to earn extra money by making their hands, mouths, and bodies available. Bowers established a going concern, including the use of a luxury RV a friend kept parked at the station. His own income, however, came at first mainly from pumping gas and doing odd jobs, aided by occasional tips for his services. Afterward, he earned his keep when he became an in-demand bartender at fashionable Los Angeles parties, a profession that served perfectly as a conduit for his naughty matchmaking.
Many of his clients were gay or bisexual. Social and legal pressures on homosexuals being what they were in those days, Bowers’s ability to find willing, physically appealing partners, male and female, to serve his clients’ specific requirements was a well-known secret among Los Angeles movers and shakers. And we’re talking not simply of one-on-one affairs. If requested, Bowers could not only rustle up partners for three- and foursomes, but a dozen or more for clients who enjoyed satiety in numbers. He himself, while insisting he wasn’t gay, being more attracted to women than men, had no difficulty serving same-sex partners, as was true of many of the other straight men who turned such tricks under his aegis. It’s not every straight guy who can service gay men, but Scotty and his cohorts were able to rise to such occasions.
By the time you finish Full Service, you’ll be unable to avoid seeing postwar LA as anything but a seething hotbed of kinky lust and ecstatic fulfillment, in spite of society’s professed sexual conservatism. Bowers makes very clear, for instance, how nastily the LA Police Department pursued gays, arresting or harassing them on the slightest suggestion of allegedly illicit behavior. That, of course, is why a book like Full Service attracts attention; for all its other qualities (not all of them salacious), it tells tales of all those luminaries whose proclivities were anything but what their public images professed.
Of course, any buff of mid-20th century movieland will already know who’s likely to be singled out for their sexual tastes and peccadilloes. Non-acting celebs also play a big role, among them the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, authors Somerset Maugham and Tennessee Williams (whom Bowers dissuaded from writing an essay about him), director George Cukor, composer Cole Porter, publishers Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf, and FBI chief honcho J. Edgar Hoover. Most such iconic figures have been outed previously in the vast amount of available biographical and other material. Having known such people in the most intimate of circumstances, and having become good friends with many of them, Bowers is often able to provide unexpected snapshots of their personalities, even, occasionally, of their luxurious homes.
Few fans will be surprised to learn, for example, that—among other household names—Walter Pidgeon (Bowers’s first movie star client), Charles Laughton, Rock Hudson, Clifton Webb, Tyrone Power (whom Bowers had known in the Marines), James Dean, or actor-playwright Noel Coward were closeted gays (or bi). Whether Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were lovers or just great buddies is still disputed, although Bowers insists he hanky-panked with both. And many will struggle to accept Bowers’s claims that the fabled extramarital love affair of Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn was a complete publicity snow job to cover up each actor’s devotion to same-sex partners. Bowers isn’t shy about declaring himself to have been one of Spence’s lovers when the alcoholic star was deep in his cups.
Many of Bowers’s mostly gay cinema-related clients may not have been marquee names, but they were often among the crème de la crème of designers and cinematographers. He mentions mainly male clients, but many lesbians also sought him out; the one he spends most of his time on is Kate Hepburn. And, of course, the irregular inclinations of straight celebrities, like Erroll Flynn, whose predilections for underage girls have long been familiar Hollywood gossip.
On the other hand, what may have been less well known before Full Service—to me, at any rate—are the specific tastes and practices, including coprophilia, some of these silver screen icons favored; you may even be excused for retching at a few disclosures. And, given Bowers’s reputation as the go-to man for covert hookups of every description, and the apparent sincerity with which he describes his experiences, it’s hard to deny that he knows whereof he speaks. Supporting his assertions is a measured writing style that doesn’t wallow in 50 Shades of Grey excess. That, however, doesn’t mean he’s shy about using blue words and images, like his descriptions of “gloryholes.”
Full Service earns some of its sense of veracity from its non-lubricious parts, which describe Bowers’s (birth name George Boltman) personal life, including his family life growing up poor during the Depression, his exposure to animal sex on the family farm, his fighting in the Pacific, his romances, and his marriages (two, the first of which produced a daughter in whom he took great pride).
In passages some may find shocking considering the equanimity with which they’re written, Bowers reveals his earliest sexual encounters, which began with his being toyed with by a friend’s father when he was just a little boy. Remarkably, he describes what transpired not as a horrendous, life-altering trauma, as have so many others who’ve gone through much the same thing, but as something he actually enjoyed.
Similarly, he writes fondly of his youthful trysts with a friendly Catholic priest. “I felt no shame, no guilt, no remorse for what I had done.” Instead, he found satisfaction in having given the frustrated cleric “a little joy.” Soon, he was bringing such joy to other priests. In other words, Bowers, without saying it directly, treats pederasty—at least when it’s consensual–with the same sybaritic insouciance as any other form of sexual experience. If it feels good and no one’s hurt, he implies, what’s the big deal?
There are lots of other books out there in what might be called the Hollywood Babylon genre, filled with scandalous tattling about the sex lives of beloved public icons of the still-remembered past. Nowadays, of course, it’s impossible not to learn such things about the contemporary equivalents of such persons whenever we look at our phones. Modern memoirs are packed with the kind of personal revelations that would never have dared make themselves known in the past. Biographers are practically obliged to unearth dirt on their subjects. Often, we don’t even have to read about the sex lives of the stars; we can actually view them on video. Things have so gone down the drain that a TV celebrity convicted of sexual abuse can even become president.
If you’re interested in revelations of what transpired between the sheets in mid-20th-century Hollywood, when such things were not only hidden from public view but could get you in trouble, Scotty Bowers’s Full Service, a now 12-year-old memoir, remains as scandalous a place to start as anywhere.
Coming up: Kevin Winkler. On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
